Summary
The set of arrangements on religion and state in Israel defined by David Ben-Gurion’s letter of 19 June 1947 to the leadership of Agudat Yisrael and carried into statehood, which Dowty presents in Chapter 8 as serving an almost sacred role as a “constitution” or “social contract” that forbids basic challenges to the existing order (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 3493-3580).
Details
- Its defined points were recognition of the Jewish Sabbath as a day of rest, kashrut in governmental institutions, state funding of religious public schools, and jurisdiction over marriage and divorce in the hands of religious authorities. On other matters it meant recognition of anomalous situations that had developed, for example banning public transportation on the Sabbath in the country as a whole but allowing it to continue in localities where it already existed (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 3493-3580).
- Dowty, following Eliezer Don-Yehiya, gives the accommodation built on it three elements: proportionality through the party key, applied to offices, patronage, public financial support and access to state lands; autonomy of religious institutions and culture, with many religious laws on the books simply not enforced; and mutual veto, each side recognising it cannot push the other past a certain point without threatening Jewish unity. The religious minority’s veto, Dowty argues, rests not on coalition arithmetic but on its institutional capability to resort to mass dissent and disruption if necessary (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 3493-3580).
- In practice, Dowty argues, few religious-secular issues have involved real challenges to the status quo; they are border skirmishes rather than full-scale warfare, the only issue of broad significance being “Who is a Jew?”. Both secular and religious Israelis tend to perceive themselves as losing ground to the other side, and the mutual and roughly comparable dissatisfaction is, he suggests, an index of the arrangements’ success in balancing opposed worldviews (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 3581-3685).
Related pages
The Jewish State: A Century Later, Agudat Yisrael, National Religious Party, Civil religion