Ghada Karmi
Mondoweiss / August 12, 2023
The anti-government protests in Israel may seem like a struggle between the Ashkenazi elite and ultra-orthodox for influence. But at a deeper level, the protests reflect the unresolved issue of Israel’s identity.
Israelis have been locked in a battle over the role of Israel’s judiciary in the country for months. From the start of this year, huge crowds of protestors have filled the streets of towns and cities across Israel every week, supported by senior members of the military, intelligence, and security services. Many sectors of Israeli civil society, including lawyers, judges, and businesses, have been involved, with calls for the Prime Minister to resign and his government’s judicial reforms to be canceled. The issue, in brief, is over the Supreme Court’s power to put a check on government action, without which Israeli governments would be free to pass whatever laws they liked.
The protests have failed to change the government’s course so far. Two weeks ago, and despite Western disapproval, Israel’s parliament passed a law preventing the Supreme Court from canceling legislation it considers “unreasonable.” As is well known, behind these maneuverings is prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s desperation to avoid prison on criminal charges by placating his right-wing ministers in order to remain in office.
But the main message to the outside world has been that the protests represent a fight over Israel’s much-vaunted democratic values and a rejection of fundamentalist religious encroachment on a Western-style liberal Israeli state. This accords with widespread Western perceptions of Israel as a secular democracy. Yet Israel is defined as a “Jewish state,” and according to Israel’s Basic Law in 2018, it is “the nation-state of the Jewish people.” The sole reference point for both these definitions is religion. Onderkant formulier
After 75 years since Israel’s establishment, there is none other than a religious meaning to the term “Jew” and no such entity as “the Jewish people” outside that meaning. Judaism, whether practiced or not, was the only factor that united the disparate Jewish groups immigrating to Palestine after 1880, who later became Israelis. They did not originally share a common language — Hebrew was the language of scripture until the advent of political Zionism — or share a specific territory or a uniformly secular culture.
The place of religion in an Israeli state that aimed from the start to fit into the secular Western world has never been resolved. Zionism arose in a European environment of secular nationalism. Israel’s founders were secular members of East European (Ashkenazi) Jewish communities who knew they could not make their claim to Palestine stick without recourse to the Bible. For that reason, they were obliged to work with orthodox Jews, who were subsequently allowed the privileges of citizenship without its obligations — exempt from serving in the military or paying the same amount of taxes. They were granted generous state subsidies and could live outside mainstream political life altogether if they chose.
It was a price Israel’s early leaders knew they had to pay to preserve the concept of the “Jewish” state, whose justification for usurping someone else’s country was the biblical Jewish “return” to the Promised Land. Despite that, Israel managed to promote itself as a Western-style secular democracy with a separation between state and religion. That fiction was comfortable for Europeans and Americans and enabled them to include Israel in the western club of nations.
But from the start, religious parties were part of all Israeli governments and are now dominant. They strike the West as aberrations, but in fact, they are an inevitable consequence of a state set up using a religious justification. For example, the ultra-religionists in Israel’s current government believe they are behaving quite logically in adhering to Jewish scripture, looking to exert the authority of the Torah in Israeli life, and wishing to put its precepts into modern effect. They believe their increasing takeover of the rest of historic Palestine is in accordance with what God in the Bible promised the Jews (to the exclusion of non-Jews — Palestinians). Their hostility to judicial interference in “the Land of Israel,” what they believe is God’s gift to the Jews, by criticizing illegal acts in the occupied Palestinian territory, is another consequence.
For example, the red heifer affair now preoccupying Israel’s rabbinical authorities is also part of the Jewish tradition these religious parties are seeking to enforce. In the Old Testament, the ashes of a sacrificial red heifer were used for the purification of anyone defiled by contact with a corpse. Priests could not conduct services or enter the Temple unless purified in this way. Nor, today, can they preside over the planned rebuilding of the Third Temple in Jerusalem until purified. The rebuilding of the Third Temple has been the aim of the Temple movement, which aims to promote Jewish sovereignty over the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount and has moved from the fringe of Israeli society to the center of its politics. Part of what makes the movement so dangerous is that several of its leaders call for destroying Al-Aqsa compound to make way for its messianic project. To aid in this, five red heifers were transported from Texas to Jerusalem in 2022 to much rejoicing amongst religious circles. These cattle currently await ritual sacrifice in preparation for the Third Temple’s establishment. The Temple movement is continuing to grow in prominence because the same religious nationalist forces behind it are also taking on national prominence in the Israeli government.
Given Israel’s origins, the current anti-government protests in Israel may be seen as the Ashkenazi elite’s battle against ultra-orthodox religious influence or as the progressive Israeli (also Ashkenazi) left against the regressive ultra-right. But at a deeper level, the protests reflect the unresolved issue of Israel’s identity. Are Israelis secular, or are they Jewish? They cannot be both, and the question of who is a Jew is no nearer an answer today than it ever was.
As the Israeli intellectual Akiva Orr argued in his book, The UnJewish State, Israel was set up to answer to the need of secular Jews for a non-religious definition. It failed to do that but instead created a new category, “Israeli,” who is not necessarily Jewish.
Orr predicted that, in time, a gulf would grow between the Jewish diaspora and the new Israeli Jews, the problem of identity still unresolved. He was right. But the tragedy for Palestinians is that this internal Jewish drama has been played out on their land and at their expense. And it still is.
Ghada Karmi was born in Jerusalem; forced from her home during the Nakba, she later trained as a Doctor of Medicine at Bristol University; her most recent book is One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel
