The Israeli State: Ethnic, Liberal, or Statist?

There are three ways of viewing the proper nature of the state of Israel.

1
One way is broadly the way the Israeli right wing thinks: Jews against Arabs; Jews must win. This is essentially an ethno-nationalist way of thinking that assumes that Jews do or should line up for Jewish interests, and same goes for the Arabs. Ethnic differences are immutable, political, and irreconcilable. Either they win or we win, so we'd better win. This way of thinking is committed to a zero-sum battle, and its ultimate implication is that there are no objective, overarching concepts of right and wrong, there is only the imperative that we survive by defeating them. Taken to its logical conclusion, this thinking leads to the thinking of Meir Kahane and the Kach party. More commonly, this thinking is not taken to its logical conclusion, and the result is the mainstream right wing position. This position certainly does not advocate 'transfer,' but it is willing to overlook unequal distribution of state resources between the Jewish and Arab sectors (in favour of the Jewish sector). This position is unstable in that it lacks the courage to reach the logical conclusions required by its own assumptions, yet it refuses to revise those assumptions.

2
The broadly leftist way of seeing things is that Israel is or should be a liberal democracy based on the western model. This view emphasises rights over duties, and the state exists to serve all its citizens equally. Individual rights reign, and there are no recognised group rights (unless one means the group right of Arabs to equality); there are only atomised individuals. There is no room for any religion in the state, and that necessarily means that the state belongs no more to one ethnic or religious group than to any other; regardless of demographics.

The media and the judiciary are often accused of being on the left. This makes sense, considering that these two professions are creations of western liberal democracy. I'll talk only about judge here. The Israeli judiciary tends to fit my second, 'leftist' category, for the simple, and valid reasons that they are educated in the tradition of modern western law which values the rule of law above all else, and that prioritises individual equality before the law. This is the most basic element of the modern western intellectual legal tradition, and ideas like group rights and ethnicity, as well as issues of community, war, and national security are secondary. This hierachy is, after all, the product and now the foundation of western liberal democracy, and the strength of this intellectual tradition in Israel is of importance to the health of the Israeli state.

3
Between, the two paradigms I have outlined, however, there is a third possibility, which synthesises them. David Ben-Gurion coined the term mamlachtiut. Essentially it refers to the value of state-building. The idea of mamlachtiut has the potential to combine the qualities of the two world-views I have already described. Shmuel Sandler (of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies) distinguishes between ethno-nationalism and statism. Mamlachtiut is statism. The statist state is neither a weapon for the Jews to weild against the Arabs, nor is it some sort of post-modern, post-historical "state of all it citizens" (a phrase which has lost its appeal by its frequent repetition among leftist circles). Rather, it is the institutional manifestation of the Zionist project. It is an ethno-nationalist project (Zionism) given expression through a slightly adapted version of the liberal democratic state. The ethno-national content gives the state, and especially the country, its identity, its historical purpose, its particularism (to borrow an American phrase), and its spiritual strength: it is not a state like any other. Meanwhile, the state, as a form of national expression, gives the ethno-national drive the settled rationality which affords it the virtues of democracy and the rule of law. Not to be neglected is the fact that the institutions of the state have the proven potential to channel national energy into creative projects; the institution of the state thus allows the Zionist project to engage in the greatest moral-economic enterprise within the reach of mankind: building. In a future post I will address the abismally destructive record of the Arab countries in the twentieth century, but for now let it be noted that if nothing else, the twentieth century was one of Jewish building. Yet beyond the community level, building has required coordination by a state. I believe that this was Ben-Gurion's insight: the Jewish state is the key to harnessing the creative power of the Jewish people. This is the essence of the statist state, and there is nothing in this essence that prevents the statist state from serving its Arab citizens while continuing to realise the Zionist project of building the country.

It is worth noting that this type of Zionist state can logically have Arab citizens, in the true meaning of the term 'citizen.' Indeed, not every Zionist vision of the state allows, even a priori, for meaningful Arab citizenship, and not every vision of an Israel with meaningful Arab citizenship also remains Zionist.