My friend and colleague Phil Gorski has posted a very interesting analysis of Barack Obama’s “More Perfect Union” speech, an analysis that points to the larger issues that the speech addresses. In Phil’s view, Obama’s speech is as much about religion as it is about race, and it approaches religion from a particular angle; it seeks to promote what Phil (following Robert Bellah and others) calls civil religion over its two main alternatives and rivals: liberal secularism and religious nationalism. Phil concludes that if Obama were to succeed in this endeavor, it would be a salutary development.
Phil’s analysis is focused squarely on the relationship between religion and politics in the context of American history, but it occurs to me from my current perspective in Tel Aviv that the analysis could be extended and transposed to Israel as well. Of course, the relationship between state and religion has been institutionalized differently here. (See Steven Mazie's book Israel's Higher Law: Religion and Liberal Democracy in the Jewish State.) Nevertheless, the three alternatives that Phil identifies are arguably discernable in Israel as well as America. In fact, I would say that relations between the secular and the religious are more polarized in Israel than in the United States, precisely because of the different institutional configuration of state and religion in Israel. (Of course, not all orthodox Jews are nationalist – some are non- or even anti-Zionist – but there is undeniably an important strain of religious nationalism in Israel, sustained and reproduced in such places as the Mercaz Harav yeshiva in Jerusalem, where eight students were murdered by a Palestinian terrorist last month.) In this polarized context, it seems to me that it’s even more essential to strengthen and reinvigorate civil religion. Too many Israelis, I suspect, fail even to see the possibility of a “third way” between liberal secularism and religious nationalism, though it is arguably already present in the existing culture and institutions of the polity. Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence, for example, states that “the State of Israel … will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel.” Thirty years later, the famous Officers’ Letter to Menachem Begin, which marked the beginning of Peace Now, appealed to these same sacred ideals to oppose government policies that would maintain control over the Arab population in the occupied territories, “hurt the Jewish-democratic character of the state,” and “make it difficult for us to identify with the path of the State of Israel.”
I see that Obama now has a blog in Hebrew oriented to Israelis. Let's hope that Israeli readers of his “More Perfect Union” speech will be as perceptive as Phil Gorski.
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3 comments:
I find it difficult to accept that israel is a secular state. If so, why don't they include Palestinians? How can you be Jewish and Secular? Seems like a racial interpretation of judaism, which fits well with the criticism of israel as an apartheid state. The U.S. and Israel are very different in this regard.
Dear Anonymous, you have raised four important issues.
1. Much depends on what you mean by a “secular state.” If by secular state you mean a state in which religion is an entirely private affair, where (as Marx put it in his 1843 essay “On the Jewish Question”) religion is expelled from the public sphere, “relegated among the numerous private interests,” and “exiled from the life of the community as such,” then Israel is not a secular state. (As I mentioned in a previous post, marriage and other matters of personal status are governed by the religious communities to which the concerned individuals belong.) But if by secular state you mean freedom of religion and democratic government, then Israel would certainly fall under this definition. Israel is most assuredly not a theocracy. Political authority here rests in the hands of a democratically elected legislature (the Knesset) and an independent and secular judiciary, not priests or rabbis.
2. You asked why Israel doesn’t include Palestinians. In fact, roughly one in five Israeli citizens are Palestinian Arabs.
3. You asked how one can be Jewish and secular. A full answer to this question would require a long discussion of modern Jewish history. Suffice it to say here that your question rests on the assumption that Jews are either a religious denomination (in which case a Jewish state cannot be a secular state) or a race (in which case a Jewish state is an “apartheid state”). Both of these definitions are modern and relatively recent formulations. The first stems from the French model of Jewish emancipation in 1791 (in the words of Clermont-Tonnerre, “we must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals”), and the second emerged in the nineteenth century, partly to deny the possibility of the very assimilation that the French Revolution promised. But there is a third possibility that you have not considered, the very one that Clermont-Tonnerre urged Jews to renounce, which is that Jews are a nation. That in fact is how the Zionist movement always understood Jewish identity. It is worth noting that in the modern era (since the French Revolution), Jews themselves (like gentiles) have been divided about how precisely to define Jewish identity.
4. Lastly, your characterization of Israel as an “apartheid state” is based upon a flawed, misguided, and spurious analogy with apartheid-era South Africa. In South Africa, non-whites were legally segregated and politically disfranchised until the country instituted a new constitution in 1993. South African apartheid denied non-whites the right to vote, decreed where they could live and work, made sex and marriage across the racial divide illegal, forbade opponents of the regime to express their views, banned opposition movements, and maintained segregated universities. In contrast, Israel is a multiethnic and multiracial democracy whose Arab citizens are guaranteed equal rights under the country’s Basic Laws. All citizens of Israel vote in elections on an equal basis (one person, one vote). Indeed, Israel is the only country in the Middle East (with the exception now of Iraq) where Arabs – including Arab women -- participate in fully democratic elections. Arab Israelis serve in parliament and have held a variety of government posts, including the nation’s Supreme Court. There are no Jim Crow or apartheid laws in Israel. There are no legal restrictions on movement or employment, nor are there any racial restrictions on sexual or marital relations. The universities are integrated (I know firsthand). Opponents of Zionism have free speech and assembly and may form political organizations. All of this is a far cry from South African apartheid.
I don’t deny that there are ethnic and racial disparities in employment and income in Israel. However, if this kind of socio-economic inequality is tantamount to apartheid, then Israel is far from alone. In virtually all developed societies, one finds analogous disparities.
The situation of the Palestinians in the occupied territories differs from that of Arab Israelis because they are not Israeli citizens and therefore do not enjoy Israeli citizenship rights. The occupation has generated a tension, even a contradiction, between Israel being a democracy inside its pre-1967 borders and a non-democratic ruler beyond them. However, a military occupation – no matter how oppressive and corrupting – is not the same thing as a legally codified system of racial segregation.
For further discussion of the apartheid analogy, see here:
http://www.engageonline.org.uk/archives/index.php?id=37
Applying the concept of "civil religion" to Israel is certainly interesting on an academic level.
However, as long as personal status is controlled by the Orthodox/ultra-Orthodox Rabbinate, such ideas in the public sphere will face an up-hill battle.
Add to this Israel's proportional system of government - and it's more like a mountain to climb.
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Joel Katz
Religion and State in Israel
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