The Constitutional Issues
Of Religion and State
In Israel
In the U.S., the first amendment provides for a separation of church and state; England has an established church, and the head of the state is the head of the church, yet England is a liberal society because citizenship doesn’t depend on membership in the official church, and other religions are recognized. The French are secular in government and society. Italy is not unlike Israel. There are many models among modern democratic states of an established relationship between church and state; America is atypical in its delineation. Also, the U.S. is not a nation state in the sense that European ones are, where the state mirrors the political expression of a preexisting people. In those cases, the people come before the nation, for example, the French people exist, and France is their nation. But the U.S. is an immigrant society endeavoring to create a nation of citizens; therefore, the nation comes before the people. This results in a hyphenated identity (Italian-American, Polish-American) not found in Europe.
Israel is, officially, a nation state—the state of the Jewish people. The state is an expression of their right of sovereignty. As in other nation states, however, there is a sizeable minority. Difficulties occur in the relationship between the Jewish majority and non-Jewish minority, the most important being the relationship with Arab Muslims (not including Palestinians in occupied territories, which are a separate issue altogether). In Israel there are 110,000 Bedouin, 800,000 Arab Muslims, 86,000 Druze (Muslim “heretics” and gnostics) and a small number of Arab Christians.
On the level of ethnic groups, religion is organized by the “milet system.” Israel inherited this system from the British Mandate. Milet is a Turkish term; every religious community has its own religious autonomy separate from the state; each religion is a milet, autonomous unto itself. Each can have its own schools and marriage system. There are no civil marriages or divorce. Each person belongs to and abides by the rules of his own milet. This in and of itself leads to difficulties, for example, the orthodox have schools which are funded by the state, but the orthodox are exempt from serving in the army.
The way the state understands Jewishness is first and foremost as a people, and not a religion; this leads to several difficulties. Jews are divided into a majority of secular and a minority of observant Jews, most of whom are orthodox. The majority view themselves as a secular people with a national identity. Here, secular doesn’t mean utterly non-religious, but rather more or less non-observant. Applying the milet system to this population results in a system whereby all institutionalized religion in Israel is orthodox, even though most Jews aren’t. There are significant ramifications to this, for example, marriage. If an Israeli Jew wants to get married, he has to do it via a religious tradition with which he doesn’t identify; the same goes for divorce. The reform and conservative movements have made some inroads in Israel, but their impact is minimal, because while the orthodox monopoly has been attacked by these grassroots movements, the Supreme Court is unable to do anything about it. This is because Israel does not have a constitution but rather a collection of laws. The Supreme Court has the right to judicial review, and assures that the basic laws have precedence over other, more local laws. The laws that keep the status quo are basic laws that cannot be overturned by laws of lesser importance.
Israel’s government is based on an electoral system; people don’t vote for a person but for a party, and the party puts together a coalition. Sixty-one Knesset members are needed for a coalition, and a coalition is needed to get anything done. There are usually fifteen or so who are eliminated because no one will form a coalition with them (the Arabs and the far right). No one party ever gets enough votes to get a majority, because there are so many parties. This gives the religious minority power, because their cooperation is needed to form a coalition.
