A Modern State's Moral State

By Adam Kisting
Queens College

The founding of the state of Israel in 1948 marked an emotional point in history for the Jewish people – the establishment of a Jewish state in their ancestral homeland. The founding of Israel in the Ottoman Palestine region was of particular importance to the Zionist movement as well, indicated by the failure of Great Britain's Uganda proposal in 1903, which would promise Jewish statehood to the Zionist movement, but in modern day Kenya and Uganda. This caused a split in the Zionist movement – and for a reason its proposer, Lord Arthur James Balfour soon realized – because Statehood itself wasn't the ultimate goal of the Zionist movement. It was the re-establishment of their home.

The modern state, however, is a historically new concept with responsibilities and obligations not addressed in ancient forms of governance, such as that of ancient Israel. Or Lagoyim, translated as "light unto the nations," is the concept describing the Jewish nation's responsibility to be a moral example unto other nations, a concept developed far before the invention of modern statehood.

So what action does this entail for a modern state, to be a moral example to the world? Israel is a main forerunner in the world of technological and medical advancement, but is this role in the international community enough? Israel's presence as a stable regional democracy in the midst of much unpredictable regime change in the Middle East is also exemplary, but once again, is this enough?

At the 2011 General Assembly for the Jewish Federations of North America, Avraham Infeld spoke on the matter of morality in Israel, and declared a moral obligation to bridge the poverty gap between the Arab minority who have Israeli citizenship and the Jewish majority. By doing so, Israel has the unique opportunity to create a framework in which a state with an official state religion can extend equal rights to a minority, as opposed to a model based on an empire, as say, the Ottoman or Roman empires.

For a Jewish State to call itself Jewish, Israel is obligated to strive to set new moral precedents in a world where the state is the dominant form of government. To simply emulate the behavior of western states in terms of democratic institutions, divisions of wealth between minorities, international relationships, and nuclear programs, would be a disservice to Jewish identity.

Adam Kisting is a political science major studying the international law track for conflict mediation in the Middle East. He is also the Secretary for the Hillel and a Facilitator at the Queens College Center for Ethnic, Racial, and Religious Understanding. And in case you were wondering, he enjoys ice cream, candlelit dinners, and long walks on the beach.

[Posted 11/27/11]