Should Israel be a Jewish state, or a state for the Jews?
Many people confuse "a Jewish state" with the present reality of "a state for the Jews." Here is the nuanced difference, and what it means for Israel's future.
Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.
Share this essay using the link: https://www.futureofjewish.com/p/israel-jewish-state-or-state-for-the-jews
A Jewish State or a state for the Jews?
The question implies more than grammatical divergence; it cuts to the essence of Israel’s current political and social discord.
There are some Jews who do not want Judaism outside of the synagogue because they believe that Judaism is merely a religion rather than the culture of the Jewish People. Yet poetry, law, philosophy, and history are all non-religious elements of Judaic civilization. This ideological divide was imprinted in the very manifesto of modern Zionism.
Theodor Herzl’s vision was a projection of his own assimilation and indifference to Judaic values and culture. The pamphlet he wrote was actually entitled, “Der Judenstaat” (“The State of the Jews”). But, it has been commonly rendered as: “The Jewish State.”
Herzl published his idea in February 1896. Despite its current connotation as the Jewish state, Herzl and many of the early Zionist thinkers intended their project to describe a state for Jews. This was not actually envisioned as a sovereign state, but merely a place where Jews could live together as a colony or an autonomous entity under the sovereignty of either the Ottomans or some European state.
In other words, Herzl presented what was merely an extension of the European ghetto; a separate place for Jews. A state of Jews describes a demographic entity. Currently, the discourse within Israeli society is about whether we shall continue to be an extension, an outpost of Western civilization, or become a Jewish state which Herzl would have described, in German, as “Der Judischstaat.”
For those demanding that Israel be a state of its citizens in the fashion of a modern liberal democracy, Judaism is perceived as reactionary and parochial. For one group of Israelis “liberal democracy” represents an ultimate concern. Perhaps they can accept their Jewishness, but like in any other liberal democracy, it would be confined to the synagogue.
In every other sense, as Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion had hoped, we would be a nation like any other nation. But, who really aspires to be ordinary? When we think about it, ordinary or common implies that we have succeeded in blending in. Assimilation is a kind of social camouflage beneath which the real Jew, as conflicted as he may be, remains hidden
The state of Jews would simply occupy space. The Jewish state would move to define and characterize that space. In ancient Biblical terminology, making something special in a certain place was called sanctification.
The debate over the character of Israel reveals the deep socio-spiritual tensions affecting Israeli life. We may have removed the Jew from the ghetto. But, we failed to remove the ghetto from the Jew. Hence, these tensions will continue to irritate Israelis.
For example, the root of the present judicial crisis is neither in points of law and governance. It is, in many ways, a continuation of the historic drive to be accepted. Israelis continue to idolize liberal democracy despite the fact that, as Plato warned, it is beginning to reveal its cracks and weaknesses.
Israelis are not asking the right question — “How can we be more Western?” The right question is: How can we govern ourselves, in our neighborhood with our demographic tensions, and still be a just society, a light unto the nations?
The current argument about Israel being a state of its citizens begs the question of character. Indeed, even in ancient Israel, the status of the non-Jew was ensconced in law. Being and becoming a Jewish state means being a nation whose identity and self-image is clearly rooted in our own understanding of reality.
For example, all men are not created equal; neither in physical endowment nor in mental ability. Hence our ancient law insures equal treatment under the law. Christians such as Augustine argued that man was essentially good and that evil, itself, did not exist. It was merely the absence of good.
Jews reasoned that all people have the potential to be either good or evil. The difference was not abstract. It was a matter of nurture. Left alone, man’s nature was evil from his youth. But, education helped people to suppress their aggressive instincts and live in more socially acceptable ways.
In Israel, we live alongside countries who believe deeply in their own culture and see its manifestation in Sharia law. Across the Mediterranean are nations balancing communism, socialism, and capitalism — all merely economic ideologies. But, can the nature of man be reduced to a species called homo economicus. Neither of these systems actually cherish human freedom, an ideal so central to our history.
Long before Edmund Burke or John Locke, these ideas were articulated by Moses, Akiba, Ben Zakkai, and Spinoza (to name only a few of the thinkers who have shaped the evolution of our Judaic civilization). The fact that Jewish values are embedded into Israeli law does not make it unwelcoming to non-Jews. Believing this would imply that Judaism is distasteful for Muslims or Christians, whereas both Islam and Christianity have foundations in Biblical and Pharisaic Judaism, as does Western culture in general.
The allegation that Israel is an ethno-religious state is simply ridiculous. The fact that the king of England is crowned by the archbishop of Canterbury does not render England an ethno-religious country. No one calls Spain an ethno-religious country because its official religion is Catholicism. While Israel is not an ethno-religious state, its goal should be to unite all of its citizens by cultivating a common national spirit based upon those same Hebraic values that shaped Western civilization.
The state of Jews has many politicians; too many. Yet there is hardly a statesman. The politician is a facilitator, but the statesman is a leader.
The state of Jews was envisioned as a solution to the Jewish problem. It was created out of fear and trauma. Accordingly, our Law of Return was actually a mirror of the Nuremberg Laws defining a Jew by having one Jewish grandparent, rather than by our own laws. The reborn nation was to be the guardian of the Jews, whereas it should be the educator of the Jews.
The state of Jews is idolatrous inasmuch as we over-value the “work of our own hands.” Our technology contributed to both our economy and defense. However, it fostered the same illusion that must have occupied the minds of more primitive peoples thousands of years ago. Namely, that the Divine was a thing rather than a force.
The revelation of October 7th was no different than our shock on October 5th, 1973 when we believed that the Bar Lev line would defend us. We believed in our “wall of stone” just as the French believed in its Maginot line. Our generals continued to build walls and devices. As long ago as ancient Israel, we built a wall around Jerusalem while, across the Mediterranean, Lycurgus warned the Greeks to trust only in a wall of men.
The state of Jews is moribund, with many Israelis suffering from a sense of anomie and homelessness even in their own home. Hence, by the millions, they are seeking their future elsewhere.
The Jewish state, however, is becoming — never to be completed because it lives in history, not to be misconstrued as the past. The Jewish state becomes or evolves as it learns the lessons of its own history.
The Jewish state is home to the Chosen People; chosen not because they are Jews but because they understand that being Jewish means becoming better, stronger, and more industrious.
Further, the Chosen People are iconoclasts. We are the heretics who revealed the delusion of paganism. We are the revolutionaries who freed people from slavery. Our prohibition against worshipping graven images does not apply only to wood and stone. Judaism liberated mankind by insisting that freedom (which is the message of the first commandment) merely reiterates an axiom of natural law.
Freedom begins in the mind. Therefore, we were prohibited from worshipping any god other than the God who identified Himself as ultimate reality. The graven image is permanent whereas life is impermanent. The danger is in believing that ideas are transcendent whereas they are merely our means of making sense of a transient present.
In other words, time changes everything. We must never allow one idea such as democracy to become sacrosanct. That is why both Plato and Jeremiah envisioned a society governed by “shepherds” (Jeremiah) or guardians (Plato) rather than rules or laws. Laws, as we were taught, are to live by; they serve man.
We must be cautious. Man has an almost natural propensity to enslave himself. It is, in fact, a biological instinct. The sages called it yetzer ha-rah in Hebrew, or evil inclination. Why was it described as evil? Because instincts are about what feels good rather than what is good. Over the centuries, mankind has enslaved itself to religion, to drugs, and to lucre.
For the Zionist founders, antisemitism was a threat. But, if perceived correctly, as for example, through the lens of the ancient sage, Ben Azzai, evil too contains its blessings.
The surge in antisemitism throughout the world can crush us or strengthen us. In a collection of essays, the historian Salo Baron described the Jews as a people “steeled by adversity.”
Such is the resolve of the Jewish state.
Great article. It picks up on the theme raised by Daniel Hazony in The Jewish State, where he argued that the first half of the 20th century Zionists did not pay enough attention to the cultural dimension of Zionism, thereby producing many offspring who became Jewish apostates (see Abraham Burg, for example). Apostates not in the religious sense, but in the political-cultural sense. And of course this detachment leading to apostasy is prevalent in left-wing circles, concerned only with being a democracy like any other, even though every other democracy also has its ethnic national basis and particularity. The argument resurfaced in the left-wing and liberal opposition to the Knesset's voting a law declaring Israel is the state of the Jewish people rather than the state of all its citizens. Democracy, which is simply the political formulation of modernity that starts with bifurcation of power at the top (government and opposition), also happens to take the form of the nation-state, of which the Jewish one is a typical representative. And given that contemporary developments in western democracies seem to be driving those states to national suicide, with antisemitism as one of its drivers, it behooves the Jewish nation-state to be wary of incorporating lock, stock and barrel the misguided shibboleths of western democracies. The secular-religious divide in Israel when viewed through the ideological prism of modern democracy increases our inability to reach deep into Jewish history, Jewish tradition and Jewish religion in order to forge the identity of the Jewish state. We need to focus our energies toward that task. So definitely the Jewish state, the country which in a way is the national synagogue of the Jewish people, even for those who do not attend services, and the one country in the world where Shabbat is a national weekly holiday!
'State of Jews OR The Jewish State', is a false Dichotomy. In fact Israel is and can be Both! The Judenrat of The Nazis was an Area set aside for Jews as a prelude to murdering us. If Israel is to be more than this, (surrounded as we are by Elites maliciously harbouring Nazism up to the present day) , Israel must be and indeed is sanctified by morality itself. Modern Western Morality is based on the view of Man as the Platonic Ideal of The Individual and his/her propensity to Choose Good over Evil. But we know how Malicious actors set out to Corrupt us, and I have sent you our Monitoring Reports about how this is done here in the UK by Nazi Elements in MI6, etc. Darwinian Homo Sapiens puts survival as the sole goal of existence. But this cynical and grim Modern approach to Ethics ignores how the Judeo-Christian Virtues of Peace and Love for ALL men ACTUALLY increases our fitness to survive and facilitates the increase of our numbers, by living healthy and Disease-free lives in the image of The Ideal. Strong and Prosperous Multi-Racial Israel REQUIRES THESE PRINCIPLES AND IDEALS AS WELL. So beware the siren Far-Right voices on the Extremes of Israel's Politics who forget this! 'The Jewish State' must therefore mean Peace and Love too.