The New Middle East (32 page)

The teachings of individual rabbis, who interpret and apply religious law in society, can be extremely influential, and their personal piety and way of living is often a great influence on their followers. They are at the heart of the long, and for those subjected to them tortuous, debates about who is or is not a Jew. And that is important, because all Jews anywhere in the world have the right to make ‘aliyah’, literally ‘ascent’ – to return to the Land of Israel. It is one of the basic tenets of Zionism. So someone has to decide what constitutes being a Jew.

The Haredim can be divided between those who refuse to recognise the state of Israel and those who have decided to work within it to claim as much of the public space for the religiously observant as they can. The latter, who have entered politics, are largely uninterested in issues of foreign policy for example, but they will agree or oppose policy depending on what they can get in return to further their aims.

There are two main political parties drawn from the Haredi community. The bigger is Shas, which was originally drawn from the Sephardi Haredi community but now gets much of its support from Mizrahi Jews. In 2010 it became the first ultra-Orthodox party to join the World Zionist Organization.
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It has only been around for twenty years, but it has become incredibly influential in political life because it often acts as a kingmaker when it comes to building Israel’s unwieldy coalition governments. Many of its supporters now are Orthodox Jews, and so too at present is the party leadership.

The other, smaller, Haredi political party is United Torah Judaism, or UTJ, which draws its support from Ashkenazi Jews. They end up with fewer seats in the Knesset, largely because much more of their community chooses not to vote and partly because the UTJ is itself an often unstable coalition prone to infighting. However they often combined forces with Shas within Israeli coalition governments to push through their joint religious agenda.

In the 2013 Israeli elections, of the 120 seats up for grabs, Shas got eleven and the UTJ got seven seats. But this time it wasn’t enough. ‘Coalition math: Settlers in, ultra-Orthodox Jews out’ trumpeted the liberal
Ha’aretz
newspaper.
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The ultra-Orthodox had joined almost every Likud coalition government since it first came to power in 1977.
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During that time they had managed to antagonise large sections of Israeli society all of whom
were
represented in the new government. The Haredi community were not very hopeful about their prospects under the new coalition. One of its newspapers summed up the mood with the front-page headline ‘Government of Evil’.
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During Binyamin Netanyahu’s previous governing coalition, the Shas Party was given control of the Ministry of the Interior. The ministry was then accused of allowing the Chief Rabbinate to decide who was a Jew, rather than the government’s Jewish Agency, which is actually responsible for the immigration and absorption of Jews. But even if you were lucky enough to get in, despite the interior minister, and then lucky enough to fall in love, when you wanted to get married you might not be able to find a rabbi who would marry you, because they might not consider you a Jew. And there was no second option, because there is no civil marriage in Israel, in accordance with the ‘Status Quo Agreement’.

The Halakha, or religious law, as interpreted by Orthodox Judaism says that to be a Jew by birth the mother at least must be Jewish. Reform Judaism, which is found mainly in Jewish communities outside Israel, says you can be Jewish by birth if either parent is Jewish. It sees the Halakha as a set of guidelines rather than as rules. Israel’s ‘Law of Return’, which gives Jews anywhere in the world the right to citizenship in the country, was modified in 1970 to enable people with a Jewish grandparent to make aliyah even if they themselves are not Jewish according to the Halakha. This led to the very rare but bizarre and deeply troubling situation for the country, of an Israeli man being arrested in 2011 for leading a neo-Nazi gang that assaulted foreign workers, drug addicts and religious Jews. These Israeli citizens filmed themselves giving a Nazi salute.
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But this case was an anomaly. The biggest clash between what the state accepted as Jewish and what Israel’s religious establishment accepted as Jewish came when the Soviet Union began to collapse and Jews there finally got a chance to escape their long history of persecution. Their problem stemmed from the fact that they often had to hide their faith to avoid abuse by the communist state. They found when they immigrated with the blessing of the state of Israel that they couldn’t get the blessing of their local rabbi. So though they lived as Jews and considered themselves Jews they were not Jews according to religious law. To get married they were first forced to go through a full, very long Jewish conversion process as if they were not Jewish at all.

The issue became the focus of a controversial party-political TV advertisement in the 2013 election campaign by Shas which mocked the piety of the Russian-speaking Jewish community and the party they largely vote for, Yisrael Beiteinu. It featured a tall beautiful blonde bride with a crudely exaggerated Russia accent standing next to her rather dumpy-looking kippa-wearing groom. They were standing under the chuppah, the wedding canopy. Between them was a fax machine.

‘Marina, what’s the fax for?’ says the groom.

‘Beiteinu sent it, it’s a wedding present,’ she replies.

‘How nice. But what the hell, why a fax?’

‘To receive permission.’

‘Permission for what?’ he asks, looking confused.

‘From 1-800-convert.’

‘1-800-convert?’

‘Da,’ she replies. ‘You call 1-800-convert and receive permission.’

‘Wait,’ he says in shock. ‘You aren’t Jewish?’

At that moment the fax whirrs into life and a certificate of conversion spews out.

‘I am now!’ she says, brandishing the document, and her family break into celebration as the groom looks on in disgust. He pulls away as she tries to kiss him.

The Shas Party pulled the ad before the National Election Committee could get to them, but it served its purpose and got the party and its point wide coverage in the Israeli media.

This issue of where the authority of the state and religion begin and end is the crux of most of the tensions within Israeli society today. Should religious Jews only be able to expect the strict observance of the tenets of their faith in their homes, or should the secular only be able to ignore those religious requirements in the privacy of theirs? Key to the issue is where the writ of religious law runs and whose interpretation of religious law takes precedence. The question that plagues Israeli society is the same one now being debated in the new democracies of the Arab world: who owns the public space?

Every little girl gets a bit nervous during her first few days at a new school. There is the new teacher, new schoolmates and a new classroom. And for Na’ama Margolis there were also the dozen or so grown men who made her walk the gauntlet along her short journey to the school gate, spitting on her and shouting ‘Whore’. Na’ama was eight years old. She and her mother Hadassa belong to the Orthodox Jewish community. That means they are religiously observant Jews and therefore cover their arms and legs, and the women will wear a headscarf. But that wasn’t good enough for the men of the Beit Shemesh ultra-Orthodox community who made their way down the hill each morning and afternoon to stand outside the girls’ school to abuse the children and their mothers as they walked by.

‘It began on the second day of school. When I picked Na’ama up they were waiting outside,’ Hadassa Margolis told me.

They started to spit at us and they were yelling and cursing us shouting ‘Prostitutes’ and ‘Whores’, ‘Immodest’ and ‘Non-Jews get out!’ and spitting all the while. We managed to push past them and there were other men still yelling on the other side of the street. And I thought to myself there’s no way this is going to happen again tomorrow. The police will come and do something. This can’t happen, this can’t go on. But it continued, on and off, for four months.

The definition of ‘immodest’ is lacking humility or decency, being immoral, brazen, wanton or loose. It means to be overtly and deliberately sexually provocative. In most parts of the world, standing in the street and shouting at the top of your voice that you find an eight-year-old girl sexually provocative is enough to put you on a child sex offenders register. That did not happen to those men. In fact nothing at all happened to any of them. Every day for those four months Na’ama woke up wondering whether they were going to be at the bottom of the stairs that led from her apartment block to follow her and her classmates as they walked the few hundred metres to the school gate. Every day she wondered whether she was going to have to start her day wiping their spit off her face.

‘Every day Na’ama would be crying and screaming that she was scared, that she didn’t want to go to school. She had anxiety attacks and nightmares,’ said Hadassa. Then somebody used their mobile phone to film the men tormenting the children and uploaded it onto YouTube. Israel’s secular and orthodox community went nuts and the state woke up. ‘The police didn’t do a thing until it was seen on YouTube,’ Hadassa told me.

As the Haredi communities grow they spill over into areas previously inhabited by Orthodox and secular Jews. Once the ultra-Orthodox community expands into a new neighbourhood anywhere in the country it then insists that because it is now also present in this public space its religious sensitivities should be respected. Its men start putting up signs telling local women from all communities exactly how they are expected to dress. The ultra-Orthodox begin to barricade the roads at the beginning of the Sabbath as darkness falls on Friday to stop people driving their cars. Buses that travel through their areas at any times carrying advertisements showing even fully clothed females may be attacked and burned.
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In other buses women, whether they are ultra-Orthodox or not, are yelled at and abused if they do not segregate themselves from the men and travel in the back of the bus. Stones are thrown at women who ride bicycles in Haredi-populated areas.

At the heart of the controversy in Beit Shemesh was a turf war. The local Haredi community wanted the newly opened school for themselves. They believed the school had been put there to mark a boundary beyond which the ultra-Orthodox would not be allowed to expand.

Na’ama’s story got nationwide attention when it broke in December 2011. It focused the attention of the nation on the tensions in society as no other had for many years. It had such resonance with the wider population that Na’ama’s picture was even used by one of the political parties, without her parents’ permission, as part of its 2013 election campaign.

The family’s plight garnered huge support, though not from everyone. Hadassa told me:

I had a good friend, an ex-good friend, who called me up and who was just absolutely yelling at me hysterically that I caused such a huge desecration of God because it made the Jewish people look bad, for having internal fights. And I said I didn’t cause any desecration, these men did. They interpret the Torah in a perverted way that doesn’t exist. They make up their own rules and they are brainwashed from birth to believe this is the right way. I think that they’re crazy and the fact that the country accepts it is just mind-boggling. These men, I think they sit all day and think about ‘How can we not think about women’ and therefore they think about women all day and all night. That’s all they think about.

In response to the uproar by the rest of society against the abuse of the children, a small group of ultra-Orthodox protesters among a protest of several hundred others dressed themselves in a version of the striped prison uniforms and Star of David patches forced on Jews in the Nazi death camps. They were implying they were being persecuted in a similar fashion by the state of Israel. As it was meant to, it caused further outrage. The then Israeli Religious Affairs minister Yakov Margi, who was also director general of Shas, warned that the deepening tensions between ultra-Orthodox extremists and less religious Jews could ‘tear Israeli society apart’.
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When I drove through the ultra-Orthodox community of Beit Shemesh after the 2013 elections there were still signs hanging from their houses saying in Hebrew things like ‘We are Jews not Zionists. We will not take part in their sacrilegious election.’ The abuse of the children had stopped, but none of the men had been prosecuted by the police. One might wonder whether their wider community agreed with the absurd notion that a fully dressed eight-year-old could in any way be immodest. The answer to that question could be found in the Yellow Pages. Or rather it could be found in the listing catalogue that was being put through the letter boxes of the Beit Shemesh Haredi community the day I was there.

Israel was then a few weeks away from the Jewish festival of Purim. This marks the escape by the Jews from persecution in the ancient Persian empire. It is celebrated by dressing up in costumes, though no one knows exactly why. Everyone gets involved, including the Haredim, which is why the centre spread of the listing catalogue had costumes for hire. There were small boys in cowboy outfits and firemen’s uniform and spacesuits. There were small girls dressed as bees and Minnie Mouse and butterflies. The boys looked out of the pages smiling. For modesty reasons the faces of the girls, who were no older than five or six, had been blurred out. A few weeks earlier one conservative rabbi had issued modesty rules for girls from the age of three.
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