Yet a high-school student encountering this material for the first time will be led to believe the opposite: The most likely conclusion to be drawn from this extraordinarily misleading presentation is that there never was a Zionist mainstream with an essentially consensual tradition concerning the basics of what a Jewish state should look like; that it certainly does not exist today; and that there is no single group with which anyone wanting Israel to keep its current, nationalist features can identify. And, lest the student try to form such a synthesis on his own, the authors of To Be Citizens in Israel appear to be determined to prevent this: In the questions at the end of a number of the chapters, students are presented with a series of passages or a list of symbols and institutions, and are asked to categorize each one of them as belonging to one of the five approaches.⁵⁰

In keeping with this divide-and-neuter approach to the ideas that have stood at the heart of the Zionist political consensus, To Be Citizens in Israel seems to take particular care in making sure that high-school students see every element of the state’s Jewish character that has served as a source of national cohesion as having actually been, above all, a source of discord. This is particularly striking with respect to the Declaration of Independence, which was adopted unanimously by every Jewish political party in existence in Israel in 1948—from Agudath Israel to the Communists. In “The State of Israel: Different Approaches,” the dramatic achievement of having reached consensus on such a complex founding document is essentially ignored, and instead the authors devote a full page and a half to the argument among the signatories over whether God should be referred to explicitly in the text—a presentation that ends with the words, “the dispute as to what is the desirable character of the Jewish state has continued unchanged ever since.”⁵¹

Later, the authors of the book perform a similar disservice to “Hatikva,” the national anthem that has been a rallying point for Zionists since being penned by Naftali Hertz Imber a century ago. Rather than describing how this anthem gradually gained acceptance until it became a central source of inspiration for the Jewish people in our own day, the book devotes most of its space on “Hatikva” to emphasizing the fact that the anthem was not acceptable to everyone:

Instead of explaining the significance of choosing “Hatikva,” which spoke to the broadest possible range of Jews rather than to a particular sector, To Be Citizens in Israel ends the discussion inconclusively by presenting the student with the full texts of all three of the proposed anthems.

This problem recurs in the discussion on the Law of Return, in which the authors briefly note that this historic piece of legislation was adopted “without opposition” by the Knesset, and that it was understood by many to represent the essence of Zionism.⁵³ The book then emphasizes that there are “many controversies, which arose from disputes [about this law] that continue through today”—after which it devotes two full pages to chronicling the feuding among various political parties as to whether Orthodox Jewish law should be used to determine “who is a Jew” for purposes of implementing the Law of Return.⁵⁴

The same pattern repeats itself in discussing those governmental institutions that reflect Israel’s Jewish character. To Be Citizens in Israel dedicates no fewer than four and a half contention-filled pages to describing Orthodox Jewish institutions that are part of the state. Thus, the reader is told that “The involvement of the chief rabbis [in public issues] stirs up controversy within society over whether they are going beyond their authority.”⁵⁵ Similarly, the authors make sure that students are aware that “in the realm of activity of the religious councils there are also subjects mired in dispute.”⁵⁶ On the other hand, those Jewish-nationalist aspects of Israel that are not “mired in dispute” are usually disposed of without any kind of real discussion at all. Thus, fewer than a dozen lines are devoted to covering the activities of both the Absorption Ministry and the Jewish Agency, which together have borne the principal responsibility for bringing Jews to Israel and establishing Jewish communities throughout the country.⁵⁷ Likewise, the Education Ministry, which for half a century has been charged with what is probably the most important mission deriving from Israel’s status as the state of the Jewish people—providing a Jewish education to Israelis from all backgrounds—is not even listed as an institution reflecting the Jewish nature of the state.⁵⁸

The shallow, fragmented, contentious, and unpersuasive presentation of the state’s Jewish character stands in bleak contrast to the compelling nature of the section in To Be Citizens in Israel that is devoted to the country’s democratic foundations.⁵⁹ For while the textbook scrupulously refrains from advocating that Israel should be a Jewish state, the section on democracy does not hesitate to argue on behalf of democracy.Indeed, the final chapter, “Why Democracy?” speaks unabashedly of the need to “clarify for ourselves what democracy is, and why democracy is to be preferred over regimes that are not democratic.”⁶⁰ Nowhere is there a parallel chapter, “Why a Jewish State?” that explains what makes such a state preferable to any of the competing models that have been proposed for Israel.

And this asymmetry dogs the entire book: The idea of the Jewish state is presented as fragmented and fragmenting, while the idea of democracy is presented as essentially cohesive, based on ideas “that are held in common by all of the Western democracies.”⁶¹ Similarly, the poverty of historical depth used in describing the development of the idea of the Jewish state stands in stunning contrast to the rich heritage of democratic thought, described in a two-millennium-long tour beginning with ancient Athens and continuing with John Locke, the French Enlightenment, the American founders, Abraham Lincoln, John Stuart Mill,and many others.⁶²

Perhaps most damning of all, however, is that while the Jewish state is presented as a series of disconnected facts (lists of laws, institutions, and so on), democracy is presented as a series of lofty values and principles—including popular sovereignty, pluralism, human rights, equality, rule of law, and separation of powers—which impart to it a conceptual coherence, as well as giving it a moral status as the preferred form of government.⁶³ Of course, the idea of the Jewish state was also based on a long line of values and principles, the product of a century of Zionist thought and argument on the subject—including the idea of the Jewish people as a united polity, the principle of the ingathering of the exiles, the unique political tie of the Jews to the land of Israel, the right of every Jew to return to Israel, the idea of Israel as a spiritual center for the Jewish people, the idea of Israel as a safe haven for persecuted Jewry, the centrality of the Hebrew language and the Hebrew Bible as the basis for modern Jewish culture, the redemption of the desert and wilderness, and the vision of the Jewish state as an exemplary society. All of these values and principles could have served to create a rich and powerful section on the Jewish state, which would have breathed meaning into the ossified “facts” of Jewish institutions and laws described in the book. In their absence, high-school students are left to wonder why or how anyone could become committed to the idea of a Jewish state.

 

But the greatest problem with To Be Citizens in Israel is not that it fails to give students a good reason to support the idea that Israel should be a Jewish state. Worse yet is that the new textbook seems to suggest that Israel’s Jewish character is detrimental to its ability to function as a full-fledged democracy. True, the authors stop short of articulating the view that a Jewish state cannot be democratic, nor do they argue that Israel has to accept the position of those who call upon the state to shed fundamental elements of its Jewish character; indeed, to the extent to which they expressly back any position, the authors seem to maintain that it is possible for Israel to be both Jewish and democratic.⁶⁴ What they do, however, is to systematically undermine the claim that Israel should maintain its Jewish character, by providing the reader with a steady stream of arguments, sources, and graphics to remind us of the toll that Israel’s nationalist character takes—and of the potential inherent in giving up on the idea of the Jewish state and transforming Israel into a non-Jewish “state of all its citizens.”