Views cracks in Israeli society. enjoys childhood memories Intimations of implosion
How Long Will Israel Survive?
Hurst, £20
Reviewed by Vernon Bogdanor
GREGG CARLSTROM is the Israel correspondent for The Times and the Economist, and a seasoned Israel-watcher. He believes that the threat to Israel’s survival comes not from its outside enemies but, as his book’s sub-title states, “from within” — from its own citizens. For it has become a society divided against itself and disfigured by racism not only against Arabs but also against Ethiopians and Sephardim. Its political system is dysfunctional and its leadership unable to look beyond shortterm electoral considerations.
In Israel, as in Britain and the United States, liberalism seems to be in retreat against the forces of populism and dislike of the other. “I can’t believe it,” a waitress in secular Tel Aviv told Carlstrom when she heard the outcome of the 2015 Israeli election, “I don’t know anyone who voted Likud”. Liberals in New York and California said something similar. They knew no one who had voted for Trump.
But illiberalism in the US, and indeed in Britain, attracts primarily older voters. If only millennials had voted, Hillary Clinton would have won by a landslide and UKIP would never have got off the ground. In Israel, by contrast, the young are both more religious and less liberal than their elders. “Left-wing rallies,” Carlstrom has noticed, “are a sea of grey hair; right-wing protests are filled with youthful energy”. A poll in 2016 found that nearly half of Jewish high-school students do not believe that Arab citizens should have the right to vote. Long division: irresolvable clash between set and progressive religious opinions at the Kotel in Jerusalem
If the book has a hero, it is Israel’s President, Reuven Rivlin, who, in an important speech at Herzliya in 2015, drew attention to a fundamental transformation in Israeli society, by which, from being a society of a majority and minorities, it was becoming one based on four tribes: secular Jews, Orthodox Jews, Charedim and Arabs. Israel, the president believed, needed to develop “a new concept of partnership” between the tribes. “Clarification of the essence of that partnership is the task of all of Israeli society”.
Each sector deserved security, but also needed to accept responsibility
for the future of the state on a basis of equity and equality. The president was right, but his solution would require a radical reform of the Israeli political system so that it can give practical effect to the principle of power-sharing as, for example, the Swiss system of government does, or, nearer home, Northern Ireland, another deeply divided society.
Carlstrom is, it seems to me, too optimistic concerning the prospects of peace with the Palestinians; and his comparisons of Israel with Putin’s Russia and Erdogan’s Turkey are absurd. Democratic institutions in Israel are far more robust than that. But he is not
totally one-sided, and he is fair in presenting the evidence on which his critique is based.
Potential readers should not be put off by his catchpenny title. How Long Will Israel Survive? is an informed book, whose criticisms are based on a real and genuine concern for the future of the state. They should be pondered carefully by all those who wish Israel well.
Vernon Bogdanor is Professor of Government at King’s College, London and a member of the International Advisory Board of the Israel Democracy Institute. The Pinocchio Brief