But the truly radical transformation in teaching about the Jewish state in civics courses was not completed until the 2000-2001 school year, when the Education Ministry introduced to classrooms across the country a new textbook, To Be Citizens in Israel: A Jewish and Democratic State. This massive 600-page work was written and produced by a ministry team headed by Hana Adan, the staff member responsible for citizenship studies in the ministry’s Curriculum Division. Adan’s team spent seven years drafting material, testing it in sample high schools throughout the country, receiving comments from academics and ministry officials, and revising the material into final form.⁴² The principal academic advisor for the book was Binyamin Neuberger, of the Political Science Department of the Open University, who served as chairman of the ministry’s supervisory committee on citizenship studies during most of the period in which To Be Citizens in Israel was being prepared—and was therefore the ministry’s most authoritative academic voice on this subject.

When To Be Citizens in Israel was published in March 2000, it became the first book on the market that conformed to the 1994 curriculum. Shortly afterwards, the ministry’s director-general issued a directive making the new curriculum obligatory for all Jewish high schools as of the fall of 2000, and declaring that only this textbook was approved for use.⁴³ The ministry’s two national supervisors of citizenship studies then sent letters to all civics teachers in the general and religious state schools informing them that during the upcoming school year, they were to teach from the ministry’s textbook, and stipulating the specific pages they were to cover.⁴⁴ When the ministry sent teachers the annual handbook on teaching civics, it included a 43-page guide explaining how to achieve the goals of the new curriculum using To Be Citizens in Israel.⁴⁵ And when the school year opened on September 1, 2000, virtually every state-run Jewish high school had in fact switched over to the new text.⁴⁶

What, then, does the only citizenship textbook available to Jewish high-school students teach them about the Jewish state in which they live? On the surface, To Be Citizens in Israel seems headed in the right direction, as the first of its three major sections, spanning 65 pages, is devoted to the question of “What Is a Jewish State?” The second section, “What Is Democracy?” sets out the nine major principles underlying democracy, and includes sources showing that these principles can be found in Jewish texts and traditions. The bulk of the textbook, covering “Regime and Politics in Israel,” is supposed to “examine how and to what degree the two foundations—Judaism and democracy—find their expression in the state.”⁴⁷

A closer examination of To Be Citizens in Israel reveals, however, that despite the promising headings, the authors have managed to create a text that systematically undermines any possibility that students will emerge with a genuine understanding of why they should want Israel to be a Jewish state. This failure stems, first and foremost, from the book’s inability to articulate a coherent explanation for why a Jewish state is needed, to provide a compelling historical account of how and why the idea of the Jewish state was realized, or to show convincingly that the principal features that make Israel a Jewish state today are worthy of admiration or loyalty. Second, To Be Citizens in Israel delivers the message that Israel’s Jewish character ultimately undermines its democratic standing, and that the resultant flaws lead to inexcusable economic, political, and cultural discrimination against non-Jewish minorities—who in turn are prevented from fully identifying with the state or redeeming the promise of the Israeli citizenship they hold.

The first of these problems surfaces a short way into the opening chapter, “Nationality and National States,” which introduces the section on “What Is a Jewish State?” and is presumably meant to explain the rationale behind the founding of national states such as Israel. This is where one would expect to find a forceful explication of the idea and practice of the national state as developed over the last several centuries in the British Isles and Europe. Such a discussion would naturally touch on the distinguished tradition of political thought undergirding the national state, including its ancient roots in classical Greece and Israel, and its modern development in the writings of Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Michelet, Herder, Hegel, Mazzini, Lord Acton, Ernest Renan, and Woodrow Wilson. Likewise, it would be natural to address the experience of national movements in Greece, Italy, and Germany in the nineteenth century, which served as an inspiration to many of the early Zionist thinkers. Jewish students’ understanding of their own national state could also be aided were they to read about parallel efforts in the first half of the twentieth century—in places as disparate as Czechoslovakia, Ireland, and India. And to complete the picture, the book’s authors could have depicted the recent success of national states such as Poland and Hungary in breaking away from Soviet tyranny and establishing themselves as nationalist democracies.

Yet none of these ideas, people, or events are discussed in the chapter’s six pages. Indeed, hardly a word is said about the reasonsthat have motivated certain peoples to aspire to self-determination within the framework of an independent state. Instead, the development of national states, and the history of their successes, is condensed into two sentences.⁴⁸ The lion’s share of the chapter is devoted to an extended critique of the theoretical and practical problems of national states, and is written in a manner so hostile that it is difficult to imagine any student coming away with the impression that such states constitute any kind of a model worthy of emulation. (As the ideas presented in this attack on the national state are of some significance, I will treat them at greater length below.)

This same pattern—of declining to explain why Israel was created as, or should continue to be, a Jewish national state—is continued in the four remaining chapters on “What Is a Jewish State?” Here, too, there is not a single reference to the reasons why the Jewish national movement came into being as a movement devoted to establishing a Jewish state. Though the ministry’s staff could have chosen to follow the advice in the 1994 curriculum by including short historical notes, they chose not to do so in the chapters devoted to the Jewish state. Thus, there is no mention of the persecution and hatred of Jews in Europe that brought Herzl to write The Jewish State, or of the horrific events which persuaded much of the world half a century later that he had been right.⁴⁹ Likewise, there is no mention of the heroic efforts that went into establishing the Zionist movement, nurturing the Jewish settlement in Palestine, or winning independence through military and diplomatic struggle.

Instead of depicting the historical circumstances that would lead students to understand why founding a Jewish state was widely viewed as desirable and necessary, To Be Citizens in Israel presents readers with a chapter entitled “The State of Israel: Different Approaches,” which offers an extreme application, almost a caricature, of the Gutmann curriculum’s principle of exposing students to the “tensions and conflicts within Israeli society.” In this chapter, Israel is not depicted as having any constitutional foundation or political tradition that can be said to determine its character as a Jewish state. Instead, the entire question of the Jewishness of the state is presented as being a matter of virtually total dispute among no fewer than five opposing camps—with the implication that there is no way of actually reaching a consensus, not only concerning why Israel should be a Jewish state, but also as to which of its nationalist features deserve to remain in place.

After presenting two views of Israel that are associated with the religious camp—“A Tora State” and “A National-Religious State”—the authors dissect the mainstream of political Zionism into no fewer than three distinct conceptions, which are depicted as being at odds with one another: (i) “A culturally Jewish national state,” which “draws from the national, cultural, and religious tradition and the Jewish heritage”; (ii) “the state of the Jewish people,” which emphasizes that Israel belongs to Jews around the world; and (iii) “the state of the Jews,”whose proponents are described as seeking to secure a Jewish majority, which in turn will shape the country’s culture and character. Now, anyone with even a limited grasp of Zionist history will quickly recognize that Theodor Herzl, Ahad Ha’am, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, Berl Katznelson, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon, Menachem Begin, Ezer Weizman, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres—in short, the major figures who founded and built the state—belonged to all three of these “camps,” for the simple reason that they are not separate camps, but rather different aspects of a single political tradition—a clear tradition, which in general had no difficulty reaching consensus on a variety of basic political and cultural issues, from the values expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Law of Return, and the State Education Law to the holding of the Eichmann trial and the creation of a united Jerusalem after the Six Day War.