1 00:00:02,070 --> 00:00:14,550 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. 2 00:00:15,330 --> 00:00:24,090 I will then move on to discuss in more detail the controversial Nation-State bill, which passed into law earlier this summer. 3 00:00:24,840 --> 00:00:33,430 As I hope to demonstrate the bill as a case history or the law is a case history with its relevant background, 4 00:00:33,450 --> 00:00:38,220 its development over almost a decade before passing into law. 5 00:00:38,820 --> 00:00:48,170 The debate surrounding it and the global controversy that it is instigated on are but an instance, 6 00:00:48,170 --> 00:00:53,040 for instance, I'm sorry, of Israel's Jewish identity crisis and its consequences. 7 00:00:54,780 --> 00:00:58,110 So what do I mean by Israel's Jewish identity crisis? 8 00:00:59,370 --> 00:01:08,370 Israel's Jewish identity crisis can be understood as a direct outcome of the Zionist unresolved claim to Jewish identity. 9 00:01:09,480 --> 00:01:17,490 The modernist shift, spearheaded by Zionist ideology, turned the focus away from the subjective, 10 00:01:17,790 --> 00:01:28,050 historical and traditional matter of Judaism to the allegedly objective and predetermined matter of Jews. 11 00:01:28,860 --> 00:01:42,660 In this scheme, Jews are primarily identified by what they are, i.e. their alleged natural common biological origin, blood, ethno or race. 12 00:01:42,690 --> 00:01:54,330 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. 13 00:01:54,870 --> 00:01:59,820 I.e., Judaism in its varied and even conflicting historical manifestations. 14 00:02:01,320 --> 00:02:08,160 Now, obviously, the abandoning of a historically established, traditional Jewish way of understanding the world, 15 00:02:10,170 --> 00:02:19,200 including the very meaning of Jewishness according to which it is Judaism, that defines the Jew and not vice versa. 16 00:02:20,160 --> 00:02:24,930 This demands that Zionism adopt an alternative language by which to understand the world. 17 00:02:25,710 --> 00:02:34,170 Zionism had clearly found this language in the predominant European modernist spirit of its time doing so. 18 00:02:34,530 --> 00:02:41,790 It has adopted a comprehensive way of viewing and interpreting the world that nourishes on the European Enlightenment 19 00:02:41,790 --> 00:02:49,439 Project and ultimately serves the political configuration of power that is beneficial to the sovereign, 20 00:02:49,440 --> 00:02:58,469 allegedly secular nation states. This was especially apparent as political Zionism emerges triumphant over other streams 21 00:02:58,470 --> 00:03:05,970 of Zionism viewed as an enlightened secularisation and politicisation of Jews, 22 00:03:06,210 --> 00:03:17,880 Judaism and Jewish identity. This ideological foundation ultimately consolidated around a political nation, statist reading of Zionist ideology, 23 00:03:18,240 --> 00:03:25,440 according to which the foremost redemptive modern reincarnation of Judaism itself is to be the nation state 24 00:03:25,440 --> 00:03:32,130 of Jews depicting two millennia of Jewish life outside of the framework of sovereignty as a pathology. 25 00:03:32,760 --> 00:03:37,470 This ideology insists that the nation state, its politicisation of Jews, 26 00:03:37,860 --> 00:03:43,200 would also amount to the normalisation a healing of the Jewish collective body. 27 00:03:44,070 --> 00:03:52,590 Critically, this healing would mean that Jews are no longer unique but rather normal, like all other nations around the world. 28 00:03:53,880 --> 00:03:57,810 Among other things, this normalcy, quote unquote, would mean. 29 00:03:58,230 --> 00:04:10,080 So the Ideational Dong Doctrine, ideological doctrine, has determined that once this polity that is the Jewish state comes into being, 30 00:04:10,620 --> 00:04:17,850 everything done in the framework of the state will be by natural, obvious political definition, Jewish. 31 00:04:18,810 --> 00:04:21,060 Moreover, it would make the state itself Jewish. 32 00:04:22,020 --> 00:04:31,320 To this day, Zionist ideologues and apologists repeatedly draw manifestly deficient comparison to other European nation states, 33 00:04:31,590 --> 00:04:41,970 suggesting that Jew should be read exactly as exactly equivalent conceptually to French, Italian, German and so forth. 34 00:04:42,960 --> 00:04:53,850 So just as the nation state of the French, French is French by simply simply by being by virtue of being their state. 35 00:04:55,350 --> 00:05:01,380 So the nation state of Jews, Israel is Jewish by virtue of its being their state. 36 00:05:02,460 --> 00:05:09,930 The peoples being Jews, i.e. their natural makeup, makes their state ipso facto Jewish. 37 00:05:11,310 --> 00:05:17,850 Now, this analogy is deficient, as I said earlier, primarily since it forces Judaism, 38 00:05:17,850 --> 00:05:27,659 Jews and Jewishness into the straitjacket of a historically situated and politically embodied conceptual scheme that of the modern sovereign, 39 00:05:27,660 --> 00:05:30,090 allegedly secular European nation state. 40 00:05:31,590 --> 00:05:38,549 However, Judaism, Jews and Jewishness so vividly understood throughout history seemed to refuse to fit easily, 41 00:05:38,550 --> 00:05:41,280 if ever, into the predominant nation state. 42 00:05:41,280 --> 00:05:49,680 Its discourse of the time looked at from a different point of views and guided by varying, sometimes conflicting interests. 43 00:05:50,340 --> 00:05:57,390 Judaism, Jews and Jewishness can fit into various, sometimes conflicting concepts and terms. 44 00:05:58,170 --> 00:06:05,790 They can be seen as race, as religion, as nation, as culture, as civilisation, as history, as ethnics and so forth. 45 00:06:06,720 --> 00:06:14,220 And they fit nicely, none of them. They are not exactly a race, not exactly a nation, not exactly a civilisation. 46 00:06:15,270 --> 00:06:19,560 Judaism simply refuses to be read in terms that have developed in Christian modern Europe. 47 00:06:21,210 --> 00:06:28,350 In any event, the most immediate implication of this analogy Jews and their state are just like the French in their state, 48 00:06:28,350 --> 00:06:30,120 a nation like all other nations. 49 00:06:31,200 --> 00:06:38,820 Given the historical context of the establishment of the State of Israel has been the logic produced by the reversal of the analogy. 50 00:06:40,410 --> 00:06:51,030 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. 51 00:06:51,990 --> 00:06:55,620 The Jewish state will cease to exist as such. 52 00:06:57,120 --> 00:07:07,080 Furthermore, it is important to remember that unlike so-called the so-called precedents of other national European movements and other nation states, 53 00:07:07,530 --> 00:07:19,350 Zionism and Israel have not emerged organically, as it were, as the political self-determination of newly defined, realised or invented nation. 54 00:07:19,650 --> 00:07:21,150 Living on a short territory. 55 00:07:21,690 --> 00:07:31,140 Rather Israel's history, such that the nation state itself being the culmination of of an ideological and political project, 56 00:07:31,470 --> 00:07:35,640 preceded the formation of the state's nation. In actuality, 57 00:07:35,640 --> 00:07:41,280 the state itself has played a central role in bringing Jews from all over the world 58 00:07:41,280 --> 00:07:46,890 under its sovereignty and shaping this newly created collective as new national Jews. 59 00:07:48,600 --> 00:07:52,050 And just as crucially, the territory over which the state is sovereign. 60 00:07:52,350 --> 00:08:00,899 Has been historically settled by non-Jews. This foundational parameters have determined the historical course by which the state 61 00:08:00,900 --> 00:08:06,630 is bound by its own guiding logic to manufacture and maintain a Jewish majority, 62 00:08:07,080 --> 00:08:11,760 or, to be precise, a majority of Jews in its population. 63 00:08:12,510 --> 00:08:16,530 This necessitates the ceaseless arithmetic of demography, 64 00:08:16,980 --> 00:08:23,790 where a necessary majority of Jews is continuously counted against a minority of non-Jewish Palestinian Arabs, 65 00:08:24,360 --> 00:08:29,280 rendering the latter an immediate threat to the very notion of the sovereignty of Jews. 66 00:08:31,280 --> 00:08:37,550 Yet, most crucially, and this, I would argue, is a key to understanding Israeli socio politics at large. 67 00:08:38,000 --> 00:08:43,160 Both the Zionist ideological foundation and its political embodiment, the State of Israel, 68 00:08:43,550 --> 00:08:48,750 have failed to offer their own modern, enlightened, secular, natural qualities. 69 00:08:48,830 --> 00:08:58,100 One definition of Jewish identity. Instead, either is a stopgap or the somewhat self-denying, almost Freudian, I would say, 70 00:08:58,370 --> 00:09:02,840 manifestation of adherence to a mythical essentialist notion of Jewishness. 71 00:09:03,410 --> 00:09:08,390 The State under the dominance of a socialist Zionist party, I must remind you, 72 00:09:09,050 --> 00:09:15,210 has chosen to rely on a rabbinical orthodox group of gatekeepers for the 73 00:09:15,230 --> 00:09:20,660 foundational maintenance and upholding of the line separating Jews from non-Jews. 74 00:09:22,580 --> 00:09:26,180 The prevalent discourse that blames this reality on the Orthodox minority's 75 00:09:26,180 --> 00:09:32,480 alleged extortion of the non-Orthodox majority of Israeli Jews is indeed helpful. 76 00:09:34,340 --> 00:09:41,120 So it is helpful for this majority's upholding of an enlightened, liberal, democratic self-image. 77 00:09:41,690 --> 00:09:45,620 But it should not confuse us from seeing how important is the role of the rabbinical 78 00:09:45,620 --> 00:09:52,309 gatekeepers for the state's upholding of its most basic of premises that it is primarily, 79 00:09:52,310 --> 00:09:55,540 if not exclusively, a Jewish state. 80 00:09:56,300 --> 00:10:04,040 This gatekeepers help maintain the most fundamental parameter of all that differentiates Jews from non-Jews in Israel, 81 00:10:04,430 --> 00:10:10,490 thus allowing the state to preserve the proper demographic balance between Jews and non-Jewish Palestinian Arabs. 82 00:10:11,570 --> 00:10:17,570 Now note that this all has to do with the notion of media Netanyahu deeming Hebrew 83 00:10:18,320 --> 00:10:25,040 the Jews state and only derivative Lee with Madinah yehudit a Jewish state. 84 00:10:25,820 --> 00:10:31,370 Political Zionism has indeed focussed from the very beginning on the establishment of the former a Jew. 85 00:10:31,370 --> 00:10:40,430 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? 86 00:10:41,390 --> 00:10:46,850 This, I would argue, has been a question that haunts Israel further, feeding its Jewish identity crisis. 87 00:10:48,260 --> 00:10:55,550 And thus the Israeli Jewish identity crisis is further compounded by another basic failure of the Zionist prognosis. 88 00:10:56,570 --> 00:11:02,780 Contrary to the secular prediction that the nation state of Jews would become not only the centre of Jewish life, 89 00:11:02,780 --> 00:11:13,400 but also the very embodiment of modern Jewishness, rendering non-Israeli Jewish identities pathologically incomplete, if not outright inauthentic. 90 00:11:14,390 --> 00:11:19,100 Jews throughout the world and Israeli Jews in particular, have kept on insisting, 91 00:11:19,100 --> 00:11:24,110 as has been historically the case, that Jewish blood alone does not suffice. 92 00:11:24,680 --> 00:11:26,210 Or, to put it politically, 93 00:11:26,510 --> 00:11:34,580 that there positively meaningful Jewish identification demands more than just being subjected to the sovereignty of the state of Jews. 94 00:11:35,720 --> 00:11:36,379 This, of course, 95 00:11:36,380 --> 00:11:45,740 is further emphasised by the fact that there are also non-Jews who are subject of the sovereignty contrary to the state Zionist prognosis. 96 00:11:46,580 --> 00:11:51,200 Israeli political culture does not accept the designation of these people or their 97 00:11:51,200 --> 00:11:56,930 creations as Jewish simply by virtue of their being citizens of the Jewish state. 98 00:11:57,260 --> 00:12:01,100 Descendants of the land of Israel. And even speakers of Israeli Hebrew. 99 00:12:02,990 --> 00:12:09,620 Moreover, the political culture sponsored and propagated by the state itself through its various institutions and branches, 100 00:12:10,040 --> 00:12:15,830 echoes this normative understanding of Jewishness, even if it does so clumsily, to say the least. 101 00:12:16,760 --> 00:12:21,590 This is manifested primarily in what has been historically labelled under the status quo 102 00:12:22,430 --> 00:12:28,540 and what recent misguided secularist protestations decry is really organisation had. 103 00:12:28,610 --> 00:12:38,390 That doesn't translate to English. Namely, the propagation by the state of an admittedly narrow and problematic sense of Jewish identity, 104 00:12:38,690 --> 00:12:47,090 mostly through the state's educational system and via the legal enforcement of certain decrees as a matter of civil, i.e. secular law. 105 00:12:47,120 --> 00:12:54,919 I must remind you that coloured Israeli public sphere in Jewish use these governmental measures while 106 00:12:54,920 --> 00:12:59,780 far from instilling one's identity with the positively meaningful knowledge of Jewish history, 107 00:12:59,780 --> 00:13:07,670 tradition, ethics and identity, they have one fundamental trait they are reserved for Jews alone. 108 00:13:08,630 --> 00:13:12,320 Hence, they reiterate the basic faultlines of Israeli nationhood. 109 00:13:13,730 --> 00:13:16,969 Recent attempts at bolstering Israeli Jews, 110 00:13:16,970 --> 00:13:23,510 Jewish identity and anchoring Israelis on Jewish identity and the first controversy 111 00:13:24,020 --> 00:13:29,720 they have instigated have only further highlighted the depth of this identity. 112 00:13:29,810 --> 00:13:36,799 Crisis driven by the nation state is concern over demography, demographics or more accurately, 113 00:13:36,800 --> 00:13:42,080 the balance or the imbalance between Israeli Jews and non-Jewish Palestinian Arabs. 114 00:13:42,470 --> 00:13:48,830 These various various legal measures and initiatives by the executive branch tend to use a shallow, 115 00:13:49,370 --> 00:13:55,549 politically manipulated notion of Jewish normativity in order to reassert the sovereignty 116 00:13:55,550 --> 00:14:00,860 of Jews and to deny Palestinian Arabs similar claims for national self-determination. 117 00:14:02,150 --> 00:14:07,430 And the nation state bill is indeed a good case in point. 118 00:14:11,640 --> 00:14:14,880 So let us focus now on the law itself. 119 00:14:16,560 --> 00:14:23,280 The past couple of decades have witnessed an apparent heightening of the political tensions surrounding Israel's Jewish identity. 120 00:14:24,030 --> 00:14:30,300 This has culminated in a legislative initiative to formulate a constitutional anchoring of this identity 121 00:14:30,630 --> 00:14:37,230 through the passing of a basic law that would enshrine Israel's identity as the Jewish nation state. 122 00:14:38,490 --> 00:14:47,400 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, 123 00:14:47,820 --> 00:14:52,890 or more elaborately, the basic law Israel, the nation state of the Jewish people. 124 00:14:54,720 --> 00:15:02,190 This encapsulates a wider history, namely the largely failing attempt to tackle the meaning of Israel's Jewish identity. 125 00:15:02,610 --> 00:15:07,410 Beyond the concern for the demographic balance or imbalance between Jews and non-Jews. 126 00:15:08,490 --> 00:15:13,350 So a careful consideration of the bill will allow us a clear understanding of both the 127 00:15:13,350 --> 00:15:18,569 taken for granted infrastructure of meaning dominating Israeli or more accurately, 128 00:15:18,570 --> 00:15:28,590 contemporary Zionist construction of the notion of Jewish politics and of what may be seen as its somewhat surprising shortcomings. 129 00:15:30,290 --> 00:15:35,960 The bill, which has cleared the final legislative hurdles in late, late July, this past summer, 130 00:15:36,440 --> 00:15:42,680 started off a started off almost a decade earlier as an extra legislative initiative, 131 00:15:43,250 --> 00:15:48,050 and it tended at first to embarrass the political leadership more than to appeal to it. 132 00:15:49,070 --> 00:15:53,510 It has since gradually became a cause celeb of mainstream Israeli politics. 133 00:15:54,170 --> 00:16:03,350 More importantly, it has put Israel's Jewish identity crisis into sharp relief after more than 60 turbulent years of statehood. 134 00:16:03,350 --> 00:16:05,750 When the original bill was first drafted, 135 00:16:06,170 --> 00:16:15,410 Israelis were presented with the most politically fundamental question What does the state Jewish identity amount to? 136 00:16:16,880 --> 00:16:20,660 What does it mean for Israelis, for Israel to be a Jewish state? 137 00:16:22,700 --> 00:16:26,750 The debate over the bill has offered the Israeli political and public sphere a unique, 138 00:16:26,810 --> 00:16:33,260 rather unprecedented, clear view of the essential tensions at the very core of the Israeli polity. 139 00:16:34,610 --> 00:16:37,370 Specifically, as I alluded to earlier, 140 00:16:37,670 --> 00:16:46,969 it highlighted highlighted the tension between Zionism's rebellion against what it has viewed as Jewish religion and its zionism's 141 00:16:46,970 --> 00:16:55,280 foundational claim to a Jewish history and identity that are by the Zionist own account saturated with the same religious elements. 142 00:16:55,970 --> 00:17:02,060 More critically, it has exposed the Zionist inability to construct a full fledged independent from religion, 143 00:17:02,060 --> 00:17:09,890 as it were, i.e. in the in its own terminology, a national and secular sense of Jewish identity. 144 00:17:10,770 --> 00:17:20,150 Such an ideological construction could or even should have been the source that would clearly identify Israel's values as a Jewish state, 145 00:17:20,540 --> 00:17:24,410 hence, ultimately, the Israeli meaning of Jewish politics. 146 00:17:25,370 --> 00:17:29,530 Instead, the bill directs much of its sort of. 147 00:17:31,740 --> 00:17:37,830 Much of its impetus toward a negative construction of Jewish Zionist nationhood by way of refuting 148 00:17:37,830 --> 00:17:44,040 Palestinian claims to nationhood and attempting to buttress the preference of Jews over non-Jews in Israel. 149 00:17:45,030 --> 00:17:49,800 So a quick review of the history of the law and its basic tenants is of necessity here, 150 00:17:50,070 --> 00:17:57,660 for it can at least offer a context for understanding the diverging assessments of the law, which I shall discuss in a minute. 151 00:17:59,070 --> 00:18:04,950 The bill, which was first submitted to the Israeli Parliament for consideration in August 2011, 152 00:18:05,370 --> 00:18:13,200 was originally initiated by an extra parliamentary organisation, the Institute for Zionist Strategies, a couple of years earlier. 153 00:18:13,950 --> 00:18:18,540 I will return to this original initiative later on because it offers some clear 154 00:18:19,530 --> 00:18:24,480 answers to the questions surrounding the legislative saga that later ensued. 155 00:18:25,350 --> 00:18:30,390 The bill was presented before the Israeli Parliament by a member of the Knesset, Avi Dichter, 156 00:18:31,020 --> 00:18:38,700 a former head of the Israeli internal security services, the Shin Bet, who was at the time a member of the centrist. 157 00:18:38,940 --> 00:18:45,090 And. It may be relevant to mention the remind you here secular Zionist party Kadima. 158 00:18:45,930 --> 00:18:51,990 This was a regional initiative was endorsed by Ze'ev Elkin, a member of the Knesset of the Likud Party, 159 00:18:52,470 --> 00:18:57,960 and the two garnered the supporting signature of some 40 other members of the Knesset. 160 00:18:59,130 --> 00:19:06,990 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, 161 00:19:07,800 --> 00:19:17,640 poured scathing criticism on the initiative and demanded that details of the Bill Livni eventually impose the party discipline against the bill, 162 00:19:17,850 --> 00:19:22,860 which resulted in the effective freezing of the original proposal in the 18th Knesset. 163 00:19:23,400 --> 00:19:25,260 Yet the initiative was far from dead. 164 00:19:26,010 --> 00:19:37,620 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. 165 00:19:39,170 --> 00:19:45,080 Livni, who had held the position of justice minister in the short lived government, 166 00:19:45,410 --> 00:19:50,120 appointed a prominent law professor to counsel the government on the matter and Endeavour, 167 00:19:50,120 --> 00:19:56,210 which culminated in a document negating the very need to constitutionally encode the vision of the state. 168 00:19:57,350 --> 00:20:01,999 The original proposal has gone through several further formulations and reformulations, 169 00:20:02,000 --> 00:20:06,530 offering various degrees of softening and hardening, as it was called in the Israeli press. 170 00:20:06,860 --> 00:20:10,340 Of the more controversial elements of the original proposal. 171 00:20:11,210 --> 00:20:17,780 The bill re-emerged once again after the 2015 elections to the current Knesset, the 20th Knesset, 172 00:20:18,260 --> 00:20:25,460 becoming something of a competitive arena between the Likud and the religious Zionist party now labelled subjectivity. 173 00:20:25,880 --> 00:20:32,930 It has been promoted by all central figures of the Israeli government, from the Prime Minister, through his justice and education ministers, 174 00:20:33,170 --> 00:20:37,639 and down to the backbenchers of the parties as a fundamental issue of 175 00:20:37,640 --> 00:20:43,460 unprecedented importance to the very vitality of contemporary Israeli nationhood. 176 00:20:44,210 --> 00:20:46,700 Yet the bill has encountered formidable obstacles. 177 00:20:47,210 --> 00:20:53,870 It was only after much deliberation and heated debates that the bill celebrated by the Israeli prime minister, 178 00:20:53,870 --> 00:20:57,020 I must note, is the affirmation of Hertz's vision. 179 00:20:57,320 --> 00:21:02,750 Some 122 years later, when it finally passed, it was finally approved by the Knesset. 180 00:21:03,770 --> 00:21:07,190 Moreover, the saga is clearly far from over. 181 00:21:07,580 --> 00:21:12,170 The bill is bound to be reviewed by the judiciary probably sooner than later. 182 00:21:17,320 --> 00:21:21,100 To understand the wider history and political meaning of the bill. 183 00:21:21,550 --> 00:21:31,720 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? 184 00:21:33,180 --> 00:21:40,440 Tellingly, the various answers and even explanation offered in the bill itself all point in one at the same time, 185 00:21:40,440 --> 00:21:42,870 its two seemingly contradictory claims. 186 00:21:43,320 --> 00:21:51,390 First, it is claimed that the bill's main motivation is rather obvious, if not outright redundant, according to its critics, 187 00:21:51,720 --> 00:21:59,550 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. 188 00:22:00,270 --> 00:22:03,420 It is, in other words, a bill that simply states the obvious. 189 00:22:05,220 --> 00:22:13,770 Second, it is claimed that it's passing into law after some 70 years of statehood based on the premised Jewishness of Israel, 190 00:22:14,460 --> 00:22:21,720 marks a historical watershed, redeeming ideational liberation of sorts, according to the bill's supporters. 191 00:22:22,170 --> 00:22:28,110 Or an ominous breaking point in Israel's history as a democracy, according to its detractors. 192 00:22:28,860 --> 00:22:32,520 The basic law, in other words, is both obvious and radical. 193 00:22:34,950 --> 00:22:40,559 Judged by its contents alone, isolated, that is from its political and historical context, 194 00:22:40,560 --> 00:22:46,950 and read naively ignoring, in other words, some critical, implicit ramifications of its tenets. 195 00:22:47,580 --> 00:22:53,580 The bill may indeed seem largely redundant, making the controversy surrounding it perplexing. 196 00:22:54,540 --> 00:23:00,029 It states what Israeli political culture has historically taken to be the political Zionist 197 00:23:00,030 --> 00:23:05,040 taken for granted the very foundation of Jewish nationhood in the state of Israel itself. 198 00:23:06,610 --> 00:23:14,320 However, many critics were quick to note such a naive reading of the bill misses much of its meaning and its main political implications. 199 00:23:15,640 --> 00:23:22,450 Two issues emerge almost instantaneously as the flash points attracting most commentators attention. 200 00:23:23,410 --> 00:23:30,520 First the implied preference of Israel's Jewish identity over the state's liberal democratic principles. 201 00:23:30,850 --> 00:23:34,000 When the two are understood to be in conflict. 202 00:23:34,510 --> 00:23:40,300 And second, the assertion of Jewish nationhood through the blunt negation of Palestinian nationhood. 203 00:23:41,770 --> 00:23:44,860 So by way of example, consider Ha'aretz editorial. 204 00:23:45,100 --> 00:23:51,430 This is an unsigned opinion piece that allegedly proclaims the stance of the paper as a whole, 205 00:23:52,030 --> 00:23:56,890 probably the most important intellectual daily publication in Israel, 206 00:23:57,580 --> 00:24:04,960 which had only the harshest of words for denouncing the bill, calling it, and I'm quoting here, an apartheid law. 207 00:24:05,380 --> 00:24:11,020 End of quote. That would label Israel a quote and I'm quoting as a Jewish and racist state. 208 00:24:11,140 --> 00:24:15,790 End of quote. This is a post, of course, to the common phrasing, a Jewish and democratic state. 209 00:24:16,900 --> 00:24:24,969 This stance, which is clearly representative of the liberal Zionist critique of the law, is so harsh that in the current atmosphere, 210 00:24:24,970 --> 00:24:32,410 many of the terms it uses would be simply considered out of bounds if used by critics of Israel outside of the state. 211 00:24:33,310 --> 00:24:44,470 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 212 00:24:45,070 --> 00:24:51,070 to firmly established the collective inferiority of Palestinian Arabs in the nation state of Jews. 213 00:24:51,820 --> 00:24:52,660 In this reading, 214 00:24:52,660 --> 00:25:00,940 the internationally accepted rightful affirmation of the Jewish majority's determination of Israel as Jewish identity masks a more sinister, 215 00:25:01,270 --> 00:25:09,730 less acceptable practice of, quote, apartheid, in which the affirmation is built primarily on the negation of the national other. 216 00:25:11,530 --> 00:25:14,109 It must be noted that such critical readings of the bill, 217 00:25:14,110 --> 00:25:19,600 according to which it contradicts the foundational democratic principle of the Israeli polity, 218 00:25:20,080 --> 00:25:25,750 also came from the ranks of the Israeli right and from the Israeli president himself, to say the least. 219 00:25:26,800 --> 00:25:32,680 Given the centrality of the alleged duality of Israel's self-image as Jewish and democratic, 220 00:25:33,250 --> 00:25:40,540 the law in exposing and its exposing of potential fundamental contradictions between the two 221 00:25:40,540 --> 00:25:46,420 organs of this duality was also presented by critics is undermining the very Zionist vision, 222 00:25:46,690 --> 00:25:54,919 if not the Zionist project itself. Regardless of the critics variations in tone, 223 00:25:54,920 --> 00:26:02,569 it would be hard for anyone who reads the bill to deny that it does indeed affirmatively assert a view 224 00:26:02,570 --> 00:26:08,000 in which the termination of Jewish nationhood is established by the negation of Palestinian nationhood. 225 00:26:08,660 --> 00:26:14,780 It reasserts the various expressions of Jewish Zionist nationhood, or to use the nationalist discourse itself. 226 00:26:15,290 --> 00:26:22,640 The rights of the Jewish nation by explicitly determining the exclusivity of these rights to Jews. 227 00:26:23,180 --> 00:26:28,130 Palestinians in the bill, as the bill clarifies, cannot claim similar rights. 228 00:26:29,150 --> 00:26:34,940 The centrality of the Palestinian challenge to political Zionist nationhood is most clearly 229 00:26:34,940 --> 00:26:41,060 explicated in the aforementioned predecessor to the original 2011 legislative proposal, 230 00:26:41,390 --> 00:26:48,320 a white paper of sorts that was published by the Institute for Zionist Strategies in July 2009. 231 00:26:50,480 --> 00:26:57,440 This draft proposal also presents itself as a somewhat of a paradox a long overdue 232 00:26:57,440 --> 00:27:02,270 attempt at legislating what is otherwise obvious and should be taken for granted. 233 00:27:02,960 --> 00:27:09,860 The authors explain the newly formed need to legislate what used to be so obvious as to be considered natural. 234 00:27:09,860 --> 00:27:18,020 And I'm quoting them In the past, the state the states status as a national home for the Jewish people was never questioned. 235 00:27:18,290 --> 00:27:23,930 It was obvious to the public and to the authorities, including the judiciary, what it meant. 236 00:27:24,080 --> 00:27:33,420 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. 237 00:27:33,440 --> 00:27:42,530 Move an email to him in Hebrew. Yet so the authors narrate something has gone terribly wrong in Israel's recent political history, 238 00:27:42,830 --> 00:27:46,340 and what used to be taken for granted is no longer so. 239 00:27:47,180 --> 00:27:49,459 This new situation demands, they argue, 240 00:27:49,460 --> 00:27:57,650 a rewriting of the Zionist view that would also entail a more robust anchoring of the Zionist vision of Jewish politics. 241 00:27:59,210 --> 00:28:08,030 There is indeed an urgent sense of looming danger, of a looming danger that is explicitly stated as the primary motivation behind the bill. 242 00:28:08,720 --> 00:28:13,760 This is also clearly evident in the actual bill presented to the Knesset by Dichter and Levin, 243 00:28:14,120 --> 00:28:20,090 where the necessity of the law is stated as the ultimate answer to this looming danger. 244 00:28:20,480 --> 00:28:23,270 The need for the law, they explain, I'm quoting, 245 00:28:23,270 --> 00:28:33,020 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, 246 00:28:33,290 --> 00:28:38,300 and the recognition of the state of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people. 247 00:28:38,510 --> 00:28:46,980 And of quote. Now, if this bill does not explicate who those who seek to abolish the political national right of the Jews are. 248 00:28:48,210 --> 00:28:51,600 But it is not too hard to see that this threatening trend, 249 00:28:52,290 --> 00:28:59,430 which I must note the Institute for Zionist Strategies call back to back it because he poorly 250 00:28:59,490 --> 00:29:05,520 thought should be translated as back-pedalling but could be translated as perversion. 251 00:29:06,000 --> 00:29:16,320 This is the book. The thought has primarily to do with the status of Israel's non-Jewish Palestinian Arabs citizens of Israel. 252 00:29:16,920 --> 00:29:18,990 It is, if left, unopposed. 253 00:29:19,110 --> 00:29:28,169 The authors warn this trend would lead to the transformation of Israel into what is sometimes called a state of all of its citizens, 254 00:29:28,170 --> 00:29:34,620 as opposed to a state of Jews, a liberal democratic state where all citizens, regardless of their nationality, 255 00:29:34,680 --> 00:29:40,350 belonging and aspirations, enjoy equal status not only in the face of law, as is the case, 256 00:29:40,590 --> 00:29:49,200 but also in the allocation of material and symbolic resources, which is not the case for the is it for the draft bill authors? 257 00:29:49,560 --> 00:29:53,790 This amounts to an outright negation of the Zionist vision of the state itself. 258 00:29:55,410 --> 00:30:00,690 Is this dream self has triumphantly put it immediately after the Knesset finally approved the bill. 259 00:30:01,140 --> 00:30:05,610 The basic law is aimed, I'm quoting, at preventing even a shadow of a thought, 260 00:30:05,940 --> 00:30:11,220 not to mention an attempt to transform Israel into a state of all of its citizens. 261 00:30:11,430 --> 00:30:15,630 End of quote. In this framework of nationalist political philosophy, 262 00:30:15,870 --> 00:30:23,520 the Jewish character of the nation state must amount to an explicit preference of people who are Jews over those who are not, 263 00:30:23,790 --> 00:30:32,370 at least in collective terms. So how does the nation state bill reassert Israel's Jewish character? 264 00:30:34,710 --> 00:30:38,760 What does it offer by way of reaffirming the Jews right to a national home? 265 00:30:39,750 --> 00:30:45,360 It is interesting to note that the bill's text, the lowest tax, is far from rendering this crucial matter clear. 266 00:30:46,140 --> 00:30:49,830 Some of the more controversial aspects of the bill have to do with what has been 267 00:30:49,830 --> 00:30:55,320 widely interpreted as the redrawing of the balance between Israel's Jewish character, 268 00:30:55,590 --> 00:30:58,170 which should, according to the bill's supporter, 269 00:30:58,560 --> 00:31:05,970 amount to a preference of Jews over non-Jews and its commitment to democracy, which would delegitimize this preference. 270 00:31:06,810 --> 00:31:12,270 It aims to redraw or reassert the original Zionist framework where nationalist 271 00:31:12,270 --> 00:31:17,870 considerations overcome democratic universal principles of individual rights rights. 272 00:31:18,510 --> 00:31:25,379 So that's why the purpose clauses of previously legislated basic laws assert a 273 00:31:25,380 --> 00:31:30,810 commitment to preserve Israel's character and values as a Jewish and democratic state. 274 00:31:31,350 --> 00:31:38,970 The nation state bill tends to establish a clear hierarchy Jewish first, Democratic second, if at all, 275 00:31:39,420 --> 00:31:45,900 is the final version of the bill approved by the Knesset drops all references to Israel's democratic regime. 276 00:31:46,470 --> 00:31:56,070 Put simply, the law aims to give a legal constitutional greenlight for the undemocratic practice of preference of one group over another, 277 00:31:56,670 --> 00:32:02,820 or to reverse the point of discriminating against one group in the name of the national rights of the other. 278 00:32:04,770 --> 00:32:10,500 Probably the most controversial clause of the bill in this regard derive directly from this newly chartered hierarchy 279 00:32:11,490 --> 00:32:17,370 has to do with the segregation of Jews from non-Jews in Israel and the preference of the former over the latter. 280 00:32:17,670 --> 00:32:24,840 One paragraph in the original draft aims directly at legalising a policy of segregation of Jews and Palestinian Arabs, 281 00:32:25,320 --> 00:32:34,110 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. 282 00:32:35,070 --> 00:32:43,140 This is a policy which had been practised for years but was ruled by the Supreme Court in 2000 to be illegal or unconstitutional. 283 00:32:44,100 --> 00:32:51,780 It's an interesting fact to note that the court's reasoning for prohibiting the establishment of settlements for Jews 284 00:32:51,780 --> 00:33:00,360 only has been that this practice contradicts the value of equality to which the state is bound by its Jewish character, 285 00:33:00,570 --> 00:33:03,840 not by its democratic rules. 286 00:33:04,740 --> 00:33:09,990 Under the headline of the right to self due to heritage preservation, 287 00:33:10,680 --> 00:33:15,930 the clause states that the state may allow a community that includes a follower of a single 288 00:33:15,930 --> 00:33:21,600 religion or members of a single nation to establish a separate communal settlement. 289 00:33:23,100 --> 00:33:31,080 Now, as aforementioned, this this clause, which explicitly aims to subvert the Supreme Court's ruling, has attracted much of the critics ire. 290 00:33:31,290 --> 00:33:33,599 It was ultimately, after much heated debate, 291 00:33:33,600 --> 00:33:40,980 rephrased to state in the language of the bill approved by the Knesset as law under the title of Jewish settlement. 292 00:33:41,760 --> 00:33:44,430 What must be read as a Zionist taken for granted fact, 293 00:33:44,430 --> 00:33:53,580 and I'm quoting The state sees the development of Jewish settlement a national value and shall act to encourage, promote and strengthen it. 294 00:33:55,240 --> 00:34:03,190 In addition to territory, the same motivation is applied to language, thus covering two basic tenets of nationalist ideology. 295 00:34:04,360 --> 00:34:08,860 Um that the only precariously tied to Judaism land and language, 296 00:34:09,250 --> 00:34:14,680 a clause titled language positively asserts that Hebrew is the official state 297 00:34:14,680 --> 00:34:19,700 language and that the Arabic language has a special status living the League. 298 00:34:19,710 --> 00:34:26,350 The details of this designation for future regulations put negatively, as was seen by all critics. 299 00:34:26,380 --> 00:34:35,980 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. 300 00:34:37,300 --> 00:34:42,040 The bill redraws the legal hierarchy in which Hebrew alone is the official language. 301 00:34:43,540 --> 00:34:52,629 Now, this undermining in practice of Arabic, the language, I must note, not only of the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel, 302 00:34:52,630 --> 00:34:56,710 but also of a very large constituency of Jews from Arab speaking countries. 303 00:34:57,370 --> 00:35:01,750 The language in which many of the foundational texts of the Jewish world were written in. 304 00:35:03,190 --> 00:35:08,230 This is part of a continual thread in which Arabic has come to be seen as the language of the enemy. 305 00:35:08,260 --> 00:35:12,220 Hence as and is an object of derision in itself. 306 00:35:13,450 --> 00:35:18,040 Other clauses in the law simply restate elements of already established laws in an obvious 307 00:35:18,040 --> 00:35:23,050 attempt to encourage a reading of this as having to do with Israel's Jewish identity. 308 00:35:23,680 --> 00:35:32,950 So, for example, a paragraph titled The State Symbols determines once again, this has already been done by previous legislations, 309 00:35:33,760 --> 00:35:39,160 already established laws that the national anthem what are the national anthem, the flag and the emblem. 310 00:35:39,850 --> 00:35:45,940 Now note that these symbols are indeed widely identified or read as Jewish. 311 00:35:46,510 --> 00:35:53,140 They clearly nourish on traditional Jewish imageries and object and they would surely be difficult for non-Jews to identify with. 312 00:35:53,890 --> 00:36:01,720 But they are a novel Zionist state, its creation or creations as Jewish objections to Zionism show. 313 00:36:02,620 --> 00:36:12,970 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. 314 00:36:13,420 --> 00:36:20,080 In other words, these symbols do not represent something that would traditionally at least be viewed as essentially Jewish, 315 00:36:20,590 --> 00:36:31,770 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, 316 00:36:31,860 --> 00:36:39,480 again repeating an already established law which encouraged the current president of the US to move the embassy back to Jerusalem. 317 00:36:39,780 --> 00:36:43,410 The beat also seeks to assert the Jews national rights and values. 318 00:36:43,860 --> 00:36:51,569 Yet this assertions are either redundant as they simply restate existing laws or they are so vague. 319 00:36:51,570 --> 00:36:53,910 I'm sorry as to practically be meaningless. 320 00:36:54,540 --> 00:37:04,500 One paragraph, for example, originally titled Return and later changed to the ingathering of exile, would fall under the first category. 321 00:37:04,560 --> 00:37:09,630 It states that the state should be open to Jewish immigration and the ingathering of exiles. 322 00:37:09,990 --> 00:37:16,260 This is obviously already determined by the law of return. A foundational element of Zionist Israeli nationalism. 323 00:37:17,250 --> 00:37:27,390 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. 324 00:37:28,760 --> 00:37:35,060 It's hard to see what this would amount to in terms of uh, binding, uh, uh, law. 325 00:37:41,830 --> 00:37:47,260 Other causes of the bill in the bill tended at first to be more explicit in setting a more Jewish tone. 326 00:37:48,070 --> 00:37:53,620 This rely on tradition, heritage, history and even religion. 327 00:37:54,040 --> 00:37:59,799 A clause in the original draft thus determines that the state shall act to preserve the cultural and historical 328 00:37:59,800 --> 00:38:07,000 heritage music of the Jewish people and to cultivate in to cultivate it in Israel and the diaspora. 329 00:38:07,900 --> 00:38:12,580 And that in all educational institutions serving the Jewish public in Israel, 330 00:38:12,580 --> 00:38:15,910 the history, heritage and tradition of the Jewish people shall be taught. 331 00:38:16,630 --> 00:38:24,520 But these statements were apparently read to suggest an opening for religious coercion and had attracted a lot of criticism. 332 00:38:24,730 --> 00:38:28,150 They were cut off in practice from the Israeli context of the bill. 333 00:38:29,190 --> 00:38:33,780 However, the final version of the bill did not forego of these clauses altogether. 334 00:38:34,050 --> 00:38:40,530 Instead, it aims this the states due the ising impetus toward non-Israeli Jews, 335 00:38:41,070 --> 00:38:46,320 and thus the law passed by the Knesset amidst the war in Israel and its religion. 336 00:38:46,830 --> 00:38:51,389 To be read, the state should act to preserve the cultural, 337 00:38:51,390 --> 00:38:58,469 historical and religious heritage of the Jewish people among the diaspora, adjust this phrase and manoeuvre. 338 00:38:58,470 --> 00:39:05,420 Reflect a wider reality in which Jewish religion or tradition is seen in Israel as suspicious 339 00:39:05,430 --> 00:39:11,430 when referring to Israeli Jews and is hardly legitimate when referring to non-Israeli Jews. 340 00:39:15,950 --> 00:39:21,950 So in conclusion, the debate over the nation state law is obviously far from over. 341 00:39:22,340 --> 00:39:29,270 The bill has cleared the last legislative hurdle to become law, but it is bound to remain controversial and debated. 342 00:39:30,140 --> 00:39:34,670 Moreover, as I suggested earlier, the debate or more precisely, 343 00:39:34,670 --> 00:39:41,960 the discourse from which it nourishes and advises capture captures the essence of the Israeli polity. 344 00:39:42,200 --> 00:39:45,290 The debate over the bill is not a political argument, per se. 345 00:39:46,460 --> 00:39:54,980 Rather, it may be described as an epistemological debate on how to approach the very constitutive notion of Israel's Jewish character. 346 00:39:55,880 --> 00:39:58,220 The unresolved nature of the basic law. 347 00:39:59,000 --> 00:40:09,290 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. 348 00:40:09,380 --> 00:40:16,190 Still, this designation, i.e. a Jewish state with explicitly positive meaning or reflect some of the 349 00:40:16,190 --> 00:40:20,750 foundational tensions in the Zionist ideology and the Israeli nation state. 350 00:40:21,560 --> 00:40:26,090 They all touch upon the Zionist taken for granted claim for Jewish nation statehood. 351 00:40:26,660 --> 00:40:33,379 That is the reading of Jewish identity as pertaining to nationality in the ideological meaning of 352 00:40:33,380 --> 00:40:40,970 the term and the just as obvious failure or neglect to construct a positive meaning of a secular, 353 00:40:41,360 --> 00:40:48,110 as in not related to what Zionist ideology would see as religion, Jewish identity. 354 00:40:48,770 --> 00:40:58,670 Instead, Zionism, it is the Israeli polity, have shifted the discourse from a Jewish state to a Jewish state or the Jewish state. 355 00:40:59,810 --> 00:41:06,650 From asking what makes some someone or something Jewish to constructing a polity based on a majority of Jews? 356 00:41:08,200 --> 00:41:14,170 They need to pass the bill. The initiative that propelled the debate from the very beginning has nothing meaningful. 357 00:41:14,440 --> 00:41:24,430 I would argue to do with a challenge to positively define or identify the meaning of the Jewishness of Israel or of Jewish politics. 358 00:41:24,880 --> 00:41:30,640 Indeed, it does a manifestly muddled work in trying to assert Israel's claim to a Jewish identity. 359 00:41:31,750 --> 00:41:39,520 As my discussion of the of the law, I hope shows, the law seems to handle these matters rather offhandedly, 360 00:41:39,820 --> 00:41:42,910 leaving them mostly to obstruct, to be meaningful. 361 00:41:43,390 --> 00:41:48,730 Instead, the bill has been motivated by the sense that design is taken for granted. 362 00:41:48,730 --> 00:41:58,840 Understanding of Jewish nation statehood had been put in question primarily due to its inconsistency with basic democratic principles of equality. 363 00:41:59,560 --> 00:42:07,690 This then, is, among other things, also a story of an attempt to overcome the narrow reading of Israel's Jewishness as pertaining primarily 364 00:42:07,960 --> 00:42:14,440 to demography and to the preference of a majority of Jews over a minority of Palestinian Arab non-Jews. 365 00:42:15,370 --> 00:42:20,380 But this attempt was motivated precisely by the need to preserve this the configuration of power, 366 00:42:20,620 --> 00:42:28,180 and not necessarily by a wish to finally resolve zionism's confused understanding of its own relation to Jewish tradition. 367 00:42:29,020 --> 00:42:34,720 In other words, this is a discussion that some of its primary spokespeople never attempted or wanted to have. 368 00:42:35,200 --> 00:42:43,090 It was forced on them by their wish to preserve the political Zionist configuration of power and understanding of Jewish nationhood. 369 00:42:43,750 --> 00:42:50,380 In this, the crippled debate that has ensued echoed a fundamental trait of the political Zionist ideology, 370 00:42:50,710 --> 00:42:54,130 which, confronted with the dilemma of its own Jewish identity, 371 00:42:54,400 --> 00:43:01,930 prefer to forgo the discussion and focus instead on establishing a quick configuration of power in which Jews hold sovereignty. 372 00:43:02,860 --> 00:43:03,310 Thank you.