Prof. Sam Lehman-Wilzig – THE FUTURE OF ISRAEL’S VIABILITY AND VITALITY (4) – Cohesive National Identity
Last week I discussed in-depth the second of seven factors – Shared Opportunity – underlying national competitiveness and dynamism (https://israelseen.com/prof-sam-lehman-wilzig-the-future-of-israels-viability-and-vitality-3-shared-opportunity/) – to evaluate what lies in store for Israel in the coming decades. Here I will look in-depth at a third factor: Cohesive National Identity.
The more homogeneous a country, the less social turmoil it will suffer. The downside of complete homogeneity is immobility; such countries usually don’t much move forward because of cultural “groupthink.” Thus, the task of each country is to try and find some “sweet spot” between a national identity cohesiveness (based on some common history, culture, ethnicity, religion, or “race”) and some mixture of various mindsets. If the former leads to over-conservatism, the latter can lead to social breakdown and even civil war when taken to an extreme.
Where is Israel on this spectrum? Not easy to answer simply because two convincing – but contradictory – arguments in this regard could be provided (something quite Jewish, for as the Talmud states: “this opinion and that opinion are both the words of God!”).
The positive scenario: Israel is a “Mosaic Society” many times over. First, from a national-ethnic standpoint, the country has Jews, Moslem-Arabs (mainstream and Bedouin), Druze, and Christian-Arabs (and several other very low number ethnicities). Among the numerically dominant Jewish-Israelis (about 75% of the nation), there are Jews from virtually every country in the world – nominally called Ashkenazim (from Europe and Russia), Edot Ha’Mizrakh (from Arab countries), Anglo-Saxons (from English-speaking countries), Ethiopim (Ethiopians), and “others” (mostly from South and Central America) – each with a distinct cultural flavor, based on centuries living in their respective areas around the globe. However, these “categories” are themselves overly generalized. For instance, there is a big cultural difference between an Israeli of Moroccan parentage and one of Iraqi provenance; between former Americans and Brits (or Aussies); and certainly between those who immigrated from the former (authoritarian) Soviet Union and the democratic west.
This is not a “melting pot” society as the early Zionists hoped, where everyone assimilates into a gigantic cultural “goulash,” but rather a “mosaic” society in which each culture offers something else to the collectivity but also absorbs influences from other groups e.g., Arabic words (and foods!) entering mainstream Israeli culture – and vice versa. The overall result: a cultural and economic flourishing far beyond what Herzl and Ben-Gurion could have imagined.
So much for the good news. The bad news is the obverse side of this coin. Several cleavages in Israeli society are deep and a few are getting deeper. The current five elections in three years, with no clear victory in sight for either “camp,” expresses Israel’s political paralysis, with the country very evenly (and determinedly) split along ideological lines that contain several “overlapping cleavages”: Two States vs. Greater Israel; secularism vs religiosity; Gush Dan vs the “periphery”.
As if these weren’t enough of an “identity crisis,” another growing split is widening between Jewish “nationalists” and Jewish “universalists.” The former believe that Israel is a Jewish State, so that Jewish particularism (read: “heritage,” broadly defined) should take precedence over other values. The latter group almost sounds like an oxymoron, but it has some historical logic by focusing on the universal human rights found in Judaism: social justice and the like. Although these are really two sides of the same Jewish coin, there is an inherent tension between the two when it comes to policy-making e.g., should Israel enable all Ukrainian refugees (mostly non-Jewish) into the country during the current war even if it could potentially “dilute” the state’s Jewish character? Or should the latter take precedence, leading to a maximal quota of war refugee ingathering?
If there is one thing holding back these serious divisions from becoming violent and socially destructive it is historical remembrance. The Jewish People have a long, collective memory and have not forgotten their self-inflicted disasters of yesteryear. Indeed, the most famous expression regarding this issue is brought into the public discourse whenever matters seem to be getting too “hot”: “We have to ensure that the Third House [a metaphor for the contemporary State of Israel – wordplay on the two previous destroyed Temples] is not destroyed.”
On the other hand, Jewish historical patterns suggest that the future is less than sanguine. The Israelites started off with twelve tribes (even civil war broke out among some of them!), and have periodically split: the post-Solomon, Judean vs the Northern Kingdom; Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes, fighting one another; Samaritans and Karaites splitting off from normative Judaism; scholarly Mitnagdim vs spirited Hassidim at loggerheads in Eastern Europe; Reform and Conservative vs. Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox with little social intercourse between them in the later modern era. And most recently we are finding a growing “political” gap between Israelis and many overseas Jews, raising the fundamental “national identity” question: is Israel the center of the Jewish world (as Zionism has always claimed) or merely one important Jewish hub among others around the planet?
In sum, Israel’s variegated society has given it great economic and cultural strength. Unfortunately, it also has seriously divided the country politically – along national, ethnic, and ideological lines. Some of these have been somewhat ameliorated over the decades (Edot Ha’Mizrakh vs. Ashkenazim with increasing “intermarriage” between them; Arabs assimilating into the Israeli economy, and to a lesser extent, its society), some have remained relatively constant (ultra-Orthodox vs secular, each still pushing to have less or more religion in public life), and a few divisions have worsened (Greater Israel vs Peace Now).
What does this bode for the future? The answer lies in Israeli politics. If the country’s leaders can lower the flame and seek election based not on “fear” but on an attempt to find common ground, then the country’s economic, cultural, and social strengths will carry it upwards and forwards into the foreseeable future. Conversely, if Israeli politics continues its current vituperative and schismatic path, none of its other strengths will be of much avail over the long term.
