Sovereignty, the secular religion of Israel’s centre-left
Two visions of Jewish identity – one civic, one religious – divide Israel, yet both defend a sacred state. And both believe implicitly that their state is a democracy, ignoring its colonial reality.
Will they be called up? Ultra-orthodox Jews protest against military conscription, from which they are traditionally exempt, outside the Israeli supreme court, Jerusalem, 2 June 2024
Saeed Qaq · Nurphoto · Getty
Whenever tensions rise among Israel’s Jews and people take to the streets against a rightwing (even far-right) government, or against Binyamin Netanyahu (prime minister almost without interruption since 2009), many foreign commentators return to the deep-seated opposition between progressives and conservatives, between an enlightened centre-left and a reactionary right, which is obscurantist, religious and fanatical. This well-worn theme is misleading.
What explained the widescale pro-democracy protests by the centre-left in 2023 against a proposed reform limiting the supreme court’s powers? The adoption in 2018 of legislation defining Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people – writing ethnic supremacy into law and thereby invalidating any claim the country might have to democracy – failed to trigger any major protests by Jews comparable to those by Israeli Arabs and Druze.
Why have self-styled progressives remained silent over the almost complete ban on demonstrations by Israel’s Palestinian citizens since 7 October 2023, which clearly violates the principle of equality? After all, these same progressives were insistent (for the same reason) that ultra-orthodox Jews should no longer be exempt from military service, as they had been since Israel was established. And how can the progressive camp express their outrage at every controversial domestic policy decision Netanyahu makes, yet fail to speak out on the mass crimes and genocide taking place in Gaza? The usual answers don’t hold up: the divide is not only – or even mainly – between democrats and defenders of liberal values on one side, and authoritarian, extremist nationalists on the other.
To understand where the divide really lies, we must go back to the early years of the Israeli state under its first prime minister, David Ben Gurion. As a representative of the Zionist left, Ben Gurion had no particular regard for the Jewish religion and saw the ultra-orthodox as too caught up in (…)
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