Sovereignty and Cultural Banalization in the Israeli Habitus: A Sociopolitical Parabola?

Sovereignty can be inclined in several fashions in Israeli political culture. It has many connotations, namely the messianic certainty of the lordship of God ("Sovereign of the Universe'') which has given more or less deterministic interpretations of Jewish lives in Diaspora. The exilic features that characterised Jewish identity were gradually transformed into a nationally-binding collectivization, following the tensions between Jewish Enlightenment, political emancipation and assimilation vis-à-vis modern anti-Semitism in Europe. In this sense the secularization of "Jewishness" brought to its nationalization, i.e. the normalization of the Jewish people in terms of statehood; thus territorial and political sovereignty. Nonetheless, the latter kept many of Judaism's original theological references. The Zionist debate between pro-nation-state factions and socio-culturalist approaches concluded with the proclamation of the Jewish state in 1948. Through the solemn declaration of independence, the Jewish state was established and grounded to the principles of territory, power and the monopoly of violence embodied by the nation-state. It was constituted at a critical moment (post-Holocaust, the end of the British mandate, the inevitable conflict with the Arab world) which revealed emergency and exceptionality (Schmittian Ausnahmezustand, 2004), typical to conflictual contexts in which relations of self-otherness engender radical political actions. That is to say that the nascent state theologized its democratic regime as well as secularized the millennial religious features of Judaism in order to mobilise citizenry to adhere and identify with it. Moreover, the combination of the theological component and the political one made national sovereignty a key-element in Israel's national habitus (Elias, 2012). The so-called Israeli Mamlakhtyiut (Ben-Gurion's republicanism, Kedar, 2007; Bareli & Kedar, 2011) enabled the process of identity-building and state-building while guaranteeing trust and sense of belonging. However, the exceptionality of Jewish statehood didn't include all citizens, namely the 1948 Palestinians who did not enjoy civil rights, nor could identify with the Jewish symbols of state. In addition to geopolitical occurrences (chiefly, Arab-Israeli Wars), the Israeli state witnessed the deepening of ideological, ethnic, socio-political and economic cleavages within its own citizenry. Tensions and fragmentation gradually eroded Mamlakhtyiut. The triumph of the Israeli centre-right in the 1977 election attested systemic fragilities and diffused discontent. The change of socio-political and economic policies commenced to tear down the founding principles of Israeli collective identity by endorsing liberalization and privatization, even of collective memory (Gutwein, 2001). Though these processes did not concern territorial sovereignty, they had an impact on the attitude of citizens towards the state. On the one hand, nationalist stances kept been interiorized through routinization and banalization (Billig, 1995); on the other, the erosion of trust and identification with the democracy and representation has decreased. The paper seeks to historically trace and critically discuss the different phases of the Israeli national habitus from political and cultural perspectives. It focuses on domestic transformations and juxtaposes the concept of sovereignty with the state's democratic regime and its national habitus.