Is Israel more torn, crumbling, and at war with itself than ever? I suggest we take a look at what the city squares and newspapers looked like immediately after the government changeover in 1977 or in the 1981 election, or during the Oslo negotiations, or just ahead of the disengagement.
No, Israel is not more split than ever. The opposite. It is experiencing expedited historic processes of opening up, democratization, and pluralism, and these are creating a reaction among groups that feel threatened by the impressive social and political change.
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New groups are joining the center, and competing as equals for their legitimate place in the workforce, in higher education, in media power centers, in politics, and in the security establishment and legal system. "The survivors of '77," the people who experienced the political upheaval as a trauma, and the generation that came after them, are consistently losing their social advantages and being forced to compete. That competition creates social tension, healthy tension, for resources and places of influence.
That tension, which the old elite sees as an existential threat, is experienced by other groups as an event of participation. Groups that thus far were alienated – Mizrahi Jews, the periphery, Arabs, Haredim, even settlers – are flooding into the mainstream, the heart of Israeli-dom, and want to take part. This wonderful revolution, which in the last 10 years has led to new heights, is being called "rifts" and "schisms." They assume that the contempt and aversion they feel at the sight of more groups making progress are feelings that we all share. They are used to thinking that their experience defines the national mood. When all the polls show that Israelis are happy and proud of their country, they experience frustration and shame. Even experiences abroad – which used to be the ultimate badge of privilege and the ability to escape the 'Israeli stickiness' they hate – have been taken from them. They don't like encountering Israelis abroad, anyway, are look for destinations where the masses won't visit on charter flights, and hate Ben-Gurion Airport in the summer because all of a sudden, it belongs to everyone. Now they have to go to Eilat, like everyone else.
It's simple: They have no interest in social solidarity if they cannot dictate its terms and conditions. They transfer their dissatisfaction with a changing Israel into myths of "strife," and try to force that to become the narrative of the current generation.
But the story about "schisms," – for which Prime Minister Netanyahu is, of course, at fault – is becoming entrenched because the elites are still dominant in the system that shapes public opinion[. They build up "the desperation," raw material that exists in every society, even the most successful, and turn it into the dominant element of the collective atmosphere. Pay attention – even now, when the economic and public health crises threaten society's normal function – they are busy fanning the flames of a mostly conceptual crisis, one that cannot be proven. That is the crisis of "strife" and "desperation."
Crises of that type are nearly always biased and instrumental: we need to look at who is pushing them obsessively, and for what purpose. The current crisis had one clear "solution" – a change of government. Only then, as Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy wrote, "will feeling of relief, joy, and satisfaction wash over the Left and the legal system and the rest of the systems under threat. A new day will dawn for Israel." He's right, it's an illusion, because even if our greatest writers call Netanyahu a "steamroller" and pray for quiet the day after, the crisis itself is still a false one.
What we are witnessing is the story of an embittered and defeated rank of society that is experiencing a historic social process of liberation and the removal of obstacles as a threat to its relative advantage, and is basically waging a battle against the new Israeli solidarity that is blossoming before its very eyes. With its announcements about leaving Israel ("Our children have already gone to Berlin"), its contrarianism ("You won't get to our Tel Aviv"); and declarations that until the historic aberration of 1977 is not rectified, "the flag will continue to be ashamed of who is flying it"), they have reached a new low. It is threatening to give up its "Israeli-hood" from the paternalistic standpoint that "they can't get along without us." Well, we'd rather not, but it has been proven that we can indeed.
Enough with infantile talk about "an Israel we will need to rehabilitate" and "the ruins Netanyahu is leaving us." Get over it, accept reality. A golden decade for the Haredim, the settlers, the Arabs, and the Mizrahi middle class is not "ruins." Don't wave unemployment figures, because the harm caused by the pandemic won't change the new social order. Israeli society isn't "split," although you might have decided to split off from it. But that's another story.
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