As Israel Turns 75, What Next?

 Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax] Chronicle Herald

Each year, the Israel Democracy Index takes the public pulse by conducting research based on the findings of a survey of a representative sample of the population.

Its most recent non-partisan report found that up to 75 per cent of Israeli Jews aged 18 to 34 identify as right-wing -- a trend, the report said, that has developed over the last decade. In addition, young people increasingly identify as being religious, or are being born into “ultra-Orthodox” families which tend to be more conservative.

That was in part reflected in last year’s national election, when a far-right alliance led by the Likud Party took power. Their leaders are now ministers in the coalition government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

A planned judicial reform announced by the government in January has led to deep divisions and the largest sustained mass demonstrations in the country’s history. Over the past four months, the gap in society between opponents and supporters of the controversial plan has been widening. The former say the overhaul would threaten Israel’s democracy, while the latter say it is necessary to curb what they describe as the country’s overly powerful Supreme Court.

But this is only a manifestation of far deeper divisions. Following the Nov. 1, 2022, elections, this latent political showdown finally erupted. Even Independence Day celebrations have been marred by political protests against the Netanyahu government. Has Israel reached a breaking point as it enters its 75th year?

The anger of Israel’s secular and liberal voters -- and the elites who make up the legal, academic, business, security, and media establishments -- is aimed at the people who voted Netanyahu back into office. Just below the surface is the contempt a large portion of the Israeli population feels for their compatriots who identify as nationalists and religious, as well as those of Mizrachi background, Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin, who are severely under-represented among these elites. These Israelis feel that they’ve been left behind, locked out of the structures of Israeli success.

The left’s conception of Israel is rooted in the purely secular vision that animated the Labour Zionists and other left-wingers who ruled the country without challenge in the Jewish state’s first three decades. The Israel of the nationalist right and the religious parties, whose voters make up about half of the country and a clear majority of its Jewish population, is a country that the secularists don’t like. They seem to be saying that Israel won’t be a legitimate state if its democratic system continues to produce majorities for the right.

The fundamental cause of the decline of the left lies in demography. It was pinpointed by then-President Reuven Rivlin in a speech to the Annual Herzliya Conference in 2015 in which he said that “Israeli society is undergoing a far-reaching transformation,” in which it was becoming composed of four “tribes” of roughly equal strength: secular Jews, national religious Jews, “Ultra-Orthodox” Haredim, and Israel’s Arabs, all with entirely different outlooks “regarding the basic values and desired character” of the state.

The court reform crisis breaks down along those lines. The Israel Democracy Institute report shows that while there is a small but stable majority against the reform, 84 per cent of the left trusts the court, but only 26 per cent of the right does; and while 63 per cent of secular Jews trust the court, just six per cent of the ultra-Orthodox do.

The academic and journalist Avishay Ben Haim has suggested in various venues that Israel’s defining political struggle isn’t between left or right, or even the religious and the secular, but between representatives of what he has called the First and the Second Israel.

In Ben Haim’s analysis, the First Israel comprises the country’s traditional elites, the largely socialist and largely Ashkenazi milieu -- Jews of European origin -- that presided over Israel’s coming into being, while the Second Israel includes Israel’s Mizrachi Jews and its growing Orthodox population. While the two Israels might coexist uneasily within the same body politic, they are in fact fundamentally different and opposing entities.

The First Israel, he asserts, measures success by how closely it resembled the West, which means celebrating everything from big IPOs to Netflix deals. The Second Israel, realizing it is very much a product of the East, is more focused on family, tradition, and nation. For the First Israel, Jewish values are tolerable only as long as they don’t interfere with the dictates of cosmopolitanism; for the Second Israel, democracy is just another name for the sort of compromises that Judaism needs to generate, but it should never supplant or minimize it.

The current crisis presents a historic opportunity to refashion the Jewish state in a way that embraces the original aims of the founding: protecting both democratic rights and freedoms and also the unique Jewish character of the state.

If Israel is to become a more stable democracy, it must, as former President Rivlin implied, reform its political system so that all its tribes feel at home in the state. It must move from being a state in which a majority can do almost whatever it likes to one in which there is real partnership between the various groupings.