In 2015, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin delivered a warning on the future of his country. “The ‘new Israeli order’ is not an apocalyptic prophecy,” he told a conference. “It is the reality.” The nation risked being split, Rivlin argued, into “four tribes” – secular, conservative and ultra-orthodox Jews, and Israeli Arabs – which would change the face of modern Israel.
This is not the division on which Europeans and Americans choose to fixate. The Israel-Palestine conflict monopolises the attention of observers. Occasional bouts of violence push it back into the headlines, bringing condemnation and concern from an intelligentsia unwilling to admit the death of the peace process. This is the arena of grand and futile ambitions, where Western statesmen’s dreams of a Nobel Peace Prize go to die.
Isabel Kershner’s arresting book, The Land of Hope and Fear, demonstrates that the enigma of Israel is best understood through a close analysis of its social makeup and potential breakdown. Seventy-five years after the nation’s founding, it’s convulsed by social and political turmoil. In 2021, Naftali Bennett, briefly Prime Minister, warned that the United Monarchy of David and Solomon had lasted just 80 years. The old guard of independence fighters, socialist statesmen and committed peacemakers is now gone: after the age of prophets, as it heads towards a tenebrous 80th anniversary, what is Israel to be?
Kershner, a British-born reporter, takes us through the fractious pieces of Israeli society with a swift eye and an eager commitment to the nation she calls home. Its Ashkenazi elite is being displaced, as Mizrahi Jews, the descendants of Middle Eastern immigrants, mobilise around Right-wing parties with Likud and Benjamin Netanyahu as their standard-bearers. Older resentments, from the early years of the state, still fester. In the 1950s, some babies of Mizrahi immigrants from Yemen disappeared from hospitals and the parents were given no cause of death, bodies or indication as to the whereabouts of their children’s graves. Some had been abducted and adopted by Ashkenazi families; the trauma still lingers. Meanwhile, Ultra-Orthodox or Haredi communities fiercely defend their interests, and their influence is growing as their society expands – Haredi families have, on average, seven children, as opposed to the national average of under three.
Netanyahu has been the beneficiary of these transformations, and become the centre-of-gravity around which all of Israeli politics is oriented. The labels of “pro-Bibi” and “anti-Bibi” offer sufficient metonyms for each faction in Israeli politics, which, on the latter side, include an eclectic mix of ultra-nationalist, centrist, socialist and Arab parties that would never typically work together. Netanyahu has been, Kershner writes, “a master of stoking ethnic tension to his advantage… The Mizrahim on the periphery formed the core of Likud’s – and Netanyahu’s – loyal base that had kept him in power so long.”
