As it enters its 79th year, the State of Israel stands at a crossroads. It can drift toward becoming a Jewish-religious nationalist state, with Third World levels of public services and GDP, or it can return to the Zionist path and serve as a model for combining liberal values with ancient tradition.
If we do not bring about a dramatic change of course, the first scenario is the more likely one. But the choice is ours. It is up to the Zionist majority – the citizens who serve, work, and share the burden of the state – to turn the ship around and prevent it from crashing into the iceberg toward which it is now headed.
Israelis will celebrate the country’s 78th Independence Day after two and a half years of war and nearly four years of a government that relies on parties that do not share the Zionist vision and are indifferent to the country’s fate.
“Total victory” on every front is elusive, and the geopolitical future remains fraught. But the Jewish People Policy Institute’s Israeli Society Index shows that what worries Israelis most are the challenges at home.
Amid this stormy period, many Israelis look dumbfounded at a government that prefers to bankroll the haredim (ultra-Orthodox) rather than those who serve and pay taxes. Even in wartime, when there is an acute need for more soldiers, this government is determined to pass a law exempting them from military service.
Israeli social media and too many surveys to count show that talk of leaving Israel is increasingly common. Some are doing more than talking. According to data from the Central Bureau of Statistics, the scale of emigration from Israel over the past two years has been exceptional. Even after excluding those who were not born here, these past few years have seen a historic number of native-born Israelis leaving.
More detailed data show disproportionately high emigration rates among people in sought-after professions, such as doctors and workers in technological fields. Israel’s security and economy rest on the qualitative edge of its human capital.
The departure of these professionals – certainly if the trend continues – is a serious threat to Israel’s ability to prosper and sustain the level of security it requires.
What is driving so many highly capable Israelis to leave their home and become strangers in another country? It seems that what troubles these Israelis most – and many who still live here – goes beyond the difficult present. More disturbing is what many see as a future that portends a change in Israel’s character and casts doubt on its ability to endure.
A look at Israel’s demographic trajectory, alongside the political shift to the right and toward greater traditionalism, especially among the young, leads many to believe that a drastic transformation of Israel’s character is in the offing.
Already today, the haredi birth rate far exceeds that of the secular. Before long, a third of Israelis will be haredi. This community is not only religiously extreme and anti-liberal, but it also does not share in shouldering Israel’s economic and security burden.
Haredim becoming a larger group in Israeli society
The haredim constitute about 15% of Israel’s population, alongside a productive non-haredi majority willing to fight for the state. It is still possible to contain this group and maintain a functioning economy and national security.
But if many of those who pay taxes and serve in the IDF choose to leave, the haredi share will grow much faster, and the resources needed both to support their way of life and to sustain the state itself will shrink.
My grandparents, survivors snatched from the flames of Europe, held visas to the golden land, the “goldene medina” – the United States. But they were Zionists, and they chose the transit camps and housing blocks of the Land of Israel.
The Zionism of the 21st century is a struggle for the soul of a Jewish, democratic, liberal Israel. It is not a struggle against our haredi brothers and sisters or against Israel’s non-Jewish citizens. It is a struggle to preserve the Zionist character of the State of Israel – a struggle that demands determined, sustained government policy to reverse the course the country is currently on.
To succeed, hard decisions are needed in both of the rival “blocs” that have dominated Israeli politics in recent years. After a decade of negating the other side and imposing mutual boycotts, the choice must be Zionism and the ability to realize the vision of the Jewish state.
Zionism must also be the moral choice of those considering leaving Israel: to stay here and fight. Together, we must drain the swamps of corruption, lawlessness, and inequality in burden sharing among communities, and build an Israeli-Zionist partnership that will steady the State of Israel and lead it safely to its hundredth year.
The writer is director-general of JPPI – the Jewish People Policy Institute – and a senior lecturer in law at the Peres Academic Center.