The Everyday Life of the State: A State-in-Society Approach

6. Nation Building and Regulation of Pluri-legal Jurisdictions: The Case of the Israeli Millet System

91 6 Nation Building and Regulation of Pluri-legal Jurisdictions The Case of the Israeli Millet System yükSEl SEZgin Israel formally inherited personal status components of the Ottoman millet system in 1948. The millet system was a highly pluralized legal system under which both the Ottoman and British imperial authorities granted juridical autonomy over matters of personal status (e.g., marriage, divorce, succession, maintenance) to eleven ethno-religious communities in Palestine .1 Since then, Israel has more or less preserved this highly plural legal system and further expanded it to include three more communities whose jurisdictions were not previously recognized under the Turkish or British rule.2 That is to say, Israel has not attempted to put an end to the multiplicity of religious courts and unify them under a network of national courts, as Egypt did in 1955 (Sezgin 2010a). Nor has it ever tried to abolish the religious personal status laws of various communities and enact a uniform civil code in their place, as India attempted in the 1950s (Sezgin 2009). Rather, it has retained a variant of the old millet system under which religious courts of fourteen state-recognized communities were granted exclusive jurisdiction over matters of marriage and divorce and concurrent jurisdiction with the civil courts over issues of maintenance and succession. 92 Yüksel Sezgin Millet-like systems had been historically employed by imperial powers to segregate and categorize their colonial subjects into ethno-religious groupings and to exclude the subaltern groups from the spoils of power and deny them the terms of equal membership in the political community (Mamdani 1996, 67; Benton 2002, 127-209; Merry 2000, 113-14). Moreover, such systems exclusively characterize individuals as, first and foremost, members of various ethno-religious groups and forcibly subject them to legal and institutional authority of their communities. In many regards, the retention of the old Ottoman personal status system by a modern and an allegedly democratic polity as Israel is quite paradoxical, given that from the very moment of its inception, the Jewish state pledged itself to guarantee its citizens freedom of religion and conscience and to ensure complete equality of all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or gender . In this regard, there are two central puzzles that guide the analysis below: (1) why Israel, as a highly centralized and democratic polity, has maintained such a fragmented system of law and courts that accentuates religious, ethnic, and gender-based inequalities, and (2) how such plural application of law and justice affects Israeli citizens’ fundamental rights and freedoms and what tactics and strategies people employ to cope with the limitations imposed upon their rights by communal institutions. The adoption and utilization of the millet structure came as a logical extension of Israel’s exclusionary and theocratically inclined ruling ideology . In the Migdalian (Migdal 2004) sense of the term, the image of the nation that the founders of Israel envisaged required the undertaking of two simultaneous but dialectical processes of nation building: the preservation and homogenization of Israeli-Jewish identity and the differentiation of non-Jewish identities. In this regard, the millet system was deemed instrumental for actualizing this very image of citizenry by transforming religious courts into state agencies and designating them as watchdogs to protect and reinforce communal boundaries through a strict regulation of marital relations among members of their respective communities. However, conflicting and divisive practices of religious authorities—particularly the rabbinical courts—as state institutions have undermined the very image that the regime originally put forth and derailed the process of nation building. In analyzing the impact of current personal status systems on the rights and liberties of Israeli citizens, a brief explanatory remark is in order. The religious personal status systems are often detrimental to the rights and 93 Nation Building and Regulation of Pluri-legal Jurisdictions freedoms of individuals, especially when people are forcibly subjected to jurisdiction of communal institutions without their explicit consent. With this in mind, the main contribution will be not in the documentation of human rights violations under the Israeli personal status laws but in the innovative use of a human rights framework to evaluate the effectiveness of the Israeli government’s interventions into its personal status system and to demonstrate what resistance strategies people employ and how they use them to navigate through the maze of religious laws and challenge the variegated, and often conflicting, images of citizenry and subjectivity imposed...