Among other reasons, Israel’s bad press in many countries causes no few Jews to distance themselves from Israel and to voice virulent criticism. Some go as far as standing for the thesis that Judaism is in essence a diasporic phenomenon and that the creation of a Jewish homeland signifies but the deterioration of Judaism. Without getting into these polemics, what is undeniable is the saliency of Jewish identity and identification in Israel’s culture. The Law of Return, for instance, which binds Israel institutionally to the Jewish world, is one of the most important codifiers of this society. It accounts for the fact that Israeli Jews are now the largest Jewish community in the world—not far from 40 percent of the global Jewish population—and well on their way to becoming the majority of this population. Hence, whether this responds to wishes or awakes reticence, Israeli Jewry does offer a major picture of contemporary Jewry. Moreover, the Israeli reality, in this sixtieth year of its existence, shows how far Jewishness is a central focus in this society’s culture, social life and political development. As one major indication of this state of affairs, Jewishness is at the heart of many of the most burning issues that divide this country.

It may be first mentioned, in this perspective, that it is the ambition of Israel to constitute a Jewish state that widely accounts for its unsolvable and never-ending conflict with its Arab and Palestinian neighbors. Actually, when the Zionists assessed that they wanted to create a Jewish state and make Jews a “normal” nation-state, they were hardly aware that Jews are able to create a “normal” state only in a way that makes sense according to their own cultural codifiers. Nationalism, says Anthony Smith, emerges on religious foundations and is infused with their motives. It is in this vein that Jewish nationalism endorsed the religion-people link that has always been taken for granted by traditional Judaism. This Judaism dealt with the endemic tension between the universalism of Jews’ monotheism and their particularism by enouncing the principle of election. This caste-like syndrome found itself in a storm of attacks with the outbreak of modernity, but the Zionists who proposed a national solution retained the definition of actual Jewish life as “exile,” placing their hopes for “salvation” on people’s own acting—e.g. building a Jewish nation-state in the “promised” land. Thereby Zionism offered a secular answer to an essentially religious question—the definition of the Diaspora as exile. It thus exited the caste-syndrome but stayed within Judaism.

However, Zionism took the risk of speaking of the “normalization” of the Jewish People, which in traditionalist eyes signified betraying Judaism’s transcendental mission. Seemingly conscious of this weakness, the Zionists amplified the general utopian meanings in their image of the Jewish future. But economic, social, and cultural processes have gradually transformed this society of pioneers into a Western-like consumer society—with both its material benefits and moral costs. While genuine “normalization” seems in reach, however, even now the role and impacts of this setting’s Jewishness do not lose their grip—sometimes in paradoxical ways.

The difficulty between bridging secular and religious forces account for, among other problems, the absence of a fully-fledged constitution. The ultra-Orthodox are the major obstacle—to the wrath of the secular middle-class—convinced as they are that they represent the true destiny of the Jew. By this very token, however, they find themselves compelled to pay heed to society. Nolens volens, they undergo some “Israelization” and contribute to make Israel the world center of ultra-Orthodoxy. From another angle, the national-religious are brought by their own understandings of the Holy Scriptures to aspire to influence the State’s policy regarding the retention of Judea and Samaria—though they showed a great deal of moderation when the settlements of the Gaza strip were evacuated—leading, in final analysis, to the pragmatic attitude of the majority in search for realistic solutions for the Israeli-Arab conflict. The ultra-Orthodox Mizrahi Shas party is another actor on the scene on behalf of the welfare of underprivileged Mizrahi communities, an ultra-Orthodox program and the rehabilitation of Sephardic rituals. This party also turns its aggressiveness toward the secular non-observant but it tends to be more cooperative with either right or left wing incumbents of the political center. 

In the context of these tensions is the adherence of Israeli Jews in general—including the non-observant—to many traditional symbols that have received national content here, and their equating Jewishness and Israeliness. This generalization, however, must be qualified regarding newcomers from the former USSR who had been uprooted from Judaism for three generations and who see in the Russian language and culture the essence of their cultural identity. Many of them, however, want to become familiar with notions of Judaism, and when asked about their collective identity speak first of “Jewishness” and second of “Israeliness.”

The link between Jewish nationalism and religion also impacts on Jewish-Arab relations within Israel. Recognized as a national minority, Israeli Arabs are deeply culturally influenced by their Jewish environment, though, on the other hand, they are not less strongly marked by their allegiance to the cause of their Palestinian brothers as well as to Islam (only 9 percent among them are non-Muslim). Hence, and this is again a footprint of the Israeli Jews’ Jewishness, the cultural convergence of Arabs toward the majority is definitely conjunctive with sharp identity divergence.

Last but not least, the importance of Jewishness for Israeli Jews is also shown by the marginality to which the main revisionist groups are reduced. The so-called “Canaanites” are the first group to turn against Zionism on behalf of an anti-Diaspora conviction requesting that Israeli Jews cut themselves off from the Diaspora. This stance was joined by the “post-Zionists” critical, not of Diaspora Jewry, but of Israeli Jews themselves and their defining Israel a Jewish state. This party blames Israel for the conflict with its environment and joins the Canaanites in their request to delete the reference to Judaism as the basis of the national identity.

Whether one draws comfort from the way it is illustrated in this society or gets disappointed with its difficulties in voicing a coherent message, the conflictual vitality itself of Jewishness in this society is indisputable. Israel is a society where Jewishness matters, indeed.