Book Quotes: Differences in Israeli Jews

From When I Was a Soldier by Valerie Zenatti on pages 185-186:

In Israel all the extremes of society live side by side, though not always easily. There are some people who are too rich and others who are shamefully poor; shadows who rock as they pray to God, and silhouettes in miniskirts who dance, thinking of their own pleasure and living for the moment; militants who want peace now, and who know that to achieve that we would have to give the Palestinians the right to live as they want to; and others who swear their loyalty to the Land and to the Bible, who block their ears and cover their eyes to the fact that 3,000,000 Palestinians live--not especially well-in Gaza, in the hills of Judea and Samaria. The tensions also grow worse every day between the religious fanatics who insist on closing a particular cinema in Jerusalem on Saturdays and the laymen who criticize them for not doing military service; between the unemployed who demonstrate their despair outside Parliament and the high-tech engineers; between the Moroccan Jews and the Russian Jews; between the left-wing militants and the right-wing militants who hurl abuse and hatred at each other: 'Assassins!' cry the ones, 'Traitors!' reply the others.

And the blood flows, flows in the territories and in Jerusalem--where every now and then a Palestinian labourer throws an axe or a hand knife at Israelis, crying 'Allah Akhbar!', God is great. Some even say that we could do with a good war to wash away all this tension. But what exactly is a 'good' war?

In the country where I live, there are a thousand revolutions to be fought.

And from pages 108-109:

Yesterday evening after supper we had a really moving conversation with Kineret. Subject: what exactly is the link that connects us to Israel, this country which has only been going since 1948 and which is full of Jews from all over the world? Some said it was the land of our ancestors: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and David. Others felt that the extermination of the European Jews during the Second World War had proved that there was a need for a Jewish state where they could take refuge if they were threatened. A few girls whose reasoning was basically pretty sound said that they'd been born here and that usually people were attached to their native country.