The Decline of Democracy in Israel’s Sovereignty Discourse

One week before Israel’s second round of general elections in September 2019, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that should he be re-elected, he would act immediately to “apply sovereignty” over the Jordan Valley in the West Bank.[i] The talk of “sovereignty” only intensified with the Trump Administration’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan, which was celebrated by the Israeli right (and center) for its endorsement of Israel applying sovereignty over at least 30% of the occupied West Bank, including the Jordan Valley and all Israeli settlements.[ii] While the term “sovereignty” rings of legitimacy, “applying sovereignty,” or “hachalat ribonut,” has become the acceptable Hebrew phrase for the annexation of the West Bank without bestowing citizenship on its majority non-Jewish – Arab-Palestinian – residents. In fact, the Hebrew term for sovereignty, ribonut, is currently used almost exclusively in this context, raising serious questions about the compatibility of ribonut with democracy.

In our ongoing research project, we explore the extent to which ribonut has become synonymous in Israeli public discourse with annexation of land and domination. We make two main arguments. First, this now common notion of sovereignty is incompatible with the dominant Western understanding of sovereignty as self-rule and as the highest order of command within a defined territory. Second, even in the Israeli context, the understanding of sovereignty as domination represents a shift from the way sovereignty had been understood since the establishment of the state. We further argue that the current meaning of sovereignty in Hebrew was consciously registered in the Israeli political imagination by a political movement that emerged from the settler movement with the disengagement from Gaza in 2005. We bring the vision of this group to light and find that if Israel is to live up to its democratic aspirations, it must resist the conceptual work being done by the “Sovereignty Movement” and reclaim the term sovereignty as self-rule and as the highest order of command within a given territory with recognized borders.

While our work is on the changing meaning of sovereignty in Israeli discourse, these transformations resonate more broadly in the treatment of annexation and domination by the international community. For example, Trump’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan perpetuates inequality between the non-sovereign people (Palestinians) and the sovereign state (Israel) by legitimating annexation and downplaying sovereignty as self-rule within a defined territory.^[iii] Though the understanding that sovereignty cultivates equality may need revising,[iv] replacing a vision of sovereign equality with one of sovereign domination is a problematic outcome for world politics.

Sovereignty in Israeli discourse

The transformation of the meaning of sovereignty in Hebrew is evident in the ways it is discussed in traditional and contemporary contexts. Historically, ribonut in Israel’s public discourse did mean sovereignty, or self-rule within recognized territorial boundaries. In fact, the hegemonic discourse of political Zionism was framed around the modern European model of the nation-state, with Jews constituting a national collective possessing the right to self-determination within a demarcated territory. To the extent that Israel accepted the partition plan voted upon by the UN in 1947, it accepted the fundamentals of self-rule within limited borders, including the existence of sovereign states on the either side of those borders. Israel was also defined from the onset as a democracy; hence the obsession over demographics from the early years of the state as only a Jewish majority would preserve the state’s Jewish character. Efforts to establish a Jewish demographic majority, including the deplorable expulsion of much of the Arab population in 1948, followed to some degree from principles of Westphalian sovereignty and particularly its logic of partition and separation from difference and its imagining of largely-homogenous self-ruled entities. The traditional modern understanding of sovereignty accepted in the early years of the state is still reflected in the definition of ribonut in the authoritative Hebrew dictionary and thesaurus, Rav-Milim,[v] where ribonut is synonymous with “sovereniut” (which is “sovereignty” transliterated), and other synonyms are self-rule, self-government, autonomy, equal rights, freedom, independence, and other terms for liberty and self-rule.

Yet the Hebrew definition of “ribonut” in Wikipedia– a critical and accessible source of information for students and the general public, and one that can reflect popular understandings of terms more quickly than conventional dictionaries^[vi]– has sovereignty as “the unique right to exercise the highest authority over a geographic territory or a group of people”.^[vii] Self-rule and freedom are obliterated from this definition, and sovereignty is about ruling over. This difference is not simply due to the way Wikipedia treats sovereignty more generally.  Wikipedia in English defines sovereignty as “the full right and power of a governing body over itself, without any interference from outside sources or bodies,”[viii] thereby emphasizing self-governance. Other differences between the Hebrew and English Wikipedia entries are that while international recognition is the key to sovereignty in English, it is portrayed as unnecessary in the Hebrew entry. Furthermore, while the English definition provides a history of the idea and practice of sovereignty from ancient through medieval to modern times, the Hebrew definition forgoes this in favor of a section on “colloquial uses of ribonut,” based largely on quoting Israeli generals.

The political ideal of “ruling over”, rather than self-rule, also has a history in the state of Israel since before its founding. In Mandate Palestine there was a concept of political authority that competed with ribonut as then understood, and this was the concept of adnut. While both ribonut and adnut draw on names of God from biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew, adnut also describes a particular human relationship: the relationship between master and slave; domination. Adnut was promoted by influential groups who rejected partition and sought to conquer and rule the entire biblical Land of Israel and control its population; agendas that resonate with the agenda of ribonut today, as reflected in the Wikipedia entry but more precisely in the publications of the “Sovereignty Journal” and other publications of the “Sovereignty Movement” we will soon introduce.^[ix]It is ironic that while the agenda of adnut was considered by Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion as threatening Israel’s sovereignty, the heirs to the idea of adnut today are shaping how sovereignty/ribonut is used in Israeli public discourse.

That the current Hebrew Wikipedia entry dates to 2006 is no accident. This was the year after Israel withdrew from the interior of the Gaza Strip (known as “the disengagement” in Israel). The disengagement is relevant in this context because, among its other implications, it demonstrated the possibility of partition and border-setting without granting the Palestinians sovereignty over territory and therefore reduced the importance of Palestinian sovereignty for Israel’s realization of its own sovereignty. The disengagement was also a turning point for the Settler Movement and the methods it employs to promote annexation and reject Palestinian sovereignty, turning to conceptual work and political lobbying alongside acting on the ground. It was in the wake of the disengagement that the idea of the “Sovereignty Movement” was conceived, which was essentially an idea to redefine sovereignty such that the concept itself would reject partition; this, we find, was critical to shaping how sovereignty is understood as domination in Israeli political discourse today.

The Sovereignty Movement that spearheaded the change in how ribonut is understood in Hebrew and the proliferation of its use was established in 2010 by “Women in Green,” a high-profile group of activists in the Israeli settler movement.[x] The movement’s founding objective was to articulate a clear political theory and vision that could be communicated to the Israeli public and the international community and to promote that vision through formal legislation. It sought to create a situation in which further disengagement, partition, and the establishment of a Palestinian state would not be viable not only because it would be impractical (due to settlement construction), but conceptually untenable. Through reconceptualizing the term “sovereignty” as control over land, the movement implied – and continues to imply – that Israel is not fully sovereign so long as it does not control the entire territory of the biblical land of Israel.

The success of the movement is unmistakable. First, as the examples from the online dictionaries discussed above showed, sovereignty in Hebrew is now increasingly associated with annexation. In 2018 an addition was made to the Wikipedia entry “ribonut” which is a cross-reference to “Sovereignty: A Political Journal”; the journal of the “Sovereignty Movement.” By 2020, all free online dictionaries in Hebrew defined ribonut according to the Wikipedia definition, such that sovereignty in Hebrew in internet research does not mean self-rule, but rule over a territory or people. This spread suggests that this understanding of sovereignty is now the dominant one in Israeli public discourse.

In that vein, the ubiquitous roadside signs calling for “sovereignty now” are immediately understood by passers-by as calls for annexation. Second, while sovereignty was hardly discussed in Israel in the past, since 2010 the issue of sovereignty has risen exponentially in new reports, almost exclusively with the meaning of adnut.[xi] A third mark of success is the extent to which democracy is excluded from sovereignty discourse. Of 10,600 news reports discussing “sovereignty” in 2010 through 2019, only 1,800 discussed democracy. Fourth, the Sovereignty movement has moved from the margins of the settler movement into mainstream society and politics. Its increasing legitimacy is evident in its endorsement by the major religious youth movement (Bnei Akiva), the adoption of the principle of annexation by the ruling Likud party’s Central Committee, and the participation of 39 of 120 Knesset members, ministers and deputy ministers as authors, contributors, or interviewees in the Sovereignty Journal. Finally, the movement’s power is evident in the current moment, when both major parties agree on “applying sovereignty” to the Jordan Valley, with ribonut being a central theme of coalition negotiations.[xii]

Conclusion: The Evolution of Sovereignty

The meaning of sovereignty is changing not only in Israel but worldwide. While the 20^th century and the beginning of the 21^sthave been considered a period of “sovereignty in crisis,”[xiii] our times raise the question of what comes next. With globalization, “sovereignty as domination” and the acceptance of paternalist power-structures in international politics may be one of two viable alternatives for the international arena, the other being a radical rethinking of sovereignty and a move to post-sovereignty and partnerships between peoples irrespective of their territorial possessions. But paternalist power structures are not only about international politics; they are about democracy itself. Israeli discourse reveals that when sovereignty comes to mean domination, sovereignty ceases to become a national right and an expression of national freedom, and becomes a tool for subjection. Those who care about the future of Israel/Palestine and about democracy should be attuned to sovereignty discourse in Israel and its implications. 

[i] https://www.haaretz.co.il/news/elections/1.7829170

[ii] The Israeli Right did not accept the plan as a whole, it rejected the part of the plan that outlined a vision for a limited – and not sovereign – Palestinian State.

[iii] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Peace-to-Prosperity-0120.pdf, pp. 8-9.

[iv] Hans Kelsen, “The Principle of Sovereign Equality of States as a Basis for International Organization,” Yale Law Journal 53 (1944); Benedict Kingsbury, “Sovereignty and Inequality,” The European Journal of International Law 9 (1998), 599-625; Jean L. Cohen, “Sovereign Equality vs. Imperial Right: The Battle Over the “New World Order”, Constellations 13:4 (2006), 485-505;

[v] First published in 1997 by the Center for Educational Technology, now available online to subscribers that include Israel’s colleges and universities, publishing houses, and news outlets: https://www.ravmilim.co.il/naerr.asp

[vi] Wikipedia has been studied as a source utilized by both school and college students, alongside other sources of knowledge. Alison Head and Michael Eisenberg, “How Today’s College Students Use Wikipedia for Course-Related Research,” First Monday 15:3 (2010); Sook Lim, How and Why do College Students Use Wikipedia?” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 60:11 (2009) 2189-2202. Scholarship on Israel has argued that Wikipedia is a more valuable source of information resource than teachers appreciate. Hagit Meishar-Tal, “Teachers’ Use of Wikipedia with their Students,” Australian Journal of Teacher Education 40:12 (2005). Further, in Computer Science, Wikipedia is nowadays being used as a resource to recreate natural-language processing, leaning on the vast amount of human knowledge encoded within it. Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Shaul Markovitch, “Wikipedia-based Semantic Interpretation for Natural Language Processing,” Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 34 (2009), 443-498. Finally, recent studies have found that Wikipedia is legitimated by US news sources, partly by their reliance upon it. Marcus Messner and Jeff South, “Legitimizing Wikipedia,” Journalism Practice (2011) 5:2. Wikipedia is thus an important resource for both human and computer learning, as well as for information gathering and wide dissemination, and its content is more significant than might otherwise be assumed.

[vii] Wikipedia, “Ribonut” [Hebrew], Accessed April 3, 2020.

[viii] Wikipedia, “Sovereignty,” Accessed April 3, 2020

[ix] Adnut was a stated goal of the “Lehi” movement, as articulated in its charter. Lehi was an acronym for Lohamei Heirut Israel, or Israel Freedom Fighters. The Lehi’s 18-point charter called “Principles of Rebirth”, identifies its goal as adnut over the entire biblical land of Israel (point 11 on the charter), and redemption (point 4a) ultimately to be marked by the construction of the third temple in Jerusalem (point 18). Conquering the land from non-Jewish inhabitants (using the term kibush, which is currently used for “occupation”) is point 10 on the charter.  https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/18_Principles_of_Rebirth.jpg. The Sovereignty Movement sees itself as conducting a campaign to evade the possibility of dividing the land of Israel and to push for Jewish control over the entire territory. It is comfortable with redemption, and among its activists are those who work towards the construction of the Third Temple in our times. One member of the steering committee of the movement, Geula Cohen, was herself a member of the Lehi from 1943 until the movement split up, and on the website of the Sovereignty journal she is listed as a Lehi fighter. http://ribonut.co.il/AboutSection.aspx?NewsHomeItemId=3&lang=2

[x] http://www.ribonut.co.il/?lang=1

[xi] Exponential rise in the use of the term in news (through google search, April 7,2020) in two-year blocks seen in a preliminary search for ribonut (in Hebrew) on Google under the “News” tab. 2008-2009: 43 mentions, not with the meaning of domination. 2010-2011: 149 articles mentioning ribonut with the meaning of domination; 2012-2013: 289 articles; 2014-2015: 646 articles 2016-2017; 1210 articles. 2018-2019: 5320 articles.

[xii] https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/west-bank-annexation-could-move-forward-as-early-as-july-623802.

[xiii] Brown, Wendy. Walled states, waning sovereignty. MIT Press, 2017.