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Chapter 2 State Legal Culture: Domination, Identities, and the Politics of Rights Israel’s state law articulates the dominant values and organizational interests of Judaism and Zionism, which are the two main principles of state ideology. State law is not merely a reflection of the state’s narration processes. Rather, it plays a major constitutive role in shaping values, norms, and political practices. Law forms and articulates elite and public consciousness as to what type of citizen is the most essential for the existence and maintenance of the political regime. Other crucial facets of state law, later illuminated, are also significant in the process of framing hegemonic legal culture. While state law in democracies is never autonomous from sociopolitical practices, legal categorizations and processes in state spheres affect society and politics (Gordon 1990; Horwitz 1990; Scheingold 1974). Since according to critical communitarianism state domination and its legal culture have significant ramifications on nonruling communities , this chapter explores a number of central aspects of Israeli state law. First, I investigate the ways in which state law has framed the concept of the “preferred citizen” in collective consciousness. Accordingly , I dwell on the ways in which the legal setting has shaped “patriotism” as part of state legal culture. Modern law has justified distinctions between and among communities through the construction of patriotism in legality. Then, I delineate the sociopolitical characteristics of state law and its legal ideology as predominately a “rule of law” in the Jewish, democratic, and Zionist state. Following a narrative analysis, I refer to neoinstitutional analysis. Institutions are carriers of narratives. I examine the Supreme Court, especially when it is sitting as the High Court of Justice (HCJ), and its contribution to the framing of the state’s legal culture. As in other political regimes, state law has been affected by transnational liberalism. It is argued that 59 60 Communities and Law liberalism has contributed to the decline of parliamentarianism and in turn contributed to the elevation of the Supreme Court to a hegemonic position. The possible ramifications of this process on nonruling communities are addressed. Finally, I dwell on national security as the state’s form of reproduced violence and its impact on nonruling communities and rights within the dynamic processes of some liberal experiences. Who Is a “Patriot”? Law and Culture as the State’s Political Dictum State law embodies exclusive formal criteria for conferring Israeli citizenship . Those criteria were constructed according to the fundamentals of Orthodox Judaism. Two statutes are central in granting citizenship : the Law of Return (1950) and the Citizenship Law (1952). They were enacted when the state was consolidating its domination, and they both, with a few other laws, constituted its cultural identity during its inception as Jewish and Zionist. These two laws formally established that even a Jew who was born outside Israel and does not have a family in Israel can automatically obtain Israeli citizenship. Conversely, Arab-Palestinians cannot return to their lands inside the Green Line (the territories under Israeli rule since 1948) due to exclusionary statutory categorizations, which grant citizenship only to Arab-Palestinians who were living in Israel upon the termination of the 1948 war. Hence, Israel was predominantly framed as a Jewish state, and Israeli nationalism was ultimately constructed as Jewish nationalism. These laws and related court rulings reflected elite desires to guarantee that Jewish and Zionist institutional and cultural hegemony would determine the state’s evolution (Barzilai 1997a). The Arab-Palestinian minority inside the Green Line enjoyed only secondary citizenship. State law articulated and constructed a precept that only an “ideal” Israeli—namely, the Jew preferred by the state—is entitled to automatic citizenship. State ideology narrated state law, whereas the state’s legal ideology justified state law as the rule of law. Accordingly, state courts further framed separate legal spheres for Jews and Arab-Palestinians in Israel. The Absentees’ Property Law (1950) and the Security Service Law State Legal Culture 61 (1986) were prominent in this context. The first legalized the state’s control over lands captured during and subsequent to the 1948 war, after their Arab-Palestinian residents had fled or were expelled. Their lands were assigned to the state’s official, “the appointed authority for absentees’ property.” Since legal ideology framed Israel as a democracy , state law licensed the state to assume control over ArabPalestinian lands without formally contradicting the declared principles of Israeli democracy. Hypothetically, Arab-Palestinians had at their disposal procedures for returning land to their control or ownership . In practice...

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