- Fault Lines versus Fissures and Fractures
It is time for a segue, from the Italian segue, “follows.” A segue transitions from one topic or section to the next. This segue transitions from the first three sections on Communications, Divisiveness and Economics to the sections on Governance, War, and the Judicial system. The earlier sections that preceded this were about tears, were about rifts in the nation and the body politic. My argument is that, as terrible as these were, they were only flesh wounds. They heal over time. Or, at least, if they do not mend but separate groups into isolated silos, in themselves these silos do not seek to damage one another.
Faults, in this case, are cracks in the demosphere parallel to cracks in the earth itself in the lithosphere. The movement of the population tectonic plates result in stress and a brittle response as a minimum. In the case of the Palestinian-Jewish Israeli fault line, it is not just brittle. War after war, earthquake after earthquake has followed.
There are three forms of stress, from tension, from compression and from shear. In the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, the two tectonic plates are neither moving away from each other, resulting in tension, nor moving towards each other, compression; rather, the Jewish demographic plate has passed on top of the Palestinian one transforming the boundaries at which the two plates slide past one another.
This is not just a metaphor or analogy. Rather, the demographic and ideological conflict lies at a much deeper level than the military (or governance tensions dealt with in a separate section) and violent one for it is NOT resolvable by any peace agreement. A peace agreement cannot stop these demographic tensions. At best, they can mitigate the force and violence of the clashes. And that is the main message of this segue.
Finally, the division between most Jews in Israel and the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are expressions of an extremely dangerous fault line with the stress on the shear threatening to explode in a way that will make the first and second intifadas look like minor test runs and warning earthquakes of a much stronger one to come.
Any survey of social and class differences in Israel will reveal cleavages, multiple cleavages. But the groups and sub-groups that form are fluid. They shift over time. They grow or shrink as we move on. Thus, if we posit a gap between the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox in Israel versus the progressive elements in the Jewish religious population, where do we place the egalitarian Orthodox groups? These have been growing. In 2018, they performed approximately one thousand marriages. The next year it was 1800.[i]
But in other areas we find both growth and shrinkage. There are now over 125 Reform or Conservative (Masorti) congregations in Israel. 8-10 Reform rabbis are ordained each year. There is a Reform rabbi as a member of the Knesset and the Environmental Minister is a Conservative who lives on a Conservative religious kibbutz. Progressive Orthodox rabbis conduct 400 conversions a year. More spectacularly, 12-13% of Jews in Israel (800,000) identify as Reform or Conservative. Those rabbis perform marriages, some even same-sex marriages, but those marriages are neither legal nor recognized by the state.[ii] The numbers who identify may be growing, but the percentage affiliated have been shrinking. This is a global pattern.
These figures are telling in another way. The vast majority have nothing or little to do with organized religion. Conservative and Reform Judaism are both in general decline. Larger shifts lie ahead. The younger generation is turning less and less to the sort of institutions and the forms of Judaism that were strong in the second half of the 20th century. As for Orthodoxy, as indicated above, in the words of Schiff, “There is no one thing called ‘Orthodoxy.’ Orthodoxy comprises a range of different types of observance. There are those who call themselves modern Orthodox; there are those who call themselves Hasidic; there are those who have more of a Yeshiva-type orientation. All these forms of Judaism, which are lumped together under the heading of Orthodoxy, are really quite distinct one from the other.”[iii]
Tears in the flesh of the body politic of the nation do not a crisis make. Instead, it is the very structural elements that lead to fractures and not just tears. And some are compound fractures that break through the flesh. Then, conflict becomes pervasive and society fractures; the result may be a failed state.
However, fractures are the result of falls. Fractures are the result of external blows. And these alone are insufficient to result in a failed state. Look at Ukraine as it fights its war with Putin. Its sense of identity and mission have both grown as the infrastructure is being blown to smithereens. In the case of Israel, there are even deeper problems than fissures or fractures. Israel has been constructed on two very fundamentally different fault lines. There are deeper divides than rifts or fissures in the flesh of the body politic.
There are even deeper divides than the different sides in intra-state and inter-state wars and between political coalitions that make governance work by engaging in compromise. These divisions are the results of history and the formation of nation states. Some countries, Norway is an example, are not built on areas of the globe where tectonic plates meet and where the boundaries between them shift to make up a system of faults. In the case of Israel, it is doubly handicapped built on two vastly different fault lines. As much as they may intersect, they are radically dissimilar.
One fault can be referred to as the east-west fault line. The two clashing tectonic plates consist of the Palestinians and Jewish Zionists. The Palestinians believe that they, and their Arab brothers who joined and moved in with them, deserved to have a state of their own when the modern world was evolving and independent nation states were emerging, especially after the end of WWI. After all, at their core, they constituted the majoritarian indigenous population.
But there never was a fixed dominant ethnic population in Palestine and what became Israel. Jews may have been the dominant majority of the first four centuries of the common era with a Christian minority living among them. But by the fifth century they had become the minority and the Christians the majority. However, by the end of the 12th century, the Christians in turn were reduced to a minority and the Muslims became the majority which they maintained until the twentieth century. And when that majority was threatened by an influx of Zionist Jews intent on re-establishing their ancient nation-state in Palestine, the religious differences between Muslims and Christians became subsumed under the common Arabic ethnicity and culture of both groups as they resisted the influx of these newcomers who threatened their own emerging nationalism.
In 1890, the total population of Palestine was just over half a million. 20% were Christians and Jews and Christians made up a slightly larger proportion of the population than Jews. But by 1914, those proportions had shifted; Jews outnumbered Christians. By the 1920s, when the Balfour Declaration was in effect and the international community had agreed to support the recreation of a national homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine, the total population of Palestine had grown to three-quarters of million, the vast majority Muslim Arabs. Jews then constituted 12% of the population. By 1947, the total population had reached almost two million as both Arabs and Jews moved into Palestine, but Jews now made up about one-third of the population. The Arab increase mostly came from a “natural” increase in the population rather than migration.
These were the tectonic plates rubbing against one another – an Arab population expecting and desiring its own national self-determination and a Jewish population with the same goals for itself. They rubbed against each another and, despite all the efforts of the international community, or perhaps because of them, war broke out. The Jewish tectonic plate now floated on top of the Arab Muslim one. The two populations had shifted positions radically in their ratios and total numbers as Jewish refugees from Europe and Arab lands flowed in and 720,000 Arab Palestinians fled or were forced to flee. In Israel proper, out of a population of almost 900,000 Palestinian Arabs, only 156,000 remained. But the rest of Palestine remained almost entirely Arab Palestinian.
In the last seventy-five years, the numbers of Jews have continued to increase as did the territory they controlled, discounting Gaza and the occupied territories of the West Bank that they did not control. As of 2014, Israeli and Palestinian statistics for the overall numbers of Jews and Arabs in the area west of the Jordan, inclusive of Israel and the Palestinian territories, are similar and suggest a rough parity in the two populations. Palestinian statistics estimate 6.1 million Palestinians for that area, while Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics estimates 6.2 million Jews living in sovereign Israel. Gaza has 1.7 million and the West Bank 2.8 million Palestinians, while Israel proper has 1.7 million Arab citizens.
According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, as of May 2006, of Israel’s 7 million people, 77% were Jews, 18.5% Arabs, and 4.3% “others”.[v] Among Jews, 68% were Sabras (Israeli-born), mostly second or third-generation Israelis, and the rest are olim – 22% from Europe and the Americas, and 10% from Asia and Africa, including the Arab countries.
The reality is that the population tectonic plates have shifted in weight and position as the fault lines between them have also shifted. Faults, in this case, are cracks in the demosphere parallel to cracks in the earth itself in the lithosphere. The movement of the population tectonic plates result in stress and a brittle response as a minimum. In the case of the Palestinian-Jewish Israeli fault line, it is not just brittle. War after war, earthquake after earthquake has followed.
There are three forms of stress, from tension, from compression and from shear. In the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, the two tectonic plates are neither moving away from each other, resulting in tension, nor moving towards each other, compression; rather, the Jewish demographic plate has passed on top of the Palestinian one transforming the boundaries at which the two plates slide past one another.
This is not just a metaphor or analogy. Rather, the demographic and ideological conflict lies at a much deeper level that the military (or governance tensions – more on this when the second fault line is discussed) and violent one for it is NOT resolvable by any peace agreement. A peace agreement cannot stop these demographic tensions. At best, they can mitigate the force and violence of the clashes. And that is the main message of this segue.
Finally, the division between most Jews in Israel and the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are expressions of an extremely dangerous fault line with the stress on the shear threatening to explode in a way that will make the first and second intifadas look like minor test runs and warning earthquakes of a much stronger one to come.
Recall that the fault lone in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is nether one of tension resulting from the two sides pulling apart nor of compression when both sides are forced to occupy the same political space. The fault line is a shear with the Israeli tectonic plate overrunning the Palestinian one. A shear is one of opposing political structural forces resulting inherently in slippage on a plane and inevitable failure. If it is a single entity, but with the force moving downwards from the polis above with the force coming upward from the polis below, the entity will fracture. It will not lead to a single state solution but to an enormous explosion and disintegration of both that part of the plate on top and that on the bottom. For the lateral movement of the plate on top when it meets an immovable object – the Palestinians in the West Bank are not going anywhere – disaster is the ultimate result. The Palestinians may be forced to occupy a smaller and smaller area, but the compression within may explode first and produce a reactionary explosion on the upper shear plate.
Unless, of course, the situation is stabilized and is no longer moving. But if it is, and the compression underneath increases, as I have said, an explosion is inevitable. When Palestinians are unable to resist the shear force to withstand the push, then disaster cannot be prevented. The compression underneath increases, and then BOOM! Most Israeli liberals have turned their backs on the clash of forces in the hope that it will stabilize, but the creeping annexation has ensured that it will not stabilize. Shear loads must be balanced and distributed. Compression through a superficial unity or through the top force continuing to move forward in its clash with the weaker force beneath are both doomed strategies that lead to catastrophic failures on all sides.
[i] A 2019 Panim study found that at least 2,610 private Jewish wedding ceremonies were held outside the auspices of the OrthodoxRabbinate in 2018, an increase of 7% from the previous year. (https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2019-12-04/ty-a…)
[ii] Even same sex marriages have been performed, though they are neither recognized nor legal. Within Israel, only Orthodox marriages certified by the Chief Rabbinate are recognized. On Aug 19, 2018, Pola Barkan, 28, director of the Cultural Brigade that promotes Russian culture in Israel, married Mark Barkan, 29. (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/19/world/middleeast)
[iii] Cf. Danny Schiff, Judaism in a Digital Age: An Ancient Tradition Confronts a Transformative Era.
[iv] Central Bureau of Statistics, Government of Israel. “Population, by religion and population group” (PDF). See also Central Bureau of Statistics, Government of Israel. “Jews and others, by origin, continent of birth and period of immigration” (PDF).
Howard Adelman 