The Frame That Houses Arguments: Israel’s Most Dangerous Enemy May Be Internal

Jewish civilization has a trick, and Israel inherited it. The trick is older than the state, older than Zionism, older than the modern era — old enough to have been refined across the centuries of exile in which a stateless people somehow managed to remain a people while arguing ferociously among themselves about almost everything. The Talmud is the master document of the trick. Hillel and Shammai both survive on the page. The majority rules; the minority is preserved. Elu v’elu divrei Elohim chayim — these and these are the words of the living God. The covenant does not silence dissent; it houses it. A frame strong enough to bind, a dissent culture lively enough to update the frame.

When Zionism built a state, it did so in a largely secular register but on the same architectural pattern. The shared fate of a small embattled country, the binding institutions of army and Hebrew and calendar and existential stakes, formed a frame inside which Israelis could argue with a vehemence that startled outsiders without dissolving the society they were arguing about. This is what made Israel both ungovernable in the conventional sense and unkillable in the deeper sense. The frame held. The arguments raged. The combination produced the most assertive citizenry on earth, the most innovative small economy in modern history, a military whose unit cohesion is the envy of armies many times its size, and a public square so loud that visiting Americans sometimes mistake it for collapse.

It is not collapse. Or it has not been. But something is happening now that should worry everyone who values what the frame has produced, and the warning signs are clear enough that they deserve to be named directly. Israel is showing the symptoms of destructive particularism — the syndrome in which group identity stops being one register among several and becomes a totalizing claim, hostile to the shared frame and corrosive of the very tradition that gave the particularism its substance. The country has resisted this longer than most, for reasons rooted in the genuine unbreakability of its shared fate. But the resistance is weakening, and the trajectory is dangerous, because what destructive particularism takes from a society it does not return.

The Marks of the Syndrome

The mark of totality — the demand that group membership become master identity — is now visible across the Israeli political map. The Haredi tribe, organized around an exemption from the most binding civic institution the country possesses, increasingly defines itself by its separation from the secular and national-religious worlds rather than by the substantive practice of Torah that was once its center. The settler-religious-Zionist tribe, in its more radical wing, has come to demand of its members an alignment that subordinates older religious-Zionist values — service to the state as a whole, respect for democratic institutions, civility toward fellow Jews who disagree — to a particularist project that increasingly speaks of the state as a tool rather than as a shared frame. The secular-liberal tribe, especially in its Tel Aviv elite expressions, increasingly treats traditional and religious Israelis as embarrassments rather than as fellow citizens whose differing convictions are part of the frame’s legitimate diversity. Each tribe has begun to demand that its members order all other loyalties beneath it. The cross-cutting Israeli — religious and liberal, settler and pluralist, Haredi and patriot, Mizrahi traditional and culturally Western — has become a more lonely figure than he was a generation ago.

The mark of enmity as constitutive is........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)