Early on he agreed to grant the Orthodox rabbinical establishment monopoly control over religious affairs, including civil matters such as marriage, divorce and qualification for automatic citizenship, under the mistaken assumption that the rabbis and their followers were a doomed remnant of the East European ghetto who would gradually disappear. Today Orthodoxy refuses to ease its grip, provoking bitter clashes with immigrants from the former Soviet Union whose Jewishness is in dispute and with American Jews who are members of the Reform and Conservative movements that the rabbinate considers a threat to traditional Judaism and to its own power. Ben-Gurion also agreed to a factionalized political system in which virtually all groups, no matter how small, have some stake in the process. As a result, political parties today remain odd collections of tribal identities, personal interests and patchwork coalitions, manipulating a system that rewards factionalism and strife, not unity and consensus. In such a system, majorities are so thin and fragile that political unrest is a constant.
Winners never feel secure and losers never surrender.
Labor and Likud, the two large political coalitions, have steadily lost clout to their smaller, more radical and more cantankerous rivals on both right and left. The electoral reform that grafted a presidential-style prime minister onto a chaotic parliamentary system has only given Israelis the worst of both worlds. Zionism, the nationalist ideology that underpinned the new-born state, has become something of a dirty word among a younger generation that has lost faith in national institutions. Even the Israel Defense Force, the much-vaunted citizen army that is the ultimate expression of national unity and pride, has come under fire. The army's failure to extinguish the Palestinian uprising between 1987 and 1993, its chilling helplessness to protect Israeli civilians from Iraqi Scuds during the 1991 Gulf War and its inability to end the stalemate in southern Lebanon have tarnished its image.