Culture shock and culture wars:the search for identity

Increasingly, the forces threatening societies today come not only from other cultures but also from within a culture as well. Excerpts from a speech made by NAOMICHAZAN at the Seventh Indira Gandhi Conference in New Delhi.

IDENTITY crisis is a relatively new phenomenon giving rise to its own tensions and conflicts. The clash is not merely between cultures, but between orthodox and liberal within cultures. As cultures interpenetrate further in the new century, the search for identity by individuals and societies will challenge tradition in ways that could destabilise or enrich. How will we cope?

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NAOMICHAZAN

... In July 1999, just after the Israeli elections when the centre and the left once again resumed power and I turned from an opposition member to a coalition member... the peace process was back on track for the first time in three years. The duly elected Prime Minister Barak had met with President Mubarak, King Abdullah, Yasser Arafat, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. For the first time in three years many of us had a tremendous amount of hope. Then we entered a crisis, which is now known in Israeli political lore as the turbine crisis...

We decided to improve our electrical power plant by building a dry turbine some 40 km away from the power plant. The turbine was an immense turbine... The turbine had to be transported from where it was constructed near Tel Aviv to the location of the power plant in Ashdod some 40 km away... you will understand very quickly that if you attempt to transport sections of the turbine, you will be clogging up the major highway in the country for the period of time that it is being transported.

So the first segment of the turbine passed through between Friday night and Saturday morning very quietly. Then the press entered the picture and on Monday morning there were big headlines reporting that the turbine had been transferred on the sabbath, at which point the country entered a two-month political crisis: what are we going to do about the turbine? If we transport the turbine during the week we will paralyse the economy of Israel, but if we do not transport the turbine during the week we will paralyse the new government because it contains two religious parties for whom travel on the sabbath is utter heresy...

It took two months to transfer the six sections of the turbine from near Tel Aviv to the power plant in Ashdod and one party left the coalition as a result of the turbine crisis.

Put yourself in my position for a moment and you will understand how embarrassing it is to tell this story. Here is Israel, a country that is proud of being the homeland for the Jews and a democratic state. Eighty per cent of the country is Jewish and the Jews are at it again fighting each other over turbines.

Why am I telling you this story? Because the story collapses what I consider to be the four essential questions about the clash of cultures. I emphasise that sometimes it is clashes between cultures but the turbine story is a clash within a culture, between the liberal components of the culture and the very fundamentalist components of the culture...

The first question: how - more than half a century after independence - does the reigning cultural paradigm, open, liberal, secular, become, to at least some portions of the population, an oppressive, hegemonic culture? Why is something that seemed so culturally open, liberal and desirable all of a sudden - and it is the transition that interests me - begin to be perceived by segments of the population as being oppressive and alien? ...

I think there are three major reasons, although you may add more. The first is that even in the most open societies inequality reigns, especially during periods of rapid development... the more rapid the economic development the greater the initial inequalities... the price that is paid is the growth of income disparities which sometimes dovetail social divisions within the country. In our case it is ethnic origin, where people came from. So one answer to the question - how does openness and secularism come to be perceived as oppressive? - is the growth of inequality.

The second answer is political frustration... there is a discontinuity or a disconnect between political leadership and significant elements of popular sentiment... The combination of elitism and liberalism leads certain classes and certain groups to feel politically frustrated.

The third reason I will offer you for this transition, again an uncomfortable reason, is that it's very comfortable to have an enemy because then you can always define yourselves in terms of the enemy. When one day you wake up and you see that your enemy, or who you thought was your enemy, is no longer your enemy then you have to confront yourself. That creates a great deal of uncertainty. The exposure to the outside world, to globalisation in a different terminology, opens one's eyes on the one hand but, I would argue very strongly, creates immense uncertainty on the other hand. What does one do when there is uncertainty? I would suggest to you that one looks for the familiar, for what is close to home and what is close to home is often religion in the narrow sense, not in the broad sense, it is often ethnicity in the narrow sense, nationalism in the narrow sense, and it breeds awful uncertainty that is a result of exposure to the outside.

If you put together the three reasons the result is that an ideological adhesive or cement which was based on the values of equality, pluralism and diversity, all of a sudden is no longer acceptable to all the people and, to put it in very blunt terms, becomes tribalised. Secularism becomes tribalised, and fundamentalism is another form of tribalisation. That is question number one.

The second question: When the adhesive has been undone and the common vision is perceived as oppressive, how is the new situation perpetuated? How is the clash of culture carried on? I would suggest by three main instruments.

One, by certain groups who are fundamentalist and extremist gaining, if not full political power, access to political power.

Two, by the use of resources, often public resources, to fund these groups.

Three, through the development of separate information channels to continue to propagate the faith.

The third question - and now I am beginning to come to the raw stuff, uptil now it has been easy - how does one deal with the new extremism?...

One way of dealing with the new extremism is to try to crush it in the name of liberalism, equality and secularism. But do you know what that creates? It has created throughout the Middle East, in Jordan, throughout the Maghreb and in Israel as well as in major portions of Europe, a direct, violent confrontation within societies between fundamentalists and so-called enlightened elements...

The second alternative is to dialogue. We have people who think we should not travel on the sabbath. By the way those people also think they should not shake my hand because I am a woman. But one wants to keep some order in society. One wants to maintain a certain amount of stability. Therefore, it is very tempting to dialogue, to try to understand. I, by the way, do not reject the dialogue option. I have used it more often than not. But I would like to suggest that this option has limits because if one dialogues away one's values one hasn't done anything, and that periodically does occur.

So what do you do? You have two alternatives. One alternative is to crush, to confront. The other alternative is to dialogue, to attempt to persuade. And in the meantime you are living in societies where the clash of culture is threatening your entire existence.

Which leads me to the fourth question. How do you confront these threats? This is where I am on very shaky ground. I would suggest two premises to try and deal with them and resolve them until the next time they erupt, which they will.

The first premise is that identities are fluid, they chachange. Under all circumstances do not freeze them, allow them to shift and to mutate as much as possible.

My second premise is even more daring. It is that in these situations one should not look for agreement. One should assume that there will be disagreement and agreement cannot be achieved. Therefore, one shifts the question which becomes instead: how do you live together when you don't agree? I think the answers will be in three directions: change the rules of the game so that you can live together when you don't agree; fortify the institutions, which I talked about this morning; do not disregard at the beginning of the 21st century the importance of ideologies and visions informed very explicitly by certain values.

I told you about the turbine because it terrifies me more than the peace process if the peace process doesn't work. But the peace process will work, it will succeed but we will have to deal with our turbines. Our turbines now are within ourselves, between ourselves and our neighbours, and I think that is the greatest threat to democracies at the turn of the century - the threats from groups who consider they have all the answers to all the questions. They are powerfully undemocratic and they threaten our world.

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Naomi Chazan is Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, and one of the top legislators in Israel's Parliament, specialising in women's rights and consumer issues.

Extracted from: New Century: Whose Century?, compiled and edited by Manmohan Malhoutra, UBSPD, New Delhi, Rs. 595.

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