BESA Center Perspectives No. 599..
29 September '17..
Link: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/israeli-identity/
External threats to our existence as Israelis create an awareness of a common fate. It is tempting to focus on such threats, because they provide a comfort zone in which security-political experts can ask the familiar question: how will we continue to defend our existence over the coming year? By concentrating on this question, we have found a way to repress basic questions about Israeli identity.
Beyond anxiety over our common fate as residents of this country stands a key question: do we still have anything in common? This debate, which has gathered steam over the past year, invites us to reconsider who we are and what we expect from our joint existence as a nation.
This past year, the Israeli identity crisis was expressed in new ways in the public discourse. President Reuven Rivlin described it in terms of the four tribes of the state of Israel: the religious, the secular, the ultra-Orthodox, and the Arabs. Amnon Rubinstein addressed the issue in his book The Tribes of the State of Israel: Together and Separately – Liberalism and Multiculturalism in Israel. Haaretz has devoted many articles to the topic.
Notwithstanding the president’s view, a focus on the deep structure of Israeli society, especially among the Jews, reveals an important common denominator, one that is more and more evident in the synagogues. Between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews there are differences of formulation, not of essence. Hence a new trend is apparent in large synagogues in Tel Aviv: the conducting of frequent integrated prayer quorums and the use of blended versions of prayers.
Not only is there a new trend of integration of communities, but religious and secular Israelis are intermingling. Israeli sociologists largely concur with one another that “secular Jews are the majority.” They tend to identify the large numbers who identify as traditional as a secular subdivision – “secular lite.” As sociologist Oz Almog put it, “The majority of Israeli society is secular and traditional.”
Based on the same data, however, one can propose a different perspective and a contrasting conclusion. If we merely change the point of departure for the distinction between secular and religious – if we agree that not everyone who drives on Shabbat is necessarily secular, as in the case of Shalom Asayag in the fascinating TV series The 1980s – we can assert that the majority of Israeli Jewish society is religious and traditional. Those of a pronounced secular bent are in the minority.
