Geredigeerd citaat uit Tal Keinan:
“ American politics reaches deadlock, even crisis, over issues such as taxation, healthcare, and trade policy. While these issues, of course, figure in Israeli politics as well, they are overshadowed by far more existential issues. Israel struggles for consensus on questions as basic as the shape of the country on a map, or Israeli citizens’ basic rights and obligations to society.
Israel is a narrow sliver of land, smaller in area than New Jersey, at the center of the most violent region in the world. Hundreds of millions of Israel’s neighbors call for the country’s destruction and demand the annihilation of its people. To that end, these neighbors have launched three all-out wars in the short time since Israel’s independence. Israel prevailed in all of these, but Israelis understand that the first time they lose will be the last.
Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s founding father, had almost noreligious education as a child in Budapest. His vision for Israel was a political solution to what he saw as the Jewish Problem. The Jews were stateless wanderers. A state would bring them dignity and safety. Israel would be just a nation among nations.
Prestate Palestine was also home to a non-Zionist religious Jewish population whose original members had lived in Jerusalem and other Jewish centers in the Holy Land for generations. This community had no interest in Jewish self-determination. They would agree to live under any government, Turkish, British, or Jewish, until the Messiah himself delivered Jewish sovereignty.
Three minority factions have been locked in constant battle over the definition of Jewish statehood ever since. Each has fought to bend Israeli government and society to its own parochial vision for Israel’s relationship with Judaism. We will refer to the three groups as the Territorialists, the Theocrats, and the Secularists. These groups have never reconciled their conflicting views on the definition of Jewish statehood, or on the very meaning of Judaism. They are separate societies. They are educated in separate school systems with different curricula. They are segregated geographically. The Territorialists live mainly in the settlements of Judea and Samaria. The Theocrats live in Jerusalem, in Bnei Brak, and in scattered but homogenous communities like Ramat Beit Shemesh or Qiryat Sefer. The Secularists are concentrated in greater Tel Aviv. “
Ebook ISBN 978 0525511175; ISBN 9780 525511168
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Julia Frankel / AP July 22, 2023 – time.com/6296874/israel-netanyahu/
Israel July 24, 2023, Hundreds of thousands of Israelis protest judiciary reform.
Part of the reforms allows lawmakers in Israel’s parliament to override decisions made by the country’s Supreme Court.