Among the Haredim, it seems they are not interested in preserving the family fabric; they separate themselves and are not willing to take part.
Some of them have reached vicious levels of detachment.

To Eli—
And among the secular left, do they want to preserve a family fabric with the right/religious/Mizrahim?

I too have criticism of both sides, and I also do not really feel family with some of them, but the fact is that despite the criticism there is still, in the background, a shared fate, even if not a shared destiny. In my opinion, that is true of all sides. It is no accident that the Haredi leadership is under pressure and is pumping out its nonsense with greater extremism now. They sense that the public has some solidarity with its surroundings. A gap has opened up between the ideology and the feelings.
https://g.kipa.co.il/1198628/g/

To Eliko, you are distorting things.
On the left they do not want to preserve a family fabric with Mizrahim? Do you know how many Mizrahi-Ashkenazi couples there are on the left?
I agree that a significant part of the left, to put it mildly, does not like right-wingers, but that exists on the other side too.
The difference between the left and the Haredim is that the left at least serves and contributes economically to the state. The Haredi leaders, by contrast, threaten that if they are forced to enlist they will flee abroad.

Eli,
Why exactly are the Haredim not right?
What is the point of preserving a “family fabric” with people who have no common denominator with you other than the fact that ten generations ago they were your cousins?
They detached themselves from Judaism, and some of them even fight it; they no longer belong to Judaism any more than my gentile cousins do (and even less so, because those cousins at least do not fight Judaism or hate it). Do you have any logical reason why a believing Jew should feel some bond with an Israeli gentile more than with a British gentile?

The claim about the Haredim has nothing to do with the unity of the people at all, only with citizenship. If Haredim in the U.S. were unwilling to take part in a defensive war for the American state, Americans would be no less angry at them—not because of Jewish unity, but because you cannot receive without paying.

There is one group with which unity is indeed impossible by definition—that is, logically impossible: the progressives. That is because progressives (being postmodernists) do not believe in the existence of collective entities (peoples, tribes, families, etc.), but see them as fictitious entities that exist only for convenience, and for them only individuals exist. By definition, “unity” cannot exist for them, because in their view it points to nothing and is itself a fictitious abstract entity. Unity with them is like the unity of the group of people who are for unity with the group of people who are against unity. Obviously that cannot work.

Some people on the left are progressives. Broadly speaking, these are Meretz voters who in principle have detached themselves from “the Jewish people,” and for whom that phrase is almost obscene. The problem is that they are the ones who in practice lead all the center and left camps and their helpers (including part of the secular Ashkenazi right that looks up to them and seeks the leftists’ approval for its very existence). In other words, they are the ones who set the tone on matters of spirit and aspiration for all those camps. And as was proven during the judicial reform period, when that entire camp supported the progressive High Court, which is responsible for the deaths of Jewish soldiers because of preserving the lives of civilians in enemy states and still persists in that path. It is very hard to know, when a leftist today speaks and mentions the phrase “the Jewish people,” whether he really means the actual historical Jewish people, and not simply the citizens of the State of Israel, including Russian gentiles and Israeli Arabs (I already met a woman who told me we must remember that the Arabs too are part of the Jewish people…). After all, this is the new “Jewish people” that the founding fathers of left-wing Zionism wanted to create. I have indeed noticed that it is very hard for leftists to get that phrase out of their mouths, or even to say the word Jews at all (for them, whoever serves in the army under their command is a Jew…), and they constantly speak about the “state” or “Israeli citizens” (which is of course a collective empty of essential content).

So the Haredim really do have a serious case here (and in my opinion they are in fact right). In fact, the time has come for the religious, the Hardali national-religious, the traditionalists, and even a small remnant of those secular right-wing Ashkenazim who have some backbone and some fear of God—even if they do not believe in the Torah, and are not swept up by the intellectual fashions of the West—to realize that the left (and the center, which is completely left) may be a mixed multitude, and the Holy One, blessed be He, does not require unity with them from us, but at least unity among ourselves first.

The family is only an example of how to conduct ourselves as a people; the discussion here is not about Judaism but about the nation. I do not really care how you feel as long as you contribute your share to the “family.”
So many words and so much nonsense, all in order to justify a bunch of draft-dodging freeloaders.

Eli, whom do you feel closer to: a secular person who does not believe in the Torah, or a Haredi person who does not serve in the army?

If you feel closer to the secular person, then you are more Israeli than Jewish; if you feel closer to the Haredi person, then you are more Jewish than Israeli.

I agree that the problem of freeloading is a serious one, and it can be defined as a problem that severely harms the unity of the people. My problem is that among nonbelievers it seems there is no unity at all that can be harmed, because there is nothing unifying there. I cannot find any common denominator between myself and a third of the country that declares it does not believe in the Torah at all and for whom Judaism is only a culture (whose characteristics are themselves unclear).

It does not seem to me that shared ethnic origin is a unifier; after all, we also share ethnic origins with the Arabs… Perhaps one could define them as Edomites whom we are forbidden to despise because of familial closeness, but that is not a national unifier.

I do not hate them—except for haters of religion and those who fight it—because they grew up and were educated in such an atmosphere, and even someone who leaves religion is influenced by the general atmosphere. But I have difficulty seeing any unifying factor here, and therefore it is unclear to me why we are talking about the same people. As it appears, there are three peoples here in the state: Palestinians, Israelis, and Jews (and many who have one foot here and one foot there).

Dear Avi,
Many nations are united around nationality and other things; religion is not what unites them.
Avi, try getting into the head of an average secular person: he sees that the overwhelming majority of the religious public thinks the world was created in six days, contrary to what he knows from science; that people lived 900 years; and that God ran the world then through miracles. All this sounds to him like other folk tales that have no basis. On top of all that, he sees the Haredi public in its lack of morality, and the representatives of that public who exploit and steal. He also sees the conduct of the Chief Rabbinate and its rabbis (look at what was published yesterday about Yonah Metzger). Someone who knows more also knows that the Haredi public is considered the engine of the Torah world, and all this comes from people who are supposedly the continuers of the chain of generations. So he says to himself: if there is a God, I have no doubt this is not His Torah. There are people like Michi and others who present a different picture, but in the Haredi public—and maybe also in the Religious Zionist one—he is considered deviant and a heretic.
By the way, I do not accept Michi’s claim that if you believe God created the world, it is reasonable in your eyes that God would have demands and commandments.
So I really ask: in light of this picture, is it so far-fetched that a secular person would not want to come closer to Orthodox Judaism?
If I had not been born into the Haredi public, I probably would have been like that too.

Eli and Avi,

What is supposed to unite us is shared fate (which is really almost mystical). The gentiles hate all of us equally (and want us dead or enslaved)—those who wear black coats and hats, and also those who in the past tried with all their might to resemble the gentiles, changed their dress, their names, and their language, and saw themselves, at best, as Germans of the Mosaic faith (whether Catholic Germans or Protestant Germans). And today too we have seen that they hate the anti-national progressive Jews, who are the new version of the assimilated Jews of old. And even if the whole world were progressive and no longer divided into nations, the Jews would still be a distinct group in their eyes—a bad nation that must be exterminated. In fact, those very people—the various assimilationists—are the ones the gentiles, even the civilized ones, hate most of all. In fact, they were the trigger for antisemitism in modern times. The gentiles still hated the old Jew in black clothes, of course, but in the assimilationists they saw a kind of plant within society, deceptive and weak Haredi Jews in disguise (there are pictures in the Ghetto Fighters’ House museum that show how the Germans viewed the assimilationists). Even today, most of those who hate Israel in the U.S. are specifically blacks and academics.

But once people deny historic Jewish nationhood altogether (as required by the progressive creed) and do not behave as one should within a family—like the High Court, the State Attorney’s Office, the IDF, the Shin Bet, the Ministries of Education and Health, academia, the media, and the rest of the state institutions, which in their hatred of Jews prefer even enemy Arabs over them—then indeed, as stated, it becomes impossible to unite.

You really are putting me to a difficult test. I would delete this cheap, foolish, vicious, and ridiculous demagoguery, if not for my loathing of censorship.