Is Israel a failing state? - analysis

If you look up the definition of a failed state, the general explanation of the term is a country where the writ of the government does not extend to large parts of the population.

The State of Israel has approximately nine million souls, so what does it mean when at least 5% of those citizens are more inclined to adhere to the instructions of their rabbis than the laws passed by their elected government?

On Sunday morning, tens of thousands of haredi (ultra-Orthodox) families, comprising around half a million citizens, chose to send their children to school in defiance of the government’s instructions to keep those schools closed and the children at home.

A large proportion of those families were following the instructions of Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, the 92-year-old leader of the Ashkenazi, non-hassidic haredi community who insists that studying Torah, which comprises by far the largest component in the majority of ultra-Orthodox schools, “protects and saves” from physical harm.

The events on Sunday comprise the largest incident of civil disobedience ever witnessed in the Jewish state, according to Prof. Yedidya Stern, an expert on haredi society at the Israel Democracy Institute.

It is an event in which one societal group, en masse, has openly flouted and defied the law, choosing instead to follow the opinion of a source of authority other than the government.

Moreover, this was not a group of anti-Zionist extremists from the depths of Mea She’arim, but a massive slice of the haredi mainstream. They are people who vote in national and municipal elections, who have a good understanding of broader Israeli society – and many of them, especially the women, have jobs.

Nevertheless, on Sunday, the belief of the ultra-Orthodox community in the concept of “Da’at Torah” – the idea that great Torah scholars have an innate ability to make the right decisions on temporal matters regardless of their lack of expertise on such issues – outweighed their commitment to the law.

These events represent a challenge to the State of Israel on a level previously unthought of until the coronavirus pandemic.

Although the haredi community has for a long time been largely exempt from military service, these exemptions were granted under the sanction of the law.

The extremists on the military-service issue have marked themselves out by refusing to even formally receive their exemption at IDF enlistment offices, while the vast majority of the ultra-Orthodox mainstream made sure to lawfully receive that exemption.

But today, at the beginning of the school semester, that same majority chose to politely ignore the law and take their children to school.

What Sunday’s event presages for the future of the Jewish state is unclear. The COVID-19 pandemic has magnified the country’s already troubling societal divisions, and it is possible that once this crisis recedes, so too will the clashes it has spawned.

But Israel faces no small number of external challenges besides this current health crisis. If a large and growing portion of the population does not feel it is part of the national effort to protect the very lives of the nation, the government and the country at large will need to think about how it will tackle its other challenges in the future.