It was the frogs that Yossi Werzansky wanted to hear. In the evenings, they would start up, calling to one another in the swampy field just beyond Werzansky's new home in suburban Pardess Hannah. Then one day came a different cacophony. Werzansky's new, ultra-Orthodox neighbors had set up a loudspeaker and were broadcasting sermons from a rented house they had turned into a synagogue. Infuriated, the community's secular majority retaliated, organizing a weekly Sabbath-night disco in the next house to outblast the worshippers. A fire bombing and a melee soon followed.
Such is the state of relations, generally, between religious and secular Israelis these days. As Israel celebrates its 50th anniversary, its citizens identify the rift over religion as their No. 1 problem. With the country well established and peace in the region a growing reality, Israelis are fighting among themselves as never before. "For 50 years, we had an external enemy who obliged us to lower the tenor of our internal tensions," says author A.B. Yehoshua. "But the external enemy doesn't unite us anymore."
The ensuing struggle is nasty and getting nastier. Cars have been stoned. Religious centers have been fire bombed. Excrement has been thrown. People on both sides have been assaulted on the street. A Prime Minister has been murdered. Says Menachem Friedman, a sociologist at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan: "We are really near the edge [of] where people can tolerate each other."
The conflict is rooted in an old and unresolved question of national identity: Is Israel a Jewish state, with the emphasis on Jewish, or is it a state for the Jews, a regular, modern, democratic place where Jews are in the majority? Israel's Zionist founders were almost exclusively secular--in many respects, antireligious--and they saw Judaism principally as a nationality. But in deference to tradition, and as a way of securing the support of the Orthodox minority, they made certain concessions to religion: restricting commerce on the Jewish Sabbath, for instance, and leaving such matters as marriage and burial in the exclusive hands of rabbinical authorities. In the past 20 years, religious political parties extracted further allowances as they joined various government coalitions.
Today Israel's secular majority is signaling that it has had enough. Says Ronni Milo, the mayor of Tel Aviv and a leader in the secular vanguard: "We are talking here of the basic rights of people to choose their own way of life."
The secularists have been reinforced by the immigration to Israel in the past decade of more than 800,000 people from the former Soviet Union, the vast majority of whom are nonreligious. Today two-thirds of Israelis define themselves as secular. Included within the religious third are 10% of the general population who belong to the ultra-Orthodox, or haredim (literally "those who fear"), distinguished by the black hats and robes worn by the men.
The religious minority has also become more assertive. Because of a recent reform of the voting system, religious parties did better in the last election than ever before, gaining 23 of 120 seats in the parliament. Now they are testing their power. Plus, the ranks of the religious are growing, in part because spirituality is flowering in Israel, and because the devout are so prolific.