Although David Ben-Gurion envisioned the Jewish state as a melting pot, with ingathered exiles merging together into a common Labor-Zionist culture, today’s increasingly conventional wisdom envisions a pluralistic society comprising various “tribes.” This view, as Yehoshua Pfeffer puts it, imagines “Arab sheikhs sitting side by side with ḥaredi scholars, feminist women next to settlers, and LGBT activists sharing a table with ḥasidic rabbis.” Yet Ḥaredim, even as they benefit from this multicultural arrangement, don’t subscribe to its underlying liberal assumptions. And that might be a good thing, Pfeffer argues:

If there is to be a resolution to the conflict between the Jewish state and a putative Palestinian one, writes Jonathan Michanie, it won’t start with drawing lines on maps or restrictions on where Jews can build houses, but with the Palestinian Authority (PA) abandoning its official anti-Semitism. The PA can, in this regard, learn much from those Arab nations that have recently made peace with Israel: