Events surrounding this year's Israel Independence Day (Yom
Ha'atzma'ut) provide important indications of current and
future social trends.
The biggest change this year was the violence by Israeli
Arabs against Yom Ha'atzma'ut. In the village of Shfaram,
there was a riot before and on Yom Ha'atzma'ut, including
rock throwing, fires and burning Israeli flags, as Arab
leaders, including members of Knesset, looked on approvingly.
They openly described the founding of the State of Israel as
nakba -- a catastrophe. Up to this year, the only
public images of Israeli Arabs on Independence Day have been
of loyal citizens celebrating along with the rest of the
State of Israel.
Needless to say, no pictures of Arabs burning Israeli flags
appeared in the papers under screaming headlines with opinion
pieces fanning the fires of dissension and questioning the
loyalty of Israel's Arab citizens. On the contrary. An
editorial in Ha'aretz, one of the leading daily
newspapers, asked, "The declaration of the leaders of the
Arab community that they will not celebrate Yom Ha'atzma'ut
this year, is merely a reaction to the many years in which
Arab politicians were forced to decorate their homes with
Israeli flags. What should the Arabs, citizens of the State
of Israel who see themselves as part of the Palestinian
people, celebrate on Yom Ha'atzma'ut? The expulsion and
tearing apart of their families?"
Their attempts to understand the Arab feelings apparently
helped them -- in one way or another -- to better understand
our feelings as well. In the same editorial, Ha'aretz
wrote, "The time has come to stop the game . . . of trapping
chareidim who do not stand silent and do not fly Israeli
flags. They have a right not to participate in the symbol of
the Zionist successes; they have a right to stick to their
way of life and to their faith."
As that paper noted, together the chareidim and the Arabs (an
association we do not welcome but cannot escape on occasion)
constitute more than a third of the citizenry of the State of
Israel. If you add a good portion of the million immigrants
from the former Soviet Union, many of whom came only because
they could not get into the U.S. and thus are not
particularly attached to the symbols of the State, you get
close to half the entire population.
If it is possible to understand the Arabs' perception of the
founding of the State, it should be possible to understand
our perception of the tragic aspects of the State. Though it
thankfully served, in its early years, as a refuge for
hundreds of thousands of Jews displaced by the Holocaust,
there are many other aspects that loom large in our image of
the State: the estranging of hundreds of thousands of Jewish
children from their cultural and religious traditions, the
ongoing attempt to create a "new Jew," and the continuing
trampling of traditional Jewish symbols like Shabbos.
As the secular intellectual leadership of Israel began to
show a more realistic attitude towards the national holiday,
the activity in national religious circles seemed
astonishingly out of touch. An article in Hatsofe
called for the rabbinate to rule that Al Hanissim
should be said on Yom Ha'atzma'ut, arguing that this would
"fill a void, . . . bring the people closer to their heritage
and draw many parts of the people to the beit
knesset." Can they really believe that is what is
missing?
Some things have changed in 52 years of Statehood, and some
have remained the same. We still pray for a geula
sheleimo, bekorov.
