On the Uses and Abuses of Tradition: Zionist Theopolitics and Jewish Tradition

Arguing against the prevalence of a “religion and politics” discourse, this chapter discusses some of the ways in which this duality, while being constantly constructed and deconstructed, affirmed and violated, functions to enable the nation-state to act on racial logic, while preserving its self-image as enlightened, secular, and liberal. The chapter focuses on the Israeli case, and more specifically the ways in which the theopolitics of the state correspond with Jewish traditions. It argues that the admittedly murky yet persistent sense of a fundamental distinction between matters that are secular and of the state’s and matters that are religious and are not of the state’s, which dominates the political (and, to a large degree, also the social-scientific) discourse in Israel, functions to allow the state to be principally based on a racial logic of belonging and Otherness, while celebrating itself as democratic, liberal, and enlightened (as is “naturally expected” from a secular, or at least “not-religious,” entity). This is enabled by a division of labor that puts the “burden” of maintaining and applying the racially-logical criteria of inclusion and exclusion - which is vital for the state’s upholding of its very raison d’être - on the “religious” (people, institutions, parties, and so on).