Sovereignty in Hebrew and the Decline of Democracy
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Abstract
Since assuming office in December 2022, Israel's government has worked to weaken the state's democratic infrastructure. While this appears to break from a long-standing Israeli consensus on democracy, this article demonstrates that retiring democracy has long been the agenda of the faction of the Israeli right most empowered in Israel's current government, namely the settler movement. Following the discourse in Sovereignty: A Political Journal, it finds that by recasting ‘sovereignty’ as involving annexation and disenfranchizing Palestinians, the settler right has consistently portrayed democracy—and particularly the Supreme Court that serves as a check on governmental power and protects minorities—as an obstacle to ‘sovereignty.’ Considering the settler right's political vision, the article claims that defending democracy today will necessarily involve engaging contentious questions of occupation and annexation.
Contributor Notes
MEIRAV JONES is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at McMaster University and a fellow of the Kogod Research Center at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. Her research, which has been published in such outlets as Journal of the History of Ideas, Review of International Studies, and Political Studies, focuses on the intersection between Jewish sources and Western political thought, on political understandings of Judaism and the Jews, and on sovereignty and Jewish sovereignty. She completed her PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has held postdoctoral and teaching positions at Tel Aviv University, Yale University, and the University of Pennsylvania. E-mail: jonesm61@mcmaster.ca
LIHI BEN SHITRIT is the director of the Taub Center for Israel Studies and the Henry Taub Associate Professor of Israel Studies at the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at NYU. She is the author of Righteous Transgressions: Women's Activism on the Israeli and Palestinian Religious Right (2015) and Women and the Holy City: The Struggle over Jerusalem's Sacred Space (2020) as well as numerous articles and book chapters. She holds a PhD, MPhil, and MA in political science from Yale University and a BA in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. E-mail: lben@uga.edu