Between Enlightenment and Obscurantism: The Jewish and Democratic Schizophrenia of Israeli Sovereignty

The State of Israel could not have been founded without the legacy of European Enlightenment. Its founding ideology, i.e., European-born Zionism, accumulated its political and social savoir-faire by aspiring to modernization (Feiner, 2004). Catalysed by the rise of "scientific" Antisemitism (unlike the millennial religion-based anti-Judaic persecutions), which not only accused Jews of obscurantism, devil-worship and plutocracy but chiefly denounced their racial inferiority (culminating motivation for their annihilation in the Shoah). The appeal of transformation engendered either sociocultural and political autonomy in terms of societal refusal (the reaction of ultra-Orthodoxy), or the desire for openness and civil equality via assimilation of professions, life styles etc. This changed the till-then stratified "habitus" of European Jewry (Elias 2000, 2001; Bourdieu, Wacquant 1992; Sapiro 2015) in both cultural and political aspects. The Jewish acquis was revolutionized. Normative dispositions and social traditions consequently interacted with socialism and nationalism, in particular. The latter political viewpoint professed the Jewish emancipation from Diaspora via the acquisition of state-based sovereignty. The 1948 independence of the Jewish and democratic state was the fruit of these processes. Nonetheless, the excessive nation-building and the lack of societal correctability in the prioritization of Israel’s founding fathers (Strenhell,1995; 1998) has hindered pro-Enlightenment values, due to the unresolvable and intrinsic tension between Western-like democracy and Jewish nationalism. The 1967 Occupation of the Palestinian Territories, institutionally exalted by right-wing governments engendered a democratic schizophrenia-like modus vivendi regarding Israeli sovereignty in both geopolitical and constitutional terms. Novel forms of obscurantism sprouted: the rise of neo-messianism and political extremism by religious settlers in the West Bank, resulting in a "revisionist sieged society" (Del Sarto, 2017); and the shift of the democratic pendulum towards Jewish particularism, increasingly (re)interpreted by ultra-Orthodox’ political participation, despite their historical adversity to Zionism in light of the exclusive authority of the rabbinical establishment and the sovereignty of God in Jewish thought. The essay enquires these two interlinked aspects in light of the progressive autocratization and democratic back-sliding in Israel which have uncovered government-led obscurantism in the legislative process and in policy-making. Opposed by a wave of mass protest against the current thirty-seventh government, the exclusionary legislation of the so-called "judicial revolution" reveals the frailty of Israel’s national cohesion and the challenges to a renewed social pact within the boundaries of liberal democracy. By using process-tracing, applied to the corpus of legislation in Israel (i.e., Knesset laws, Supreme Court rulings and governmental legal counselling), juridical and political fields intercross, thus enabling the reconstruction of the trends and identity of sociopolitical actors. The method is also refined by a series of face-to-face in-depth semi-structured interviews to specialists from law and government in order to provide greater salience to the enquiry, inspired by historical sociology, the sociology of law and Bourdieusian theory. Hence, it empirically explores the juridico-political and societal implications, the interpretation of sovereignty has engendered in Israeli democracy.