The Unmaking of Israel (27 page)

It is true that the army may lose some talented commanders. That cost, however, pales next to the risk of the armed forces dividing along ideological lines. Before a second
Altalena
affair takes place, the lessons of the first must be remembered and reapplied: the country has one army, responsible to the elected government. Again, the history of Lebanon provides a gory warning of the dangers of permitting armed groups linked to political factions. Depoliticizing the army is essential not only in order to carry out the specific mission of removing settlements, but also in order to restore Israeli democracy and ensure the stability of the state.

Once a border is again drawn on the map, Israel can finally complete its long-delayed transition from national liberation movement to liberal nation-state. The competition between Jews and Palestinians for control of the entire land, from river to sea, can be put in the past, where it belongs. Within its smaller and clearly defined territory, Israel will be a country with a four-fifths Jewish majority and a Palestinian minority that must enjoy equal citizenship.

Naturally, there will be no agreement among Jews about what it means to be Jewish or to live in a country where the public sphere is overwhelmingly Jewish. This, perhaps, is the best definition of a Jewish state: the place where Jews can argue with the least inhibition, in the most public way, about what it means to be Jews.

To this argument, I offer a simple definition of what will make the country Jewish in its values, and not just in its ethnic makeup. The most basic Jewish memory is that “we were strangers,” we were the minority and were badly done by. In secular terms, this memory derives from long historical experience. Religiously, it is recorded in Judaism’s founding text. The most basic Jewish aspiration should be to do better as a majority when we have the opportunity. If Israel did not have a non-Jewish minority, it would almost be necessary to import one in order to fulfill this aspiration.

Since, fortunately, the minority is already here, all forms of discrimination against it should be ended. In some realms, affirmative action is needed to make up for past injustices. The nation as a whole desperately needs massive investment in education, but a disproportionate amount must go to Arab-language schools to compensate for years of neglect. Universities should actively seek to recruit Arab students; the civil service must enlist Arab staff and actively seek to advance them in the hierarchy.

Israel’s system of state ownership of land is eminently sensible if used to prevent concentration of property in a few private hands. But state land must be equally available to all citizens. Admissions committees and other techniques of housing discrimination against Arabs should be assigned to history books. The land still owned by the Jewish National Fund must really be nationalized—that is, turned over to government ownership. JNF representatives should not sit on the boards of the government bodies controlling land.

This is just part of the necessary divorce between the state and the anachronistic “national institutions”—the JNF, the Jewish Agency, and the World Zionist Organization. If Diaspora Jews want to support Israel philanthropically through a single, United Way–type organization, it should be entirely independent of the government.

Civil equality does not mean that cultural differences and ethnic identity will vanish. The government needs to encourage a shared civic identity while respecting the differences. Parents must have a choice of schools in which the main language of instruction is Hebrew or Arabic. In both sets of schools, the other language should be taught from the lowest grades, with the aim of fluency by the end of high school.

The fear sometimes expressed today on the religious right that familiarity with Arab culture will produce “assimilation” is one of many signs that the right has yet to free itself of Diaspora anxieties and accept that Jews have their own country. Assimilation is a legitimate concern of minorities, not of a majority. Besides, religious Jews will gain something of particular value to them from learning Arabic. Much of Judaism’s classical literature was produced by Jewish scholars living in the Islamic world and was written originally in Arabic or in Hebrew shaped by Arabic. The language is a key to fully unlocking the treasures of that era of Jewish-Islamic coexistence.

At the same time, the state must avoid locking citizens into ethnic categories. It’s likely that some Arab politicians will demand autonomous institutions for their community as part of the system of government. That demand serves those politicians better than their constituents, and should be resisted. It makes ethnic identity a legal and political fact rather than something a person can freely define for himself or herself—a freedom that is particularly vital for members of a minority. While Arab citizens should be free to create representative organizations, those bodies should be voluntary.

One realm in which neither Jewish nor Arab citizens will want instant integration is the military. The pain and fear produced by a conflict do not vanish the day after signing a treaty. Nor, given the Middle East’s instability, will the risk disappear of conflict erupting again with an Arab state. Israel’s Palestinian citizens overwhelmingly regard the IDF as a Jewish army that fights Arabs and would feel deeply uncomfortable serving in it. And as Chaim Gans writes, a basic justification for Jews to have an independent state is to provide themselves a safe refuge—not just for their culture, but also for their physical existence. Given “that the Jews are a minority in the region,” Gans writes, they “must rely on their strength.” They justifiably see the IDF not just as protecting the state, but also as protecting Jews from destruction.

For the foreseeable future, therefore, it is reasonable for Arabs to be exempt from the draft, and for the army to remain under Jewish hegemony. Equal service may eventually be a result of building a shared identity as Israelis. It cannot be a precondition for equality. Whether young Arabs should be required to perform a civilian form of national service depends on whether Jews are required to do the same if they are not drafted. What does need to change—and almost certainly will if peace breaks out—is the attitude of equating military service with being a real Israeli, or being a real Jew in Israel.

Removing the settlements and reestablishing Israel’s borders will put to rest the question that until now has left little space for a normal political agenda. Parties will have to take clear stands on the free-market policies that have put much of the country’s wealth in the hands of a few families, on funding for schools and health care, on gender issues, and more—or become irrelevant.

The realignment is likely to make new alliances possible, weakening the clerical parties and allowing for long-delayed reforms. A full bill of rights can finally be enacted, and the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review can be anchored in a basic law, meaning that it will have constitutional status. The divorce of state and synagogue can finally begin.

The purpose of this divorce is not only to protect the rights of secular Israelis. It is also to free religious Israelis from a clerical bureaucracy. Nothing does more to alienate Jews from Judaism in Israel than the various reminders of state “support” for religion—the experience of marriage and divorce through the rabbinate, the jingoistic pronouncements of some deans of state-funded yeshivot, the ever-rising cost of underwriting
haredi
society. “There is no greater degradation of religion than maintenance of its institutions by secular state,” Yeshayahu Leibowitz wrote in 1959, and again his words proved prophetic.

A comparison with America is necessary here. Constitutionally, the United States is the most secular country in the West. Yet as a society, America is strikingly religious. Nearly two-thirds of Americans report that religion is important in their lives, compared to a median of 38 percent in developed countries. This is not a contradiction. As sociologist of American religion Brenda Brasher argues, the United States is the most religious country in the West precisely because of its sharp separation of church and state: since religious institutions must survive by attracting people to come through their doors, the United States has become a hothouse of religious innovation and variety. In Israel, once the state ceases to fund and sanction specific varieties of religion, Judaism is likely to flourish, invite wider interest, and take new forms.

As Leibowitz wrote half a century ago, religious communities should fund their own needs, starting with paying their clergy. Having taxpayers pay rabbis creates justifiable resentment among the nonreligious. It also creates a bloated class of clergy with little connection to the communities they supposedly serve. The residents of my Jerusalem neighborhood, for instance, range from secular to modern Orthodox; the salaried rabbi of the neighborhood is ultra-Orthodox. If all I knew of Judaism were his sermons, I’d give up faith.

This does not mean Israel can or should follow the American model exactly. In the United States, clergy are empowered by the government to perform marriages. Israel, with its history of the state deciding who qualifies as a rabbi, is better off making a clean break: marriage for legal purposes should be purely a civil procedure. Couples wanting a religious ceremony can turn to the person of their choice to perform the ceremony. If they need a religious divorce, they can take their choice of rabbis offering that service.

In education, on the other hand, the separation should be less sharp. Israel’s ethnic and religious divisions, along with the centrality of religious study in the practice of Judaism, make the American model of a single state-supported school system unworkable. It will be a difficult enough social revolution for the state to require a shared core curriculum in all schools. The government should fund that curriculum, and only that curriculum, in every school. It should allow parents to establish schools with additional hours of religious studies, for which they will pay. This balances respect for cultural diversity, the need to get government out of the religion business, and the need to teach a shared foundation for identity.

The core curriculum must include the subjects that children will one day need to earn their livings in a postindustrial economy—and the history, civics, literature, and arts that will help them understand other members of their society and become thinking participants in democratic debate.

Those changes will prepare the next generation of
haredim
to support themselves. In the meantime, though, the government needs to phase out financial support for lifetime study by ultra-Orthodox men. This will be a slow and much-resisted transition, possible only if the state builds the bridge from the society of scholars to the society of work: it will need to give men the vocational training or higher education they need to get jobs, and pay them stipends to support their families while they study. It will have to provide job counseling, help establish small businesses, and launch a campaign to encourage employers to hire
haredim
. As long as Israel has a universal draft, a solution will be needed for service by the ultra-Orthodox, but it cannot be based on separate combat units.
Haredi
men will either have to serve in the military together with other Israelis or be required to perform civilian service.

For the country as a whole, the costs of this transition are an investment in economic growth. For the
haredim
themselves, the change will mean an end to the danger that one’s children might live in subterranean storerooms in parking garages. It also promises an end to the corrupting hypocrisy of living on forced contributions from people who do not share your values. A productive
haredi
community can, if it chooses, underwrite a year or two of full-time religious study for young men and advanced study for the intellectual elite. Bitterly as ultra-Orthodox politicians and rabbis may denounce these changes, the
haredi
community will be far healthier as a result.

One area in which the state can and should continue to distinguish between Jew and non-Jew is immigration. For that reason, it is also an area in which a complete separation of state and religion will be difficult. There are no perfect solutions to this problem, but there is plenty of room for improvement over the current situation.

At independence, as I’ve said, the Zionist movement had implemented most of its goals and had made itself obsolete. The Jews had political independence in their historical homeland. The justifications for independence were providing a refuge from persecution for Jews, and creating a space where Jews could express their culture most fully. For those justifications to hold true, Israel had to make it possible for Jews to immigrate freely. In every other respect, the state’s responsibility was toward its citizens, irrespective of ethnic identity. In immigration policy, it had a particular obligation to Jews.

That remains true, but conditions have changed drastically since 1948. The Jewish population of Israel has increased tenfold. Most other Jews in the world live in democratic Western countries. At the moment, refuge from anti-Semitism is a very marginal reason for people to immigrate to Israel, though that could change as a result of an unexpected crisis somewhere in the world. Israel still has an obligation to allow immigration of Jews who simply want to live in a country where Jews are the majority. Meanwhile, something has happened beyond the imagination of the state’s founders: Israel has become safe enough and prosperous enough to attract refugees and economic immigrants who are not Jewish. Refugees from Darfur cross the Sinai from Egypt to find a haven in Israel; people from the Philippines who come on work visas to take care of elderly Israelis stay on.

Almost as unimaginable to many present-day Israelis who still think of “assimilation” as referring to Jews adopting non-Jewish culture, those non-Jewish immigrants assimilate into Israeli Jewish society. Their children grow up speaking Hebrew and go to schools where they learn Jewish history. Israel desperately needs an immigration policy that includes Jewish repatriation but is wider than that.