ABSTRACT
Israel was established as a Jewish state, regarded, according to its Declaration of Independence, as the culmination of the striving of the Jewish people for a state of their own. The different perceptions range from minimalist descriptive notions, which regard the fact that the country has a Jewish majority as being the only real element that makes it the “State of the Jews,” to messianic views that regard the state as a means of bringing the millennium. The World Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency Law, 1952 contains a number of declaratory provisions. The national anthem of Israel is Hatikυa, the hymn of the Zionist movement that expresses the yearning of the Jewish people to be “a free people in our own land.” The constitutional significance of the definition of Israel as a Jewish state cannot be gauged solely in terms of the statutory expressions of the Jewishness of the state.
