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Israel's Unique Support for Preserving Minorities' Identities
(Washington Post) Megan McArdle - Last week, I spent some time in Israel talking to people about religion, ethnicity and identity. Viewing faith as integrally tied to your place and your ancestors and your history is probably more common worldwide than the modern American and Western European view of faith as a personal choice. That radical difference in worldviews explains much of what makes many Americans most uncomfortable about Israel: calling itself the Jewish state, maintaining separate educational systems for Arabs and Jews, excusing most Arabs from mandatory military service. Israel gives its religious minorities ample freedom to practice their faith, as Israel defines itself by Judaism. But Israel's religious minorities don't necessarily resent that in the way Americans might expect. I spoke to Shadi Khalloul, a Maronite Christian activist in the Galilee who is working to revive Aramaic as the daily language of his community. He wants a separate school system for his community's children. If a country protects the civil rights of minority citizens, as the Israelis generally do, it can offer the one thing that an aggressively secular liberal state can't: easy preservation of the minorities' own particularist identities, which tend to be lost in aggressively secular liberal nations as the minorities are more or less forcibly assimilated. Israel is able to accommodate these communities more tolerantly not despite its particularist self-definition but because of it. Judaism isn't a universalizing creed - it doesn't seek converts - so the Jewish majority feels relatively little threat from other faiths.