The recent attack on Israel by Hamas combined with the massive intelligence failure that it exposed, however painful it might have been, was in no way a substantive threat to the State of Israel as such.
Conversely, domestic tensions that have been brewing over the past three decades and show no signs of abating are slowly turning into an existentialist crisis that threatens the very foundations of the state as had been conceived by its founding fathers.
Granted this was not an overnight process but rather a slow erosion benchmarked by an increasing number of isolated incidents. These slowly coalesced into a trend from which there seems to be no escape.
On November 19, 2018, the departure of Flight 002 of the Israeli airline El Al, which flew from New York to Tel Aviv, was delayed by five hours because of adverse weather conditions. When the aircraft approached Athens, some two hours away from Tel Aviv, there was a sudden commotion on board.
Some of the passengers became unruly and demanded that the aircraft land in Athens. Were it to proceed to Tel Aviv, they claimed, it would have landed after the Sabbath had begun, which for them was intolerable.
Other passengers, however, demanded that the aircraft proceed as planned.
Soon the commotion reached such a pitch, with passengers loudly taunting one another, that the pilot, for safety reasons, decided to land in Athens. There the passengers were accommodated in a hotel at El Al’s expense until the Sabbath was over and aircraft could resume its flight.
The travails of El Al Flight 002 were actually only the tip of the iceberg of a predicament, the seeds of which were planted in 1948, and which today is the harbinger of an existential crisis that threatens the very existence of the State of Israel in its present guise.
Declaration of Independence
Israel’s Declaration of Independence was adopted on May 14, 1948, by a “provisional council” of Palestinian Jews. The council, which included representatives of the full spectrum of Jewish Palestinian society, from ultra-Orthodox to reform Jews to secular liberal socialists, was not one likely to come to a consensus; but a consensus was what David Ben-Gurion, the founding father of Israel, was striving for.
To this effect he yielded to the demands of the minority ultra-Orthodox, who demanded that those attending Torah rabbinical schools be exempted from military service.
Likewise, while the Declaration of Independence guaranteed all rights irrespective of “race, religion and sex,” it was agreed that this would be a guiding principle but not a legal pronouncement, as it contravened traditional Jewish Halacha law as regards the role of women.
Left unanswered by the Declaration of Independence were a number of substantive questions; if Israel was the land of the Jews, would an Israeli Jew who converted to another religion lose his citizenship? And if a non-Jew could be a citizen of Israel, would he have to submit to Jewish traditional law? And, last but not least, who was a Jew and who was to decide who was a Jew and who was not?
Role of Knesset
With Israel surrounded by hostile Arab states that openly advocated wiping it off the map, the new state had little volition to address questions that did not concern issues of immediate urgency. It thus soldered on, without a constitution and with its parliament, the Knesset, adopting over time some 13 “basic laws” as conditions required.
As long as Israel was under siege from its Arab neighbors, this constitutional vacuum could be put up with. With time, however, changes in Israeli society combined with the emergence of a semblance of peace have stretched the system close to its breaking point. The end result is an existentialist crisis that today threatens the very core values on which Israel was conceived.
Israel is a parliamentary democracy in which the 120-seat parliament adopts laws. With no constitution and hence no constitutional court, the only restraint placed on parliament is the Supreme Court. Indeed, the Supreme Court is the only institution that can annul a vote by the parliament.
It is that court that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now trying to emasculate, a move that, if successful, would open the floodgates of a legislative outpouring engineered by the right and the ultra-Orthodox, which might well change the face of Israel.
With some 9.3 million inhabitants, Israel currently has 43 political parties, of which 12 are represented in the Knesset. The end result is that Likud, Netanyahu’s party, having only 32 seats must form an alliance with other parties to obtain the minimum 61 votes to form a government. It is the price of this alliance by Netanyahu with the ultra-Orthodox that is liable to bring down the State of Israel as it has endured to this day.
Power of the Haredim
Currently Israeli Jewish society, excluding Muslims and Christians, is made up in essence of 18% Haredi ultra-Orthodox, 25% traditionalists, and 40% secular. Within this microcosm, the Haredim are a world by themselves.
They live in closed communities, speak mostly Yiddish among themselves, do not define themselves as Zionists and overwhelmingly believe that Halacha, Jewish traditional law, takes precedence over the laws of the state.
Ultimately they live on the sidelines of Israeli society in the equivalent of a socio-economic incubator. Some 50% of the men are unemployed and live off state subsidies and only 13% have completed high school, as compared with 80% for the general population.
Overall they see no use for democracy and shun personal autonomy, gender equality, and secular education and would rather pursue Torah studies than seek gainful employment.
Over the past decades, many of Israel’s institutions were slanted to conform to their values. Not only are they are exempted from military service on the grounds that they are Torah students, but the only recognized marriages between Jews are those performed by Orthodox rabbis.
Likewise, only Orthodox rabbinical courts can determine who is Jewish, with the result that currently there are some 400,000 Israeli citizens who see themselves as Jewish but are not recognized as such.
In the same vein, Egged, the national bus company, is not permitted to operate on the Sabbath and all restaurants are by law required to be closed, a law impossible to implement while 70% of the population want them to stay open.
The alliance of the hard right with the Haredim puts them on a collision course with mainstream Israel, and the view is increasingly expressed that the country has been “hijacked by religious fanatics” – and some of the upshots are starting to emerge.
High-tech companies are starting to leave Israel, and half of the startups created in March this year are registered as foreign entities. Many reservists are now refusing to serve in the army, and resentment bordering on violence is increasingly expressed at the grassroots level when women are prevented from boarding trains on the grounds that they are not gender-segregated.
With an average seven children per family, demographic trends put the Haredim at 30% of the population by 2062. With this deadline in sight, the question as to whether the State of Israel as such can endure until then and beyond and in what form is not idle speculation.
For the Haredim, Halacha Jewish religious law must take precedence over state law. Thus their aim is to ensure that Israel abides by Halacha. If democracy is rule by the majority, democracy is not the issue; the Haredim combined with the radical right do have a majority, albeit a very small one. The issue is a majority imposing on the minority a code of conduct incompatible with the functioning of a democracy in the 21st century.
For Israel the conundrum extends well beyond Hamas, Hezbollah, the Palestinians or even the Arab states. It is domestic, and can only be addressed domestically. The question is how.
Curbing the power of the Haredim by making the right to vote conditional on military service might be appealing, but this would require a vote by parliament, which is unlikely. The other potential option is a “Swiss solution.”
Switzerland is a confederation of 26 cantons, each with its own parliament, government, administration, school system, finances and police. The “cantonization” of Israel, which might well include one or several Palestinian “cantons” in addition to secular ones and Haredi ones, might go a long way in giving the Haredim their own space without impinging on the rights of their fellow Israelis – or on the viability of the State of Israel.
