a short essay on the complexity of Israeli society

Here I want to collect some thoughts about my brief month in modern Israeli society, taken from some self-study and also from soaking up the culture wide-eyed and curious. Many of the opinions I form exclusively from my stay in Israel thus far and I only focus on observations/essays/movies I have encountered therein. The result is a string of thoughts about the way I perceive social situations and interaction among different people groups in Eretz Israel.

One older American man, now immigrant to this country, said that he thought this was one of the most complex societies he has ever come across. I might even consider Israel a sociological/anthropological paradise, with so many congregating cultures (race/religion/ways of life) coming to live under one banner. This cultural division goes beyond the simply Israeli/Arab division that the Western media is so fond of capitalizing on. When we start talking about the plethora of different people groups coming to create a new immigrant-based country, it begins to sound a lot like America. Yet before we start to make too many comparisons between the two, I venture on a limb to say that there are exceptions to every rule in Eretz Israel, which is not how I would immediately describe the United States.

Take for example the Druze people, Arab on the surface yet distinct from the wider collective of "Arab", owners of their own religion deeply embedded in their ethnicity. I have learned that they come from Egypt long ago and their beliefs are a distant off-shoot of Islam. Without looking too deeply into them, one is tempted to categorize these people with other Israeli-Arabs (who themselves are not limited to being Palestinian, per se). The Druze live as a sort of minority status within their own country, which they love, although the state takes very little interest or concern for them. This last thought I paraphrase from my Israeli friend Gil, who commented to me about them. Another film in Israel I saw recently, called Syrian Bride, explores the hardship of the Druzi people, spread throughout upper Israel, Lebanon, and Syria. Some have chosen "non-state" status, choosing to be neither Israeli or Syrian, simply Druzi. This quickly becomes a complicated issue according to laws, rights, and border control, as the film Syrian Bride adequately shows.

Another complex facet of Israeli society is the Jewish question: who is Jewish? What are the cultural stereotypes of Jews and what arises in your mind when you consider these people? A book I have been perusing from the University of Haifa library, The Flying Camel, collects many essays of like-minded Sephardic and Mizrahi (Eastern) Jewish women across North Africa and the Middle East. They, primarily Arab in constituency, comprise the voice of the overlooked and often oppressed Jewish segment of Arab societies, many of whom have immigrated to Israel to be with their religious brethren. Their dark skin and Judeo-Arabic tongue immediately classifies them as more Arab than Jewish, but who set up this split? The point of the book is that the term "Jewish" is not solely explicating Eastern-European, klezmer-listening, black-hat-and-long-beard-dressing Jews, but that the Jewish people have a rich history across the Middle East and Africa that breaks the Western (and Ashkenazi) perception of Jewish heritage and ownership of culture.

So far I have seen a wide variety of people groups: from Ethiopians, to Russians, to Arab-Israelis whose families have lived in the land before the first Zionists came to claim the state for their own. On more than one account, I have been mistaken for a Russian girl and native Israeli. In this land is where a multitude of cultures clash and interweave to create new culture, comprised of various elements into a sabra (nickname for an Israeli) culture. Not everyone has molded perfectly into this collective stereotype, and it is thus difficult to make any stereotype at all, for each person carries with him a history of his own people, his own beliefs, and ways of life that make him distinct from the collective. Some have done better than others to carve out what it means to be a sabra-Israeli, but considering the ultra-religious Ashkenazi Jews still wear the black fedora and black suits that they did in Poland some hundred years ago, they have simply brought the ways of life and transplanted them into a new land.

These traditional cultural practices from different social groups, mixed with a great deal of wariness towards imported traditions and minority peoples' traditions, produces a very interesting and complex dynamic in the tiny state of Israel, bursting with complexity and depth.