\u201cWe [\u2026] hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.\u201d These are the jubilant words that conclude Israel\u2019s Declaration of Independence. It is instructive to consider, from a distance of 75 years, what is in the Declaration and what is not.<\/p>\n
The Declaration seeks to establish the Jewish people\u2019s historic right to the Land of Israel. It assures the international community that the state will accord its minorities equality and treat them with respect. It says nothing at all about Judaism\u2019s role and its place in the new state. The term \u201cJewish state\u201d as employed in the Declaration is technical and geographic; it derives from the UN partition plan calling for the founding of a Jewish state alongside an Arab state. A Jewish state is the state of the Jews. Nothing more, nothing less.<\/p>\n
A Jewish state. Over the years, this terse phrase has given rise to a wide-ranging debate \u2013 ethical, legal, and political. Each side has interpreted it in its own way and for its own convenience. Three Basic Laws approved by the Knesset have added to the Jewish state its counterpart \u201cdemocratic state.\u201d A law of contrary character, the Nation-State Law, has gone all out for a Jewish state and deliberately disregarded the previous Basic Laws\u2019 commitment to democracy, thereby generating yet another disagreement: Do these two definitions complement each other or contradict each other, and which definition takes precedence? From time to time, we encounter the dispute\u2019s sometimes-cruel practical implications at the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s leave aside for a moment the philosophers, the historians, the rabbis, the jurists, and the fateful debates over what a \u201cJewish state\u201d means. In everyday Israeli life, a \u201cJewish state\u201d is understood according to it plain meaning, one similar to the interpretation given by the signatories of the Declaration of Independence: The Jewish state is the state that is not Arab. It is defined first and foremost by what it is not. Afterward, at second and third glance, additional features present themselves: language, religion, shared fate, culture, ways of life.<\/p>\n
But the distinction between Jewish and Arab has for a long time now been not technical but rather emotional, political, tribal: it is a matter of identity politics.<\/p>\n
Seventy-five years after the founding of the state, one might have hoped that all Israelis, Jews and Arabs alike, would feel that Israeliness is their primary identity \u2013 the thing that defines them, that makes them proud: Israel as a homeland, a vision, a success story. Unfortunately, it hasn\u2019t happened. The Jewish state won out.<\/p>\n
Is religion, in its Orthodox form, the axis around which the Jewish state pivots? Not necessarily. In the 1990s Israel was blessed with a wave of immigration from the Former Soviet Union. Some 400,000 immigrants did not meet the stringent criteria of Halacha and neither they nor their descendants are Jewish by this definition. There were concerns that the Jewish majority would single them out and exclude them. This fear proved unfounded. All immigrants suffered absorption difficulties; it was only in exceptional cases that those whose Judaism was in doubt were subjected to exclusion. The immigrants joined Israeli-Jewish society as they were, with no investigation of their ancestry and no conversion. One main factor made this miracle possible: they weren\u2019t Arabs; they were as non-Arab as they could possibly be.<\/p>\n
That is what Bezalel Smotrich, head of the Religious Zionist party, meant when he promised his voters that the newly-formed government (December 2022) of which he is a member would be a \u201cJewish\u201d government. The sin of the previous government was that it was based on a coalition that included an Arab party. That\u2019s what made it non-Jewish, in the eyes of Smotrich and many others.<\/p>\n
\u201cJewish\u201d is not just the antithesis of \u201cArab,\u201d it is also the antithesis of \u201cIsraeli.\u201d The late Arthur Finkelstein, a strategic consultant to Benjamin Netanyahu and to Avigdor Lieberman, devised an efficient means of identifying right-wing voters: Ask someone what he is first and foremost \u2013 Jewish or Israeli. If he answers \u201cJewish,\u201d he\u2019s on the right, one of our own; if he answers \u201cIsraeli,\u201d he\u2019s center-left. \u201cThe Jews defeated the Israelis,\u201d Shimon Peres said, or reputedly said, after his loss in the 1996 elections.<\/p>\n
What was true in 1996 is even more true in 2022. Repeated waves of terrorism, violent clashes between Jews and Arabs within the Green Line, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and social-media incitement have all raised the barriers higher. In the Declaration of Independence, \u201cthe Jewish state\u201d and \u201cthe State of Israel\u201d are identical concepts. In the consciousness of a large proportion of Israelis today, this is not the case. The State of Israel is the framework; the Jewish state is the content, the essence, the vision.<\/p>\n
One parameter that can help us determine the degree to which the Jewish state is Jewish is the state\u2019s attitude toward Jews living outside it. The answer to this question is complicated. Israel is willing to receive aid from the Jewish people; it has trouble giving. Aliyah yes, donations to Israel yes, investments yes, Jewish lobbying of foreign governments and parliaments, yes. But when non-Orthodox streams within the Jewish people want to integrate in the Jewish state, solidarity disappears. They are excluded, expelled, and humiliated. Solidarity also disappears when Jewish communities in the West are critical of Israeli policy. It is a conditional solidarity; it exists so long as it serves the Israeli political system\u2019s agenda.<\/p>\n
The problem starts, perhaps, with the simplification of the concept of Judaism. One day, in Jerusalem, I met the son of acquaintances of mine, kibbutzniks. The boy had been given 13 assignments to complete by the time of his bar mitzvah. One of these assignments was called \u201cJudaism.\u201d \u201cWhat\u2019s the assignment,\u201d I asked. \u201cTo visit Mea She\u2019arim,\u201d he answered. \u201cWhy?\u201d I asked. \u201cDo your teachers think the Judaism of Mea She\u2019arim is more complete, purer, better, than the Judaism of your parents?\u201d The boy was embarrassed. All he wanted was to get home in peace.<\/p>\n
In the eyes of the state\u2019s founders, Israel wasn\u2019t just a state; it was a project, an idea, a national and social ideal. The Jews would return to their historical homeland and establish there a just, secure, flourishing society that would set an example for the rest of the world \u2013 a light unto the nations. The pretensions may have deflated, but the aspiration still exists. It exists among Israelis who want to shape the state in the spirit of the Zionist, secular, liberal heritage, and it exists among Israelis who want to shape the state in accordance with the heritage of their rabbis. There is no easy way to reconcile Vision A and Vision B. Not because there is a contradiction between \u201cJewish\u201d and \u201cdemocratic,\u201d but because there is a contradiction between \u201cJewish\u201d and \u201cJewish.\u201d A secular Israeli interprets his Judaism one way; a Masorti (traditional) Israeli another way; a Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Israeli a third way; an ultra-nationalist Israeli in a fourth way; and there are yet other ways.<\/p>\n
This is all very interesting, but it doesn\u2019t get us the slightest bit closer to answering the question before us: What is a Jewish state, and where does it take us? I am a concerned Israeli. I\u2019m afraid that when the dispute over the values embodied in a Jewish state dissipates, we will end up with something much simpler, much cruder: Jewish supremacy; a supremacy based not on values or heritage, but on ethnicity. White supremacy in the United States, Jewish supremacy in Israel.<\/p>\n
Judenstaat, a state of the Jews, for the Jews, was what Theodor Herzl suggested. We should follow his vision. Nothing more, nothing less.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Nahum Barnea is a columnist with Yedioth Ahronoth<\/em> and a 2007 Israel Prize laureate in journalism.<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sorry, this entry is only available in \u05e2\u05d1\u05e8\u05d9\u05ea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15507,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15754"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17418,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15754\/revisions\/17418"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jppi.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}