Comment / Israel's religious system will bring to its demise (Haaretz Israel News)
The religious public was the first to fall into the cistern, but the state itself will follow shortly after. In its weakness, Israel has developed an autonomous, competing religious apparatus, one operating in stark opposition to the promises of Israel's Declaration of Independence for civil equality. Israel has passed racist legislation like the Citizenship Law, which prohibits Palestinians married to Israeli citizens from becoming naturalized citizens, and has brought the consequences of such legislation upon itself. It is no coincidence that the country now has a justice minister who calls for the legal system to be informed by Jewish juridical codes, as well as an interior minister driven by transparent racism and a foreign minister with a racist platform. As such, most Jewish first-graders in Israel receive a religious education explaining that the goyim are not human beings, that women are inferior and that the secular are deficient.
A similar process is taking hold across the Middle East and beyond. In Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, the world of the madrassa has swallowed the national-secular order completely.
This pattern is anything but coincidental. When the secular system allows religion to create a messianic bubble within it, it creates a hothouse that converts religion into reality and fosters the growth of violent sentiment with no room for those who are both pragmatic and religious.
Unless democratic, non-messianic forces in Israel unite, they will find that the existential threat to Israel is the religious-messianic threat both within and without. They must dismantle the religious-messianic autonomy, step by step, and restore equality, democracy and openness in Israeli society, or Israel will be no more.
Free the Kotel a 2nd time - Israel Opinion, Ynetnews
- Do you want to know how the Orthodox establishment in Israel bolsters its status? How it succeeds in creating institutions and functions, which are seemingly for the benefit of the public but which in practice deepen the systematic exclusion of non-Orthodox trends in Judaism and the alienation of world Jewry? The Kotel is a good example. More than 20 million shekels were given to the Western Wall Heritage Foundation in the course of one year, while the Masorati movement must provide all of its own equipment - Torah scrolls, Siddurs, and ushers - in order to enjoy a few hours a day in a certain section - I almost wrote “second-class section” - of the Western Wall.
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