The Contradictions of Israeli Citizenship

Guy Ben-Porat, Bryan S. Turner, Guy Ben-Porat, Bryan S. Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136727375
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides an integrated analysis of the complex nature of citizenship in Israel. Contributions from leading social and political theorists explore different aspects of citizenship through the demands and struggles of minority groups to provide a comprehensive picture of the dynamics of Israeli citizenship and the dilemmas that emerge at the collective and individual levels.

Considering the many complex layers of membership in the state of Israel including gender, ethnicity and religion, the book identifies and explores processes of inclusion and exclusion that are general issues in any modern polity with a highly diverse civil society. While the focus is unambiguously on modern Israel, the interpretations of citizenship are relevant to many other modern societies that face similar contradictory tendencies in membership. As such, the book will be of great interest to students and scholars of political science, political sociology and law.

1 Introduction

Contemporary dilemmas of Israeli citizenship

Guy Ben-Porat and Bryan S. Turner

Citizenship is a legal status conferring privileges of membership in a particular political community and thereby creating processes of social inclusion and exclusion. Inclusion provides members with social status, social rights and the right to take part in collective decision making. As such, citizenship is often a contested ground for individual and group rights, and over the very definition of the political community. Social and political struggles over the boundaries of citizenship and the meaning of citizenship are central to contemporary Israeli politics. These diverse struggles – religious, national, gender, economic and ethnic – are, on the one hand, about equality, recognition and re-defining the collective and, on the other hand, about the practical needs of everyday life. This collected volume engages with contemporary questions about citizenship in Israel as they pertain to particular group demands and to the dynamics of political life in the public arena. Contributors to this volume examine different aspects of citizenship primarily through the needs, demands and struggles of minority groups. In general terms, they provide a comprehensive picture of the dynamics of Israeli citizenship and the dilemmas that emerge at the collective, group and individual levels.

Political struggles in Israel are defined fundamentally by an attempt to reconcile the two conflicting principles of a “Jewish and democratic state.” This dual commitment requires a definition of the meaning of democracy and the meaning of a Jewish state – and the quest for some compromise between them. In the past two decades, demographic, social and economic changes have widened the disagreements and intensified the struggles over group rights, collective identity and state institutions. Citizenship has thus become the medium through which many struggles are conducted over the rights, duties and hierarchies of different social groups. In particular, the presence of an Arab minority challenges the overall definition of the Jewish state and questions its ability to be democratic, and furthermore it is evident that the new generation of Arabs is no longer willing to accept its marginal social and political position. At the same time, but for very different reasons, religious and secular Jews are also involved in a contest over the meaning of the Jewish state and the actual role of religion in the public sphere. Old arrangements and conventions no longer retain their authority over the political compromise between these competing groups. To these major fissures in the political fabric, other struggles defined by ethnicity, gender and class have been added; these divisions often intersect with a number of unanswered major political questions. These relatively old debates about membership and identity have been further complicated by mass immigration from the former Soviet Union and by the rapid globalization of Israeli economy and society. These additional ingredients add to the complexity of the debate about ethnicity and the Jewish character of the state and the essential meaning of citizenship and the rights and duties it entails. Citizenship in Israel in sum is a site of contention that illuminates a variety of contemporary struggles between social groups – struggles that in turn raise problems about the legitimacy of the state and its institutions. This volume engages with these questions about citizenship in Israel as they pertain to particular group demands and the dynamic of the political arena. The diverse perspectives which the authors bring to this volume provide a comprehensive account of the dilemmas of Israeli citizenship and explore the complex fabric of political life in terms of various ethnic, cultural and religious differences.

Comparative citizenship studies

Citizenship is essentially a modern concept – the product of revolutionary transformations of society such as the American War of Independence and the French Revolution (Isin and Turner, 2002). Israeli citizenship is a peculiar combination of late nineteenth-century developments in nationalism and Zionism and twentieth-century wars and settlement. Of course, the idea of citizenship was prominent in classical philosophy, for example in Aristotle’s account of politics and the city, but the ancient world was a slave economy and participation in the polis was severely limited. We should therefore hesitate to regard Athens as the ancient foundation of participatory citizenship. Women, who constituted the majority of slaves, were excluded from participation in public life in the classical world, because they were thought to be incapable of rational thought and it is more accurate therefore to recognize the severe restrictions on citizenship in classical society than to celebrate the Greek city as the pure foundation of modern democratic politics. We might at the very best call this classical form political citizenship, arguing that the revolutionary struggles that produced modernity also produced modern or social citizenship. In its contemporary form, citizenship has three important characteristics: it is universalistic, it does not recognize or accept familial and kinship ties as valid conditions of authority and participation in the public arena, and it is closely connected with the rise of the modern state, and hence with effective taxation and military conscription. In addition, this social model is very different, we shall argue, from the individualistic tradition of American liberalism with its emphasis on the private sphere and its reluctance to support any centralized administration or state apparatus to provide collective welfare arrangements for its citizens. The analytical consequence of this model is to suggest that, without a dynamic and flourishing civil society and an affluent middle class, citizenship could not function as the framework of a modern democracy.

Citizenship has been defined as the “right to have rights” and these rights in turn depend on the existence of a political community (Arendt, 1976: 296–7). Thus, membership, rights and participation are three components that make up citizenship, as well as its duties and obligations. T. H. Marshall’s classic theory of citizenship (Marshall, 1950) divided citizenship rights into three categories that evolved from the seventeenth century: a civil component for the achievement of individual freedoms, a political component of participation in the exercise of political power and a social component of welfare and security. Citizenship according to this trajectory is about equality based upon collective rights that are institutionalized around habeas corpus, jury system, parliamentary democracy, rule of law and so forth. According to Marshall, citizenship can be regarded as a status that is granted to those who are fully members of a community. Those who possess this status are formally equal with regard to the rights and duties of the community. Similarly, Turner (1986: 135) describes the “movement of citizenship … from the particular to the universal, since particular definitions of persons for the purpose of exclusion appear increasingly irrational and incongruent with the basis of the modern polity.”

Although the modern debate around citizenship in the social sciences starts with the work of the English sociologist Marshall, the limitations of his model are by now only too well understood (Turner, 2009). Marshall focused on class divisions in relation to the growth of social rights and hence ignored both religion and ethnicity as markers of identity. By contrast, much of the debate about modern citizenship has been around the problems of identity in societies that have been transformed by globalization. Obviously the Marshall framework will not work automatically or effectively as the most promising way of conceptualizing citizenship and social rights comparatively (Isin, Nyers, and Turner, 2009). Even as a model of western citizenship, it is confronted by serious conceptual problems. There are, for example, important differences between Britain and America in terms of the rise and nature of citizenship. For example, because the development of modern citizenship presupposes some radical change to society from migration, warfare or revolution, one might assume that the defining issue in American citizenship was the War of Independence and the signing of the Constitution. However, this way of looking at American society neglects the history of slavery and subsequent racial conflict.

To grapple with the American version of citizenship, Judith N. Shklar (1991) coined the phrase “liberalism of fear” (1998) to underscore the long history of racial inequality in America and the deep divisions between the North and South in the history of social rights. She regarded grinding poverty and inequality as key issues to be addressed by citizenship and in her influential American Citizenship (1991) she argued that the capacity to earn a living was fundamental to the sense of personal autonomy and responsibility. Earning a living, she argued, distinguished respectable, hard-working but independent citizens from both the landed aristocracy and the property-less slaves. Consequently, the American citizen was associated with an emerging middle class against both a decadent and declining land-owning aristocracy and an exhausted and exploited agrarian class of slaves. Her work has been regarded as the most decisive defense of liberalism in modern political philosophy not as a soft option – everything is permissible, everything is possible – but as a criticism of and defense against what she called “ordinary vices” – indifference, greed, resentment, cruelty and so forth. However, we would qualify this view of Shklar’s definition of American citizenship by noting that it defines autonomy by reference to employment and the market, and hence her understanding of liberal citizenship was very different, for example, from the tradition represented by J. S. Mill. Our point here is not to launch into a debate about the character of liberalism, but simply to note that there are important variations within the western tradition.

In order to deal with the very different trajectories that have produced citizenship in the modern world, it is useful to develop a distinction between citizenship as fundamental to a welfare state, and citizenship as the necessary basis of a nation state. Social citizenship is made up of the social rights associated with welfare-state provisions – the right to health care, education, social security and so forth. By contrast, national citizenship involves political membership or a political identity associated with state building, the forging of a nation and typically the suppression of minority cultures and traditions. In the creation of national citizenship, states engaged in the modernization of the military, the development of a universal education system, the construction of a national religion and the imposition of general taxation to create a common national identity often in the face of an inherited social and cultural complexity that resisted national incorporation. Thus, minorities have to be incorporated into the political system, either through coercive integration or more systematic marginalization. Different languages, traditions and religions are characteristically degraded or excluded from the public domain by the state. Perhaps all forms of citizenship require some degree of exclusivity in terms of cultural traits, but national citizenship requires such exclusivity more definitely and, if necessary, violently than either the liberal or social versions of citizenship. State building often required recognition of a dominant religious tradition as defining the national identity or indeed the creation of such a dominant tradition. Two obvious examples are the historical role of the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines and the place of Buddhism and the monarchy in Thailand. The alternative was to impose a policy of strict secularization in which a nationalist and republican ideology played the role of a civil religion. The classic example would be republican Turkey. While Japanese modernization after the Meiji restoration is probably the most obvious and successful Asian case of authoritarian state building, the creation of a developmental state in South Korea to forge a nation on the back of rapid urbanization and industrialization after the Korean War might be another example (Chang, 2007).We argue that Israel is also in this sense a developmental state with problematic borders, a civil society divided by ethnic and religious differences, and a dominant military stratum given its need for security. In short, Israeli citizenship is essential for state building and has a decidedly exclusionary character.

With regard to these nationalist issues, Michael Mann’s account of citizenship with respect for example to the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire provides a convincing analysis of continental Europe (Mann 1986 and 1987). National citizenship may have more to do with creating exclusionary boundaries and identities than with building up the legitimacy of claims against the state. Outside continental Europe, the evolution of social citizenship in Britain in the 1950s was less relevant in creating a national identity and forging a nation out of a melting pot of migrant communities than with rebuilding the economy, with urban renewal and with the social issues that followed the social dislocation produced by mass mobilization and industrialized warfare. National citizenship typically requires the exclusion of minority communities, especially in post-imperial or post-colonial contexts, and in emergent nation states with problematic and uncertain borders. Liberal citizenship, as the name implies, involves granting legal and political entitlements rather than building a welfare system or defining a national identity. We might simplify the discussion of these different types of citizenship in the following. Liberalism celebrates individual rights, but says relatively little about corresponding duties and consequently places an emphasis on the private provision of welfare and services through individualized insurance. Social citizenship requires some balance between rights (to welfare) and duties (to the family and the state). These entitlements may be appropriately called “contributory rights.” National citizenship has relatively little interest in individual rights and emphasizes duties to the state (especially military duties). These three forms of citizenship – liberal, social and national – are at least worth separating conceptually even where in many empirical cases the forms will become blurred.

These three manifestations of citizenship have at least one thing in common – they presuppose a connection between geographical territory and a political system or a relationship between territoriality and rights or more precisely a relationship between territory and a sovereign state. The relationship with national citizenship is obvious – national identity requires a boundary with recognizable borders that are policed by a nation state, especially where there are hostile or troublesome neighbors. Migrants who are merely denizens are clearly not citizens because the rights and duties of denizenship and citizenship are, at least historically, very different. Ownership of a passport is the hallmark of citizenship, permitting an individual to move in and out of a territory with the support of a state. Perhaps the connection of territory with liberal and social citizenship is less obvious, but both nevertheless define an exclusionary package of rights. In the case of social citizenship, the taxation of citizens within a given territory as the basis of social security claims provides the linkage between residence and rights. This connection between the modern state, sovereignty, territory and rights in many respects represents the core of Max Weber’s political sociology in his definition of the territorial sovereignty of the nation state. The relationship of law and territorial sovereignty has become a difficult issue in post-colonial and multicultural societies where claims for separate legal authorities has made legal pluralism appear as one possible solution in dealing with customary or aboriginal claims. It is this relationship which also makes the case of Hong Kong – two systems, one society – unique in modern political history. However, politically divided societies – North and South Korea, East and West Germany, Cyprus and Palestine – are equally problematic and interesting from the point of view of citizenship studies.

One further issue in citizenship studies is the question of secularization; that is, the separation of church and state and the differentiation of the religious and the political spheres. After the Treaty of Westphalia which brought religious wars to an end in seventeenth century Europe, church and state were, in principle, separated and religion became a matter of private conscience. Religious freedom meant freedom as a private practice of religion and the public manifestations of religious practice were largely to be determined by the prince. Lutheranism probably represents the extreme case of such privatization of belief in which the inner sphere of the private individual was utterly separate from the external sphere of state violence. In this Westphalian model of political institutions, it was assumed that secularization was a necessary pre-condition of modernization. However, in recent times, this liberal solution involving a separation of spheres has broken down with the eruption in the 1980s of the Iranian Revolution, the Solidarity movement, the Sandinista revolution and the growth of the radical Christian right in the United States. Sociological attention has consequently shifted to the analysis of the role of religion in the public sphere and José Casanova’s Public Religions in the Modern World (1994) was important in this evolving criticism of the conventional secularization thesis. His work was in many respects focused on Catholicism in Latin America and on Poland. For obvious reasons, the role of Orthodox Judaism as a “public religion” in Israel provides an equally important case study.

The final weakness in much of the literature on citizenship is that the theory has a strong, if implicit, teleological aspect. This may also be yet another legacy of Marshall for whom the basic rights of the citizen – civil, political and social – emerged in a teleological or evolutionary progression in British history. It is obviously the case that citizenship and social rights can be supported by the policies of the state, but they can equally be violently expunged by military dictatorships and we should therefore remove from our minds any ideal or utopian future where citizenship will be universally and comprehensively recognized by states as the foundation of a viable democracy. This extinction of rights was, to take one prominent example, a traumatic outcome of the dictatorship of the General Pinochet in Chile and in many Latin American societies the growth of what came to be known as “bureaucratic authoritarianism” was the consequence (O’Donnell, Schmitter and Whitehead, 1986). Given the contemporary drift of societies towards greater securitization, it may well be the case that erstwhile liberal democracies take on the hue o...