The New Middle East (30 page)

To get to Yoel’s apartment I had to park my car a short distance away and walk down the narrow cluttered streets. Slapped across every wall, layer over layer, were Haredi ‘Pashkevilim’ or wall posters. The tradition dates back to sixteenth-century Rome, where they originated as a form of protest before the creation of the newspaper industry.
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The world may have moved on but this remains, for the Haredim, the most important source of local news, rabbinical decrees or information on planned protests. It allows them to keep in touch with their wider community without being polluted by the influence of the mainstream media. They speak the once thriving but now almost dead European language of Yiddish. They avoid everyday use of the national language, Hebrew, because they believe it should only be used in religious ceremonies. The language of the words of the Pashkevilim was biblical in its forceful condemnation of the state of Israel, Zionism and its ‘Nazi-like’ oppression of the ‘Jewish people’, by which they meant the Haredi community.

There was only one poster that was both moderate in tone and printed in English, and that was because it was meant for outsiders who strayed into their community. It was addressed ‘To women and girls’ and it said in large black capital letters: ‘WE BEG YOU WITH ALL OUR HEARTS PLEASE DO NOT PASS THROUGH OUR NEIGHBORHOOD IN IMMODEST CLOTHES’. It then helpfully pointed out that: ‘Modest clothes include: closed blouse with long sleeves, long skirts, no tight-fitting clothes’.

When Yoel had heard the siren’s call to honour the nation’s military dead he was sitting at his computer. He just carried on typing. ‘Zionism and the state of Israel is what brought this dangerous, dire situation in this place,’ he told me. ‘All these slurs on Jews and these terrorism attacks were never a factor here before. Basically we think that the state of Israel is part of the problem, not part of the solution.’

The real problem is that Israelis cannot agree collectively what the problem is, so they cannot agree on the solution. The yawning gap that exists between the religious and secular is the biggest issue facing the Jewish communities of Israel today. There is no other country in the world where the citizens of a shared history, shared religion and shared ethnicity argue among themselves whether the state they live in should exist or not.

The broader issues confronting Israel today are about the essence and identity of the state: what it means to
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its people, whether they are religious nationalists, Modern Orthodox, ultra-Orthodox, Arab Muslims or secular. Israel is debating many of the same issues as post-revolution Egypt, and like Egypt they revolve around religion. The government in Israel sees no contradiction between declaring itself a Jewish state and protecting the rights of its non-Jewish minorities. The new Egyptian government sees no contradiction between Egypt being an Islamic state and protecting its minorities. In both cases the minorities disagree. There is a similar debate in both countries as to how far religious law should take precedence in the public sphere. In Egypt the Salafists are the ones pushing for a greater role for religion in a society that they believe should draw more of its identity from the origins of its faith. The ultra-Orthodox in Israel believe exactly the same. They want Jews to emulate the founding principles of their religion, unpolluted by modernity.

In both countries, though much more recently in the case of the Salafists, both religious communities have realised that they need to play a role in politics if their spiritual aims are to be met. Both have almost identical views on many social issues, particularly concerning the role of women in society. The difference is that in the Arab world the people now have the confidence to openly and loudly disagree with each other. It’s different among Jews in Israel, because they don’t want to wash their dirty linen in public. They don’t want the outside world to see them as divided, because divided means weak, and the outside world has exploited their past weaknesses to try to obliterate them. The country’s culture minister, Limor Livnat, reacted to the Oscar nomination in 2013 of two Israeli films, which she said ‘slander the state of Israel before the whole world’, by urging Israeli film-makers in future to exercise ‘self-censorship’.
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This kind of attitude means that much of the debate there is in Israel, and there is lots of it, is often lost to outsiders because it largely takes place in a language few non-Jewish people learn, Hebrew.

The ultra-Orthodox care less about the democratic nature of the state of Israel and more about its Jewishness.
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They believe, like the Salafists in Egypt, that religious law should take precedence over the laws made by men. Their problem with the rest of Israel is that they believe most of the people in it do not revere God or his laws as they should, and so no longer act in accordance with the Jewish faith. The ultra-Orthodox do not care about many of the battles the state of Israel feels it must fight to ensure its survival, because many of the Haredim do not care whether it survives or not. The ultra-Orthodox want the state of Israel to leave them alone. They do not want to take part.

The ultra-Orthodox don’t care about boundary and border disputes because they don’t recognise the state. On the margins of their community are people that champion the Palestinian cause. They don’t care about the bile coming out of Iran towards Israel because they agree with it. These are the reasons why secular and Orthodox Jews want to change the Haredim before the Haredim change Israel. They fear that the growth in the ultra-Orthodox community is undermining the economy, the security, even the very idea of the state. And because of the demographics of Israel they want to change things fast before, for them at least, it is too late.

But the Haredim are not the only ones who regard many of the actions of the state of Israel with scorn. On windswept hilltops in small flimsy structures are religious ultra-nationalist Jews who believe that the destiny of their people is to take back the West Bank, or what they call Judea and Samaria. They will fight the state of Israel for the right to hold on to and expand their present outposts, which even Israel has declared illegal. When the state acts against what they see as their interests, they make sure that the actions of the state carry what they call a ‘price tag’. These ‘price-tag’ attacks have been formally declared as acts of terrorism by the US, and include burning mosques and desecrating Arab graves.

The majority in Israel sees them as terrorists too. One senior government official described the attacks as ‘meant to drag Israel into a religious, national Armageddon’.
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These men, while still tiny in number, have caused outrage in the country. They have attacked Israeli soldiers, thrown firebombs at cars holding Palestinian families and vandalised Christian holy places, once scrawling the words ‘Jesus is a Monkey’ on the walls of a monastery.
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Yet some highly charged political acts of ‘price-tagging’ – for instance uprooting Palestinian olive trees which have been nurtured for centuries – are not dealt with seriously at all, because the Jewish settlers are bound by different laws than the Palestinians in the land they occupy. The Palestinians fall largely under military law, the Jewish settlers under Israeli law. Attacking olive trees often ends up being dealt with in a Tel Aviv court like a row between two neighbours over a hedge. It means there is a growing sense of impunity among these extremist communities for many of their crimes.

The spectrum of Israeli society is enormously wide and in constant churn. It struggles to accommodate people drawn from every corner of the globe and also communities that have lived on these lands before the modern state of Israel was born. It has some of the brightest software engineers and most creative hi-tech industries in the world. It also has people who think using the Internet is a sin.

Israel is complicated.

The results of the Israeli elections in 2013 were a signal that the secular majority wants to deal with many of the country’s divisive issues now. Israel has a thriving economy, and yet, because of its Haredi and Arab populations, the level of poverty is one of the worst among the world’s leading industrialised nations. Sixty per cent of both communities are simply broke. Low employment in the Israeli Arab community happens because the women are not working. By contrast, in the Haredi community it happens because the men are not working.

Arab women are unemployed because there are fewer job opportunities within their local communities, their levels of education are much lower than those for Jewish women and, as an International Monetary Fund report said in 2012: ‘Arab females face double discrimination problems, one for being women and the other for being Arabs.’
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Haredi men are unemployed because they do not want a job. They spend all day studying the Torah: Jewish law and tradition. If both the Arab and Haredi communities worked at the same level as everyone else it would add 5 per cent to the country’s GDP.
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At present, 40 per cent of six-year-olds in Israeli primary schools come from either the Haredi or the Arab communities. Both communities have large families, typically six or seven children for the Haredim and three or four for Arabs.
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That demographic means that the two communities least connected to the state are going to have a huge impact on a society they at present do not feel part of.

‘Ten years from now we are going to see something completely different demographically in Israel,’ the justice minister Tzipi Livni once told me in conversation while she was still leader of the opposition. ‘It’s not only about the state of Israel as a democratic and Jewish state but also the substance of the nature of the Israeli Jewish state. What does it mean from a religious perspective, from a national perspective . . . the Jewish-ness of the state?’

The country has many different splinters of Judaism, but its society can be broken down in religious terms into three main strands. The largest group, by far, are secular Jews. They are Zionist, which means they believe in the creation of the state of Israel for the Jewish people and they believe it is the right of all Jews anywhere in the world to come and live there. They are often only mildly religious, and pick and choose to what extent their faith constrains their lifestyle. In and around Tel Aviv, which is Israel’s biggest population centre, even on Shabbat, religion barely impinges on people’s lifestyles. However elsewhere in the country a whole industry has bloomed to cater for the desire of those secular Jews who want to adhere in principle to the key tenets of the faith, like not doing work on Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, but to go about their business as if it were largely an ordinary day.

Among those work activities forbidden under Jewish religious law is making fire. Electricity falls into this classification, so pressing buttons to turn on the TV or the cooker or to start the car are all forbidden. Modern technology helps them work around it. People set their electrical goods on timers to come on and go off by themselves between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday, which is the period of Shabbat. Shabbat lifts stop at every floor, so you can ride them without pressing a button. Touch-screen technology is also starting to stretch what is technically allowed.

These workarounds though are not used by most Modern Orthodox Jews, who in modern Israel are normally just called Orthodox Jews. They tend to be religious Zionists or ‘Dati Leumi’, which means National Religious. They believe in the state of Israel, over time their families or they as individuals have become more religious, and they follow much of the religious life of the ultra-Orthodox. The women will cover their heads, though that often doesn’t stop them being fashionable about it. The men will wear Western clothes, but there will be tassels hanging from under their shirts. These tassels are called tzitzit, and they are attached to the four corners of the prayer shawl they are wearing underneath. The display of the tzitzit shows that the wearer is religiously observant. Orthodox Jewish men also often shave their beards and wear a kippa, a small skullcap, which symbolises their deference to God. But like secular Jews, both sexes will work, receive a mix of religious and secular education and serve in the Israeli army or do other national service. In terms of nationalism, the spectrum of this community is very broad. It ranges from those who are willing to accept the present boundaries of Israel, to those who want to hold on to the West Bank, right through to the small minority which claims a Greater Israel that would include Jordan and the Sinai.

The style of kippa chosen tells you a lot about the politics of the wearer. The Haredim, like Yoel Weber, wear a black one under their hats, so their head is still covered when the hat comes off. Knitted kippas tend to be worn by National Religious Jews. Large knitted kippas are often worn by the religious, ultra-nationalist settlers. Therefore a gun and large knitted kippa are not an usual combination. Other styles of kippa, in suede, satin and cloth, are worn more broadly by Modern Orthodox Jews who, while Zionist, are less stridently nationalist than the knitted kippa wearers. The mildly religious liberal Jews will sometimes wear kippas with, perhaps, their football team’s logo on, which is heavily frowned upon by more religious people.