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

Abstract

AbstractIn 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.