Civil Religion in Israel: from Begin to Netanyahu

This article is dedicated to a certain phenomenon of Israel political life - civil religion. Too much complicated system of relations between state and religion in this country encouraged lots of researchers, who tried to understand its unique nature combining European democratic values and Middle East attitude to traditions, religious as well. Present status-quo is backed by Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox, it coexists but sometimes conflicts with the value system, introduced by government. Israeli researcher Daniel J. Elazar in his article "Religious Parties and Politics in the Begin Era" marked out five forms of the religious influences of religion in Israel: system of Orthodox Judaism and its institutions; "popular religion"; civil religion; activity of ultra-Orthodox sector and non-Orthodox sector. This article deals with the peculiarities of "civil religion" issue as one of the instruments of religious influence in Israel. American researcher Robert Bella wrote that civil religion includes statements, symbols, rituals and institutions which legitimate and build up a society to achieve common political goals. And our research of Israeli case is based on that. The civil religion in Israel was influenced by left-wing socialist camp, which was represented by the first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. It was based on "statism". In time it became necessary to revise the basic principles, thus a "new civil religion" came to life. Despite of the fact that the new approach was also proposed by Ben-Gurion, the main progress of this new concept was gained when conservative right-wing of the Israeli political spectrum came to power under the government of the Likud Party leader Menachem Begin. There are three main targets of the civil religion in Israel: integration, legitimation and mobilization. The greatest development of the "new civil religion" had been reached after the 1967 war, when instead the concept of "Jewish state" almost replaced the concept of "State of Israel". However the situation changed dramatically with the arrival of one million citizens from former Soviet Union. New Israelis not only forced the country's leadership to review the existing system of absorption, but also the question of determining the correlation between the religious Jews and status quo with the democratic principles of the state once again became burning. The actuality of the topic is proved by the whole situation in Israel exposing the problems that require the revision of many aspects of the status quo in general, and particularly the approach to the formation of civil religion. To somehow resolve the problem the law of civil status was changed and also an attempt was made to put on the agenda the Basic Law: "Jewish State".

Keywords

Authors

References