The Unmaking of Israel (22 page)

Those challenges for adults only highlight the absurdity of bringing up another, larger generation trained only for “the economy of the next world,” to use Menachem Friedman’s phrase. Twice in the last decade, the High Court of Justice has ruled that to uphold the State Education Law and the principle of equality, the government must set a core curriculum for high schools and cease funding
haredi
yeshivot that refuse to teach it. The second ruling was needed because the state ignored the first one. The latter ruling, however, came a few days too late. While the justices were preparing to deliver it in July 2008, the Knesset passed a preemptive law, allowing the Education Ministry to fund secondary schools serving “unique cultural groups”—explicitly including
haredi
schools that only teach religious subjects.

The script of this legal drama was an Israeli cliché: the Supreme Court asserted that democracy requires honoring basic rights. The ultra-Orthodox viewed the decision as an attack on Judaism, and used their power in the Knesset to overrule it. The small variation on the genre was using the liberal-sounding language of multiculturalism to protect funding of illiberal education.

Democracy, however, is not a synonym for unbound multiculturalism. An earlier democracy than Israel’s was founded on the philosophical and theological axiom “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” This is not a culturally neutral statement. It is a proclamation of a moral truth that sometimes takes precedence over cultural heritage.

In a democratic society, it is reasonable to protect parents’ rights to pass their values and their faith to their children. But that right must be balanced against the rights of the children themselves, who are people, not chattel, and against the rights of other citizens. If parents’ religious values include forcing teenage daughters into polygamous marriage, for instance, the state is obligated to intervene. Freedom of religion does not protect child abuse.

For an education system to deprive young people of the knowledge they will need to support themselves as adults, in order to deny them the choice of whether to leave or stay within a sectarian community, is a form of child abuse. For the state to tolerate this abuse is abdication of duty. For it to fund such education is unconscionable. By forcing those children to become wards of the public as adults, the government also violates the rights of the remaining citizens who will have to support them.

The problem with
haredi
schooling, however, is not just economic, and will not be solved only by adding job skills to the curriculum. In its current constrained form, almost devoid of the humanities as well as science, ultra-Orthodox education denies young people the chance to articulate and question opinions, to see issues from many sides, to look at the world through other people’s eyes, to understand human complexity. It evades exploring the mechanics and the moral basis of democracy. It fails to give young people the basic knowledge of science needed to understand what a doctor tells them or a debate over global warming. This, too, is abuse. Not only do children have to learn to think openly, they have a responsibility to do so, because the free consideration of ideas is essential to the functioning of a democracy. Other Israelis have the right to fellow citizens who can debate issues without fear and who can vote as individuals.

Being “exposed to the wider world” does not “naturally” lead to abandoning religion. A religious education and a liberal education can and should complement each other. The Talmud, the pinnacle of classic Jewish education, is essentially the transcript of centuries of debate. It can be taught, as American Jewish educator Joshua Gutoff asserts, to develop “moral imagination,” the ability to see the moral complexity of everyday life.

The state of Israel can respect the right of Orthodox parents to give their children a religious education. But by allowing religious schools to deny children a general education, it fails those children and puts its own future as a democracy at risk.

The armored personnel carrier stops in the dry riverbed. Soldiers leap to the rocky earth, spread into a line, and run uphill, weighted with guns, helmets, and battle vests. They drop, prone, to the hillside. A second line of men advances, overtakes the first, and then drops to provide cover as the first line leapfrogs past. Scattered on the slope are cardboard figures of helmeted men facing them with guns, figures ripped by the fire from the advancing soldiers. Officers without helmets walk upright behind the troops, surrealistically calm, observing their performance. In a few minutes, the men of Netzah Yehudah, the IDF’s
haredi
battalion, have conquered two desert hilltops. The company commander, a clean-shaven officer who grew up in a religious Zionist settlement in the Golan Heights, is quietly pleased. The exercise “flowed,” he says. He never had to interfere.

Netzah Yehudah is an unusual unit. Soldiers are required to wear skullcaps, pray thrice daily, keep the Sabbath, and attend daily Torah study with the unit’s rabbis. At the battalion’s isolated base, the roles normally filled by women—the education officer, the social work NCO—are staffed by men. Women do not enter the gate.

Netzah Yehudah inducted its first recruits in 1999. It was a joint project of the IDF’s Manpower Branch and an association of
haredi
rabbis concerned about young men unsuited for yeshivah study. In order to gain legal employment, the men needed to acknowledge leaving yeshivah, which in turn meant they would have to serve in the army. The rabbis agreed to cooperate with the military if the unit enforced a
haredi
lifestyle. Soldiers who enlist get a bonus: they spend their final year of service either studying to complete a high school education or training for a vocation.

Netzah Yehudah started with thirty recruits. When it celebrated its tenth anniversary, it had seven hundred men on active duty, in four companies, and was expanding. The IDF sees the unit as a success. In the ultra-Orthodox world, wall posters signed by major rabbis denounce Netzah Yehudah, lest real yeshivah students sign up.

The soldiers are not all from the same mold. About a third are religious Zionist troops, who want a stricter Orthodox atmosphere than elsewhere in the army. Their presence has boosted demands from
hesder
soldiers to have separate brigades of their own. Some of the soldiers are skin-deep
haredim
. A military rabbi, interviewed about the unit, described “a young man who came to me, with beard and sidelocks, bitter and angry that they forbade him to talk on the phone on the Sabbath. . . . He did not understand why the army . . . forced him to keep religious commandments.”

The unit is run in tight coordination with the rabbinical association. “The commanders don’t do anything without consulting the rabbis,” says Ze’ev Drori, an academic expert on the military and a colonel in the reserves who researched Netzah Yehudah. The battalion commander at the time I visited, a religious Zionist officer, said it would take time for an ultra-Orthodox soldier to rise to command of the unit, but the day would come. To develop morale, he said, “We stress [defending] the Jewish people,” rather than defending the state. Most of the soldiers do not identify with the secular state and its citizenry.

The battalion’s military rabbi, Lieutenant Ariel Eliahu, is the grandson of former chief rabbi Mordechai Eliahu and son of the controversial far-right rabbi of the Galilee city of Safed. Lieutenant Eliahu often conducts the daily class for soldiers, on subjects ranging from Talmud to “the justice of our cause,” which includes “the truth that . . . the Land of Israel belongs to us by historical and divine decree.” Drori notes that when a rabbi has an hour to teach soldiers, and “mixes in love of the land and Jewishness compared to Arabness,” he is transmitting his “personal ideological and political credo.” Religious study becomes political indoctrination.

Netzah Yehudah is part of the Kfir Brigade, whose main task is policing the West Bank. The battalion carries out raids to arrest Palestinians suspected of terrorism and mans the checkpoints through which Palestinians must constantly cross. Netzah Yehudah was not assigned to participate in the withdrawal from Gaza. There was no point in placing the soldiers in that bind.

The
haredi
unit demonstrates one more way in which the strains on Israeli democracy reinforce each other. The battalion is meant to overcome
haredi
self-segregation, to help men leave the yeshivot and enter the workforce. Yet it is built on segregation within the army. It is a unit tied to a particular political community, with two hierarchies of command, military and ideological, a unit where esprit de corps is built on defending Jews and their homeland, not on defending Israel. It is the kind of unit that Ben-Gurion knew he should not have in his army.

Through Netzah Yehudah and the
haredi
settlements, a problem in Israeli society is being exported to occupied territory. There is a greater danger, however: the longer the occupation lasts, the more its ills enter Israel proper. They cannot be sealed off behind the missing border. They metastasize.

Chapter VI
Importing the Revolution

“Clearly, there’s a war here, sometimes even worse than the one in Samaria,” the student said. “It’s not a war with guns. It’s a war of light against darkness.” That’s why, he said, he set clear lines for himself, why he didn’t let himself form any connection with Arabs, even if they lived across the hall from him.

We were sitting in a side room of the
hesder
yeshivah in Akko—or Akka, as members of the Arab minority in the Israeli coastal city call it, or Acre, as it’s sometimes marked on maps in English. The student had grown up in a settlement in Samaria, the northern West Bank. In Samaria, he said, there were clear lines dividing Jews and Arabs, which was how he liked things. He was in his early twenties, recently married, back in the yeshivah after finishing his active duty in the army. Years before, he explained, the Arabs had “started spreading” from the Old City on the southwest of Akko. The dividing line was now the railroad tracks—mostly Arabs on the west side, Jews on the east. But now Arabs were “trying to get in” on the east side as well. The battle in Akko, he said, was “psychological and overt—who will be here, who will rule here.”

The yeshivah is on the west side, in the Wolfson neighborhood, in a synagogue surrounded by the Soviet-style apartment blocks built in Israel’s early years: long stucco rectangles, four stories high, with multiple entrances leading to small walk-up flats. Most of the names on the mailboxes are Arab; a few are Jewish. On the main street, an Arab-owned restaurant stands next to an empty storefront, formerly a dental clinic, with a sign in Hebrew and Russian, a reminder of the 1990s wave of Soviet Jewish immigration. Near the yeshivah, a corner kiosk has been converted into a shirt-pocket police station—a more subtle reminder of the 2006 melee between yeshivah students and their neighbors, which presaged the ethnic riots of 2008.

Akko was the last capital of the Crusaders in the Holy Land. Relative to the length of the city’s history, this is the recent past. Much more recently, Akka was one of the main cities of Arab Palestine—and the harbor from which many refugees fled north by sea to Beirut in 1948. Yet when Haganah troops conquered the city on the fourth day of Israeli independence, some of the Palestinian Arab residents stayed, along with Arabs from surrounding villages who’d found refuge there. Their numbers were small enough that Israel could order Arabs living in the modern, British-era section to move into the walled Old City, with room left inside the walls for Jewish immigrants to join them. Akko was now one of Israel’s “mixed cities,” mostly Jewish, partly Arab.

To the victors went the street names. Along the beach runs Haganah Street. The Comprehensive Arab High School, just outside the Old City walls, is on the Street of the Two Eliahus, named for Eliahu Hakim and Eliahu Bet Zouri, members of the Lehi terror group who in 1944 assassinated Lord Moyne, the British Minister Resident in Egypt. They died by hanging and became martyrs of the Israeli right. Those who named the street for them surely did not think of the potential lessons that their choice might have for Arab high schoolers. The blaze of ethnic conflict blinds people to how their actions might be seen in the other side’s eyes.

In the 1960s, Jews moved out of the Old City to the modern apartments of Wolfson. Later, as Arabs also found homes in the neighborhood, Jews moved on, to newer parts of town or to the nearby all-Jewish town of Nahariyah. In Akko, Muslims went to the Old City for public prayer; the government refused permission to reopen pre-1948 mosques outside the walls. Meanwhile, the big synagogue in Wolfson slowly emptied. Palestinian citizens of Israel moved into Akko from nearby Galilee villages, where growing populations collided with government policies that made both land and building permits into scarce commodities. In the 1990s, Russian-speaking Jewish immigrants arrived. Overall, Jews remained a large majority in the town.

Here enter two more hard-line nationalist Eliahus: former chief rabbi Mordechai Eliahu and his son, Rabbi Shmuel Eliahu. In the late 1990s they established a project to place groups of their followers in Israeli towns to work with the poor and bring Jews to their version of “redemptive” Judaism. While the agenda of the urban “settlement groups” was supposed to be religious education and social projects, the first city that Mordechai Eliahu targeted was Akko, which he saw as being abandoned by Jews. His son picked Nachshon Cohen, a rabbi who had studied at the yeshivah in Hebron, to be the group’s spiritual leader. Cohen later recounted that he recruited three of the group’s original families from the Jewish settlers in Hebron. The project’s administrator, Yishai Rubin, was a native of Elon Moreh.

They were moving back into Israel. But they were not leaving behind the sectarian nationalism distilled in the West Bank hills. They were bringing that way of seeing the world back home, reimporting the message of ethnic struggle for each acre of land. And in doing so, they embodied the long-term effect of the settlement effort on society within Israel.