Happy Birthday Israel?

 

“Are we going to live according to the laws of Moses or to the laws of Parliament?”

(President Yitzhak Navon)

 

All of this talk of 60 years is nonsense, really.  Not only does it demonstrate a rather juvenile obsession with, and unwarranted attachment of value to, the decimal system, but it also ignores the thousands of years of history that precede 1948; the state enters its seventh decade, while the nation is well into its fourth millennium, and the resonance is strong.

 

As a Jewish state – the only Jewish state – Israel is unique.  But this is more profound than simply a matter of monopoly: Judaism is the only religion that has intrinsic nationality.  Etymologically, the Jews are called as such because they come from the province of Judea, and throughout nearly 2000 years of exile, the religion has never lost touch with its nationalist root.

 

This creates an enormous problem for the secular progressive state of Israel, which from the very beginning was to be democratic, inclusive, strong and free: Judaism is none of these.  An example of this would be that rather than the hereditary, theocratic and corrupt rule of the priestly class of Cohanim and Leviim, the modern state opted for proportional representation.

 

But the dichotomy between religion and secularism pervades Israeli society, and a balance has not yet been found.  There are several allowances which are made to appease the Orthodox community: because it is a coalition system of government, the relatively small religious factions in the Knesset wield significant influence.

 

Matters are most serious in family law.  Control of marriage and divorce rests entirely with the Orthodox rabbinate, under whose restrictions Jews may not marry non-Jews (they have to go to Cyprus if they wish to do so), there are no secular unions (Muslim and Christian weddings are recognised, but there is no registry) and I’ll let you guess their position on same-sex marriage.

 

Moreover, according to halacha (Jewish religious law), a woman cannot divorce her husband if he is not willing to cooperate; so it is, unbelievably enough, in the modern, democratic state of Israel.  The courts are therefore empowered to use sanctions up to and including imprisonment to coerce the husband, but in the meantime the woman remains an “agunah”, “bound woman”.  It really is quite astounding.

 

The majority of Israelis, however, are secular, and even those who are religious do not necessarily want to live in what is referred to as a “halachic state”: they look at their (somewhat unfriendly) neighbours in Saudi Arabia, Iran and elsewhere and decide that they’d really rather not, thanks.  But their private religious views also tear on the fabric of Israeli society.

 

It is very easy to blame the Israel-Palestine conflict on the settlers in the West Bank (who, for the most part, are religious Zionists), which is why I do.  Because they believe that the land was given to them by God and that it is their inheritance, they continue to appropriate and populate land that does not belong to them in any actual sense.  Meanwhile, the government, which needs the backing of religious parties to maintain a majority in the Knesset, largely turns a blind eye.  In the unilateral pullout from Gaza, these tensions exploded across Israeli society with a remarkably polarising effect.

 

On the other hand, in 2006 the Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz ordered the Jerusalem Police to provide 12000 of officers to protect both the freedom of expression and the lives of those participating in a Gay Pride march in the “holy city” of Jerusalem from religious bigotry and violence.  As Yael Gelman, the mayoress of Herzliya, said at the time, “How could it even be imagined that violence could prevent an elementary right like this in the state of Israel?”  How indeed?

 

It was Mr. Simm (quoting President Lincoln) who said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand”.  He (President Lincoln) turned out to be correct.  The a fortiori application to Israel is rather worrying: if two halves of a continent the size of America, actually separated by a great big line drawn across the map, cannot live together half-slave, half-free, then how can a country the size of Wales, in which those on either side of the philosophical divide may live down the street from each other, manage?

Leo Davidson

 

 

The Leipzig, Dresden and Prague trip

The 2007 History trip to Leipzig, Dresden and Prague. Gregory Steckelmacher has written the following reflections on the recent History Trip.  Please submit your responses. “Europe’s basically one giant guilt-trip about World War II,” to paraphrase Gabriel, the oft-used tour-guide of the History department on their expeditions into continental Europe. He had said this on a tram making its way through Dresden, referring to the TV screens fitted into the ceilings of each carriage, which continuously played a selection of government and commercial advertisements, and noticeably contained a wide array of ethnic minorities. That the German government still appeared to be trying to right the wrongs of its past appeared odd, but the necessity was demonstrated by the drunken man who had followed us around Leipzig, shouting “only a dead Indian is a good Indian”. Although he sheepishly ran off at the first mention of police on a mobile phone, it had only been around seven weeks prior to our visit when eight Indians were injured in an attack near Leipzig itself.  In some ways the 18 years after the fall of communism seemed a long time. The huge shopping centres and shopping-centres-in-train-stations (a by-product of Sunday trading laws, I am told) were bustling and I couldn’t imagine them not being there. Alternatively, however, the scars of a bygone era were unmissable when traversing the residential areas of Leipzig. Huge concrete buildings tower over the roads, each filled with the same communist flats, mandatory for everyone (as Gabriel told us, you would never need to ask where the toilet was when visiting a friend, for it would be in the exact same place as in your own apartment). Dilapidated and in need of renovation, sitting on land that no-one wants to buy, they are brightened only by large decorative hangings positioned on their side. The situation is worse in Dresden, a city which had almost all of its 19^th century architecture destroyed in a firestorm created by the Allies in 1945; it now looks as though it has been overrun by council-housing. And, indeed, where communism hasn’t literally built over the past, nothing has. Dresden is 63% green areas, and although I was sceptical when Gabriel first informed us, casually yet seemingly cynically, that there was nothing anymore at Dresden, I can not help but agree. The new shopping centres, museums, and even a football stadium, are there, but the architecture of Dresden’s past is sorely absent. A shopping centre is no identity for a town to cling to.

Monument to the lost children of Lidice

Prague itself appeared to have successfully retained most of its architectural history, something which might be seen in the staunch warning we got of pick-pockets whilst in the city, a sure sign of tourists flocking to view it in all its beauty. Our time there was spent touring the city’s wealth of landmarks, from Charles Bridge to Prague Castle, and from the Astronomical Clock to Wenceslas Square, where student Jan Palach set himself on fire as a political protest against the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. However, it was outside Prague itself where I received my most poignant experience of the History trip – at the site of the old village of Lidice, which proved that the Nazis’ drive to exterminate their enemies was not a solely attack on the Jews of Europe. After the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by the Czech resistance force, it was ordered that the village be completely destroyed, and its men and most of its children (save those young enough to be “Germanized”) were killed. The people living in the village had no connection to those involved in the assassination other than the fact that its name was written on a piece of paper held by one of the assassins – the people there were truly innocent. And so, I found myself reconsidering, even if only for a small while, my beliefs on the Holocaust. Perhaps because I had been raised in a Jewish environment, I had always felt that the Holocaust was brought up too much, and that people had never really moved on from it. Yet, on the last few days of the trip, I was asking myself if that was entirely fair. Should the atrocities of the German regime be forgotten? Should Lidice and its 82 gassed children be forgotten? You would have to be most hardened to say so. But I soon found myself thinking once again that if we allow ourselves to be too concerned with events in the past, we stop making decisions based on the current situation, but rather because of what has happened already, subsequently producing choices which might not always be the most appropriate.  Gregory Steckelmacher