Featured Post
Free The Hostages! Bring Them Home!
(this is a featured post and will stay at the top for the foreseeable future.. scroll down for new posts) -------------------------------...
Dec 14, 2014
Barnea's rant against the Dati Leumi is enlightening
I find Nachum Barnea's attack on Habayit Hayehudi voters to be particularly interesting.
There are numerous differences between the Haredi and Dati Leumi communities. The one in particular that stands out, to me at least, is the approach to the general Israeli community. The Haredi community, for the most part, cloisters itself in self-imposed ghettos and tries to interact with the outside world as little as possible. The Dati Leumi community, on the other hand, mixes with the general society, is fully part of it in every way.
The Haredi community itself gets criticized for its ghetto-approach. If only they would open up more and integrate into society, the general community would meet them more, understand them better, and be less antagonistic to them. Naturally such normal meetings and interaction would develop into acceptance and mutual respect.
Nachum Barnea blows that out of the water.
The Dati Leumi community is fully integrated in every way. They are involved in every aspect of society. You can find them everywhere - the army (in regular mixed units), banks, politics, hospitals (as doctors and nurses), They are rabbis, teachers, accountants, lawyers, programmers, janitors, electricians, plumbers, actors, mathematicians, Nobel prize winners, scientists, entrepreneurs, business-people, etc.
Yet, still, despite all the integration of the Dati Leumi community, Nachum Barnea showed with his diatribe that integration does not actually change perceptions. According to Barnea, and perhaps he is representative of at least a large segment of Israeli society, the Dati Leumi community as represented by those who vote Habayit Hayehudi - Bennet, are dark, unenlightened, tied to racist rabbis, religious fanatics, people who squeeze money from the government, xenophobes...
If that's what Barnea thinks of the Dati Leumi community, people who are fully integrated into society and are Israelis like any other, would it really help if the Haredi community did an about-face and decided to leave their ghettos and integrate into society?
I think it is fairly clear from Barnea's rant that integration into society is not really the ticket to acceptance or even understanding.
There are numerous differences between the Haredi and Dati Leumi communities. The one in particular that stands out, to me at least, is the approach to the general Israeli community. The Haredi community, for the most part, cloisters itself in self-imposed ghettos and tries to interact with the outside world as little as possible. The Dati Leumi community, on the other hand, mixes with the general society, is fully part of it in every way.
The Haredi community itself gets criticized for its ghetto-approach. If only they would open up more and integrate into society, the general community would meet them more, understand them better, and be less antagonistic to them. Naturally such normal meetings and interaction would develop into acceptance and mutual respect.
Nachum Barnea blows that out of the water.
The Dati Leumi community is fully integrated in every way. They are involved in every aspect of society. You can find them everywhere - the army (in regular mixed units), banks, politics, hospitals (as doctors and nurses), They are rabbis, teachers, accountants, lawyers, programmers, janitors, electricians, plumbers, actors, mathematicians, Nobel prize winners, scientists, entrepreneurs, business-people, etc.
Yet, still, despite all the integration of the Dati Leumi community, Nachum Barnea showed with his diatribe that integration does not actually change perceptions. According to Barnea, and perhaps he is representative of at least a large segment of Israeli society, the Dati Leumi community as represented by those who vote Habayit Hayehudi - Bennet, are dark, unenlightened, tied to racist rabbis, religious fanatics, people who squeeze money from the government, xenophobes...
If that's what Barnea thinks of the Dati Leumi community, people who are fully integrated into society and are Israelis like any other, would it really help if the Haredi community did an about-face and decided to leave their ghettos and integrate into society?
I think it is fairly clear from Barnea's rant that integration into society is not really the ticket to acceptance or even understanding.
------------------------------------------------------
Reach thousands of readers with your ad by advertising on Life in Israel
------------------------------------------------------
Labels:
dati leumi,
haredim
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Related Posts
All it shows, is that's what Barnea thinks of religious Jews. He is prejudiced and will always be prejudiced - or, he will always want his readers to be prejudiced.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I think that the integration throughout Israeli society is very real. Surveys have shown that those in media are statistically not at all similar to the majority of the country - most secular observe Yom Kippur by some sorts of abstention, most secular avoid bread during the entire week of Passover, yet almost none of the writers for Haaretz, Maariv, etc. observe anything at all.
Unfortunately the real problem is that the media does not represent "us" - and us is indeed Klal Yisrael. We are far more united - and appreciative of each other - than the Left would want us to believe.
completely הזוי conversation on the radio yesterday: is the israeli media anti right wing? of course uzi benziman, the person brought in to discuss the issue, concluded that it wasn't.
ReplyDeleteI think the issue with Barnea is that indeed many people do not understand other 'societies'. I really hate what people like Barnea does when they try to make the BY seem like fanatics because A) we know they really aren't an in fact strive to be parve and B) that makes the people even to the right of the BY even more far-right than they really are. Well it's the juice Bennet and his like have to deal with. They make every effort to make sure that people like Prof Eldad, Dr Ben Ari and friends are distanced, so the BY then became the far-right. Have the cake, and eat it too :-)
ReplyDeleteI was just reading an artiyin Globes where the journalist pointed out that the DL community is of the opinion that the country is for more understanding of them as opposed to the chareidim, he went on to talk about how in reality the country thinks they are both in the same category with different lifestyles
ReplyDelete