ABSTRACT
The description of Israel as an “overburdened polity” was coined by Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak in their seminal book Trouble in Utopia. Israeli politics is burdened with existential questions of identity, belonging and rights, as state borders and societal boundaries are constantly debated. Israel’s formal definition and consequent policy attributions of a “Jewish and Democratic state” entailed a differential set of policies for different groups adopted in the early state period. Jewish immigrants were to assimilate into Israeli culture and society, to shed their older “diasporic” identities and, if they were perceived as non-modern, to “modernize” as well. Economic development and the globalization of Israeli society since the 1990s created new opportunities but also demarcated the difference between center and peripheries and underscored debates over property rights, economic rights and the mutual obligations of citizens and the state.
