Noah Efron's reveling piece in Foreign Policy gives us a close up look at the fault lines inside Israeli society.
Israel Turns on Itself
Secular Israelis, for their part, live in perpetual dismay over the fact that their successes have never led them to where they expected to arrive. Their parents’ generation, and that of their parents, expected to be vindicated, that the value and truth of the ideology they embraced would be confirmed by the society they built. After Zionists produced the Good Society, they reasoned, no one could doubt that Zionism itself is a social good. And for some time, it seemed that this formula had proven itself to be Israel’s self-image, broadly, as the country passed through two phases.
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In the first phase, Israel saw itself as a model of state-building, the only country in the world in which voluntarist socialist communities -- kibbutzim -- thrived, producing not only a plurality of the country’s food, but providing in extraordinary numbers charismatic leaders in government and the army. Even beyond the green lawns and gates of the kibbutzim (which accounted, after all, for only a bit over 3 percent of the country’s population), economists determined that Israel was the country with the smallest "socioeconomic gap" in the world; the difference in income between the richest and poorest 10 percent was smaller than anywhere else. Israel had undertaken and succeeded in massive development projects. The country had absorbed several times its population in immigrants, many poor, and many refugees arriving from dreadful circumstances. Israel reversed the regional trend towards desertification, reclaiming tens of thousands of acres of arid land for productive agriculture. Israelis became agricultural advisors through much of Africa, helping to spark a short-lived but significant increase in African agricultural production. And of course, Israel had assembled an army and airforce recognized for its effectiveness and creativity. Generals like Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin became international celebrities and found themselves dining at the tables of princes and starlets.
No one holds a heroic view of Israel anymore, not abroad and not here. Today’s kibbutzim are not a source of national pride. In the past decade, dozens of them have "privatized," dividing up what was common property (it took a Supreme Court ruling to stop kibbutzim from selling to developers valuable government-owned lands that had been lent to them for agriculture). Israel’s social gap is now considered among the greatest in the developed world. The most recent wave of immigrants, from the former Soviet Union, are largely disgruntled, and surveys suggest that a large percentage of them are not even Jews. Several of Israel’s large development projects have caused great harm to the local environment. Israelis are unwelcome in African capitals. They are mostly unwelcome anywhere. And most important of all, Israel’s military excellence has been tested in a 20-year misadventure occupying southern Lebanon, and in laboriously maintaining the peace in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The disastrous last war in Lebanon, and the wrenching recent war in Gaza, won support by most Israelis, and censure by some, but together they have left little doubt that the country’s army is not heroic in the sense that it once was.
I'm hoping to pique your curiosity so you'll read Efron's whole thought provoking essay, and then we'll discuss it below. Many on both sides of this issue agree that the path Israel is now taking is not sustainable over the longer term. Efron's essay gives us a better understanding of the complexities at work inside Israeli society. Whether you agree with Efron or not I hope the discussion will be productive.