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It is well known that Israel was established in traumatic circumstances. Israel’s heterogeneous population adds to the complexity of trauma. There are Ashkenazi Jews, most of them offspring of parents who were persecuted during WWII in Europe and survived, sometimes barely, the Shoah. There are Eastern Jews, who are mainly offspring of Jews who immigrated to Israel from Arab countries, also after being persecuted in their countries of origin after the establishment of the state of Israel. There are Israeli Palestinians, or Israeli Arabs, who are offspring of Palestinians who lived in Palestine before 1948. These Palestinian families in Israel today were not among those forced out in Israel’s war of independence in 1948 and also chose not to flee. Some are Muslims; others are Christians or Druze. There are over a million Russian Jews who immigrated or whose parents immigrated to Israel from the USSR and from the Russian Federation. Other groups, even though smaller, are the Ethiopians, who were moved to Israel by the government in two immigration waves (between the years 1979 and 1990), and Bedouin Arabs. Finally, there are many Palestinians who live under the Israeli occupation. On another dimension, there are religious Jewish populations and secular Jewish populations. A cultural and economic gap divides these populations. Overall, Israel has a highly heterogeneous population that consists mostly of families with traumatic backgrounds.
For years, there was an invisible barrier between the different groups. The tensions sometimes burst out in public demonstrations, but they were also disguised and created strongly felt undercurrents. The Ashkenazi secular Jews were politically empowered and economically better off during the first decades of the new country, and had a greater impact on the building of the new state institutions. The values and culture of the Ashkenazi Jews were considered “progressive” and therefore often given more official support. They shared Herz