What makes Israel a Jewish state?
Two Israelis, a lawyer and a rabbi, on the complicated relationship between religion and national identity
When the state of Israel was founded in 1948, a new question arose for the Jewish people as a whole and for the inhabitants of this unique territory in particular: What exactly had they inherited? They had gained a country, that much was clear. But what sort of nation was going to be built within its borders?
Some Israelis looked back at historical precedents—the first and second commonwealths of the First Temple and Second Temple periods. Others, like the writer S. Y. Agnon (Israel’s first Nobel Prize winner), desired a theocracy rooted in Jewish law. But most Zionist pioneers and politicians—chief among them the state’s founder and first prime minster, David Ben-Gurion—wanted a secular state run on democratic lines and freed from religion of any kind.
Although the state of Israel has been flourishing for almost 70 years, many questions about the nature of the state remain unresolved and in some ways are more complicated than ever given the increasing number of religiously observant Jews. So when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared in 2014 that he wanted Israel to be known officially as a Jewish state, or as the Jewish state, he raised hackles of all sorts both inside and outside of Israel.
