Israel is not more conflicted than ever, but is experiencing accelerated processes of democratization • There is a bitter and defeated social stratum that experiences this as a threat to its relative advantage • Opinion
Demonstration in front of Balfour
Photo:
Oren Ben Hakon
1 Is Israel a divided, torn, crumbling, conflicted and divided than ever? I suggest examining what the squares and press pages looked like immediately after the '77 uprising or in the '81 elections, against the background of the SHL war, during the Oslo period, on the eve of the disengagement.
No, Israel is not more conflicted than ever. On the contrary. It is experiencing accelerated historical processes of openness, democratization and pluralism - and these are producing a reaction among groups that feel threatened by this spectacular social and political change.
New groups are entering the center, competing equally for their legitimate place in the labor market, in higher education, in the centers of power in the media, politics, the defense system and the judiciary. "Survivors of '77," those who have experienced the political upheaval as a trauma, and their next generation, are consistently losing their class advantage, and are forced to compete. This competition produces social - healthy - tension over resources and centers of influence.
Photo: Yoni Rickner
This tension, which old elites identify as a terrifying and shaky existential threat, is experienced by other groups as an event of participation and leadership. Groups that until now were alienated - or alienated from them - Mizrahis, the periphery, Arabs, ultra-Orthodox, even settlers - are flocking to the center, to the core of Israeliness, and want to be a part of it. This beautiful revolution, which the last decade has brought to heights we did not know - they call "division" and "rift". They assume that the contempt, reluctance, fear and disgust that grips them at the sight of the progress of other groups - are feelings that everyone shares. They are used to thinking that their particular experience is the appearance of everything, and it is this that defines the national mood. Where all polls consistently show happiness and pride in the country, they experience frustration and shame. Even the experience abroad - the ultimate signifier of privilege and escape from the "Israeli stickiness" hated by them - was taken away from them. In the summer because it suddenly belongs to everyone, now they are doomed to meet the turtles in Eilat.
2 The matter is simple: they have no interest in social solidarity whose terms they cannot dictate. They turn their anger with the changing Israel into a myth of "division", and try to force it into the founding story of the current generation.
But this story of "division" - whose culprit is, of course, Netanyahu - is taking root, because these elites still have moves and dominance in mind-shaping systems. They build "despair" - a raw material that exists in every society, even the most prosperous and cheerful, and make it a dominant nuance in the design of the collective atmosphere. It should be noted - even now, when an acute economic and medical crisis threatens the proper functioning of society, they are engaged in fueling a sense of essentially a conceptual crisis, one that has no way of proving, subjective, atmosphere-dependent. The crisis of "despair" and "division".
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• When the High Court restricted right-wing demonstrations in Balfour
Such conceptual crises are almost always trending and instrumental: one needs to examine who is obsessively wallowing in them, and for what purpose. And of course the current crisis has only one solution: a change of government. Only then, as Gideon Levy defiantly wrote, "will feelings of relief, joy and satisfaction wash over the left and the justice system and the other threatened systems. The dawn of a new day will come upon Israel." He is right, this is a false illusion, because even if the great soprano calls Netanyahu a "compressor" and prays for the silence that will follow, the crisis itself is false and fictitious.
3 What we are witnessing is the story of a bitter and defeated social stratum that has experienced a historic social process of release and removal of barriers - as a threat to its relative advantage, and in fact is waging a mass battle against the thriving new Israeli solidarity before its eyes. In her announcements of leaving Israel ("Our children are already going to Berlin"), in her contrasting defiance ("You will not be able to penetrate our Tel Aviv"), and in her declaration that until the historic deviation of '77 is corrected, "the flag will continue to be ashamed of those who carry it" - she reached the point Depression: It threatens a kind of retirement from Israeliness out of a lordly perception of "they will not be able to do without us." Well, better not, but it's been possible without them.
Enough of the infantile talk about "Israel that we will have to restore" and "the ruins that Netanyahu leaves us." Grow up, come to terms with reality. The golden decade of the ultra-Orthodox, the settlers, the Arabs and the eastern middle class is not "ruins that need to be restored." And do not flaunt the unemployment data, because even the damage of the plague will not change this new social order. Israeli society is not divided; You may have decided to split from it, but that's a whole other story.