Israel at a crossroads between civic democracy and Jewish zealotocracy

Abstract

Mainstream Zionism (now comprising both Labor and Likud) is in- creasingly being challenged by the Right and Left. Post-Zionism has exposed the intellectualfallacies underlying traditional Zionism's at- tempt to combine ethnic segregation with an open society, but it is the moral and ideological substitute offered by neo-Zionism, opting for ethnic segregation as an ultimate goal, that is mounting the realpolit- ical challenge. This article argues that while mainstream Zionists will delineate the space of a future Israel (by drawing the borders in a settlement with the Palestinians), the neo-Zionists will cast the ideolog- ical content into this space (by defining the identity and orientation of Israeli society).