Political liberalism is floundering in Israel.
But even if we cannot win at the ballot box, we have a right to our
identity, and must begin to fight for it.
A Haredi man walks by a graffiti reading 'Decent behavior preceded the Torah.' Jerusalem, July 16 2013.
Photo by Tomer Appelbaum
Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party has been sponsoring a bill
that would finally fix one of Israel’s greatest anomalies: Jews in
Israel are not allowed to marry whoever they want to, and even more
incredibly, they cannot marry the way they want to. Jews cannot choose
to wed without a Rabbi, and any non-Orthodox Rabbi’s marriage ceremony
is not recognized as valid.
But the Civil Union Bill
looks bound to fail. Once again, the Haredi stranglehold on Israeli
public life will carry the day, and, as former Chief Justice Aharon
Barak is arguing, Israelis’ basic human right
to marry as they wish will be denied. Secular Israeli Jews unwilling to
cave in to religious coercion will continue traveling abroad in order
to wed, because the homeland of the Jews does not allow this most basic
freedom of marrying according to their own preferences and beliefs.
This
situation is symptomatic for a long-term development. Secular liberal
Israelis are gradually squeezed into the status of a disenfranchised
minority. Depending on the polling method and formulation of the
questionnaire, between 22 and 35 percent of Israelis describe themselves
as secular. Our relative size has been waning, and for almost four
decades we have been politically ever more powerless.
As
a result, growing numbers of Israeli secular liberals feel that the
country is no longer theirs. Since 1977, when the Likud first came to
power, Israeli politics have become ever more nationalist and religious –
most dramatically in the settlement policy and the gradual de facto
annexation of the West Bank led by religious settlers.
Israel is, as political scientist Charles Kupchan has argued, a special case
that combines most elements of liberal democracy with distinct
theocratic elements – such as the enormous role the ultra-Orthodox
rabbinic establishment plays in public affairs. Israel is, in other
words, only partially a Western country.
Israel’s
secular Jews currently get the worst of all possible worlds: on the one
hand, we have very little political power. On the other hand, to this
day the national-religious and ultra-Orthodox feel free to attack us
with the most bilious and derogatory terms
– while at the same time demanding respect for their own creed and way
of life. They continue to behave as if we secular Jews were an
oppressive majority, even though we haven’t been in power for decades.
Many
secular Israelis feel that the country is ‘naturally’ theirs and has
been stolen from them. They feel that since 1977 the country has been
slipping away, and often nostalgically yearn for the times of
Ben-Gurion’s Mapai rule. But Mapai’s socialist Zionism is now
essentially defunct. Its heirs, the Labor party and Meretz are social
democratic along the lines of the European consensus, and most of
Israel’s secular Jews are mostly far less nationalist than Ben-Gurion’s
Mapai was.
Personally
I do not decry this: I have never been a socialist, and socialism has
proven not to be viable ideologically, economically and politically in
its long history in the 20th century. Hence I am glad that Israel’s
moderate left has moved from socialism to liberalism.
But
Israel’s secular liberals are in a problematic position: Political
liberalism is by its nature, definition and goal non-extremist. It
doesn’t flout grand ideology, but believes in modest goals and pragmatic
compromise. This is viable if the surrounding political forces are
moderate as well, but in Israel this is not the case. Israel’s
national-religious camp is follows a radical messianic ideology and the
ultra-Orthodox adhere to a fundamentalist understanding of Judaism.
Secular
Israelis need to realize that Israel is not ours, that our influence
here is bound to be limited for demographic reasons: we will never reach
the birthrates of the national-religious and certainly not the
ultra-Orthodox. We need to stop feeling and behaving as if Israel is our
country that was stolen from us. Instead we need to start acting like
the minority we are: we need to fight for our rights the same way the
ultra-Orthodox and national-religious are fighting for theirs. Even if
we cannot win at the ballot box, we have a right to our identity.
Most
of us hold Universalist values, and identify ourselves with core
elements of Western culture. We disagree with Israel’s occupation
policy, and we are against the ultra-Orthodox stranglehold on Israel’s
public life. We should stop being apologetic about this; we should
refuse any accusation from either right-wing nationalists that we are
insufficiently Zionist (in their chauvinist version of Zionism, at
least) or accusations from the Haredim that we are insufficiently
Jewish.
We
will continue to fight for an Israel that corresponds to our values –
among other things by continuing to promote and argue for the creation
of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. But we must face reality:
hardly anybody believes that Kerry’s well-meaning effort to reach an
Israel-Palestine agreement will succeed. The national-religious are
bound to wreck this effort in the same way they are blocking Yesh Atid’s
Civil Union bill.
We must brace for the possibility that the two-state vision
will fail, and that Israel will go towards dark times indeed. If this
should happen, liberal-secular Israelis will undergo a severe identity
crisis and we will have to make more valiant efforts to define our
identities vis-à-vis a majority that is pushing Israel towards a
religiously colored chauvinism. This is not an easy task, and I intend
to devote a number of posts to this topic in the near future.
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