I recently reread this book for the first time in many years, and stumbled upon the following passage towards the end of the book (chapter 24):
One of the difficulties of laws which tried to control books and habits of reading was that they assumed that our society was as one .... In England the moral values of a group of retired army officers and their wives frequenting a golf course in Worthing are not the same as those of a crowd of art students in a Kings Cross squat. What appears permissible in the Surrey commuter belt, among bright young advertising men and their wives, would be looked on with horror by the Puritan Pakistanis of Bradford. Of course all these groups must be subject to a basic strongly enforced criminal law; they must not be allowed to assault or pillage or rape or rob one another. But in such a society, tolerance demands that no one group may be allowed to impose its own moral views, however strongly held, upon another; still less should they be able to use the severe sanctions of the criminal law to do so. The law, it has always seemed to me, is at its best when it is enforcing practical remedies for specific crimes; it is at its worst when it tries to enforce the morality of one group in society upon another which may, for quite sincere and logical reasons, refuse to accept it.
Replace 'England' with Israel, 'Worthing' with Bnei Barak and 'criminal law' with law, and this passage shows the view of an Israeli liberal.
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