In Israel they are called “The Sabbath Wars”. Lately the battles have been back in full force. But this time the familiar scene of bearded black-cloaked ultra-Orthodox Jews facing off against police squads has transplanted itself from the downtown streets of Jerusalem to the parking lot of the city’s Intel factory.
This past weekend, for the second Saturday in a row, some 3,000 ultra-Orthodox did battle at the plant to protest the international computer chip giant’s employment of Jewish workers over the Sabbbath, saying such employment desecrates the holy day and violates Jewish law.
Ultra-Orthodox protesters chanted, “Shabbos, Shabbos” (Yiddish for the Sabbath) and called the policemen “Nazis” and - gasp - “Lefties”. The confrontations are being waged by an extreme sect within the ultra-Orthodox movement even after a deal was reportedly struck with more moderate religious elements not to employ Jews for Sabbath shifts at the plant.
Part of the irony of the protests (aside from the fact that a deal was already made that should answer the issue) is that most of those protesting do not work, living instead off government subsidies to study Torah. The presence of Intel in Jerusalem (it also has offices and a large chip-making factory in the country) is considered an important economic boon for the city which has seen its economy shrink and its secular population flee in recent years, partially in response to the rise in number and influence of the city’s most religious residents. Jerusalem, for all the talk of its political and historical importance by successive governments, now ranks as Israel’s poorest city.
Uri Regev, a reform rabbi who now heads Hiddush, an organization that promotes religious freedom and equality, told The Faster Times that one of the most disturbing factors of the protests is that “they threaten the continued operation of the Intel plant in Jerusalem, though it is one of the most important sources of employment and income for the city and the country.”
Writing yesterday in Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s largest daily, senior columnist Nahum Barnea asks the question being asked by many secular Israeli Jews lately of the ultra-Orthodox about the series of confrontations they have been launching recently, of which the Intel plant is one example.
He suggests the answer is the larger battle over the very character of Jerusalem itself, “whether it will be a city that is friendly to its visitors, pluralistic, a city that offers residents work and leisure, or whether it will be Bnei Brak (an almost exclusively ultra-Orthodox city). Since this is the capital, the battle goes beyond the interests of the residents of the city. It belongs to Israeli society as a whole.”
“The Israeli government speaks in high-flown terms about Jerusalem, but does very little for it. In this, it is no different from previous governments. In 1977, when the Likud replaced the Labor Party in the leadership of the state, then-mayor Teddy Kollek said, “We have gone from hostile rule to foreign rule.” What would he have said about the silence of the current government? He would probably have said that we have gone from foreign rule to no rule at all,” Barnea continues.
And Rabbi Regev, whose NGO recently did a survey of Israeli public attitudes on such issues adds, “It is unfortunate for Judaism and for Israel, that the debate over the nature of Shabbat in the modern democratic and Jewish State of Israel is dominated by the Ultra Orthodox. We should all respect Shabbat, as a key contribution of Judaism to world, as a day of rest and nourishment of the soul. The discussion as to the desirable boundaries and accommodations should invole the labor unions, the trade and commerce associations, secular, Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews alike (and non-Jewish Israelis as well). Shabbat is far too important to be left to the extremist religious fundamentalists alone.”
His colleague, Shahar Ilan, argues in an op-ed in today’s Haaretz newspaper that the ultra-Orthodox must urgently be acculturated into Israel’s workforce and their children taught subjects other than Torah study and their sons and daughters drafted into the army like other young Israelis. Otherwise, he warns darkly, nothing less than Israel’s future is at stake.
Without such changes, he writes, the phenomenal growth of the ultra-Orthodox population, “is liable to bring down Israel’s economy and society in 20 years, turning Israel into a third-world country with an atrophied economy and increasing disrespect for human rights. In the most pessimistic scenarios it could lead to a partition of the state, or to civil war. It has happened in other places. It could happen here.”
Ilan’s words may sound a bit alarmist, but as the Sabbath Wars threaten to rage on, driving a further wedge in the ever growing secular-religious divide here, one is reminded that Israel’s fate is not just about its relations with the Palestinians and its neighbors but the relations between its own citizens whose worlds increasingly seem to spin in entirely different orbits.
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