Israel

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Israel

The State of Israel is located at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. Its borders—indeed its very existence—have been in dispute since it proclaimed its independence in May 1948. Those nations (and the United Nations) that recognize Israel as a legitimate nation-state generally are agreed on the following boundaries: the Mediterranean Sea forms Israel's western border; Lebanon and Syria are to the north; Egypt is to the south; and the territory commonly designated as the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) is to the east. The area within these boundaries comprises approximately 22,145 square kilometers (8,000 square miles)—about the size of the U.S. state of New Jersey.

In 2004, Israel had a population of 6.8 million. Ethnically, Israel's population was 80 percent Jewish; its 20 percent non-Jewish population was mostly Arab. In terms of religion, the population was 80 percent Jewish, 15 percent Muslim, 2 percent Christian, 1 percent Druze, and 2 percent other.

The semi-arid landscape provides limited opportunity for agriculture, so as Israel developed, it increasingly turned to industry and technology. In the twenty-first century, Israel had become a modern, Western-oriented nation, and Israelis had a standard of living (measured by gross domestic product per capita ) comparable to European countries such as Spain.

general historical background

It is a commentary on Jewish history that the nationalist movement—Zionism—that gave birth to the State of Israel had its organizational roots in Western Europe, its sociological roots in Eastern Europe, and its emotional roots in the Biblical homeland of the Jews, the territory usually called Palestine.

After their dispersion by the Roman Empire in the second century, the vast majority of the world's Jews lived outside Palestine. In 1881, the twenty-five thousand Jews who lived in what was then Ottoman Palestine were the remnant of a people who had inhabited the land since biblical times. Comprising roughly 6 percent of the region's population, they were desperately poor, totally apolitical, and completely involved in a way of life molded by their ancestral religion, which is now called Orthodox Judaism. This community did not appear to be fertile soil in which to plant a modern nationalist movement.

Yet, it was the tradition represented by that community that provided the affective ties of unity needed by the Zionist nation builders. Until the nineteenth century, all Jews, wherever they happened to reside, lived according to the norms of the Jewish religious tradition. Not only did those norms specify a Jew's relation to God, but in specifying the relation of person to person, especially within the Jewish community, those norms also defined the Jewish people. Traditional Judaism makes no distinction between religious belief and national identity; it entails both a religious and a national commitment. The religious tradition—its precepts and practices—also bound the Jewish people to Palestine. For Judaism connects God's covenant with the Jewish people to that land and to no other. So strong was this traditional attachment to the land that when Jewish nationalism did emerge, even the children of secularized European Jews could identify their nation only with the Zion of tradition—Palestine.

Western European Jewry had ceased to be a traditional religious community during the nineteenth century. In the aftermath of the French Revolution (1789–1799), Jews began assimilating into the societies of Western Europe. Their major concern was adapting themselves to the dominant cultures. Eventually, they modified or discarded some of their religious practices, and they began to make a distinction between their religion and their nationality. They were now French citizens who were Jewish, Germans who were Jewish, and so on. Because these Jews functioned as members of the modern Western societies in which they lived, they developed the skills and resources needed to create and sustain a nationalist movement.

The Jews' entry into Western societies was frequently met with resistance, which occasionally turned violent. This anti-Semitism led a secular Jew, Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), to form the World Zionist Organization in 1897. Its aim was to facilitate the return of the Jewish people to the land of Palestine and to establish an internationally recognized nation in which Jews could live free from persecution. The World Zionist Organization provided the ideological momentum and the institutional apparatus to wage the political fight for a Jewish state.

Most Western Jews, however, despite their anxieties about anti-Semitism, continued their struggle for full acceptance in their countries of birth. However, most Jews in Eastern Europe—in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Czarist Russia—were regarded, and regarded themselves, as a distinct alien people merely cohabiting the same territory. When the economic structures that had sustained those communities collapsed at the end of the nineteenth century and incidents of violent anti-Semitism multiplied, however, the Jews of Eastern Europe sought to escape. Between 1882 and 1914, approximately 2.5 million Jews, almost one-third of the entire Jewish population, left the Eastern European empires. A minority went to Palestine and established the first Zionist settlements there. Despite the enmity of the Ottoman (Turkish) authorities and the hostility of the indigenous Arab population, those Zionist immigrants from Eastern Europe laid the foundations for a viable Jewish community in Palestine.

During World War I (1914–1918), the World Zionist Organization's leadership in Europe was able to negotiate a political arrangement for establishing an autonomous Jewish community in Israel. Led by Chaim Weizmann (1874–1952), they helped persuade the British War Cabinet that the Zionists' goals were not incompatible with its imperial interests. The result was the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. Although it did not grant the Zionists their ultimate objective (i.e., an independent Jewish state), it promised them the opportunity to establish a "national home" in Palestine. After the war, the San Remo Treaty (1920), which recognized Britain as the League of Nations' mandate authority governing Palestine, also incorporated the Balfour Declaration. From the Zionists' perspective, this provided international legitimacy for an autonomous Jewish community.

The majority Arab population of Mandate Palestine, however, never accepted the arrangement. They opposed the Zionist settlement from the outset because the continued arrival of Jewish immigrants would shift the balance of power within Palestine. Thus at the heart of the conflict were rival Jewish and Arab claims to the same territory. Both groups believed in their future right to rule the country after the mandate expired. The British were unable to resolve this conflict during their administration, as were the United Nations (UN) and the Allied nations after World War II (1939–1945). The dilemma continued into the twenty-first century.

Events in the post–World War I period, particularly the rise of Nazi Germany, soon exacerbated the situation in the region. Large numbers of European Jews sought refuge in Palestine, and the Palestinians revolted. Palestine was generally calm during World War II, but the destruction of six million Jews by the Nazis led many non-Jews to support the Zionist plan. In 1947, the UN sought to resolve the conflict by partitioning the territory into Jewish and Arab states. Although the Zionists reluctantly agreed (they had wanted their state to include all of Mandate Palestine), the Palestinians refused to surrender any part of the land they considered to be their own.

In May 1948, the Jews implemented the UN resolution by proclaiming an independent Jewish state named Israel. The Palestinians and seven surrounding Arab states militarily attempted to destroy Israel but were repulsed. In 1949, UN–sponsored armistice agreements established the boundaries previously noted and led to Israel's admission into the UN.

In the years since then, Israel fought wars with its Arab neighbors in 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982. Israel signed peace treaties with Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994) that settled the boundaries with those countries. But as of 2005 Israel had been unable to reach comparable agreements with Syria, Lebanon, and, most importantly, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

israel's democratic political system

The 1947 UN Partition Resolution called for both of the proposed democratic states to function under written constitutions. However, the Constituent Assembly elected in March 1949, immediately after the War of Independence, was unable to complete the task in Israel. The enterprise foundered on disagreements between Orthodox Jews and the non-Orthodox majority about the role of Jewish religious law (Halakhah) in the Jewish state. Unable to resolve the issue without doing irreparable harm to the much-needed consensus of all elements within the community, the Constituent Assembly became the first Knesset (parliament).

As a compromise, in June 1950, the Knesset agreed that a constitution would be constructed, chapter by chapter, on the enactment of Basic Laws. By 1992, the Knesset had passed eleven Basic Laws, although a full bill of rights was not enacted. Nonetheless, in a 1995 decision, the Israeli Supreme Court declared that henceforth it would treat those Basic Laws as the constitution of Israel and as superior to ordinary legislation.

From the Basic Laws and the stable practices that have emerged over the subsequent decades, it is possible to describe the nation's actual institutional practices. Israel is a secular republic , with a theoretically supreme parliament (the Knesset), a powerful cabinet (the government), an independent judiciary, and a weak, ceremonial president. The protections accorded human rights are a result of its democratic political processes and of its civil law system.

Israel is a parliamentary democracy with a single-chamber elected assembly, the Knesset. National elections occur every four years, unless they are called earlier by a Knesset majority. All Israeli citizens over the age of eighteen have the right to vote, and voter turnout in elections during the late 1990s and early 2000s exceeded 75 percent of the eligible electorate. An Israeli votes for a list of candidates prepared by a political party (or group of parties), not an individual representative. The 120 members of Knesset are selected via a nationwide, proportional system . That is, the whole country is considered a single electoral district, and Knesset seats are allocated in proportion to the strength of a list at the polls. Any list that receives 2 percent of the vote is guaranteed some representation in the Knesset. This 2-percent requirement is the lowest threshold of any democracy utilizing a proportional election system.

Moreover, it easier to form a new political party and to submit an electoral list in Israel than in any other democratic nation. Only 100 citizens and a $10,000 deposit are needed to register a new party. The signatures of only 1,500 supporters are needed for a new party to submit a new list of candidates to compete in a Knesset election.

The combination of electoral rules that facilitate the creation of new parties (and electoral lists) with the law guaranteeing at least one Knesset seat to any list that receives only 2 percent of the national vote results in Israeli citizens having an extremely broad choice at the polls. In the 1996 elections, there were twenty lists on the ballot; in 1999, there were twenty-eight choices available to the Israeli elector.

The nationwide, proportional election system has meant that no single party (or party list) has ever achieved a Knesset majority. Because the government requires the support of at least sixty-one members of Knesset to be installed, all Israeli governments have been coalitions . Usually the government is cobbled together by the leader of the largest single Knesset party from among the eight to fifteen parties represented in that chamber. To form a coalition, the prime minister–designate must agree to support some of the programs favored by the smaller parties and to assign the administration of certain government ministries to the leaders of those parties.

The politics of coalition formation and maintenance supports Israeli democracy. As in all parliamentary systems, real effective power resides in the government (i.e., the prime minister and cabinet), not the Knesset. The government makes all significant policies because it has the support of a built-in parliamentary majority. The opposition (the parties comprising the minority) can only criticize the government in the hopes of gaining sufficient support to be part of a future ruling parliamentary coalition. In Israel, however, government policy is invariably based on bargaining and compromise rather than the dictates of a single individual or group, because the prime minister must worry about losing the support of coalition partners.

Nonetheless, the highly politicized and centralized structure of Israeli democracy creates a potential danger to human rights from arbitrary governmental operations. There are no institutional checks and balances once a Knesset majority agrees. The civil courts of Israel, particularly the Supreme Court, have responded by actively protecting human rights. The Supreme Court is the final authoritative interpreter of the law and has utilized its authority to reinforce the rule of law as a hedge against potentially destructive governmental actions. The judges are selected by a nine-member nominating committee whose dominant members are the chief justice and two other Supreme Court justices. This procedure has successfully insulated the civil court judges from partisan politics and enabled them to protect individual rights even in the absence of a constitutional bill of rights.

human rights in israel

According to Freedom House, all Israelis—Jew and non-Jew, secular and religious—enjoy nearly all of the basic human rights that are exercised by citizens in other Western democracies. They have freedoms of speech, of the press, and of association that are necessary to conduct competitive, democratic elections and to pursue their artistic, cultural, and intellectual interests. Israelis are guaranteed fair treatment in the criminal justice system. This record is a considerable achievement for a nation that has never been completely free from the threat of armed attack.

As with other democracies, however, there are some problems. The non-Jewish Israeli citizens (roughly 20 percent of the population) are not functionally treated as equals. Although they have all the formal legal rights, they find it impossible to identify with the symbols and civic rituals of the Jewish state. The vast majority of non-Jewish Israelis are ethnically Palestinian, the same national group that has contested the very existence of the state of Israel since its establishment. Israeli-Palestinians generally turn out to vote in national elections in only slightly lower proportion than their Jewish fellow citizens and have formed their own political parties that receive their proportional share of Knesset seats. But Arab parties have never been included in government coalitions, which is the real source of power and influence. In sum, those citizens who are Palestinian in origin are isolated from the mainstream of Israeli life; their political effectiveness is limited by the Jewish nature of the state of Israel and by the state's omnipresent security concerns.

Another area of concern involves religious liberty and court proceedings for those who are not Jewish by religion. The Jewish state is not a theocracy . Judaism has not become the official religion of Israel, as Islam has become the state religion of other Middle Eastern countries. Nor does Israel enforce the norms of Judaism as part of its public and criminal law. Also, as a democracy, it seeks to guarantee freedom of religion and conscience to all its inhabitants. Unlike the United States, Israel's policy of religious liberty has not been implemented by a separation between religion and the state. Instead, Israel has continued the practice of the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) and British Mandate, the millet system, under which the courts of the fourteen recognized religions have the sole authority to resolve such family matters as marriage, divorce, adoption, and so on. This prevents the religion of the majority (in Israel's case, Judaism) from interfering in the religious practices of minority groups.

This arrangement also means, however, that a member of a particular religious group who deviates from the practices recognized by that group's religious authorities confronts major obstacles. For example, because there is no civil marriage, a divorced Roman Catholic cannot be married in Israel because it would violate the tenets of the Catholic religion. Again, because most religions frown on the practice, a couple from two different communities cannot marry each other in Israel. Similarly, an individual can only be divorced by the courts of his or her community. If the individual does not satisfy the clerical requirements, divorce is impossible. Numerous Israelis are legally "chained" to a partner from whom they have long parted. The examples can be multiplied, but they all point to the same problem: The medieval millet system is not functional in a contemporary liberal democracy.

Nonetheless, these blemishes should not dominate the assessment of the system. For more than fifty years, Israel has been—and continues to be—a vital democracy. There is no indication whatsoever, despite the absence of real peace in the region, that the Israeli leadership or the Israeli people will abandon their commitment to democracy and human rights.

See also: Gaza Strip; Halakhah; Palestine; West Bank.