Eyal Warshavsky/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP Images
Israeli reserve soldiers hold the Israeli flag after signing a declaration letter refusing to volunteer and to be called for reserve duty during a protest in Tel Aviv, July 19, 2023.
The Israeli Air Force is falling apart. According to a report in The Times of Israel, more than 1,100 pilots, drone operators, air traffic controllers, and the like issued a letter on Friday saying they’ll suspend their service if Prime Minister Netanyahu’s governing coalition enacts a law scaling back the powers of Israel’s Supreme Court.
The flyboys constitute just a tiny slice of the multitudes who view the Israeli right’s assault on the Court with alarm. Hundreds of thousands have regularly taken to the streets to protest what they see—correctly—as a mortal attack on the nation’s democratic foundations (foundations that haven’t notably benefited Palestinians, but we’ll get to that later).
In particular, they see it as a way that the nation’s fast-growing population of ultra-Orthodox Jews can forever avoid the two years of military service that every other Jewish 18-year-old, male and female alike, is required to serve. More fundamentally, they see it as part of the broader erosion of democratic egalitarianism and secular society that the growth of the Haredim (the Hebrew word for the ultra-Orthodox) portends. And that growth is subsidized by their own—but not the Haredim’s—tax dollars (well, shekels).
In 2017, the Court struck down a law passed by an earlier Netanyahu-led coalition that permanently exempted the Haredim from service. Thanks to the various subsequent Netanyahu-led coalitions, however, the Haredim haven’t yet been called to serve. They do, however, receive financial support from the government: a necessity, since most Haredi men don’t work but rather study the Torah, Talmud, and Mishnah, while their wives stay at home or work in menial occupations. The capacity of either gender to enter a modern workforce is limited by the curricula of Haredi schools, where education in math is often limited to addition and subtraction, and instruction in English is often nonexistent.
As only a relative handful of the Haredim had survived the Holocaust, the government of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, decided to subsidize Haredi schools and households as a way of keeping what looked to be a dying tradition alive. What Ben-Gurion didn’t anticipate was that Haredi families had far higher birthrates than Israel’s secular, Reform, Conservative, Modern Orthodox, and Palestinian families. Today, the Haredim make up 13 percent of Israel’s population, but with a birthrate of 6.5 children per mother, they’ll make up one-third of the nation by mid-century.
Even at 13 percent of the nation, they already make up a decisive political bloc in the Knesset. Like Donald Trump, Bibi Netanyahu is desperate to control the government for fear that absent that control, he’ll be convicted of crimes (bribery among them). He needs a law that will strike down the current Court’s adherence to no-one-is-above-the-law norms. Hence, like Kevin McCarthy, Bibi is dependent on the support of the far-right parties in his governing coalition—Palestinian-hating ultranationalists and the secular-hating ultra-Orthodox. The two Haredi political parties now hold 18 of the Knesset’s 120 seats, and Bibi needs their support to satisfy what is clearly his most basic need: staying out of jail.
Israel’s secular majority understands that the attack on the court opens the door for the Haredim to substantially erode the egalitarianism long enjoyed by Israeli Jews.
Problem is, the Haredim don’t just want to avoid military service. They want continued financial support to subsidize their non-entry into the economy. They want a nation that opposes such egalitarian tenets as rights for women, gays, and lesbians. They want a nation that closes down on Shabbat. Like our own Supreme Court, they want their religious beliefs to exempt them from obeying civil rights laws mandating equal treatment for all.
Israel’s secular majority understands that the attack on the Supreme Court opens the door for the Haredim to substantially erode the egalitarianism long enjoyed by Israeli Jews. (They also understand that while enabling 13 percent of the nation to avoid both productive work and military service through subsidies is a burden, doing the same to one-third of the nation will be unsustainable.) At the most fundamental level, they understand this battle is really over the future of Jewish Israel: whether it will be a democracy or a theocracy.
As is also the case here in the USA, then, the truly mortal threat to Israel isn’t external but internal. And just as the policies of our red states and blue states are rushing ever farther away from each other, so the gap between secular and Haredi Israel appears more unbridgeable with each passing day.
So, a modest suggestion: Even as designating separate sovereign states for Israelis and Palestinians has long since seemed the only workable solution to that conflict, so creating separate sovereign states for Israel’s secular and ultra-Orthodox Jews may be the only workable solution, too. In both instances, of course, geography is a huge problem. Just as Israelis have relentlessly occupied what should have been the center of a Palestinian state—the West Bank—so the Haredim and the secular are interspersed unevenly across Israel.
That said, the intra-Jewish conflict seems to me even more fundamental than the Israeli-Palestinian one. At least before Israeli began throwing up towns throughout the West Bank, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians should have been one of where: where the line between the two states could be drawn, where each could be free to build its own nation. The conflict between the Jews and the Jews, however, is one of what: What values will a Jewish nation honor? Those of egalitarian democracy? Those of Old Testament decrees made narrower and more exclusionary by the anti-Enlightenment crowd of fundamentalist rebbes who’ve dominated Haredi life? What, in short, is a Jewish state? And how will it treat its women and gays and non-Jewish citizens (this last particular is one that most of Israel’s secular Jews—not just the Haredim—have generally, stupidly, and often criminally refused to acknowledge).
In fact, Israeli secularists actually have a good deal in common with Palestinian secularists, just as the Israeli and Palestinian ultra-Orthodox have much in common as well. Back in 2005, I wrote a Washington Post column, which the Prospect republished, noting how Israel’s chief rabbi, the deputy mufti of Jerusalem, and the leaders of Jerusalem’s Catholic and Armenian churches—Jews, Muslims, and Christians—had all come together in common cause, that cause being their insistence on banning a scheduled gay pride parade in Jerusalem. I titled that column “Future of the Past,” and that future is still present today.
I’ve long thought that the two-state solution for Jews and Palestinians is the only workable one, even though that would now require uprooting hundreds of Israeli settlements in what should be a Palestinian state. But the conflicts besetting Israel itself are no less fundamental, perhaps even more so. I do not believe the Israeli nation can endure half modern-democratic and half theocratic-primitivist; a house divided against itself cannot stand. Unlike Lincoln, neither do I believe that it will become all one thing or all the other. Someone there should start thinking about how to break it up.
