The New Middle East (33 page)

I asked Hadassa how Na’ama was getting on. ‘She’s fine now,’ she said,

though she gets nervous when we go out somewhere. She asks me if she is dressed OK. I took her to the dentist’s one day and there was a sign that said you should be dressed modestly and she got very nervous and I said: ‘Don’t worry, you are fine.’ She’s still scared if she sees an ultra-Orthodox because she doesn’t know if they will spit at her or not, or yell at her, because they look the same most of them, so although a lot of them are very good people, she can’t differentiate.

Many ultra-Orthodox people would not condone spitting at eight-year-olds. They would argue that the men in Beit Shemesh did not represent their broader community. But incidents like this have added to the social tensions that had already been inflamed by economic strife. Just like anywhere else in the world, when the economy turns downwards hard-working people start looking around for someone to take blame for their lot. So even the ultra-Orthodox who just want to get on with their lives as law-abiding people end up being demonised in Israeli society in the way benefit cheats and illegal immigrants are in the UK or the US. Most Israelis simply think Israel cannot afford to let the Haredim continue with the same lifestyle any more.

This came to a head while the Middle East’s attention was on the revolutions in the Arab world. That summer of 2011 saw a revolt in Israel too, and this one was also led by the middle classes. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest at the downturn in the quality of their lives. They were drawn from the normally quiet, law-abiding, hard-working majority who did their national service, paid their taxes but still couldn’t make ends meet. The cost of housing became the catalyst for much of the anger, and tents were put up in city centres to illustrate their inability to afford a decent home. These people blamed the government but they also blamed those they thought were getting a free ride at their expense, the ultra-Orthodox. Perhaps the most enduring manifestation of the protest movement was the creation, by the former television journalist Yair Lapid, of the centrist party ‘Yesh Atid’ in 2012 and its surge of support in the following year’s polls. Dealing with the entitlements of the ultra-Orthodox was a key plank of his campaign, because it was what mattered most to the previously silent mainstream of Israeli society.

‘The majority of Israelis are not like the ultra-Orthodox, they are people like me, the Jews who go to work, pay our taxes, serve in the army and then in the reserves and go to college so we can get a good job,’ said Nimrod Dotan. He is in his early thirties and works for an organisation in Tel Aviv that searches for gifted children living in the country’s poorer communities and provides them with a tailored education to develop their abilities. We arranged to meet in a coffee shop in central Tel Aviv after he’d finished a meeting at the Internet giant Google. This is a man who spends his life looking for the potential in others, so the waste of human capital he sees in the Haredi community infuriates him. He joined Lapid’s party as soon as it was launched because he thinks the country’s demographics mean time is running out before things will be broken beyond repair. ‘The future of Israel is going to be decided in the next five to ten years,’ he told me:

and what worries me is that if we don’t solve the problem, society is going to be split between the ultra-Orthodox and us Zionists, and it’s going to descend into violence because we can’t live like this. I have friends who have foreign passports who are keeping them so they can go and live abroad because in ten years, who is going to pay the taxes? If the Haredi won’t serve in the army they lose their ticket into society, if they won’t learn maths and English then they can’t work, so where is the money going to come from? And look around us, with everything going on in Lebanon and Syria and Egypt and everything unstable. Who is going to serve in our army? We have been avoiding this issue for too long. This is an important moment for Israel and we have to deal with it now.

The ultra-Orthodox make up only 10 per cent of the population, but that number will have more than doubled by the late 2030s.
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‘Jerusalem today is Israel tomorrow,’ a UN diplomat told me, and he said the demographics in Jerusalem were already ‘incredible’, with just a small percentage of children there being educated in secular state schools. The social and physical divide within the society and the country was reflected by the voting patterns in its two most important cities: increasingly conservative Jerusalem and increasingly cosmopolitan Tel Aviv.

In Jerusalem the Haredi Ashkenazi United Torah Judaism led in the polls. In Tel Aviv it was the polar opposition, the very secular Yair Lapid’s party, that swept the board, having done poorly in Jerusalem. The Haredi parties barely registered in Tel Aviv. But if the diplomat is right and Jerusalem points the way, then it is the men in beards, not the clean-cut TV personality, who will be the future faces of Israeli politics.

The demographics show an explosion in the ultra-Orthodox population because of the size of their families. Their families tend to be large because the Torah commands them to ‘be fruitful and multiply’,
²⁵
and because the use of contraceptives is not allowed for men, who are forbidden to indulge in sexual acts unless it is to procreate. The increase in birth rate was also encouraged by the state, which for a while made it financially rewarding for the Haredim to have many children. In the 1990s, when they began to gain greater political influence in the Knesset, child allowances went up and so did their fertility rates. When these benefits were cut in the early 2000s, as part of the government’s economic recovery programme, the numbers went down again.
²⁶
Twenty-seven per cent of the first-grade (six-year-old) students in Israel today are ultra-Orthodox Jews, but as a group they are among the poorest in society.
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The population of Israel as a whole is expanding by 1.8 per cent a year. The Haredim are growing at 5 per cent.
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Most people send their children to school to prepare them for life in the modern world. The education given to the children in the religious schools run by the Haredim deliberately doesn’t do that, because their communities don’t want their children to be able to operate in the modern world. At least that is the shorthand version, but things are actually more complex.

Family is at the core of the Haredim’s religious beliefs. That means that putting bread on the table is as important as scripture. The reality is the Haredim are not preparing their
sons
for life in the modern world. The men don’t work, so they can’t support their families, and so that burden falls largely on to the state or on their community’s charity. And the state no longer pays anywhere near enough. So by default, providing for the family, now that families have grown so large, has fallen to women. They
do
need to be prepared for, not protected from, life in the modern world so that they can provide for their families. So Haredi girls, who are taught separately from boys, get a broader education. The Haredi community is changing, but it is changing quietly. The Haredi men make all the noise about rejecting modernity while the women literally get on with the job. Throughout history empowering and educating women fundamentally changes societies. There is no reason to think it won’t happen here too. It has already begun in the Arab communities in Israel, where rising education levels in women have produced a slow drift downwards in birth rates.

Nilli Davidovitz runs ‘Realcommerce’, a very successful software company in the heart of very modern and very secular Tel Aviv. She has made it successful by tapping into one of Israel’s hidden pools of talent: Haredi women. Nilli looks nothing like most of the women who work for her. She was in her late forties, and when we met at a conference she was wearing a smart business suit, aquamarine eyeliner and had long wavy auburn hair. We shook hands and looked for a table among the delegates so she could tell me about her attempt to pull down the barriers that have built up between religious and secular Jews in Israel. I asked her what she got out of employing Haredi women, because it means having to create segregated work areas and separate canteens, as well as abiding by their rigid working hours so that they can also look after their children. The women will only move out of the segregated areas of their offices in pairs, and the same system has to operate for business trips or meeting clients.

They are very reliable and they are very loyal. Having work is important to them but they are not looking for a career, so they don’t jump from job to job. They are very honest. They will not talk during work, they don’t go off smoking, they don’t take breaks. They ask you for permission to make a private phone call and they work the extra time without pay to make up for the duration of the call. Eight hours of work means eight hours of work. And they believe they are stealing if they do not give you the time that you have paid them for, and stealing is a sin.

I asked her if she thought the skills and experience these women were getting would impact on the communities they return home to each day.

‘It is changing them,’ she said:

It’s rippling through their societies. These are women who when they were in school, they would address their women teachers using the Hebrew third person to show respect. Now when they are dealing with clients they are talking to a non-religious man as an equal. It’s a very big change and they are not used to it. We are giving them a lot of self-confidence, and that is leading to them becoming more equal at home too. And now more girls are learning what they should do at school so they can get good jobs, not just all be kindergarten teachers like their mothers. They get mathematics, English, geography, biology, whatever everybody else in the country learns. Whereas the boys, after fourteen they only get Jewish studies, and before that the level of maths and English teaching for the boys is very, very low.

When you live within secular communities in Israel you absorb the prejudices of the people around you. You don’t realise it until the moment it slaps you in the face. My slap was delivered by the words: ‘It’s not my hair.’

Nilli’s company only employs women, so I asked her how the non-religious women in her company had reacted.

‘After a year we were accepted, they realised not all religious people are the same, they are not all called Sarah or Rivka, but they have faces and names and personalities. They understood about our boundaries, that you don’t ask a religious woman about her personal life. You can talk about her work, but not why she looks tired or sad.’

At which point I blurted out: ‘Nilli, are you Haredi?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

Without thinking I said: ‘But you don’t dress like a Haredi woman, you don’t cover your hair.’

She smiled at me and said: ‘Yes I do. It’s not my hair. Why do my clothes not look like someone who is Haredi?’

Suddenly it was obvious. Nilli was a very successful businesswoman. She could afford a wig that did not look like a wig. She could afford clothes that met the standards of her community’s sense of modesty but that weren’t black and shapeless and didn’t fit the stereotype. I apologised for shaking her hand.

‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I lived for some time in a Haredi community in New York and we had a very wise rabbi and he said: “If a man offers you his hand and he means no disrespect then you don’t need to insult him by refusing it.” ’

I didn’t make the same mistake with Libi Affen. She too runs a major software company. ‘One of my clients he holds his hand out to me every time and says: “I’m still hoping one day you’re going to take it” and I say to him: “I’m still hoping one day you’re going to stop sticking out your hand,” ’ she said with a laugh. She believes her community can change, but it requires change from the secular Jews too. She thinks Israelis dealing with the world outside will also help them get along with their next-door neighbours. She told me:

Globalisation is making a big difference, because we are working with the Chinese and Indians and Arabs. And people are learning that you have to understand different cultures. Understanding the Haredi world is no different from understanding the Indians or the Chinese. You don’t want to change the Chinese, you just want to understand their culture and work with them. And that’s how you have to work with the Haredi.

Libi is a little more socially conservative than Nilli. Her husband is a prominent and highly respected rabbi. Libi feels very strongly that the main reason it is important for Haredi women to be successful in work is so that as many of their menfolk as possible can focus on their studies of the Torah rather than join the workforce.

The Haredi men are seen as spongers by the secular Jews because they spend their days exclusively devoted to this study. Their education is subsidised by the state. That subsidy is lost if they also work. The ultra-Orthodox believe that understanding and interpreting Jewish law to keep it alive and relevant makes a huge contribution to the Jewish way of life and the Jewish people. They argue that it is God who will keep the Jews safe from harm, and he’ll only do that if they merit his protection.