The proposed round table focuses on the relationship between mamlakhtiyut and Israeli perspectives on Diaspora Jewry. Mamlakhtiyut is a concept developed by David Ben-Gurion based on modern republican ideas. Ben-Gurion originally designed it around civic participation, the rule of law, patriotic loyalty, and the authority of a democratic state`s institutions in normative, social and cultural issues. However, mamlakhtiyut is not merely an Israeli-flavored form of Republicanism. It is characterized by a unique national and trans-national context: a tension between global Jewish solidarity and an Israeli-centered civic alliance and patriotic loyalty. Both are intrinsic to the raison d`être of the State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, as well as its own citizens, Jews and non-Jews alike – It belongs both to all its citizens and to the Jewish people as a whole.
We, therefore, aim to assess the viability of this historic tension and its impact on the relationship between Israel and American Jewry through the following perspectives:
The first presentation, of Prof. Avi Bareli, addresses Israeli mamlakhtiyut and American Republicanism through national, civic and diasporic concepts. It will focus on the tension between Israel as a country that belongs equally to all of its citizens, regardless of ethnic or religious affiliations, and its commitment to the Jewish people, regardless of where they reside. This tension will be analyzed via an analysis of the concepts of belonging and ownership, and exemplified through two cases: Israel’s Arab citizens and Jews who reside outside of Israel and.
The second presentation, of Prof. Ofer Shiff, offers two competing definitions to the concept of Jewish solidarity, and explores the ways in which various groups in Israel and the Jewish world perceived its centrality. The two different definitions lead to two possible Israeli answers to the question “Who is a Jew?”. The first answer is that Israel’s role is to lead a form of pan-Jewish solidarity aimed at combating fluid borders between Jews and non-Jews, and against the dangers of assimilation and integration into non-Jewish societies. The second possible answer is in the form of pan-Jewish solidarity that ought to be led by Israel and rests on the search for a common meaning among various, often competing groups in a world characterized by fluid borders. This possible route includes providing legitimacy to different, occasionally contradicting answers that this search brings.
The third presentation, of Talia Gorodess, focuses on the boundaries of the desired American-Jewish involvement in Israel prior to its establishment in 1948, as part of Ben-Gurion’s early mamlakhti vision. It thus shows the forty-year-old origins of the Blaustein-Ben-Gurion ’understanding’ (1950). The common view is that this understanding formed a ‘precedent’ in the mutual boundaries it set on Israel’s relationship with American Jewry. However, these boundaries were hardly new; in an article published in the Poale Zion newspaper HaAchdut in 1910, Ben-Gurion laid out his view on American Zionism and its role vis-a-vis the Zionist project. This presentation will explore Ben-Gurion’s perspective and examine its later application in the form of several encounters with Hadassah Women during his stay in America in the 1910s.
The final presentation, of Dr. Adi Sherzer, focuses on the place of Diaspora Jewry in Israel’s Government Yearbook, as designed by Ben-Gurion. Part of Ben-Gurion’s mamlakhti outlook included certain government accountability, which translated into a comprehensive report by the government to its people. The Yearbook included statistics and annual reports from various government bodies, and opened with a long, programmatic article written by Ben-Gurion himself. The yearbooks in general and the articles, in particular, raise the question to whom does Israel’s government report to and what are the boundaries of its imagined body-politic? Interestingly, the Yearbook included relatively few mentions of the state of Israel’s non-Jewish residents, but Diaspora Jews are a much more prominent topic, with numerous reports and analyses regarding the state of World Jewry. Nonetheless, the place of Diaspora Jewry in this source remains liminal, as they are simultaneously portrayed inside and outside of the Israeli collective.