Word: secularism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...little less than 50 years since its creation, Israelis are endorsing either the secular state or the Jewish state, but not both. The majority of secular Israelis, notwithstanding the Hebrew language they speak, have lost any substantive connection to Jewish culture and history. Religious rightists, on the other hand, have ceased to see the value of the secular state...
...Secular Israelis have failed to locate their own collective identity within the long chain of Jewish history. It is not that they have suddenly ceased to be religiously observant. They were never observant, and that was fine. But even the most fervently secular Israelis used to have a degree of familiarity with classical Jewish literature, for instance, beginning with the Hebrew Bible. Whether or not the words were divinely inspired was unimportant. What mattered was that they were part of a canon of texts that were crucial to the formation of Jewish identity...
...member of the Israeli Knesset, recently suggested that there has been too much focus on classical Jewish literature in Israeli schools. She recommended a little less Judah ha-Levi (the towering figure of medieval Hebrew literature) and a litte more Rabelais. While it is not fair to implicate all secular Israelis in the switch from Hebrew to French literature, the trend is there. And insofar as its boosters would have Israel become an ersatz California or phony France, the trend...
...then there is the other trend. Religious rightists, especially those settlers who are wedded to the Greater Israel of the Bible, have ceased to see any value in the secular state as such. As the late Israeli philospher Yeshayahu Leibowitz noted, religious rightists are too often incapable of distinguishing "between the Jewish people as the bearer of Judaism and the sovereign state instituted by this people as its intrument of self-government...
...this gruesome act of political violence simply does not make sense except as the result of an underlying fragmentation of Israeli society. Religious rightists and secular leftists have grown incapable of recognizing each other's Jewishness, Israeli-ness, and humanity. It is imperative that Israel continue on its path of peace with its many Arab neighbors. It is even more crucial, perhaps, that the country address the disuniting of its own society...