O Zion

If the Christians ever get their way here and establish an official state religion, this is the scene we can look forward to once the various denominations launch their holy wars over who is a True Believer and who an apostate and, not incidentally, which sect should get the reins of state control and channel to itself the juicy subsidies.

Israel’s rival Hasidic Jews are going at it again in what calls itself a religious democracy, exposing that contradiction in terms more deeply with every passing day. The zionist founders having created their state on the apartheid principle that members of their religious group would have special privileges over and above the territory’s indigenous populations, modern-day Israelis now must face the conundrum of deciding who is the truest of the true Jews.

It’s not an idle debate as wealth, land and power are at stake. Having enabled and empowered the orthodox, then the ultra-orthodox, then the ultra-ultra-orthodox, pumped up their nationalistic and enthusiastically racist tendencies, allowed them to become a Jewish Ku Klux Klan and roam with impunity over the conquered 1967 territories, subsidized their yeshiva network and pandered to their narrow-minded, confessional political parties, Israeli society now faces a Frankenstein slipping ever further out of the superficially secular authorities’ control.

The controversy described into today’s New York Times reminds me of the demented disputes chronicled in Gao Yuan’s breathtaking Born Red about his adolescence in the midst of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. He narrates how ever more purist revolutionary factions sprang up among his classmates as groups of inflamed teenaged ideologues without enough common sense to slice bread competed to denounce more of their teachers, seize school buildings and even kill each other.

That’s merely a variation on what the Yahweh-fearing Hasidim are on about, with their banners threatening ‘Don’t Touch the Messiah’ hanging from the schoolyard rafters and their religious paraphernalia. As long as they merely ostracized and abused Arab non-Jews, no one much cared. But it was inevitable that eventually each fraction would insist that they and only they know how to be Jews and that everyone else is an irrelevant and probably dangerous imitation. And thus the religious whirlygig of time brings its nasty revenge onto the Jewish state.


Our own Founding Fathers, imperfect as they were, knew better than to start up the new nation with people ripping each other’s eyes out over religion. They wrote the disestablishment clause into the Bill of Rights, and the country has had a flourishing religious culture ever since, strengthened by the hands-off position of the state. Battles over belief are as rampant as ever, but they do not lead to coups d’état or public burnings of heretics—or haven’t yet. The Bible-thumpers don’t know how lucky they are and how the strict dividing line between church and state keeps them relatively united instead of plotting how to kill each other.