A major focus of sociology in Israel has been ethnic differences and assimilation within the Israeli-Jewish population. Almost all studies investigating inequality or the class structure have dealt with ethnicity, and the same is true of studies on religiosity. Publications on ethnic differences and ethnicity among Jews (Smooha, 1987) have far outnumbered those on other important research topics such as the Arab minority and religion in Israel. This focus is understandable given the basic assumption among Israeli Jews that Israel is first and foremost a Jewish state, and the dominant ideology of the “ingathering” and “merging” of Jews from different parts of the world. Much of the theoretical debate on ethnicity in Israel has revolved around the question of the distance between the ideology of ethnic amalgamation and the ethnic reality. This has not always been an explicit issue, but it provides an important part of the background of the differences among the theoretical perspectives to be outlined below.

The four general perspectives on ethnicity outlined in the first chapter have had their Israeli representatives, and they have appeared roughly in that order: the perspectives focusing on ethnic adaptation and socio-psychological aspects were followed by a conflictual pluralistic approach, and then by a perspective which emphasized the class basis of ethnic differences.

The concept of discrimination

Discrimination is a phenomenon that is widely referred to and talked about in everyday life, but its recognition and meanings have rarely been investigated by sociologists. Sociologists have analyzed discrimination for the most part as a variable that can be defined and measured objectively, and they have given little attention to accounts by either the discriminators or the discriminated. Until recent years discrimination was discussed by sociologists almost exclusively in the field of racial and ethnic relations, and the focus of many studies was on the relationships between prejudice and discrimination (see Feagin and Eckberg, 1980, for a review). In recent years the topic of discrimination has shifted somewhat to a focus on discrimination against women. Discrimination is occasionally mentioned although rarely studied with reference to other areas of differentiation (for example, in the cases of the aged or physically disabled), but it is perhaps significant that the term has hardly ever been employed in the literature on class stratification. Since discrimination is often defined in terms of an inappropriate ascriptive orientation, its absence from the class literature would be understandable if it was generally agreed among sociologists that achievement determined class position. There is, however, considerable emphasis among many sociologists on differential treatment based on class origins; examples include children from the lower strata receiving inferior formal education, and individuals from the upper strata receiving preferential treatment in entering certain occupations.

Secularization and its limits

Our investigations of neighborhoods and ethnic synagogues have pointed to the important relationship between religion and ethnicity. If religiosity in Israel is an important basis of ethnicity, secularization would necessarily lead to a decline in ethnicity. In this chapter, we present the findings from our survey that relate to the question of secularization among the four groups of origin, Moroccans, Iraqis, Poles, and Rumanians.

Secularization, “the process by which religious institutions, actions, and consciousness lose their social significance,” has commonly been viewed either as a dimension or as a consequence of modernization; industrialization, urbanization, the growth of science and technology, the spread of education, the development of the mass media, and the participation of the masses into political society have been seen as contributing factors in the decline of religion (Wilson, 1966,1982; Berger, 1967). Secularization is not, however, an inevitable consequence of the many developments that have often been grouped together under the term “modernization,” and the relationships of these two multidimensional processes vary considerably depending on the religious, cultural, and social contexts. In many Islamic societies developments such as urbanization and expansion of higher education appear to have contributed to the contemporary resurgence of Islam (Arjomand, 1986).

At the beginning of this study we distinguished between non-national forms of ethnicity, such as among Israeli-Jewish groups of origin, and ethnonationalism. It is the latter term that best denotes the cases of Jewish citizens and Arab or Palestinian citizens of Israel, and of Israeli Jews and the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The intra-Jewish cleavages and the Jewish-Arab cleavages differ in fundamental respects, but the framework of dimensions and perspectives in the sociology of ethnicity, discussed in the first chapter, can be applied to both. It is, in fact, the common conceptual framework that allows us to demonstrate the important differences between the two ethnic encounters and the relationships between them.

On the eve of the establishment of the State of Israel the Arab population of Palestine was about 1,200,000, nearly twice as large as the Jewish population. Only 156,000 remained after the first Israeli-Arab war, although there was some increase in the early fifties as a consequence of minor borderline changes with Jordan and a family unification policy. A high natural growth has gradually increased the proportion of Arabs in the population, and today the Arab citizens of Israel constitute 18% of the total population. They are themselves divided by ethnicity and religion: Sunni Muslims are the majority, the Christians belong to a number of churches, the Druze are an important group, and there are smaller groups of Samaritans and Karaites.

In the 1950s Middle Eastern and European groups of origin in Beer Sheva founded ethnic organizations which provided both contexts of sociability and material help, such as small loans, for their members. Over time these organizations lost their instrumental functions to state, municipal, and other public agencies, and as contexts for social interaction, they held little appeal for the younger generation who grew up in Israel. Ethnic organizations or Landsmannschaften are far less important today, but the ethnic synagogue has remained important among Middle Easterners.

As in other countries of immigration, such as the United States, the ethnic religious congregations provided a medium for the continuation of traditional religious practices and a center for the social interaction of members whose common origins, native language or dialect, and common cultural and social patterns provided important bases for the comforting and familiar patterns of communication and community. However, in the United States most ethnic churches and synagogues did not last beyond the first generation, and the second generation tended to reject the traditional ethnic culture of their parents and to join interethnic congregations along denominational lines (Herberg, 1960). Since more than half the adult population of Israel was born or socialized in the country, it is now possible to investigate whether a similar process of de-ethnization of religion is occurring in Israel.

Many social scientists have perceived a “resurgence” or “revival” of ethnicity in recent decades in many societies. The analysis of the reassertion of ethnic identities, the emergence and growth of ethnic movements, and the pervasiveness of ethnic conflicts has been one of the most important growth areas of sociology in the last two decades. It is admitted that sociologists and political scientists in the 1950s and early 1960s had assumed that ethnicity was declining in importance, and that it would continue to decline in the future. Western states had been held up as “nation states” that had succeeded over the centuries to assimilate and amalgamate diverse peoples, and many expected that the newly independent states in Africa and Asia would follow suit. Ethnicity was often associated with traditional societies, and it was expected that the process of modernization would weaken such ascription-based groups.

The growth of ethnicity and ethnic conflict has been analyzed as a universal or world-wide phenomenon. Not only have “tribal” or ethnic differences posed acute obstacles to the “nation-building” of newly independent states, but ethnic groups have appeared to endanger what had been considered the accomplished unity of European states. In multinational states, such as the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, ethnic divisions and conflicts have perhaps only become more manifest and politicized, but indigenous ethnic movements have also appeared in countries, such as Britain and France, which had been considered unified nations.

Explanations and the puzzle

The subject of ethnic voting in Israel has aroused strong interest both in the mass media and among social scientists. This interest stems principally from the clear statistical relationship between ethnic origins and support for the two largest political parties: Israelis of Middle Eastern origin have shown a strong preference, especially in the last few elections, for the Likud, and Israelis of European origin have continued to show a strong preference for the Labor Alignment or Ma'arach (Matras, 1965; Lissak, 1969; Arian, 1972; Peres, Yuchtman-Yaar, and Shafat, 1975; Shamir and Arian, 1983; Peres and Shemer, 1984; Peretz and Smooha, 1985). The correlation between ethnic origin and voting, and the feeling that the ethnic-political division has widened over the years have prompted investigations of the meanings and causes of the relationship.

The explanations that have been suggested by social scientists may be briefly summarized as follows:

1 The most common explanation of the support of Middle Easterners for the Likud is in terms of a protest vote (for example, Yishai, 1982; P. S. Cohen, 1983; Ben-Sira, 1988). It is argued that the feelings of deprivation, frustration, and bitterness that developed among Middle Easterners are directed against the Ma'arach, the party of the socio-political establishment, which they hold responsible for their relatively low economic distribution and status in Israeli society.

Friendships: theoretical models

In his well-known delineation of the dimensions of assimilation, Milton Gordon noted that structural assimilation was “the keystone of the arch of assimilation.” A minority's interaction with the majority at the primary group level was bound to be accompanied or followed by its assimilation in other dimensions (cultural, marital, identificational, etc.), and this would lead to its disappearance as a separate entity (Gordon, 1964:80–1). Recent studies of ethnicity have tended to move away from the implicit one-directional emphasis of assimilation and have reconceptualized interethnic relations in terms of boundaries, but the importance of extensive interethnic friendships and intermarriage in the weakening or dissolution of ethnic groups has been reiterated.

Intermarriage is a clear indicator of a change in ethnic boundaries, and in the United States the increase and extensiveness of intermarriage among most white ethnic groups probably signals the “twilight of their ethnicity” (Alba, 1985). In Israel, a large proportion of marriages now cuts across countries of origin, but the proportion that crosses the broad European and Middle Eastern categories has increased only marginally in recent years. The Moroccan respondents in our sample had the highest proportion of in-marriage: 71% were married to spouses of Moroccan origin, and only 8% were married to spouses of European origin.

Ethnicity, class, and religion provide important foci for social cleavages, identifications, and consciousness in many societies, including Israeli society. They differ in many respects but they also converge and interrelate in complex ways. An empirical study of these divisions, including their institutional, behavioral, and subjective forms, is the centerpiece of this book. The dimensions that we decided to study and the questions that we asked can be best understood within the theoretical and empirical framework provided in this part. Here we give the greatest amount of attention to ethnicity, and chapter 1 provides an overview of the definitions, concepts, and theoretical perspectives in the sociological study of ethnicity. The intention is not to provide a complete review of the literature in one chapter but to focus on those topics in the general literature on ethnicity that we believe are relevant to an analysis of ethnicity in Israel. A short review of the relationships between ethnicity and class and between ethnicity and religion is also provided. Chapter 2 sets out the general historical development and present state of ethnic divisions among the Israeli-Jewish population, and chapter 3 discusses critically the theoretical perspectives on ethnicity in Israeli sociology. Our study focuses on four of the largest groups of origin in Israel: Jews from Morocco, Iraq, Rumania, and Poland.