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This is a two-part essay, the first part by Joel Meyer, an educator and speaker; and the second part by Joshua Hoffman, the founder of “Future of Jewish.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
At a moment when Israelis pause to celebrate the 78th anniversary of our independence, the country performs one of our most powerful rituals. We remembers our dead just the day before. We celebrate our existence together. We tell ourselves, implicitly and explicitly, that despite everything, we are still one society.
But is this true?
In recent years, a familiar story has taken hold about the direction of Israel. Walk through central Israel and it seems to confirm itself at every turn: cafés filled with remote workers, conversations about careers and rising living costs, families spending weekends in malls that could be anywhere in the developed world. The conclusion feels almost unavoidable: Israel is becoming more individualistic, less ideological, and more oriented toward personal choice.
This is not just an impression. Maoz Azaryahu captured a version of this shift years ago in his essay “McIsrael?”, describing the moment a McDonald’s opened next to the Golani Brigade Museum and Memorial in northern Israel. The image was striking because it appeared to capture a deeper transformation: A society once organized around shared sacrifice now seemed to be reorganizing itself around consumption and individualism.
The implication was clear: Israel was becoming something more familiar, more “normal,” more like other developed societies.
It is an appealing story because it is simple. It suggests direction. It suggests movement. But it does not describe what is actually happening.
If you step back and look more broadly, a different picture comes into focus. It is not one of convergence, but of divergence. The Pew Research Center’s major study of Israeli society describes a country deeply divided across religious, ethnic, and ideological lines, not only in politics but in daily life, social networks, and identity. Other research reinforces this point, showing that Israeli society is structured around multiple overlapping cleavages which shape how people live, what they believe, and how they relate to the state.
These divisions are visible in everyday life. There are Israelis whose lives are increasingly shaped by global culture. Many work in technology or international industries, travel frequently, and think in terms of personal opportunity alongside national belonging. Their concerns are often practical, focused on housing, careers, and quality of life.
At the same time, there are large communities for whom those concerns are secondary to a very different set of priorities. Within the national religious sector, military service is often understood not only as a civic obligation but also as part of a larger historical and, at times, religious narrative. Research on post-1967 Religious Zionism shows that these communities have become more ideologically assertive over time, placing greater emphasis on identity, land, and long-term purpose.
Alongside both of these are ultra-Orthodox Jews. In their communities, daily life is organized around religious study, communal authority, and internal systems that operate alongside the state. Education, media, and social norms are shaped internally, and engagement with broader society is selective. Studies from institutions such as the Israel Democracy Institute note that these communities often prioritize maintaining clear social boundaries even as they adapt socially and economically, but in limited ways.
What emerges from this is not a society gradually converging toward a single model, but one in which different groups are moving along distinct paths.
The story that describes Israel as shifting from socialism to capitalism, or from collective to individual, is no longer enough to explain what is happening. Economic divisions have, in many ways, become less central, while divisions around identity, religion, and the meaning of the state have moved to center stage.
The events of October 7th and thereafter seemed, at first, to challenge this picture. In the days that followed, Israelis across different backgrounds mobilized quickly. Reservists reported for duty in large numbers, volunteer networks filled logistical gaps, and civil society responded with speed and scale. For a brief moment, it appeared that beneath the divisions there was still a shared core.
But that impression became more complicated as people began to interpret what had happened. In some parts of society, the events reinforced a long-standing belief that Israel faces an ongoing existential struggle which requires strength and continuity. Elsewhere, they intensified criticism of the political leadership and renewed demands for accountability and change. In ultra-Orthodox communities, the response often centered more on communal action, prayer, and internal resilience, with less emphasis on public political debate than in other parts of Israeli society.
The same events were experienced across society, but they did not carry the same meaning. Conversations in homes, schools, and public spaces revealed not only disagreement but different starting points.
People were not simply arriving at different conclusions; they were asking different questions.
This pattern is not unique to Israel. Research on polarization shows that shared crises do not necessarily produce shared narratives, and can deepen divisions by reinforcing existing frameworks of interpretation.
Israel did not fail to come together in the wake of October 7th; it came together in action, but not in interpretation and meaning.
This is also where the idea of a single direction begins to fall apart. In “McIsrael?”, Maoz Azaryahu himself notes that cultural change of this kind is never a simple process of replacement, but is shaped by local conditions and layered onto existing identities. Consumer culture has expanded, and the decline of the old pioneering ethos is real. At the same time, religious identity has strengthened in other parts of society, communal structures have remained resilient, and political divisions have deepened.
Academic literature increasingly describes Israel not as a society moving toward coherence, but as a deeply divided one in which competing identities and frameworks coexist without fully resolving into a single system.
It is tempting to think of Israel as in the middle of a process, moving toward a clearer, more stable form. But it may be more accurate to recognize this is the form that is emerging — a society in which different groups share institutions, share risks, and even share moments of solidarity, but do not share a single story about what those moments mean.
Every year, Israel moves from Memorial Day to Independence Day with a sense of shared transition, from loss to renewal, from grief to celebration, from sacrifice to continuity. The ritual suggests a common story. But beneath it, something more complicated is taking shape.
There is another layer to this that is easy to miss.
Homogeneity is easier when a country is small. In 1948, Israel’s population was just over 800,000. Today, it is more than 10 million. That is not a marginal increase; it is a transformation by an order of magnitude. Countries do not grow tenfold and remain socially simple.
What many people miss about Israel’s growth is not just its scale, but its composition. The country was initially shaped largely by Ashkenazi Jews. But within a few short years, that foundation expanded dramatically with the arrival of roughly 850,000 Jews from across the Middle East and North Africa — Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Iran, Turkey, Algeria, Ethiopia, India, and Uzbekistan — each bringing distinct traditions, lifestyles, and worldviews.
In the decades that followed, new waves arrived from the former Soviet Union, Latin America, and English-speaking countries, layering additional identities onto an already complex society. Alongside them are Arab Israelis, who are not a monolith themselves but a diverse population with their own internal differences.
This is not a side note to Israel’s story; it is the story. You do not build a society this compressed, this diverse, and this historically loaded without friction. The expectation that it would somehow cohere into a single, seamless culture misunderstands what Israel has actually become.
And so, everything about Israel has changed at this scale. The economy is larger, more complex, and globally integrated. The military is more sophisticated and operates under entirely different conditions. Institutions have expanded, diversified, and, at times, strained under the weight of that growth.
Few allies in the region existed in 1948; today, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates are official partners, while there is increasing coordination with Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria, and even Iraq and Qatar in this recent war against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
It would be strange if Israeli society itself had not changed as well, and it has.
What once could be held together by a narrower set of shared assumptions is now shaped by a much wider range of identities, priorities, and ways of life. This is not a deviation from the trajectory of a “normal” country; it is the trajectory.
Which leads to a more uncomfortable conclusion: Israel is, in many ways, becoming a normal country. Not a perfect one. Not a uniquely unified one. A normal one.
What remains abnormal is not Israel itself, but how it is perceived and judged.
There is a persistent tendency to evaluate Israel against standards that are not applied to other countries — to expect coherence where other societies have fragmentation, moral clarity where others operate in ambiguity, unity where others live with deep internal disagreement. When Israel falls short of those expectations, the gap is often interpreted as failure.
But the gap is not between Israel and some objective standard; it is between Israel and an imagined version of what it is supposed to be. Adjust the expectation, and the picture changes.
If Israel is expected to be exceptional in its coherence, it will always disappoint. If it is understood as a country like any other — complex, nuanced, evolving — it becomes easier to see it clearly. It will still frustrate. It will still fall short. But it will also impress, surprise, and, at times, exceed what seems possible.
This is true of United States, where internal divisions shape nearly every aspect of public life. It is true of France, where debates over identity and secularism remain unresolved. It is true of Vietnam, where history, politics, and rapid development coexist in tension.
And it is true of Israel.
The idea of Israel as a “light unto the nations” carries moral weight and historical resonance. It works in a sermon. It works in a social media post. But it is not a governing framework for how a modern state actually functions. Countries are not abstractions; they are made up of competing interests, imperfect decisions, and constant trade-offs.
When that phrase is taken as a literal standard, it distorts expectations. It turns complexity into perceived failure. Israel, like any other country, operates in the realm of constraints, not ideals. The problem is not the aspiration itself, but the insistence on judging reality as though it were obligated to live up to it at all times.
More than anything, the real measure of Israel’s success is that, after 78 years, it is still here, still functioning, arguing, adapting, continuing — alive and unmistakably real.
The term multicultural truly applies to Israel although not in the classical sense. If only Israel were evaluated on the same basis as other nations.
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