Welcome to the Wonderful Land of Middle Israel

Let me introduce you to Middle Israel, the quiet engine that runs Israel today. In a scarred landscape of war and extremism, it has managed to invent, invest, churn out Nobel Prize winners and make the shekel the strongest currency in the world.

I am neither pundit nor prophet, merely a historian. My sons will someday serve in the army—we no longer promise children that they will not—but I hope that their beautiful Israeli childhood will be followed by a peaceful Israeli adulthood. These sentiments commit me to support a stable and sovereign Palestine in the nearest possible future. Like a great number of fellow Israelis, I am secular, Jewish and liberal, make a decent living and lead a global life.

In other words, most television viewers around the world have probably never heard of me.

The medley of newsroom reports, pixel snapshots and breathless pseudo-analyses that pass for serious accounts of Israel are a scandal. They typify much of the media’s short-wired spinning of information-lite, cut up into easy snippets. But contemporary truths about Israel, like all truths, are subtle, complex and multi-layered.

Middle Israel comprises the backbone of Israeli civil society. Its members are educated, multilingual and well-connected to global developments. They work hard, providing Israel with the high-tech success it has enjoyed during the past decade. The youngsters, having served in the army, often backpack in India or trek in Peru before settling down to a mature student’s life followed by creative careers in business, technology and the arts.

Middle Israel is mostly secular, though it also includes religious moderates. It despises any sort of fanaticism, whether orthodox or nationalist. It is based on a strong, legally entrenched (though never perfect) ethos of equality between men and women that typified Zionism from its start. Middle Israel is gay-friendly and distinctly un-xenophobic. It is mostly Jewish, though a young Arab professional class is now coming out of the universities and making its way—with difficulties—into the heartland of civil society.

This quiet majority is under-represented in the Knesset because its members steer clear of political careers. Which political leader, then, speaks best for Middle Israel? In a sense, most of them do: Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni, Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu all hail from the sober center of Israeli society. But electoral realities and constitutional arrangement preclude them from catering to Middle Israel alone. Almost every government in Israeli history has been an uneasy coalition of widely differing worldviews.

Middle Israel spans about one half of the country’s population. It is not exclusively urban and includes people of different cultural origins. It has a powerful common identity, shared memories and a rich, dynamic culture. Not inward looking or atavistic, Middle Israelis famously love things American, European and Japanese. Their language, modern Hebrew, is a 20th century success. More people in the world speak Hebrew today than Danish, or—the historical irony of it!—Austrian German. If you know Hebrew, you will enjoy Borat (not to mention the Bible) twice as much. Hebrew is strong enough to adopt foreign words without the French-like fear of deterioration. Indeed, Middle Israel is happy to test all things new and exciting, from sushi and Facebook to J.K. Rowling and Quentin Tarantino. Rather than “invading” or “colonizing,” such global floaters are taken in, translated and reshaped to inspire.

Does this mean that the Jewish majority of Middle Israel is “less Jewish” than their more traditional peers? Many of us would strongly reject this claim. The kibbutz where I grew up had no synagogue, but it celebrated the Jewish holidays with all the fresh energy of early labor Zionism. Many Israelis—even those accused of belonging to the godless Left—share instincts of social solidarity and human justice that hail back to Bible and Talmud, shtetl and kibbutz.

Israelis thus have their own tradition of communality and informality, familiarity and irreverence. Even in its stern Ben-Gurion days, this polity was never in danger of skidding into a totalitarian realm. Very seldom, most recently and horribly with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, internal disagreements imploded into violence. But the Israeli norm is argumentatively peaceful. I am sometimes asked by puzzled Europeans about what it means to live in a Jewish and democratic state. Well, it means that we argue among ourselves all the time.

At the heart of this modern Israeli culture stands Tel Aviv. But Middle Israel is far broader than Tel Aviv, running a full gamut from hedonistic Eilat to hard-working kibbutzim and even to the rocket-hit Sderot. Here is Israel as the pragmatic, the non-fanatic, the lover of life. Palestinian extremists are hoping to destroy precisely this. “The Jews love their lives more than anything,” a Hamas leader famously put it. “This is their weak point.”

Other Palestinians see it differently. They are hoping to become something like Middle Israel. They too would like life, pragmatism, creativity and even joy to gain the upper hand. They too want moderation and modernity, if not perhaps full secularization, to prevail. These Palestinians are our natural allies.

If the political voice of Middle Israel prevails, and if the international community works hard to broker peace, the region’s future will ultimately depend on the strength of Middle Palestine.

Fania Oz-Salzberger is the director of the Posen Research Forum for Political Thought at the University of Haifa and the Leon Liberman Chair of Modern Israel Studies at Monash University in Australia. Her books include Translating the Enlightment and Israelis in Berlin.