Israel: From Democracy to Confessional Rule

Israel Is Being Rewired Into a Confessional State, and I Refuse to Call It “Identity”

I am no longer interested in the comfortable posture of the distant analyst. I am watching Israel being deliberately rewired: from a democratic arena of competing claims into a regime where one confessional authority increasingly behaves like a source of jurisdiction, and public space is treated as territory to be disciplined in its name. This is not a culture war. It is institutional redesign.

On December 17, 2025, The Times of Israel reported that the coalition advanced a bill framed as the “Realization of Jewish Identity in the Public Sphere,” described as aiming to ensure the ability of Israelis to “express their national and religious identity.” In practice, the mechanism is sharper than the slogan: it criminalizes “interference” with Orthodox religious practices in public. That phrasing is not a technical footnote. It is the pivot.

In a democratic sense, religious freedom is symmetrical. It protects persons, not blocs; conscience, not monopoly; the right to practice, not the right to impose. When a state turns one bloc’s public ritual into a protected state interest and attaches criminal liability to “interference,” it manufactures asymmetry. It does not need to prosecute often. It only needs the law to be usable. The mere possibility becomes a governance tool.

This is how democratic decline happens in real time: by re-engineering the risk landscape. One group receives legal shelter as entitlement. Others inherit exposure for objecting, delaying, questioning, or insisting on civic neutrality. Administrators learn the new rule without anyone having to teach it explicitly: do not interpret, do not balance, do not mediate. Comply early, comply more than required, and hope the file never lands on the wrong desk. That is institutional conditioning.

Here is the concrete picture I do not want us to pretend we do not recognize. A school principal hesitates about a scheduling clash. A hospital director worries about a corridor dispute. A municipal clerk tries to apply one standard to everyone. Under a criminalized “interference” regime, the safest move is not fair judgment. The safest move is overcompliance. Public space becomes an arena where the neutral option is punished and the biased option is rewarded.

The second layer is definitional monopoly. A modern state should not outsource the parameters of belonging to a single confessional center. Yet the trajectory is visible: Jewishness becomes an administrative stamp, and the state becomes an enforcer of one narrow standard. This is not theology. It is a citizenship filter. It turns internal plurality into official hierarchy, enforced not by persuasion but by legal threat and institutional friction.

The third layer is jurisdictional gravity and the disabling of checks. On the same track, The Times of Israel reported the advancement of a bill that would remove the Supreme Court president’s authority to determine judicial panels, replacing it with assignment “in a computerized way without human involvement.” Do not be hypnotized by the neutral-sounding language. In systems under political pressure, procedural redesign is one of the cleanest tools of long-term capture: you do not need to abolish the court, you only need to reduce its steering capacity and pretend it is “efficiency.”

Now, the element that cannot be skirted: the Sharia analogy. I am not equating religions. I am naming a state pattern. A polity drifts into a Sharia-like mode not by adopting Islam, but by converting one religious norm into public jurisdiction, criminalizing “interference” with that norm in shared space, and training civil institutions to treat dissent as disruption rather than legitimate politics. The banner changes. The mechanism stays the same. The mechanism is what replaces a civic commons with confessional enforcement.

And yes, the same kind of machinery exists elsewhere in different colors, especially in the United States. There, “religious liberty” can operate as a delivery system for religious nationalism: the normalization of the idea that the state should privilege one moral order, and that dissent is not disagreement but an attack on the nation’s “real identity.” PRRI and Pew data show this is not a fringe aesthetic; it is a measurable constituency with political gravity. The vocabulary differs. The institutional logic rhymes.

There is also the darker possibility that makes all of this easier to sell. It may be that many citizens genuinely accept these moves. But it may also be that exhaustion from war, chronic threat, and permanent mobilization produces a brutal “natural” push: the Other is edged out of full presence, gradually marked, and then treated as a hygiene problem rather than a political partner. This is social eugenics in its modern form: not the laboratory caricature, but the institutional and affective sorting of lives into “desired” and “burdensome,” “morale-boosting” and “unity-breaking.” Crisis becomes the solvent that dissolves the right to be different. Administration becomes the technique that makes exclusion feel like common sense.

This is why I am less and less surprised by a posture I keep encountering: the acceptance of modern fascisms simply because they arrive wrapped in “tradition” and “conservatism.” Tradition becomes a moral certificate. Conservatism becomes an alibi. And the essential questions are not asked: who is being pushed outside equal rights, who is being made administratively unsafe, whose speech becomes “interference,” whose life becomes negotiable.

Modern fascism does not need uniforms. It needs familiar vocabulary and a soft voice. It does not shout “I hate.” It whispers “I love.” Love of order. Love of holiness. Love of normality. And in that whisper, coercion is rebranded as protection, exclusion as community defense, and punishment as respect.

But there is a second side, darker, that cannot be covered with the ornament of tradition. So I will put the question bluntly, as a question that should no longer be taboo. Is a powerful segment of the community, the segment that currently holds the steering wheel, demanding its “protection” through other people’s lives?

Is the logic now: we have a right to safety and sanctity, and you have a duty to pay the cost, to yield, to disappear, to comply, and if you do not, you will be sanctioned? We have a right to monopoly over definition, and you have a duty to accept that your Judaism, your secularism, your difference, your objection will be treated as disruption to be managed?

If that is the core, then this is no longer “conservatism” or “religion.” It is a political technology that takes other people’s lives and freedoms as collateral and calls it “community protection.” It is the conversion of community into a selection device.

We are told not to name it. I refuse.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig
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Sources (for verification)

Times of Israel report (Dec 17, 2025) on the bill “Realization of Jewish Identity in the Public Sphere” and its provisions.

Times of Israel liveblog entry (Dec 17, 2025) on advancing the bill stripping the Supreme Court president of authority to staff judicial panels via computerized assignment.

Reuters (Mar 28, 2025) on the judicial selection committee law and concerns about judicial independence.

PRRI (2024 American Values Atlas / Feb 2025 update) and Pew Research Center (Mar 2024; Jan 2025 global report) on religious nationalism and Christian nationalism in the United States.

Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2025 (Feb 2025) on broader global democratic decline.