"Through its 50 years of life, Israel has been a nation very demanding of its people. In the army, on kibbutzes and at the tax collector's office, Israelis have had to give their blood, their sweat and their cash. The nation was built on a politics of sacrifice that relied on a cohesive vision, a mission: the restoration and survival of the Jewish homeland.
BUT with the prosperity and maturation of the country, and with every new wave of immigration, that ideological fervor has diminished. Many immigrants from North Africa and from the former Soviet Union came because they were fleeing oppression or poverty, and religious Jews flocked here to live in the Holy Land. All told, they were refugees, economic migrants and spiritual migrants, not missionaries for the Jewish homeland as the Zionist pioneers envisioned it........................."
The World; Israel's Divisions Splinter Its Politics
By DEBORAH SONTAG
IF the rifts in Israeli society could be frozen in images, the images would be the violent incidents that represent the fear of what could happen here more routinely if the political order disintegrated.
For immigrants from the former Soviet Union, the image is that of Jan Shafsovich, a 22-year-old Israeli soldier stabbed to death in November in a cafe in Asheklon for speaking Russian.
For secular Jerusalemites, it is Yitzhak Daniel Levi, an elderly, wheelchair-bound man whose arms were broken by Hasidic thugs in December for watching television on the Sabbath.
And for Jewish settlers in the West Bank, it is Asaf Miara, the Israeli sergeant dragged from a car in November and pummeled by Palestinians for driving through Ramallah.
These images, so fresh, are stuck in the public mind here just as the fragmentation of Israeli society finds new echoes in the Israeli political system in a way that many feel is dangerous for the country.
During the four volatile months leading to new elections in May, the challenge for the system will be to rise above a dysfunctional body politic; the new Israeli Parliament must be representative enough to be democratic, and not so representative that it is dysfunctional itself.
But with the old parties, Labor and Likud, facing identity crises and new parties forming every day, that is a serious challenge. The new multi-party system is not only chaotic, making it difficult to build and sustain a lasting government coalition. It is also a political expression of something more deep-seated, what many have called a new tribalism that is eroding the traditional singleminded unity of an Israeli people devoted to Zionism above all.
''Israel has been reduced to a series of enclaves, as if its very flesh has been hacked apart,'' David Ohana, a historian, wrote in his recent book ''The Last Israelis.'' ''Each group speaks in its code, cordons off its own territory, takes its pound of flesh, and ''apres moi, le deluge.''
Through its 50 years of life, Israel has been a nation very demanding of its people. In the army, on kibbutzes and at the tax collector's office, Israelis have had to give their blood, their sweat and their cash. The nation was built on a politics of sacrifice that relied on a cohesive vision, a mission: the restoration and survival of the Jewish homeland.
BUT with the prosperity and maturation of the country, and with every new wave of immigration, that ideological fervor has diminished. Many immigrants from North Africa and from the former Soviet Union came because they were fleeing oppression or poverty, and religious Jews flocked here to live in the Holy Land. All told, they were refugees, economic migrants and spiritual migrants, not missionaries for the Jewish homeland as the Zionist pioneers envisioned it.
Similarly, many second- and third-generation Israelis lost the sense of embattlement that ruled their parents' lives. Zionism, while still important, became less central; the conflict with the Palestinians grew wearisome.
Israelis began to live as much in their own local, ethnic, religious and professional communities as in their nation. The ethnic diversity alone of the population of 6 million is surprising to outsiders: 20 percent are Sabras, or Israeli-born Jews; 20 percent were born in the former Soviet Union; 20 percent are Arabs; 25 percent are Jews from North Africa and Arab countries.
With greater diversity, there were greater divisions -- religious-secular, Ashkenazi-Sephardic, new immigrant-old immigrant, Arab-Jewish, Christian Arab-Muslim Arab -- and the political system began to express them.
THERE are 11 political parties in the current Knesset, and there may be 19 in the next one, all skilled at the art of leveraging their specific interests.
''Now we have the politics of allocation, not of sacrifice,'' said Yaron Ezrahi, a political scientist and fellow of the Israel Democracy Institute. ''Every group is fighting not for the collective whole but for its share of the national pie.''
In the Parliament, because of the deep rifts between factions, a good deal of the battle ends up being showmanship on behalf of an idea, a people or a way of life, too. While the number of bills introduced has increased more than a thousandfold in recent years, the percentage that make it into law is lower than ever -- 8 or 10 percent, Mr. Ezrahi said.
Many political analysts see this development as dire. They think Israel can ill afford to indulge in political theater when huge issues -- a constitution, borders under a peace agreement, the separation of religion and state -- remain unresolved.
The two leading candidates for Prime Minister against the incumbent, Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud, are obsessed with the fragmentation of Israeli society. The campaign of the Labor Party leader, Ehud Barak, is prescriptively named ''One Israel.'' Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, a popular former general who is trying to capture the center with a new party, paints an ugly social portrait of a place where ''people are humiliated every day because of their origin and attacked because of their beliefs and way of life.''
On one of Mr. Shahak's first campaign ventures, into a marketplace in Tel Aviv that is a right-wing, working-class Sephardic bastion, he was pelted with chickens and a death threat: ''The next bullet's for you,'' he was told. Apologies followed, but there was no mistaking the animosity that courses through the political veins of this country.
Mr. Shahak was mercilessly mocked when, in his debut political speech, he called for a new, more civil and compassionate level of social discourse. Journalists and other politicians jeered as if he were prescribing a national etiquette program, or asking an entire nation to get its elbows off the table.
But it is possible that Mr. Shahak, with his simple, dire view, was getting at something deeper than others discuss, even if all of them talk in similar terms about possible solutions, whether electoral reform or a unity government.
The optimistic see this moment as a crossroads, a stage that may force structural changes in Israel's young democracy or a major political reshuffling to accommodate the new diversity of the country.
But the worrywarts, who are plentiful, fear that internal conflict is the new Israel, and that no political Band-Aid can cure the deeper wounds. |
