Divided Israel

In early March, Yitzhak Yosef – chief rabbi of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Sephardi community – caused an uproar. Speaking at his weekly lecture, he suggested that Israel’s survival depended more on prayers than military might. He also made what could appear to be a threat. “If they force us to go to the army, we’ll all move abroad,” he said. “All these secular people don’t understand that without kollels and yeshivas [institutions where religious Jewish men study], the army would not be successful.”

Yosef was speaking in defence of the long-running exemption of ultra-Orthodox Jews from conscription, in place since the foundation of the state. As Israel faces its greatest military crisis in decades, many are questioning whether this exemption is still fair. It’s part of a larger question around the role of the Haredim – the Hebrew term for ultra-Orthodox Jews, meaning “the fearful” – in Israeli society, which speaks to a paradox at the heart of the Jewish state.

In its 1948 Declaration of Independence, the nascent nation pledged to “uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race, creed or sex” and to “guarantee full freedom of conscience, worship, education and culture”. There is much to say about the unequal treatment by Israel of the Palestinians, including those who are citizens of the state, and what it means for Israel’s future. But critical, too, are the deepening divides among Israeli Jews – secular and religious, Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox – and the strain this is placing on competing visions of what it means to be “the Jewish state”. Can Israel resolve its existential tensions and internal contradictions, or will they tear it apart?

It was early on 8 October, the day after Hamas struck, that Hannah Katsman found out her son, Hayim, had been killed at his home in Kibbutz Holit, one of the Gaza border communities attacked that day. The 32-year-old was a peace activist, atheist and academic. He had completed a PhD thesis on Religious Zionism, a movement he grew up in and had subsequently left. Speaking to me from her Jerusalem flat, plain white walls behind her, Hannah’s speech seemed slowed by grief.

Hannah is a Religious Zionist, a movement of Orthodox Jews which believes that God promised the land of Israel to the ancient Israelites, and that the Jewish people have a duty to live on and defend that land. However, she doesn’t support the political direction of the movement, which has become increasingly right-wing. She moved from the US to Israel with her family in 1990, and says she was surprised then by some aspects of the movement. “One of the more shocking things to get used to was how much people talked about politics in the synagogue,” she said, “How politics was considered fair game and your political views were scrutinised.”

In the decades since, this rightward drift has only accelerated. Elana Sztokman, a feminist activist and author, left the movement because she is no longer religious, but also because she thinks it has completely lost its way. “Once they [Religious Zionists] had lots to say about education and welfare,” about building a better society, she says.

“Today it’s all about shtachim [territories] and Palestinians. It’s what’s taught in yeshivas. It’s what the rabbis say … That comes with a whole ideology that ignores the cries of actual human beings who also live in those areas, that has constructed a reality that is an apartheid reality.”

Religious-secular tensions

The current Gaza crisis has only highlighted how far to the right Religious Zionism has travelled. While prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu practices a conscious vagueness when it comes to any discussion of what happens after the Gaza war, finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir – Religious Zionists and two of the most powerful members in the coalition – have talked openly about Jewish resettlement.

On 28 January, at a conference in Jerusalem attended by settler groups – and reportedly 11 government ministers, including Ben-Gvir – hundreds of Religious Zionists danced, waved Israeli flags and sang “Am Yisrael Chai” (“The nation of Israel lives”), while calling for Jews to live in Gaza after the war. Ben-Gvir told attendees that the only way to avoid another 7 October was “to return home and control the land”, as well as to “encourage emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza.

Zionism was initially a secular nationalist project, but the very founding of Israel set in motion religious-secular tensions. In the summer of 1947, when all-out war between Arabs and Jews loomed, David Ben-Gurion, then leader of the executive of the Jewish Agency, which represented Jews in Palestine, reached an agreement with the religious Jewish population on how Israel, if founded, would incorporate Jewish law, assuaging the fears of Haredim about an overly secular state.

Socialist secular Jews led the Zionist movement when the state was founded the following year, and Labour Zionists dominated the country’s politics until the 1970s. But today, Israel’s Labour Party is a shadow of its former self. Many kibbutzim – the collectivist communities symbolic of the Jewish state’s early years, some of which were the targets of the attacks on 7 October – are now business parks or wedding venues.

Meanwhile, Israel’s changing demographics have made the country more divided. In 1948, when the state was founded, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community made up around 1 per cent of Israeli Jewry. Last year, the minority was 13.6 per cent of the total Israeli population of some 9.2 million, which includes 20 per cent non-Jews. The secular population has also grown. Polling by Pew Research, conducted in 2014-2015, found that roughly half of Jewish Israeli respondents identified as secular. That means that religious Jews, at least at that time, accounted for around 40 per cent of Israel’s population overall, around the same as secular Jews.

Despite this, Israel has been moving towards intolerance and away from the pluralism enshrined in the country’s Declaration of Independence. In 2018, for instance, Israel passed the Nation State Law, which defined the Jewish characteristics of the Israeli state with no consideration for equality or minority rights.

The law asserts that self-determination is an “exclusive right” of Jewish people in Israel, as well as declaring the “national value” of Jewish settlement (the law does not specify where that settlement could be). If interpreted as support for settlement in the West Bank, East Jerusalem or Gaza, this obviously affects a future Palestinian state, but it also affects Muslim and Christian Palestinians living in Israel, and the other Arabs, Druze, Circassians and Armenians who together make up the country’s 20 per cent non-Jewish minority. And while the pluralist, socialist underpinnings of the state have been largely undermined since Israel’s founding, many of the agreements made with the religious population remain unaltered.

One example is the observation of the Sabbath as the day of rest, guaranteed by Ben-Gurion. This means that public transport is practically non-existent from sunset on Fridays to sunset on Saturdays in Israel, causing significant difficulties for those who don’t observe the Sabbath. Ben-Gurion also promised that state-run kitchens would observe kashrut, or Jewish dietary laws, and that religious education institutions would retain autonomy, all of which remains in place today (kashrut is now also the default for hotels across the country).

The separation of school systems, meanwhile, means that ultra-Orthodox Jews, whose education is focused on religious study, remain isolated from the wider community. It is also one of the factors behind most Haredi Jews living in poverty, as many lack the skills and education required to join the modern workforce, adding to issues that might be caused by the need to live by strict religious codes. Increasing numbers of non-ultra-Orthodox Israelis resent that the growing community contributes less in taxes as a result of these factors.

Rights are also affected. There is still no civil marriage. Those wishing to intermarry across religious lines without converting, or even those simply wishing to marry outside of a religious institution, must leave the country to do so. Jews not deemed “Jewish enough” by Israel’s rabbinate are not able to marry in Israel, either. And divorce, which can only be granted by the husband in Orthodox Judaism, can prove impossible to secure, leaving women trapped in marriages that are unwanted or unsafe.

The ultra-Orthodox exemption

Today’s hot button issue, the Haredi exemption from conscription, was also agreed by Ben-Gurion. It was part of a deal with Haredi leaders made during the 1948 war that established the state, which Israelis call the War of Independence and Palestinians the Nakba, or “disaster”. The law was intended to allow ultra-Orthodox Jews to focus on religious study and has often caused resentment over the years.

Today, amid the war in Gaza, the issue has become a lightning rod for the country’s divisions. In January the liberal daily newspaper Haaretz ran an editorial calling for a paradigm shift following 7 October. Hamas’ attack changed everything, it said, but “only one paradigm did not change, despite the catastrophe: drafting the ultra-Orthodox … Even in calm times, the inequality in sharing the burden is troublesome, but in a prolonged war that is expected to continue throughout this year and possibly beyond, this constitutes a severe injustice toward those who serve.”

Netanyahu’s alliance with the most religious and right-wing parties on the Israeli political spectrum had already created tensions within parliament. Now the prime minister has the added challenge of keeping his emergency war cabinet united. This includes people like Benny Gantz, the former Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) chief-of-staff-turned-politician, who joined the national unity government after 7 October. Secular, and considered a centrist, Gantz is one of the key politicians who opposes the Haredi exemption. After new legislation was proposed to extend army service and reserve duty, while preserving the exemption, Gantz branded it “a serious moral failure” and threatened to resign.

Beit Shemesh is a hilly city halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It was first established in the 1950s as a home to Jewish immigrants from Morocco, Iraq and Iran, before the construction of shiny new neighbourhoods in the 1990s attracted a growing Haredi and Orthodox population. The city has long been the site of tensions over the segregation of men and women in public spaces. In one case that caught the nation’s attention, in 2011, an eight-year-old girl called Naama Margolese was spat on by ultra-Orthodox men on her walk to school, and insulted for dressing “immodestly”. This was one in a series of such incidents, making the city the subject of hot debate about the nation and the rights of its citizens.

Under the former ultra-Orthodox city mayor Moshe Abutbul, the municipality became a symbol of illiberal theocracy. In 2013, Abutbul declared Beit Shemesh “holy and pure” for its supposed lack of LGBTQ residents. In 2015, four women took the municipality to court for failing to remove signs posted around the city demanding that women dress “modestly” and warning them to stay off certain pavements and buildings. They were awarded damages. In 2017, when the city had still not acted to remove the signs, the Supreme Court ordered the municipality to do so. In August last year, the then mayor Aliza Bloch – the first woman to hold the position, and an Orthodox, rather than ultra-Orthodox, Jew – was effectively held hostage for two hours inside a school while ultra-Orthodox men rioted outside.

Beit Shemesh is not the only city that has become a flashpoint, exposing deep divisions in Israeli society. Just east of Tel Aviv, the centre of secular Israeli culture, is the Haredi city of Bnei Brak, another site of friction. While Tel Aviv’s pace – certainly before the current conflict – is one of casual hedonism, of flesh and heat and revealing clothes, in Bnei Brak the men wear black hats or kippas and the women dress modestly in wigs or head coverings concealing their hair, while life revolves around the rituals and rules of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. In August last year, amid a reported rise in bus drivers forcing women to sit at the back of buses, and away from men, or even telling women passengers to dress more modestly, hundreds came out to Bnei Brak to protest. Footage shows demonstrators waving Israeli flags while local residents look on, bemused.

These tensions simmer in the background, but the matter of the military draft is a distinctive issue, as it concerns the biggest and most painful sacrifice the average Israeli makes for the state. It also threatens to shatter the political alliance between Religious Zionists and the ultra-Orthodox. Joining Netanyahu in his December 2022 coalition, politicians from both communities and movements cemented their political marriage of convenience, but since 7 October it is showing strain.

After all, there are major gaps between the Religious Zionist and ultra-Orthodox parties. Ultra-Orthodox Jews are generally non-Zionist, while some of the more extreme sects are explicitly anti-Zionist. The Neturei Karta, for instance, some of whom live in Israel, see the country’s very existence as an abomination. And while the ultra-Orthodox have lived as a minority throughout Israel’s history, using their political leverage to look after themselves, the Religious Zionist parties want to shape the country’s future.

So far, politicians like Smotrich, the finance minister and leader of the Religious Zionism party, have refrained from outright criticism of their Haredi partners in government over the conscription issue. On 11 March, Smotrich urged them to “find a solution” to the impasse. Their voting public, however, many of whom are serving in Gaza, looks askance at the alliance. At the time of writing, more than 600 Israeli soldiers have been killed, and thousands injured, since the attack on 7 October. On that day alone, Hamas killed nearly 1,200 and took more than 200 soldiers and civilians hostage. As the fighting continues, tensions will grow.

But while the conflict has ramped up some debates, it has – at least temporarily – shut down others. Israel was in political turmoil before the 7 October attacks, with mass protests against Netanyahu. On trial for criminal charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, the prime minister would seemingly partner with anyone in his attempt to stay out of prison. In December 2022, he formed the most religious and right-wing government in the country’s history. It not only included Israel’s two ultra-Orthodox parties, Shas (Sephardi) and United Torah Judaism (Ashkenazi), longtime political partners to his right-wing Likud, but also Religious Zionism, a coalition of parties that includes those with Jewish supremacist, anti-Arab and anti-LGBTQ views.

Ben-Gvir, the brash and increasingly popular leader of Jewish Power, one of the parties on the Religious Zionism slate, has convictions for incitement to racism and support of a terror organisation, the now outlawed Jewish supremacist party Kach, which he joined as a teenager. “Netanyahu is back,” splashed the UK’s Jewish News at the time, “but now it’s the iron fist of Israel’s far-right empowering him. It confirms our worst fears.”

Throughout 2023, this coalition pursued policies that pushed Israel to breaking point. Chief among them was a judicial overhaul, dubbed a “coup” by opponents. In January 2023, Justice Minister Yariv Lavin, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud, announced a programme of reforms that critics claimed would weaken the mechanisms of Israeli democracy, targeting the power of the judiciary. Weekly protests attracting hundreds of thousands of Israelis occurred for much of the year, alongside major strikes.

The judicial reforms pitted the most conservative elements of Israeli society against liberal ones, and in a crude reading, religious against secular Israelis. While the reforms were not in themselves religious, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich were seen as driving them. Elana Sztokman agrees with this analysis, describing the rallies against the reform as “very secular dominated” and the protest as “rooted in the religious-secular divide”.

Both the ultra-Orthodox parties and the Religious Zionism party supported the judicial reforms because it helped them advance their agendas. Indeed, with their power in Netanyahu’s coalition, the ultra-Orthodox and Religious Zionism parties secured unprecedented allocations of billions of shekels for their sector in the country’s budget, passed last May, much to the chagrin of the rest of the country.

But the 7 October changed everything, sending the country into shock and grief. Right before Hamas’s attack, the anti-government protests had translated into momentum for elections, with possible challengers to Netanyahu emerging from the Israeli centre. One week before “Black Saturday”, as Israelis refer to it, half a million people were out on the streets. Now, the horror of the massacre and ongoing war have pushed the Israeli public to the right, and Netanyahu has helped himself to religious rhetoric to garner support for the army’s operations in Gaza.

In the meantime, Israel’s religious Jewish political parties have gained in strength. In municipal elections in February, ultra-Orthodox and Religious Zionist parties took control of the city council of Jerusalem, the tense capital of the country. In the meantime, apart from anger over the issue of conscription, there is little wider debate. “We have no way to fight this,” Sztokman told me. “The war has shut down public discourse.”

Point of no return?

Amid the horrors of the war, there is some cause for hope. On 28 February, one month after hundreds gathered in Jerusalem calling for Jews to resettle Gaza, a very different conference took place in the capital. This was the second annual gathering of Smol Emuni, or “the faithful left”. Under the shadow of conflict, the event attracted 900 religious, liberal Jews looking for an alternative to the domination of the religious right.

Hannah Katsman was among them, taking part in a panel on the victims of 7 October. She spoke about her son, Hayim. That evening the war was in its fifth month. The death toll of Palestinians and Israeli soldiers continued to pile up in Gaza, the former well beyond 20,000. (Palestinian deaths have now climbed to over 34,000.) Meanwhile, 101 hostages were believed to still be alive in the Strip. I asked Katsman whether attendees seemed energised, if there was a sense it could be fruitful in building a path to bridge divides. “It was a positive feeling, but it was subdued,” she said. Lots of young people took part, but there was also “anger about the hostages”.

At the time of writing, an Israeli ground operation in Rafah, southern Gaza, remains a sword of Damocles over the region. With Israeli casualties piling up, and “total victory over Hamas” looking ever elusive, anger over the Haredi exemption from army service is only increasing. At the same time, fury over the hostages still trapped in Gaza many months after Hamas’s attack has reignited anti-government protests. In the last weekend of March, the largest such protests since Black Saturday took place, with a tent encampment set up outside the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.

Since 7 October, it looks increasingly like Israel is at a point of no return. Amid the war and violence and accusations of genocide, the relationship with the Palestinians has reached its nadir. Unprecedented escalation with Iran has the region on high alert. From within, meanwhile, Israel is tearing itself apart. Is there room for hope that religious and secular Israelis can find a way beyond these decades-long tensions? And can Israel resolve its central paradox, and be a truly equal home to all its communities, non-Jews and Jews alike?

Underneath it all, Israel has a pluralist ethos, according to Yair Ettinger, an analyst for Israel’s Kan News and author of Frayed: The Disputes Unravelling Religious Zionists. “This ethos does exist,” he says but “the war has to change this for everyone. There isn’t another way.”

A pluralist ethos must be more than theory, or decades-old intention. If the modern Israeli state can’t find a way to uphold rights and equality for all citizens – Palestinians and Jews, religious and secular – it cannot survive, at least not as a democracy. These internal problems are interwoven with the decades-long occupation. But even on its own terms – even if territory wasn’t as disputed as it still is today, even if the conflict did not exist – the state of Israel is so fragile it could break.

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