Remember to be Jewish: Religious Populism in Israel

Guy Ben Porat,Dani Filc

doi:10.1017/s1755048320000681

Abstract

AbstractThe paper explores the relation between religion and populism in Israel. Jewish identity has been an important marker of citizenship and belonging in Israel since its inception. The founders of the Zionist movement and the dominant elites of early statehood remained dependent upon Jewish religion to demarcate national boundaries and legitimate territorial claims. With the establishment of the state, Jewish identity helped create and legitimate a segmented citizenship regime that secured privilege for Jews. Gradually, and especially in the past two decades, Jewishness became more contested, demarcating not only Jews from non-Jews but also “authentic” Jews from allegedly “cosmopolitan elites,” thus becoming part of populist politics, central to Israeli politics. The complex relation between religion and populism in Israel is demonstrated by the development of two populist parties; an “inclusive” one (Shas) and an “exclusionary” one (Likud). The study of the two parties shows the role of religious identities, tropes, and symbols in boundary-making and political strategies. In Israel, religion functions both as the positive content of the political community (the ethnos––the Jewish people—is conflated with the demos) and the demands for inclusion; and as the marker of a threat (non-Jewish citizens, asylum seekers, and allegedly disloyal secular elites).

Highlights

In 1997, during an election campaign, Benjamin Netanyahu paid a visit to Rabbi Yitzhak Kadury, an important Sepharadic religious and spiritual leader
Jewish identity has been an important marker of citizenship and nationhood in Israel since its inception, an integral part of Zionism, and, more recently, part of populist politics
In a society like Israel which is characterized by a multi-layered structure of different degrees of inclusion and exclusion, Shas plays an inclusive role for Mizrahim, while adopting extreme exclusionary and xenophobic rhetoric and policies towards the non-Jew “other,” mainly embodied by African asylum seekers. Both inclusive and exclusionary populist movements, share a friend/ enemy distinction posed as a confrontation between the “people” and “others,” elites, immigrants and/or minorities

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Exclusionary populism was expressed both symbolically and politically, Netanyahu’s nativist definition of the people advocated a closed ethno-national unity, threatened by foreign enemies, non-Jewish citizens, and by Jewish-Israeli opposition advocating equal citizenship The latter were depicted as detached elites not committed to Jewish nationality and to the Jewish State. The definition of the Jews as the chosen people and a narrow, biological understanding of Jewish belonging (based on matrilineal descent) combine to produce an ethnocentric approach to social life This underscores a Manichean approach that divides the world into “the good [Jewish] people” and the dangerous or evil “others,” namely the secular liberal elites that threaten the (religious) Jewish character of the state, and the non-Jews who embody the danger of assimilation and loss of religious/national purity (Leon 2014).

CONCLUSIONS

Findings

Rovira Kaltwasser et al Oxford and New York