The Book of Job, one of the most beautiful in the Bible, has become involved in a furious political debate, caused - once again - by the inimitable Rabbi Ovadia Josef,

The book tells about a cruel game played by God and Satan. In order to prove Job's loyalty, God allows Satan to inflict terrible suffering on "a perfect and upright man".

This creates a dilemma for devout Jews. The God of the Book of Job is cruel and immoral, rather like those pagan gods who quarrel among themselves and use human beings as instruments. How does that go together with the image of a just and merciful deity? Comes Rabbi Ovadia Josef, following in the footsteps of his predecessors, and provides an answer: Job is not a victim of God's whim, he is justly punished. It's a matter of transmigration: The soul of Terah, father of Abraham, had passed into his body. Because Terah was an idol-worshipper, Job had to suffer.

An atheist may think that this is a ridiculous excuse. Why was Terah more of a sinner than his contemporaries, all of whom did worship idols? And what about the progressive principle of "In those days they shall say no more, The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children's teeth are set on edge…"

Since the beginning of religion, believers were plagued by the question: Why do sinner flourish? Why do the righteous suffer? How does that go together with the idea of justice, reward and punishment? Well, it's like this: God likes to test his faithful (see Job and Abraham). Or: The righteous one suffers in this world so as to get his reward in the next one, where the sinners will suffer hell. Or: By way of transmigration, the soul of the sinner is being punished in the next incarnation. And anyhow, mysterious are the ways of God, better not to ask too many questions.

The dilemma came to a head in the Holocaust. Six millions were tortured and murdered, religious and agnostic, young and old, righteous and evil. Where was God when the furnaces of Auschwitz were burning? Logical people, like Supreme Court judge Ha'im Cohen, offspring of a religious family, came to the conclusion that there is no God - or, if there is one, he is evil or indifferent. But those who held on to their belief in God who loves the human beings he created needed other answers. For example: God punished the Jews because of the sins of the Zionists, who usurped the job of the Messiah. Or: The victims of the Holocaust paid for the sins of former generations.

Thus said Rabbi Ovadia, and his words aroused the fury of "secular" Israelis. I wonder why. Why should I care for his utterances? Why should they concern me more that the mumbo-jumbo of a medicine-man in Papua? What do I have in common with him?

Ovadia complains that the "secular" public misunderstood his words, that it is unable even to understand his language. He is quiet right. His language isn't ours, ours isn't his. Between the two lies and abyss, and not from today. The expletives of Ovadia are nothing compared to the curses thrown in the face of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, by all the important rabbis of his day.

Some pretend that this is an "ideological debate" between two parts of the people, one of them religious-orthodox, the other secular. Such differences of opinion should be settled by argument. One has to "bring the hearts together", as the Hebrew phrase goes. "Gratuitous love" should replace "gratuitous hatred".

("Gratuitous hatred caused the destruction of the temple," says the oft-repeated cliche, especially beloved by politicians and such on the 9 th of the month Av, the day the temple was destroyed. That is complete nonsense. Even if all the Jews in besieged Jerusalem had loved each other, instead of burning each other's granaries, Jerusalem would have fallen. The temple was destroyed because gangs of religious fanatics had taken control of the people by murder, terror and demagoguery and dragged the people into a crazy war against Rome, the world power. Such a war could only have ended in total destruction.)

The truth is that there is no debate dividing the people, because the two sides do not belong to the same people. During the last hundred years two different peoples have evolved here, and the distance between them is growing all the time.

When I first said so many years ago, I was accused of wild exaggeration. Lately it has become fashionable to speak - still half in jest - of Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem as the capitals of two peoples, Well, it's time to treat this reality seriously.

In the course of the last generations, a new nation has emerged in this country, an Israeli nation, a mutation of the Jewish people. This nation is Jewish in origin and historic remembrance. Mutual ties connect it with the Jewish Diaspora. But it is a new national entity, much as Australia, Canada and the US are new entities with a common British origin. A completely new reality, new ways of life, a new landscape, a new geo-political situation, new neighbors, a new language (since words of the old language have changed their meaning), new needs, new aims - all these have necessarily created a new nation with a new culture.

But this is not the only new entity that has emerged in this country. The Jewish-orthodox community, too, has undergone a mutation that has turned it into something quite new. It is not just a continuation of the Jewish people in the Diaspora, even if it seems to continue their traditions. Into the old flask a new cocktail has been poured, a mixture of Messianic beliefs, elements from the cabbala, ultra-nationalistic Zionism, anti-Zionism and anti-nationalism, together with a new sense of power. A forceful mixer has turned these seemingly contradictory elements into a potent brew. The educational systems of this camp (the independent system of the orthodox, the Ma'ayan of Shass, the State-religious system of the "national religious" and the divers Yeshivot) have caused this mixture to become more and more distant from Israeli education, to the point where there is now little resemblance between the pupils of the two camps.

A nation consists of the unity of people, territory, culture (including language and historical memories, real or imagined), society, education and more. In most of these aspects there is no connection between the Israeli nation and the Jewish-orthodox community in Israel. This community has a completely different Weltanschauung . Its different education derives from quite different values and ideas and instills them in the minds of the next generation. It sees its place in the world and in the region differently. It imagines a different history and longs for a different state.

It is no coincident that Ovadia spoke of snakes, with whom one cannot make peace. All "Ishmaelites" - and indeed, all Goyim - are evil, out to destroy us, God is sorry he created them in the first place. This is not ordinary racism, a kind of anti-Semitism in reverse, nor a one-time lapse or another code-word misunderstood by the secular. This is the teaching of the cabbala, which says that only Jews are full human beings, while the goyim are closer to animals than to Jews. Non-religious Jews, meaning the whole Israeli nation, are not Jews at all, but the offspring of the biblical Amalekites who have succeeded in stealing into the Israelite camp during the exodus from Egypt. And the Bible is unequivocal about them: "Remember what Amalek did unto thee…thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven!"

This teaching means the total negation of everything that is not Jewish. It is an absolute anti-humanism, a twin of the rejection of democracy and majority rule, to be superceded by a Halakah-state under a rabbinical dictatorship. (Halakah is the Jewish religious law.)

In the religious melting pot in Israel, the divers streams of orthodox and national-religious, who used to be opposed to each other, are being merged into one single orthodox-religious-messianic-cabbalistic- Zionist-nationalist entity. The poliarena is only the outward manifestation of a much more profound process.

It is important to understand that the Jewish-orthodox mutation in Israel has nothing to do with Judaism as it evolved in the course of the last centuries in Europe, North America and North Africa, where religion has become tolerant, humanist and universal. Indeed, American Jewry may have become a third Jewish people.

It is impossible to understand the struggles in Israel without taking note of the fact that two peoples have emerged here, without a common language or a common view of anything, two peoples who see the past, present and future in a completely different light. Yet the border between the two is not hermetically sealed. A steady thin trickle of religious individuals become secular, some secular individuals turn religious. Some secular nationalists in the middle do not know where they belong. But the differences between the two peoples are greater than those between Canadians and Australians, for example. Those two share the same cultural level, while the Israeli nation and the Jewish-orthodox community live in two different worlds.

This is another dimension of the problem. The Israeli nation is oriented towards the Western world. It competes with the United States and Europe in high-tech development, science, technology and cultural achievements. It is part of the "global village". The Jewish-orthodox entity in Israel, on the other hand, is - by choice - a part of the Third World, not only in its mentality but also in its material level. It creates a built-in poverty, made permanent by an excessive birth-rate, traditionalist education and the inferior status of women, not to mention the profusion of holy men and cabbalists, amulets, charms and incantations. It strives for a state governed by rabbis, much as the ayatullahs and their like rule some Muslim states. The late ayatullah Humeini was not different from Rabbi Ovadia. The Afghan Taliban are not different in their thinking from the Yeshiva-bochers in Israel - except, of course, that they work and serve in the army.

When people speak about the "gap" in material terms, this aspect of the problem, which is ideological-religious, is generally ignored. But there is a mutual relationship between extreme religious attitudes and poverty. One feeds the other.

Can two such peoples live together in one state? Yes, but only under certain conditions. It is not easy. Co-existence is possible only if it is based on the separation of state and religion. Different people can live together in one state if they want to (Belgium and Switzerland, for example) and if the rules are accepted by all. The state is based on the supremacy of the law, the citizenship of the individual and the equal rights of different communities. On this level there should be no difference between a Jewish-Israeli, a Jewish-orthodox and an Arab-Israeli citizen. As long as all accept the framework of the system and the law, they can exist side by side. Let Rabbi Ovadia talk to his heart's desire, and so, too, Sheikh Abdallah Nimmer Hussein of the Islamic movement and Tommy Lapid of the violently anti-religious Shinui party (who, by the way, objects to the separation of state and religion.)

Trouble is, the extreme orthodox people do not really accept the framework of the state except as a passing evil. If they would succeed in turning Israel into an anti-democratic Halakah-state (as happened in Iran), it would cause all those who want a Western state, where ever they came from, to emigrate to Europe or the US. If this happened, Israel would descent into the Third World (as also happened in Iran.)

If the views of Rabbi Ovadia will win, no peace between Israel and the Arab world, including the Palestiniamns - will be possible. Not tomorrow, not ever. If the Ishmaelites are snakes, there can be no peace. Without peace, the development of Israel will stop, the state will revert to the vicious circle of wars - and this, too, will widen the gap between it and the Western world.

So what will happen? Where is Israel going?

No political games, nor "bringing the hearts together", nor parliamentary tricks will determine the fate of the state. In the end, the future will be determined by the inner strength of each camp, its determination to defend its values.

I strongly believe that the Israeli nation will prevail. It constitutes the majority and is oriented towards the future. But it must understand what the decision is about. The fight for peace is but one battle - although an important one - in this struggle.