Summary
Baruch Kimmerling’s term, in Zionist Israel and the Question of Palestine, for the specifically Jewish cultural code that remains the main pillar of Jewish society and the Jewish state even where the Declaration of Independence is invoked as a liberal-democratic basis (PDF p.61).
Details
- Kimmerling’s central argument, in his essay “Religion, Nationalism and Democracy in Israel” (1994), is the taken-for-granted equation of the religious and national aspects of Jewish identity on which Zionist ideology is based: Israel defines itself not as a “state of its citizens” but as a “state of the Jewish people”, so ethnicity and religion are the factors on which state membership and rights are granted, and democratic institutions are strictly limited to the framework prescribed by Zionist hegemony, with privileges ensured only to the Jewish ethnic group — a “theo-democracy” or “Jewish democracy” (PDF p.68-69).
- In the Yishuv the code produced a “processual democracy” whose rights were grounded on belonging to the Jewish community, not universal in the civil sense; the status-quo agreement with Agudat Israel on the eve of statehood made the religious status quo, on the Ottoman “religious millet” framework of 1922-1947, the fundament of the future Israeli order (PDF p.69-70).
Related pages
Baruch Kimmerling, Ethnic Democracy, Ethnocracy, Religious status quo