6. Reasons For The Reality Gap
4. Anti-Egalitarian Tendencies in the Different Subcultures of Israeli
Society
Jewish Israel is made up of a plethora of sub-cultures, and in many ways
this has made the attempt to achieve a modern integrated culture as envisaged
by many of the founding fathers’ generation more difficult. In the years
following the creation of the state, hundreds of thousands of Jews flowed
into the country, transforming a relatively homogenous society into a truly
heterogeneous one. The advanced social norms that had been largely a product
of a confluence of European ideologies, and which had stood as basic suppositions
within the pre-1948 society, suddenly found themselves embroiled in a cultural
struggle with representatives of a hundred different Diasporas.
The result was a cultural tug-of-war in which the dominant society of the
pre-State establishment attempted to impose its cultural assumptions on the
newcomers. This period, which basically lasted for a generation and has lasted
in some ways till today, has seen a struggle, among other things, over the
question of the role of women. Many of the societies whose Jews came to Israel,
especially the Moslem lands of North Africa and the Middle East, were societies
that held extremely conservative attitudes towards women. The reinforcement
of traditional Jewish attitudes towards women by traditionally Moslem norms
in countries which had stayed still, economically and culturally for centuries
(apart from the situation in large cities), created a cultural mix that was
extremely conservative in attitudes towards women.
The shock of encounter with the modern Western-oriented Israeli society of
the early 1950’s was very great indeed. Only slowly, have some of those
attitudes been eroded. Patriarchal norms are still very strong in large sub-cultures
within Israel. It is not just the immigrants of the early state years who
have exhibited such conservative modes of behaviour towards women. Many of
the immigrants from the large Russian Aliyah of the eighties and nineties
have brought with them similar ideas as has the smaller Ethiopian wave of
Aliyah.