Israel's Hidden War
June 3, 2021
The latest Israel-Palestinian crisis flared for a handful of days as bombs rained down on both sides, causing the predictable diplomatic flurry and another cease-fire deal that won’t last. Nothing will change for two reasons: Fortress Israel is impregnable, and the Palestinians in the occupied territories cannot get their act together because of their dysfunctional and corrupt leaders. So the cycle will repeat, and pundits will bleat, about a two-state solution and other options that are unattainable.
But Israel’s real existential challenge is within. It’s about an irreconcilable clash between worldviews: Israelis (Jewish and Arab citizens) who want Israel to remain a vibrant economic and technological powerhouse and liberal democracy; and ultra-orthodox Jews, or Haredim, who believe Israel should be a theocracy for the devout. The hidden war is due to demographics and the fact that the Haredim population explodes and in less than two generations will represent half of Israel’s population.
This challenge is behind the creation this week of a broadly-based coalition of eight political parties — right, left, centrist, and the United Arab List parties — which aims to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his radical policies. It’s important, however, to note that this is an awkward alliance that only agrees on one issue, his removal. Governance going forward will be tricky, to say the least, and the coalition intends to be led for two years by Naftali Bennet as Prime Minister, a hard-line religious-nationalist, then by centrist leader Yair Lapid, favored by secular Israelis.
The coalition is a metaphor for Israel’s deep divisions. Arab Israelis represent 20 percent of the population (and 25 percent of its children), the ultra-orthodox or Haredim represent 14 percent (and 20 percent of the country’s children), and the remaining majority consists of secular and religious Jews. The Haredim have been awarded major privileges by Netanhayu over the years while the Arab minority has been neglected in state budgets and housing and land policies. Further, in 2018, an incendiary Nation-State Law passed that enshrined the right of national self-determination as being “unique to the Jewish people,” rather than to all Israeli citizens.
While a blow, Arabs in Israel enjoy higher living standards and more freedoms than their counterparts anywhere else and are becoming democratically engaged. Arab parties are in the new coalition, and Arabs also becoming more successful. For instance, today half of Israel’s pharmacists and one-fifth of all its physicians are of Arab background.
Israel’s biggest “threat”, politically and economically, is the exponential population growth — and political clout — of the Haredim, or ultra-orthodox Jews. (“Haredim” is defined in the Oxford dictionary as “a member of any of various Orthodox Jewish sects characterized by strict adherence to the traditional form of Jewish law and rejection of modern secular culture, many of whom do not recognize the modern state of Israel as a spiritual authority.”) They are not a threat because of their religion, but because their worldview differs from other Israelis who believe in liberal democracy.
Demographically, the Haredim will take over Israel’s population in two generations because of exploding birthrates. Their political clout is already dominant and Netanyahu has taken the country radically to the “right” in favor of special privileges for the Haredim. This demographic alarum has been raised often by Professor Dan Ben-David, an economist at Tel Aviv University’s Department of Public Policy who heads the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research. The Haredim, he says, constitutionally enjoy enormous privileges while, at the same time, disdain modern life and gainful employment, therefore living off all Israeli taxpayers.
This trajectory will result in unresolvable internal conflicts which have begun to bubble over into the population at large. For the first time inside Israel, serious inter-communal violence broke out during the latest crisis with Hamas in Israel’s “mixed communities” as far-right Jewish militias attacked Arabs, who retaliated, according to news accounts.
“The most shocking developments occurred on the streets of Israel, as rival Jewish and Arab mobs attacked cars, shops, and people in several towns and cities,” wrote The New York Times. “In Bat Yam, a seaside suburb south of Tel Aviv … dozens of Jewish extremists took turns beating and kicking a man presumed to be Arab, even as his body lay motionless on the ground. Another occurred in Acre, a northern coastal town, where an Arab mob beat a Jewish man with sticks and rocks, also leaving him in a critical condition.”
This is happening at a time when Arabs have integrated more with their Jewish neighbors in recent years, wrote The New York Times. “But at the same time, the Israeli Jewish leadership has grown more right-wing and nakedly racist.”
When the Haredim won certain inalienable rights in 2018, etched into the country’s Basic Laws, they obtained special status, wrote Ben-David. This includes exclusive control over the education of their children and support for their growing “community of learners” (Torah students) who are not only exempt from military service but may refrain from paid work too, and must be supported by taxpayers. The result is that employment rates among Haredi men are low.
These low employment rates among Haredim men are partly a choice (to pursue religious studies) but are also the result of poor educational outcomes. Yeshivas don’t teach core subjects and Ben-David adds that many Arab children attend schools that are under-funded and sub-standard. “One-quarter of Israel’s schoolchildren are Arab-Israeli and perform poorly in core subjects – in math, science and reading – even below that of other Muslim countries, and most of the Haredim (ultra-orthodox) children, which comprises one-fifth (20 percent) of the total, and is growing exponentially, don’t study these subjects in their religious schools,” wrote Ben-David in an article for The Times of Israel in 2019.
Not surprisingly, Israeli students as a whole underperform the rest of the developed world in terms of test results.
This means that Israel will lose its status as a “start-up nation” unless educational and other reforms are enacted because already nearly half of Israel’s children will be unprepared to assume the reins of a high-tech nation, argues Ben-David. “How is it even possible that government after government refuses to grant an exponentially increasing number of Haredi children the basic right to a core curriculum – a right that is stipulated by the law in every developed country, except Israel.”
This dramatic demographic shift results in conundrums: How can Israel’s pluralistic and meritocratic society continue to grant special status and financially support an increasing number of unproductive persons, based on religion? How can the country tolerate poor educational outcomes, and welfare dependency, and still deliver economic prosperity? “Not only is Israel’s labor productivity among the lowest in the developed world, but the gap between the leading G7 countries (the U.S., Canada, U.K., Germany, France, Italy, and Japan) and Israel has increased over three-fold over the past forty years,” he wrote.
The proportion of Haredi men with an academic degree has remained very low and unchanged over the past decade and a half, however, a slight increase has occurred among Haredi women.
Will this growing divide result in more inter-communal clashes, such as those that just occurred during the latest conflict? Fortunately, these were sporadic and relatively short-lived because, it’s important to note that calm was restored, thanks to centrist politicians representing both Arab Israelis and secular Jews. “The vast majority of the people of Israel -- Jews and Arabs -- are far better than this,” said Yair Lapid. Likewise, Ayman Odeh, a young Israeli-born, multilingual lawyer of Arab descent who describes himself as secular and heads the Joint Arab List representing four Arab parties, publicly called for restraint and urged followers to participate only in organized demonstrations.
Odeh is a respected power broker who recites Martin Luther King and concentrates on establishing peaceful co-existence among all Israelis. He was born in Israel and describes himself as an Arab Israeli, not a Palestinian. And in a leadership debate in 2015, he made his mark when he was attacked by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, a right-wing leader of Israel’s Our Home party, who sneered at him: “Why did you come to this studio, why not to Gaza, or Ramallah? Why are you even here? You are not wanted here; you are a Palestinian citizen.”
Odeh was unruffled and replied: “I am very welcome in my homeland,” he said in Hebrew, then referred to the fact that Lieberman migrated from the Soviet Union. “I am part of nature, the surroundings, the landscape.”
Hopefully, the new coalition can begin to address the country’s need to level the playing field, institute comprehensive, systemic education reform that will turn Israel’s schools – including in the Haredi sector – into the world’s best, and improve healthcare, infrastructure, and policing in all poor neighborhoods.
In The Times of Israel piece, Ben-David concludes with a demographic warning: “It should be clear that the complexity of the challenges that Israel faces extends far beyond the issue of Haredim. Pervasive poverty and income inequality also exist among non-Haredi Jews, not to mention Arab-Israelis. Not everything begins and ends with education. But if a population group this large continues to exercise considerable influence on the direction and amplitude of flows from the government faucet in a manner that only further enhances their exponential growth, while concurrently depriving their children [and others] of the vital tools necessary for integration into a competitive global economy and a modern society, Israel will cease to exist.”
IMPORTANT: When you sign up please add dianefrancis@substack.com to your contact list or the newsletter could be blocked by your spam function.
My newsletters will arrive in your inbox Monday and Thursday mornings.
For those interested in more information about Israel's “Education Crisis”, here’s a 54-minute presentation by Ben-David on YouTube.
Well written..... Amazing research and insight into Israel's political dilemma. A short to mid term nightmare.
I had no idea. Thank You.