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The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace at Last.

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The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace at Last, by Bernard Avishai. Harcourt, 2008. 290 pages. $26.00, hardcover.

How can Israel remain Jewish and democratic when its occupation of the West Bank denies Palestinians basic political rights? When its Arab citizens, one-fifth of the population, are victimized by discriminatory laws that favor Jews as individuals? When legally privileged Jewish Orthodox institutions threaten the civil liberties of secular Jews and non-Jews? These questions, which make it plain that the primary threats to Israel's survival are basically internal, form the focus of this thoughtful and provocative volume by the widely published political economist Bernard Avishai.

Avishai notes that when Israel became a state in 1948, it not only lacked a written constitution, it also inherited institutions such as the Jewish Agency, the Jewish National Fund, Zionist political parties and an Orthodox rabbinate that had been established to advance particularistic Jewish interests. At the same time, the new state, with Arabs constituting one-fifth of the population, also embraced universalistic democratic tenets, including protection of life, body, dignity, property and privacy. The tension between these contradictory commitments manifests itself in several ways: the fusion of politics and religion, the absence of a standard for earning Israeli nationality, and the legal sanctioning of discriminatory policies against...

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