Israel Only Mideast Country Promoting Safe Sects

In many Mideast societies it takes force to unite opposite sects.

Jerusalem, June 10 – A survey of Middle East religious communities and their host countries shows that Israel remains the only country in the region that makes it a policy to promote safe sects for all, a new report shows.

The report took an intimate look at relations among the various groups that have amalgamated, to varying degrees of success, into the nation-states of the Middle East, and concluded that despite the palpable ethnic tensions that still arouse the country’s passions, the safest place in the region for any of those groups is Israel. Stiff conflict has waged for years already in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Egypt, with paroxysms of violence flaring in places such as Lebanon, the country with perhaps the bloodiest history connecting violence and sects.

Such tensions could only be repressed in many of those societies, say the report authors, by a strong, testosterone-fueled dictator capable of uniting opposite sects, such as the Sunni and Shia of Iraq, under the banner of a larger state. That trend makes Israel’s case all the more surprising, according to the report, since the thrusting of a non-Arab, non-Muslim sovereign state into the super-sensitive region could hardly be expected to induce internal stability. However, despite the seeds of conflict sown in earlier times, domestically Israel has proved far less fertile for such internal upheaval than any of its neighbors.

Despite the prevalence and starkness of sects in Israel, it remains the only Mideast state to allow sects to remain more or less unmolested. Jews, Bahai, Druze, Circassians, Muslims, and various Christian denominations may not ever be best friends, but the benefits of living under the system Israel has erected stands in sharp contrast to the orgy of killing, torture, slavery and abuse that characterizes much of the rest of the region.

“Israel has lots of sects, and that does not make it unique,” says lead author Lou Bricant. “What Israel has managed to do that its neighbors have not, however, is to foster safe sects by releasing sects from the bondage of religious tyranny and stripping away the primacy of faith-driven clan loyalty. It has thus encountered less friction with sects, spreading open before them the world of religious tolerance and the safety it affords.”

Which is not to say that problems do not affect sects in Israel. “Discrimination more than occasionally swells and rears its head,” noted researcher Frenn Schtickler. “But it is a far more limp and impotent discrimination. Massacres and other atrocities that are the order of the day elsewhere in the region exist in Israel only in the wet dreams of some radicals with little power or audience. To be sure, for some sects the government must provide better protection, but for the most part discrimination in Israel remains decidedly soft-core.”