Politically Incorrect: Why a Jewish State is a Bad Idea

by Ofra Yeshua-Lyth

?An eye-opening memoir on the struggle between religion and domocracy in Israel. Israel claims to be a modern democratic state, but Israeli writer Ofra Yeshua-Lyth reveals some startling truths about modern day Israel: how although up to 70% of Israelis do not follow the Jewish religion, all citizens are subject to laws designed to favor religious Israelis over all others. In matters of birth and death; marriage and divorce; finance and the military, Israels rabbis exercise iron control over their government. Yeshua-Lyth sees the seeds of Israels demise in the growing tension between Israelis who want to lead modern secular lives, and those who wish Israel to continue in the iron grip of the rabbis. The authors arguments are woven through the story of her childhood and later life in Israel, illustrating the conflicts between modern democracy and an outdated theocracy in everyday life.

Genres: Israel, Politics

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2016

Reviews

[Antenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came to read this book through being so intrigued by a third generation Jewish Israeli journalist who felt impelled to write such a provocatively titled memoir. Her assessment of the errors which she believes will cause the ongoing “inner crumbling” of Israel in its present form are refracted through article-like chapters on her life and that of her family members back to the economic need or desire for freedom from religious control which led them to emigrate to the land of Israel before it became an independent state.

Ofra Yeshua-Lyth does not condemn the existence of Israel as such. Two weeks after the end of the Six Day War, she set off without a qualm on a family tour of the newly occupied West Bank. When Egyptian President Sadat recognised Israel in his historic meeting with the right-wing leader Menachem Begin, she wrote optimistically of her country finding “its true vocation, which is to become an integral part of the Middle East” without the intercession of “meddling” foreign diplomats, distorting issues and restricting “the power of the imagination” through translating Hebrew and Arabic via the medium of the English language. These views are not surprising, since as a child she was taught how her grandparents had come to the country and built it up from nothing, and that she had a responsibility to continue their work in a unique but vulnerable Israel. “The only Jewish state in the world was small but brave, poor but just”.

Perhaps the experience of being half-Yemeni, in a racially prejudiced Israel initially dominated by white east European Ashkenazi Jews, made the author more sympathetic to the growing plight of the Palestinian Arabs dispossessed of the their lands. Certainly, by the end of the book she is advocating dismantling unauthorised settlements in more than a cosmetic exercise and getting out of lands illegally settled under international law. In what she insists is “not mission impossible”, the author argues that the land which Ariel Sharon claimed could take 15 million residents should be one where Jews and Palestinians agree to “live in a normal state as equal citizens living in one territory”, rather than one reserved for those with “the right religion as an entry card”.

This is why her initial and most polemical focus is on the negative implications of the alliance which has grown between the government and deeply religious Orthodox Jews who maintain the raison d’être for an exclusive and expansionist state. She describes the heavy state support for the lifestyles of the Haredi, whose menfolk devote their lives to studying religious texts, exempt from national service, and massive subsidies for the settlers of the occupied territories, “easily identifiable by their uniform of yarmulkes and bearded faces and by their battered vehicles overloaded with children”. In addition, she lambasts the increased Orthodox influence on state education, and its controls on marriage to non-Jews, weddings, funerals, and the practice of circumcision even for secular Jews, not to mention kosher food, all of which serve to maintain a sense of inward-looking separation and superiority.

This book is often wordy and long-winded, assumes a good deal of prior knowledge, sometimes seems too subjective, slapdash or stilted in style. I imagine it will enrage many of the author’s compatriots, but in its frankness and heart-felt sincerity, it is also a very informative, thought-provoking, insightful with wry humour, evocative, fascinating read.

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

This informative book, which is good humoured and gentle in its style, uses anecdotes from the author's own family history to review the harm done to the Zionist project by the religious extremists of Orthodox Judaism. It is a very calm study of a very difficult topic, touching on moments throughout the history of the Israeli state. It is the opposite of hate speech written by someone who proclaims her love of Israel. It is hopeful, not cynical but it throws down the gauntlet on the issues that need to be addressed.

A Jewish state is a bad idea because, in an nutshell, the power to identify who can or cannot be considered Jewish, which laws are or are not consistent with being Jewish, has been assigned to an authoritarian religious leadership lacking any and all the necessary qualifications to deal constructively with social and political life and to an immense, hugely expensive, unaccountable yet fully state sponsored religious apparatus that ought instead to have been consigned to the margins of any rational Jewish society and left to fund itself or to wither away. Their refusal to allow space for other ethnic and religious groups in Israeli society, their demands for self segregation and abhorrence of anything that is not Orthodox has produced a narrow minded, bigoted, vicious and deeply racist body of religious laws and cultural norms that are incompatible with a modern, democratic nation.

The comparison which she suggests best fits Israel is with Pakistan, another religious state set up after the second World War, and the comparison of Orthodox Judaism with Islamic fundamentalism is more than cutting. She lists off many common features of Islam and Judaism, and especially their more reactionary features. As a woman she shows an ability to discuss the Jewish and Islamic practice of circumcision in a detail and with an objectivity which - as she suggests - male writers (and perhaps readers) shrink from.

The resources are there for a fully integrated, multi-ethnic and religiously diverse single state to prosper, and the religious right repeatedly subvert the possibility. Palestinians do wish to integrate, do wish to live alongside Jews, do value the infusion of Western capital and technical expertise, do wish to contribute positively to the evolution of a modern, progressive, democratic state at peace with its neighbours within - and as part of - the Middle East. So too do secular and reform minded Jews who ought to be better represented in Israeli politics but fail to stand up against the religious right.

One major reason that such obscurantist religious leadership can sustain itself is the vast level of foreign - especially English speaking - interference. While this book does not review international affairs as such, it does include a passionate appeal to reject the racist ideals inspired by European influences in Israeli politics, and reviews instead the natural affinity and many shared values of Israelis with their Middle Eastern neighbours, from which she believes a far more positive and inspiring vision of the future can be drawn. Part of this appeal relies on a challenge to the racist (orientalist) caricature which refuses to appreciate the positive and productive qualities of Arab societies and of Jews within those societies, while claiming an enlightened European heritage that is at direct odds with the obscurantist, self segregating bigotry of Orthodox Jewish practice.