Journalist and former radical-left Member of Knesset Uri Avnery believes that the religious community is taking over the country, despite the predictions of Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, that the religious community would disappear.
"The religious [community], especially the national religious [community], are full of aggressive passion, they are full of enthusiasm, they feel they are winning, while the secular side is characterized by indifference, apathy, and comfort in the present circumstances and therefore there is no initiative to counterattack, to comply with their principles." Avnery said in an interview with Galei Yisrael radio
Avnery said that "Ben-Gurion believed that the religious [community] would disappear on their own, he did not think there was a need to preach secularism, and he was absolutely sure that the religious were like a vestigial organ, to disappear from the world within a generation or two. We all believed so."
"I think that the country that we established in '48 is disappearing, and instead there arose another state, one very different from the state that was before our eyes. The Hebrew culture that we started to create before '48 and after '48, has disappeared; it no longer exists. There is a new culture: religious, messianic, and it is gradually taking over," said Avnery.
He also referred to a column written by A.B. Yehoshua in Ha'aretz that addressed the idea of two states for two peoples, saying that "Israelis and Palestinians will be dragged slowly, willingly or unwillingly, into a binational state."
Avnery replied, "Despair is a very bad adviser. Anyone who thinks or acts based on despair will not come to anything other than greater despair. A.B. gave up totally and offers - with all due respect that he is an important writer - something dumb. It's something that simply can't be, but novelists are not always the most important thinkers," he said.
According to him, "this battle of peace between Israel and Palestine vs. eternal war, an apartheid state or an Arab state with a Jewish minority, this battle is not over and it has not been decided. It is far from being decided. We need to reestablish the secular ideal. Secular does not mean empty of religion. Secular is an entire worldview: humanistic, liberal, and it relies on the great human thinkers of the last 2,000 years."