Jewish and Democratic? A Rejoinder to the "Ethnic Democracy" Debate

Introduction

Growing awareness of tensions between Jewish and democratic elements in Israel’s regime abounds in the scholarship of Israeli society of the last two decades. This may be surprising, since the tensions were not created recently. They have accompanied the Zionist movement and its idea of a Jewish state from the very beginning. In fact, all agree that Israel is in many ways more democratic today than it was when it was founded. Nonetheless, the debate about the possible and actual relationships between the Jewish and the democratic strands in the identity of Israel is becoming more intense. In part this is the result of the inclusion of the description of Israel as a Jewish and Democratic state in the 1992 Basic Laws, and the ideological, legal and judicial debate that ensued. ¹ But more important is the fact that the complex processes and mechanisms that had helped to manage and obscure these tensions in the first years of Israel’s existence have been weakened significantly.

There are at least three different sources, independent but inter-related, of these tensions. One is the fact that Israel, a state defined and structured as the locus of Jewish self-determination, has a 17 percent Palestinian minority within its borders. The second is the inter-Jewish debate about the meaning of the Jewishness of the state, with a fierce competition between religious and secular-cultural-historical conceptions of Jewish identity. The third is the deep political debate in Israel concerning its borders and its nature: while most Jewish Israelis want Israel to remain a Jewish state in some sense, positions on what are, or should constitute, Israel’s border move between the 1967 lines and the whole region of Israel/Palestine.

In the years prior to 1967, all these sources of potential tension were subdued. While Israel’s borders were never legislated, Jews struggled to consolidate their control, and to gain international recognition, of the 1949 borders. It was accepted that the Jewish State would not extend to the whole of Eretz-Yisrael.

The inter-Jewish debate was highly visible. Initially, the talk was not about Jewish versus democratic, but about democratic versus theocratic. The mechanisms used to resolve these differences were based on negotiation and agreement, exhibiting clear signs of non-majoritarian democracy, of power-sharing and seeking consensus between representatives of these two major conceptions of Israel. While religion received a place in public life and most religious needs were financed by the public, the orthodox in general accepted that laws in Israel were made by the Knesset, not by priests or rabbis following religious law. The negotiated status quo gave religious courts a monopoly over matters of marriage and divorce.

The Jewish-Arab rift, on the other hand, was initially never seriously acknowledged. The arrangements concerning the Arabs in Israel were adopted by exclusive Jewish decision-making mechanisms. Military government was imposed on most of the Arab population. There was a massive transfer of titles in land to the Jewish state, which ended up owning more than 90 percent of Israel’s land. Even the decision to grant the Arabs linguistic autonomy and not to assimilate them into the Jewish culture was made by Jews, and primarily for Jewish interests. While Arab citizens did get the right to vote from the start, the regime was majoritarian in the clearest way.

All these background conditions changed. The 1967 war reopened the debate over Israel’s borders, and has extended the time frame of the Jewish-Palestinian struggle for control over territory. ² The hold of the secular elites on political power has weakened, and orthodox Jews are no longer willing to trade autonomy and public finance for support. The demographics of the Jewish population also meant that the Jewish secular majority is now replaced with a more complex division between a religious minority of about 22 percent, a secular group of equal size, which constitutes most of the economic, scientific and cultural elites of the country, and a large “traditional” population, which does not fully observe, but does not see itself as secular. ^3...