This is the first book to explore the idea that Israel is a theocratic state through the examination of different aspects of Israel's history and Israel today. For example; Judaism and its place in Israel, politics and the political sphere, the media and other aspects that could constitute Israel being a theocracy. Also explored is opposition to Israel and how through this, Israel cannot be a theocratic state.

"This book is about the attempt of Orthodox Jewish Zionists to implement traditional Jewish law (halakha) as the law of the State of Israel. These religious Zionists began their quest for a halakhic sate immediately after Israel's establishment in 1948 and competed for legal supremacy with the majority of Israeli Jews who wanted Israel to be a secular democracy. Although Israel never became a halachic state, the conflict over legal authority became the backdrop for a pervasive culture war, whose consequences are felt throughout Israeli society until today. The book traces the origins of the legal ideology of religious Zionists and shows how it emerged in the middle of the twentieth century. It further shows that the ideology, far from being endemic to Jewish religious tradition as its proponents claim, is a version of modern European jurisprudence, in which a centralized state asserts total control over the legal hierarchy within its borders. The book shows how the adoption (conscious or not) of modern jurisprudence has shaped religious attitudes to many aspects of Israeli society and politics, created an ongoing antagonism with the state's civil courts, and led to the creation of a new and increasingly powerful state rabbinate. This account is placed into wider conversations about the place of religion in democracies and the fate of secularism in the modern world. It concludes with suggestions about how a better knowledge of the history of religion and law in Israel may help ease tensions between its religious and secular citizens"--

The state of Israel was established in 1948 as a Jewish democracy without a legal separation between religion and the state. An expert on the construction of social and moral problems, Nachman Ben-Yehuda examines more than 50 years of media-reported unconventional and deviant behaviour by the Haredi community.

A comprehensive look at how rabbinical courts control Israeli marriage and divorce

Why should anyone be a Zionist, a supporter of a Jewish state in the land of Israel? Why should there be a Jewish state in the land of Israel? This book seeks to provide a philosophical answer to these questions. Although a Zionist need not be Jewish, nonetheless this book argues that Zionism is only a coherent political stance when it is intelligently rooted in Judaism, especially in the classical Jewish doctrine of God's election of the people of Israel and the commandment to them to settle the land of Israel. The religious Zionism advocated here is contrasted with secular versions of Zionism that take Zionism to be a replacement of Judaism. It is also contrasted with versions of religious Zionism that ascribe messianic significance to the State of Israel, or which see the main task of religious Zionism to be the establishment of an Israeli theocracy.

At the intersection of two sweeping global trends—the rise of popular support for principles of theocratic governance and the spread of constitutionalism and judicial review—a new legal order has emerged: constitutional theocracy. It enshrines religion and its interlocutors as “a” or “the” source of legislation, and at the same time adheres to core ideals and practices of modern constitutionalism. A unique hybrid of apparently conflicting worldviews, values, and interests, constitutional theocracies thus offer an ideal setting—a “living laboratory” as it were—for studying constitutional law as a form of politics by other means. In this book, Ran Hirschl undertakes a rigorous comparative analysis of religion-and-state jurisprudence from dozens of countries worldwide to explore the evolving role of constitutional law and courts in a non-secularist world. Counterintuitively, Hirschl argues that the constitutional enshrinement of religion is a rational, prudent strategy that allows opponents of theocratic governance to talk the religious talk without walking most of what they regard as theocracy’s unappealing, costly walk. Many of the jurisdictional, enforcement, and cooptation advantages that gave religious legal regimes an edge in the pre-modern era, are now aiding the modern state and its laws in its effort to contain religion. The “constitutional” in a constitutional theocracy thus fulfills the same restricting function it carries out in a constitutional democracy: it brings theocratic governance under check and assigns to constitutional law and courts the task of a bulwark against the threat of radical religion.

During Israel's military operation in Gaza in the summer of 2014 the commanding officer of the Givati infantry brigade, Colonel Ofer Vinter, called upon his troops to fight "the terrorists who defame the God of Israel." This unprecedented call for religious war by a senior IDF commander caused an uproar, but it was just one symptom of a profound process of religionization, or de-secularization, that Israeli society has been going through since the turn of the twenty-first century. This book analyzes and explains, for the first time, the reasons for the religionization of Israeli society, a process known in Hebrew as hadata. Jewish religion, inseparable from Jewish nationality, was embedded in Zionism from its inception in the nineteenth century, but was subdued to a certain extent in favor of the national aspect in the interest of building a modern nation-state. Hadata has its origins in the 1967 war, has been accelerating since 2000, and is manifested in a number of key social fields: the military, the educational system, the media of mass communications, the teshuvah movement, the movement for Jewish renewal, and religious feminism. A major chapter of the book is devoted to the religionization of the visual fine arts field, a topic that has been largely neglected by previous researchers. Through careful examination of religionization, this book sheds light on a major development in Israeli society, which will additionally inform our understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As such, it is a key resource for students and scholars of Israel Studies, and those interested in the relations between religion, culture, politics and nationalism, secularization and new social movements.