Still to come later this week,
as promised when we sent our our last column, “What you just witnessed was one of the greatest weeks in Israel's history” … the continuation of that column. Does everyone agree it was a great moment for Israel? Why are people on both sides disappointed? And what was averted? That will follow soon for paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
And now, for today’s subject. ….
The massive immigration that the new-born Jewish state faced in its early years presented Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion with the challenge of forging a state out of such different masses of people.1 He wanted Israel to be more than an ingathering of exiles—he wanted the state to attain almost sanctified status in the minds of recent arrivals as well as those who had been in Palestine for decades.
He grew determined to impress on Jews of all backgrounds not only the state’s political authority, but its moral and cultural centrality as well.
In Ben-Gurion’s mind, it was imperative that everyone and everything be subordinate to the newly formed state. “A state is more than a formal entity, framework, regime, international status, sovereignty, or army,” he said. “The state does not exist unless it has been internalized inside people’s hearts, souls, and consciousness. A state is mental awareness, a sense of responsibility . . . [that connects] all the people, the citizens of the state.”
Ben-Gurion even created a term for what he was trying to create: mamlachtiyut. There is no adequate English translation of the term, but “statism” or “state consciousness” comes closest. It was in the realm of mamlachtiyut—his absolute determination to build a national culture with the state at its core—that Ben-Gurion’s genius as well as his tendencies to the autocratic were most on display. With astonishing determination and wisdom, Ben-Gurion led the charge to build the state’s institutions and culture.
The Histadrut, which he had helped lead decades earlier, became a powerhouse, responsible for workers’ rights, education, health care, some banking, and more. (The Histadrut was central to the strikes that paralyzed Israel earlier this week during the massive protests.) To many workers, the Histadrut was nothing more or less than the way that Ben-Gurion’s government cared for them. As one laborer noted years later, “Just as the religious believe that God protects them, I knew that the Histadrut was taking care of me.”
At the same time, so determined was the new prime minister to build the new state, so convinced was he that only he could do it, that many other considerations became secondary. Israel’s Declaration of Independence, for example, stipulated that the Knesset would ratify a constitution by October 1, 1948. But Ben-Gurion was anxious to avoid the battles between the fledgling state’s religious and secular powers, a political and cultural conflict that might derail his efforts at state-building. Ben-Gurion also understood that a constitution might well create a judiciary that could strike down laws (an issue that has surfaced once again, of course, during these past months), would entrench the electoral system of proportional representation that made it impossible for a party to win a majority, and could, in myriad ways, curtail the powers of the prime minister.
So he delayed the adoption of a constitution—a document that to this day Israel has never ratified.
Worried that the Palmach, the Yishuv’s most elite military unit, was too linked to the political Left and determined to create an apolitical military whose sole loyalty would be to the state, Ben-Gurion dismantled the Palmach in September 1948—to the great dismay of many, who felt he had undone one of the great institutions of the Yishuv. For all intents and purposes, Ben-Gurion also banned television and he refused to allow the establishment of a government TV station. Even when Yigael Yadin, who had been a senior officer in the Haganah and was now the IDF’s chief of staff, claimed that television could help immigrants as an educational and unifying medium, Ben-Gurion refused to back down. He claimed that television’s lowbrow culture would be terrible for society as a whole.
The government also controlled the airwaves. The two bodies that governed radio broadcasting—the Broadcasting Authority and the army radio station—were both under the aegis of the government. There was a vibrant press, but even there, Ben-Gurion exerted pressure. Ben-Gurion made clear to the press that if they cooperated with the government, they would get information that they could not find elsewhere, sometimes from the prime minister himself. The press was often merciless in attacking Ben-Gurion; that tradition of skewering the political echelon persists to the present. Ben-Gurion, in turn, sought to use what power he had to try to shape how certain issues were reported. No issue better illustrates the perception of Ben-Gurion’s heavy-handed commitment to mamlachtiyut than the accusation—not only never proven, but almost certainly untrue based on recent research, but still, passionately believed by many in the Yemenite community—that the government took babies born to Yemenite mothers shortly after their arrival in Israel between 1949 and 1952, when they were living in ma’abarot, and gave them to Ashkenazi families.
The mere accusation is a reflection of how life felt to those who became Israel’s underclass in the country’s trying early years. Ben-Gurion’s focus on mamlachtiyut clearly led to excesses, and Israeli society has been grappling with the implications of many of those policies ever since. Some of those issues are what is fueling the current unrest in Israel.
Yet to be fair, Ben-Gurion also faced enormous challenges. He had founded a state and now had to build a country out of new citizens who had long seen governments as entities that one evaded, deceived, and cheated. That was certainly true of the Middle Eastern Jews who came to Israel, and even those from Europe who had come to Palestine and then to Israel with no love for the governments they were escaping.
What would hold the country together?, he wondered. Mamlachtiyut, he believed.
Given the deep divides that Israel now faces once again, it should come as no surprise that many are advocating a revival of some form of mamlachtiyut. (Hebrew speakers are invited to read another discussion of the subject from Dr. Tehillah Friedman.)
These proposals take many forms, and in today’s conversation, we speak with Dr. Masua Sagiv, Koret Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies at UC Berkeley and a Scholar in Residence of the Shalom Hartman Institute based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Dr. Sagiv’s scholarly work focuses on the development of contemporary Judaism in Israel, as a culture, religion, nationality, and as part of Israel’s identity as a Jewish and democratic state. Her research explores the role of law, state actors and civil society organizations in promoting social change across diverse issues: shared society, religion and gender, religion and state, and Jewish peoplehood.
In our conversation, she reflects on why she believes that mamlachtiyut failed the first time around, but why, especially now, it might be time to try again.
The link above will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below is a transcript (just scroll down a bit) for those who prefer to read, available for subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
Impossible Takes Longer, which addresses some of the above themes, will be published this April. It’s available now for pre-order on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Please note: due to the Passover holiday, when many people will be traveling and otherwise occupied, Israel from the Inside will not be posting columns or podcasts during the weeks of April 3rd or April 10th.
We have been spending a lot of time in the past few weeks because of the nature of what is transpiring in Israel, talking about the current goings on, the proposed judicial reform, all sorts of other issues having to do with the government. But that's not really the goal of Israel from the Inside. The goal of Israel from the Inside is to show Israel as a multicolored panoramic mosaic of all different sorts of things, which is why we look at literature and music and poetry and culture and history and so forth. And today we have an opportunity to both revisit history and to talk about current Israel at the very same time by talking to Dr. Masua Sagiv who is a Scholar in Residence at the Shalom Hartman Institute based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and she is the Koret Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies at U.C. Berkeley. So, in that small regard, she and I actually share something because I am the Koret Fellow at Shalem College, and she is the Koret Visiting Assistant Professor at Berkeley. So, we are both fortunate to have our work supported by a very wonderful foundation based in the Bay Area.
Dr. Sagiv is an expert in a variety of things, including a concept called mamlakhtiyut, which I guess we roughly translate as statism, even though there's really no good English word for it, which is a concept that David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of the country, established and talked about. And she will explain to us what that was. And in addition to that, she is very involved in interrelations between law and social change, especially in the halakhic feminist struggle in Israel. She received the Israeli Hope in Academia Prize from former Israeli President Reuven Rivlin for a leadership program for high school students. She's taught at Bar Ilan University Law School and Tel Aviv University. She has an LLB in Law and Political Science, magna cum laude, I should add, from Bar Ilan University, and an LLM with honors from Columbia University School of Law, a book out called Radical Conservatism in Hebrew on the halakhic feminist struggle in Israel, and lots of articles and lots of publications and lots of things one can watch on YouTube and so forth. So, first of all, Dr. Sagiv, thank you very much for taking the time to chat with us today. And let's start out by talking about what mamlakhtiyut was back in the olden days when David Ben-Gurion was alive and writing, he talked about mamlakhtiyut. So, tell us a little bit about yourself and your own journey, and tell us what Ben-Gurion meant by mamlakhtiyut, why it was so important to the founding of the state. And if you think that it died down over the course of decades, why did discussion of mamlakhtiyut die down? Then we'll come back to your ideas about reviving it. So, tell us about you a little bit first.
Great. So, thanks for having me here. I'm so happy to be here. I'm a big fan of your podcast.
Let me start that way, maybe, which may seem slightly not connected, but I think you'll see how it connects. I grew up in a religious Zionist family, dati leumi, very mainstream. I went to Bnei Akiva, the youth group and still am deep in the dati leumi society. But then throughout, I mean, you've said it, I've studied at Bar Ilan, and then I went abroad, and I studied at Tel Aviv. So, I got to meet people from all spectrums of Israeli society and also from the Jewish society or the Jewish people, if you will. And I realized that the journey that I am going through is a bit lonely. It's something that most of the people in Israeli society and the Jewish people are not going through, are not meeting the different sectors of either Israeli society or the Jewish people. And I think that a lot of my work is focused around bridges between different societies and different populations.
I’m just curious, why does meeting all of these people feel lonely? I mean, one could imagine that meeting all these different groups would feel, “Oh, my God, I'm enveloped by all these new and interesting people”. Why does it feel lonely?
I'll give you an example dafka (specifically) on my journey to Jewish peoplehood. Growing up in the religious Zionist community outside of Jerusalem, I should say, because it's completely different than in Jerusalem and outside of it, you don't really know or hear or see or think about the Jewish people outside of Israel. I mean, you know that they are potential olim (immigrants) or they are potential victims, but they are not an actual thriving Jewish community. And then I went through my journey, first when I studied in New York and then when I joined the Hartman Institute. And I'm going through that journey, and I'm finding out amazing things, as you said. But I'm walking in this journey alone. And one of my missions is to bring people with me on this journey. But it's very challenging because we live in different echo chambers. It's really hard to break these echo chambers. And maybe I'll give one more example, which is I'm sorry, it is contemporary, very relevant to now.
That's totally fine. Contemporary is fine.
Since the past election, I have been experiencing a need to scream in both directions. On one direction to the right, I want to scream “Not in my name!” I am a religious Zionist, but this is not, don't do it in my name, but to the other side, to my left, I want to scream in my name too. When you are talking about liberalism, democracy, don't exclude me just because I'm religious and just because I'm traditional, just because I believe in Judaism. And in a sense, this location of being a bridge is both potential and amazing and a privilege. But it also can be quite lonely.
That's really interesting. I’m just going to make two quick points and then let you get on. One of them is that in my work at Shalem College I cannot tell you how many students have said to me that before I went abroad for this program, that program, I went to summer camp or I went on a Shalem trip to the Bay Area, which we do every year, whatever the case may be, until I did that, they say, these Israelis who are very smart and they're well read, they're very worldly they say, “I never in my life thought about Jewish peoplehood”. And I say, “what do you mean you didn't think about Jewish people? What were you thinking?” I mean, you know, that half the world's Jews and Israel, but the other half has got to be somewhere else. What were you thinking? And they said, sort of like what you were saying. I thought of them either as potential victims or potential immigrants but that there's this kind of thriving, multi-dimensional, alive, pulsing Jewish life which has its strengths, it has its weaknesses, like everything else in the world, never occurred to them. So, I just find it so fascinating that you also have this experience of until you go abroad, you don't even think, as an Israeli about Jewish peoplehood. Which I just point to just because I think it's just fascinating for us, as Israelis, you and me, to think about what we're not doing right in the educational world in Israel that really smart people like you and my students can grow up in this country and say, “Oh, my God, never thought about Jewish peoplehood”. That's kind of crazy. And it's a failure of Israeli education. But for a different conversation. The other thing that I'll say since you're talking about loneliness and this contemporary political scene, so my wife and I have been going to the protests in Jerusalem. And Jerusalem, as you pointed out, is very different from Holon or almost any other place in Israel. It's very Anglo, parts of it, at least southern Jerusalem is very Anglo and there's a lot of religious Anglos here and so forth. And still at the protest there were very few people wearing kippot. And I felt exactly what you were saying, which is, on one hand, not in my name, I'm a religious Zionist. And what the government is doing is, to me, appalling. Leaving aside the judicial reform, which is obviously very complicated, just having a person who calls himself a fascist in the government, just having a person who's an unabashed homophobe in the government, just having a person who's been arrested 46 times being a minister. Just things like, yeah, not in my name, but at the same time. I had the same feeling at the rally this past Saturday night. But what about me? I'm here too. And yes everybody- men and women, religious and secular, Jew and Arab. But it was kind of, as we say, in Hebrew “laasot vee” to check off the boxes and make sure we said all the right things. So, I mean, you and I have very different experiences. I was born in the States, you were born in Israel. I'm probably like five times your age. If not quite that, then a lot older, maybe three. But in any event, our experiences are very different. We experienced some of that loneliness even in similar kinds of ways, even though you're experiencing it now in the States where you are and I'm experiencing it in Israel. Okay, so you're going through this whole process. It's a little bit sort of rediscovering yourself, rediscovering Jewish peoplehood. What else along this journey do you begin to think about anew because of the nature of your past?
So, I think that I was always interested in how Judaism is developed and who are the different agents that cause or affect specifically the development of Judaism both in Israel and in the States. And I'm a legal scholar, so I always look at mechanisms and how to change institutions and how to build different institutions in order to promote change. And I found myself looking at different fields and different areas. So, I am much more in my natural tendency, I am much more drawn into Judaism. But I have seen that in Israel since Judaism is all encompassing, and we'll talk about it, I think, in a few minutes I've realized that I cannot just stay in my own daled amot, I don't know how to translate it.
My own little box. I mean, daled amot is four cubits, but it's a Talmudic phrase meaning a personal space really.
Yeah. I can't stay in my own box because I felt it would be immoral both towards my vision for Judaism, but also towards my vision to Israeliness. And so, I started reading and by the way, when we were talking about the fact that I and a lot of other young Israelis don't know or don't think about Jewish peoplehood, I understand if now we are connecting a bit to the history of Israel, I understand why that is. I mean, I disagree with it. I think we failed. I think we need to change it. And a lot of great people are working on changing it, by the way. But I understand why that is, because when you establish a very fragile new state and when it's really challenging to come to the state and invest your future in it, you want to strengthen those who chose to be in it. And you are saying this is the right place. Not just that this is the right place, this is the only place for you to be in. But then another year, another year and another year passes, and this state stabilizes. And we forgot that it's no longer something that we have to do and there is something that it's time to start looking outward.
Now, what is mamlakhtiyut? Mamlakhtiyut comes from the Hebrew word mamlaka, which is a kingdom or a state. But actually, and it sounds very like biblical Jewish term, but in fact it was invented, it was coined by David Ben-Gurion, as you said in your intro, and he actually took it from the Russian empire. So, the word in Russia and Russian was gotsu darsveni. So, in the Russian Empire, they couldn't call the public institutions. They didn't want to call the public institutions Russian institutions or national institutions because the Russian Empire included a lot of different nations and they wanted everyone to feel that they are included. So, they thought of this word, gotsu darsveni, which is a statism, which is something a bit different, a different word and a more inclusive word. Now, it doesn't matter what national identity you have you could have identified with this word, which was later on translated as mamlakti and Ben-Gurion the reason that he wanted to do that, he was very smart. He knew that Israeliness could not be equal or identical to Jewishness. There's a reason why Israel was not called Judea, for example, or Zion for example.
Which were both names that were bandied about. It wasn't obvious at the beginning that it was going to be called Israel. Or other ideas were also proposed, Judea and Zion being two of them. But there were others as well.
Yeah. Can you imagine us being called as citizens Jews or Zionists? It sounds so odd today. But when they decided on Israel and when Ben- Gurion decided to translate and coin mamlakhtiyut, he said, I know for a fact two things. The first is not all the Jewish people are going to come to Israel, although it is the state of the Jews or the Jewish state. It's not the states of all the Jews. So, I can't say it is the Jewish state. That's one. And the second, I know, and I realize, and I have to acknowledge and recognize that not all of the citizens of this new state would be Jews, that a large chunk of these citizens won't be Jews. And I want them to feel that this is their country too. So, we cannot call our parliament, the Jewish Parliament, and we cannot call our court the Jewish Court. It has to be something else that everyone could feel included in. So mamlakti was meant to be a solution for that or a path towards it. It didn't work. It didn't succeed. At least that would be my argument.
Well, it succeeded in certain ways for a certain while though, right? I mean, Ben-Gurion was able in the 1950s to communicate a sense of absolute devotion to state institutions like the Histadrut, which was a labor union. I mean, it had an aura of sanctity about it. I mean, people who worked at the Histadrut felt that this was the sort of the mother ship that was taking care of them and their children. It's important for people that maybe know that Israel has a whole bunch of different HMOs to know that these HMOs actually were born in the various parties. This party had an HMO. That party had an HMO. Why did a party have an HMO? Because the party took care of you. By the way, I mean, I don't mean this to be facetious at all, in the same way that Hamas and Hezbollah offer medical services to their people, because that's part of the way of earning their loyalty. The same thing happened in the pre state yishuv in the same way. So, I think that it's true. You're right that mamlakhtiyut didn't fully work. But if you read biographies and diaries from back then, people did have a sense of the sanctity of state projects.
The army took on a sanctified role. In the 50s when there was the tzena, the food rationing. There are people that wrote about how being hungry, and the amount of food they got was paltry. I mean, literally paltry. And the newspapers would say that on day X there's going to be eggs and next week there might be some chicken. I mean, it was ridiculous how little food they got. People wrote about how I was willing to be hungry because that's what the state needed. Ben-Gurion said we needed to do this. Tell me if I'm wrong, but I think there was a way in which Ben-Gurions notion of mamlakhtiyut for a while did convince people that there was something greater than me and my needs that was embodied in the state. And mamlakhtiyut kind of was the term for that sense of grandeur of this new thing of which I'm a part. Does that make sense?
So, I agree and disagree with you at the same time because I think you are absolutely right that one or the aspect that survived of mamlakhtiyut that we have with us until today, and maybe we'll talk about how one party decided to take the notion of mamlakhtiyut and politicize it for better or worse. So, this aspect of mamlakhtiyut that survived is indeed the aspect that says we should prioritize the state over the sector and over the individual for sure, but also over our sector. Because on many years when you don't have a sovereign state, you are used to taking care of your own community and of your own. And this instinct, which is completely natural and justified and great when you don't have a country, needs to transform into something else. So that I agree with you, that succeeded. But the problem is, for me at least, is that the notion of the state that we created is partial and not everyone feels that they are included in the story of the state. And that's something that should have been a part of mamlakhtiyut. And I think that it is a crucial part of mamlakhtiyut that we kind of left behind, or even worse, we transformed the meaning of mamlakhtiyut to only mean Jewishness, to mean how the Jewish collective chooses the state…
So, when you say people got left behind in mamlakhtiyut, who were the groups that should have felt part of it, who did not? So, I'm going to guess Arabs and I'm going to guess Mizrahim, Jews from the Levant, North Africa, but other groups too, right?
I think that also when you've talked about Mapai, I know that my parents who had…
Mapai was Ben-Gurion’s Party, just for our listeners.
Yes. So, my parents who were part of the Mizrahi definitely felt they are not part of the mainstream of those who get, or the hegemony, if you will. So, the classical religious Zionists, if you will, the Mizrahis, the Arabs, absolutely. The Haredim didn't want anything to do with it, but still they weren't part of it. Through time it became that there are two competing narratives for the state. The one is the mamlakhtiyut that we've talked about and the second is the Jewish and democratic state. Now, instead of complementing each other, I feel like they have turned into competing notions of the state. And what I mean by that is that we establish a country, and we say, well, obviously it's a Jewish state, but we don't say exactly what it means to be a Jewish state. And there are different options. And as someone who is in law, I always look at reflections of values and principles in the laws, so in Israeli law we have everything, every possible meaning for what it means to be Jewish. What it means to be a Jewish state, what it means to be a Jewish individual, what it means to be a Jewish citizen. So, does it mean to be a religious state? Does it mean to be a national, the state of the Jewish nation? Does it mean just a demographic description of a state of the Jews? Is it culture? And we have all of it manifested in our different laws. On the one hand, you could say it's just a hot mess. Can you please decide the state of Israel what are you? On the other, maybe it's also on purpose. We don't want to decide something that would exclude others who feel differently. But that's not maybe our topic for now. What I wanted to say is that the motivation at the beginning was we're establishing a Jewish state, but it's also a democracy and we are safeguarding the equal political rights of all citizens. And it doesn't matter, you don't have to be a Jew. And the idea of mamlakhtiyut was meant to be hand in hand. The mamlakhtiyut was supposed to be the identity, like the narrative, the story of the state, what we would call, if we had it, an Israeliness.
Right, that would have been the all-inclusive narrative, right? Mamlakhtiyut, statism roughly would have been the all-inclusive narrative in which all Jews, Arabs, everyone who was an Israeli citizen would have been swept up into this grand narrative, you're saying. But at the same time, if I understand correctly, there's a parallel narrative which we all hear all the time, Jewish and democratic. We're hearing it a lot now because of the news. Jewish and democratic, you say, also sounds really wonderfully inclusive. But it's not as inclusive, because depending on what Jew means, you might be a person who converted in a way that the rabbinate doesn't recognize. Maybe you're out, you might be an Arab, so maybe you're out, you might be all different kinds of things. And so Jewish and democratic, which sounds so embracing, you're saying, is actually a lot narrower a narrative than the original mamlakhtiyut narrative. Now, you said before that one party co-opted mamlakhtiyut. Which party was it? Why did they do it? And what was the result of their doing it?
I just want to say that now that you were talking, I'm realizing something for the first time that you said that we've succeeded in mamlakhtiyut. And I agree with you that our institutions have. But the story of ourselves as an identity we failed and that I think is connected… of the versions of it started as Kahol Lavan, right? The Blue and White party. And in the latest elections, representatives of them and of the New Hope party joined forces and established a political party named the Mamlakhti Camp, which is kind of an inner contradiction, right? After understanding what mamlakhtiyut is.
That's fascinating. I hadn’t thought about that. They also had a problem, by the way, they had no idea how to translate their party name into English. They actually sent out an email to a whole bunch of us saying we've established this party we're calling ourselves Hamachne HaMamlakhti or whatever it was. What should we call it in English? And nobody knew what to say. I mean, actually it was almost impossible. But in any event. Okay, so that's fascinating.
One of the problems is, again, if we would have gone and it's difficult and maybe we'll have a chance to talk about how to respond to different crises. But the best and ideal road for a new, delicate, fragile state to go is to go in these two directions together. Go and form what it means to be mamlakhtiyut both institutionally and on the ground, identity wise, what it means to be an Israeli. And the second route would be the Jewish and democratic, what it means to be a Jewish state. What are our commitments to democracy? And by the way, on a different route, the Arab or Palestinian citizens of Israel should have asked themselves the exact same question. What does it mean that I am a Palestinian Israeli or an Arab Israeli? What does it mean? What are my commitments? What are my obligations? None of these paths is living up to its potential unfortunately. As a result, what we see is in 2019, Shmuel Rosner and Camil Fuchs folks from JPPI did a survey among the Israeli society, and they showed that overwhelmingly Israeli Jews conceive their Judaism as part of their Israeliness. They see first themselves as being Jews and then Israelis. Something like, I think 80% or 90% of Israeli Jews say that to be an Israeli, you really have to be a Jew. And we see petitions going to the court. Last week, the philosopher Yosef Agassi died. He was one of the people who petitioned the Supreme Court asking them, I want to be registered as having an Israeli nation, not just the Jewish nation, because we have one of the I'm sorry, I'm going to be for like 60 seconds of being highly lawyer-y, and I apologize. But in 1965, Israel legislates the Registration Act. Now, every state registers a lot of details on its citizens, right? So, I don't know, like parents’ names and citizenship and all kinds of things.
Date of birth, gender, all that kind of stuff.
Yes. And some of the things that Israel registers is citizenship. It's fine, it's easy. Religion not easy, but not the topic of our conversation. And nationality. And the nationality, you would assume that there would be like an Israeli there, right? But no, there are some esoteric options, but basically there's like Circassian and Druze and Tatri and Karai. But it can be Jewish or Arab. No Israeli, no Palestinian. And every two decades or so, you have Israeli citizens who go and petition to the Supreme Court and say, I want to be registered as Israeli, not as Jewish or Arab. And the Israeli Supreme Court says, I don't know what an Israeli nation is, what an Israeli nationality is. I only know what a Jewish nation is.
So, what you're saying is that because the Supreme Court is saying you can't be registered as an Israeli, you're saying that that's kind of an implication or a reflection of the fact that at the end of the day, mamlakhtiyut didn't really work. Like some of the institutions did take on this aura of sanctity. The Histadrut drew the labor union and the army and whatever. But as a notion of creating an Israeli narrative, we’re all Israelis in this together, that you're saying failed. Now, we don't have time now for all of the history, I mean, part of it, obviously, is the fact that the first half of Israel's War of Independence was actually really a civil war between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs, or people that would become Israeli Arabs. And I think that even 75 years later, the echoes of the fact that this country started as a civil war are still felt in many ways. The way history is taught in certain kinds of places that we see. But what I want to do is jump into now, because I think it's really fascinating and exciting about your work, is you're actually trying to almost do CPR on mamlakhtiyut, right? I mean, you're trying to say we can revive this thing, we can give it new meaning, we can invest it with new importance. So, tell us, first of all, why you think we should do that, and second of all, then what would be the substance of the mamlakhtiyut alla Dr. Masua Sagiv.
Yeah. So why should we do it? Two reasons for me and for you. Our story, the Jewish story, is also the story of the state. Our identity is very stable within the identity of our state, the state of Israel. 21% of Israeli citizens don't have access to the story that is the story of the state. Now, I'm not asking us to change our story or the story of the state as a Jewish state. But I am saying and maybe that's something that I can say as a religious feminist who holds a tension both in religion and in feminism. I want to say that our state can also hold the tension of being both Jewish and Israeli. So that's one for the non-Jews citizens of the state. But two and I think that it's not less important, I think that our Judaism actually needs it. Our Judaism needs not to be… I'm going to say something that is maybe harsh, but I feel like in Israel, Judaism is taking Israeliness as hostage. I feel like Judaism is all encompassing. I feel like what we see and what you described at the beginning in the new government is the result of us not being able to distinguish between Jewish nationalism and Israeli mamlakhtiyut.
So, in a way, if we had a mamlakhti narrative, we would kind of liberate Judaism, right? I mean, Judaism could flourish without all of the baggage of politics and ethnic strife and political parties and all of that. Judaism could be a tradition, a culture, a religion, a way of life, a history, a literature and all of that. And we would be able to take all the other stuff and put that onto the statist, whatever you want to call it, mamlakhti side. And we would really liberate Judaism from the weightedness of statism. Is that what you're basically saying?
Absolutely. And the way to achieve that is first change our mindset and then change our practices. So, to change our mindset, I return to a short article I wrote in Sources, the long form journal of Hartman. I return to a dialogue from last summer between then members of the government, the former government, Matan Kahana, who was the Minister of Religious Affairs and Mansour Abbas, the head of the Ram Party. And it's not a direct dialogue, but it was a dialogue where Matan Kahana, who's a self-defined, right wing religious conservative is saying if I had a button that I could press and would send all the Arabs away from here, they live happily ever after in Switzerland or wherever, I would press that button. But there is no button. And we have to realize that.
A lot of Israelis feel that way.
A lot of Israelis feel that way. And I would say maybe Americans as well. Not just about the Arabs, but about people who we disagree with.
Or who are different than us. I mean, a lot of Americans probably feel, if I could press a button that all African Americans can go back to Africa, and we could set the clock back 500 years or whatever it was that would be simpler. It's not going to happen. But I think that's a natural instinct of people to think well, if I could just get rid of this other group without hurting them in any way, life would be much simpler.
What I think is amazing here, though, is his other part of the sentence of saying but we don't have this button. So, wake up after 75 years, almost 75 years, and understand that it's not going to happen. And we have to figure out what to do when we're living together. That's I would call a consciousness of a shared fate. This is our fate. We are stuck together. Mansour Abbas when he answered him, he did something, he took it one step further. Even when he acknowledged, I think, how difficult it was to finally understand that we're stuck together, he said, I don't want to be stuck together. I want that even if we had this button, we wouldn't have pressed it because actually we have an opportunity here. And actually, I'm glad that both of our communities are here. And this is a consciousness of a shared destiny. It's our destiny to be together that's first.
People should just, by the way, pay attention to the fact that that's the statement of the head of the Arab Party, the first Arab Party ever to be part of a coalition, by the way, under the Bennett- Lapid government. But just people should sort of take a pause and say the person who's saying I don't want to live separately, I want us to be part of the shared narrative and not wish the other side wasn't around is the Arab Party here. It's a kind of an extraordinary thing. I mean, Mansour Abbas is a very complicated fellow but some of the things that he has said are really very noteworthy and I think this is one of them.
Yes, absolutely. And I think it's the first time that the Israeli public is hearing the Jewish Israeli public and also the Arab Israeli public is hearing such words that I think they are incredibly important even if they are not in government right now. I think it's very important to still pay attention, as you said. Now, what should happen on the ground? I think that I'll try to really summarize it quickly, but I think that we should look at three fields, if you will. One is calendar and symbols. The second is education and the third is the legal realm. The Israeli calendar is actually one of the most diverse calendars that I know. Meaning that we celebrate the holidays of every one of the different sectors within Judaism and the different religions that live in Israel. That's one. But the national events, whether to commemorate or to celebrate, are mostly Jewish. We can change it pretty easily. Not with changing what we have, but with adding something that can be common to Israelis, that can be common to the fact that we live in this land in the Middle East, and it has some characters. That’s one.
What would you add? What dates would you add to the calendar, for example?
So, I don't know if I have specific dates to add to the calendar, but I have thought of what would be the possible basis, the connection to the land is very important both to Jews and Arab Palestinians. I think this is something that can be in common. The different art. We can definitely share a day to celebrate Israeli art. I don't think it's that complicated for a land that has literally like birds and flowers as their national symbols, it's not hard. We celebrate everything. I don't know. I submitted an article. We go to celebrate. We literally celebrate everything in Israel, which is great and awesome. I love it. I think we can definitely do one more. Education. We have an educational system that is based on separation. We have the different streams that study separately. So, by the way, the mamlakhti educational system, which has the mamlakhti secular and the mamlakhti religious and the mamlakhti Haredi and the mamlakhti Arab, but they all study separately and the private or the non- mamlakhti. It's so funny because when we translate to English “hahinoch ha’mamlakhti”, we say public schools versus private schools but it's actually mamlakhti which is interesting.
I don't suggest to abolish the streams of education but I do think that we need one, to study Israeli culture in all streams of education and two, have more meetings and meetups among the different streams. That's actually something that I led with great partners at the Menomadin Center for Jewish and Democratic Law at Bar-Ilan University where I worked and it's such a successful program for high school kids from different streams that it just grows and grows and grows and we don't have the facility to actually make it work. And I think we also need to work on some of our legal documents that exclude the national self-determination of anyone who are not Jewish in Israel. I think it's relatively harmless. Specifically, Palestinians, yes. And I'll say that I think that some of the things that I am saying may sound naive to the point of what is she talking about? Is she looking what's going on in the government right now and who we are talking about? And I ask myself this all the time, what's the right amount of balance between like reacting to immediate events and planning future plans and building initiatives? You were talking about the protests and I'm also very updated with everything that is going on and I understand why but I feel like we are drawn to react. I feel like we should also at least part of our attention, focus on and direct towards building something more sustainable and long term.
Well, I have to say to me it doesn't sound naive at all and in fact I think that that's why we're having this conversation. I specifically in the midst of all of these columns that I'm writing and all these conversations that I'm having with really learned people about the judicial reform and all the other challenges that the government is presenting right now. I wanted to talk to you precisely because your work is about a sustainable, long term Israeli narrative. And I thought it was important for readers and listeners to remember whatever this government situation is going to be, we'll get through it somehow. And then we're going to be left with the work of continuing to build the state, which is about to celebrate its 75th anniversary. But as you pointed out earlier, we want to think about the next 75 years. So, I don't think it's naive. I think it's actually critically important that even in the midst of the day to day we still stay in some ways at 30,000 feet and ask ourselves what's the big project that we're building and that's what your work is really all about. So, I want to say one thing about a document and then ask you a question about another document and then we can wrap up.
So, the first thing that I'll just say is that some of this is actually rooted in our Declaration of Independence. Because the Declaration of Independence says we and you, we, the Jews who are establishing this state, turn to you, the Arabs who will be citizens of the state and ask you to join with us in peace and building and all that kind of thing. Nothing we can do about that. Nobody is going to amend the Declaration of Independence. But we should just understand that every time a Jewish kid studies the Declaration of Independence, they are going to keep hearing that voice of the we and the you, the Jews and the Arabs. That's just going to be a hurdle we're going to have to overcome. But there is another text and I just wonder if you've thought about this. There's another text that also poses a hurdle and I'm curious if you have any interest not in amending the text but creating a parallel text. That text, of course, is the national anthem Hatikvah, right? “Kol od balevav p'nimah Nefesh Yehudi homiyah”, deep in the heart, a Jewish soul yearns… And then towards the end “Od lo avdah tikvatenu, Hatikvah bat shnot alpayim”, we've not lost this hope, this 2000-year-old hope. That's just not an anthem that an Israeli Arab can sing. So, for example, even Israeli justices who are on the Supreme Court, who are deeply committed to the Jewish state or deeply committed to the State of Israel, I would say that's a faux pas that I just said accidentally. They're committed to the State of Israel, and they've obviously been very successful. They've made it to the Supreme Court. They don't sing the anthem. And who can blame them? Why should they sing an anthem about 2000 years of Jewish yearning? Canada, as you probably know, has two anthems, has an English anthem and a French anthem and they are not exactly translations one of the other, the French anthem, has the line “il sait porter la croix”. He knows how to carry the cross, which does not appear in the Canadian English anthem. But they have the same meter so that French speakers and English speakers can all sing the Canadian anthem together. In thinking about sort of the things that we can do to make our narrative more robust, have you or your colleagues ever thought about the possibility of having not a changed Hatikvah, but an additional national anthem that would speak not about Jewishness but about Israeliness with the same meter? So, when Israel wins an Olympic medal that Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs could all sing an anthem with the same meter and the same melody, but they would each be singing words that would actually be meaningful to their communities. Is that something that you've thought about at all?
So yes, I've been thinking a lot about this, and are a lot of points in this conversation and in this journey that are personally difficult and challenging. And I think we need to acknowledge it because we were raised in a certain way, and there was a reason for that. My mom always tells me, my mom comes from Romania, and she experienced Romania under Ceaușescu, and she experienced antisemitism growing up, definitely. And she always tells me, “You don't understand, you're taking for granted the miracle that is the state of Israel”. Even though I feel like I'm not taking it for granted, but I understand why she's saying it. Even me when I'm talking and you've heard me for too long maybe, but I'm talking about all of these things, and still when you were talking about the national anthem, about Hatikvah, I'm like feeling how do you say “tzvita b’lev”?
Like a little grumble in your stomach or something. You're feeling internally conflicted. I mean, I don't know what quite the translation is, but an internal conflict.
Exactly. But for sure, I think that the national anthem is a problem. I think the symbols are so important and symbols are signaling for us. They are signaling this is your story. For Arab Israelis they are signaling, you are not part of us. You are not a part of this state. So, along the years, there were several suggestions. One of them is “Sachki Sachki Ani Ma'amin” by Shaul Tchernichovsky. That's a beautiful, beautiful poem. And there is a reason why I didn't suggest a different anthem. The first is, I think we are really not there yet. I think that this is so far off. Even though I have to say, I think that what we're seeing right now, this specific government, is a backlash. Exactly because there is movement and inclusion inside Israeli society. That's one. And the second, I think that if we would have an additional and I agree with you, let's not abolish Hatikvah, let's add, if we would have an additional anthem, it probably shouldn't be like a Zionist thinker, the words of him. It should probably be something that is the result of sitting a Jew and an Arab together, sitting and thinking what should be the words of the Israeli anthem?
Okay, that's fascinating. Either a Jew and an Arab or Jews and Arabs or a national conversation. I mean, this is a country desperately in need of national conversations. I think that one of the things that the current news is reminding us is we have a lot of things that we do great here. One of the things that we do not do well are national deliberations, why we never were able to pass the constitution. It's why we've never been able to bridge some of the gaps because we're much better at going to elections and fighting things out than we are at having these conversations. That's a human tendency in general. But I think Israelis have honed that tendency to an unfortunate art form. So maybe it's part of a national conversation when the country is ripe for it. But I want to thank you because I think a lot of our listeners may not have even known at all about this notion of mamlakhtiyut this very central idea to Ben- Gurion’s life and thought. And until I read your work, I had never really thought about the conflict between mamlakhtiyut, on the one hand, as a central narrative of the state being the overarching defining canopy under which we all live, on the one hand, and Jewish and democratic, which is the narrative that we always hear about also, and how they're in conflict.
Until I read your work, I really hadn't thought about that, and I thought it was really fascinating. And the idea that somebody in 2023 would be saying, let's go back to this Ben-Gurion notion of the 1940s and the 1950s more than half a century later and say, let's not toss it, but let's reinvigorate it is I think really a classic Israeli trope, which is to take something from the ancient past or the relative past and not to cast it aside, but to give it new meaning. That's what the Zionists did with Hanukkah. That's what the Zionists did with archaeology. That's what the Zionists did with a lot of things. So, in a lot of ways, you're kind of a radical thinker in certain ways and a deeply Zionist classic thinker at the same time. And for just giving us a lot to think about in terms of what does it really mean to be Israeli and the way in which Israelis have thought about that, but the ways in which Israelis have also not thought about that nearly enough. This is hugely important reminder for all of us. I'm really grateful to you for your time, for your research, for your work, and because you're in San Francisco and I'm in Jerusalem, I look forward to an opportunity to thank you in person when that works out. So, thanks very much once again.
Thank you. It was a pleasure to be here.
Music credits: Medieval poem by Rabbi Shlomo Ibn Gvirol. Melody and performance by Shaked Jehuda and Eyal Gesundheit. Production by Eyal Gesundheit. To view a video of their performance, see this YouTube:
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Some of the following material is adapted from my history of Israel, Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn, pp. 207-209.
