Religious politics and Israel's ethnic democracy.

THE POLITICAL AND RABBINICAL REPRESENTATIVES of religious Israelis often engage their secular counterparts using highly contentious public rhetoric. In a weekly sermon (17 March 2000), for example, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the leader of Shas--the third largest party in the Israeli parliament--declared that the current Minister of Education and leader of the secularist Meretz party (Yossi Sarid) is deserving of a fate similar to Haman. Haman is the mythical character who attempted to wipe out the Jews of Persia in the biblical story of Ester and ended up hanging for his sins.

What is the significance of Yosef's statement? Is it simply another example of the ongoing chain of hostility between the leaders of the secular and religious parties dating back to the earliest days of the pre-state Zionist Movement, or a sign of more serious conflict that is not manageable within the existing political framework? When is the antagonism between religious and secular politicians an actual threat to the democratic system? These questions take on greater significance in the wake of the Rabin assassination by an extremist religious Zionist in 1995, and the unprecedented 27 seats gained by religious parties in the 1999 election.

For the social scientist, the problem is not religious politics of one kind or another, but the theoretical framework we use for determining the significance of Yosef's statement, or, for that matter, the significance of the actions of other religious political actors for Israeli democracy. Several dated works provide overviews of the historical development, theological positions, and political behavior of the religious political movements. (1) To date, however, no theoretical paradigm exists to enable an informed debate about the consequence of particular religious actions for the larger political system.

To build a paradigm for the study of the interaction between "religion" and "democracy" requires us to grapple with the meaning of both concepts in the Israeli context. What Israelis understand to be democracy and how they conceptualize the role of religion within their democratic system bespeaks an historically specific notion of both concepts. If we are to distinguish between situations in which religious politics strengthens rather than weakens the democratic system, we need to ask what type of democracy and what type of religion we are talking about. We will see that democracy in Israel is understood by the vast majority of Jewish politicians to be an "ethnic democracy." Representatives of the various Jewish political parties cooperate with one another to ensure Jewish ethno-national political dominance. A key component of Jewish dominance is the practice of ethno-national parliamentary coalitions between "secular" and "religious" political parties.

In most Western democracies, religion is not a distinct political actor clearly demarcated against the secular; rather, progressive and conservative religious groups act as political interest groups within the frameworks of primarily non-religious political parties or religious parties reach out to embrace non-religious constituencies. (2) In contrast, within the context of Israel's ethnic democracy, the political world is clearly divided between religious and secular political parties. Thus, the point of contact between "the religious" and "the secular" becomes a playing field on which we can begin to discern the logic of religious politics and its consequence for the larger polity. When will religious politicians cooperate with secular politicians for the sake of maintaining the ethno-nationalist character of Israeli democracy?

This paper focuses on the willingness of secular and religious politicians to tolerate the ambivalence they feel toward one another. The question is the willingness of the religious political parties to disengage from elements of their doctrinal end goals in order to engage secular Jews in the coalition formation process. The process of disengagement results in a structured ambivalence, a continuous gap, between religious ideals and democratic reality. How does a religious actor manage the ambivalence central to the ethnic-democratic experience? We will consider party doctrines, the structure of religious authority within a party and changes in both the political system and the surrounding society.

AMBIVALENCE AND ISRAEL'S ETHNIC DEMOCRACY