Summary
David Ben-Gurion’s term for the civic ethos of the new Israeli state, as Dowty presents it in Chapters 3 and 4: usually translated “statism”, but, Dowty argues, closer to “civic-mindedness” — respect for legitimate state public authority and “a sense of public responsibility” (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1330-1400).
Details
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Ben-Gurion devised the term (derived from mamlacha, “kingdom”); he did not consider the state an end in itself, but sought to establish its universally binding character as an instrument for achieving the common goals of Zionism, against a Diaspora legacy he described as “customs of disintegration, anarchy, lack of national responsibility and unity” (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1345-1380).
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Dowty presents mamlachtiut as dialectically related to the Jewish past rather than a strict Western civic conception: Ben-Gurion redefined tradition selectively, turning to the Bible and the ancient period of Jewish statehood, and built a high tolerance for pluralism into the state structure — including accommodation with religious interests — despite his bias for majoritarian over consociational democracy (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1360-1395).
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Its practical program in the first two decades of statehood: integrating Etsel into the new army (marred by the Altalena Affair), dismantling the Palmach, replacing the party key with merit appointment in the civil service (laws of 1959), putting education and labor exchanges on a state basis, and combining the parliamentary model with strong parties and collective cabinet responsibility to produce executive dominance over the Knesset (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1380-1474).
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Dowty traces its origin in Chapter 3 to Labor Zionism’s move from “class” to “nation” (Mitchell Cohen’s “revolutionary constructivism”), which he reads as a move toward a more “civic” conception of the political order whose culmination was Ben-Gurion’s mamlachtiut after statehood (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 974-1000).
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Dowty’s Chapter 4 assessment of its limits: many of its successes were only the minimal features of any sovereign state; elsewhere it was so intertwined with partisan advantage for Mapai that judgment is difficult, political appointments and the party key continued through loopholes in the 1959 civil service legislation, and it made no progress whatsoever in health services or electoral reform (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1555-1595).
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Ben-Gurion himself, in an interview at the end of his career, is quoted by Dowty: “Jews never understood mamlachtiut.” (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1585-1595)
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Dowty adds that the mamlachtiut push did not focus on the rule of law and did not even include a legal theory, leaving the pattern Ehud Sprinzak calls Illegalism largely intact beneath it (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1660-1695).
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In Dowty’s Chapter 6, mamlachtiut is one of the instruments of Labor Zionism’s own decline: in pursuit of it, Labor Zionists undercut their own movement by putting national symbols and values ahead of socialist ideology and party institutions, and the integration of Labor Zionist schools into the state system — revised in 1957 to include a “Jewish Consciousness Program” adding particularistic elements — robbed the movement of the principal means of passing on its distinctive values. As classic Labor Zionist ideology declined, the somewhat atypical period of mamlachtiut became a memory and traditional political habits reasserted themselves (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 2212-2514).
Related pages
The Jewish State: A Century Later, David Ben-Gurion, Mapai, Labor Zionism, Consociationalism