The Double-Edged Banalization of Israeli National Identity

According to a certain vantage point, the banalization of the nation-state engenders a doxa which common sense cannot be applied or practised without. Only well-established nations reach this kind of identity-related automatism. When the collective imagination represents high degree of habitualization what diverge from it seems rather marginal, esoteric or even passes through society as practically unseen. This is because the imaginative ‘survival unit’ (Elias,1991,1994) of the nation-state implies “[a] banal mysticism, which is so banal that all the mysticism seems to have evaporated long ago, binds 'us' to the homeland - that special place which is more than just a place, more than a mere geophysical area” (Billing,1995,175). Nonetheless, the banality ends only when emotionally driven and actively political nationalism outbreaks, following the crackdown of the daily and orderly routines that have been predetermined by this national habitualization. So-called 'mature democracies' face this kind of banalization, since they cope with the rise of democratic discontent (manifested in the opposite phenomena of protest, abstention or political indifference) on the one hand, and the tensions between national\ nationalist stances against universal and supranational trends. This paper attempts to apply these theoretical assumptions to the Israeli case-study. Israeli (Jewish) society does not question the central role of the nation-state, as it reflects perfectly the banalization of nationalized civil duties (the mandatory military service, for example). Moreover, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, - either connected to violent radicalization or to political stagnation -, has often implied top-down nationalist stances (i.e. politicians' rhetoric), thus further fortification of nationalism. However, and although Israel's collective identity has engendered expressions of solid societal identification, there is also another way to evaluate national banalization. The once taken-for-granted Zionist and consociational statism, has been facing democratic unrest, malaise and critique. This contradictory phenomenon seems highly reasonable, since banal nationhood also means the mundaneness of the state, e.g. daily needs, quotidian worries, adjunct commonplaces and self-repeated clichés. Israel, therefore, presents,-perhaps more polemically than in other societies-, the double-edged nature of national banalization. On the one hand, the nation-state is highly felt in the day-to-day perception and reception of symbols; on the other, political, socioeconomic and sociocultural cleavages have become more evident; thus supposedly weakening the halo of the Israeli nation-state. This paper uses a process-tracing analysis and organizes the contradictory trends of national banalization, as it puts the emphasis on three venues: a) the idea of the Jewish nation-state as inherited by political Zionism; b) the tensions between Zionism and post-Zionist stances; c) the shift from political collectivization to the privatization of the public space. All three elements are intertwined within Israeli contemporary politics and consequently affect the equilibrium between its Zionist and democratic values and its national identity. Yet this single case-study can be generalized and thus provide greater understanding of how a democratic nation-state, though imperfect, is challenged by the ever-changing reality of our time. Key-words: National Identity, Nationalism, Israel, Banalization, Nation-State