By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript
The Jewish population of Israel is probably one of the most racially diverse groups in the world. Israel is a melting pot immigrant society. And this has resulted in deep intra-ethnic and class divides, expressed politically.
In the years immediately following the founding of the state, Israel’s newly arrived Mizrahi/Sephardi immigrants – Jews from the Middle East and North Africa -- were at a serious disadvantage in many ways.
The Ashkenazi Jews, those of European background, had been the mainstays of the twentieth century Zionist movement. They had created the state and after 1948 had continually governed it.
Mizrahim were often less educated, and disadvantages in professional training were compounded by discrimination and exclusion, because they were outside existing social and economic networks, and also because the established elites were prejudiced against them.
Elitist sentiments, though they ran contrary to government assimilationist policies, persisted. After all, they had been the pioneers, the farmers, the soldiers, the educated people who made the Zionist cause a reality.
As a result, Mizrahim eventually flocked in growing numbers to Menachem Begin’s Likud Party, which was far more hospitable to religion and tradition than the ruling Labour Party coalitions. He won the 1977 election on the strength of his appeal to Mizrahi voters. For Israel’s Ashkenazi elites the shock was total and extreme.
By 1990, this establishment was in a dire state, having been unable to win a single election since the Likud gained its electoral upset in 1977, after almost three decades of uninterrupted Labour rule.
And so began a slow and arduous process of neutering electoral politics and investing actual power in the bureaucracy. The spearhead of the attempt to shift decision-making power from elected politicians to career bureaucrats was the Supreme Court.
The left’s struggle to regain power meshed with the ambitions of judges, who were all too eager to augment their own authority. Under the leadership of Supreme Court President Aharon Barak, Israel was gradually transformed from a democracy to a judiciocracy.
In a 1995 court decision Barak announced, unilaterally and retroactively, that Basic Laws, passed by the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, in 1992, were now constitutional, and therefore the basis for striking down legislation through the process of judicial review.
And this was virtually open-ended. Since the court also established “reasonableness” as a central criterion for its judgments, it could veto policies which were perfectly legal based on its own opinion of whether they were “reasonable.”
This came about in order to prevent the right from taking power, not to exclude Mizrahi Jews, but since the majority of them vote for the right, the line between politics and ethnicity coincided. And this has led to the current struggle that has rocked Israel with protests and even violence for months.
Israel’s Jewish population is divided more or less evenly between the Ashkenazim and the Mizrahim. Yet representation in the Supreme Court is sharply skewed. Of 76 judges who have served as permanent associates in the court since the state was founded, only 12 were Mizrahi.
Both sides in the bitter controversy over Israel’s identity nominally subscribe to the slogan that theirs is a Jewish, democratic state. But the right sees Israel not merely as a Jewish state but as a state that is first and foremost Jewish, not only in the sense that it has a Jewish majority and state symbols, but Jewish also in ways that are expressed in its policies, in the character of public spaces, and in its understanding of its own place in the world.
Representatives of this bloc understand democracy first and foremost in majoritarian terms: if Israel has a Western, liberal character, then its legitimacy is rooted in the existence of a majority that supports it, and one which is free to change its mind and turn Israel into something other than a Western, liberal country if it wishes.
The Israeli right is afraid that, whether in government or in opposition, the liberal camp is trying to undermine Israel’s Jewish character. The right-wing media frequently describe all of Israel’s center-left as “post-Zionist,” and accuse them of trying to transform Israel into a non-Jewish state. This vision taps into millennia of Jewish history and sees a country that is thoroughly exceptional because it is Jewish.
The parties opposed to the right-religious bloc also affirm Israel’s self-definition as a Jewish state. But this left-secular bloc generally sees Israel as first and foremost a modern Western state and a liberal democracy, though one with a Jewish majority and Jewish cultural characteristics.
In the eyes of its adherents, Israel’s identity as a Western-oriented, liberal democracy isn’t contingent on the wishes of a temporary majority; rather, these features are parts of Israel’s very definition.
The liberal camp’s conception of Israel is built on Theodor Herzl’s idea of Jewish normalcy. The founder of political Zionism envisioned a thoroughly modern country, one just like any other except that it would have a Jewish population.
In other words, in today’s Israel, the greatest dividing line between Western-oriented liberals and Jewish exceptionalists is, in effect, one between “Israelis” and “Jews.” And the Ashkenazim are found in the first, the Mizrachim in the second.
A genuine Kulturkampf, the conflict between these competing identities and the accompanying visions is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon.
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