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What Will Israel
Look Like in 2048?
Rachel Avraham | JNS.org
F ormer U.S. Ambassador to Israel and member
of Knesset Michael Oren discussed his vision
for the Jewish state’s future at a recent event
in Jerusalem launching his new book, “2048: The
Rejuvenated State.”
Oren, a historian who fought in the Second Lebanon
War, said, during his remarks at the Menachem Begin
Heritage Center in Jerusalem, that the book began
as a conversation between himself and Benjamin
Netanyahu fi ve or six years ago.

“We used to schmooze at 3 a.m. in the morning
during our Knesset debates. I told him once that we
never have a chance to think about Israel’s future.

We are so bogged down with our current crises that
we never think of what kind of state we want to build
for our children and grandchildren,” Oren said at the
Begin Center.

“Now, the 50th anniversary [of Israel’s indepen-
dence] does not feel like that long ago, so leaping
forward 25 years is not beyond the canon. For young
people, 25 years may be a long time, but not for older
people,” he said.

Oren noted that when Israel was established,
intense discussions were held regarding what kind
of state it should become.

“Should it be a socialist state or a capitalist state?
Pro-Western or pro-Eastern [Bloc]? As much as by
the power of the sword, this country was created by
the power of the word."
But somewhere along the way, Israel stopped
holding these discussions, he said. A state
18 MAY 4, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
commission was once established to delve into
these issues, but its mandate was sabotaged by the
collapse of the government, he added.

At that point, Oren told former Jewish Agency
leader Natan Sharansky that these discussions were
too important to abandon, so they were moved to
the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, but then
COVID-19 hit.

It was during the pandemic that Oren decided to sit
down and actually write the book.

“Afterward, we had Zoom talks on Israel-Diaspora
relations, Israel’s foreign policy, and some extraor-
dinary things caused me to establish an NGO, Israel
2048,” he said.

In the book, which is printed in English, Hebrew
and Arabic in one volume, Oren delves into many
issues that aff ect Israeli society today. For example,
he criticizes the state for not recognizing Reform
Judaism, which is the main Judaism practiced in the
Diaspora. “The absurdity, indeed the obscenity, of the situa-
tion was underscored by the aftermath of the massa-
cre of Jewish worshippers in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life
Synagogue on October 27, 2018,” he said. “While
expressing solidarity with the victims, several Israeli
ministers and the Chief Rabbinate refused to call Tree
of Life a synagogue. The place where Jews were killed
while praying as Jews had in the words of the Jewish
nation-state merely a ‘profoundly Jewish fl avor.’”
Oren accused Israel of being ungrateful for the
fact that Diaspora Jews account for some 6.5% of
its GDP, which is roughly equivalent to its defense
budget, and have “contributed massively to building
Israel’s educational, medical, cultural and fi nancial
infrastructure.” He said that by 2048, “Israeli and Diaspora Jews
must share a sense of common identity and destiny,
an awareness of the fact that regardless of where we
live, we belong to a single people.”
Haredim In the book, Oren describes haredim as an “existen-
tial threat” to the state of Israel because they “pro-
duced nothing materially but only drained the state,
shared none of its liberal and democratic values and
denied children even the most basic modern educa-
tion.” If these issues are not remedied, it will “cause
Israel’s collapse,” he wrote.

Oren said the state of Israel must force all haredi
schools to teach English, math, science and civics,
but to achieve this via persuasion and not coercion.

“Proposed legislation for penalizing haredim and
their schools for draft dodging will only backfi re
and result in large-scale unrest and incarceration.

Instead, the state must make a historic eff ort to
engage ultra-Orthodox leaders in a dialogue.”
Polygamy Oren also described the polygamy practiced by the
Bedouin in the Negev as a threat to Israel’s long-term
security. “The tradition is radically anti-feminist and
frequently cruel, with many wives purchased like
chattel, forced to conduct hard labor and bear seven
children or more. With four wives, a Bedouin male
need never work but only collect child subsidies from
the government. For this reason, in 1977, the Knesset



passed a bill outlawing polygamy, and then for the
next 45 years it ignored it.”
According to Oren, “By failing to apply its laws,
Israel has not only eroded a once overwhelming
Jewish majority in the Negev but created an unbroken
swath between Gaza and the Hebron Hills, essentially
bisecting the Negev. Taking advantage of Israeli indif-
ference, both Hamas and the PLO have constructed
mosques and madrassas throughout the Bedouin
communities and provided the teachers, many of
them Israeli Arabs from the North who radicalized the
Bedouin. It is scarcely surprising that Bedouin involve-
ment in terror attacks such as that which killed four
Israelis in Beersheva in March 2022 is rising.”
In response to this threat, Oren called upon Israeli
society to make a “new deal” with Israeli Arabs, where
the state will declare war on any form of discrimination,
promote Arabic-language education in Jewish schools
and Hebrew-language education in Arabic schools,
and enforce the law in Arab-populated areas of the
country, so that polygamy, unauthorized construction
and smuggling will be clamped down upon.

“In contrast to the past, when Israeli Arabs
protested against the presence of the police in their
villages, now they protest in favor of greater police
presence. And as the recent elections showed, Arab
politicians are harnessing their newfound power not
to delegitimize the system but to influence it. These
trends offer opportunities that must not be missed
and which, if catalyzed by policy, can make Israel
2048 a truly cohesive state,” he said.

Women’s rights
In his book, Oren discusses the difference between
how outsiders perceive Israel and how Israel is in
reality. “Growing up in America in the 1960s and 1970s,
Israel looked to me like the paragon of women’s
rights. There were photographs of short-skirted
women soldiers marching proudly with their Uzis, the
kibbutz women in their kova tembel [hats] working
the fields, and women who appeared to be self-confi-
dent to the point of brashness. There was Golda Meir.

Israel looked like a feminist forerunner. Only when I
came here did I begin to see the deep discrepancy
between the myth surrounding Israeli women and
their far less-than-egalitarian reality.

“Though the IDF was one of the only armies in
the world to draft women, it strictly limited them
to noncombat roles, many of them clerical. Sexual
exploitation by male superiors was commonplace.

Similarly, on the kibbutz, relatively few women worked
in the fields but rather [most] remained in the commu-
nal kitchens and children’s houses,” Oren wrote.

“And if the Israeli women were outspoken, their
candor did not translate into equal career opportuni-
ties. Golda might have been prime minister, but she
was only one of three women in her 56-seat party.

Beneath these disparities lurked even darker injus-
tices such as polygamy, female sex trafficking and
honor killings.”
Oren said that Israel has progressed much since
Young Jewish men holding Israeli flags dance at Damascus Gate in Jerusalem’s Old City, during Jerusalem
Day celebrations on May 29, 2022.

then, but still women earn 70% of what men do.

“Between college-educated men and women, the
gap is even wider. Though women have traditionally
dominated the banking sector, the percentage of
women on boards of major banks is under 20%. The
percentage of women in the Knesset falls far behind
that of the Swedish, Norwegian and Rwandan parlia-
ments. There has yet to be a woman head of the
Mossad or Shabak [the Shin Bet] or a woman minister
of defense. Women cannot serve as Knesset members
for any of the ultra-Orthodox parties,” he said.

Furthermore, “Women in Israel are afflicted by a
scourge of societal evils such as family violence,
female sex trafficking, genital mutilation and the
marriage of minors. Each year sees the recurrence of
the so-called honor killings in which an Arab woman
accused of sexual improprieties is murdered by a
male family member. Honor killers have traditionally
received relatively light sentences,” Oren said.

“Israeli women seeking a divorce must work
through the Chief Rabbinate, which reserves the
right to grant a divorce only to the husband. Refused
by their spouses, hundreds of Israeli women become
agunot, unable to remarry and receive alimony
and child support. In religious sectors, women are
increasingly excluded from public spaces and events.

Their images on billboards are defaced.”
He continued, “Such discrimination is outlawed by
a list of Knesset bills and Supreme Court decisions,
all of which are flagrantly ignored. Israel must be a
state that relentlessly fights sexual harassment and
public exclusion, and that eliminates the scourges of
agunot and genitally mutilated women. It must treat
the killing of women to preserve their family ‘honor’
as exactly what it is, premeditated murder, punish-
able by life imprisonment.”
Oren hopes that Israel in 2048 will be a far more
egalitarian society not only for Diaspora Jews and
minorities but also for women.

“I am not a prophet,” he proclaimed in his talk.

“My vision is not in any way sacrosanct. This [book]
is my vision. It is 22 chapters that cover every field
of Israel’s future, educational policy, social policy,
foreign policy, Israel as a state for Jews, Israel for
the Palestinians, Israel for the Arabs, gender issues,
environmental issues, etc. It is all there.

“The idea is to get people here and, in the
Diaspora, to engage with my vision. You can get
angry with it. You can throw my book at the wall.

But still engage with it and facilitate a discussion on
what kind of future we want for our grandchildren
and great-grandchildren. I look at the issues Israel
is facing now and it did not take a prophet to see
these issues coming. If we thought about them 10
years before, we might be in a different situation.

Here is your opportunity to think about the future,”
Oren said.

Gil Troy
Historian Gil Troy also spoke at the book launch.

He said it was not really Jewish to think about the
future. In all their holidays, Jews like to time travel
throughout different periods of history, but they
never visit the future.

“Nevertheless, Zionists do not just live in the
present and do not just root ourselves in the past, but
we also think about the future, roll up our sleeves and
make it better.”
Therefore, even though it goes against his Jewish
instincts, Troy said the book makes him excited as
a Zionist, for Theodor Herzl always thought about
the future and worked to make what he aspired to
happen. “This is not just a book launch,” Troy said. “It is a
conversation launch. It asks what Israel should look
like and what we will do to make it happen." ■
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