Israel’s Last Hope

I made aliyah with my wife and two children in 1985. I didn’t go to Israel because I was looking for a job or in search of a mid-life change. I was the rabbi of a flourishing congregation in the outskirts of Manchester, England. I came, in the words of our national anthem, to be part of “a free people in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem”. I was unashamedly a Zionist.

Living in Israel was never easy. There was the Gulf War in 1991 in which we huddled in our bomb shelters wearing gas masks while Saddam Hussein rained Scud missiles on Tel Aviv.

There were the 1st and 2nd Intifadas: the suicide bombings at the Park Hotel in Netanya, Mike’s Place in Tel Aviv, the Dolphinarium, the Dizengoff Centre, the Sbarro Pizzeria in Jerusalem and many others. They are all part of our collective memory.

Many of us have lost loved ones here, including my only son, Jonathan, in the Jewish State’s ongoing struggle to survive in a hostile neighborhood.

However, there was also the privilege of living in Israel. “Next year in Jerusalem” was no longer the yearning for a lost homeland, but had become a realistic option after 2,000 years of wandering, incessant antisemitism and the horrors of the Holocaust. We had finally come home.

But “Israel’s complexion has changed” as Ehud Manor wrote in his song “I have no other country”. Perhaps the turning point was Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination by a Jewish, right-wing, religious fanatic in November 1995. At a memorial gathering shortly thereafter, the Israeli singer Gali Atari sung Manor’s words as much of Israel, but not all, wept.

The Israel that Benjamin Netanyahu has fashioned since he was first elected less than a year later is not the country to which I made aliyah. Religious settlers have claimed the West Bank as part of a Greater Israel. Some have done so violently while the government looked on. “From the River to the Sea” is not only a Palestinian slogan but also theirs.

In the early days, the vintage JNF Blue box did not include the West Bank as part of Israel. Today it does.

But it is much more than that. In 1967 the Kotel plaza was a bulldozered, open space in which everyone could circulate freely.

Today it has become a Charedi synagogue complete with mechitza separating women from men at the Wall for the first time in history. A bill currently before the Knesset would grant Israel’s Chief Rabbinate sole authority over the area and criminalize non-Orthodox and pluralistic worship there.

As a Reform rabbi, I always knew that Israel did not grant equal rights to all streams, but we learnt to overcome and ignore that. While the government generally did not recognize us, large segments of Israeli society did, and the Supreme Court played a key role in limiting an Orthodox hegemony.

But now the Supreme Court, which has played such an important part in ensuring that Israel remain a democracy, is under threat. Earlier this week the cabinet voted unanimously to defy a High Court of Justice ruling regarding the ⁠Second Authority for Television and Radio, the commercial broadcasting regulatory body.

When the government no longer respects Israel’s courts, one of the central components of our democracy becomes powerless, and Israel is on the way to becoming a dictatorship.

Were that not enough, the fast-growing Haredi community is projected to represent no less than 25% of Israel’s population by 2050. Most of them do not undertake military service. Indeed, some 80,000 ultra-Orthodox men aged between 18 and 24 are currently believed to be eligible, but have not enlisted.

Many of them are uneducated. They refuse to institute a core curriculum in their schools. They are dependent upon the public purse for their very survival. No wonder that their political parties are now trying to legislate a basic law on Torah Study to shield draft evaders from sanctions and prosecution while continuing to grant them benefits under the guise of Torah study.

Israel cannot continue that way. Reservists will resist the repeated calls on them to leave their homes and their jobs in order to defend their country while so many others are absconding. Enough is enough. Those who can will leave in search of greener pastures. Many already have. That would be a tragedy for Israel and the Jewish People and lead to the end of the Third Commonwealth.

Elections are scheduled for October. Hopefully a very different kind of government will emerge and save Israel from itself before it is too late. That is Israel’s last hope.