In a talk at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute on February 22, 2026, Israeli academic Alexander Yakobson discusses the question of national and civic identity in Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. He suggests adopting terminology that distinguishes between three concepts: Jews in Israel and the Diaspora as a ‘people’, Jews in Israel as a ‘nationality’, and an Israeli ‘civic nation’ that includes all the citizens of the state – Jews, Arabs and others.

One of the fundamental and permanent facts of our life here is that in this land ‘from the river to the sea’ there are two peoples. Pointing this out is currently considered some kind of left-wing act in Israel, but it is an undoubted fact, regardless of anybody’s ideology. Indeed, this fact appears in the first paragraph of Jabotinsky’s The Iron Wall, where he writes that ‘there will always be two peoples in Palestine.’ This basic fact cannot be changed. If Israel is defeated, God forbid, then yes, it can be changed – but not otherwise. There is no way it can be changed by Israel – if only for the simple reason that no country will enable such a thing by accepting a displaced Palestinian population.

Moreover, I also have a basic assessment, which of course doesn’t pretend to be a fact, but this is my strong assessment: that nobody in Israel – neither Jews nor Arabs, neither the right nor the left, neither secular nor religious people – has, or can expect to have in any foreseeable future, a better option than the State of Israel and Israeli democracy.

The fact of two peoples in this land is, of course, the basis for the idea of two states for two peoples, the idea that I support. But I want to focus on the ramifications of this fact on questions of identity within the state of Israel, among different groups of Israeli citizens. Obviously, the notion of two peoples means that among the citizens of Israel there are two distinct national groups: a national majority (Jews) and a national minority (Arabs). In such a situation there is no basis in Israeli reality for the idea – which is accepted in other places and which is perfectly legitimate and proper where conditions favour it – of a single national identity shared by all citizens, what is referred to as ‘civic nationalism’. If there are, indisputably, two national identities within the citizen body, there is, by definition, no single national identity shared by all citizens.

The idea that we should cultivate the notion of an Israeli national identity common to all citizens is fine as an idea, but it is groundless in Israeli reality simply because neither side of this proposed ‘marriage’ has any intention of giving up its identity, in any foreseeable future. The Jewish majority has no intention of giving up the notion that it is part of the Jewish people, its connection to the Jewish people of the Diaspora. That is the basis of its identity, and this is not about to change. Nor is the Arab minority in Israel going to give up its Arab national identity, its connection to the Palestinian people outside Israel (a notion supported by an overwhelming majority of Arab citizens), and, more broadly, its connection to the Arab world.

In such a situation there is no point in trying to engineer a new national identity in which neither side is interested. In principle that may change in some distant future (I actually don’t think it will, but I don’t want to rule out anything for the future.) If the two sides were to decide in favour of such a ‘marriage’, then there would be no room for a Jewish state, because then there would be no Jewish people in this country, but rather an Israeli peoplehood as a national identity common to all citizens – and then Israel would be properly defined as nation state of this Israeli people rather than a Jewish nation-state. This ‘marriage’ is the alternative to the notion of Israel as a Jewish state, and this alternative does not fit the self-identification of both the majority and the minority.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE MAJORITY AND THE MINORITY

At any rate, what we have to work with now is the existing map of national identities in this country. But while those who suggest promoting the idea of civic nationalism in Israel are proposing the wrong solution, they are trying to solve a real problem.  I will give them credit for that.  The problem that they are trying to solve is very real. Because the question that arises from the current situation and the current definitions according to which there are citizens belonging to two groups with no shared national identity is: where does this place the minority vis-à-vis the majority, and vis-à-vis the state itself?

That is a question we must deal with. To some extent, this question arises in any country in which there are national minorities – groups of citizens who assert not merely ethnic or cultural distinctness, but a national identity that distinguishes them from the majority. Naturally, things are more complicated in a situation like in Israel where there is a large national minority in the midst of a prolonged national conflict between the state and the people to whom they (overwhelmingly) regard themselves as belonging. If as Ruth Gavison said – and this is a position that I fully support – the State of Israel realises the right of the Jewish people to self-determination, and it is therefore a Jewish nation state with equality of civil rights, if the state is identified clearly, explicitly, with the national identity of the majority – where does that place the minority in relation to the state? Does that mean that the state is not theirs? If it is the state of the Jewish people, as the law says, does that mean it is not the state of anyone who does not belong to the Jewish people? Does that mean that, for members of the minority, the state is not theirs, or less theirs?

The term ‘Jewish state’ does allow for such an interpretation, that the state of the Jewish people is by definition not a state of anyone who does not belong to the Jewish people. This has always been the claim of the ideological opponents of the Jewish state. This is not how the term ‘Jewish state’ was understood by the founders of the Zionist movement, this is not what the term means in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, and this is not what it means legally under the case-law of the Supreme Court of Israel.  But now those who drafted the Nation-State Law [formally ‘the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People’] have in fact accepted this interpretation, by refusing to include in the law a guarantee of civic equality or any acknowledgement of the value of common Israeli citizenship and of the fact that in a democracy, sovereignty lies with the civic community as a whole, and not only with the majority people. They decided that since they have the political power, they can liberate themselves from the constraints of ‘political correctness’, and the text they produced really gives expression to an ethnocentric interpretation of the idea of a Jewish nation state.

If we are trying to make Israel a better state, or at least prevent it from becoming a worse state, at this stage, then our aim should not be to design new identities, but to build on something that is already there, and that in principle nobody disputes – the Israeli citizenship, a shared ‘Israeliness’ as citizenship.

THIN AND THICK CITIZENSHIPS

I am not referring to citizenship in the thin, formal sense – an identity card and the obligation to obey the law – but rather a notion of citizenship that is a significant, ‘thick’ identity, one that gives all the citizens of Israel the feeling that the state is fully theirs, that they are fully at home in it. That is a duty of fairness on the part of the state towards all its citizens, and it is also a clear national interest. We must make clear in what sense Israel is a state ‘of’ the Jewish people. A nation state with a large national minority is indeed a state ‘of’ the majority people in a significant sense: in that it realises the majority people’s right to self-determination and national independence; in that it turns them, as was the case with Israel’s establishment, from a stateless people into a people with a state ‘of’ their own. But it is does not belong to them as a piece of property to the exclusion of citizens who belong to national minorities, because citizenship in a democracy means an equal share in the state. And this ‘thick’ notion of common Israeli citizenship should be fostered and cultivated – by state policy and by public rhetoric.

Needless to say, this is an extremely difficult task under present conditions. But those who believe that it is impossible in principle are wrong – this is what the ‘Jewish and democratic state’, just as any democratic nation state with a significant national minority, should mean. Moreover this ‘Israeliness’, this ‘Israeli we’ is far from being a purely theoretical concept. It actually exists, under almost impossible conditions.  Everybody knows that it exists among the small Druze community, but it also exists far beyond it. Of course, it doesn’t exist to a sufficient degree, but it exists in practice, in various important spheres of Israeli social reality much more than we usually assume when we discuss those issues. It exists, but it is rarely verbalised, among other things because there is not a commonly accepted terminology for verbalising it.

For example, in a recent poll published by the Israel Democracy Institute, 44 percent of Arab respondents said they were quite proud or very proud to be Israelis (with 29 percent saying ‘not proud at all’, others: ‘not so much’, or ‘no opinion’). There is nothing new in this:  I have been following these polls since early 2000s and for many years, a large  part of Arab citizens has been giving this answer to the question about pride in being Israeli  – usually above 40 percent, but not seldom above 50s, and once, I recall, above 60 percent. But this poll was taken in the spring of 2025, during the stage of intensive fighting in Gaza, and, needless to say, under the present coalition government. Indeed, in the two previous years, the figure of those who expressed pride in being Israeli had fallen to 20 percent and 30 percent – an exceptionally low mark. And now it has risen again. So this feeling, this ‘thick’ Israeli identity, certainly exists among the Arab citizens. It barely dares to speak its name, it is not encouraged, to put it mildly, by the present government – nor is it in any manner encouraged by most of those who speak for the Arab community. But it exists.

PEOPLE, NATIONALITY, NATION

I want to make a proposal regarding the terminology that we use on matters of identity. Terminology does not in and of itself solve any problems, but it can sometimes help – and it can certainly cause damage when used badly. Today we use these three Hebrew terms interchangeably; Am – people; Le’om – nationality, or national  identity; and Umma – nation.

These terms have different meanings in different contexts in different languages, and this is not a matter of finding a ‘scientific’ definition. But I think it would be a good idea in Israel to distinguish between these terms and to use them as follows. First, the Jewish people. The notion of Jewish peoplehood is important for Israeli Jews and for those Diaspora Jews who wish to share it. Second, the Jewish-Israeli nationality, or national identity (“Le’om” in Hebrew):  – the Jewish-Israeli collective is that part of the Jewish people that lives as a full-fledged national community,   And I suggest that we should adopt the notion of  the Israeli civic nation that includes all Israeli citizens, including, of course, the Arab national minority.  Naturally, no definition of identity can be forced on anyone. But I believe that such terminology can give expression both to Israel being a national home of the Jewish people , and to it being a common homeland to all its citizens – not ‘civic nationalism’,  but a common civic nationhood.