Israel: From Democracy to Confessional Rule |
Israel Is Being Rewired Into a Confessional State, and I Refuse to Call It “Identity”
I am no longer interested in the comfortable posture of the distant analyst. I am watching Israel being deliberately rewired: from a democratic arena of competing claims into a regime where one confessional authority increasingly behaves like a source of jurisdiction, and public space is treated as territory to be disciplined in its name. This is not a culture war. It is institutional redesign.
On December 17, 2025, The Times of Israel reported that the coalition advanced a bill framed as the “Realization of Jewish Identity in the Public Sphere,” described as aiming to ensure the ability of Israelis to “express their national and religious identity.” In practice, the mechanism is sharper than the slogan: it criminalizes “interference” with Orthodox religious practices in public. That phrasing is not a technical footnote. It is the pivot.
In a democratic sense, religious freedom is symmetrical. It protects persons, not blocs; conscience, not monopoly; the right to practice, not the right to impose. When a state turns one bloc’s public ritual into a protected state interest and attaches criminal liability to “interference,” it manufactures asymmetry. It does not need to prosecute often. It only needs the law to be usable. The mere possibility becomes a governance tool.
This is how democratic decline happens in real time: by re-engineering the risk landscape. One group receives legal shelter as entitlement. Others inherit exposure for objecting, delaying, questioning, or insisting on civic neutrality. Administrators learn the new rule without anyone having to teach it explicitly: do not interpret, do not balance, do not mediate. Comply early, comply more than required, and hope the file never lands on the wrong desk. That is institutional conditioning.
Here is the concrete picture I do not want us to pretend we........