The Inner Conflict

...Those measures originally were seen as pragmatic moves to ease the concerns ofthe Orthodox in a state that Ben-Gurion and his allies were determined to develop as a liberal democracy...

...Israel's political leaders have generally avoided taking action to defuse this time bomb—in part because ofthe country's longstanding preoccupation with serious security concerns, and in part to avoid aggravating the social rifts that exist within its diverse, often contentious population...

...along ethnic lines, there are misunderstandings and simmering resentments between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews...

...But given that it is beset by more external and internal problems than it knows how to solve at the moment, true "normalization"—the goal of the early Zionists—seems out of the question for the foreseeable future...

...And hundreds of thousands of others, from all ofthe earth's continents, live and work within its narrow borders...

...Van Diggele concludes, reasonably enough, that "the Orthodox will have to live with the fact that the role of Judaism in public life in Israel will always remain limited, and the secularists will have to accept the fact that the democratic qualities of Israel will never be fully developed...

...Known as the "Status Quo," they have helped to guarantee the Jewish character of the country...

...As van Diggele illustrates in her generally well-informed and highly readable account, many of those conflicts are reflected in the heated arguments that swirl around the basic question, "Who is a Jew...

...Still relatively young, Israel continues to absorb sizable numbers of immigrants from different places, all of whom not only change its demographic makeup in large and small ways but also threaten its national identity...

...The improvisatory nature of Israeli life has a unique history that van Diggele sets forth in her opening chapter...

...The difficulties would-be converts confront are, to put it mildly, extremely discouraging...

...Its dominant group, the Jews, consists of individuals who come from dozens of different countries, speak myriad languages, and indulge in a wide assortment of ethnic, religious and cultural practices...

...Failure to deal with the problems stemming from the Status Quo agreements, however, maintains an ambiguity about the state's identity and the rights of its citizens, some of whom feel marginalized and at times are forced into painfully contradictory situations...

...Many secularists would like to see a strict separation of religion and state, but that would outrage the religious Jews and could bring on something like a civil war...

...In addition, he granted the ultra-Orthodox special privileges that included exemption from compulsory military service and the right to a separate school system...

...But despite their having been modified in several respects over the years, they are an abiding source of irritation and growing resentment among Israel's secular majority...

...Through interviews with dozens of Israelis from different backgrounds, van Diggele describes these dilemmas in revealing and often distressing detail...

...Taken together, these divisions comprise what van Diggele aptly calls Israel's "culture wars...

...David Ben-Gurion, the architect of the state, realizing how difficult it would be to forge consensus between religious and secular Jews, postponed the drafting of a formal constitution...

...As for the Palestinians, with whom the Israelis live most closely and bitterly, the violence featured in each day's news shows how hard it will be to forge a genuine peace in the Middle East, even as it demonstrates in heavy human cost on both sides the need for an accommodation...

...The essence of the domestic problem in Israel," she recognizes, "is the chasm between groups that don't understand each other...

...yet despite signing formal peace agreements with their Jewish neighbor, they have retained their coolness...

...and, increasingly, there are misperceptions and suspicions between Israeli Jews and the growing numbers of Christians who now live in the country as a result of the large influx of non-Jewish immigrants and imported laborers from the former Soviet Union, Romania, the Philippines, and elsewhere...

...That may not be tenable over the long run, but for now it serves to let most Israelis get through the day...

...She has no solutions to offer, though, that have not already been proposed by others...

...Because there is no civil marriage in Israel, mixed marriages are out ofthe question within the country's borders, and even couples who are Jewish but want to have a non-Orthodox ceremony frequently end up traveling to Cyprus for their weddings...

...Egypt and Jordan are the two exceptions...

...Some 20 per cent of Israel's citizenry is made up of Arab Muslims and Christians...

...As any visitor to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv quickly discovers, Israel is an attractive, energetic, resourceful, and endlessly interesting place...

...In these respects, the Jews of Israel remain a people apart: inhabitants of the region's freest and most advanced state who are isolated and unwanted...

...director, Boms Jewish Studies Program, Indiana University Israel is a little country with big problems...

...The author terms them a deferred "time bomb under the foundations ofthe state...

...But she does not merely expose Israeli civil society's fault lines and fractiousness...

...In returning to their ancestral homeland and regaining their national sovereignty after millenniums of disenfranchisement, the Jews have achieved a great deal, but the Zionist project, for all of its successes to date, remains a work-in-progress...

...Civil divorce is similarly impossible, and the present divorce courts can be vexing in their procedures to the point of causing endless frustration...

...within the religious camp, they fuel animosities among Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jews...

...on the national level, distrust, fear and hostility exist between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs...

...For besides the external dangers Israel has confronted since its inception, it faces chronic and potentially explosive internal challenges—ideological, political, social, ethnic, and religious—that remain largely unresolved...

...Israel is commonly referred to as the "Jewish state," but far from being a socially cohesive polity, it is markedly heterogeneous...

...They produce tensions and, at times, open clashes between secularist and ultra-Orthodox Israelis...

...An Israeli citizen who is not deemed to be a Jew according to Jewish law, for example, may be drafted to fight as an Israeli soldier, yet the status of his burial rights will be contested if he falls in combat...

...The most serious stem from the hostility of its Arab neighbors, most of whom have never recognized the legitimacy of the Jewish state and, more than half a century after its establishment, still refuse to have anything like normal relations with it...

...In these and countless other ways, Israel's lack of clarity about itself—can it be both a Jewish state and a democratic one along American or European lines?—creates no end of complications...

...Its title notwithstanding, Dutch writer Els van Diggele's book deals not with such issues but with those that await the Israelis if and when they ever manage to win acceptance by the Arab world...

...Although the state's Jewish character is fundamental, there is little agreement on who or what should define this "Jewishness" or determine its proper role in civil affairs...

...Though not observant himself, he further instituted the Jewish Sabbath as a day of rest for the country's Jewish citizens, saw to it that the dietary rules of kashrut would be observed in all public institutions, and mandated that traditional Jewish religious laws would govern all matters pertaining to the civil registry (marriage, divorce, burial, conversion, etc...

...This is not surprising, for the conflict between Orthodox and secular Jews over the nature ofthe Jewish state is ongoing and seemingly intractable, and no King Solomon has yet appeared in modern Israel to resolve it...