Dear Neighbor,
In the days before the suicide bombings of the early 2000s, before the wall was built, Palestinians and Israelis had opportunities to get to know each other. The occupation, of course, always stood between us. Still, there was human interaction.
But now we’ve become abstractions to each other. What worries me about the next generation is that even limited encounters between our peoples are increasingly rare. On both sides, rage and hatred are growing among our young people. Any possibility for coexistence depends on each side having at least some positive interaction, some knowledge of the other’s reality.
I have already told you something of my faith, my personal history, and the story of my people. Now, in the spirit of the Qur’an’s exhortation to know each other, I’d like to tell you something about modern-day Israel, the society that exists within plain view from your hill—who we are and how we manage our internal issues. After all, our two nations are bound to each other. How my country works will have implications for both our futures.
If I had to sum up in one word what most characterizes Israeli society, it is: paradox.
Our Declaration of Independence defined Israel as a Jewish and a democratic state. According to the framers, Israel would be the homeland of Jews around the world, whether or not they are Israeli citizens. And it would be the democratic state of all its citizens, whether or not they are Jews. That dual identity—Jewish and democratic—is the aspirational challenge bequeathed to us by the founders.
Is Israel a secular or a religious state? Partly that depends on where the question is being asked. Seen from Tel Aviv, with its clubs and nonkosher restaurants, Israel is a thoroughly secular society. Seen from Jerusalem, with its synagogues and study halls, Israel is a deeply traditional society. I define Israel as a secular state in a holy land. When Zionism determined that there could be no substitute national home for the Jews but Zion, it ensured a permanent conflict between religion and state that can only be managed, never entirely resolved.
Israel is an uneasy meeting point between Jews from East and West. For Mizrahim, or Jews from Muslim countries, that encounter often meant, especially in Israel’s early years, discrimination and patronizing contempt from the Ashkenazi European establishment; today, increasingly, the encounter between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim happens under the wedding canopy. The core community that founded Israel was overwhelmingly Ashkenazi and secular, and secularism remains vibrant; at the same time our music, cuisine, even language are all increasingly influenced by traditional Mizrahi culture. The oud has met the electric guitar: Piyutim, the prayer poems of Mizrahim, have been retrieved from the cultural amnesia of secular Israel and adopted by our leading rock musicians. Israeli music was once the carrier of the secular ethos; today it expresses the longing among Israelis to reconnect with Jewish tradition.
I know Israeli Jews of Middle Eastern origin whose passion for Oum Kalthoum, the great Egyptian singer, is part of their family identity. And there are Israeli singers and bands—like Orphaned Land, which combines heavy metal with piyut—that are popular in Arab and Muslim countries. When the band performs in Turkey—the only Muslim country that has allowed them to appear—fans from Lebanon and Egypt and even Iran come, some waving their national flags.
Recently I attended a concert celebrating both Jewish and Arab music, held outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City. The concert drew not only Israeli Jews but Palestinians from the Old City and elsewhere in Jerusalem. Onstage were Jews singing in Arabic and Arabs singing in Hebrew. Peace isn’t just a political but a cultural challenge. The more Israel reclaims its Eastern identity, the better the chance of finding our place in the region.
Paradox is built into the very nature of Israeli society, created by the “ingathering of the exiles,” as we call the immigration of Jews from around the world. Jews brought home the wisdom and fears learned from their varied wanderings and imposed those on Israeli reality. As a Jew raised in New York in the 1960s who absorbed the pluralistic values of American society, I came to Israel with a commitment to help strengthen its democratic culture. I fear the weakening of democratic norms, especially among young Israelis, who grew up after the collapse of the peace process and whose formative memories have been terrorism and rocket assaults from Lebanon and Gaza. I was grateful to the IDF for putting on trial an Israeli soldier who shot and killed a disarmed Palestinian assailant in Hebron. Yet even though the soldier had violated the Israeli army’s code of ethics and rules of engagement, many celebrated him as a hero.
But I know Israelis from the former Soviet Union, for example, who grew up as an oppressed minority under a totalitarian regime. Their great anxiety is that the Jews, so long defenseless, have yet to learn how to effectively wield power. They worry that democratic niceties, like an army code of ethics, are a luxury that a besieged country cannot afford, and that those self-imposed restraints undermine our ability to defend ourselves.
It often seems to me that the Israeli national debate is really Jewish history arguing with itself. Who are we? What does our history expect of us? How do we reconcile, or simply live with, our multiple paradoxes?
Inevitably, Israel reflects the contradictions of the Jews. We came home with opposite expectations of what a Jewish state should be. Secular Zionists longed for a state that would “normalize” the Jews, one of history’s most abnormal peoples, by creating a nation among nations. In the process of demythologizing the Jewish people, secularists hoped that anti-Semitism would gradually disappear.
Religious Zionists, on the other hand, longed for a state that would confirm Jewish exceptionalism, become a “light to the nations,” even a trigger for the redemption of humanity. How the Jewish state could be both normal and exceptional was a dilemma that remained abstract for the Zionist movement—until we actually achieved statehood. Now contradictory visions have become social conflicts.
There is a seminal moment in the Bible, when the elders of Israel approach Samuel the prophet (whose grave, not far from our two hills, is located in a building that peacefully contains both a mosque and a synagogue). The elders demand that Samuel anoint a king over Israel, so that we will be “like all the nations.” Normal: freed of the burden of chosenness. Samuel is outraged. Israel is governed by prophets; why would the elders want a mere king as ruler?
Those impulses—to be normal and to be exceptional—are the twin longings that run through Jewish history. Zionism’s genius—and one of the reasons for its success among the world’s Jews—was that it embraced those two longings and promised the Jews to fulfill them both.
I share those contradictory longings. I see the transformation of the Jews back into a sovereign nation as one of the great achievements of Jewish history. I want Israel to be normal, accepted by the international community, more at home in its ordinariness, able to finally take existence for granted. But I also want an Israel that seeks more than existence, that cherishes the vision of the prophets of a just society—that is worthy of all the hopes and prayers and efforts invested in its founding.
Ironically, we have yet to truly fulfill either vision, of normalcy or exceptionalism. Israel is a nation-state, but hardly normal. We are often the great exception, the outcast—from the Middle East, from the UN. As for the wish to be an exemplary society, Israel often feels painfully normal, with political corruption and organized crime and all the ailments of modernity. The founders sought to create a nation that would be normalized in its relations with the world but internally exceptional, a laboratory of democratic socialism. Sometimes, though, it seems as if we’ve created the reverse dynamic: externally abnormal, internally unexceptional.
Perhaps this is Israel’s greatest challenge: to become a normal nation among nations while aspiring to create a society worthy of Jewish history and dreams. One reason I am reaching out to you, neighbor, is that Israel’s ability to fulfill both those aspirations will depend, in part, on our relationship with you and your people.
Secular and religious Israelis are still arguing about normalcy and exceptionalism. Neither is likely to entirely prevail, because both arguments speak to an essential Jewish need. After the Holocaust, even many religious Jews agreed that secular Zionism’s promise of normalization offered vital healing for the Jewish people. And today, with growing materialism in our society, many secular Jews agree that Israeli society needs an infusion of spirituality, a renewed sense of purpose and direction.
I live at the uneasy meeting point between tradition and modernity. I am a religious Jew, but I don’t vote for a religious party. I want to keep religion as far away from politics as possible. At the same time, I recognize that this isn’t America, and that in our region, and in a Jewish-majority country, there cannot be complete separation between religion and state. I once interviewed one of the leaders of secular revolt against the rabbinic establishment, and I assumed that her model for Israel was the American separation of religion and state. But she surprised me: That’s impossible in Israel, she said. Religion is too much a part of the nation’s identity.
And yet secularism is also an essential part of our identity. Because of the centrality of peoplehood for Judaism, the most strictly observant Jews have no choice but to accept the most secular as fellow Jews. And so Israel must accommodate religious and secular, ensuring that both see a reflection of their identities in the national ethos.
To ease religious–secular tensions, we have reached a series of compromises. The Orthodox-run state rabbinate, for example, has a monopoly on marriage—a carry-over from the Ottoman Empire, where every religion had its own courts for personal status issues. (Sharia courts have the same legal status in Israel as rabbinic courts.) That means that there is no option of civil marriage in Israel, for either Jews or Muslims. But if a couple flies, say, to Cyprus, twenty minutes away, and gets married in a civil court, their marriage will be recognized by the state when they return home.
Sooner or later this absurd system will have to change, if only because more and more young Israeli Jews are opting out, choosing to fly abroad and marry without an Orthodox rabbi.
Then there’s the compromise over public observance of the Sabbath. One of the first questions that vexed Israel after its founding was, How should a modern Jewish state observe Shabbat in its public space? Should it forbid activities considered violations of the Sabbath under Orthodox law, or treat the day as any other?
Israel opted, as usual, for a messy compromise. Public transportation is suspended on Shabbat in Jewish areas and commerce more or less banned, but cultural and sports events are permitted, and restaurants and cafés remain open. In recent years the so-called status quo on Shabbat observance has been eroded, and commerce on Shabbat has expanded. One possible update to the status quo, jointly presented by a leading rabbi and a leading secular jurist, would permit limited public transportation and maintain entertainment while enforcing the ban on commerce, which is the most blatant violation of the spirit of Shabbat. In that way, each Israeli Jew could determine his or her way of enjoying the day of rest. That suggested compromise is an example of religious–secular relations at their best: figuring out how to make a place in our public space for a range of approaches to Jewish tradition.
Israel was founded by secular Jews—many of them in revolt against their religious families—and so secularism is built into our foundations. It is also the safety net against rising fundamentalism. But like most Israeli Jews, I want Jewish values and culture to shape our public space. (What constitutes “Jewish values” is part of the ongoing debate over our identity.) Polls show that a majority of Jewish citizens want less religious legislation and more tradition in their lives. I believe that that is where Israel is ultimately heading. It’s a delicate balance between our secular and religious identities, and each generation will need to renegotiate the details. The premise of all those arrangements must continue to be that no part of Israeli society be allowed to totally determine the face of Israeli culture and politics.
To further complicate matters, there is the ongoing feud between the Israeli government and the Reform and Conservative Jewish denominations over who has the right to control prayer at the Western Wall. A government compromise that would have granted official status to those liberal denominations over one area of the Wall collapsed following the opposition of ultra-Orthodox parties, who oppose recognition of the non-Orthodox movements. Given that a majority of American Jews who practice Judaism identify either as Reform or Conservative, the crisis has created a rupture between Israel and the Diaspora.
I find the anger and anguish of Reform and Conservative Jews deeply moving. What they’re saying to Israel in effect is: You are supposed to be the homeland of all Jews, which means your public space needs to reflect our religious diversity; by granting exclusive control to one part of the Jewish people, the Orthodox, you are betraying the Zionist commitment to peoplehood.
Not only does Israel have to manage its radical Jewish diversity; its even greater challenge is including Arab citizens—fully 20 percent of the population, many of whom identify as Palestinian—in its national identity.
Israel must honor its two nonnegotiable identities, as a Jewish state and a democratic state. Israel cannot give up its commitment to being the continuation of Jewish history and the potential protector of the world’s Jews without doing irreparable damage to its essence. So much of Israel’s vitality and achievements comes from the country’s Jewish identity, from the motivation to turn a two-thousand-year dream into an ongoing miracle of fulfillment. Remove the Jewishness of Israel—and its heart, its passion are excised.
But failure to embrace Arab citizens in the national identity and public space creates a different kind of existential threat. I once asked an Arab Knesset member what his most “Israeli” moment was. I expected him to mention his swearing-in as a member of parliament, or perhaps his pride over the victory of an Israeli sports team. Instead he said: I never had an Israeli moment; I’ve never once felt Israeli.
For Israel’s Arab citizens, the problem of their identity is embodied in Israel’s national anthem, which evokes the Jewish longing for Zion. “So long as the Jewish soul yearns within the heart,” it begins. As one Arab Israeli said to me: I have no problem with a Jewish heart, I just don’t have one. An Arab Supreme Court justice, who presided over the sentencing to prison of a former Israeli president (on charges of rape)—surely an expression of a judge’s unassailable status in society—told an interviewer that he doesn’t sing the national anthem.
How do Jewish Israelis and Arab Israelis celebrate Independence Day together, when for Jews it is a day of redemption and for Palestinians a day of catastrophe?
Fully opening up Israeli identity to Palestinian Israelis is a frightening prospect for both Arabs and Jews. For Arabs it means taking an active role in the public life of a nation that is occupying their relatives in the West Bank. For Jews it means trusting as fellow citizens a population whose natural sympathy may be with the Palestinians and the Arab world, with the country’s enemies.
Can there be a more paradoxical identity, given our situation, than “Palestinian Israeli”? During the 2006 war between Israel and the Lebanese Islamist Hezbollah, I was in an Arab restaurant in the northern city of Haifa when the siren went off, warning of an imminent missile attack. Arabs and Jews all crowded for shelter in the kitchen. We stood pressed together in awkward silence. Finally, someone said, “Coexistence.” Everyone smiled ruefully. The surreal moment caught the paradox of Israeli Palestinians: seeking shelter together with Jews from a missile attack launched in the name of the Palestinian cause.
And yet, for all the awkwardness and ambivalence and anger, I believe that a sense of shared citizenship between Israeli Jews and Arabs isn’t just essential but also possible. Polls consistently show that a majority of Arab Israelis believe that Israel is a good country to live in, even though half also say that Arabs are discriminated against; even more surprising, a majority say they are proud to be Israeli. Asked whether they would opt for citizenship in a future Palestinian state, the overwhelming majority say no, even if they could remain in their homes and not move across the border.
The bad news for my country is that a large minority of Arabs is alienated from Israeli society. Some Palestinian Israelis don’t call themselves Israeli at all, preferring the term “Palestinians of 1948”—that is, Palestinians who didn’t leave during the Nakba.
Yet the fact that a majority of Palestinian citizens of Israel still identify to some extent with the state, even with no end in sight for our conflict, means that there is a basis from which to work toward a shared society and identity, however fraught. As a citizen of Israel, I am committed to this effort.
How, then, to proceed? Mohammad Darawshe, one of the leading Palestinian Israeli activists and my colleague at the Hartman Institute, says that Israel’s Arabs need to learn to act like a minority and Israel’s Jews need to learn to act like a majority. He has, I believe, touched on the psychological core of the problem.
Israel’s Jews are a curious majority: We are a majority in our own country but are acutely aware of being a minority in a hostile region—a region to which Arab Israelis belong, by culture and sentiment. That means that both the Jews and the Arabs of Israel often feel at once like a majority and a minority.
Darawshe’s challenge to Jews is to remember that we are, after all, in control of a powerful and successful country, and we must act with the generosity of a self-confident majority. His challenge to Arabs is to act with the wisdom of a minority caught in an extremely delicate situation, between their loyalty to their Palestinian identity and the need to find their place in a Jewish-majority society.
Many Jews fear Arab citizens as a potential fifth column. Those fears are reinforced by Arab Knesset members, some of whom openly identify, even during wartime, with Israel’s enemies, like Hamas and Hezbollah. Arab parliamentarians have called Israeli soldiers Nazis and supported terror attacks. One Arab MK refused to call the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers (who were later found murdered) an act of terror. Those are not isolated incidents but part of a pattern.
As the majority, Jews need to reassure Arab citizens that we see them as an integral part of our society. The first place to begin is by ending discrimination against Arab citizens, especially in government allocations for education and infrastructure and other needs. That disgrace violates the promise of Israel’s founders to create a society in the spirit of prophetic justice. In some ways the situation is gradually improving—and even the right-wing Netanyahu government invested significant resources in the Arab community, realizing that the Israeli economy will suffer if a substantial part of the population remains behind. But in other ways we are moving backward—like the plethora of laws, proposed by right-wing legislators, emphasizing the Jewishness of the state at the expense of its democratic identity. While few of those laws actually pass, they are creating a mood in which democracy is on the defensive.
As part of the regional majority, Israel’s Arabs need to reassure Jewish citizens that they want to be part of Israel—beginning with electing Knesset members whose goal is integrationist, rather than nationalist or Islamist. The gap between the polls that show an appreciation of Israel among Arab citizens with the expressions of alienation and even hatred by Knesset members representing them is untenable. It only reinforces the darkest fears of Israeli Jews.
So long as our conflict persists, relations between Arabs and Jews in Israel will remain abnormal. At the very least, though, Israeli Jews need to convey to Israeli Arabs that we see their place in our society not as a problem to be managed but as an opportunity for Israel to uphold its own moral standards. And by integrating Arabs into Israeli identity, we are taking a step toward integrating Israel into the region.
In the end, I don’t know if our internal paradoxes can be resolved. Nor perhaps should they be: Any attempt to embrace one definition of Israel at the exclusion of another will alienate major segments of the population from the national ethos and do violence to the delicate balance that manages our conflicting identities and longings.
At its best, Israel is energized by paradox. I see Israel as a testing ground for managing some of the world’s most acute dilemmas—the clash between religion and modernity, East and West, ethnicity and democracy, security and morality. These are worthy challenges for an ancient people that wandered the world and absorbed its diversity—and has brought the world with it back home.
In fact, the balance between our paradoxes is constantly shifting. Few societies are as malleable, so prone to fundamental change in so short a time, as Israel.
In my nearly four decades here, I’ve lived through at least three distinct Israels. There was the depressed Israel of the 1980s—300 percent inflation, a no-win war in Lebanon, increasing isolation from the international community. Then there was the exuberant Israel of the early 1990s—the Oslo process, the beginning of high-tech start-up Israel, massive immigration from the former Soviet Union, increasing acceptance by the international community. And then there was the Israel that emerged with the collapse of the peace process in the year 2000—moving from one war to the next, its civilian population the target of suicide bombers and rockets, a dreamless Israel living one day at a time, that never lowers its guard.
This Israel has persisted now for nearly two decades. But if the past is any indication, we are due for another drastic shift in the Israeli story. My hope, neighbor, is that, at the next turn, our two societies will renew their encounter, but this time on the basis of mutual respect.