Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on March 2, 2020

The conventional wisdom about young Israelis is that theyre pretty right wing. Definitely more right wing than their parents, more right wing than their peers in other countries, and more right wing than previous generations of young Israelis.

Unlike young people elsewhere, who seem to be constantly out in the streets, spearheading movements for political, social and environmental change, these young Israelis dont seem particularly motivated to change the world. Just stop by any big protest in Tel Aviv and youll notice how few young faces there are in the crowd.

True, young Israelis dont follow the trajectory commonof other Western countries. Whereas high school graduates in the United States and Europe will often spend the next four years of their lives in university classrooms opening their minds and learning to challenge authority, their peers in Israel can expect to spend most of that time in army fatigues, following orders from their military commanders. What little free time they have, they prefer to spend hanging out with friends rather than starting revolutions.

Very little academic research has been conducted on young Israelis. One built-in problem is that an important subgroup of this demographic 18 to 21-year-olds is for the most part off-limits: While they are serving in the Israel Defense Forces, young Israelis are not available and generally not at liberty to participate in such research. And while public opinion polls in Israel tend to segment respondents by age, the detailed breakdowns that might shed light on this particular age group often dont get published.

The main motivation for this special project, given all the common assumptions about this age group, was our curiosity: We wanted to see if the accepted stereotypes were really true.

We started out by looking for 10 young Israelis, men and women aged 18 to 27, each of whom could represent a particular community. In some cases, this required us to consult with people deeply plugged into these communities. Before our subjects responded to the questions in our survey, we knew nothing about their politics or their views on other issues.

We do not pretend that this is a scientific or representative sample of young Israelis. It is simply a focus group. Therefore, we also sought out existing data about this age group both in Israel and abroad to better understand their politics, positions and passions.

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Their responses, and how they measure up to the more scientific data, surprised us in certain ways. Here, then, are five takeaways from our special project...

1. Right wing? Maybe, but not so much

There was a time when support for a two-state solution, including the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, was the key issue dividing left from right in Israel. Left-wingers tended to support a two-state solution while right-wingers did not. Based on that definition, most of the members of this focus group would qualify as right wing. And yet, among those who agreed to share information about their voting habits, not a single one said they had voted or planned to vote for Israels largest right-wing party, Likud. (Some had voted in the past for smaller religious parties to the right of Likud.) Furthermore, when asked to identify themselves politically, not one went so far as to call themselves right wing though two-thirds (66.9 percent) of 18- to 24-year-old Israelis identify as such, according to data recently gathered by the Israel Democracy Institute. Indeed, a study by Israeli sociologists Noa Lavie and Irit Adler shows that young Israelis are profoundly more right wing than their European peers. But the most that members of our focus group were willing to say was that they were center-right. We were also quite surprised that three of our subjects chose to describe themselves as left wing often considered pejorative in Israel these days.

2. Not the usual dichotomy

In Israel, it used to be easy to predict a persons positions on a wide range of issues based on whether they self-identified as right wing or left wing. Right-wingers could be expected to favor annexation of the West Bank and oppose a two-state solution. They could also be expected to oppose equal rights for the LGBTQ community and public transportation on Shabbat. Left-wingers, by contrast, could be expected to oppose annexation and support a two-state solution. They could also be expected to support equal rights for the LGBTQ community and public transportation on Shabbat. The young Israelis in this focus group dont fit these standard categorizations. Tali, our ultra-Orthodox participant, for example, expressed unusual sympathy to the plight of gay Israelis. Im someone who follows halakha [Jewish religious law], where such relations are prohibited, she told us. But at the same time, its hard for me to deny someone their basic rights. By the same token, some of those who defined themselves as left wing did not necessarily support a two-state solution or oppose annexation. If there is some common theme in their responses, it is that these young Israelis tend to be hawkish on security but liberal on social issues.

3. Dont judge a book by its cover

Sometimes, all you need to know about an Israeli is what tribe they belong to, in order to figure out how they vote and where they stand on different issues. Settlers and religious Israelis traditionally tend to be on the right, while kibbutzniks, Tel Avivians and Arab citizens are on the left. Mizrahi Jews, Russian speakers and Ethiopian Israelis all tend to the right, while Ashkenazi Jews lean to the left. These stereotypes, for the most part, did not apply to our young group. Our secular kibbutznik, for example, was probably the biggest hawk politically. Both our Russian speaker and Ethiopian Israeli, on the other hand, were proud to define themselves as left-wingers. And our secular Tel Avivian surprised us by being one of the few to express reservations about buses operating on Shabbat.

4. The personal is political

It didnt surprise us to learn that most members of our focus group had not attended a single demonstration in the past year. I dont like protests, especially when it involves blocking roads, one said. Another wondered whether attending AIPAC was considered a protest. Those who took their battles to the streets, however, tended to focus on causes that affected them in a very personal way. Our Arab and Druze participants, for instance, attended protests against the so-called nation-state law often seen as an attempt to downgrade the status of Israels non-Jewish minorities. Our Tel Avivian, who is gay, attended a protest for equal surrogacy rights for single-sex couples. And our Ethiopian Israeli took part in demonstrations to stop police violence against Israelis of Ethiopian origin.

5. Staying put

None of our participants had any concrete plans to leave Israel, and most said they definitely saw their future in the country. This would seem to be in line with data gathered by the Israel Democracy Institute poll, which show that nearly a quarter of Israelis aged 18 to 24 say they would consider leaving Israel if they could obtain citizenship from another Western country. It is noteworthy that two of the three who expressed any inclination to move elsewhere were our Arab and Druze participants. As Fadi, our Druze participant, said: Weve always taken pride in being the only democracy in the region, and the rule of law was once considered the holy of holies in this country. But these days, I have a harder and harder time explaining how Israel is different from other regimes in the area. ... I really want to stay here and raise my children here. It all depends on which direction the country takes and to me it looks like its moving in a dangerous direction.

See the original post here:

5 takeaways from Haaretzs Young Israelis project and what it means - Haaretz

Category: Ashkenazi
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