Israel deepening religious divide

Last December 21 Tanya Rosenblit, a Jewish woman, refused to sit at the back of a bus after a haredi (ultra-orthodox) male passenger ordered her to do so in the Israeli town of Ashdod. The episode fuelled already-existing tensions between the ultra-orthodox part of the population (10 percent) and the remaining seculars or semi-seculars. Protests have erupted against what demonstrators consider to be religious extremism and a sign of the rise of religious fundamentalism in Israel.  From their part, haredi people claim to be the target of a segregation and religious discrimination and have taken to the street dressed up as Nazi-camps’ deportees. The episode triggered an animated debate, both in the country and internationally, about the rise of religiousextremism in Israel. Holocaust scholar at the Hebrew University  Yehuda Bauer has been warning about the danger of ‘a violent Jewish radical, genocidal nationalism with a minority of Israeli Jews.' International criticism towards Israel has also arisenafter those episodes.  Frank La Rue, UN Special rapporteur and independent human rights expert, recently criticised Israel for its restrictions on freedom of expression. ‘Truly democratic societies are measured by their respect of human rights and, in particular, the right to freedom of expression as a 'facilitator' of all other rights,’ he said. The image of Israel as "the only free democracy" in the Middle East is now fading away due to several, increasingly evident cracks between rival factions of Israeli society. Different opinions have been expressed by the community itself. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach described religious extremism  as something that 'festers when decent lay people are cowed into submission by fanatics whom they falsely believe to be more religious than them. [...] A black coat will never redeem a dark heart and a long beard is poor compensation for a shriveled soul.’ Uriel Heilman on JTA has tried to make distinctions among the haredi community itself. ‘The question isn’t how many haredim support haredi violence and how many do not [...] the problem is that most haredim allow the extremists to act and do not stop them,’ he says quoting sociologist Menachem Friedman. No matter how hard Israelis try to save their secular reputation by attributing intolerance to a minority, the recent episodes have had a strong impact both on the international and, quite predictably, on Arab public opinion. ‘The extremism that has shamefully started to appear now in some media outlets does not come from the Middle East, and does not come from countries inside the Islamic world; rather it comes from inside Israel itself,’ says Al-Arabiya’s Hussein Shobokshi in an article that points out that Israel’s main enemy is its internal religious extremism.