Israel: A Sharply Divided Society on the Brink of a Cultural Civil War

By Allan C. Brownfeld

The election victory of Ehud Barak as Israel’s new prime minister has caused many observers in the U.S., in Israel and in the Arab world to hope that the peace process will once again move forward.

Exactly how forthcoming the new Barak government will be, of course, remains to be seen. And while the future course of the peace process remains uncertain, what seems clear is the fact that Israeli society is sharply divided over fundamental issues and appears to be on the brink of a cultural civil war.

Stanley Greenberg, the pollster who has served both President Clinton and Mr. Barak, has worked in many countries and was struck by the depth of disagreement on fundamental questions in Israel. Even in South Africa, he said, there was no basic discord over the nature of the state once apartheid ended and democracy was introduced. “But in Israel, on religious–secular issues, on security–peace issues, and on land issues, a range of groups sees that losing the election threatens their way of life,” he said.

Many Israeli voters, for example, were Russian-speaking immigrants who arrived this decade from the former Soviet Union. Angry at the neglect of the previous Labor Party government, they voted 2 to 1 for Netanyahu in 1996. This placed them in a coalition with Likud’s ultra-Orthodox allies. Their rights of residency, marriage and funeral arrangements were in the hands of the Interior Ministry, controlled by members of the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party. Because a significant number of the new immigrants are married to non-Jews, their children are not considered Jews by the Orthodox and, as a result, cannot marry in Israel or be buried there.

“When the Interior Ministry doesn’t recognize a member of one of our families as a Jew, it really hurts,” said Michael Raif, a Russian immigrant who is deputy mayor of Rishon LeZion, Israel’s fourth largest city. In some cases, he said, the obstacles posed by the Interior Ministry have caused immigrants to return to the former Soviet Union. These tensions drove many Russian immigrants to turn away from Netanyahu and cast their votes for Barak.

In the months preceding the election, the tensions in Israeli society became increasingly clear. In February, Orthodox Jews rallied in Jerusalem to protest the Israeli Supreme Court’s recent decisions that would limit the privileges of the Orthodox in Israeli society. In a counter-rally on behalf of religious freedom and pluralism, Jewish Agency Chairman Avraham Burg declared: “There is a war in Israel. There is a cultural war...that will determine the life or death of democracy in Israel.”

The secular Jewish state established in 1948 has been characterized as “largely a fleeting episode.”

Israel’s best known author, Amos Oz, issued an appeal to Israelis to join the Reform and Conservative movements as a way of protesting the religious monopoly which the Orthodox now have in Israel. In response, The New York Times (Feb. 18, 1999) reported: “Hundreds of Israelis have now contacted the offices of the Reform and Conservative movements to register as members. The groundswell of sympathy is a backlash against the [Orthodox] rally which many nonreligious Israelis saw as an assault on the judicial system and democratic institutions...Through a series of legal battles, the Conservative and Reform movements have chipped away at the Orthodox rabbinate’s control of religious affairs, winning court orders to register non-Orthodox conversions and to seat Conservative and Reform Jews on religious councils. The inroads have brought a torrent of invective against the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Aharon Barak, who has been labeled ‘an enemy of the Jews.’ Reform rabbis have been called clowns and leaders of a non-Jewish sect.”

Amos Oz declared: “We wanted to show the Orthodox that there is another Judaism that is appropriate for us and to strengthen these movements, which are being persecuted...The Judaism of these movements is closer to the position of most of the democratic Jewish public.”

The Question of Identity

Writing from Jerusalem, Washington Post (Feb. 14, 1999) correspondent Lee Hockstader provided this assessment: “The struggle casts a spotlight on the still-unsettled relations among religion, the state and society, as well as the identity of Israel itself—whether it is principally a secular democracy populated largely by Jews and governed by civil law, or a Jewish state in which Halakah, or Jewish law, is deemed sacrosanct in matters pertaining to the observant.”

Professor Shlomo Ben-Ami, an historian and leading intellectual in Israel’s Labor Party, describes the gravity of Israel’s cultural divide: “The ties that hold Israel together as a united society have long been in a tragic process of disintegration. What we have here is not a society but cells inimical to one another in a state of potential civil war. Israel will not be able to stand this way before an enemy or confront the difficult challenge of peace…Years after the assassination [of Yitzhak Rabin] we have learned nothing and forgiven nothing; we are in exactly the same place. This is a nation that is not even capable of mourning together.”

When a Gallup Poll done by the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv on the second anniversary of the murder of Yitzhak Rabin asked whether the country was closer to unity or civil war, more than twice as many respondents, 56 percent compared with 21 percent, answered the latter. Four months later the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research asked Israelis to rate the issues on which there is a “high chance of violence breaking out.” Almost four-fifths, 79 percent, of the respondents cited relations between the secular and the religious camps, with friction between the left and right coming in a close second, 70 percent. Noting that the messianic strain in Israeli life is growing increasingly militant, Hebrew University sociologist Moshe Lisak has gone so far as to characterize the secular Jewish state established in 1948 as “largely a fleeting episode.”

Messianic extremism manifested itself most dramatically in the Nov. 4, 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Rabin by a religious zealot, Yigal Amir. Amir believed that there is only one guideline for fixing the borders of the Land of Israel, the Divine Promise made to the Patriarch Abraham: “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates” (Genesis 15:17). Today these borders embrace a large part of the Middle East, from Egypt to Iraq.

In the book Murder In The Name Of God: The Plot To Kill Yitzhak Rabin, Michael Karpin and Ina Friedman note that, “Zealots read this passage as God’s Will and God’s Will must be obeyed whatever the cost. No mortal has the right to settle for borders any narrower than these. Thus negotiating a peace settlement with Israel’s neighbors is unthinkable. After all, the manifest destiny of the Jewish people has not been realized, say the zealots, so what is the basis for making peace? The order of action must be reversed: First the territorial conquests must be completed, so as to bring the Divine Promise to fruition. Yet even after their territorial demands are satisfied, the zealots doubt whether it will be possible to reconcile with the Arabs. ‘Esau hates Jacob,’ says the Talmud, and you cannot make peace with those that hate you.”

The ultra-Orthodox world from which Yigal Amir came, in which he was educated and nurtured, has contempt for the idea of Israel as a secular democratic state with equal rights for all of its citizens. Karpin and Friedman write that the Orthodox view on the dichotomy between Israel’s self-definition as both a Jewish and democratic state “has consistently been that a Jewish state must, by definition, be ruled by Jewish religious law as interpreted by rabbinical scholars. Israel’s secular founders had never even entertained that idea. They established the state as a democracy governed by civil law and undertook, in the Declaration of Independence, to ‘ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex’ and to ‘guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture.’ But as a concession to the religious parties, they agreed to a certain blurring of the formal division between the authority of ‘church’ and state. Thus in the early 1950s an arrangement was reached whereby matters affecting a citizen’s ‘personal status’—essentially meaning marriage, divorce and burial—was controlled exclusively by clerics. For Israel’s Jews this means they are controlled by the Orthodox religious establishment, and over the years this arrangement has played havoc with the civil rights of countless citizens.”

The Israeli notion of “religious freedom” involves a system in which no Jewish Israeli, even the most atheist, can marry outside his “faith” in Israel. Since there is no option of civil marriage, that 20 percent of new immigrants from the former Soviet Union who do not fit the Orthodox definition of being Jewish but claim no other religious affiliation are ineligible to marry in Israel at all, unless they undergo formal conversion.

A Growing Division

During the past decade the division over which system of law—religious or civil—should prevail has grown, with the religious right demanding that democratic values be subordinated to Jewish law and the secular left demanding that a bill of rights be legislated. On the political right, there are calls for an end to equal political rights for nonJews. Since the signing of the Oslo agreement, some have demanded that any government decision fateful to the country’s future should require a “Jewish majority” to be ratified by the Knesset. The implication is that votes cast in the Knesset by parties representing Israel’s Arab citizens should simply be disqualified.

The rhetoric of the Israeli ultra-Orthodox groups in the days preceding the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin made it clear that Rabin’s death was a legitimate, even a religious goal.

Elyakim Ha’etzni, a 67-year-old lawyer, founder of the Yesha Council, the voice of the West Bank settler movement, a former Knesset member from the defunct radical right Tehiya Party, was one of three former Knesset members who signed an open letter in November 1993 calling upon soldiers and police to defy orders to evacuate settlements and warning that relinquishing any territory to the Palestinians would spark a civil war. In March 1995 he again tried to spur the army to revolt by telling the head of the Israel Defense Force’s General Command, during a heated meeting with settlers in Hebron: “In Hitler’s Germany there were officers who understood that their government was leading the German people to oblivion, and they stood up and threw down their insignia and paid for it with their lives. Here the government is leading the people to oblivion.”

Ha’etzni also harped on the alleged parallel between Rabin’s government and the collaborationist Vichy regime in France during World War II: “Those loyal to the Greater Land of Israel have the right to declare a government that gives up territory as an illegal one, just as De Gaulle declared the Vichy government illegal.” He even drew a direct parallel between Rabin and Vichy leader Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain, saying: “We will treat [the signing of the Oslo agreement] as collaboration with the Nazis was treated in occupied France...This is an act of treason, and it’s unavoidable that the day will come when Rabin is tried for this as Pétain was.”

The ultra-Orthodox weekly Hashavna (“The Week”) was used by its publisher, Asher Zuckerman, to wage a vicious crusade against Rabin. The magazine regularly called the prime minister “a Kapo,” “an anti-Semite,” “ruthless” and “a pathological liar.” This weekly, which is read by close to 20 percent of the ultra-Orthodox community, published a symposium on the question of whether Rabin deserved to die and the appropriate means of executing him.

Members of the Likud establishment expressed similar views. Hashavna published an interview with Ariel Sharon, who spoke of the Oslo peace policy as “graver than what Pétain did,” adding, “It’s hard to use the word ‘treason’ when speaking of Jews, but there’s no substantive difference.” In March 1995, Zuckerman wrote of a talk he had with Likud Chairman Binyamin Netanyahu. He quotes Netanyahu as saying: “Rabin charges that he’s called a terrible word, ‘murderer.’ But with all the unpleasantness [implied by that term], he has no reason to complain. Whoever is aware [that] the fetters he places on soldiers’ hands have led directly to the murder of a large number of Jews has difficulty refraining from use of the terrible word ‘murder.’”

By the critical summer of 1995, Hashavna went so far as to charge that Rabin and Peres “are leading the state and its citizens to annihilation and must be placed before a firing squad,” In the issue published on Friday, Nov. 3, 1995, the day before the assassination, Zuckerman (under the pen name A. Barak) offered his readers the forecast that, “The day will come when the Israeli public will bring Rabin and Peres into court with the alternative being the gallows or the insane asylum. This nefarious duo has either lost its mind or is flagrantly treasonous.”

Beyond all of this, a group of Orthodox rabbis gave religious sanction to the murder of Yitzhak Rabin. These rabbis, both in Israel and abroad, revived two obsolete precepts—din rodef (the duty to kill a Jew who imperils the life or property of another Jew) and din moser (the duty to eliminate a Jew who intends to turn another Jew in to nonJewish authorities).

By relinquishing rule over parts of the Land of Israel to the Palestinian Authority, these rabbis argued, the head of the Israeli government had become a moser. And by branding Rabin they effectively declared open season on his life. Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun, himself an Orthodox rabbi and West Bank settler, declared that, “Hundreds of people heard the word rodef in connection with the late prime minister months before and around the time of the murder. The fact that these discussions leaked out and inspired a heated public debate in the religious community turned the obsolete notions of rodef and moser into household words.”

From the beginning of 1995 onward, the popularization of the words rodef and moser nourished the belief in Orthodox circles that a consideration of whether or not they should be applied to Rabin was legitimate. Orthodox rabbis were consulting one another about whether Rabin fell into the category of a rodef or a moser. In the U.S., hundreds of Orthodox rabbis signed a statement declaring that he did.

Two students of Rabbi Shmuel Dvir, a teacher in the Har Etzion Yeshiva in Gush Erzion, subsequently reported that he told them it was definitely permissible to kill Rabin under the provision of din rodef. A third described Dvir’s desire to execute the act personally. “If Rabin comes to visit Gush Etzion, I myself will climb on a roof and shoot him with a rifle,” he boasted.

After Yigal Amir acted upon the ultra-Orthodox agitation to remove Yitzhak Rabin from the scene and thereby bring the peace process to an end, he was hailed as a hero in many quarters. A resident of the ultra-Orthodox stronghold of Bnei Brak stood before TV cameras and declared: “There is no mourning here. Yitzhak Rabin was not one of us.” In the West Bank settlements of Tapuach and Yizhar, pictures of Amir were hung on the walls at parties celebrating the “miracle.” When word of the assassination reached the large West Bank settlement of Ariel, participants at a political assembly stood up and applauded. In the Yeshiva of the Jewish Idea in Jerusalem, young men embraced one another on hearing the news. In the Orthodox study group at Bar-Ilan University—of which Amir had been a participant—students called him “a saint.”

A question on the 1996 high school matriculation examination in citizenship prompted many essays indicating support for Yigal Amir and his motives. Two of the teachers grading these exams spoke out about the answers of students from religious high schools and sought to publish them. But the Ministry of Education and Culture, then headed by Minister Zevulun Hammer of the National Religious Party, forbade them from doing so. Bar-Ilan University sociologist Nissan Rubin, himself of moderate political views, declared that, “There’s a feeling among the religious public that Rabin’s death was a miracle.” Citing ancient Jewish myths of miraculous rescue, Rubin wrote in Ha’aretz: “Just as the Jews were always saved from destruction at the last minute—an allusion to the parting of the Red Sea during the Exodus and the 11th hour rescue of the Jews in Persia from the wicked Haman, so now people are saying a miracle has occurred.”

The depth of Israel’s cultural divide may be seen in the fact that Yigal Amir and those who embraced his act of murder are not a small, isolated fringe, but a large segment of Israeli society. Hebrew University sociologist Moshe Lisak states: “Yigal Amir grew out of the mainstream, not the margins. What is referred to as the ‘ideological fringe’ is actually very broad. We’re speaking of a variety of groups—social networks—some of which speak and write on a high level. They share a good degree of common ground, and they live and act in continuous circles. These are not isolated or reclusive elements, and there is a big difference between them and the Kahanist thugs.”

Rabbi Yehudah Amital, the founder of Meimad, a small movement of politically moderate religious nationalists, said that, “The murderer came from among us, out of religious Zionism and Judaism and we cannot say that ‘our hands have not shed this blood.’ Rather than be a tempering influence, many of our rabbis have been a radicalizing one, creating a political dogma and a public mood that made the murder possible. Political extremism has been dressed up as religion. Not only did the prime minister’s murderer come from among us, but Baruch Goldstein, the murderer in the Cave of the Patriarchs, did too. That the religious community brushed off that slaughter...shows that its moral sensibility is flawed...The decline began when the rabbis chose to turn a blind eye to the attacks on Arabs that eventually led to acts of murder…”

Authors Michael Karpin and Ina Friedman report that, “Historians are likely to characterize the post-Rabin period as a time of deep anxiety. There are many indications that racist and separatist philosophies are gaining ground, especially among...the national religious population. One particularly troubling development is the recent wave of verbal assaults on the High Court of Justice by religious circles…Knesset Member Aharon Cohen of the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, which in the past decade has grown from a marginal political force to a major power, characterized the court’s justices as ‘foreign priests of modern primitive idolatry.’ Shas’s spiritual mentor, former Sephardi Chief Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, went a step further in urging all Israelis to boycott secular courts ‘which are not for Jews,’ and agree to be judged only before rabbinical tribunals.”

In the same election which unseated Prime Minister Netanyahu, the Shas Party grew, while both Likud and Labor shrank. Shas captured 17 out of 120 seats, up from 10 and only 2 less than Likud. “Thank God for He is good!” proclaimed the Shas Party newspaper, Day By Day. The subheadline read: “The dream has come true: The Second Israel is not second anymore: Sephardim have captured the state of Israel.”

Shabar Ilan, a religion expert for Ha’aretz, said of Shas: “It’s the closest thing we have to the Islamic movement.” A party that received nearly 430,000 out of 3.7 million votes can hardly be ignored.

Can a society in which a large bloc of voters seek to replace the civil law mandated by a political democracy with religious law, and are willing to use violence when its desires are thwarted, maintain its identity as a state which is both Jewish and democratic? Can such a divided society avoid a cultural civil war? Can it move forward toward a genuine peace with its neighbors? These are the questions which Israelis, Israel’s friends throughout the world, and its Arab neighbors are asking. The most recent election has not made the answer any more clear.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.