Shlomo Hasson (editor). Published by the Florsheimer Institute for Policy Studies (159 p., 02-5666243)
Yoav Peled
The problem with experts, as David Ben-Gurion said, is that they are all experts on what happened. Attempts to use what has been to predict what will be are generally doomed to failure, at least in the social sciences. This can be evidenced, among other things, by the failures of the experts to predict the Yom Kippur War, the loss of the Labor Party in the elections, 1977, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and many other cases (and many of the informed readers of these lines will surely be happy to add to the list some resounding failures of my own) .
Still, on what basis can we try and evaluate future developments, if not based on past experience? One of the ways to try and predict the future, and at the same time avoid the risk involved in an unequivocal forecast, is to draw "scenarios" that describe a variety of future possibilities, without committing to the degree of likelihood of one of them materializing. The question is, what can we, or the policy makers for whom these scenarios are drawn up, learn from the various scenarios?
The book before us presents scenarios relating to the future of relations between religious and secular people in Israel. To the authors of the scripts, it can be said that they understood very well that this question cannot be separated from all the other questions at hand, such as
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Jewish-Palestinian relations within Israel, the economy, immigration to and from Israel, etc., so that the scripts they wrote actually refer to the future of Israeli society in general. The scenarios are compounds of assumptions that refer to the fundamental questions of society, with scores (plus or minus) and in different mixes: the Israeli-Arab conflict will settle or intensify, the economy will decline or flourish, the increase/decline will increase or decrease, the power of the ultra-Orthodox/left/right will increase or decrease , and so'.
Although the book was published in 2002, it was created and born during the Oslo process, and the basic assumptions on which the various mixes are based are anchored in this period. The rise in prominence of the secular-religious divide in Israel during the XNUMXs stemmed from the feeling that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was about to be resolved. The connection between the two things does not only come down to the statement, which is correct in itself, that in the absence of an external threat, internal disputes increase.
The secular-religious divide has a more fundamental connection with the Israeli-Arab conflict. Zionism's need for Jewish-religious legitimacy is directly proportional to the intensity of the conflict. As the cost of the Zionist enterprise increases, in terms of Jewish blood and blood, but also in terms of Arab blood, the questions arise more strongly, is all this worthwhile? Is all this justified? The Jewish religion is the most reliable source of arguments that allow giving positive answers to these questions. From this derive both the growing religiosity of Jewish society in Israel in the period after 1967 and the rapid secularization of a part of it after the Oslo Accords.
The writers of the scripts in the book refer to the connection between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the religious-secular divide only in the first, more superficial meaning of the balance between external threat and internal solidarity. This is how they manage to deal with the failure of the Oslo process without it affecting the internal logic of the scripts. They do this in one of two ways: either the renewed outbreak of the conflict is presented as a short-term interruption to the basic process of conflict resolution, or the continuation of the conflict is presented as actually removing it from the public agenda (if there is no one to talk to on the other side, it's a shame to argue between us), and so it remains A wide living space for questions of religion and state.
In fact, as we know today, the conflict goes on and on, with low or high intensity, and at the same time it does not fall off the public agenda (and there are, on both sides, those who make sure it stays on the agenda). What has largely dropped from the public agenda is precisely the secular-religious divide. The reason for this, as mentioned, is the essential connection between the conflict and the legitimacy needs of Zionism. It is this relationship that is behind the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon that precisely when the burden of military service was on the decline (does anyone still remember the talk about shortening mandatory service and the reserves?), the exemption given to ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students became the hottest political issue, and when the burden has now increased considerably, The issue disappeared from the agenda.
So what can be learned from the scenarios about the future of Israeli society? In my opinion, not much, for two main reasons. First, in the absence of a guiding super-argument, or any theoretical framework, the readers of the scenarios have no way to assess the likelihood of this or that scenario coming to fruition. Therefore, if the readers are policymakers, the scripts do not provide them with the predictive infrastructure they need for policymaking. Second, the scenarios cannot, by their very nature, take into account occurrences that did not have any precedent in the past. The course of Israel's history in the last decade, so it can at least be argued, was determined by two events that could not have been predicted in any way: Rabin's assassination and September 11. Today we are, apparently, on the brink of another event that also could not have been foreseen before September 11: another American attack on Iraq, whose results, unpredictable, could change the face of the entire Middle East. The scenario predicting that religious-secular relations in Israel will be affected by the results of this attack more than by any "internal" Israeli development is a scenario no less likely than any of the scenarios that appear in the book.
The article was published in Haaretz newspaper. The knowledge site was at that time part of the IOL portal of the Haaretz group
