14 - Cleavages among Jews

Summary

The class cleavage

The cleavages of class, ethnicity, and religion have been analyzed along a number of dimensions, objective and subjective. Our findings have both corroborated what we know from other sources and thrown new light on the social divisions within the Israeli-Jewish population. With respect to class, we have confirmed that class consciousness is not strong in Israel, but we have also shown that class, quite independently of ethnic origin, is relatively important in the social life of respondents, including their friendship networks and in the ways that discrimination is felt.

Objective class position influences cognitive images of the class structure and levels of dissatisfaction with both the distribution of rewards among classes and with the individual's own socio-economic position. The weak politicized class consciousness appears to be related to the importance of the “socialist” or public economic sector in the political economy of Israel. Socialist ideology was one of the principal ideological forces that shaped Israeli society, but it came to be associated with elites, bureaucrats, or public servants who controlled and administered those parts of the economy belonging to the state or the Histadrut: the large industrial concerns, the co-operative transportation companies, the collective rural settlements, the public health organizations, and the highly centralized trade-union organization.