Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel: 2

Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel: 2 

Although Israel is the world's only Jewish State, Judaism is not the official religion of Israel

Judaism is not the official state religion of Israel. Yes, you read that correctly. Israel, the world’s only Jewish state, has not designated Judaism as the official religion of the country.

Judaism is one of five religions recognised by the state – Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Druzism and Bahai and all have equal status in law. Both the concept of the Jewish State and the nature of Judaism itself are hotly debated in Israel and no official constitutional definition of either has ever been made. 

For many (perhaps most) Israelis, being Jewish is not primarily, or even partly, a religious identity and they view their country as Jewish in terms of its history, geography, culture and language rather than faith. 

In a 2018 lecture, former Member of Knesset Einat Wilf said “Zionism is a modern secular rebellion” [against religion]. The depiction of Jews as adhering to a religious faith (Judaism) is a modern European construct that arose out of the Enlightenment. It was embraced enthusiastically by some Jews but ultimately failed to improve the general position and status of Jews in Europe that had been promised by Napoleon and others. That was because Jews were granted rights as individuals adhering to a faith while denying their rights as a people.

Even religious Jews in Israel tend to view their identity in terms of Am Yisrael (the people of Israel) rather than a theologically-defined credo. Restrictions on public transport and commercial activity on the Sabbath, and on the Orthodox rabbinical monopoly on the life-cycle rituals of birth, marriage and death, are widely reviled in Israel; they reflect the longstanding taboo against disturbing the so-called Status Quo of religious life in the country, first established by the Turks and continued by successive British and Israeli administrations. This peculiar historical legacy has been perpetuated by the vagaries of Israeli coalition politics, whereby small religious parties exert disproportionate power, rather than as a result of a national consensus on the perceived need for public life to reflect any particular brand of spiritual observance.

In comparison to other modern democracies, Israel sits closer to the secular than to the religious end of the spectrum. Take the United States and the United Kingdom: almost all US presidents and British prime ministers have been practising Christians. By contrast, almost all Israeli prime ministers have been non-religious, non-observant Jews. Allegiance to Christianity permeates every level of society in the US and UK, including their parliaments, judiciary and national holidays. Anglicanism is the official religion of England, the largest constituent of the United Kingdom, whose monarch is the head of the Church of England and "Defender of the Faith.” While the US is formally a secular state, the words “In God We Trust” have been mandated to appear on American currency since 1957, and are familiar to all who have contact with the institutions of state. No contender for high political office would dream of ending a speech without uttering “God Bless America." 

Such a culture of publicly-proclaimed fervent religiosity is (with rare exceptions) alien to the Israeli political system. It’s a supreme irony that the leaders and institutions of the world’s only self-defined Jewish state are far less religious than their counterparts in so-called “secular” states elsewhere. And yet it is Israel, rather than the US nor the UK, that is repeatedly (and falsely) criticised for its allegedly confessional, theocentric nature. 

The religious nature of many other countries is equally unambiguous. Modern states with a single official state-endorsed religion include Italy, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Finland, at least 24 Muslim-majority countries plus the Palestinian Authority, and six Buddhist-majority countries. Somehow, these countries manage to escape the solemn strictures against fusing church and state that are hurled with stridency against Israel. In the UK and other “secular” European countries, look what happens in the period before Christmas: we get wall-to-wall carols, masses, oratorios, gospel singing and endless speeches, homilies and other references to God and Jesus – as if there were no non-Christians or non-believers in the country. That just doesn’t happen before and during the national holidays in Israel.

Critics will retort that, notwithstanding the formal position of religion in Israel, Jews are nevertheless a privileged group within the country. The Israeli flag and anthems are Jewish, government is dominated by Jews, the Nation State Law declares that Israel is a Jewish state, and the Law of Return favours Jewish immigrants. Superficially, all of this looks a plausible case for the prosecution. But a closer analysis of the evidence reveals a different picture. First, all of these symbols and laws relate explicitly to nationality rather than religion. Second, all citizens of Israel are treated equally under the law, and have equal political, legal, civil and religious rights. This is the epitome of a true liberal democracy, and the only example of one in the entire Middle East. 

Nevertheless, there is a degree of systematic religious discrimination in Israel – against Jews and Jews alone. Jews are the only religious group forbidden to pray at their most sacred site – the Temple Mount. Access to their second most sacred city, Hebron, is strictly limited to a small enclave. Jews are not permitted to live or even enter Area A of the West Bank (the contemporary name for the biblical Jewish homeland of Judea). Moreover, Jews are not permitted to establish “Jewish only” communities in Israel (a deleted clause from the Nation State law draft) while Arabs are. And only Jews are required to undertake military service, disrupting family life, education and employment. 

It is true that the Law of Return favours Jewish immigrants over others in an attempt to reverse two millennia of expulsions, discrimination and massacres. Jews were not only ethnically cleansed by the Roman colonial administration in the first century, they were prevented from returning to their homeland throughout most of the next two thousand years by successive rulers of the land, renamed Syria Palaestina (a gesture of Roman contempt towards the Jews by deliberating renaming Judea after their bitterest enemies, the Philistines). Despite these restrictions, some Jews managed to remain in the country against all the odds though they were, of course, a minority. If ever there was a case for positive discrimination, this is it. Similar laws exist in many other countries with a far weaker case. 

It’s time to lay this canard of Israel’s Jewish nature to rest. The evidence is clear: Israel is not the national embodiment of religious Judaism. Its culture, calendar, symbols and national life are certainly inspired by the Jewish world and yes, even by some aspects of Judaism, but it is far from the ethnocentric, clerical state of popular Western and Arab imagination. Israel is one of the most diverse countries – ethically, culturally and religiously – in the world. No amount of massaging of the facts to suit a preconceived and prejudiced notion can change that reality.