The State That Refuses Its Own Nationality

On Identity Cards, Citizenship, and the Architecture of Exclusion

Château de David et murailles de Jérusalem, Maxime Du Camp

The party began well. Then we started talking about Israel. Soon we reached that familiar impasse where political disagreement threatens social pleasantry. My acquaintance, a seemingly sharp guy who had taken a hard right turn since October 7, was insisting that whatever its flaws, Israel remained the Middle East's only democracy where all citizens enjoyed equal rights. When I mentioned that Palestinian citizens of Israel were essentially second-class citizens despite their formal citizenship, his expression shifted from skepticism to something approaching offense. "That's simply not true," he said with the confidence of someone who'd absorbed decades of carefully crafted talking points. "Arab Israelis have the same rights as Jewish Israelis. They serve in the Knesset and on the Supreme Court."

I asked him a simple question that punctured his certainty. "Can a Palestinian citizen of Israel bring their spouse from the West Bank to live with them in Israel through family reunification?" The silence that followed was telling. Then I asked another. "Does Israel recognize an 'Israeli' nationality that encompasses all its citizens equally, or does it insist on classifying citizens as 'Jewish,' 'Arab,' 'Druze' in their official identity?" His discomfort was palpable, but it was my mention of the 2018 Nation-State Law—which explicitly reserves the right of national self-determination exclusively to Jews—that struck a chord.

This exchange illuminates something far more profound than gaps in knowledge about Israeli policy. It reveals how successfully Zionism has obscured one of its most radical innovations. Namely, the transformation of Judaism from a religious tradition into a national identity, and the simultaneous refusal to create a civic nationality that could encompass all citizens of the state. This isn't merely a bureaucratic quirk or semantic distinction. It represents what both the orthodox Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro and Israeli historian Shlomo Sand identify, albeit from very different vantage points, as one of the most audacious acts of identity reconstruction in modern history.

The Bureaucracy of Belonging

To understand the depth of this transformation, consider a telling legal case from 2013. A group of Israeli citizens petitioned the Supreme Court to allow them to register their nationality as "Israeli" rather than "Jewish," "Arab," or one of the other ethnic-religious categories the state recognizes. The court's rejection of this seemingly reasonable request revealed the architecture of exclusion built into Israel's foundation. Justice Hanan Melcer wrote that recognizing an Israeli nationality "would have weighty implications for the character of the State of Israel" and could "bring about the negation of the State's definition as a Jewish state."

The implications are staggering when you pause to consider them. Here is a modern democratic state explicitly refusing to acknowledge a common national identity for all its citizens, insisting instead that national belonging must be parceled out according to ethnic and religious categories. Imagine if France declared that only ethnic Gauls could claim French nationality while citizens of Arab or African descent must be classified differently, or if the United States officially distinguished between Anglo-American nationals and all others. The international condemnation would be swift and deserved.

Yet this arrangement in Israel has been so thoroughly normalized that even critics often miss its fundamental abnormality. The state that claims to be the Middle East's only democracy operates on a principle that would be recognized as apartheid anywhere else. There are different categories of citizenship with different rights and possibilities attached to each. The 2018 Nation-State Law didn't create this reality. It simply codified what had been in practice since 1948, stripping away the last pretenses that equality was ever the goal.

Sand's Archaeology of Invention

Shlomo Sand's controversial scholarship provides crucial context for understanding how this transformation occurred. In "The Invention of the Jewish People," Sand doesn't argue that Jews don't exist or lack genuine historical connections, which is a common misreading of his work. Rather, he demonstrates how Zionist ideologues consciously reconstructed Jewish identity from a primarily religious designation into a national one. This project required creative mythology about biological descent, racial continuity, and territorial rights that had little basis in historical fact.

Sand's research reveals how the narrative of exile and return—the foundational myth of Zionist legitimacy—was largely constructed in the 19th century. The idea that the Romans expelled the entire Jewish population from Palestine in 70 CE, that these exiles maintained racial purity across two millennia, and that their descendants had an inalienable right to return to their ancestral homeland would have seemed bizarre to most Jews throughout history. Jewish communities understood themselves as united by law, practice, and covenant, not by blood or territorial claims.

The invention Sand describes wasn't merely intellectual since it required institutional enforcement. The early Zionist movement had to overcome massive resistance from Orthodox Jews who saw the nationalist project as heretical, from assimilated Jews who had found homes elsewhere, and from Labor Bundists who sought Jewish cultural autonomy without territorial concentration. The creation of a "Jewish nationality" was thus both a political project and an act of ideological violence against competing visions of Jewish life. This resistance still exists and is the subject of my recent pieces.

What makes Sand's work particularly threatening to Zionist ideology isn't his historical revisionism but his proposal for moving forward. He argues for the creation of an actual Israeli nationality that would encompass all citizens equally. Such a civic identity would necessarily dissolve the privileged status of Jewish nationality, thereby transforming Israel from an ethnostate into a normal democratic country. The hysterical reaction to this modest proposal reveals how central ethnic hierarchy remains to the Zionist project.

The Religious Critique

If Sand approaches the question as a secular historian, Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro brings the weight of religious scholarship to bear on the same problem. His critique is perhaps even more devastating because it emerges from within the tradition that Zionism claims to represent and protect. For Shapiro, the transformation of Judaism into a nationality represents nothing less than theological catastrophe. It’s the replacement of divine covenant with political ideology and the substitution of territorial sovereignty for spiritual purpose.

"You cannot be a Jewish nationalist without destroying Judaism," Shapiro argues with characteristic directness. His extensive documentation of pre-Zionist Jewish thought reveals that for millennia, Jewish identity was understood as fundamentally different from national belonging. A Jew could be a loyal French citizen, a patriotic American, a devoted subject of the Ottoman Sultan, while maintaining their Jewish religious identity. These weren't contradictions to be resolved but the normal state of diaspora existence.

The Zionist innovation was to declare this arrangement intolerable and to insist that Jews required their own state where Jewish religious identity would merge with national identity. Bear in mind this argument was made before the Holocaust. But this fusion, Shapiro demonstrates, corrupts both religion and nationality. It transforms Judaism from a universal ethical tradition into a tribal ideology, while creating a state that cannot offer equal citizenship to non-Jews without negating its own purpose.

Consider how this plays out in contemporary Israeli society. Jewish religious symbols become instruments of territorial domination. The Torah itself gets conscripted into justifying policies that violate its most basic ethical teachings. This isn't the flourishing of Jewish life but its degradation into what Shapiro calls "state idolatry."

The Nation-State Law's Clarifying Brutality

The 2018 “Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People” represents the culmination of this trajectory. By declaring that "the exercise of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish people," the law acknowledges what critics had long argued. Israel is not a state of all its citizens but an ethnostate that privileges one group above all others.

The law's other provisions follow this logic with relentless consistency. Hebrew alone is the official language, while Arabic—spoken by 20% of citizens—is demoted to "special status." Jewish settlement is declared a "national value" to be encouraged and promoted. The Jewish calendar, Jewish holidays, and Jewish symbols are enshrined as state fixtures. Every clause reinforces the same message: this state exists for Jews, and all others live here at sufferance.

My acquaintance at the party wanted to believe in a different Israel. One that somehow balanced Jewish character with democratic equality. The Nation-State Law makes such comfortable delusions impossible to maintain. It forces recognition that the contradiction between "Jewish" and "democratic" isn't a bug in the system but its essential feature. A state that defines itself as belonging to a global ethnoreligious group rather than its actual citizens cannot offer genuine equality any more than the Jim Crow South could offer "separate but equal."

Sand and Shapiro, approaching from opposite directions, arrive at compatible conclusions. The invention of Jewish nationality was a political project that required the destruction of Judaism's religious and ethical core. The refusal to create an Israeli nationality that could encompass all citizens reveals that equality was never the goal. The Nation-State Law's explicit codification of ethnic supremacy strips away the last veils of democratic pretense.

Reclaiming the Possible

The transformation of Judaism from a religious tradition into a national identity hasn't resolved the tensions of modern Jewish existence. It has weaponized them. Only by recognizing this transformation as a historical choice rather than inevitable destiny can we begin to imagine alternatives that honor both Jewish continuity and human equality. Here, Sand's proposal for a civic Israeli nationality offers not an abstract ideal but a practical path forward from the wreckage Zionism has created.

Those who speak of dismantling Israel entirely ignore the reality of millions of Jews who now call that land home, just as those who fantasize about Palestinian expulsion deny the indigenous population's unbreakable connection to the same territory. Neither maximalist vision offers anything but continued bloodshed. What's needed isn't more dreams of total victory but a clear-eyed reckoning with the existing reality. A single state already controls everyone between the river and the sea, parceling out rights based on religious and ethnic categories.

The creation of an inclusive Israeli nationality wouldn't solve everything, but it would be a step toward shattering the legal framework that enables systematic discrimination. When all citizens share the same national designation and rights are attached to citizenship rather than ethnicity, the elaborate system of privilege and exclusion loses its bureaucratic foundation. Sand understands that genuine security comes not from demographic dominance but from genuine equality.

The path forward demands abandoning both the fantasy of ethnic purity and the delusion of separation. Palestinians aren't going anywhere, despite the fever dreams of Israel's right. Jews aren't leaving either, regardless of what some extremists might wish. These populations are intertwined now in ways that make partition impossible economically, geographically, and demographically. The only question is whether they'll share the land as equals or whether one group will continue dominating the other while calling it democracy.

Sand's vision of civic nationality offers an exit from this deadly binary and a way to preserve Jewish cultural and religious life without requiring Palestinian subjugation. It asks Jews to trade the false security of ethnic supremacy for the genuine security of equal citizenship, to recognize that their own freedom depends on Palestinian liberation. This isn't capitulation but wisdom. It requires the recognition that the transformation of Judaism into nationality was always a tragic mistake, and that undoing that mistake offers the only path toward a future worth living for everyone between the river and the sea.