The ministry registers immigrants as Jews and grants them Israeli citizenship, and it has questioned the Jewish credentials of many arrivals from the former Soviet Union, blocking their marriage or burial as Jews, and even deporting some. With the May 17 elections rapidly approaching, the splintering of Israeli society has produced a cacophony of campaign messages by 32 different parties competing for seats in the parliament. A multiplicity of voices is sometimes a sign of a healthy democracy, but that is not the way the babble is being interpreted here. Rather, commentators and analysts are struck by the tensions that they hear expressed. In past decades there were areas of agreement that moderated the debate.
Pluralism is enlightened, positive, democratic.
Factionalism means the absence of a common bond uniting the whole society. Instead, the proliferation of entrenched ideological, ethnic and religious factions seems to be closing many Israelis to the kind of open discourse in which their groups could integrate, and this reinforces their sense of isolation. A stark example is the cocoonlike environment created by Shas, which is a broad social movement as well as a party, and whose followers include many traditional working-class Sephardic Jews who are not Orthodox. Guided by an ideology that scorns Western culture, the movement has its own newspaper and television broadcasts, and runs schools and youth programs that teach only religious subjects. Although it seeks to promote the ethnic pride of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa and has become a powerful political force, Shas has done little to break barriers to social mobility that have left many Sephardic Jews living in economically depressed communities with poor schools.