Israel marks 75th anniversary amid doubt and division

Israel celebrates its 75th anniversary this week in a contentious and uncertain environment, overshadowed by a court dispute that has opened up some of the sharpest societal divisions since 1948.

Memorial Day on Tuesday honors the nation’s military dead, while Independence Day a day later unites a nation that has fought multiple conflicts since its founding.

This year feels different.

“I am convinced that there is no greater existential threat to our people than the one that comes from within: Our own polarization and alienation from one another,” President Isaac Herzog addressed the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America in Tel Aviv this week.

Since the start of the year, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have protested Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s nationalist-religious government’s ambitions to limit the judiciary, which they view as an existential danger to democracy.

The government and its backers argue the changes are required to reign in activist judges who have aggressively intruded into parliament and the administration, but they agreed last month to halt the measures for more consultation.

But the protests have continued, and for many Israelis, the impasse has raised fundamental questions about their society that go beyond the Supreme Court’s makeup and the executive’s capacity to overrule it.

Tel Aviv high-tech business park developer Uzy Zwebner declares himself a patriot from a 19th-century Zionist family.

He is a veteran of the 1973 Yom Kippur war who was injured a day after his brother was slain battling the Egyptians in the Sinai. The new government has badly alienated this group.

“What kind of nation will we be?” Said he. Are we going to be a democracy, a modern nation? (One with) everyone in the army? Are we going to be like other countries surrounding us?”

DEEPERING DIVISIONS

He fears a severe worsening of Israel’s longstanding differences between European Ashkenazis and Middle Eastern Mizrahi, holy Jerusalem and relaxed Tel Aviv, and right-wing settlements and urban liberals.

Many Palestinians argue the debate ignores their concerns and the decades-long occupation of regions they want as the center of a future state because Israel’s Arab citizens, who make up a fifth of the population, have mostly kept out of it.

But the growing power of the religious parties that catapulted Netanyahu to power last year has frightened many secular Israelis, who often resent the special circumstances and subsidies that allow many Orthodox men to escape military duty and study in Torah schools rather than work.

The nationalist right accuses its detractors of failing to respect democracy, and an increasingly corrosive political climate has fuelled the hostility between “populists” and the “liberal elite” seen across the Western world.

According to a Channel 12 News survey last week, 51% of Israelis are pessimistic about the country’s future, which has developed from a poor, agricultural nation to a high-tech powerhouse in a lifetime.

“There’s a lot of fear in the air that gives way to hatred sometimes,” said Elisheva Blum, a resident of Eli, a town in the occupied West Bank. She claimed Israelis shouldn’t hate one other after moving to Israel with her religious family in 1988.

But she said she was alienated by demonstrators’ signs referencing Israel’s national song, such as “To be a free people in our land.”

“It bothers me,” she remarked. “The slogans are very close to home—we all want to be free in our land.” What does that mean?”