Okay. So again, welcome. I would like to open with a concise presentation of my main argument regarding what I call Israel's Jewish identity crisis.
I will then move on to discuss in more detail the controversial Nation-State bill, which passed into law earlier this summer.
As I hope to demonstrate the bill as a case history or the law is a case history with its relevant background,
its development over almost a decade before passing into law.
The debate surrounding it and the global controversy that it is instigated on are but an instance,
for instance, I'm sorry, of Israel's Jewish identity crisis and its consequences.
So what do I mean by Israel's Jewish identity crisis?
Israel's Jewish identity crisis can be understood as a direct outcome of the Zionist unresolved claim to Jewish identity.
The modernist shift, spearheaded by Zionist ideology, turned the focus away from the subjective,
historical and traditional matter of Judaism to the allegedly objective and predetermined matter of Jews.
In this scheme, Jews are primarily identified by what they are, i.e. their alleged natural common biological origin, blood, ethno or race.
Call it whatever you like and not or only remotely so by what they believe in practice and by how they live their collective and individual lives.
I.e., Judaism in its varied and even conflicting historical manifestations.
Now, obviously, the abandoning of a historically established, traditional Jewish way of understanding the world,
including the very meaning of Jewishness according to which it is Judaism, that defines the Jew and not vice versa.
This demands that Zionism adopt an alternative language by which to understand the world.
Zionism had clearly found this language in the predominant European modernist spirit of its time doing so.
It has adopted a comprehensive way of viewing and interpreting the world that nourishes on the European Enlightenment
Project and ultimately serves the political configuration of power that is beneficial to the sovereign,
allegedly secular nation states. This was especially apparent as political Zionism emerges triumphant over other streams
of Zionism viewed as an enlightened secularisation and politicisation of Jews,
Judaism and Jewish identity. This ideological foundation ultimately consolidated around a political nation, statist reading of Zionist ideology,
according to which the foremost redemptive modern reincarnation of Judaism itself is to be the nation state
of Jews depicting two millennia of Jewish life outside of the framework of sovereignty as a pathology.
This ideology insists that the nation state, its politicisation of Jews,
would also amount to the normalisation a healing of the Jewish collective body.
Critically, this healing would mean that Jews are no longer unique but rather normal, like all other nations around the world.
Among other things, this normalcy, quote unquote, would mean.
So the Ideational Dong Doctrine, ideological doctrine, has determined that once this polity that is the Jewish state comes into being,
everything done in the framework of the state will be by natural, obvious political definition, Jewish.
Moreover, it would make the state itself Jewish.
To this day, Zionist ideologues and apologists repeatedly draw manifestly deficient comparison to other European nation states,
suggesting that Jew should be read exactly as exactly equivalent conceptually to French, Italian, German and so forth.
So just as the nation state of the French, French is French by simply simply by being by virtue of being their state.
So the nation state of Jews, Israel is Jewish by virtue of its being their state.
The peoples being Jews, i.e. their natural makeup, makes their state ipso facto Jewish.
Now, this analogy is deficient, as I said earlier, primarily since it forces Judaism,
Jews and Jewishness into the straitjacket of a historically situated and politically embodied conceptual scheme that of the modern sovereign,
allegedly secular European nation state.
However, Judaism, Jews and Jewishness so vividly understood throughout history seemed to refuse to fit easily,
if ever, into the predominant nation state.
Its discourse of the time looked at from a different point of views and guided by varying, sometimes conflicting interests.
Judaism, Jews and Jewishness can fit into various, sometimes conflicting concepts and terms.
They can be seen as race, as religion, as nation, as culture, as civilisation, as history, as ethnics and so forth.
And they fit nicely, none of them. They are not exactly a race, not exactly a nation, not exactly a civilisation.
Judaism simply refuses to be read in terms that have developed in Christian modern Europe.
In any event, the most immediate implication of this analogy Jews and their state are just like the French in their state,
a nation like all other nations.
Given the historical context of the establishment of the State of Israel has been the logic produced by the reversal of the analogy.
In other words, Israel is Jewish only insofar as it is a state of Jews where the population it rules over not be seen as Jewish.
The Jewish state will cease to exist as such.
Furthermore, it is important to remember that unlike so-called the so-called precedents of other national European movements and other nation states,
Zionism and Israel have not emerged organically, as it were, as the political self-determination of newly defined, realised or invented nation.
Living on a short territory.
Rather Israel's history, such that the nation state itself being the culmination of of an ideological and political project,
preceded the formation of the state's nation. In actuality,
the state itself has played a central role in bringing Jews from all over the world
under its sovereignty and shaping this newly created collective as new national Jews.
And just as crucially, the territory over which the state is sovereign.
Has been historically settled by non-Jews. This foundational parameters have determined the historical course by which the state
is bound by its own guiding logic to manufacture and maintain a Jewish majority,
or, to be precise, a majority of Jews in its population.
This necessitates the ceaseless arithmetic of demography,
where a necessary majority of Jews is continuously counted against a minority of non-Jewish Palestinian Arabs,
rendering the latter an immediate threat to the very notion of the sovereignty of Jews.
Yet, most crucially, and this, I would argue, is a key to understanding Israeli socio politics at large.
Both the Zionist ideological foundation and its political embodiment, the State of Israel,
have failed to offer their own modern, enlightened, secular, natural qualities.
One definition of Jewish identity. Instead, either is a stopgap or the somewhat self-denying, almost Freudian, I would say,
manifestation of adherence to a mythical essentialist notion of Jewishness.
The State under the dominance of a socialist Zionist party, I must remind you,
has chosen to rely on a rabbinical orthodox group of gatekeepers for the
foundational maintenance and upholding of the line separating Jews from non-Jews.
The prevalent discourse that blames this reality on the Orthodox minority's
alleged extortion of the non-Orthodox majority of Israeli Jews is indeed helpful.
So it is helpful for this majority's upholding of an enlightened, liberal, democratic self-image.
But it should not confuse us from seeing how important is the role of the rabbinical
gatekeepers for the state's upholding of its most basic of premises that it is primarily,
if not exclusively, a Jewish state.
This gatekeepers help maintain the most fundamental parameter of all that differentiates Jews from non-Jews in Israel,
thus allowing the state to preserve the proper demographic balance between Jews and non-Jewish Palestinian Arabs.
Now note that this all has to do with the notion of media Netanyahu deeming Hebrew
the Jews state and only derivative Lee with Madinah yehudit a Jewish state.
Political Zionism has indeed focussed from the very beginning on the establishment of the former a Jew.
As a state leading critic such as I had to ask already at the end of the 19th century what exactly would make it a Jewish state?
This, I would argue, has been a question that haunts Israel further, feeding its Jewish identity crisis.
And thus the Israeli Jewish identity crisis is further compounded by another basic failure of the Zionist prognosis.
Contrary to the secular prediction that the nation state of Jews would become not only the centre of Jewish life,
but also the very embodiment of modern Jewishness, rendering non-Israeli Jewish identities pathologically incomplete, if not outright inauthentic.
Jews throughout the world and Israeli Jews in particular, have kept on insisting,
as has been historically the case, that Jewish blood alone does not suffice.
Or, to put it politically,
that there positively meaningful Jewish identification demands more than just being subjected to the sovereignty of the state of Jews.
This, of course,
is further emphasised by the fact that there are also non-Jews who are subject of the sovereignty contrary to the state Zionist prognosis.
Israeli political culture does not accept the designation of these people or their
creations as Jewish simply by virtue of their being citizens of the Jewish state.
Descendants of the land of Israel. And even speakers of Israeli Hebrew.
Moreover, the political culture sponsored and propagated by the state itself through its various institutions and branches,
echoes this normative understanding of Jewishness, even if it does so clumsily, to say the least.
This is manifested primarily in what has been historically labelled under the status quo
and what recent misguided secularist protestations decry is really organisation had.
That doesn't translate to English. Namely, the propagation by the state of an admittedly narrow and problematic sense of Jewish identity,
mostly through the state's educational system and via the legal enforcement of certain decrees as a matter of civil, i.e. secular law.
I must remind you that coloured Israeli public sphere in Jewish use these governmental measures while
far from instilling one's identity with the positively meaningful knowledge of Jewish history,
tradition, ethics and identity, they have one fundamental trait they are reserved for Jews alone.
Hence, they reiterate the basic faultlines of Israeli nationhood.
Recent attempts at bolstering Israeli Jews,
Jewish identity and anchoring Israelis on Jewish identity and the first controversy
they have instigated have only further highlighted the depth of this identity.
Crisis driven by the nation state is concern over demography, demographics or more accurately,
the balance or the imbalance between Israeli Jews and non-Jewish Palestinian Arabs.
These various various legal measures and initiatives by the executive branch tend to use a shallow,
politically manipulated notion of Jewish normativity in order to reassert the sovereignty
of Jews and to deny Palestinian Arabs similar claims for national self-determination.
And the nation state bill is indeed a good case in point.
So let us focus now on the law itself.
The past couple of decades have witnessed an apparent heightening of the political tensions surrounding Israel's Jewish identity.
This has culminated in a legislative initiative to formulate a constitutional anchoring of this identity
through the passing of a basic law that would enshrine Israel's identity as the Jewish nation state.
I would argue that the contentious nature of the debate on the bill sometimes referred to in Israeli Hebrew as the locally owned the nation law,
or more elaborately, the basic law Israel, the nation state of the Jewish people.
This encapsulates a wider history, namely the largely failing attempt to tackle the meaning of Israel's Jewish identity.
Beyond the concern for the demographic balance or imbalance between Jews and non-Jews.
So a careful consideration of the bill will allow us a clear understanding of both the
taken for granted infrastructure of meaning dominating Israeli or more accurately,
contemporary Zionist construction of the notion of Jewish politics and of what may be seen as its somewhat surprising shortcomings.
The bill, which has cleared the final legislative hurdles in late, late July, this past summer,
started off a started off almost a decade earlier as an extra legislative initiative,
and it tended at first to embarrass the political leadership more than to appeal to it.
It has since gradually became a cause celeb of mainstream Israeli politics.
More importantly, it has put Israel's Jewish identity crisis into sharp relief after more than 60 turbulent years of statehood.
When the original bill was first drafted,
Israelis were presented with the most politically fundamental question What does the state Jewish identity amount to?
What does it mean for Israelis, for Israel to be a Jewish state?
The debate over the bill has offered the Israeli political and public sphere a unique,
rather unprecedented, clear view of the essential tensions at the very core of the Israeli polity.
Specifically, as I alluded to earlier,
it highlighted highlighted the tension between Zionism's rebellion against what it has viewed as Jewish religion and its zionism's
foundational claim to a Jewish history and identity that are by the Zionist own account saturated with the same religious elements.
More critically, it has exposed the Zionist inability to construct a full fledged independent from religion,
as it were, i.e. in the in its own terminology, a national and secular sense of Jewish identity.
Such an ideological construction could or even should have been the source that would clearly identify Israel's values as a Jewish state,
hence, ultimately, the Israeli meaning of Jewish politics.
Instead, the bill directs much of its sort of.
Much of its impetus toward a negative construction of Jewish Zionist nationhood by way of refuting
Palestinian claims to nationhood and attempting to buttress the preference of Jews over non-Jews in Israel.
So a quick review of the history of the law and its basic tenants is of necessity here,
for it can at least offer a context for understanding the diverging assessments of the law, which I shall discuss in a minute.
The bill, which was first submitted to the Israeli Parliament for consideration in August 2011,
was originally initiated by an extra parliamentary organisation, the Institute for Zionist Strategies, a couple of years earlier.
I will return to this original initiative later on because it offers some clear
answers to the questions surrounding the legislative saga that later ensued.
The bill was presented before the Israeli Parliament by a member of the Knesset, Avi Dichter,
a former head of the Israeli internal security services, the Shin Bet, who was at the time a member of the centrist.
And. It may be relevant to mention the remind you here secular Zionist party Kadima.
This was a regional initiative was endorsed by Ze'ev Elkin, a member of the Knesset of the Likud Party,
and the two garnered the supporting signature of some 40 other members of the Knesset.
Critics were quick to denounce the bill. Members of their own party, including the head of Kadima at the time at the time Tzipi Livni,
poured scathing criticism on the initiative and demanded that details of the Bill Livni eventually impose the party discipline against the bill,
which resulted in the effective freezing of the original proposal in the 18th Knesset.
Yet the initiative was far from dead.
It is emerged as a cornerstone of certain coalition agreements upon which Israel's 33rd, 33rd ruling government was put into power in March 2013.
Livni, who had held the position of justice minister in the short lived government,
appointed a prominent law professor to counsel the government on the matter and Endeavour,
which culminated in a document negating the very need to constitutionally encode the vision of the state.
The original proposal has gone through several further formulations and reformulations,
offering various degrees of softening and hardening, as it was called in the Israeli press.
Of the more controversial elements of the original proposal.
The bill re-emerged once again after the 2015 elections to the current Knesset, the 20th Knesset,
becoming something of a competitive arena between the Likud and the religious Zionist party now labelled subjectivity.
It has been promoted by all central figures of the Israeli government, from the Prime Minister, through his justice and education ministers,
and down to the backbenchers of the parties as a fundamental issue of
unprecedented importance to the very vitality of contemporary Israeli nationhood.
Yet the bill has encountered formidable obstacles.
It was only after much deliberation and heated debates that the bill celebrated by the Israeli prime minister,
I must note, is the affirmation of Hertz's vision.
Some 122 years later, when it finally passed, it was finally approved by the Knesset.
Moreover, the saga is clearly far from over.
The bill is bound to be reviewed by the judiciary probably sooner than later.
To understand the wider history and political meaning of the bill.
We May 1st ask, as did practically all commentators, both those supporting the bill and those and its opponents, what is the true purpose of the bill?
Tellingly, the various answers and even explanation offered in the bill itself all point in one at the same time,
its two seemingly contradictory claims.
First, it is claimed that the bill's main motivation is rather obvious, if not outright redundant, according to its critics,
since what it proclaims and seeks to enshrine as law is, by all measures, a foundational notion of the Zionist politics of the state of Israel.
It is, in other words, a bill that simply states the obvious.
Second, it is claimed that it's passing into law after some 70 years of statehood based on the premised Jewishness of Israel,
marks a historical watershed, redeeming ideational liberation of sorts, according to the bill's supporters.
Or an ominous breaking point in Israel's history as a democracy, according to its detractors.
The basic law, in other words, is both obvious and radical.
Judged by its contents alone, isolated, that is from its political and historical context,
and read naively ignoring, in other words, some critical, implicit ramifications of its tenets.
The bill may indeed seem largely redundant, making the controversy surrounding it perplexing.
It states what Israeli political culture has historically taken to be the political Zionist
taken for granted the very foundation of Jewish nationhood in the state of Israel itself.
However, many critics were quick to note such a naive reading of the bill misses much of its meaning and its main political implications.
Two issues emerge almost instantaneously as the flash points attracting most commentators attention.
First the implied preference of Israel's Jewish identity over the state's liberal democratic principles.
When the two are understood to be in conflict.
And second, the assertion of Jewish nationhood through the blunt negation of Palestinian nationhood.
So by way of example, consider Ha'aretz editorial.
This is an unsigned opinion piece that allegedly proclaims the stance of the paper as a whole,
probably the most important intellectual daily publication in Israel,
which had only the harshest of words for denouncing the bill, calling it, and I'm quoting here, an apartheid law.
End of quote. That would label Israel a quote and I'm quoting as a Jewish and racist state.
End of quote. This is a post, of course, to the common phrasing, a Jewish and democratic state.
This stance, which is clearly representative of the liberal Zionist critique of the law, is so harsh that in the current atmosphere,
many of the terms it uses would be simply considered out of bounds if used by critics of Israel outside of the state.
In this liberal Zionist reading, then the main and the main motive behind the law is an attempt which the critics deride as outright racist
to firmly established the collective inferiority of Palestinian Arabs in the nation state of Jews.
In this reading,
the internationally accepted rightful affirmation of the Jewish majority's determination of Israel as Jewish identity masks a more sinister,
less acceptable practice of, quote, apartheid, in which the affirmation is built primarily on the negation of the national other.
It must be noted that such critical readings of the bill,
according to which it contradicts the foundational democratic principle of the Israeli polity,
also came from the ranks of the Israeli right and from the Israeli president himself, to say the least.
Given the centrality of the alleged duality of Israel's self-image as Jewish and democratic,
the law in exposing and its exposing of potential fundamental contradictions between the two
organs of this duality was also presented by critics is undermining the very Zionist vision,
if not the Zionist project itself. Regardless of the critics variations in tone,
it would be hard for anyone who reads the bill to deny that it does indeed affirmatively assert a view
in which the termination of Jewish nationhood is established by the negation of Palestinian nationhood.
It reasserts the various expressions of Jewish Zionist nationhood, or to use the nationalist discourse itself.
The rights of the Jewish nation by explicitly determining the exclusivity of these rights to Jews.
Palestinians in the bill, as the bill clarifies, cannot claim similar rights.
The centrality of the Palestinian challenge to political Zionist nationhood is most clearly
explicated in the aforementioned predecessor to the original 2011 legislative proposal,
a white paper of sorts that was published by the Institute for Zionist Strategies in July 2009.
This draft proposal also presents itself as a somewhat of a paradox a long overdue
attempt at legislating what is otherwise obvious and should be taken for granted.
The authors explain the newly formed need to legislate what used to be so obvious as to be considered natural.
And I'm quoting them In the past, the state the states status as a national home for the Jewish people was never questioned.
It was obvious to the public and to the authorities, including the judiciary, what it meant.
Practical manifestation of the Jewish status of the state can be seen in the very name of the state and from a multitude of laws which are obvious.
Move an email to him in Hebrew. Yet so the authors narrate something has gone terribly wrong in Israel's recent political history,
and what used to be taken for granted is no longer so.
This new situation demands, they argue,
a rewriting of the Zionist view that would also entail a more robust anchoring of the Zionist vision of Jewish politics.
There is indeed an urgent sense of looming danger, of a looming danger that is explicitly stated as the primary motivation behind the bill.
This is also clearly evident in the actual bill presented to the Knesset by Dichter and Levin,
where the necessity of the law is stated as the ultimate answer to this looming danger.
The need for the law, they explain, I'm quoting,
assumes greater validity is at a time when there are those who seek to abolish the right of the Jewish people to a national home in its land,
and the recognition of the state of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people.
And of quote. Now, if this bill does not explicate who those who seek to abolish the political national right of the Jews are.
But it is not too hard to see that this threatening trend,
which I must note the Institute for Zionist Strategies call back to back it because he poorly
thought should be translated as back-pedalling but could be translated as perversion.
This is the book. The thought has primarily to do with the status of Israel's non-Jewish Palestinian Arabs citizens of Israel.
It is, if left, unopposed.
The authors warn this trend would lead to the transformation of Israel into what is sometimes called a state of all of its citizens,
as opposed to a state of Jews, a liberal democratic state where all citizens, regardless of their nationality,
belonging and aspirations, enjoy equal status not only in the face of law, as is the case,
but also in the allocation of material and symbolic resources, which is not the case for the is it for the draft bill authors?
This amounts to an outright negation of the Zionist vision of the state itself.
Is this dream self has triumphantly put it immediately after the Knesset finally approved the bill.
The basic law is aimed, I'm quoting, at preventing even a shadow of a thought,
not to mention an attempt to transform Israel into a state of all of its citizens.
End of quote. In this framework of nationalist political philosophy,
the Jewish character of the nation state must amount to an explicit preference of people who are Jews over those who are not,
at least in collective terms. So how does the nation state bill reassert Israel's Jewish character?
What does it offer by way of reaffirming the Jews right to a national home?
It is interesting to note that the bill's text, the lowest tax, is far from rendering this crucial matter clear.
Some of the more controversial aspects of the bill have to do with what has been
widely interpreted as the redrawing of the balance between Israel's Jewish character,
which should, according to the bill's supporter,
amount to a preference of Jews over non-Jews and its commitment to democracy, which would delegitimize this preference.
It aims to redraw or reassert the original Zionist framework where nationalist
considerations overcome democratic universal principles of individual rights rights.
So that's why the purpose clauses of previously legislated basic laws assert a
commitment to preserve Israel's character and values as a Jewish and democratic state.
The nation state bill tends to establish a clear hierarchy Jewish first, Democratic second, if at all,
is the final version of the bill approved by the Knesset drops all references to Israel's democratic regime.
Put simply, the law aims to give a legal constitutional greenlight for the undemocratic practice of preference of one group over another,
or to reverse the point of discriminating against one group in the name of the national rights of the other.
Probably the most controversial clause of the bill in this regard derive directly from this newly chartered hierarchy
has to do with the segregation of Jews from non-Jews in Israel and the preference of the former over the latter.
One paragraph in the original draft aims directly at legalising a policy of segregation of Jews and Palestinian Arabs,
namely the designation of certain settlements as reserved for Jews only, and the preference of Jews in the allocation of land held by the state.
This is a policy which had been practised for years but was ruled by the Supreme Court in 2000 to be illegal or unconstitutional.
It's an interesting fact to note that the court's reasoning for prohibiting the establishment of settlements for Jews
only has been that this practice contradicts the value of equality to which the state is bound by its Jewish character,
not by its democratic rules.
Under the headline of the right to self due to heritage preservation,
the clause states that the state may allow a community that includes a follower of a single
religion or members of a single nation to establish a separate communal settlement.
Now, as aforementioned, this this clause, which explicitly aims to subvert the Supreme Court's ruling, has attracted much of the critics ire.
It was ultimately, after much heated debate,
rephrased to state in the language of the bill approved by the Knesset as law under the title of Jewish settlement.
What must be read as a Zionist taken for granted fact,
and I'm quoting The state sees the development of Jewish settlement a national value and shall act to encourage, promote and strengthen it.
In addition to territory, the same motivation is applied to language, thus covering two basic tenets of nationalist ideology.
Um that the only precariously tied to Judaism land and language,
a clause titled language positively asserts that Hebrew is the official state
language and that the Arabic language has a special status living the League.
The details of this designation for future regulations put negatively, as was seen by all critics.
This amounts to the national demotion or exclusion of Arabic, which used to be until July a second official language of the State of Israel.
The bill redraws the legal hierarchy in which Hebrew alone is the official language.
Now, this undermining in practice of Arabic, the language, I must note, not only of the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel,
but also of a very large constituency of Jews from Arab speaking countries.
The language in which many of the foundational texts of the Jewish world were written in.
This is part of a continual thread in which Arabic has come to be seen as the language of the enemy.
Hence as and is an object of derision in itself.
Other clauses in the law simply restate elements of already established laws in an obvious
attempt to encourage a reading of this as having to do with Israel's Jewish identity.
So, for example, a paragraph titled The State Symbols determines once again, this has already been done by previous legislations,
already established laws that the national anthem what are the national anthem, the flag and the emblem.
Now note that these symbols are indeed widely identified or read as Jewish.
They clearly nourish on traditional Jewish imageries and object and they would surely be difficult for non-Jews to identify with.
But they are a novel Zionist state, its creation or creations as Jewish objections to Zionism show.
One can view himself and be viewed by others as wholly, authentically Jewish and still fail to revere the symbols or even activity that's agreed them.
In other words, these symbols do not represent something that would traditionally at least be viewed as essentially Jewish,
but they are surely of a Zionist essence. The final version of the Beat also states that Jerusalem unified and whole is the capital city of Israel,
again repeating an already established law which encouraged the current president of the US to move the embassy back to Jerusalem.
The beat also seeks to assert the Jews national rights and values.
Yet this assertions are either redundant as they simply restate existing laws or they are so vague.
I'm sorry as to practically be meaningless.
One paragraph, for example, originally titled Return and later changed to the ingathering of exile, would fall under the first category.
It states that the state should be open to Jewish immigration and the ingathering of exiles.
This is obviously already determined by the law of return. A foundational element of Zionist Israeli nationalism.
The law states that the state shall act in the diaspora to strengthen the affinity Zika in Hebrew between the state and members of the Jewish people.
It's hard to see what this would amount to in terms of uh, binding, uh, uh, law.
Other causes of the bill in the bill tended at first to be more explicit in setting a more Jewish tone.
This rely on tradition, heritage, history and even religion.
A clause in the original draft thus determines that the state shall act to preserve the cultural and historical
heritage music of the Jewish people and to cultivate in to cultivate it in Israel and the diaspora.
And that in all educational institutions serving the Jewish public in Israel,
the history, heritage and tradition of the Jewish people shall be taught.
But these statements were apparently read to suggest an opening for religious coercion and had attracted a lot of criticism.
They were cut off in practice from the Israeli context of the bill.
However, the final version of the bill did not forego of these clauses altogether.
Instead, it aims this the states due the ising impetus toward non-Israeli Jews,
and thus the law passed by the Knesset amidst the war in Israel and its religion.
To be read, the state should act to preserve the cultural,
historical and religious heritage of the Jewish people among the diaspora, adjust this phrase and manoeuvre.
Reflect a wider reality in which Jewish religion or tradition is seen in Israel as suspicious
when referring to Israeli Jews and is hardly legitimate when referring to non-Israeli Jews.
So in conclusion, the debate over the nation state law is obviously far from over.
The bill has cleared the last legislative hurdle to become law, but it is bound to remain controversial and debated.
Moreover, as I suggested earlier, the debate or more precisely,
the discourse from which it nourishes and advises capture captures the essence of the Israeli polity.
The debate over the bill is not a political argument, per se.
Rather, it may be described as an epistemological debate on how to approach the very constitutive notion of Israel's Jewish character.
The unresolved nature of the basic law.
The fact that it manages to be seen both in it at the same time as obvious or redundant, is radical or dangerous and its ultimate failure to positive.
Still, this designation, i.e. a Jewish state with explicitly positive meaning or reflect some of the
foundational tensions in the Zionist ideology and the Israeli nation state.
They all touch upon the Zionist taken for granted claim for Jewish nation statehood.
That is the reading of Jewish identity as pertaining to nationality in the ideological meaning of
the term and the just as obvious failure or neglect to construct a positive meaning of a secular,
as in not related to what Zionist ideology would see as religion, Jewish identity.
Instead, Zionism, it is the Israeli polity, have shifted the discourse from a Jewish state to a Jewish state or the Jewish state.
From asking what makes some someone or something Jewish to constructing a polity based on a majority of Jews?
They need to pass the bill. The initiative that propelled the debate from the very beginning has nothing meaningful.
I would argue to do with a challenge to positively define or identify the meaning of the Jewishness of Israel or of Jewish politics.
Indeed, it does a manifestly muddled work in trying to assert Israel's claim to a Jewish identity.
As my discussion of the of the law, I hope shows, the law seems to handle these matters rather offhandedly,
leaving them mostly to obstruct, to be meaningful.
Instead, the bill has been motivated by the sense that design is taken for granted.
Understanding of Jewish nation statehood had been put in question primarily due to its inconsistency with basic democratic principles of equality.
This then, is, among other things, also a story of an attempt to overcome the narrow reading of Israel's Jewishness as pertaining primarily
to demography and to the preference of a majority of Jews over a minority of Palestinian Arab non-Jews.
But this attempt was motivated precisely by the need to preserve this the configuration of power,
and not necessarily by a wish to finally resolve zionism's confused understanding of its own relation to Jewish tradition.
In other words, this is a discussion that some of its primary spokespeople never attempted or wanted to have.
It was forced on them by their wish to preserve the political Zionist configuration of power and understanding of Jewish nationhood.
In this, the crippled debate that has ensued echoed a fundamental trait of the political Zionist ideology,
which, confronted with the dilemma of its own Jewish identity,
prefer to forgo the discussion and focus instead on establishing a quick configuration of power in which Jews hold sovereignty.
Thank you.