Ethics and the state: Israel's nationality law and the revision of a revolution

Abstract

In 2018, 70 years after it was founded, the State of Israel accepted a new nationality law, one which reshaped the identity of the state. Supporters of this constitutional law argue that it is necessary since the Jewish-national character of the state is under threat, and since liberal-democratic principles and policies have acquired undesired dominance in public life. The nationality law, however, does much more than restore a lost or imagined collective identity: it is a significant setback to both the liberal and republican understandings of a democratic state, as well as to Jewish-Arab relations. More broadly still, the law displays the growing distance between the ethical and political spheres in Israel; this distance is expressed in the law's remarkable modifications of the three Zionist revolutions pertaining to the material (land), the linguistic and the political-communal dimensions of Jewish, national life.