Years ago, Itzhak Rabin, in his inaugural speech as premier to the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) warned of growing internal pressures to persuade all the world’s Jews to immigrate to Israel. Aliya, or “return” to the “promised land” had been a key element in the birth of Israel but a few years before he was assassinated by a young Jewish religious fanatic. The former general-turned-premier argued that that push should be curbed. If all the Jews in the world were in Israel, he said, one nuclear bomb would be enough to eliminate the Jewish people. For now, Israel is the only nuclear power in the region, and many Jews, both citizens of Israel and in the Diaspora, wonder what will become of their land when there is no more shooting in Israel, in the occupied territories of Palestine, in the devastated Gaza Strip.
Around the same years that Rabin was warning his people, an American Jewish journalist editor of a magazine being published in Tel Aviv made a bad prediction and launched a proposal. When there is peace between Israelis and Palestinians, he wrote during the first Intifada, civil war will break out in Israel: secular versus religious. To avoid it, perhaps even to foster a solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict, he wrote, a state should be founded in Jerusalem for all the religious: committed Muslims, Orthodox Jews, fundamentalist Christians; and in the rest of Israel-Palestine, with Tel Aviv as capital, a modern state for the secular. Many laughed; others judged the proposal as premature. Today, on the margins of the Gaza war, tensions are rising dangerously between these two important components of Israeli Jewish society, and between Israel and a part of the Jewish diaspora.
These days the government is expected to discuss, and possibly pass, a controversial bill that would continue to exempt ultra-Orthodox yeshiva (religious school) students from being drafted into the army. It has always been the case that haredi youth do not go under arms, but the situation in the country has changed. Religious leaders have always managed to block any attempt to recruit their children attending schools with the excuse-justification that they needed to deepen their knowledge and interpretation of the holy scriptures. The armed forces are essential to Israel’s defense, but while in recent years new warfare systems, new weapons have allowed governments to perpetuate exemptions for the religious, the Gaza war and the risk of a widening of the conflict to the northern border require revising the laws and introducing new forces. “If you change the laws, if you ask us to be soldiers, we will leave Israel and return to the Diaspora,” ultra-Orthodox rabbis have threatened, but while in the past their position could lead to a government crisis, today, the reality is much more complex.
The army needs at least seven thousand men in addition to those deployed on the various fronts, and there is talk of thousands of additional combat soldiers. Reservists, who have already been called up more than once in recent months, support the bulk of the war effort and account for the largest number of dead and wounded in the assault on Gaza. They and their family members, exasperated and weary, are pushing for an end to the privileged treatment of the Orthodox. To increase the regular army’s forces, many new fighters will have to be drawn from the 66,000 yeshiva students currently exempt and studying mostly at state expense.
In recent days Netanyahu, ever ambiguous, has tried to forestall a major political crisis surrounding a bill that would exempt ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students from enlisting. The premier would like to raise the exemption age for the ultra-Orthodox to 35 to allow them to stay in rabbinical schools for a long time. “Netanyahu,” writes the Haaretz newspaper, “depends on the ultra-Orthodox parties just as he depends on the far-right parties. And just as he is terrified to discuss the future of Gaza – as it could lead to the fall of his government – he is also reluctant to harm the special status that the ultra-Orthodox have practically organized for themselves” with the consent, it must be said, of all governments – left as well as right – in Israel’s short history.
The effects of the ongoing clash between the secular and religious has considerable weight among American Jews. According to some polls taken in the United States, not only Netanyahu but also many Israeli politicians of different factions are losing credibility and support among Diaspora Jews. “Israel’s survival depends on the strength of its armed forces, and it is now clear to all but the settler fanatics and Haredi draft-dodgers,” Haaretz again writes, “that Israel cannot sustain itself when so many of its young men refuse to fight. It is clear that in the absence of a popular army, built on a fair, efficient and inclusive draft, Israel and the Zionist project are doomed to failure and collapse. American Jews, if they take Israel at all seriously, must throw themselves into the public debate and exert whatever influence they can.”
