Page 102 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

4 Holy Pirates: Media, Ethnicity,

and Religious Renewal in Israel

David Lehmann and Batia Siebzehner

A Society of Enclaves
Israel is a society of enclaves, and of profound cultural divisions. The
enclaves emerged in the way the country was settled, ¤rst in the quasi-legal
status of early Zionist settlement, and in the leading role played in that settle-
ment by highly centralized political parties parceling out power and space among
themselves, and later in the peculiar relationship (for a modern democracy) be-
tween religion and the state. The pattern is graphically described by Swirski
1
(1999), who uses the term “micro-societies” and by Horowitz and Lissak (1987)
in their discussion of social enclaves.
The notion of enclaves is both territorial and analytical: it describes dis-
tinct de facto enclaves inhabited, for example, by the highly observant ultra-
Orthodox Jews, by the secular, even by the fairly observant Arab population—
and the settlements in occupied territories are an extension of the same principle;
it also describes the parceling out of state bureaucracies or departments as ¤ef-
doms to particular parties or factions. It can even be seen in the way governing
coalitions are formed: once a party has a minister in place, that minister is in
effect the owner of his or her ministry and does not seem to be bound by col-
2
lective Cabinet responsibility. Beyond these tangible enclaves are the less tan-
gible ones: people signal their religious or political allegiance in how they dress,
in whether they speak Yiddish, in what they eat and where they shop, even in
how they walk on the street. Given that religious life is deeply marked by con-
cepts of pollution and the proliferating taboos arising therefrom, it is hardly
surprising that the social and territorial space of the country is criss-crossed by
an in¤nite number of additional boundaries.
3
Institutional enclaves are seen in rabbinical control over family law, and
therefore over nationality law, but also in the in®uence of rabbinic authorities
over vast areas of public life, from the El-Al ®ight timetable to the subsidies
accorded to hundreds of thousands of full-time young and adult Torah stu-
dents (who neither work nor serve in the army) and their vast families (average
fertility of eight), and to the institutions in which they study. Enclaves mean
muscle, and the ultra-Orthodox exercise their muscle in issues of Sabbath ob-
servance just as West Bank settlers exercise theirs territorially and politically.
Likewise state-funded education is divided, for the Jewish population, into a