Jewish/Palestinian self-determination and citizenship in Israel/Palestine

The paper presents a distinction I worked out in great detail in my book A Political Theory for the Jewish People: Three Zionist Narratives (Hebrew, 2013, submitted for publication in English) among three versions of Zionism. Mainstream Jewish and Israeli politics are based on Zionism under two conceptions of this ideology. The first is proprietary. According to this conception, Zionism initiated the physical repossession of a land and of a political entity which the Jews had owned since antiquity. This ownership has allegedly not lapsed despite the physical separation between the Jews and their land. The second mainstream conception of Zionism is hierarchical. It is based on a hegemonic interpretation of the universal right that peoples have to self-determination. According to this conception, the right to self-determination is a right to "a state whose institutions and official public culture are linked to a particular national group [and which…] puts those citizens who are not members of the preferred [group…] at a disadvantage." [Ruth Gavison, "the Jews' Right to Statehood: A Defense," Azure 15 (2003), 74-75.] The paper explains the main arguments which the proponents of these two versions of Zionism invoke in order to support their interpretation of this ideology and explicate their implications regarding citizenship and self-determination in Israel/Palestine. It then proposes a third interpretation of Zionism, an egalitarian one. This version of Zionism, which I argued for in A Just Zionism, falls between the two mainstream conceptions mentioned above, and on the other hand, the post-Zionist critique of the notion of "a Jewish and democratic state"

Citizenship and nationhood

Citizenship in this chapter means membership of a state. Nationhood means membership of a “nation”, which is a particular type of cultural and/or ethnic collective. I first set out the reasons that liberals and anti-liberals have given for making citizenship and nationhood coterminous. Second, I describe the major historical and sociological explanations that were advanced for the processes that helped create this overlap, the methods that states and other political agents have adopted to realize it, and the practical and moral obstacles that these agents have always faced. Third, I discuss the positions of contemporary liberals on the issue, including the position I believe to be appropriate. The discussion concludes that the ideal of full overlap between citizenry and nationhood should be rejected both constitutionally and certainly demographically. However, it endorses arrangements allowing for a limited identification of states’ citizenries with one or a few national groups