Israel is changing: Here are the key tribes and trends involved - opinion

Forget the ideological battles. Most Israelis have settled on a rather pragmatic view of the ideal Jewish nation-state.

Roughly speaking, the common vision is that Israel must be a country where Jews feel sufficiently at home that they can develop their own culture and traditions without the threat of persecution or assimilation. This entails two things: the basic elements of a national home – language, calendar, symbols, immigration policies, robust security, connections with Jews around the world; and liberty for individuals and communities to develop their traditions as they see fit.

To understand the emergence of this unifying Israeli vision, let’s first sketch, in somewhat simplistic terms, the different Israeli tribes that are only now beginning to unite around it.

I’ll call the tribe that evolved from the legacy of Labor Zionism the “Blue Tribe.” They tend to cosmopolitanism and identify less with a continuous Jewish religious tradition with ancient roots than with a modern Israeli ethos that seeks to overcome what they see as the flaws of tradition: piety, passivism, and bigotry. With increased affluence, their focus has shifted from socialist economics to general opposition to oppression – and the definition of the oppressed has broadened from the workers of the world to Palestinians to women and gays. Blues played a central role in laying the groundwork for the state and still dominate the upper echelons of Israel’s unelected institutions – the army and other security branches, state-licensed media, the justice system, state-funded universities, professional guilds, and public labor unions.

There are many small tribes that are not part of the Blue Tribe – Revisionists, Mizrahim, Religious Zionists, haredim, and others – each distinct from the Blue Tribe in its own ways. In recent years, these disparate groups have gradually munged into what I’ll call the “Orange Tribe.”

Members of this tribe share a deep respect for Jewish tradition and conservatism generally, and an abiding resentment of the Blues. The Orange Tribe is increasingly defined by traditionalism, hawkishness, communitarianism, and populism, but it remains an amalgam of disparate sub-tribes so that the fringes of each – especially those for whom elitism is particularly attractive – sometimes defect to the Blues. The Oranges are less concerned about the oppression of the weak than about the barbarism of the uncivilized.

Roughly speaking, the Blues control Israel’s institutions, but the Oranges win elections.

In short, Israeli society, once fragmented across multiple axes – religion, ethnicity, security, economics, nationalism, and elitism – has now largely realigned along a singular axis, which I’ve termed “Orange vs Blue.” However, this division isn’t as binary as it may seem. The Israeli population’s distribution along this axis resembles a bell curve – with most clustering in the middle, despite pronounced extremes. At the peak, or center, of this bell curve, there is a median voter – the voter whose position is exactly in the middle of the political spectrum. The elected official who represents this voter is able to align with parties on either side and thus holds all the political cards.

With this insight, we can pinpoint three key trends.

Three key trends that will lead to a changed Israel

First, for some years now the center of the bell, the median voter, has been slowly shifting Orangeward. Second, the center of the bell has been getting higher and narrower as Israelis increasingly coalesce around the pragmatic vision near the center, even as the extremes become more vocal. Third, both Israel’s mostly Orange-elected governments and its mostly Blue unelected institutions have suffered declining prestige.

The war has accelerated each of these trends.

First, the war has propelled the median voter further toward the Orange view, with concerns over barbarism taking precedence over the oppression narrative. The romanticized perception of our adversaries as victims, who could be mollified with the promise of autonomy, economic progress, and condescending sympathy, has been discredited.

The naive approach to peace has revealed its costs, exposing a profound misjudgment of human nature. Worse, it turns out that for many of our supposed allies abroad, using the wrong pronoun is a greater offense than beheadings and rape; the world’s most under-refined people and its most over-refined people seem to share a taste for Judeophobia.

Second, even during the most contentious battles over judicial reform, most Israelis wanted a compromise. The war has clarified just how great is the need for unity – or at least sane public discourse. The appetite for doctrinal purity, Orange or Blue, has greatly diminished.

Finally, both the government and the establishments have faced severe and justified criticism for not anticipating the catastrophe that precipitated this war.

The Blues point out the government’s failings as a result of cronyism, sectarianism, and complacency. The Oranges observe that the military’s general staff has been inbred for mediocrity and conformity, and its legal advisers, meant to aid military goals, have often done the opposite.

When the war ends, Israel will have an opportunity to reset. The most profound changes will be cultural and social rather than political, but here I speak of politics.

The war will usher in a generational transition – the generation of the soldiers who united in battle will gradually begin to lead our country. The current Orange government will be succeeded by a new coalition with fresh faces. This new coalition’s central challenge will be to rebuild Israel’s old institutions, freeing them from stale Blue groupthink. Less Blue entitlement; less Orange resentment. One nation united.

I am not naïve. Old establishments have myriad ways to cling to power, and this will take time. But I am convinced that as the next generation assumes the mantle of leadership, we will witness the realization of the median voter’s pragmatic vision, the millennial dream of the Jewish people: a strong and resilient state where the free and organic development of Jewish life and culture is not just possible, but a reality.

The authentic growth of Israeli Judaism, emerging naturally and accepted broadly, will be the defining journey of the next generation. 

The writer is chairman of the Kohelet Policy Forum.