Presenting Ethnicity: Israeli Citizenship Discourse

Introduction

Israel’s citizenship laws, like most citizenship laws around the world, articulate the rules for entering and leaving the polity (rather than regulating the internal relations between the various groups or presenting the rights or obligations in each country). The Law of Return (1950) and the Citizenship Law (1952) clearly identify Israel’s citizenship regime with its ethnic principles (e.g., Harel-Shalev & Peleg, 2014; Rosenhek, 2011; Rouhana, 1998; Samooha, 1989; Shachar, 2000; Shafir & Peled, 2002; Weiss, 2002; Yiftachel, 2006). In keeping with the central Zionist goal of encouraging Jewish immigration to Israel, article 1 of the Law of Return states the principle of return decisively and explicitly: “Every Jew has the right to come to his country as an oleh [Jewish immigrant].”

The enactment of the ethnic component in the Citizenship Law (1952) was celebrated by the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) members as an important occasion that complemented the Law of Return (1950). Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion argued that:

… The Law of Return and the Law of Citizenship that you have in front of you are connected by a mutual bond and share of common conceptual origin, deriving from the historical uniqueness of the State of Israel, a uniqueness vis-à-vis the past and the future, directed internally and externally. These two laws determine the special character and destiny of the State of Israel as the state bearing the vision of the redemption of Israel. (Ben-Gurion, 1950, p. 2035) ¹

One of the foundational aspects of the Zionist ideology, which comes to the fore during the debates on these bills, is the understanding that the Israeli state does not provide a license for Jewish immigration, but it only formalizes the “natural” right of any Jew to live in Israel.

In this article, I ask how Israel presented its social boundaries and how it justified those provisions that classify people according to their inherited traits. This policy had led opponents and criticizers of Zionism to condemn it as racist. Therefore, it is important to explore and understand how this social construct was understood and utilized by the constructors of Israel’s citizenship laws.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the term “race” is generally used as a signifier for negative (and even heinous) practices and belief systems. Nevertheless, the intent of this article is not to utilize this term to show that Israel was evil or immoral. In contrast to popular perspectives, I am investigating citizenship practices that employ ascriptive categorizations to understand the social construction of “difference” and its articulation. To this end, I look at the instances in which Israel classified the population according to biological descent or collective characteristics and the means by which these classifications were justified.

Fields of Study

From an analytical perspective, this article lies at the intersection between three areas of study. Therefore, my literature review covers those fields: issues relating to the importance of immigration policies in relation to perception of citizenship and nationhood; the construction of social categories such as race; and the history of immigration policies in Israel.

Scholars of citizenship have traditionally discussed two issues: who is allowed to join each state and become a full citizen (e.g., Brubaker, 1992; Joppke, 2010; Joppke & Rosenhek, 2001; Smith, 1997) and what rights and responsibilities are associated with the legal status of citizenship (e.g., Isin & Wood, 1999; Kymlicka, 1995; Marshall, 1992). In the current study, I look at the former question and investigate attitudes in the Knesset toward immigration and naturalization.

All countries create immigration laws. The regulations governing entry into the national community and the inclusion of new members in it are dependent on the understanding of who, in the first place, should belong to the national “we.” Although citizenship and immigration policy are not the same thing, immigration policies are usually derived from the perception of citizenship in each country. Moreover, one of the main methods of investigating citizenship empirically is by looking at who can become a citizen through immigration. “Admission and exclusion are at the core of communal independence. They suggest the deepest meaning of self-determination” (Walzer, 1983, p. 62). Determining who becomes a member is the state’s way of shaping and defining the national community.

According to Brubaker (1992), Germany and France differ in their conception of citizenship. While France’s model is one of territorial inclusion and assimilative citizenship (jus soli), Germany subscribes to a model of nationhood based on ethnic inclusion (jus sanguinis). “The French understand their nation as the creation of their state, the Germans their nation as the basis of their state” (Brubaker, 1992, p. 184). The former gives priority to the protection of individual rights within the territory of the state, while the latter emphasizes ethnic origin as the criterion for equal citizenship or naturalization. In terms of this analytical framework, Israeli citizenship follows the jus sanguinis principle by favoring a particular ethnic group.

Smith (1997) expands Brubaker’s original arguments and argues that there is another significant tradition of citizenship—republicanism. The civic ideal of republicanism rests on the assumption that an institution such as citizenship must rely on a meaningful human community. To form such a community, republicanism preaches an ethos of civic virtue, economic regulation, and active participation in advancing the common good (as understood by the state). A noteworthy difference to both territorial and ethnic citizenship is that republicanism bases membership on consent, not on inherited traits (being born in a particular geographical area or to a particular lineage).

From this perspective, there is an affinity between the racial categories and the Israeli immigration regime. “Descent-based approaches to national membership have obvious racist overtones, and are manifestly unjust” (Kymlicka, 1995, p. 23). Nonetheless, the ethnic preference given to Jews to immigrate to Israel is not purely racial. First, the Jewish collective is not strictly closed, and there is a possibility of conversion into the Jewish faith. Second, until 1970, the Law of Return did not specify “who is a Jew,” and anyone who claimed to be Jewish was admitted to the Jewish State. However, even with such “open” boundaries, a jus sanguinis classification based on ancestry and bloodline was the foundation of the Israeli immigration regime. “While Jews may not be a race in the biological, genetic or phenological sense, they often behave and are treated as a ‘race’ in this social-historical sense.” (Kaplan, 2003, p. 79)

Scholars of race and racism tried to address the question of whether we can view ethnic classifications as a type of racial categorization. From an analytical perspective, race and discrimination are different social constructs. Racism is an attitude, a prejudice, and an ideational system held in individual human minds that categorizes human behavior according to “given” (rather than acquired) traits. Discrimination, segregation, ostracism, and so on, are forms of behavior which include or exclude certain groups, and which are frequently, but not necessarily, associated with the racist beliefs of their practitioners. Jones (1997) argues that racism can be personal (which may be considered the same as prejudice); institutional (involving a set of environmental conditions, like housing market conditions, that favor one group over another); or cultural (referring to shared beliefs about the superiority of one group over another).

Another distinction is between ethnicity and race. An ethnic group is defined as a social category of people who share a common culture, nationality, religion, norms, practices, customs, and history. Conversely, race is a division between distinct groups based upon certain biological characteristics, which have been assigned social importance. This division between cultural and biological partitions has normative significance. Culture, which is not necessarily inherent, “reflects the rationalist individualism that has come to permeate identity and groups formation in contemporary ‘world society’” (Joppke, 2005, p. 6), and therefore is perceived as legitimate.

Since race was socially defined, and ethnicity was often based on a theory of common descent, the distinction between the two was held to be spurious. Although writing 100 years ago, Weber (1978[1922]) understood this in an era in which anthropological types were seen as natural classifications: “We shall call ‘ethnic groups’ those human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent … it does not matter whether or not an objective blood relationship exists” (1978[1922], p. 389). In this sense, we can locate distinctions in Israel that can be seen as “racial”, even when the subjects themselves vigorously maintain that this belief system is inadequate to describe the social reality.

This article is in dialogue with academic literature on symbolic or new racism that deals with the transition from blatant to implicit racism. There is a general agreement among scholars that racism is more subtle, covert, and gentler than in past centuries. Among the schemes employed are color-blind racism, laissez-faire racism, symbolic racism, and systemic racism (Byrd, 2011). Etienne Balibar (2005) has suggested that difference, otherness, and exclusion are also cultural categories, which reproduce racism; since the end of the twentieth century, there is even racism “without races.” Despite the multiple denunciations and criticisms of racist doctrines, attitudes, discourses, and policies, racism still plays (and will continue to play) a crucial part in the social condition.

The civil rights movement and the abolition of the Jim Crow system ²

Moreover, scholars have also questioned the validity of the distinction between belief and behavior, and between prejudice and discrimination in relation to racial inequality. That is, the concept of “institutional racism” referred to the form of racism, involving the negative treatment and oppression of one racial or ethnic group by society’s existing institutions and may be independent of individual attitudes.

In Israel, using racial terminology is immediately perceived as being associated with the Holocaust and the hideous atrocities of the Nazi regime (Herzog, Sharon, & Leykin, 2008). In relation to a benchmark such as that, Israel’s policies have never been racial—not within the Jewish world, nor toward Arabs. Until the 1970s, using racial terminology was considered taboo, both when discussing Jewish-Arab relations (Herzog, et al., 2008) and when talking about Jewish ethnic groups (Hirsch, 2008). There was (and still is) popular and academic acceptance that there is no racism in Israel. Even the most critical social scientists, who studied the social segregation of and discrimination against groups such as Arabs, foreign workers, Mizrahi, or Ethiopian Jews, refrained from describing Israel in explicitly racial terminology (Shenhav & Yonah, 2008). The Israeli–Arab conflict is presented as a national conflict, while conflicts between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews are usually depicted as conflicts within “the family” (Ben-Eliezer, 2004).

In this article, I advance beyond the debate about whether Israeli immigration policies are unjust (Ben-Porat & Turner, 2011; Shafir & Peled, 1998) or morally valid (Gans, 2008; Kasher, 1985; Yakobson & Rubinstein, 2003), in order to locate the social classification schemes utilized during the 1950s.

Classifications in Israeli Citizenship Laws

This study focused on the communication policies that differentiate between social groups according to their descent. Therefore, my primary sources were official state policies and parliamentary debates in Israel. By analyzing the presentation of immigration policies, rather than their actual implementations, I have been able to locate the mechanisms employed by the Israeli state to disguise racial discrimination in its immigration policy.

My empirical investigation looked at two settings in which Israeli politicians discussed the Law of Return and the Citizenship Law: the protocols of the Knesset plenum and the protocols of the subcommittee especially created to formulate the Citizenship Law. At the outset, the two laws were supposed to be legislated together, and the public debates on the laws began in the Knesset plenum on 3 July 1950. However, as the administration attributed to the Law of Return a festive significance, it decided to enact the law quickly. Two days afterwards, the Knesset voted on the law, while it continued to debate the Citizenship Law for another two years.

The debates on the Citizenship Law began on 10 July 1950. At this meeting, it was decided to continue the debates in a Knesset committee. The bill was discussed in the committee for a year and a half over the course of 33 meetings; 19 meetings in the first Knesset between 8 August 1950 and 22 May 1951; and 14 meetings in the second Knesset between 5 December 1951 and 27 March 1952. As the proposal was extended to the second Knesset, the first hearing was repeated in the plenum on 20 November 1951. The Knesset voted on the Citizenship Law on 1 April 1952.

Both the special subcommittee and Knesset plenum discussed similar issues during debates on the Citizenship Law (1952). Those issues included Arabs residing in Israel, automatic citizenship for Jews, dual citizenship, and naturalization. However, as the goal of this article is to locate the categorizations and its terminology, I do not merely compare the debates with those in the committee but assess those debates in relation to the actual policy that was finally passed.

The deliberations during the first reading of the Law of Return celebrated the enacting of a law that finally conferred independent citizenship on Jews. The two main issues that were debated were whether to allow dual citizenship (for Jews and non-Jews) and whether the law discriminated against the Arab inhabitants. Both issues referred to the Israeli Citizenship Law, which, initially, was discussed together with the Law of Return. All parliament members, including the Arab Knesset members, voted unanimously in favor of the law. However, although the Law of Return was based on a distinction between Jews and non-Jews that can be seen as racial, except for one Knesset member, no one remarked on this fact.

MK Yaacov Gil (Lifschitz) from the General Zionists Party acknowledged that “citizenship is a family. A big family or one clan, one nation, one race” (Gil, 1950, p. 2044). Moreover, nationalism is made up of four pillars—territory, administration, culture, and race. From Gil’s perspective, the Israeli state “should not settle for the cement called race” (Gil, 1950, p. 2045) and must develop the first three factors (which are not shared by all Jews).

During the second hearing of the Law of Return, which was by now separated from the Citizenship Law, Meir Vilner (Israel Communist Party) argued that the Law of Return was clearly racist. He proclaimed that the fact that all Jews in Israel, whether they immigrated to Israel or were native-born, would be registered as citizens according to the Law of Return, was prejudicial against the native Arab population. MK Tawfik Toubi (Israel Communist Party) also had similar observations, but, perhaps because he was an Arab, refrained from directly accusing the State of racism. This position was not accepted by the rest of the Jewish Knesset members.

After the Law of Return was enacted, the debates on the Citizenship Law continued for two more years, both in the Knesset plenum and in a subcommittee of the Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee especially created to formulate the Citizenship Law.

During the debates on the law, members of the Israeli Communist Party continued to argue that the law was prejudicial against the Arab population. In most cases, the MKs did not explicitly accuse the Israeli state of being racist but asserted that it created a policy of discrimination against Arabs. On two occasions, the notion of race was explicitly mentioned. Though not using the term race, MK Emil Habibi (Israel Communist Party) argued:

If this clause remains in the wording that most of the committee imposes on us, thousands of Arab inhabitants of this country will be found to be residents, not citizens in their country and homeland, in the land of their fathers and forefathers. Did you hear that such a miracle would happen even in America itself, the “Wonderland” the land that hangs niggers on telephone poles? (Habibi, 1952, p. 1683)

On the other hand, MK Shmuel Mikunis (Israel Communist Party) maintained openly that:

We will vote against the Citizenship Law because it is based on anti-Arab racial foundations that harm not only the Arab residents, but also the entire Jewish people. Because this law is against the interest of peace between our people and the Arab peoples in this part of the world; because the law undermines our future and disgraces the state. (Mikunis, 1952, p. 1862)

Not only was this viewpoint not accepted by most politicians, it was constantly mentioned that the Citizenship Law is actually progressive and assimilationist. MKs from all the Zionist political parties maintained that, in spite of the hostilities and continued hatred between Arabs and Jews, the new law officially grants full citizenship rights to the Arab inhabitants in Israel. That is, although the primary goal of the new state was to establish a Jewish identity and majority, Israel should be a democratic country, which accepts the Palestinian inhabitants who reside within Israeli territory. The debate was not whether the original Palestinian inhabitants should receive citizenship, but about the conditions for those inhabitants to be granted citizenship. These conditions included that they must truly be from the area (rather than foreign workers from Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, or any other Arab country), and that they had not left (or fled) the country during the 1948 War. It was repeatedly mentioned that Israeli citizenship would be granted to Palestinian refugees only if future peace treaties would dictate it.

MK Zerach Warhaftig (United Religious Front) summarized this position aptly:

In the state of Israel there are two natural citizens: a) any Jew who makes Aliyah to Israel, according to the Law of Return; b) the permanent inhabitants in the country, which were tied to its land before the establishment of the Israeli state. We should decide what determines the inhabitant’s connection to it. (Warhaftig, 1950, p. 3)

MK Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (Mapai) accepted this logic stating that:

… from the discussion here, it is clear that there is a common will, without party difference, to extend automatic citizenship, in addition to the Law of Return which is basic to all Aliyah [Jewish immigration]. The inclusion of the residents of the Land of Israel, irrespective of race, religion, or nationality, is obvious. And this makes our task [in legislating this law] much easier. (Ben-Zvi, 1950, p. 14)

In contrast to the allegations that the Israeli state was trying to exclude Arabs from obtaining Israeli citizenship, it was repeatedly maintained that Israel is liberal and permits the naturalization of non-Jews. MK Haim-Moshe Shapira (United Religious Front), the Interior Minister, stated that:

I think that we were quite relaxed with this law when we granted the right of automatic citizenship to 63,000 non-Jews registered on November 30, 1948 … The rest of the non-Jews, who did not register on that date, will need to request to be naturalized according to section 6. Those who deserted the country or left it in order to fight it—and those days are not long gone, we remember them—need to make this small effort: to receive their citizenship according to section 6. (Shapira, 1950, pp. 2134–2135)

Although the Law of Return is totally structured according to ethnic citizenship tradition, the Citizenship Law did, indeed, combine ethnic, republican, and liberal components (Herzog, 2017). The first part of the law describes the different routes for acquiring Israeli citizenship. While the first section restated the ethnic principle of the Law of Return—(a) that any Jew who immigrates to, or lives in, Israel automatically becomes an Israeli citizen—the next provisions cover the granting of citizenship (but not automatically) according to both the liberal and republican citizenship discourse. That is, (b) citizenship is granted to permanent residents (i.e., Palestinians) who lived within the territory of Israel, before and after its establishment, (c) citizenship established upon birth (jus soli) in the state’s boundaries (as long as one of the parents is an Israeli citizen), and (d) a naturalization process that requires residence, active participation, and cultural assimilation.

Moreover, in its terminology, the Citizenship Law does not use any racial classifications. That is, terms such as “Jews”, “Arabs”, or any other signifier of a particular group do not appear in the law. Likewise, the law and debates did not refer to the divisions within the Jewish world. The social division between Jews from Arab lands and European Jews, which had “racial” components (Shenhav &Yonah, 2008), is ignored. Accordingly, the law did discuss those groups but with neutral vocabulary like “inhabitants” and “Aliyah” that, at least, theoretically could refer to all racial groups.

Discussion

The Israeli public, its politicians, and scholars tend to avoid using racial terms. “Race” in Israel is immediately associated with the ultimate evil of Nazi Germany. As the pre-state Yishuv (Jewish community prior to the establishment of the State) or the Israeli state actions are considerably remote from the atrocities that took place during the Second World War, there is no doubt in the minds of Israelis that the Jewish State is not racist. Moreover, there are also several philosophical explanations elucidating why Jews are not a race. For example, Jews do not have clear and distinctive physical phenotypes, such as skin color, facial features, or hair texture; or, unlike purely racial groups, a person could convert to Judaism and join the Jewish social group; or Arabs and Jews are part of the same Semitic race and therefore their hostilities cannot be considered racial animosity.

In the current study, I found several additional mechanisms which politicians attempted to use to distance themselves from the ethnic distinction at the core of Israel’s citizenship regime, from distinguishing between Jews and non-Jews, from articulating racist terms, or being perceived as racist. Those mechanisms include emphasizing the positive and democratic sides of allowing Jewish immigration; repeatedly avoiding the usage of racial terminology; highlighting the willingness to incorporate non-Jewish residents; and employing security justifications when prohibiting non-Jewish immigration.

Politicians celebrated the enactment of the Law of Return as the most important law according to the Zionist ideology. This law was a critical correction for the Jewish condition in the past 2,000 years. Presenting the law in this light, rather than emphasizing that the law blocks non-Jewish immigration, enabled the Knesset members to disregard its negative side. As the empirical findings suggest, even in the few instances in which Zionist politicians were accused of being racists (mostly by members of the Israeli Communist Party), these allegations were swiftly and utterly rejected.

The second method to conceal any racial bias was to avoid using any racial terminology. This practice is parallel to the general taboo in Israel on speaking in racial terms prevailing until the 1970s (Herzog, et al., 2008). Two observations are particularly striking—the fact that the word “Jew” is absent from the phrasing of the Citizenship Law and that even the Arab politicians who complained about the ethnic favoritism in the Law of Return refrained from accusing Israel of being racist.

Knesset members also highlighted the fact that, although the hostilities between Arabs and Jews had not ceased, Israel was willing to give full citizenship rights to non-Jewish local inhabitants. Many of the debates in the Knesset plenum and in the special committee were devoted to the Arab residents. However, these debates dealt with the conditions in which Arabs, who are not included according to the Law of Return, would, nonetheless, receive Israeli citizenship. The assumption among the Jewish politicians was that the state was being generous. As MK David Bar-Rav-Hai (Mapai) claimed: “Section 2, as it is currently articulated, confers the maximum of automatic citizenships the State of Israel can permit in its existing condition” (Bar-Rav-Hai, 1952, p. 5).

Lastly, when the Knesset members did introduce restrictions on the naturalization of Arab residents, they justified this by citing neutral reasons—mainly not only security concerns but also bureaucratic reasons. It was repeatedly mentioned that Israeli citizenship would be granted to Palestinian refugees only if future peace treaties would dictate it.

Conclusion

The significance of this study is not only limited to the advancement of our understanding of a particular history in Israel but also our understanding of racial boundaries. Although the notion of “race” essentializes distinctions between groups, it is, nonetheless, a social construction in which particular categories are presented as if they were natural distinctions. The racialized perspective is not constant and, therefore, certain groups could be considered racist, victims of racism, and anti-racists at the same time. This depiction can also change in different periods and as employed by different observers. Therefore, the fact that Israel did not use racial terminology, and did not exercise demonic or cruel racial discrimination, did not preclude Israel from using a “given” characteristic—being a Jew—as the foundation of its immigration policy.

By looking at the immigration terminologies and policies, I have been able to show that Israeli politicians tried to distance the ethnic classifications, at the core of the Israeli immigration regime, from being expressed, or perceived as racial. First and foremost, the establishment of an immigration system that favors Jews was (and still is) seen as the greatest success of the Zionist project, the ultimate goal of the Israel State. Similar to affirmative action, this policy was understood as a correction to the history of the Jewish people rather than an act of discrimination. In Israel, security justifications played a major role in prohibiting non-Jewish immigration, but the neutral discourses of bureaucracy and economy were also employed. Another significant measure was permitting many non-Jews to acquire Israeli citizenship.