The Unmaking of Israel (21 page)

My host’s wife stayed in a different room while we talked. Before I left, she called him for an urgent conversation. He returned and asked, uncomfortably, that I sign a written declaration that I would write nothing that could identify him. In a few years, they would need to arrange marriages for their children. They could not risk being known as critics or heretics.

The implications of the state’s link to ultra-Orthodoxy begin with economics, but they go much further. For instance, one source of employment for
haredi
men has been the state rabbinate and rabbinic courts. The rabbinate has exclusive jurisdiction over marriage between Jews within Israel. The main function of the rabbinic courts is divorce, also a religious monopoly. For mixed couples, or for Jews who don’t want to deal with a clerical bureaucracy, the only alternative to the rabbinate for marriage is going abroad for a civil ceremony. There is no alternative for divorce.

Formally, rabbinic court judges are appointed on professional grounds. In practice, positions in the courts and rabbinate are parceled out as patronage. The rising power of
haredi
parties since 1977 has allowed them to fill more of those posts with their appointees.

Rabbinic court treatment of women has been particularly shameful. Under Jewish law, the husband grants the divorce to his wife. Rabbinic judges have allowed recalcitrant husbands to deny their wives divorces for years, or to use their advantage to dictate financial and custody settlements. Religious scholars concerned with women’s rights have proposed innovative interpretations of Jewish law to solve the problem. The rabbinic judges show no interest in sanctioning innovation.

In the name of tradition, however, the state rabbinic establishment has introduced startling changes into Judaism, especially regarding the question of who is Jewish. In the classical view of Judaism, Jews are a “large extended family” that accepted a covenant with God—to use Bar-Ilan University law professor Zvi Zohar’s phrase. The child of a Jewish mother is a member of the clan; a convert is an adopted child and, like anyone born into the family, remains Jewish for life, whether or not she continues to observe the rules of the covenant. This is a self-understanding that fits poorly into the European categories of “nation” and “religion,” though both Zionism and ultra-Orthodoxy have tried to squeeze Jewishness into those frames.

The state rabbinate has never recognized non-Orthodox conversions. In recent years, it has become skeptical of Orthodox conversions, except those carried out by a select group of rabbis. What’s more, a radical thesis has taken hold among rabbinic court judges: for a conversion to be valid, a convert has to have sincerely committed herself to keeping Jewish law—and her sincerity at the moment of conversion can be measured by her behavior years later. If the convert eats nonkosher food, works on the Sabbath, perhaps if she fails to cover her hair after marriage, a court can annul her conversion.

The state’s rabbinic court of appeals endorsed this view in 2008, when it upheld a rabbinic judge’s ruling in a divorce case involving a Danish-born convert. Because she had not kept a strict Orthodox lifestyle, the appeals court affirmed, her conversion seventeen years earlier was invalid. Rather than issue a divorce, the judge annulled her marriage. The ruling meant she could not remarry a Jew without going abroad. Her children, raised as Jews, had just lost their identity, and were likewise added to a rabbinic court blacklist of people ineligible to marry Jews in Israel.

In religious terms, the ruling was a scandal. It uprooted the principle of Judaism that a convert must be treated as the equal of a Jew from birth. The greater scandals, however, are that the state empowered a particular set of rabbis to impose their views on other Jews, and that it allowed them to negate a citizen’s civil right to marry.

The High Court of Justice subsequently sent the case back to another rabbinic court, which interrogated the woman three separate times about her observance of religious law and finally ruled that she had, in fact, converted properly. While that decision ended her case happily, it again rested on the presumption that conversion to Judaism is conditional and that the state’s religious courts may cancel it. The need for the High Court’s intervention underlined the entanglement of state and religion. The obvious remedies are to institute civil marriage in Israel and to dissolve the rabbinic courts. It’s equally obvious that as long as secular parties depend on ultra-Orthodox ones to rule, the Knesset will not adopt those remedies.

In Israeli political discussion, the standard explanation for the ultra-Orthodox parties’ clout is that they hold the balance of power in parliament: since they can sell their support to a coalition of the left or of the right, they can drive up the bids from both sides. This description is misleading.
Haredi
parties have consistently preferred right-wing governments. Yet even when Labor won the 1992 election and Ehud Olmert’s centrist Kadimah did so in 2006, they sought alliances with the ultra-Orthodox. The real foundation of
haredi
strength lies elsewhere—in the exclusion of Arab-backed parties from power.

In 1992, when Rabin was elected, two parties drawing their votes mainly from Palestinian citizens of Israel won a total of five seats in parliament. By 2006, three Arab-supported parties held a total of ten seats. The meaning of Labor’s 1992 election victory was that
together with the Arab parties
and another left-wing party, it won a majority in the Knesset. The same was true of Kadimah’s victory.

But the iron rule, ever since Ben-Gurion disqualified the Communists, is that Arab-backed parties are not candidates for the coalition and cabinet. The most polite explanation is that as long as the Israeli-Arab conflict continues, Arab-backed parties cannot be trusted with sharing responsibility for national security. The less polite explanation is that much of the Jewish majority does not see a government resting partly on Arab votes as legitimate.

Coalition building is like shopping: the major party must pay its smaller partners in some political coin. If there are several potential partners, each must set a lower price for its support. Because the Arab parties are eliminated, the ultra-Orthodox can charge more.

To Rabin’s credit, he pushed the limits on Arab participation more than any Israeli leader before or after. Without formally including the Arab-backed parties in his coalition, he reached agreements under which they supported his government in parliament. In turn, the government allocated funds to make up for long neglect of Arab communities. As one Communist Knesset member told me at the time, Rabin treated the Communist Party as a publicly acknowledged mistress, an improvement on the past but hardly sufficient. When Shas quit the coalition, Rabin stayed in power with the help of the Arab parties, which was one more factor in the right’s fury against him. Since his assassination, no other leader has had the courage to follow his example or go further.

The link between
haredi
power and the exclusion of Arabs is not the only way in which the ailments of Israeli democracy compound each other. One of the most pressing social concerns within the
haredi
community is housing. Young couples, both husband and wife from large families of little means, are desperate for inexpensive apartments. The community expects its elected representatives to procure state help. At the end of the 1980s, the government began using that hunger for housing to draw
haredim
into the settlement enterprise.

In 1990, the first homes were completed at Beitar Illit, southwest of Jerusalem, and 350 ultra-Orthodox settlers moved in. The first apartments cost $60,000, with the government providing a $50,000 interest-free mortgage. Four years later, the first residents arrived in what would become the town of Modi’in Illit, east of Tel Aviv. The two communities grew faster than any other settlements in the West Bank. By the end of 2009, they were also the two largest settlements, with a total of 81,000 residents between them, a quarter of the total settlement population outside East Jerusalem. Besides the constant arrival of new residents, the internal growth of the communities was stunning. Nearly 30 percent of the people living in Modi’in Illit were aged four or under. Each apartment in one of these towns could end up housing ten people or more. The government designated additional developments for
haredim
within settlements elsewhere in the West Bank.

Virtually every extended
haredi
family in Israel now has members living over the Green Line, notes geographer Yosseph Shilhav, a veteran researcher of the ultra-Orthodox world. “Every household has a vested interest in the territories,” Shilhav says. “Israeli governments over the years who sent
haredim
to these places pushed them rightward. . . . After [the
haredim
] saw what happened to the Katif Bloc, they’re even more afraid . . . and that pushes them further and further to the extreme.”

So the combination of self-chosen poverty and dependence on the state has made the ultra-Orthodox constituency an integral part of the pro-settlement, pro-occupation alliance. The
haredi
community, moreover, mobilizes completely at elections. The value put on trust in the leading rabbis of the generation, and the social pressure against public dissent, ensures voting as a bloc. These factors increase the community’s representation and its bargaining power. Yet participation in the democratic system is entirely instrumental—and seen from the inside, defensive. The mood within the community is a strange mix of feeling persecuted by secular society and celebrating victory over it.

At noon, a third-grade class at the Nitei Meir elementary school in Beitar Illit is studying the details of religious law on ritual handwashing before meals. The two dozen boys read the text in chorus, in Yiddish-accented Hebrew. There are no girls; they study in separate schools. The kindergarten teachers at Nitei Meir are women. Their classrooms are in the basement, so that they can enter through a separate door and not be seen by the male teachers. The walls of the kindergarten rooms are decorated with pictures of great rabbinic sages.

To see the boys study arithmetic or Hebrew grammar, I would have to come later in the day. At Nitei Meir, first- through sixth-graders have religious study from 8:30 to 2:30, and then two hours of general studies. In seventh and eighth grades, religious studies last till 4:00. The general curriculum also includes “a little history,” explains Rabbi Yosef Rozovsky, the educational director, and “nature,” a soft version of natural science. Studying English is out of the question. In the late nineteenth century, Rabbi Yehoshua Leib Diskin, a leader of Jerusalem’s Orthodox community, put a ban on studying foreign languages to keep Jewish children from enrolling in European schools that were opening in the city, Rozovsky explains. Nitei Meir’s principal, Rabbi Eran Ben-Porat, adds, “The moment a boy studies English, he’s more exposed to the wider world, and he naturally leaves religion and he can even engage in intermarriage, like in America.”

Nor does the curriculum include geography or physical education. “And civics?” I ask. No, says Rozovsky. Instead, the boys learn
Mesilat Yesharim
, an eighteenth-century work on perfecting oneself ethically. (I refrain from saying that while
Mesilat Yesharim
may indeed help moral improvement, it says nothing about the rationale for elections or free speech.) The point of school is to shape the child’s personality, Rozovsky argues. Secular education has failed at this, while
haredi
education succeeds. He does not mention the ultra-Orthodox community’s inability to cope with the
shebab—
an Arabic word for youth, which originally entered Hebrew as the term for the stone-throwing Palestinian teens of the first Intifada.
Shebab
is now used to describe
haredi
young people who no longer believe in the ultra-Orthodox lifestyle but are locked in the community by their lack of job skills and knowledge of mainstream Israel. In Beitar Illit, a resident told me, the
shebab
hang out restlessly on the sidewalks on Friday night, or have the Sabbath meal with their families and then walk out to the main road and hitchhike to Jerusalem to hit the bars.

“Every society is selective. people who don’t fit in, leave,” says Shlomo Tikochinski, a resident of Beitar Illit and a rarity, a
haredi
Israeli who recently completed a doctorate in history. Ultra-Orthodox society, he argues, has “no drainage. The
haredim
have sealed it hermetically.” There are still dropouts, but they can’t get out.

Actually, it’s impossible to seal a society completely. Despite rabbinic condemnations of the Internet, one can find young
haredi
men in the Internet cafés of the Christian Quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City, or in the National Library on Hebrew University’s Givat Ram campus, using the catalog computers to surf the net. They assume they won’t be seen by other
haredim
. Among the online temptations are
haredi
discussion sites where they can anonymously discuss ideas they fear to acknowledge having in public.

And despite rabbis’ pleas to trust heaven, economic desperation is pushing men to consider going to work. Vocational and academic programs have sprung up to help
haredim
do that. The change requires turning one’s self-image inside out. Ex-
kollel
student Bezalel Cohen, who now directs a job program for the ultra-Orthodox, notes that “in all their thoughts and plans for the future,” many
haredi
men have never realistically considered getting a mainstream job. A
kollel
student who wants to learn a profession must also overcome practical barriers. To get a college education, he must acquire the missing pieces of a primary and secondary education. The financial crunch is most likely to hit a man over forty with a large family, Cohen explains. Yet enrolling in an academic or even vocational program means giving up his meager
kollel
salary.