Walk around Tel Aviv on any given Saturday, and religious fervour is the last thing you'll encounter. The people vote with their sandal-clad feet, which carry them from grocer's shop to cafe to golden mile of sand without the slightest inclination to walk into a synagogue – and in a free country it should be their cast-iron right to do just that.

Yet the vagaries of a country defiantly defining itself along religious lines are disrupting the lives of millions of Israel's citizens every weekend, and there seems precious little the state is prepared to do about it.

In February, the Tel Aviv municipality approved a resolution to petition the transport ministry to allow public transport to operate in the city on Shabbat (the Sabbath), but the idea was rejected outright by the transport minister Yisrael Katz. This week, members of the leftwing Meretz party took the case to the high court, arguing that Katz is obliged by Israeli law to consider the proposal.

Given the secular character of the vast majority of Tel Aviv – whose roads heave with private cars round the clock, and whose beaches boast thousands of near-naked youths packed together like sardines every Shabbat – such a proposition seems hardly out of place. Yet the establishment is up in arms about the plans, and is mobilising its troops to prevent any change to the status quo.

As is the case so often in internal Israeli politics, the religious factions are throwing a spanner in the works, with the likes of Tel Aviv chief rabbi Lau expressing his "deep disappointment and pain" at the idea that buses should run on the Sabbath. He is backed by not only his fellow zealots, but also by avowedly secular politicians, who are happy to scramble aboard a religious bandwagon (but not on Shabbat of course) as long as it suits their nationalist aims.

Forbidding public transport on Shabbat is a decidedly hypocritical stance when everything from state TV to state FA-run football leagues to state-run public facilities are allowed to operate on Shabbat in direct contravention to religious law. Were Israel to rigidly enforce the laws of the Sabbath on its entire populace, there would be a revolution before the Shabbat siren could sound its first notes, as the government knows only too well.

Instead, the state clings desperately to ludicrous notions that by banning public transport on Shabbat, the Jewish nature of the country is somehow reinforced, despite the majority of the population neither adhering to, nor caring about, religious laws and statutes. And that's just the Jewish citizens – as for non-Jewish Israelis, their rights mean even less when it comes to state provision of services in this instance.

For those for whom Saturday is neither Sabbath nor sacred, why should they be denied the right to public transport on their one day off in the week, just to pander to the rights of one religious group? The answer is, of course, that the state is not interested in giving Christian and Muslim citizens any say in such matters – as rightwing politicians like to say: if you don't like the rules, no one is keeping you here, and don't forget to shut the door behind you when you leave.

But the worm is turning, and Meretz's case in the high court will be a major test of Israel's self-proclaimed definition as a democratic state for all its citizens. The country being held hostage by religious parties is hardly news – the decades-old argument about national service for yeshiva students is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to secular-religious warfare. But in this case, the state is firmly on the side of the ultra-orthodox, albeit for different reasons.

The moment that you argue that Israel should be entirely secular, and that there should be no religious trappings, you lose the case for Israel. Those who champion Israel as a Jewish state are compelled to require it to have a Jewish identity of some description, and in that context Shabbat is a major icon.

But banning buses operating on Shabbat is shutting the stable door long after the horse has bolted down to the beachside cafe for a seafood salad. The vast majority of Israelis want the freedom to eat what they want, dress how they want, and travel where and when they want by whatever mode of transport is most suitable. For those who can't afford a car or taxi fare, cutting off public transport means isolating them on the one day a week when they most want the liberty to roam.

Israel has to get over its obsession with its religious character, and fast. It must be a country for all its citizens, and if that means changing the status quo to suit the modern, secular demographic of cities such as Tel Aviv, then so be it. You can break Shabbat in a million ways in Tel Aviv, and making it a million and one by running buses to assist the poorer residents is hardly a game-changing proposition. And by doing so, non-Jewish citizens might just get a much-needed glimmer of hope that their needs are being catered for as well, rather than feeling perpetually second-class and sidelined.

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