Jerusalem is ground zero of an emerging Orthodox alliance: more than 45 percent of schoolchildren in greater Jerusalem are now Haredi, a number often linked to the estimated 200,000 mainly secular Jews who have left the city for the coastal plain over the past generation.
In Jerusalem, about 30 percent of schoolchildren are Arab, while about 13 percent are National Religious. That leaves about 12 percent in secular schools, which Haredi activists might harass and take over when their neighborhoods outgrow their own.
However, the influence of the Orthodox does not stop at the schoolroom door.
Where everyone is hungry for unity, Orthodox Judaism has become a kind of comfort food. Framed portraits of obscure Haredi rabbis hang discreetly behind cash registers in fruit stores and dry cleaners.
“The idea was a Jewish state, wasn’t it? So what is more Jewish than a rabbi?” one of my secular students said, only half-mockingly.
Many secular friends, who otherwise agree with gay rights, opposed the parade in Jerusalem, claiming earnestly that this was, after all, a holy city and perhaps gays should stick to Tel Aviv.
In a way, the two cities, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, now constitute the choice. About 42 percent of Israelis, the so-called center, say, not without humility, that all they want is for Israel to have a “Jewish majority.”
The nature of that majority is to be fought out by two urban models. Jerusalem has become the head of the settler octopus, the seat of its yeshivot, the personification of greater Israel.
Tel Aviv, and its northern suburbs, have become a hub for a global Israel: hip, cosmopolitan, cybernetic and cynical.
There is a Hebrew political culture for both, but only the latter Hebrew is self-ironising, playfully anglicized, erotic, brassy, metaphorical and mischievous. This is the Hebrew every with-it Israeli knows and every democratic Israeli unknowingly counts on. This is what just won the Eurovision song contest.
Then again, even Tel Aviv Hebrew carries the weight of the Torah-culture’s archaic power. You cannot live in a state with an official Judaism, valorizing that power, and expect no erosion of “citizenship” per se.
You can try, as most secular Israelis try, to speak the language, ignore the archaism and tolerate the Judaism, but then it is harder to teach children what democracy is.
From its origins, Israel tried to contain the tension. It cannot do so indefinitely. Nor does it need to define things that torture its intelligentsia, but no democratic state actually needs to define.
A Jewish state — it cannot be emphasized enough — does not have an identity like that of a Jewish person. A state is also not a family, a club or a congregation. It is a commonwealth, a social contract, in which individuals who are subject to equal rules of citizenship work out their lives — if they wish, in voluntary association with people, families, clubs and congregations.
The only plausible “Jewish and democratic” state is a democratic state that speaks the Jewish national language: in effect, a Hebrew republic.
Again, the Hebrew of Tel Aviv is spacious enough for Arabs to absorb its nuances and yet remain Arabs, at least in the hybridized way minorities everywhere adapt to a majority’s language and the culture it subtends.
Diaspora Jews are nothing if not proof of how this can work. Those preoccupied with demographic trends, including leaders of Israel’s peace camp, have an understanding of “Jewish and democratic” that is shallow and mechanical. They are painting by numbers.
If there is hope here, it is that the businesses and towers of Tel Aviv are facts on the ground just like the settlements in the territories are. Nor are settlers alone in determining Israel’s political fate.
The most important and least specified force comes into relief when we look at the center in a different light, not as political leaders, but as economic players.
I am referring to a new generation of elite professionals whose talk about demographics is actually a placeholder for a potentially open-minded vision — people who are willing hostages to the market pressures and liberal values inherent in globalization.
If they intend to maintain their nation’s economic vitality and retain their own power, this elite would have to nudge Israel in the direction of global integration, no matter what their traditional prejudices about Zionism’s cause might be.
Ultimately, this must mean not only two states, Israel and Palestine, but the separation of religion and state and the retiring of old Zionist institutions.
The only Israel that could integrate in this way, so they are discovering, is a nation that looks much like that Hebrew republic, and given that Israel and Palestine together are no bigger than greater Los Angeles, the confederation advocated by Israeli Arabs might well be the only way to make two states work.
In any case, the advocates of a greater Israel would ultimately have to be defeated by advocates for a global Israel — not an easy challenge so long as US President Donald Trump’s administration cheers on the former, but the likes of Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu come and go. Eventually, things that cannot go on do not.
If Israel were to take shape as a Hebrew republic, would Israeli Arab elites agree to join it? If they did, would Israel’s Jews accept them?
You walk down Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv and the questions do not seem rhetorical, but a new generation would have to think, not just about bad apples, but about bad barrels too.
This is part II of a two-part article. Part I appeared in yesterday’s edition.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
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