A house of many mansions: Economist

A house of many mansions
A house of many mansions: Economist

Apr 3rd 2008

Israeli Jews are becoming more disparate but also somewhat more tolerant of each other

YARON, as we shall call him, is a secular, left-wing, Jewish resident of Tel Aviv in his mid-30s—intelligent, cosmopolitan, well-connected and clearly destined to be a member of his country's elite. But in about ten years' time, he says, he and his partner might well leave. “By about 2025, Arabs and religious Jews are going to be a majority, people like us will be a minority—and ten years from now is about when all the other people like us are going to start realising it.”

He fears that the religious will gradually force the rest to accept more of their restrictions, such as bans on Sabbath trading and the sale of non-kosher food. The rising cost of supporting ultra-Orthodox yeshivas and unemployed Arabs will push up taxes. The conflict with the Palestinians will grind on. Inter- and intra-ethnic conflicts will intensify. And the secular Jewish elite will trickle abroad, leaving the economy in the dumps.

The divides between religious and secular date back to the foundation of the state, when David Ben-Gurion enlisted the support of the rabbis (who were sceptical of Zionism) by giving them authority over “life-cycle events” such as marriage and burial. Leftists are furious when right-wingers describe Palestinians as “backward”, “dirty” or “fanatical”, but they themselves can be heard saying the same about the ultra-Orthodox. For their part, the haredim do plenty to anger their more moderate co-religionists. Last year a former chief rabbi suggested that the Holocaust was a punishment for Reform Judaism, a liberal stream born in pre-Nazi Germany. It is an old joke that Israel's real troubles will begin only after it has made peace with the Palestinians and has to start making peace among the Jews.

Yet the joke is already less fashionable than it once was. And Yaron's vision of the future is based partly on out-of-date assumptions. First, the demographic balance is not shifting all that fast. Though Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Jews do indeed have more children than the rest, the birth rate even among Jews broadly defined as “secular” is 2.4 children per family, as against less than 1.5 in much of western Europe.

The battle of the bulge

Meanwhile, birth rates among both Arabs and haredim have dropped, particularly in the past few years. There is much argument over whether the abolition in 2003 of child benefits that favoured larger families played a part in this. Studies by Sergio DellaPergola, a demographer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and colleagues suggest that the availability of things like flexible working hours for mothers, mortgages and child care affect people's family planning much more than do benefit payments. Whatever the reasons, although by 2020 secular Jews are likely to make up only half the population, as Yaron fears, the share of the haredim—who might wish to limit his secular freedoms—will still be just 8%.

Also, haredi society is changing. Rabbi Israel Eichler, a former member of parliament for an ultra-Orthodox party, is keen to dispel what he sees as some slanderous myths.

• First, most men leave the yeshiva by about the age of 25; only in certain hardcore sects was a lifelong “society of learners” ever considered the ideal. Secular youth who do army service (most haredim are exempt) and then go to university often take just as long to enter the workforce.
• Second, haredi men are not unemployable; although they are barred from most government jobs, supposedly because their spiritual education ill prepares them to work in the real world, they have had no trouble reaching the top tiers of the private sector. Israel's richest man, Lev Leviev, is a haredi businessman. And
  
• third, there are now many employment schemes that take account of religious restrictions, such as women-only software companies and paralegal firms.

Please hold, God will be with you shortly

As haredi society has been forced into contact with modernity it has become more worldly and open, while often finding ingenious ways to impose its own limits. Rabbi Eichler sports a “kosher mobile phone” on which internet access is disabled, stamped with the rabbinical council's seal of approval. There is also a “kosher internet”, which allows people to browse only websites that have been officially vetted.

The rest of society is changing too, says Ruth Calderon, the director of Alma, a Jewish study centre in Tel Aviv aimed at secular Jews. She and Rabbi Eichler, from their different vantage points, both detect a softening in the fervent anti-religionism of the early state. Liturgy has penetrated the work of leading pop musicians. Bible study has become “cool” among a younger generation of show-business personalities and public intellectuals. Israelis who used to channel their spiritual energies into Eastern philosophies they had picked up on their post-army backpacking trips are now returning to the fold of Judaism.

Finally, the growth of the ultra-Orthodox seems to have made them more self-confident and less militant. It has also led many to concentrate in segregated communities, including a couple of big new settlements in the West Bank, where their conservative, tight-knit lifestyles do not clash with anyone else's.

True, this segregation carries costs. The most notable is the decline of Jerusalem. The ancient city that both Israelis and Palestinians claim as their capital is now populated mostly by Palestinians with Israeli residence permits, religious Jews of various kinds, aid workers and foreign journalists, and is one of the country's poorest municipalities. Tel Aviv types like Yaron say they find the atmosphere suffocating.

But the separation of public spaces has also calmed things down. Seas of angry, black-garbed haredim demonstrating against cinemas and Sabbath-breaking are a thing of the past. The annual Jerusalem gay-pride marches have caused riots, but last year they were already more muted. The rabbis, says Kimi Kaplan, a sociologist who studies the haredim, have belatedly realised that the best way to keep their young men from the temptations of homosexuality is not to mention it. For their part, gay activists have debated whether they should insist on marching in Jerusalem or relinquish the holy city and confine themselves to tolerant and open Tel Aviv.

Rejewvenation

Society is fragmented in other ways too. Besides Arab-Israelis, who have always lived mostly separately, the post-Soviet and Ethiopian immigrants have not been absorbed as seamlessly as earlier waves. They hold on to their language and culture and often clump together in their own neighbourhoods. Russian-language radio advertises visiting Russian pop stars and adult circumcision services. Ethiopian teenagers make hip-hop and African roots music. Around 4% of Israelis are immigrants or their children who were given citizenship because they had a Jewish relative, but who are not technically Jewish themselves. These even include home-grown anti-Semites, alienated youth whom the press, with a touch of sensationalism, has labelled “neo-Nazis”.

This is not the uniform collective that the early Zionists dreamed of. But it is culturally richer, and “there's a certain comfort in the fragmentation,” says David Landau, the editor of the daily Haaretz and himself an unusual combination of religious and leftist. “We have a mosaic of minorities, and this gives each of them a certain self-confidence.”

These ethnic boundaries will also slowly blur. Already much reduced is the gulf between Ashkenazi Jews, immigrants from Europe, and Mizrahim, who came from the Middle East. The elitist Europeans looked down their noses at the “Arab Jews”, who watched the state's Holocaust-centred identity erase their own rich cultural history. For years the neglect of the Mizrahim was one of Israel's most burning social issues. Today, says Amnon Rubinstein, a law professor and former government minister, “I have students who can't tell me whether they are Ashkenazi or Mizrahi because each of their grandparents is from a different country.”

Yet like Yaron, Mr Rubinstein still worries about the secular-religious divide. Thanks both to the growing religious population and the widening wealth gap, Shas, a right-wing, populist party with a reputation as the champion of the poor, has been broadening its appeal beyond its traditional base of ultra-Orthodox Mizrahi voters. It is using its weight in the current coalition to demand more benefits for religious Jews and to obstruct the peace talks with the Palestinians.

Another concern is a slow convergence of interests between the ultra-Orthodox and another stream of Israeli Judaism, the religious Zionists, who pioneered the settlements in the occupied territories after 1967. These two groups have traditionally had quite different views of the role of the state. The haredim want it to promote Jewish learning and religious observance. The religious Zionists rely on it to support the settlements, which to the haredim are less important.

But their gradual integration into Israeli society has made some haredim more nationalist. A few of the more extreme younger settlers have adopted a sort of hybrid identity known as hardali (see article). If in future the settlers manage to enlist broader support among the ultra-Orthodox, letting go of the occupied territories will become even harder. And the longer the conflict with the Palestinians stays unsolved, the more it will alienate a group of Israelis known as the “other fifth”.