In a special interview with six former heads of the Mossad, published in Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper on Passover eve (March 30), Nahum Admoni expressed his concern about the growing rifts within Israeli society. Admoni, who served as director of the Mossad from 1982 to 1989, told the interviewer, “It is stronger now than it ever was before. I mean the rift between religious and secular Jews, and between Mizrahi Jews and Ashkenazi Jews. It hasn’t been closed in years. It is only getting wider.”

The entire interview was an elegy to the country that was, expressed by a group of people who were and still are among the most powerful and best-connected individuals in Israeli society. Yet their criticism of the growing rifts seems tedious at best. It has become a kind of worn-out mantra that politicians and other public figures use so frequently that it is not at all clear what it really means.

Usually, “rifts in Israeli society” are presented negatively, as something that must be mended immediately. They run counter to the doctrine of the “melting pot,” which dominated the early years of the state. Israeli society was composed of native Israelis ("Sabra"), immigrants from across the globe and minorities. At the time, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion wanted to build a homogeneous society, even if, on occasion, this meant eliminating the distinctive social markers of the new immigrants.

As the country prepares to celebrate its 70th anniversary, it is time to come to terms with Israel being a divided country of distinct tribes. But while that is part of the reality of life here, it is not necessarily a bad thing. There is a process underway of saying goodbye to the past and even of mourning, but when it comes to the old elites who established and led the state — the very people who believed in the melting pot — it is time to stop complaining about what was and to accept that it is not coming back.