The deadlock produced by this week’s election in Israel is a reflection of the baked-in premise of a Jewish state. This phrase has, according to the politicians and architects of the project of the state of Israel, always meant a state in which a Jewish majority get to determine their government. By 1940, Mapai and the Revisionists were both clear on a Jewish majority being necessary for the state to function properly in this manner, setting the stage for apartheid, as the immigrant populations would never outnumber the native populations unless a forcible population transfer was undertaken.
It behooves us in America to remember that the phrase “Jewish and democratic” means something specific. The “Jewish” part was a formal commitment of the founders of the state to a Jewish demographic majority state at all costs. The Declaration of Independence promises individual equality, but national sovereignty only to Jews. This was formally encoded in the 2018 Nation State law at the constitutional level in Israel: Israel is exclusively the state of the Jews as a national group, and only Jews have a right to self-determination within it. Usually, self-determination as the national entity is accorded to every citizen. People of all descents who have, for example, French, Spanish, or American citizenship are counted amongst the nation. Macedonia’s constitution had a similar clause to Israel’s, but it was formally abandoned about a decade after its establishment in favor of sovereignty for all citizens. In Israel, the Population Registry can read "Jewish" or a bevy of other options. Only those deemed "Jewish" have the right to self-determination. This is what is meant when people refer to Israel as an ethnostate: It is not a state for all Israelis, it is a state for Jews.
Today's parties in the Change Coalition are, by and large, holding to this foundational commitment of the ethnostate. Eisenkot, Bennett, and Liberman have all vowed to never partner with "Arab parties." Bennett tried it before. It failed rather quickly due to right wing defections from Bennett’s party, and he is now claiming that the events of October 7th changed this possibility, implying Arab Knesset members are accountable for the actions of Hamas. This means that there is no actual path to change. If any of the current parties dropped out of the Change Coalition, it wouldn’t matter whether the remaining coalition joined with the rest of the “Arab parties.” There still wouldn’t be enough seats for a governing majority. And, if there were, this would still leave the millions of Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza disenfranchised.
A two-state solution has traditionally been the suggested remedy, in which instead of one exclusivist ethno-national state, we would have two. That is not a true solution. Even in its most idealized form of two totally independent, equitably divided, ethnostates, which has never actually been on offer, it propagates the inherent issue of ethnonationalist exclusivity.
I understand why there are so many people with hope for an Israel that could overcome this foundational commitment to the exclusion of non-Jewish Israelis. Many compare it to America’s foundational commitment to white supremacy via slavery and genocide of the native population, and the steps that have been taken to remedy those foundational crimes over the past 200 years. Of course, those strides in America are simply nowhere close to enough (the 13th Amendment still permits slavery as punishment, and the Insular Cases need to be remedied immediately), and we continue to backslide regularly into forms of Christian and white supremacy over and over again. But there is a major difference: In America, most modes of systemic oppression written into the system explicitly have been formally revoked. This gives us at least the capacity to point to the guarantees of equal rights in our constitution, even as the inequality continues to function in the system implicitly. Through these guarantees, we can demand radical systemic change, as through reparations, land back, and other forms of repair.
Israel’s system of ethnic exclusivity is explicitly encoded in its foundational conception. For Israel to change that, it, too, would have to, once and for all, relinquish exclusive Jewish right to self-determination, which would require the equivalent to a constitutional amendment that enshrines equal rights for all inhabitants of the state. Such an amendment would need a Knesset majority, which is, as it currently stands based on various parties’ platforms, impossible. It would require true repair for the Nakba and Naksa, which are ongoing as we speak through the continued genocide in Gaza, and the ongoing, military-enforced ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. It would require either a total revisioning of what “Jewish” means with relation to the state, or dropping “Jewish” as a legal category within the state at all. We cannot expect any coalition to welcome, as full equals, non-Jewish parties without this issue first being addressed, which means that a true Change Coalition can never happen. If the Knesset cannot find within it a path towards equality for Israel’s non-Jewish citizens, hope for the present “Jewish state” ending the oppression of the millions of Palestinians living unrepresented under de facto Israeli control in Gaza and the West Bank is slim. Until the issue of ethnonational Jewish exclusivity is directly repaired, no amount of Knesset reshuffling will get to a place of justice.
