Culture comes first: minorities’ behavior during the Covid-19 pandemic: Arabs and Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine minority communities’ behavior and practice in Israel during the Covid-19 pandemic (2020–2021) using Smelser’s model for collective behavior. The paper uses formal documents of Israeli state institutions and media reports and concentrates on two minority groups: Ultra-Orthodox Jews (13% of the population) and Arabs (21%). These two populations constitute minority groups with similarities in aspects such as tradition and language that are unique to each. Both communities also suffered from high morbidity rates compared to the general population. The main conclusions of the study are: (1) Ultra-Orthodox Jews disregarded official decrees and obeyed only the religious leadership; (2) the Arab population distrusted the official establishment and its instructions for two major reasons: longstanding neglect of the health system in Arab localities and frequent policy changes during the pandemic; (3) both groups maintained their patterns of collective behavior despite formal instructions to avoid it during the pandemic; and (4) the state failed to provide both communities with updated information during the pandemic, which increased both groups’ distrust of the formal state instructions. This dysfunctioning was a spark event for further disobeying of both communities.

Keywords:

• Minority groups
• Israel
• Covid-19
• Ultra-Orthodox Jews
• Arabs in Israel

REVIEWING EDITOR:

• Lincoln Geraghty, School of Media and Performing Arts, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK

SUBJECTS:

• Cultural Studies
• Popular Culture
• Subcultures

1. Introduction

Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic at the beginning of 2020, different studies have tried to analyze its implications. While medical research has considered the origin of the pandemic, social and political science studies have focused on decision-makers’ policies and public behavior. Some of them concentrated on policy implementation, and others took this one step further asking to offer some possible ways in which the public policy and administration community (Dunlop et al., 2020; Scott et al., 2020, pp. 257–265).

Like many other states, Israel tried to determine the right policy for eradicating the virus. Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu, admitted (March 2020), that the infection rate is probably greater than we estimated and there is currently no vaccine. The new reality – all around the globe – of uncertainty and a lack of information regarding numerous questions – how dangerous is the virus? What are the effects of infection? How long does it take to recover? How does the virus affect children, adults, and older people? – led to confusion. Governments’ policies changed almost every day, sometimes at a dizzying pace, simply because heads of state did not know how to deal with an unknown enemy. This resulted in a situation where experts in medicine, public health, policy, and management made recommendations – which were often completely different from each other in substance – to political leaders, including in Israel, on what to do in order to eradicate the virus (Carroll, 2020; DoctorsOnly, 2020). Israel’s population remained confused for a long time because of the unclear policies and the fact that the government’s instructions, at least during the first months, were in Hebrew, resulting in different groups and communities having language difficulties. This was the situation among two minority groups: the Arab sector (1.5 million people) and the Ultra-Orthodox community (1.175 million), whose primary language is Yiddish.

This study aims to explore these two groups’ patterns of behavior from the beginning of the pandemic to the summer of 2021, when Israel switched to a policy of ‘living with the coronavirus’. By this point, most of the population had received vaccinations and the death rates from the coronavirus had decreased significantly. Another reason for focusing on these groups is that both had increased morbidity rates compared to the general population (Israeli Ministry of Health, 2021).

The qualitative analysis is based on official data and papers of the Israeli establishment (Ministry of Health, coronavirus headquarters), Parliament (Knesset) discussions, and officials’ statements. While Arab localities in Israel can be easily classified, some Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) communities lived in mixed areas with non-Haredi Jews. Therefore, the analysis encompasses Haredi cities (where at least 90% of the residents are Haredi) and Arab localities (except Arabs living in the following mixed cities with Jews: Haifa, Jaffa, Acre, Lod, Ramla). The total number of people that this study discusses is more than 2 million, so the findings are valid and reliable.

The first part of the study reviews the demographic structures of Ultra-Orthodox Jews. The second part reviews the Arab minority’s demography, and the third section compares the two groups’ behavior.

2. Sociocultural features of Ultra-Orthodox society

In Israel today there are over fifty local authorities where Orthodox Jews (Haredi) live. Some of these settlements such as Bnei Brak, Elad, Beitar Illit, Modi’in Illit are distinct ultra-Orthodox settlements. In large cities such as Jerusalem, Haifa, Ashdod, Be’er Sheva and Beit Shemesh there are ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods that live as closed communities. This situation poses a real challenge to the official establishment for crisis situations such as the case study of the Covid-19 pandemic.

As a rule, this society does not accept new and unreligious culture. Haredi means fear from God (Heilman & Friedman, 1991, p. 199). Therefore, ‘any deviation from the path of the Torah is an absolute prohibition and any idea of reform, progress, or innovation must be banned’. (Rheins, 2002, p. 94). In order to prevent the penetration of foreign ideas into the community, a partition (physical and conceptual) must be established and there must be a message for a complete separation between the life of the community and the life outside it, from which there is the danger that the younger generation will deviate from the straight path of the Torah of Israel

According to recent data, 1,175,000 Haredim lived in Israel at the end of 2020, the relevant year for analyzing their behavior during the pandemic (Israel Democracy Institute, 2021). There are four main groups of Ultra-Orthodox Jews as follow:

1. Yerushalmi community (Jerusalemites), the Litvak community (originally from the territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania), the Hasidic community, and the Oriental Sephardic Haredim (Baumel, 2006). Hasidic society is further subdivided into an array of sects, broadly divided into the Polish Hasidim, the Hungarian Hasidim, and Chabad-Lubavitch, a movement of Russian origin that stands apart from other Hasidic sects. This community can be classified as a separatist group, and naturally, its stance directly impacted their behavior during the examined period (January 2020–August 2021).

2. Lithuanians are considered the elite of the Haredi community. They represented a ‘community of learners’ that views religious studies as the core value of life (Etkes & Tikochinski, 2004, p. 31). Lithuanians are also referred to as ‘opponents’) misnagdim or mitnagdim(. The reason is their opposition stance towards the Hasidic movement. They refused to automatically accept the separatist position and were willing to listen to the outside world. Members of this group, for example, vote in the general elections for the Israeli Parliament (Knesset). Within this group there is also a separatist community, called the ‘Jerusalem Faction’, founded in 2012 by Rabbi Shmuel Auerbach.

3. The Sephardic Haredim current is new compared to the previous currents. Until the 80s of the 20th century, it operated without independent institutions and relied on educational institutions of the Ashkenazi movement, which deprived the Sephardic students. In the mid-1980s, a group of Sephardi rabbis, among them Rabbi Yitzhak Peretz and Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, founded a political framework (Shas) that has since established a network of independent educational institutions. In doing so, shas offered a combination of Torah studies with integration into Israel’s state institutions (Hitman, 2022). This pattern of activity is inclusive, and, theoretically, one can assume that during the pandemic, this group would have obeyed official instructions.

4. Recently, a subculture known as the New Haredim has appeared within Haredi society. These people belong to the Ultra-Orthodox sector but are open to the modern world and general society. The New Haredim is not a defined stream but rather encompasses Haredim whose thinking is more liberal. They can be found among communities of Lithuanians, Hasidim, and Sephardim. Haim Zicherman, a researcher of Ultra-Orthodox society, estimated that they constituted about 9% of the total Haredi population in Israel, or about 70,000 of the total 1,175,000 Ultra-Orthodox (Zoldan, 2019). Modern Haredim consume Western culture, and their engagement with modernity includes secular media and the internet. Most have cell phones that are not kosher, and some even have a television at home. Some support enlistment in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and some live near secular Jews in communities like Jerusalem or Beit Shemesh (west of Jerusalem). These are clear signs of their will to integrate within the Israeli public sphere while maintaining their unique cultural character.

3. The Arab minority in Israel

According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, the Arab minority in Israel makes up about 21% of the Israeli population (as of the end of 2020). The minority community is a compound of various religions and groups that includes Muslims, Christians, Druze, Bedouins, Circassians, Alawites, and Ahmadis. The Arab minority is a native population that sees itself under the hegemony of a majority which is essentially not such. In the distinction accepted in the professional literature between ‘indigenous minorities’ and ‘immigrant minorities’, the Arab minority in Israel belongs to the former. Generally, the native character of a minority enhances its self-awareness and the validity of its social-political claims to a greater extent than that of non-native minorities. The same is true of the Arab minority in Israel. The value of steadfastness (sumud), that is, the determined clinging to the inheritance of the ancestors in the face of the challenges posed by the Jewish majority, which they perceive as a society of immigrants, is highly admired in the Arabs’ worldview. This scenario – of a ‘native’ minority versus an ‘immigrant’ majority – has the potential to increase tension (Orr Committee, 2003).

From 1948 to 1990, the Israeli policy toward the Arabs was mainly framed in terms of security. This did not just relate to the military rule that the Israeli authorities imposed on the Arabs from 1948 to 1966. Those who left their homes during the civil war of 1947–1949 were not allowed to return when the war ended, their lands were confiscated in favor of building new towns and cities for Jews, and Arabs were under intelligence surveillance many years after the military rule ended. They were prevented from having an equal opportunity to become part of the Israeli civil, cultural, and political fabric. This has changed, to an extent, since 1990 because of both internal Israeli and external Palestinian reasons (Hitman, 2019, pp. 153–154).

The constant tension between the Jewish majority and the Arab minority, based on historical conflicts, has deteriorated several times into head-on collisions that resulted in casualties, damage to property, and a crisis of trust in the parties’ relations, which required a long time to return to a quiet routine. This was the case with the Land Day of 1976, the October 2000 events, and the May 2021 crisis, mainly in mixed cities, (where Jews and Arabs live in the same city (Saban, 2008).

One topic constantly under focus is whether Israeli Arab citizens are interested in integrating into Israeli society or support segregation due to feelings of alienation based on different perceptions of nationalism. This issue directly impacts individuals’ behavior during periods of routine and times of crisis. For example, Nasasra points out that political exclusion is not just about being outside the Israeli ruling coalition but also not being an active party in diplomatic efforts to solve the Palestinian issue, as was the case at the Oslo Accords (Nasasra, 2021, p. 523). Pinson argues that Palestinian Arab students are aware of the existence of the politics of citizenship in Israel, from which meanings are derived about the ability to integrate into society as well as their collective identity as Israeli citizens or their sense of belonging to a non-Jewish nationality (Pinson, 2008). Ben Porat chooses exclusion over integration and examines the distribution of resources in a way that strengthens the Jewish majority and marginalizes the non-Jewish minority, which he calls a Palestinian minority. He also argues that this unequal distribution affects the citizenship status of the Palestinian minority (Ben-Porat, 2008). Khaizran and Khlaile’s main argument is that Israeli Arabs face an impassable obstacle every time they ask to integrate because of the fact that they are non-Jews. According to their study, Arabs have been suffering from exclusion since 1948, and, in fact, ‘Arabs do not enjoy full citizenship’. (Khaizran & Khlaile, 2019).

Studies from recent years have explored Arabs’ motivation to integrate. Popper-Giveon and Keshet, for example, found that Arabs study medicine because this increases their chances of integrating into Israeli society and that the ethnic component influences the choice to study medicine as an expression of self-realization (Popper-Giveon & Keshet, 2016). These authors’ research is unique because it illuminates one of many angles of those seeking to integrate themselves into the bottom-up process.

The Arab community can thus be seen to have similar characteristics to the Ultra-Orthodox community: they are both minority groups in a multicultural society and are made up of different ideological streams that produce subgroups, which have different leaders, customs, ideas, patterns of action, and factions that are variously interested in secession from or integration into Israeli society. Both Ultra-Orthodox Jews and Arab have diversed leadership composed of religious figures, heads of localities and Knesset members. Yet, while Rabbis were the relevant leadership to deliver official guidelines to the Haredi communities, heads of Arab localities was the address for Arab population. These were the conditions that the Israeli establishment found the two groups in when the coronavirus epidemic broke out at the beginning of 2020.

3.1. Collective behavior patterns

The subject under investigation in this study connects to collective behavior. It is particularly important to address patterns of collective activity in traditional communities as the Ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Arabs (most of them Muslims) in Israel. Moreover, the issue of following the official rules or disregard it can be fall within a broader topic of civil protest.

Collective behavior theory, which is defined as the behavior of aggregates whose interaction is ‘affected by some sense that they constitute a group’ (Turner & Killian, 1957, p. 4). This approach meets Diani’s definition and believes that a social movement is acting outside the establishment and looking to change the current situation – politically and many times culturally. This attitude has also sought for cohesiveness among its members around the goals. Neil Smelser’s model contains six independent variables for explaining collective behavior, as it starts with structural conduciveness and ends with mechanism of social control, i.e. whether the authorities allow the people to protest or do they have the will and the power to stop it, even by force (Lang, 1963). His model can explain what, why, when and how people coalesce and act in the same way. The fourth stage of Smelser’s model - the occurrence of a spark event was in this test case the outbreak of the virus. It is added to the first three parts of the model that exist within the two communities under investigation: a supportive structural situation (Orthodox and Arabs against the Zionist establishment), a supportive structural tension (Orthodox and Arabs against the character of a Jewish and democratic state), and the blame towards the establishment that does not treat them equally (especially among the Arabs).

3.2. Methodology

The data analysis is qualitative. It cannot be quantitative because it was not possible to conduct face-to-face surveys in Israel during the Corona crisis, due to the closures imposed on the population. Therefore, we based the collection of materials on official documents published by the Israeli government (Prime Minister’s Office, Ministry of Health), the Knesset Research Center, hospitals and communication materials in Hebrew and Arabic. In relation to media materials, the focus was on statements by public figures, professionals (Ultra-Orthodox and Arab), who followed closely what was happening in both communities and analyzed the patterns of behavior in relation to the official instructions given to the entire community during the plague. The media material included a systematic review of ultra-Orthodox press and ultra-Orthodox writing on national websites. The materials in the Arab sector are based on a scan of the main websites in the Arab sector in Israel. In both cases, the search included materials from March 2020 to the summer of 2021, when most of the population in Israel was already vaccinated against the virus.

4. Analysis of Haredi society

The first case of Covid-19 in Israel was discovered on February 27, 2020. Three weeks later, when the uncertainty dictated the official policy, the Israeli government decided that gatherings of more than ten people were prohibited. By June 2020, the total number of deaths from the virus was 300, 45 of whom were residents of Bnei Brak, a Haredi city 4 miles east of Tel Aviv. To put it another way, 15% of the dead came from a city that makes up 2% of Israel’s population. Several fundamental factors, among them population density and high poverty rates, made it challenging for the Ultra-Orthodox sector to meet the sanitation and isolation conditions required as part of the effort to prevent mass infection. In July 2020, the then Minister of Interior, Aryeh Deri, an Ultra-Orthodox, said that 70% of people infected by Covid-19 were Haredim (Pepper, 2020). However, several scholars have pointed out that Haredi citizens violated the state rules imposing strict limitations to reduce morbidity rates in the following ways:

1. Educational institutions for boys remained open despite the instruction to close them. This was particularly noticeable in the Lithuanian stream of Rabbi Haim Kanievsky, which kept study rooms open despite sharp criticism and the fact that non-Orthodox students stayed home due to the epidemic. Interestingly, the leaders of the Hassidic communities did not obey the official policy, and each made his own decision regarding the education system. During the pandemic, the Ultra-Orthodox press gave educators a broad platform to justify why education must continue, despite the epidemic, to prevent a crisis among the members of the yeshiva. Rabbi Yitzhak Koldatsky expressed his fear of yeshiva students abandoning the world of the Torah if they did not attend educational institutions (Rabina, 2020). Israel Eichler, a Member of the Knesset, spoke about the educational destruction caused by the coronavirus (Eichler, 2020). As Kahner presented it, the fear in the Ultra-Orthodox sector was that many learners would not return to their educational institutions and instead would enter the labor market, where they would come into contact with secular society that might introduce them to an immoral culture (Cohen, 2021).

2. Hundreds of wedding ceremonies continued at a time when official warrants of the Ministry of Health prohibited them. One of the first instructions given to the population in Israel was to wear a mask in public places. However, this directive was ridiculed in Ultra-Orthodox society, which refused to comply. While the morbidity data increased in the summer of 2020, the Ultra-Orthodox community continued to hold mass weddings. Even in moderate Hasidism like Belz, the directive was given to celebrate weddings without masks even at the cost of mass infection (Halbertal, 2020). David Daman, an Ultra-Orthodox journalist, realized in the middle of the pandemic that he would not be able to hold his son’s wedding with many participants: ‘A wedding cannot take place except in dark cellars with spies who infest the entrance and report the arrival of government inspectors, much like Jews circumcised their children during the Spanish Inquisition ‘. (Daman, 2020, p. 110).

3. Synagogues remained open, though for no more than 10 people, but the number of prayers increased. Interestingly, the Haredim challenged secular people, attesting that prayer is important to them, just as demonstrations are important to secular people. (The year 2020 was full of demonstrations against public corruption.)

4. During the first weeks of the pandemic, Haredim used public transportation even though the formal instructions were to refrain from it as much as possible. Public transportation is typical instrumental behavior of this community, and it lies in the fact that only 44% of Haredim own a private car. This situation forced them to violate the guidelines to be able to move from place to place. (Friedman et al., 2020).

There are several reasons why Haredi society disobeyed the state’s instructions and rules. To start with, all internal sub-communities (hatzerot) in this society see the sacred studying of the Torah as the most important thing. It is the highest religious and moral value, and they believe (especially the Lithuanians) that ongoing studying of the Torah is critical to the physical survival of the world. As such, learning the Torah was the right thing to do to save humanity from the virus.

Second, giving up prayer is seen as an extreme abnormality in a society where prayer is a sacred custom. Only the religious authority (rabbis) can permit Haredim not to pray, not the Israeli establishment.

Third, from a cultural point of view, this society is founded on community life, and as a result, it maintains a wide variety of activities that emphasize the collective rather than the individual. When the epidemic broke out, it was difficult, if not impossible, to change cultural habits rooted in it for many years, even at the cost of high mortality rates.

Fourth, the level of the Ultra-Orthodox community’s trust in state institutions is low. The fact that the official policy during the pandemic changed rapidly further undermined its faith in the government’s directives, and the instruction not to pray was perceived negatively. This lack of trust was expressed in a report published in October 2021 that examined the number of civilians tested for the virus in 205 localities in Israel (broken down into Jewish-secular, Ultra-Orthodox, Arab, Druze, and Bedouin localities), which found that the lowest number was in the Ultra-Orthodox and Bedouin groups (Taub Center, 2021, p. 9). In January 2021, when the vaccination campaign against the virus began, violations of the Ministry of Health’s guidelines were registered in Bnei Brak (a city of 205,000 Ultra-Orthodox). The police tried to enforce the instructions using force, and in response, the Ultra-Orthodox community accused the police of engaging in a revenge campaign. Naturally, this situation did not alter the high level of mistrust this community has toward state institutions (Adamkar & Levy, 2021).

Fifth, the information that reached the Ultra-Orthodox public from the state was partial. Most of this population is not exposed to secular means of communication (for reasons of modesty, as their religion requires). Hence, their understanding and internalization of the situation were only partial, as, consequently, was their compliance with official instructions.

Another important aspect that should be dealt with here is the question of leadership. From the Haredim’s perspective, political authority is not in the hands of the state but in the hands of the rabbis. Hence, the state does not have the authority to enforce its directives, neither in normal times nor in emergency times, which led to the mass violation of directives that sought to protect public health. The only authority they are ready to accept is that of the rabbis. However, the pandemic era has caused trust in the religious leadership to be undermined. As one Ultra-Orthodox youth put it:

Orthodoxy is constantly threatened by progress. Medicine, science, and the whole modern world – everyone is trying to tell you that what you believe in is wrong. And there are moments, like moments of an epidemic, in which science seems to win. Here, all the Torah you study is worth nothing. Apparently, the whole paradigm is supposed to collapse. This is what is at the heart of the story here. If, in the end, it turns out that your doctor wife looks after me better than my rabbi, that’s it, the story is over. I’m panicking. (LePair, 2020)

5. Analysis of Arab society

The Arab population in Israel mostly lives in homogeneous settlements and some mixed cities with a Jewish majority, such as Jaffa, Lod, Ramla, Haifa, and Acre. This study focuses on Muslim and Bedouin Arab localities and does not include the Arab population living in cities.

The morbidity level in Arab society caused by Covid-19 was 9.7% compared to 9.2% in the general population. This level is high, especially considering the relatively low number of people who tested for Covid-19, which was 1.2% versus 1.8% in the general population. During the period under study (January 2020–August 2021), for every 1,000 people aged 45+ in Arab settlements, 6.3 died due to the virus, compared to 3.2 per 1,000 persons in this age group in the general population (Knesset Research Cenrer, 2021).

The first wave of Covid-19, which took place from February to May 2020, was characterized by Israeli Arabs’ full cooperation with the Ministry of Health’s instructions and with the Israeli security forces – the police and the IDF’s Home Front Command. The involvement of the Arab political leadership (the Joint List), the religious leadership, and the Islamic Council (for religious rulings), as well as Arab medical staff and civil society organizations, increased awareness in the community of the importance of following the instructions of the Ministry of Health.(INSS, 2021). During the holidays of Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr (April–May 2020), prayers were canceled, instructions were issued to refrain from opening non-essential businesses, and large-scale events were banned, including the marking of Land Day, which normally takes place on March 30. At the same time, the Ministry of Health began to take steps to enforce its coronavirus instructions, including intensifying information activities in Arabic and establishing an Arab company desk at the National Control Center in Tel HaShomer Hospital (INSS, 2021).

However, the Arabs’ behavior during the second wave of the pandemic (September 2020) was completely different: they opened shops and businesses and held weddings and large-scale events, despite the instructions that prohibited them. This resulted in significantly increased morbidity and death rates among Israeli Arabs. There are some possible explanations for this change in the Arab minority’s behavior:

1. Lack of confidence – The frequent changes in the instructions issued by the government, which resulted from political pressure from representatives of the Ultra-Orthodox community and uncertainty and confusion regarding the virus, led to frustration among the Arabs, who lacked influential representatives among the decision-makers (INSS, 2021). This lack of trust was also reflected in the field of vaccines. Most Israeli Arabs received the first vaccine at the beginning of 2021, when most of the public feared the consequences of the disease. In the second and third rounds of vaccines, there was a decline in the Arab public’s willingness to be vaccinated: the community’s vaccination rate was 49.8% compared to 57.7% for the general population. (Knesset Research Cenrer, 2021, p. 3). ‘Alaa Aghbariyya, a strategic consultant and marketing expert for Arab society, explains this phenomenon as follows: ‘The Arab citizen no longer has much confidence in the health system. Longstanding neglect in the field of health has lowered health literacy among this population’. (Zoebi, 2022). Health literacy is an individual’s ability to obtain, read, understand, and use information from the official establishment, especially from the Ministry of Health, to make tailored health decisions and respond to medical instructions. Bishara Bisharat, an expert in family medicine and chair of the Society for the Advancement of Health of the Arab Population in the Israel Medical Association, cites Diane Levin’s research to show that Arab society in Israel, as a population group, has low health literacy (Basharat, 2020).

2. Euphoria – The low morbidity rates in the first wave of Covid-19 caused the feeling that the crisis had passed. According to Elias Nail, director of the French Hospital in Nazareth: ‘In the second wave, people are less afraid of the coronavirus, and because we did not see a high number of seriously ill patients and deaths in the first wave, it brought society to a situation where many people did not believe that there was coronavirus at all’(Kraus, 2020).

3. Traditions – Funerals and weddings as mass events testify to the social status of the family in Arab society, which is essentially clan/tribal. The size of the funeral reflects the status of the deceased, as well as the socio-economic/political status of his family. A funeral, like a wedding, stems from a social code of hospitality, and the family cannot avoid people taking part in these events (Ali, 2020).

4. Politics – The Arab population was unwilling to cooperate with the government to prevent the collapse of the state due to the coronavirus. According to them, before the outbreak of the pandemic, the state did not deal with eradicating crime in Arab society or with reducing the gaps between it and Jewish society (Reichner, 2020). In addition, at the level of local authorities, residents who did not vote for the mayor or the elected council did not follow their instructions regarding the coronavirus.

5. The traffic light system – Localities with high infection rates were classified as ‘red’ and were subject to closure or a nightly curfew. These brought a curse on those localities, so in order to circumvent the prohibition, mass events were brought forward to the hours before dark (INSS, 2021, p. 34).

6. Propaganda – Although only about 44% of Israeli Arabs over the age of 20 speak reasonable Hebrew, the information disseminated by the Ministry of Health regarding the coronavirus was only gradually translated into Arabic. In March and April 2020, the Ministry of Health only published partial information regarding the focal points of exposure to the virus in Arab local authorities. It activated an Arabic Telegram channel in mid-March 2020 and only established an Arabic-language call center for Covid-19 in early April 2020 (Special Report, 2021).

6. Conclusions

Previous scholarly on both Ultra-Orthodox Jews and Arab communities discussed a wide range of topics as political ideologies, education, employment, sovereignty of the God and using violence. Covid-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to explore whether these communities are willing to obey or disobey the formal policy during a health crisis. Therefore, the conclusions of the study place it in a series of other studies that deal with sociological aspects that refer to both groups. Its uniqueness is that it allows observation of the behavior of two large minority groups in Israel during an event of a continuous crisis that had many points of uncertainty.

This paper has compared the patterns of behavior of two minority communities in Israel during the Covid-19 pandemic from 2020 to 2021 and concludes the following: first, regarding the attitude towards the official establishment – the Ultra-Orthodox community was unwilling to obey the instructions relating to the coronavirus issued by the official establishment – government orders, health ministry guidelines, and police supervision and enforcement. The Haredim did not follow the provisions prohibiting prayer in synagogues because, in their view, the permit to cancel public prayer could only be given by a religious authority (the rabbis). Their disregard for government instructions reflects both a lack of confidence in it and a clear preference for religious leadership over state sovereignty. This was exacerbated by the frequent policy changes and changes to the instructions and prohibitions associated with the coronavirus. Moreover, they saw the police’s enforcement actions against the Haredim sector as an expression of a revenge campaign. The Arab minority population also expressed distrust of the government due to the frequent policy changes regarding the coronavirus. The roots of this mistrust go back to the Arabs’ general sense of the Ministry of Health’s long-standing neglect of the Arab sector. This type of behavior was the dominant in both communities despite official data of high number of deaths and illness among Ultra-Orthodox Jews and Arabs during the pandemic.

The second conclusion deals with the conflict between tradition and state sovereignty. Learning the Torah and holding prayers are deep and uncompromising traditions for the Haredim. The members of this community will not give up their creeds and will not follow the instructions of the establishment to cease them unless their religious leaders order them to do so. Holding large events such as weddings and funerals and people’s extensive participation in them are also integral parts of the community’s customs. They are not willing to change their traditions and customs derived from the Torah, that is, directly from God. Mass events are also of uncompromising importance in the Arab sector. Social codes require the invitation of guests, who, in turn, are obligated to comply. These codes outweighed the community’s fear of the consequences of Covid-19. In contrast to the complete obedience of the Haredim to their leaders, the Arabs ignored the urgings of prominent personalities in the Arab sector – politicians and medical staff – to follow government orders. The explanation for such behavior is a cultural one since it is a part of the Arab tradition, which is similar to that of Ultra-Orthodox Jews, involves having social events that occupy a central place in community life.

Thirdly, concerning provision information – in both sectors, the government failed to provide either the Haredim or the Arabs with appropriate information about the coronavirus in the early stages of the pandemic. The government issued instructions in Hebrew on television and websites. However, some Israeli Arabs do not speak, read, or understand Hebrew, and most Haredim speak Yiddish, saving the use of Hebrew for religious rituals and prayers; moreover, they are not exposed to the internet and the popular media. As such, the government’s communication strategies missed large segments of the population, who were denied vital and relevant information about the pandemic. The outcome was that both minority communities continued their normal patterns of behavior instead of changing them to help eradicate the disease.

Finally, the main limitation of the study is that it is a snapshot of environmental behavior during one case study. The research challenge in the future is to try to identify action patterns (fixed or changing) of minority groups during crises of a similar magnitude.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gadi Hitman

Gadi Hitman is a senior lecturer, faculty member and the chair of the Middle East Department and Political Science at Ariel University. He holds a Ph.D from Bar Ilan University. He is the author of five books: a) Israel and its Arab minority: Dialogue, Protest, Violence (Lexington, 2016). b) National Schism and Civil Integration: Mutual Relations Between the Israeli Central Government and the Israeli Arab Palestinian Minority (Sussex Academic Press, 2018). c) The Fatah-Hamas Rift: An Analysis of Failed Negotiation (SUNY Press, 2022). d) A SWOT Analysis if Family-Wahhabi Nationalism Case Study (Lexington, 2022) – the winner of Bernard Lewis prize 2022. e) In Search of Identity: the ongoing internal crisis within the Israeli Society (Mc-Guill -St. Queen, expected 2024). In addition, Hitman published nearly 40 articles on the Gulf States region, consequences of the regional turmoil in the Middle East and theoretical/empiric aspects of nationalism, ethnicity, political protest or violence, and narratives. He already has developed various models relating to these topics.