Haaretz: If the state is defined by religion, it cannot treat all its citizens equally, as required of a democrat

If the state is defined by religion, it cannot treat all its citizens equally, as required of a democratic system of government.

If the state is defined by religion, it cannot treat all its citizens equally, as required of a democratic system of government.

If the state is defined by religion, it cannot treat all its citizens equally, as required of a democratic system of government.

Amplify’d from www.haaretz.com

If the state is defined by religion, it cannot treat all its citizens equally, as required of a democratic system of government.

23.08.10 You can't be a Jewish Muslim Instead of bringing about the secularization of Judaism, Zionism turned religion into the central element of the definition of national identity, and turned the State of Israel into a tool of the religious redemption project. By Lev Grinberg

His argument is simple: If the state is defined by religion, it cannot treat all its citizens equally, as required of a democratic system of government.

Masalha did not claim that there is no Jewish people or that Jews do not have the right to self-determination. His argument is simple: If the state is defined by religion, it cannot treat all its citizens equally, as required of a democratic system of government. Its true that from its inception, Zionism intended to turn the Jewish people from a religious community into a modern nation, but Avineri ignores the regrettable fact that the project of secularizing the Jewish people has failed. Israel has no legal definition for Judaism other than the religious definition, it does not recognize an Israeli national identity defined on the basis of citizenship, and it does not recognize a Hebrew nationality that is culturally defined. The comparison to other countries where religion and nationality are linked is irrelevant, because those countries have a secular definition of the state and citizenship. You can be a Polish Jew or an Egyptian Jew, but you can't be a Jewish Muslim or a Jewish Christian. In the attempt to make the Jewish people a nation like all others, Zionism strove to unite it through one language and concentrate it in one territory. There were arguments and struggles over this, and they were decided in favor of preserving the centrality of religion in the definition of the national collective. Instead of picking one of the languages that Jews spoke day in and day out, Hebrew, the holy tongue, was chosen. Read more at www.haaretz.com

 

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