STATES:

If you're at all interested in the future of the State of Israel, you need to read the speech that Israeli President Reuven Rivlin delivered to the 15th Annual Herziliya Conference in early June on what he termed the "real Israel" -- a country he argues is now divided into four tribes growing increasingly apart. [...]

In his speech, which was delivered in front of Israel's political and security establishment, Rivlin began mundanely enough by describing the changing composition of a typical Israeli first-grade class. In the 1990s, that class would have comprised a large secular Zionist majority with three accompanying minority groups: national religious Israelis, Arab Israelis, and Israeli Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox). Today, that same class looks radically different, Rivlin said: 38 percent are still secular Israelis, 15 percent are considered "national religious," 25 percent are Arabs, and nearly the same number is Haredim. The result, the president argued, is that there is no longer a clear Israeli majority. Instead, he sees four population groups or "tribes" different in character but also growing closer in size.

Numbers are always open to question. Birthrates are variable. But the trend lines over time reflect a pretty dramatic change in the character of the stakeholders that comprise Israeli society. According to a 2012 report by Israel's Central Bureau of statistics, by 2059, Israeli Arabs will make up 23 percent of the population and Haredi Jews 27 percent. Israeli society has been riven by differences since the inception of the state. And those divides have grown and also include differences between left and right, rich and poor, Ashkenazi and Sephardi. But Rivlin's takeaway is that unlike those divides, the current differences between the four tribes are much harder to bridge.

He asserts:

"Each tribe has its own media platforms, newspapers they read, the television channels they watch. Each tribe also has its own towns, Tel Aviv is the town of one tribe, just as Umm el Fahm is the town of another, as is Efrat, and Bnei Brak. Each represents the town of a different tribe. In the State of Israel the basic systems that form people's consciousness are tribal and separate, and will most likely remain so. I do not want to oversimplify with rough generalizations. Obviously, this division is neither absolute nor all-embracing. No population sector is in itself a single element, but rather comprises a varied range of members; and there are of course, also common areas between the sectors. However, it is also important we do not ignore, whether through blindness or denial, that it is not the marginal elements of each sector that create the huge gaps between them."

Rivlin worries that these new divides are fundamentally changing the nature of the country -- its politics, economics, morals, security, and identity. "Do we have a shared civil language, a shared ethos?" asked Rivlin. "Do we share a common denominator of values with the power to link all these sectors together in the Jewish and democratic State of Israel?" And while in the past, Rivlin argued, the Israeli military could help create personal bonds and a national identity, today more than half of the population doesn't serve in uniform.

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