The Nation-State Law, Populist Politics, Colonialism, and Religion in Israel: Linkages and Transformations

precis:

This essay discusses the content of the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, focusing on its religious language. In doing so, it links the law with three points of gravity: religious-ethnonationalism, populism, and colonialism. Specifically, it highlights how the Nation-State Law is a manifestation of the religious-right politics in Israel, which seeks to consolidate the Jewish nature of the state, to entwine the nature of Israel as a state for the Jews with its absence of borders, to devalue the political significance of citizenship, and to gain a wide consensus on the right of self-determination as a religious right derived from the Jewish sacred texts rather than as a political right based on international law.

This essay discusses the content of the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, focusing on its religious language. In doing so, the essay links the law with three points of gravity: religious-ethnonationalism, populism, and colonialism. Specifically, the essay highlights how the Nation-State Law is a manifestation of the religious right politics in Israel, which seeks to consolidate the Jewish nature of the state, to entwine the nature of Israel as a state for the Jews with its absence of borders, to devalue the political significance of citizenship, and to gain a wide consensus on the right of self-determination as a religious right derived from the Jewish sacred texts rather than as a political right based on international law.