Religious Liberty in the State of Israel

The frontiers of religious liberty in the State of Israel are often hard to demarcate. Equally difficult to conceptualize is how regulation of religious liberty in Israel fits into the country’s generally accepted framework of religion-state relations. Israel is not a theocratic state; it does not have a formally established religion. ¹ Nor has it adopted a system of separation of religion and state or granted full equality to the religion of the majority of the population and the beliefs of others. ² In a report to the United Nations Human Rights Committee, Israel referred to the “labyrinthine” ³ relationship between religion and state as “a patchwork of laws and practices that are not easily susceptible to generalization.” ⁴ This patchwork comes as the result of “[h]istory, political expediency, party politics, the lack of a constitution… and the broad power of the Knesset (the Parliament).” ⁵ Furthermore, party politics have frequently prevented the Knesset from using its “broad power,” thus creating a situation in which the judiciary plays a major role in the protection of basic religious freedoms.