Israel's Jewish Divide

7 Jul 2010

Often sidelined by the media's focus on security issues, the culture war between secular and religious Jews and within the religious community itself continues to be a defining feature of modern Israeli society.

Crises associated with the Jewish religious-secular kulturkampf (culture war) in Israel are decades old and, indeed, predate the formation of the state in 1948.

It was the decision of the first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion and other state founders to effectively calcify and extend the status quo ante, dating back to the external pagemillet system of Ottoman rule, in which religious authorities held significant sway over personal status issues and significant areas of communal life, that sewed the seeds for this enduring series of crises.

Initially intended to revive what was seen as a dying Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) sector, devastated by the twin ravages of the Jewish enlightenment and Holocaust, the extension of state largess to religious institutions and associated confirmation of religious purview over personal status issues for all Israeli Jews has dramatically backfired.

According to external pagereports, thousands of secular Israeli couples now fly every year to Cyprus and other destinations to marry in a bid to circumvent religious strictures. They remain subject to divorce in religious courts, conversion recognition difficulties and other constraints maintained by the state's Chief Rabbinate and associated religious court system upon their return.

These culture war battles continue to roil throughout the country in a process whose cyclical nature fails to elide the traumatic nature of struggles over neighborhoods, funding and personal status crises for those involved.

Burying issues

Central and local governments tend to win set piece standoffs with the ultra-Orthodox on specific issues of little relevance to key secular demands, where these do not threaten the maintenance of political coalitions.

A good example was Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's external pagereversal in April of an earlier cabinet decision to move a planned ER at Ashkelon's Barzilai Medical Center.

The earlier decision to force a change in the intended site of the ER, which would have significantly delayed completion of the project at the cost of millions of shekels, was due to ultra-Orthodox parties' concerns that graves found at the proposed site could have held Jewish burials.

In May the Jerusalem municipality was forced to temporarily external pagesuspendservices to ultra-Orthodox areas of the city after a number of its workers were badly beaten in violent riots, organized by the hard-line ultra-Orthodox Eda Haredit sect, over the removal of human remains from the proposed ER site and a second hospital site in Jaffa.

This was only the latest in a wave of Haredi riots in the city, dating back decades. Last year there were violent protests and attacks on city workers over the arrest of a woman from an extremist sect, found by city workers to have starved her child, and a series of protests by ultra-Orthodox over the operation of a new parking lot on the Sabbath close to the Old City's Jaffa Gate.

While Eda Haredit remains a marginal movement within the overall, disparate ultra-Orthodox community, it has demonstrated the capacity to publicly humiliate Haredi political representatives, both at local and central government levels, in a manner that forces them to take actions on its demands.

The head of the main Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox party, Deputy Health Minister Eliezer Litzman of United Torah Judaism (UTJ) had threatened to resign from government should the Barzilai Medical Center graves not be preserved in situ. He subsequently retracted this threat but struggled to bring fellow UTJ parliamentarians into line with the party's decision not to withdraw from the Netanyahu government.

Living with the enemy

Extant tensions regularly break out into full kulturkampf struggles in cities and towns throughout the country where ultra-Orthodox, Orthodox and seculars live side by side, often with little to no social contact.

These struggles usually start with efforts by ultra-Orthodox movements to open a synagogue or educational facility in a previously secular or less religiously stringent neighborhood - usually through the surreptitious exercise of power in local government coalitions to obtain budgets and permits.

In some cases this leads local neighborhood groups, often comprising residents of varying degrees of religiosity, to band together in usually losing efforts to force the local government to rescind permissions and prevent what they fear will be the movement of ultra-Orthodox into their area. Their fear is that 'Haredisation' will depress apartment prices; force shifts in public inter-sex cohabitation; impact women's freedom of dress; and color the public observance of holidays and the Sabbath.

In Jerusalem, the number of secular neighborhoods has shrunk markedly in recent years as the ultra-Orthodox population (22 percent of the populace) continues to grow. Young seculars continue to flee the increasingly religious and socio-economically stagnant city, which is now Israel's poorest.

However, kulturkampf struggles are also occurring in largely religious cities such as Bet Shemesh, where ultra-Orthodox and Orthodox residents are increasingly squaring off, and intra-Haredi violence appears to be on the rise.

In June 2008 a US immigrant was admitted to hospital after he was savagely beaten by a mob of fellow Haredim, and street signs have reportedly emerged in the city warning women to dress modestly - a precursor to 'modesty patrol' attacks in other cities.

Speaking to Haaretz in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 attack, Deputy Mayor Shalom Lerner external pagesaid: "It's sad that they are trying to terrorize the city […] Unfortunately, though, the Haredi violence isn't news anymore."

Powerbrokers

Hard-line ultra-Orthodox groups have always seen themselves as under threat from the secular government, even when their political representatives are blocking movement on a variety of kulturkampf issues.

Here it is important to note that the UTJ and Shas - which enjoy only 16 Knesset seats between them but win support on selective kulturkampf issues from national-religious MKs and major parties - have again made themselves indispensable to the formation of central government coalitions and enjoy equal sway in local government in many areas.

Both at local and central government levels, the pragmatic bent of Haredi politicians, whose political priorities often do not stretch far beyond securing greater budget disbursements for associated educational and religious institutions, makes their involvement in coalition an attractive option for secular parties even in cities where the ultra-Orthodox constitute only a small minority.

This is exacerbated by the fractured nature of government and governance at both the state and local level, and the virtual lock on Interior Ministry funding for local government held by the Shas party through its almost perennial leadership of the ministry.

Secular political downturn

The political potency of the culture war, at least within the secular Jewish community, reached a new peak with the political struggles of the early 1990s to early 2000s. This surge was first expressed through the civil rights activism of Meretz, with the gradual erosion of secular public interest in rights issues, then in the meteoric fall and rise of Shinui.

Some members of the party broke away from Meretz in 1997, running on a radical anti-religious platform in 1999 before joining the right-wing government of Ariel Sharon with 15 seats following the 2003 elections.

The subsequent, effective collapse of the party led to the demise of militant anti-religious politicking in intervening years. This diminution reflects both growing secular middle-class disillusionment with the failure of militant political secularism to end religious control over personal status issues. It also reflects a larger apolitical dynamic that has emerged through and in the wake of the second intifada and via the collapse of ideological party orientations from the Zionist center right to center left.

Shinui's collapse leaves a vacuum that has not been filled by the populist far right stances of Yisrael Beiteinu, which ran on a platform that included the old canards of secular freedom from religious coercion. However, Avigdor Lieberman clearly drew more support both from his party's Russian-Israeli base and working-class Jews through a radical upgrading of the anti-Arab tendencies inherent in the Yisrael Beiteinu platform.

This thinly-veiled racist orientation runs counter to the amorphous liberalism of the Ashkenazi middle class, which provided both Shinui and Meretz with the bulk of their support. This electorate has now largely shifted its vote to Kadima or the Likud, or joined the burgeoning ranks of non-voters.

Kadima occasionally raises kulturkampf issues in lashing out at the Netanyahu government, with leader Tzipi Livni accusing Netanyahu of bowing to the excessive financial demands of the ultra-Orthodox.

However, this criticism is usually tempered in a manner that will allow Kadima to form a coalition with religious parties in the future; hence, external pageLivni's clarification that "the issue here is not the Haredim; the issue at hand is politics that take advantage of a terrible system and a weak politician."

The next secular kulturkampf party appears to be in gestation with strong indications that high-profile broadcaster Yair Lapid is to enter politics at the head of a new slate. Lapid is the son of deceased Shinui leader Tommy Lapid.

Given the fractured and fractious state of the Israeli political system and apathy of the middle-class secular voting public, it remains unclear whether political polls showing his putative party enjoying considerable support will hold, should he make the leap into the bear pit of the Israeli political contest.

However, such is the fear of his entry into politics that two bills have been submitted to the Knesset, by the Likud and Kadima, calling for the institution of a "time out period" for journalists wishing to enter politics.

No escape

As kulturkampf issues continue to fester, popular expressions of distrust of and disgust with the ultra-Orthodox populace are regularly vented in the secular Israeli press, notably by popular radio hosts. These sometimes carry disturbing resonances of anti-Semitic prejudices of the past.

Mirror chauvinism is also openly exhibited in ultra-Orthodox and national-religious characterizations of the secular Jewish public in their own media organs.

Ultimately, Israeli-Jewish society will remain fractured along interwoven religious, ethnic and class lines in a manner that necessitates the very compromises that feed the country's culture war. This in a situation marred by the near complete absence of functioning, mediating political mechanisms and points of social interaction required to alleviate attendant tensions and crises.

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