Mamlakhtiyut

The article establishes that civic ideas were a central part of Zionism in its quest to actualize modernist civic ideas, and in particular the concept of the nation-state based on political participation and the rule of law. It argues that this civic perspective, which dominated Zionist thought and action, was a republican perspective and describes the Zionist manifestation of republican thought, which – following Ben-Gurion – is termed mamlakhtiyut. The article strives to show that this republican thought is the ideological core of the emergence of a progressive and developed Jewish political community in the country before and after independence, guided by modernist civic political principles. Pre-state Israel was a nonindependent community, ruled by a foreign sovereign, yet it achieved a great degree of autonomy and succeeded in establishing a central political authority based on democratic consent and widespread national recognition, which operated within a vibrant republican-democratic political culture. The State of Israel inherited this political culture and fostered it. In the concluding section, Israeli mamlakhtiyut is analyzed as an important common conceptual ground for all the major political powers in Israel’s first decade, and yet an arena of controversies and struggles between left-wing and right-wing republicanism and between consociational and majoritarian aspects of republicanism.