2 - Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People?

Summary

Chapter 2 takes the infamous Basic Law: Israel the Nation-State of the Jewish People as its anchor to develop Yadgar’s critique of Israel’s inability to account for its claim to Jewish identity and politics. The chapter offers an overview of the debate on the law, and traces some of the main signposts in its legislation. Yadgar chooses not to dwell on the minutiae of the varying “softer” and “harder” versions of the law that were discussed over a decade of debate. Instead, he focuses on its birth in an initiative by the Institute for Zionist Strategies and on the final version approved by the Israeli legislature in July 2018. The chapter studies the legal initiative and the discourse surrounding it. The chapter also puts the debate on the bill in the wider context of the discussion on the meaning of Israel’s being “a Jewish and democratic” state. Yadgar avoids polemics in a field that is saturated with political argumentation to use the debate over the bill to study Israeli political culture. In his truly insightful analysis and close reading of the bill and the debate, surrounding it Yadgar shows the bill to betray the Jewish identity crisis that dominates contemporary Israeli politics. As he argues, the bill was never really meant to “solve” this identity crisis by way of offering a comprehensive understanding or definition of Jewish statehood. Instead, it was motivated by what Yadgar calls “the Palestinian challenge to Zionist nationalism.” The aim of the bill, Yadgar argues, was exactly to reaffirm Israel as a state of Jews – and of no one else. This is what accounts for the “more controversial” aspects of the bill that explicitly establish a preference of Jews over non-Jews in the Israeli “democracy.” The law was designed to fight the idea that Israel might offer an equal share in its sovereignty to all of its citizens. The law thus does a very questionable job in putting positive content behind the title “Jewish state.” This chapter is bound to be marked as a most important contribution to the debate about the bill. There might be a need to also account for the current discussion of the bill, that is taking place as part of the election campaign in Israel, but there would obviously be a need to seal the text at a certain point. If anything, this chapter should be an incentive to produce the book faster than usual.