Religion and Sex in Israel: Street Clashes
Over Defining a Jewish State
Israel seems to be at war with
itself. For two weeks the Hebrew media have been dominated by street clashes
between Jews arguing viciously over such matters as sleeve length and bus
seating, which in the Israel of the moment are markers for the kind of country
people want: Religious, or secular, or what balance of the two? It’s a conflict
that goes back at least to the founding of Israel six decades ago, and grows
more and more potent with the dramatic population growth of the most piously
observant.
The latest flashpoint speaks
volumes about the state of the nation: An eight-year-old girl stopped going to
school after neighborhood men spat on her and called her a prostitute because
even in long sleeves and a skirt her dress was deemed “immodest.” The men were
extremist members of the ultra-Orthodox, the fastest-growing segment of
Israel’s Jewish population. Known in Hebrew as Haredim, which
roughly translates as God-fearing, ultra-Orthodox men are easily recognized by
their signature black clothes and headgear (either wide-brimmed black felt or
brimless beaver skin) their side locks and their agitation at being seated near
women.
Which brings us to a second locus of controversy: Buses segregated
by gender. On bus lines serving ultra-Orthodox communities, women ride in the back.
Most do so quite happily, but a ruckus often ensues when an outsider climbs
aboard and insists on taking a seat up front with the men, as a woman named
Doron Matalon did last week. After being called a “shiksa” and “slut,” she
summoned police, who arrested a passenger named Shlomo Fuchs. In the shorthand
biography of news accounts, the suspect proved representative of his cohort:
Fuchs is 45, has 12 children, and no paying job. Instead he studies scripture
all day at a yeshiva, or religious college, which entitles him to welfare
payments and excuses him from military service.
These are sore points for the many
Israelis who pay taxes and are compelled to serve in the army, an essential
obligation of citizenship here. Recent efforts to draw the Ultra-Orthodox into
the Israel Defense Forces have produced some successes, but also a new platform
for tension. Israeli women famously also serve in the IDF (Doron Matalon was in
uniform when she took her seat at the front of the bus) and in recent weeks Haredi soldiers
made headlines by walking out when their sisters in arms sang at group
morale-building events, such as the lighting of Hanukah candles.
Erupting within days of one another, these cascading controversies
have Israelis questioning the nature of the Jewish State, 63 years after
independence.
“Right now, what is holding the country together is the label,
‘Jewishness.’ But in practice, you have groups of people who have nothing to do
with each other,” Eva Illouz, a sociologist at Hebrew University, tells TIME.
“I think what we are seeing now is struggles that emanate from the label that
people keep carrying around.”
There are almost as many
definitions of Jewishness as there are Jews in Israel (about six million in a
population of seven million-plus, the balance mostly being Arabs). But as
Illouz pointed out in a lengthy meditation on Israeli identity in
Saturday’s Haaretz, more and more are defining themselves in
religious terms rather than cultural. And the numbers will surely grow. Today
various ultra-Orthodox sects account for roughly 10% of the population, but the
faithful produce offspring at a rate that demographers predict will within a
generation or two remake the face of a country that, historically, has
trumpeted its commitment to women’s rights, to name one topic secular observers
worry will come into play. Already Haredim wield
disproportionate cloud in politics, frequently providing the balance of power
in coalition governments.
The irony is that many
ultra-Orthodox actually object to the existence of Israel as a state, arguing
that Jews should have waited for a signal from God before returning to their
Biblical homeland. Historians recount how David Ben-Gurion, the atheist founder
of the Israeli state, struck a bargain with Haredi rabbis: In
exchange for stifling their opposition to the establishment of Israel,
Ben-Gurion offered the ultra-Orthodox specific concessions, including their own
state-funded schools.
Their numbers always included militants. Anyone driving through
their neighborhoods on the Jewish Sabbath could expect to be stoned. Bearded
clerics opposed Israel’s participation in the Miss Universe pageant, and today
warn against smart-phones as portals to licentious websites. But heaping abuse
on a second-grader put things in another realm for many Israelis. Last week
several thousand marched in protest near the scene of the incident in Bet
Shemesh, a city of 100,000 between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose right-wing coalition
includes the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, also weighed in, vowing to safeguard
equality for women. For his part, Shas leader Eli Yishai warned against tarring
all Haredim because of the actions of a few extremists – in this case, several
hundred who call themselves Sicarri, or daggermen.
“Anyone who doesn’t live here and
only follows the hyperbolic public discourse,” Yishai wrote in the daily Ma’ariv,
“would think that women in Israel cover their faces in public, that the clubs
and bars packed on Fridays have become yeshivas and ritual baths, that
television has scheduled Bible passage readings for primetime and that
thousands of citizens have signed themselves up for the new seasons of the
Bible Quiz and the leading reality show Rabbinical Idol.”
But extremists have a way of
getting the final word, and New Year’s Eve brought images brazenly calculated
to linger in the public memory. In Jerusalem’s Shabbat Square, ultra-Orthodox
protestors denouncing “the cruel persecution of Haredi Judaism”
rolled out a wagon carrying children dressed in the striped pajamas of
Holocaust death camps, complete with yellow Stars of David. “Hundreds stuck the
stars to their coats with obvious pride,” Nahum Barnea wrote in Yedioth
Ahoronth. “Children stood before the camera with their hands in the air, in
a pose meant to evoke the child from the terrible photograph taken during the
Warsaw Ghetto roundup.”
At the edge of the crowd, demonstrators shouted toward the police:
“Nazis! Nazis!”
“The police officers didn’t bat an eye,” Barnea reported. “They’ve
grown used to it.”
