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Concept
Jewish state
Summary
In world politics, Jewish state is a characterization of Israel as the nation-state and sovereign homeland of the Jewish people.
Modern Israel came into existence on 14 May 1948 as a polity to serve as the homeland for the Jewish people. It was also defined in its declaration of independence as a "Jewish state", a term that also appeared in the United Nations Partition Plan for British Palestine in 1947. The related term of "Jewish and democratic state" dates from a 1992 legislation by Israel's Knesset.
Since its establishment, Israel has passed many laws which reflect on the Jewish identity and values of the majority (about 75% in 2016) of its citizens. However, the secular-versus-religious debate in Israel in particular has focused debate on the Jewish nature of the state; another aspect of the debate is the status of minorities in Israel, most notably that of the Arab-Israeli population.
In pre-modern times, the religious laws of Judaism defined a number of prerogatives for a Halakhic state. However, when Theodor Herzl wrote Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in 1896 which birthed the Jewish movement of Zionism, he envisioned a state based on European models, which included religious institutions under the aegis of the state. In order to avoid alienating the Ottoman Sultan, there was no explicit reference to a Jewish state by the Zionist Organization that he founded. The phrase "national home" was used intentionally instead of "state".
The 1942 Biltmore Program of the Zionist Organization explicitly proposed "that Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth". In 1946, the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, also known as the Grady–Morrison Committee, noted that the demand for a Jewish state went beyond the obligations of either the Balfour Declaration or the British Mandate, and had been expressly disowned by the chairman of the Jewish Agency as recently as 1932.
The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, which brought the British Mandate to an end in 1948, referred to a "Jewish state" and an "Arab state" in its plans for land allotment.
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