CHAPTER 5
JEWISH FUNDAMENTALISM
Jewish fundamentalism is increasing at a galloping pace. It has two main forms – ultra-Orthodoxy; and the messianic aspirations of some of the Jewish settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The American sociologist Samuel Heilman offers a useful typology of Jewish fundamentalism in his seminal article, ‘Jews and Fundamentalism’,1 Heilman identifies two ‘phases’ of fundamentalism: the first is ‘active fundamentalism’, ‘in which the battle is waged “aggressively”, taken to the enemy who is to be completely obliterated’.2 These fundamentalists are messianists who believe that it is their sacred duty to engage in activity that will hasten the redemption.
The second phase is ‘quiescent fundamentalism’. Its adherents believe that they own absolute truth from their inerrant text and their message will eventually triumph, but at the moment they should remain in ‘protected waiting’ insulated from the contaminations of the world. As they wait, they build physical enclaves and psychological fortresses around themselves. In his article, Heilman refers to these types of fundamentalism as ‘phases’, as he sees a progression between them in intensity. In contemporary Jewish society, however, these forms exist side by side and have some political synergy in the Israeli setting, as we will see later.
Regrettably, we contemporary Jews have the dubious double pleasure of both burgeoning active and quiescent fundamentalists. The quiescent phase is best represented by the ultra-Orthodox (some use the phrase radical Orthodox) whilst the active fundamentalist energy is channelled through and by the minority of settlers in the West Bank of the occupied Palestinian territories who bring religious fervour to political Zionism. In addition to these two groupings, which I believe are the most influential, I will also refer briefly to one other group, an activist sector of the ultra-Orthodox world.
The terms ‘Haredi Judaism’ or ‘Haredim’ are used frequently for ultra-Orthodox Jews, from the Hebrew, meaning ‘fearful’ which in this context refers to the image of ‘trembling in the face of God’. The growth of Haredi Judaism and of militant religious messianic Zionists is having an immense impact on Judaism and will shape it, possibly irrevocably, both in Israel and in the Diaspora.
The focal points of the two groups are different, but they also converge. The inward-facing Haredim do not eschew political power to secure their way of life. For their part, the highly political settlers underpin their political conviction and activism with a fundamentalist reading of sources that they see as divinely validating the right and obligation of Jews to settle all parts of the biblically-promised Land of Israel.
This survey starts by taking a closer look at the Haredi Jews who are a classic example of quiescent fundamentalism. They believe that they have unique access to the whole truth of the Hebrew Bible – the Torah – through their interpretations. To Haredim, all other forms of Judaism are wrong3 and furthermore, mortally undermine ‘authentic’ Judaism. Whilst the Haredim believe that their views of Torah and God hold the only correct view of Judaism, their emphasis is inward-facing. They posit that their mission is physically and spiritually to build their own communities, strengthening their relationship with God through continuous study and prayer. Haredi communities are united in their that their views and religious practices extend back in an unbroken chain to Moses and the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. Although Haredi communities have varied lifestyles as well as spiritual and organisational approaches to Judaism, they share a common view that they have a divinely commanded mission to hasten the Messiah's arrival through a literal approach to Judaism and an emphasis on a lifelong, intensive total immersion by men in religious study. They believe that their views will triumph over those of the rest of the Jewish world and they will be those whose interpretation will be vindicated when the Messiah comes. Actually bringing about the Messianic age is only in God's hands; in the meantime, they need to strengthen themselves rather than concentrate on anyone outside their immediate sphere. Haredim live in densely populated and highly homogeneous communities within tightly-defined boundaries – this proximity is essential for strict observance of the Sabbath during which travel is forbidden. They strongly discourage participation in secular education beyond gaining any instrumental benefit – such as transport, state welfare benefits or certain trades or skills that enable livelihoods that remain within the Haredi community such as computing, teaching and trading.
Although outwardly it may look timeless, organised Haredi Judaism is in fact a relatively new phenomenon in Jewish history. It began as a reaction against the growth of Reform Judaism in central Europe in the nineteenth century and continued slowly to grow in the early twentieth century. Haredi Judaism was nearly decimated in the Holocaust as an extremely high percentage of the ultra-Orthodox communities were murdered throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. This is attributed to their obvious visibility due to their distinct dress code; their living in densely populated clusters; their passivity in the face of political threat. From this near destruction, there has been a robust resurgence in the Haredi communities in Israel and in the Diaspora over the last 50 years, powered by extremely high birth rates and very low dropout rates.
In recent years, Haredi Judaism has also been strengthened by many in Orthodox Judaism becoming far stricter in their observance.4 There is a process of ‘Haredisation’ of mainstream Orthodoxy5 to such an extent that Michael Kress suggests that ‘Modern Orthodoxy is essentially dead’.6 This change is due to many factors. For example, traditionalist religious groups are aggressively and successfully proselytising for new members. Whilst Orthodox Judaism does not proselytise gentiles, it believes in kiruv (Hebrew: ‘drawing near’), which is the process of drawing non-observant Jews nearer religious Judaism, or Orthodox Jews towards Haredi Judaism. A Haredi lifestyle is easier to maintain than ever before in Jewish history through the existence of the state of Israel (despite deep Haredi reservations and antagonisms towards the state as a secular entity); technical mechanisms that enable a more stringent level of Sabbath observance; accessibility of religious books and some use of social media; and the availability of a wide variety of kosher food. There are an increasing number of young men and women from an Orthodox background in the Diaspora studying in religious seminaries in Israel for one to three years. The atmosphere of total immersion and day-long study result in more stringent practice and, as Michael Kress states, ‘when they return, these [young adults] are expressing ever-deeper discomfort with secular college life – socially because of the culture of sexual permissiveness and intellectually because of their discomfort with the academic teachings on subjects like the Bible and the nature and history of religion’.7 This has a knock-on effect on political views, with American Orthodox Jews overwhelmingly advocating right-wing Israeli policies, further to the right of mainstream Israeli opinion.
Haredi Jews attempt to preserve the Jewish society that prevailed before the eighteenth century ushered in Jewish Enlightenment and the Emancipation, a society governed internally almost exclusively by Jewish law. This insularity was challenged by the Jewish Enlightenment (Hebrew: Haskalah), which took root in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, originating in central Europe. As part of a movement towards justifying political emancipation, the Haskalah advocated integration into wider European society and introduced extensive secular studies for the first time into education as well as Hebrew language and Jewish history, which were new foci for Jewish learning. The events of the Enlightenment and European Emancipation altered the nature of Jewish life in Europe beyond recognition, bringing Jews into the gentile and more secular spheres in an unprecedented manner. The majority of the Jewish population welcomed this change enthusiastically as it opened new economic, educational, and political horizons. However, Haredi Jews rejected the Enlightenment, seeing these changes as threatening the very core and permanencies inherent in Judaism. Haredi Judaism defines itself positively – as the ‘Judaism of the Torah’ – but also negatively, through its negative view of outside society and culture and its rejection of any intrinsic benefit in gentile, secular and Jewish non-Haredi cultures. Haredi communities increasingly became inward-facing and developed a Fortress Judaism with no aspirations to impact on a wider gentile society and limited interest in influencing Jewish life, particularly in the Diaspora. Up to the present day, they stake out and sustain separate enclaves through vigorous defence and expansion of geographic boundaries, maintaining strictly separate eating, distinctive dress code, a separate language – Yiddish (a mixture of German and Hebrew), and their own, rabbinically-sanctioned mass media.
Each of these physical manifestations of separation from mainstream Jewish and secular society reflects clear Haredi ideology. The level of separate eating laws extends ultra-Orthodox stringency to dietary laws and their implementation so that there are separate Haredi kosher certification systems with different, even stricter, guidelines and supervisors than those acceptable to and serving the mainstream Orthodox community. The distinctive dress code amongst the Haredi communities is a key element of identity separation and reinforcement. It not only distinguishes them from the gentile world but from other Jews. One of the means of distinguishing to which sect of Haredi Judaism a person belongs is through the subtleties of their dress code, though the united element of dressing is an emphasis on dress code adherence at all costs. All men grow the hair at the side of their heads into long locks and grow long beards, carrying out the Biblical command, ‘You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard.’8 Additionally, Haredi men wear distinctive colourless clothing – white shirts, a long black jacket, a black skull cap and, on the Sabbath, a fur hat and, a silk caftan. Women also have strict dress codes – covering their arms below their elbows and legs from an early age and when married, Haredi women not only cover their heads with a hat as Orthodox women do but never show any of their hair to anyone other than their husbands and so wear headscarves or wigs. In a very few communities, women shave their heads but this is extremely rare although often referred to because of the extreme nature of this means of ensuring modesty.
As clothing is seen as key to identity, Haredi male dress codes represent both a rejection of modernity and a sanctification of older lifestyles. As well as positively adopting a strict dress code, those who do not dress in what is seen as modest clothes are condemned strongly and at times aggressively, especially women who are urged (by posters) to wear ‘modest’ clothing that covers their arms and legs in Haredi areas.
After its decimation in the Holocaust, the Haredi population has found safe havens in Israel and the Diaspora and is thriving like never before. Very high birth rates and low dropout rates lead to a doubling of their population every 12 to 15 years and, at this trajectory, some demographic projections state that the majority of world Jewry will be Haredim by 2050.9
An illustration of how this manifests itself on a micro level is in the Haredi neighbourhood of Kiryas Yoel (New York) where out of 1,000 women aged 20–34, 730 will be pregnant today.10 This means women fall pregnant three months after they give birth and repeat this cycle so that Haredim have the largest families in the United States, with an average of six to seven children.11
In the United Kingdom, the Haredi community accounts for about 15 per cent of the Jewish population, with around 60 per cent of the Haredi community aged below the age of 18. Nearly a third of UK Jewish schoolchildren in primary school are Haredi already. This proportion will grow inexorably, since three out of every four children that are born within the Jewish community in the United Kingdom are now born into the Haredi community.12
There is virtually no secular education in British Haredi schools, particularly after the age of 14. Depending on the nature of the Haredi faction, some people's English is so limited that they cannot converse in English beyond simple vocabulary.
In Israel, the ultra-Orthodox population currently accounts for 8 per cent of the total population; with current trends indicating that they will be 20 per cent by 2030.13 To quote Israeli journalist Leslie Susser, ‘No government will be able to go on making welfare payments to such vast numbers of unemployed Haredim and continue to fund basic social and defense needs. The economy will simply collapse.’14 A key focus in the Israeli general election of January 2013 was the ‘burden on the majority of population’ imposed by Haredi Jews’ extensive reliance on the state benefit system for housing benefit; unemployment benefit and child benefit in addition to the incendiary issue of Haredim not serving in the army.
It is interesting that as Haredi girls are often the only breadwinners, they may receive a better secular education than boys. Women's work can enable their husbands to devote themselves to full-time and lifelong religious study. At the same time, girls are excluded from learning the majority of religious texts. The Haredi lifestyle is cemented by the early age of marriage, men at about 19 and women at about 18. Couples then have children as soon as is possible. As there is a complete separation between men and women, matchmakers are used to identify partners. These are not forced marriages but arranged – they will meet their potential partner once or twice before the engagement and could object to the match if they want.
Within the Haredi world, history contains clear themes – exile and return; sin and consequent punishment; repentance and redemption. The Haredi view of history is dominated by three key events – ‘Sinai, Shtetl and Shoah’. In the vernacular these are, respectively, the revelation of the Torah to Moses at Mount Sinai;15 the centuries of self-contained life in the villages of Europe; and the Holocaust. Proximity to Sinai confers authority – so the older a text or an opinion, the harder it is to question it. The Shtetl has been greatly romanticised, focusing on a longing for a closed, self-governing society and forgetting the extent of poverty and anti-Jewish riots (pogroms).
The Holocaust is the driving force propelling the desire to ‘replenish’ the devastation wrought to the Jewish demographic and consequently, spiritual damage done to world Jewry by the Nazis. Theologically, the Holocaust is seen by many in the Haredi world as a form of divine retribution for the Emancipation. Many Haredi rabbis propose that the Emancipation gave the Jews of central Europe an unprecedented choice – whether to be part of Jewish society or not. Those who chose to move away from traditional Judaism brought on cataclysmic divine retribution.
A key distinction between streams of Haredi Judaism is their varying attitudes to Israel. At one end of the spectrum are the numerically tiny but impactful, Neturei Karta (Aramaic: The Guardians of the Gate), who are strongly anti-Zionist, visible if not notorious for some of their anti-Israel stunts.16 At the other end of the spectrum are groups that collaborate with the Israeli state and are involved in parliamentary politics. Within the Israeli Parliament – the Knesset – that was elected in January 2013, 18 of the 120 members are from the two Haredi parties – the Sephardic Shas and the Ashkenazi United Torah Party. They exploit the mechanisms of statehood pragmatically to promote their vision, to direct state education funding to their institutions and defend their exemption from military service. They claim that the world is spiritually and existentially sustained by their continual Torah study. Torah study protects the nation, existentially sustains the universe and is a holy task that should be supported economically and is as valid a means of protecting the country as army service. They also seek to dominate state-sanctioned institutions providing Jewish religious services such as the religious courts that rule on matters of personal status – divorce, marriage and conversion, all of which are regulated only through the monopoly of the Orthodox religious authorities. Haredim in Israel see themselves as the real Jews, internally exiled within the secular Zionist state. They believe that the only proper Jewish state is the one that will be brought about by the arriving of the Messiah.
There are currently 60,000 Haredi men in Israel who are legally exempted from military service, which is notionally compulsory for most citizens. The original exemption was granted to the Haredi community to enable full-time study in the wake of the decimation caused by the Holocaust. When the prime minister of the newly-formed State of Israel, David Ben Gurion, granted the exemption it applied to just 400 scholars.
Now the Orthodox rabbi, Dov Lipman, is trying to bring Haredi young men into the military in separate units without women commanders and with separate prayer schedules and training. The Washington Post reported that there has been considerable outrage and even death threats aimed at Lipman for saying these things.17 In response to criticism, Lipman quotes the leading eleventh century Jewish scholar, Moses Maimonides who ‘says that anyone who chooses the Torah and does not contribute is a person who has disgraced and brought shame to the Torah and will have no place in the world to come’. Alongside avoidance of military service, another source of tension between the Haredi and general population is the low rates of participation in the workforce of Haredi populations and very high dependence on state benefits. This is partly due to the lack of mainstream education of the Haredi population and partly commitment to full-time study (for men) and large families (impacting on women's opportunity to work for a wage). In the most recent general election of 2013, the lack of Haredi participation in the workforce and the army was a key factor in impacting on voting patterns.
To conclude, the quiescent fundamentalists are sitting in waiting, but they are far from static. The Israeli sociologist Yosef Shilhav referred to their communal-political dynamics as ‘Expansionism through Insularity’.18 In contrast, our second type of fundamentalists shun insularity for active, sometimes aggressive, engagement.
I will now turn to the ‘Active’ type of fundamentalist Judaism, of which I will refer to two main forms: the Chabad-Lubavitch sect; and militant Messianic Orthodox Zionists. Like the Haredim, both groups believe they have a duty to hasten the arrival of the Messianic age. In stark contrast with the Haredim, however, both believe in engaging with the wider world and actively seeking to make converts to their causes.
The Chabad-Lubavitch sect is a form of Hasidic Judaism, an eighteenth-century movement that promoted spirituality through Jewish mysticism and an emphasis on joyful prayer. Hasidic Judaism is organised into sects, which tend to follow rabbinic dynasties. The Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidim are followers of the dynastic leader, the Rebbe of Lubavitch, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died in 1994. They believe in dynamic, wide-ranging and even daring outreach in order to bring all Jews closer to Orthodoxy. They have a global network of educational institutions and emissaries who often represent the only organised Jewish presence in their regions around the world. Lubavitch followers see it as their mission to draw people into Judaism as a way of hastening a Messianic age. Many followers believed that Rebbe Schneerson was indeed the Messiah, and the personality cult around him continues even now, two decades after his death.
Also in the business of hastening the arrival of a Messianic age are the activist religious Zionists who live in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank of the Jordan, which Israel has occupied since the 1967 Six-Day War. The term ‘West Bank’ itself has been superseded by the biblical ‘Judea and Samaria’ in the language of the militant settlers which has spread to official government terminology. This messianic Zionism is activist fundamentalism – a messianic theology that legitimises and encourages human intervention in Israel's destiny. It is future-orientated as the settlers and their followers believe that they can precipitate a utopian society based on God's rule. However, unlike Haredim, they do not reject modernity but rather, selectively integrate modernity into their ideology and modus operandi. Elements of religious Zionism interpreted Israel's capture in the 1967 Six-Day War of the West Bank of the Jordan as divine confirmation of the Jewish people's renewed claim to the Land of Israel. Orthodox Judaism was uncomfortable with secular Zionism and the idea of normalisation and self-determination along with other secular nation states, but – sometimes begrudgingly – accepted modern Zionism as a stepping-stone to redemption, with Zionists playing – perhaps unwittingly – a role in a wider divine design. The formula for reconciling Zionism and Orthodox Jewish views of national revival were articulated in a definitive manner by Rabbi Yehuda HaCohen Kook,19 who referred to the state as a divine miracle and the ‘Beginning of Redemption’. The idea of the independent state as a ‘miracle’ cleverly appropriates the human and political agency that the Zionist movement attributed to itself, without rejecting the outcome. The formula also successfully contained many young people within Orthodox Judaism, which a binary choice between Haredi Orthodoxy and secular Zionism would have failed to do.
The victory of the Israeli armed forces against overwhelming odds in 1967 was seen as another miracle and with the return to the Biblical Land of Israel, Orthodox religion and Zionism could be forcefully realigned through active settlement in the ‘Liberated Territories’. The settler movement took root following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, with the foundation of the Religious Settler Movement ‘Gush Emunim’ – ‘the Block of the Faithful’. It aims to redeem the biblical Land of Israel through settling the land. The key differentiation here is between the messianically-driven settlers and the overwhelming majority of Jews who live in the territories because that is where successive governments made mass housing available cheaply, mainly on the periphery of major cities such as Jerusalem in order to boost areas that were seen as strategically important for national security.
The ideological settler movements, particularly those underpinned by fundamentalist approaches to religious Judaism, reproduced the frontier experience of early Zionist pioneers of the nineteenth century. They see their settlement activity as religious activism along a divinely ordained path, hastening the coming of the Messiah by settling land near Jewish holy sites, such as Hebron and Nablus in the heart of the Occupied Territories. There are worrying signs that holders of this ideology are becoming part of societal mainstream, to an even greater degree than the Haredim. The Haredim are prominent in politics, but the settler zealots and their sympathisers are not only involved in politics, they are also becoming prominent in the Israel Defence Force. Over the last 15 years, the proportion of religious settlers in the army in key strategic fighting units has increased significantly.20 This increase in settlers in key army units impacts not only on the political ideology of key fighting units towards the settlements but also on attitudes to religious life within the army. For instance, Elyakim Levanon, the rabbi of the West Bank settlement of Elon Moreh, was quoted as saying that the Israeli Defence Force soldiers should choose death rather than remain at events that include women's singing.21
Although the ideological settlers are the minority of Jews living in the Occupied Territories, I believe they are disproportionally dangerous to Israel. At least some of them, led by fundamentalist rabbis, do not see themselves beholden to the Israeli government or the rule of law.22 They debate the religious injunctions to disobey the secular law, and adding to this potent brew of militant messianism is the fact that they are armed with weapons given to them either to protect their settlements or for individual self-defence. Some militant messianic fundamentalists, motivated by the idea of bringing salvation through radical action, have attempted to destroy the Dome of the Rock. Another, Dr Baruch Goldstein, committed the 1994 massacre of Muslim worshippers in the Cave of the Machpelah in Hebron.23 Recently, there has been an escalation in violence against Palestinians by a group called ‘Tag Mechir’, Price Tag. This price tag is paid by Palestinians in retribution by settlers and their sympathisers for actions by Palestinians, the Israeli government or the army deemed to be ‘anti-settler’. According to the UN, attacks by settlers on Palestinians and their property, mosques and farmland rose 144 per cent between 2009 and last year.24 There are groups of Israelis, such as Rabbis for Human Rights,25 who protect Palestinians and intervene with the military and legal authorities on their behalf.
Over the last decade, the two elements of Jewish fundamentalism reviewed in this chapter have joined forces in a potent and toxic way – to promote racist ideas of an Arab-free Greater Land of Israel. Ultra-Orthodox Rabbis and militant settlers have formed an alliance, which leaves traditional Zionism with its emphasis on gradualism and pragmatic compromise far behind. The examples of Jewish fundamentalism – representing the categories of quiescent and activist fundamentalism – form a formidable challenge to the post-Emancipation Jewish status quo. This status quo is based upon embracing secular law, equality before the law and acceptance of the prevailing separation of religion and state. The state of Israel has always strained between these post-Enlightenment principles and more fundamentalist interpretations of its Jewish nature, held by a significant minority of its citizens. The pivotal question now is whether the pendulum is about to swing irrevocably in the fundamentalist direction.
Put another way, the question is, can the fundamentalists sustain their advances? Assessing this means looking at political and economic influences, as well as the inter-relation between what happens in Israel and the Jewish worldwide Diaspora. For the Haredi world the question is one of economics and the ability to deploy political power to protect economic and social privileges. In Israel, there are clear signs that the Haredi communities and their political leaders may have over-reached. The current coalition is rare in Israeli politics in having no Haredi representation or support, reflecting the strong performance of the newcomer ‘Yesh Atid’ (translation – ‘There is a future’) party – strongly secular and middle class. Yesh Atid came to power on the promise of ‘sharing the burden’ and promised to impose on Haredim similar rules to those that apply to the wider community – impacting on school curriculum; level of social security entitlements; housing benefits and military service. Not all that this party promised will be delivered, even though its leader has become finance minister, but there is a sense in the political system that the days of Haredi carte blanche are over. A new dynamic was already emerging, albeit slowly and on the margins, of greater Haredi participation in the workforce. Women are a key and have been quietly demanding and gaining access to more sophisticated jobs, with men following suit. Major non-profit organisations, supported by the state and Jewish philanthropists, have for some years invested heavily in improving the employability of Haredim and the point of economic equilibrium for this community seemed to be moving towards somewhat greater self-sufficiency. Ironically, the Yesh Atid-led political attack on perceived Haredi privileges is creating a backlash – very visibly and aggressively against the small number of young Haredim who have joined specially-adapted units of the Israel Defence Force. Israeli politics are very volatile so it would be foolhardy to assert that the balance has shifted irrevocably; what is clear is that the limits of Haredi influence – and the tolerance of wider society towards it – have been tested in an unprecedented manner and have generated a very lively debate about the way Israel will look in the decades to come; this debate may well impact profoundly on future political choices made by Israeli citizens.
The same debate, about Haredi influence on Jewish life, extends to the Diaspora as well. Here the question does not revolve around the control of state institutions and the overturn of the post-Enlightenment paradigm, but rather the ability of diversely Jewish communities to sustain their institutions as the demography shifts towards the Haredi groups. The figures quoted above on the split of entries to Jewish primary schools in the United Kingdom demonstrate the issue; the question of long-term sustainability is exacerbated by the fact that Haredi philanthropists are very unlikely to support mainstream communal institutions.
On a more personal rather than communal and political level, there are signs that Haredi young people are finding new ways to navigate between the closed world of their communities and the opportunities of the wider world around them; the internet has a major disruptive influence on the status quo. The ‘dynamite in the pocket’ is the smartphone, providing discreet personal internet access. Many Haredim, we are told, have a ‘dumb phone’ for use in public and a smartphone alongside it. There has been a recent increase in Haredi networks on Facebook where men and women use pseudonyms to relate to each other and to the non-Haredi world as well as an increase in Haredi women phoning hotlines to get help with domestic violence and alerting to issues of gender segregation. These changes in individual behaviour are not leading to a mass departure from Haredi communities, but may be contributing to the development of a different relationship between this fundamentalist community and the world around it. Within its quiescent fundamentalist paradigm – perhaps accurately characterised as ‘passive aggressive’ – there are signs that new and different patterns of permeability are developing.
For the activist fundamentalists of the settler movements, the political and territorial gains have been almost uninterrupted since 1973. In a political masterstroke, the same 2011 Israeli election that isolated the Haredim also saw the National Religious community move into greater political influence – achieved by sharpening the contrast between their Zionist loyalty and the Haredi approach. Creating common ground with secular parties – especially the aggressively secular Yesh Atid – to isolate the Haredim enabled the national religious block with its strong presence in two key parties – Likkud Beytenu (the party of Prime Minister Netanyahu) and HaBayit Hayehudi (The Jewish Home – the latest branding of the historic Zionist National Religious Party) to shift the key political battleground away from the Palestinian issue. The Israeli Right has for years maintained that there is no solution for the Palestinian conflict and the best that can be done is to manage it; the war-weary but economically successful Jewish Israeli community seems content to go along with this assertion, enabling the settlers and their supporters to be part of a wide political consensus. The HaBayit Hayehudi party controls two ministries that are key to supporting the settlers in the Occupied Territories – the Ministry of Housing and the Ministry of Economic Affairs – the latter decides on tax breaks for preferred geographic regions and the former allocates funds to housing development and communal infrastructures.
For the settlers and their supporters, the moment of truth will come if there is serious discussion and resolve to evacuate them in order to advance a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. The first test will be whether they have the capacity to block such a proposal in the Israeli parliament and in public opinion. The far right in Israel has over the years passed laws that will make it harder for any government to agree a significant territorial compromise. The question now is whether the political influence of the settlers is such that no Israeli government will muster the will to even attempt to impose an evacuation. If a territorial compromise were offered and accepted it would probably require a majority in a referendum. In past evacuations such as from the Gaza Strip in 2005, settlers did not resort to the use of firearms against the army and the will of the government prevailed. While a referendum requirement may make it more difficult to get an agreement on territorial compromise, if such a peace agreement were ratified in a plebiscite it may make it harder for the settlers to gain support for violent resistance. That said, there is little question that if a plebiscite were to vote in favour of a withdrawal, the fundamentalist right would challenge its legitimacy on the grounds that Israel's Palestinian Arab citizens have no right to vote on handing over parts of the historic homeland of the Jews. This accusation of illegitimacy was already directed at Prime Minster Rabin when his minority government, held in place by the support of Arab parties in the Knesset, signed the Oslo Accords with the Palestine Liberation Organisation in 1993. Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by a Jewish fundamentalist determined to halt any process of compromise.
What this review shows is how influential the Jewish fundamentalists have become in shaping the possible futures for Jewish communities and Jewish civilisation as a whole, despite their relatively small numbers. Their strength in Israel, where they can use the mechanisms and resources of the state, amplifies their voice in the Diaspora as well. In the Diaspora and especially the United Kingdom which is a relatively small community with a strong link to Israel, the Haredi future seems set to dominate the community's future in the coming decades. The accommodation between messianic and pragmatic; theocratic and liberal; ethnocentric and pluralistic that has characterised the Jewish world for 150 years and the state of Israel for its first 65 years seems on the verge of significant change with the fundamentalists on the ascent.
Notes
1. S. C. Heilman, ‘Jews and Fundamentalism’, Jewish Political Studies Review 17:1–2 (Spring 2005).
2. Ibid.
3. See D. Finkelstein, ‘It’s courage versus arrogance in the Mirvis Limmud Row’, The Jewish Chronicle (17 October 2013).
4. M. Kress, The State of Orthodox Judaism Today (Jewish Virtual Library, 2012), p. 1.
5. Also see H. Soloveitchik, ‘Rapture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy’, Tradition 28/4 (Summer 1994).
6. Kress, The State of Orthodox Judaism Today, p. 1.
7. Ibid.
8. Leviticus 17:21.
9. Professor Sergio Della Pergola, Hebrew University, in American Jewish Yearbook, 2012.
10. S. M. Cohen, J. B. Ukeles and R. Miller, Diverse Jewish Communities (UJA-Federation of New York: Berman Jewish policy archive, 2012).
11. J. Halberstam, ‘Lives of the Ex-Haredim’, Jewish Ideas Daily (2 August 2011).
12. D. Graham, 2011 Census Results (England and Wales) Initial Insights into Jewish Neighbourhoods (London: Institute for Jewish Policy Research, 2013).
13. Central Bureau of Statistics in Israel, 28 March 2013.
14. Jerusalem Report, 11 March 2013.
15. Exodus 20.
16. www.nkusa.org (accessed 11 March 2015).
17. S. Quinn, ‘A rabbi’s call to draft Israel's ultra-Orthodox into military service’, Washington Post (16 September 2013).
18. Y. Shilhav and M. Friedman, ‘Expansionism through Insularity: the Haredi Community in Jerusalem’ [Hebrew] התפשטות תוך הסתגרות: הקהילה החרדית בירושלים (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, 1985).
19. D. Samson and T. Fishman, Torat Eretz Yisrael (Jerusalem: Torat Eretz Yisrael Publications, 1991).
20. D. Ephron ‘Onward, Jewish Soldiers’, Newsweek (20 November 2010).
21. K. Nahshoni ‘Troops will die rather than listen to women’, YNet (11 November 2011).
22. M. Parks, ‘Israeli Rabbi Urges Troops to Disobey Army’, Los Angeles Times (20 December 1993).
23. www.princeton.edu/∼achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Baruch_Goldstein.html (accessed 11 March 2015).
24. www.un.org (accessed 11 March 2015).
25. rhr.org.il/eng/ (accessed 15 March 2015).
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