Next Thursday’s event at the International Convention Center in Jerusalem has been circled in red ink for months on the calendars of every aspiring member of Israel’s right-wing intelligentsia. It’s the “Israeli Conservatism” conference where exponents of reining in the bloated public sector, the rapaciously activist court system and the radical progressives who apparently dominate Israel.
Surprisingly, perhaps, the money for the lavish event is coming from an American foundation and the ideology they will be hawking there at Binyanei Ha’Uma, along with heavily-subsidized tomes by Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray, will be anything but “Israeli.” It will be what passes today in America for conservatism, awkwardly translated into Hebrew.
There’s a long list of reasons why American-style conservatism can’t work in Israel, and why this is a hollow debate. For the sake of brevity, here’s just one reason.
If the Israeli “conservatives” ever have their way in privatizing the country’s comprehensive public services and in dismantling the Israeli welfare state, the biggest impact will be on the Haredi community, which not only relies most on those services, but cannot in any way continue having its “learners society” without a comprehensive social safety net.
A truly “conservative” system means an end to the political alliance between the right-wing and the ultra-Orthodox, one that has kept Likud in power for nearly half of Israel’s existence. The Haredi parties, Netanyahu likes to declare, are “Likud’s natural allies.” Since Likud is not going to give up on its path to power, it’s not going to adopt such a policy. Israeli “conservatism” is fated to remain a fringe element on the secular right.
One of last year’s Likud campaign election night parties at the Tel Aviv Exhibition GroundsOfer Vaknin
But the fact that it’s trending as the fashionable flavor of the month in Israeli discourse is telling. There’s a tendency on the right and left in both countries to think that American ideologies, theories and political dichotomies are easily applicable to Israel.
The American debate over abortions is another example.
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Each time it erupts afresh, as it did this month with the leaked Supreme Court opinion on Roe v. Wade, there’s a certain type of American-Jewish or Israeli pundit who will try and make a point over the fact that abortions in Israel are supposedly easily accessible and uncontroversial. It’s a facile argument based on a (willful) ignorance of the intersection of religion and politics in Israel, aimed at presenting Israel as a liberal society.
Protesters at the “Jewish Rally for Abortion Justice,” hosted by the National Council of Jewish Women, near the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC this weekAnna Moneymaker – AFP
It’s true, “pregnancy terminations” are easy to obtain in Israel (though a married woman under the age of 40 may have to lie to the hospital “committee” to have one) and on the long list of state vs. religion clashes, the issue barely features. But that’s largely due to the fact that the religious communities which do view abortion as taboo have enough ways to subjugate their female members and ensure they are dutiful child-bearers without prohibiting abortion.
No matter what progressive rabbis tell you, Judaism isn’t cool with abortion. A more accurate description would be is that their Judaism is OK with it, Orthodox Judaism certainly isn’t, except in cases when the fetus clearly endangers the mother. So why haven’t the Haredi rabbis gone to war against abortion? They don’t have to.
In a community which is strictly segregated, both from the outside world and within itself, girls who are taught separately from boys from kindergarten onwards, and brought up with the clear understanding that their supreme role in life is to marry before they turn 20 and bring as many children to this world to continue on the path of Torah, abortion simply isn’t an issue.
In fact, while Haredi politicians have not sought to make abortion less accessible, they have tried to fight laws prohibiting underage marriage. It’s not that they agree to abortion, they’ve simply made the strategic choice to choose their battles, and not fight in one that doesn’t impact on their own community’s growth.
Ultra-Orthodox Jewish family at Tel Aviv’s beach during summer vacationAP Photo/Oded Balilty
No-one should envy the toxic conflict in America over abortions, but at least there it’s out in the open, it’s a national debate, even a battle. If only Israelis who see themselves as liberals and feminists, instead of patting themselves on their backs about how free abortion is in Israel, gave a thought to the fact that one in every five female babies born today in Israel will have little choice but to marry at 18 and bear as many children their bodies can bear, and often more.
Another ignorant attempt to impose American terms of reference on Israeli politics is the right-wing depiction of Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation as “antisemitic” and the left-wing characterization of Jewish sovereignty as “racist.”
The latest wheeze along these lines is, on the U.S. right-wing, the adoption of the “great replacement theory,” which maintains there is a concerted effort of progressive elites and Jews to dilute and replace, through immigration, the white majority in the United States, and on the left-wing, framing this conspiracy theory as yet another mirror image of Israeli Jewish supremacism against the Palestinians.
Putting aside the obscenity of repurposing the western conspiracy theory – one which has already fueled the largest single slaughter of Jews in America and is just another evolution of the Nazi ideology that killed millions of Jews, just to score rhetoric points against other Jews – it has no basis in reality.
I mean, if you want to use the great replacement theory in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you can just as easily say that the violent opposition of the Arabs to the arrival of Jewish Holocaust refugees in mandatory Palestine after World War Two was a version of the replacement theory. Of course it isn’t, but that’s where making viciously stupid and grossly ignorant comparisons takes you.
Palestinians gather with national flags along a beach in Gaza City for a rally ahead of the 74th anniversary of the Nakba, the “catastrophe” of Israel’s creation in 1948MAHMUD HAMS – AFP
The national-religious conflict between two peoples who have historic connections to the same sliver of land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean is not caused by Arab antisemitism or by Jewish racism, though these elements are both present and exacerbate the situation. To insist that it is a racially-motivated conflict, you have to believe, just like the Nazis, that Jews are a race, and then contend, in total denial of history, that either they or the Palestinians have no roots in the land.
Why are so many seemingly intelligent pundits, activists and academics so insistent on foisting American frameworks of political thinking on Israel, a small country two continents away, with a society, history and political system which has very little in common with the United States of America?
Ignorance can’t be the only reason: After all these are people who are paid to study, research and write about these two countries. Surely they should know better. Actually, the payment is part of it. There’s money to be had in this type of commentary and think-tankery. But neither can opportunism entirely explain the credulousness with which the conceit of these baseless comparisons is absorbed and celebrated.
It’s partly the myth, on the side of Israel’s American supporters on both sides of the aisle, that there are somehow unique “shared values” binding the two countries together, and partly the antisemitic belief in the mythical power of “the Benjamins,” of Jewish money over American politics. Either way, the comparisons and theories so beloved by Israel’s lovers and haters in America have nothing to do with an actual country.
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