If demographic change spells a more progressive future for America, it spells a much more culturally conservative future for Israel. The impact is already being felt strongly enough there that even some orthodox women are joining a feminist movement to combat it. Believe it or not, a lot of their struggle involves preventing segregated busing. The Haredim (ultra-orthodox) don’t want to have to ride the bus with “immodest” women. They don’t even want “immodest” women to walk or jog in their neighborhoods, and they have signs to prove it. When Israel began, the Haredim might have made up 1% of their society. That is no longer the case.
Already, many fear that efforts like Nili Philipp’s to stop ultra-Orthodox encroachment are doomed, simply because Haredim, nearly all of whom have more than five children and some of whom procreate in the double digits, are reproducing rapidly. The Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics projects that, at current growth rates, Israel could well be 40 percent Haredi by 2059. The activists worry, justifiably, that as the Haredi population continues to expand, so will its political influence.
The demographics already reached one tipping point. Originally, when the Haredim population was tiny, the secular socialist state granted them an exemption from military service so that they could devote themselves to religious study. But the past election created a coalition opposed to extending the military exemption. Too many people were exempt. Yet, it probably won’t be too long before the Haredim are strong enough to restore the old way of doing things.
The country is changing profoundly.
As a Jew it’s perplexing to me that the more I learn about Israel, the less I understand the place.
I hear you.
I feel like as soon as I learn about it, it changes.
True. It’s good to see the ultra-orthodox are at least (at last) expected to serve in the military. For so many years it seemed like the very people demanding military protection for settlements were also refusing to do the heavy lifting, though it may be somewhat more complex because there’s more than one flavor of orthodox, each with its own interests.
I am as well and feel similarly.
Interestingly enough, there is a Haredi community in the county where I work. It is having a similar increasingly large impact on local politics and allocation of resources.
Where is it that you work?
Orange county, NY, home of Orange County Choppers and West Point amongst other things.
It is amusing to me that when the pink washers come out in full force to misdirect Israel’s crimes by showing how tolerant of gays they are, and how terrible Muslims are for women, that no one mentions the orthodox community taking over and establishing just as gross rules as in Saudi Arabia. I’m glad that a major publication is taking notice, as I rarely see it in MSM sources.
TNR is a major publication?
I’d say so. Obviously not to the level of The Nation or National Review. But 50,000 isn’t anything to sneeze at for a partisan magazine.
Seems like fundamentalist Judaism, Christianity and Islam ALL have a whole lotta problems with the (modern) ladies! They don’t know their place! And the irresistible Temptation! And Seduction! The ungodly Immodesty! It’s universal! Sort of dark comedy that all these religious “ultras” apparently are blind to their massive similarities and common desires to repress and oppress.
This general rise in religious fundamentalism doesn’t bode well for anyone, particularly, but women appear to be the universal targets of rightwing clerical repression, whether its label is “conservative”, ultra-orthodox or fundamentalist. Whatever, it’s all horrible and mindless reaction.
Anyway, good luck, Israeli moderns. This is a problem you created for yourselves.
Israeli moderns have created many problems for themselves, but I’m having a hard time seeing how this is one of them. The Haredim are, it hardly needs emphasizing, extremely dedicated to their own conception of Eretz Yisroel, and always have been.
Exactly, euzious. This kind of regressive, repressive religiosity is not peculiar to any one religion, but exists and is growing frighteningly, at least in the three Abrahamic ones.
One of these decades, the much-reviled one-state solution may start looking surprisingly attractive to a lot of secular Israelis.
🙂 <
=evil grinNot much different from trends in US evangelicalism. When you have bigotry, misogyny, and homophobia rooted in a certain reading of historical texts deemed “holy”, it tends to seek power to discriminate and harass and punish those who do not conform. And to adopt a policy of population increase in order to gain political power.
These folks are in fact no different in mindset from the KKK.
Their exemption from military service will make them attractive to draft dodgers. And eventually that will undermine the apartheid state.
However, if the movement to end the military exemption succeeds, either the armed forces experience will moderate the Haredi or the Haredi will co-opt the culture of the armed forces. The latter would likely result in women no longer serving in the armed forces.
If lightning strikes and ultra-conservative muslims ever find themselves in political alliance with the Haredi on commmon social-cultural issues, the situation could become very interesting. Likely, doctrinal differences make that impossible, which makes violent conflict likely.
Stability in the region is looking much less likely.
There is not a lot of difference between the hard-right Jews and the hard-right muslims. Both have the same attitudes toward women.
And not only towards women, but in general.
link
.
These demeaning and derogatory terms are part of fascist vocabulary and used extensively by Nazis te exterminate “inferior” persons transported to the death camps. I would not use comparisons to the Nazi era for death camps, razzia’s and propaganda in today’s news. Neither the Shoa or Holocaust should used in today’s debate, it should refer to the Nazi era only. PM Netanyahu has been accused to use the threat of a holocaust to install fear for the Islamic regime of Iran and the Ayatollahs with the nuclear bomb. Netanyahu is establishing himself as a student of Goebbels for propaganda of fear. Shameless.
From your link:
“Brig. Gen. Gadi Agmon, from the Israeli military’s human resources branch, told a parliamentary committee here last week that the well-orchestrated campaign was no less vicious in style than that of Der Stürmer, the Nazi-era propaganda organ notorious for its anti-Semitic caricatures. The remark was widely reported in the secular news media and on Haredi Web sites.
Haredi soldiers have been verbally abused, spit on and humiliated while walking through their neighborhoods all over Israel. Some have been attacked with stones, or their car tires have been slashed. The children of others have been rejected by local educational institutions, and there are growing fears that enlisting could harm the marriage prospects of their siblings.”
From an article in the Jerusalem Post:
Underlying Torat Hamelech is a philosophy that demeans the value of the non-Jew as a human being. Yes, there are sources in the Torah that support this approach, but they are all referring to idol worshipers. This clearly does not apply to monotheists such as Christians and Muslims.
Sick, sick, sick.
The comics-style campaign against Haredi soldiers has been primarily aimed at children to counter what opponents of the draft said was the military’s attempt to legitimize the young men by sending them into ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods in uniform.
As part of the outreach to children, the anonymous organizers of the “Hardakim” campaign announced a children’s poster competition this summer via a Gmail account, soliciting entries showing how best to shun the soldiers.
It seems to me that the Haredi commitment to military exemption, combined with their growing share of the Israeli population, will eventually lead to Israel having no armed forces.
That could be the silver lining to this cloud.
There is a fact about Israel that many are not aware of. I think that it is important.
In 1989, the wall came down, the Soviet Union ended, and the Jews got out of Russia. There was a huge exodus. Many of them went to Israel. Many of these “jews” ate pork, were secular, and had very different attitudes than others. For one, they had lived the socialist dream, and they were not interested in socialism of any sort. The Russian expats are ROUTINELY anti-socialist, to the point of being the hardest of hard right anti-socialists. Ayn Rand, anyone?
In 1995, I was working with a psychiatrist to score mental health providers from many countries on assessment. We translated the assessment device into a number languages, French for the French, German for the Germans, Russian for the Israelis. Nothing in Hebrew, just Russian.
Actually, the original Zionists were also mainly secular, frequently atheist. On the other hand, unlike the Russians who flooded into Israel after 1989, they were, of course, mostly “leftists”.
It is also a little-known fact that quite a large number of the Russians who became Israeli citizens after 1989 were/are not Jews at all, though for the most part they were married or otherwise related to Jews. I was in frequent contact for several years with such a young man, and his views were very much of the extreme Zionist sort. We had quite a few very, very lively arguments!
Read a while back that the Amish population increasing rapidly for the same reason here in the States:
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/08/exploding-amish-population-bubble/2795/
Fundamentalist sects which live a strict, separated lifestyle seem to have the ability to grow there numbers as it is hard for young people to leave and strike out on their own in mainstream society. Israel’s problem is that it’s a very small country, and the alternatives for secular people (Germany, USA, etc) are pretty tempting when things get rough. While 500,000 Amish in the US might cause some trouble in some rural areas, most of us won’t have to deal with it (especially as many don’t actually vote). But the heredi numbers are striking.
At the very least they should modernize their educational system over there, require school for all through age 16 (and make high school free – last I checked it still wasn’t), and require the same core curriculum in public and private schools.
If they don’t do something, they will cleave off into many different countries. I suspect that Palestinians vs Israelis might look like child’s play compared to an Israeli civil war.
“I suspect that Palestinians vs Israelis might look like child’s play compared to an Israeli civil war.
The greatest threat to Israel’s existence is, always has been, and always will be internal, not external.
.
That’s why PM Netanyahu has added his demand the Arab states and the Palestinians should recognize Israel as a Jewish state. President Truman had crossed out “Jewish” by establishing the State of Israel in 1948.
To make aliyah, interested “Jews” will be required to take a genetics test to establish their Jewishness. Where in history have we witnessed a similar tendency. May we call it a return to fascism?
Israel shares our democratic values except for closing down shops and roads on the sabbath, apartheid in the occupied territories, repression of women, sexual harassment and segregated schools and bussing.
My previous diaries:
Now we are full circle with the Mormon “race”, Republicans [Wasp] and the Evangelicals in the USA.
Don’t forget the de facto and de jure discrimination against non-Jewish (specifically Palestinian) and therefore not-quite-equal citizens of this self-proclaimed “only democracy in the Middle East”.
It’s not hard to see this as an unintended consequence of decreeing a mono-ethnic state. If, for instance, Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank had at some point merged into a single nation with equal rights for all (I know, crazy talk), then moderate and progressive Jews and Arabs could work together to keep the zealots at bay. Oh well!