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In-Depth Information
into a pro-Zionist movement, which, after Israel was established, became the National Reli-
gious Party. These adaptive traditional Jews are called Datim (“religious”), or, in the English-
speaking world, Modern Orthodox.
Unlike Haredim, the Datim participate fully in mainstream culture and Israeli national
identity. This group makes up roughly 11 percent of Israel's Jewish population. Datim, like
Haredim, accept the primacy of the Torah but are open to more fl exible interpretations, a
stance very much in line with the Jewish religion in past centuries. As both Zionist and reli-
gious, Datim view Israel as the fulfi llment of the deity's plan, an idea increasingly infl uenced
after the 1967 war by the ideas of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, Israel's fi rst chief rabbi.
Most Datim live in cities, in their own or mixed-religious neighborhoods, or in one of a few
Dati kibbutzim. Dati men combine religious with secular study. Dati children are educated in
the national-religious school system, participate in the Bnei Akiva youth movement, and at-
tend the Dati-run Bar-Ilan University. Datim dress like nonreligious Israelis for the most part,
but some women, among Datim whose beliefs are closer to Haredi beliefs, wear long skirts,
and married Dati women may cover their hair with hats or scarves (but typically not wigs).
Dati men wear a knitted
kippa
(skullcap), usually with a colorful design.
Another key difference from the Haredim is that Dati men go into the army to perform
their mandatory military service, and the women often perform their regular military service
or national service of another sort. There are also special programs, called
hesder yeshivot
, in
which young men combine Torah study with army service.
The National Religious Party participated in every coalition government from 1948 to 1992.
Until 1981, the party held twelve Knesset seats, but with the establishment of other parties that
appealed to Mizrahi voters — mainly conservative ones — their representation shrank that year
to just six seats, and it fell further until in 2006 it won only three seats, and it won those only
by forming a joint list with the National Union Party. In 2009, when the party joined other
factions and was renamed the Jewish Home Party, it still won only three seats.
A key reason for party's decline was its turn toward single-issue politics rather than focus-
ing on broader communal interests. In the 1970s, it became involved, in particular, with the
establishment of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Gush Emunim (literally, “bloc of the be-
lievers”) was founded in 1974. Extrapolating from previously held ideas, its members — many
of them Datim —believed that keeping control over the territories that Israel captured in 1967
and settling them would accelerate the coming of the Messiah.
Many Israelis came to associate the Dati community politically with right-wing extremists,
including such fi gures as Baruch Goldstein, who murdered Muslims in a Hebron mosque in
1994, and Yigal Amir, who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. The Israeli gov-
ernment's decision in 2004 to withdraw unilaterally from the Gaza Strip required the removal
of the 8,000 Jews who had settled there, many of them Datim. Dati activists organized protests,
with the color orange as their symbol.
Although many Datim were not militant supporters of the settlement movement, or at least
did not focus on settlement, this single-issue obsession destroyed the National Religious Party
and seriously damaged the Dati community's interests. The group's votes fragmented and the
