Religion and State among the Palestinian-Arabs in Israel: A Multicultural Entrapment


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The religion-and-state debate in Israel is Jewish centred and systematically disregards the Palestinian-Arab minority. This is rather puzzling. For the religion-and-state debate in many other countries does take up conflicts pertaining to minority religions, and the Palestinian-Arab minority did generate quite a diverse series of questions that could have easily qualified as part of the existing debate. In this article, I decode this anomaly by pointing out the existence of a legal matrix in the Israeli religion-and-state debate. This matrix identifies the recognition accorded to Jewish religious institutions and norms as “public and coercive” but that accorded to the Palestinian-Arabs as “private and liberal”. In the second part of this article, I point out some of the legal implications of this matrix as well as critically evaluate if what seems to be “private and liberal” is in fact as such.