The Israel Model: From Nation-state to Ethno-religious State
Photo courtesy of Al Jazeera
“To me, it seems as if Hitler has won. He’s changed us Jews from being compassionate and caring and do unto others as you would have them do unto you into this vicious, genocidal, nationalist nation, pursuing and killing women and children…” Jewish-Australian actress Miriam Margolyes (The Guardian, 9.4.2024)
On May 31, 1962 Adolf Eichmann, the SS official responsible for the identification, assembly and transportation of Jews in occupied Europe to Auschwitz, was executed by hanging in a Tel Aviv prison. He was the second and the last man to be hung in Israel.
In March 2026, Israeli parliament passed a law imposing mandatory death sentence on Palestinians of West Bank convicted by Israeli military courts of “nationalist crimes”. Death Penalty for Terrorists Law passed in the Knesset by a vote of 62 to 48 to sounds of celebration. The father of the bill, Itmar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s Security Minister, wearing a noose-shaped lapel pin, popped a bottle of champagne in the chamber.
The law, a product of and a boon to Jewish extremism, is being widely criticised by moderate Jews within and outside Israel. The Times of Israel called it “intentionally racist”. Correctly. The equivalent would be a law carefully crafted to impose mandatory death penalty on North-Eastern Tamils convicted of terrorism by military courts during the Eelam War.
During the 2025 Democratic primary debate for New York mayoralty, Zohran Mamdani was asked whether he believes in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. He answered that he accepts Israel’s right to exist as a state with equal rights for all its people and that he believes all states should be states with equal rights. The question (and the answer) refer to Israel’s claim to be a Jewish and a democratic state. The Palestinian-only death penalty law demonstrates beyond any doubt that a country which formally identifies itself as the state of one particular ethnic/religious/ethno-religious (or tribal or caste) community can be a democracy only for that community.
Perhaps not even that. With the passage of time, Israel’s Jewish-only democracy may further erode, expelling from its protected spade any Jewish-Israeli seen as an Other or an ally of the other. Pastor Martin Niemöller’s warning remains relevant across time and geographic boundaries: a state that represses a community seen as less than equal will, eventually, turn on those it claims to privilege.
Israel has no written constitution. That vacuum is filled by a series of basic laws which function as the country’s constitutional framework. The latest such law was approved in 2018. Nation State of the Jewish People Law has 11 clauses. The first clause titled Basic Principles enshrines Israel as the nation-state of Jews and Jews only:
- The land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people in which the state of Israel is established.
- The state of Israel is the national home of the Jewish people, in which it fulfils its natural cultural, religious, and historical right to self-determination.
- The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.
Historically, Jews were a religious community consisting of believers of Judaism, much the same as Christians, Muslims or members of any other religion. Even during the worst of Papal or Spanish Inquisition, the horrendous repression of Jews was based on religion; a Jew who converted to Christianity could escape persecution. Tomas de Torquemada, the first Grand Inquisitor of Spain whose name is synonymous with religious persecution and Diego de Raza who succeeded him are believed to be of Converso ancestry (Jews who converted to Christianity). Jewishness was seen as religious and cultural and not biological.
It was Adolf Hitler who transformed a mutable religious identity into an immutable racial destiny. The Nuremburg Race Laws of 1935 defined anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents as a Jew (irrespective of his/her current religious adherence). Israel, in turning Jewish people into a racial/national category is following in these Hitlerian footsteps. In Israeli ID cards, an Arab is listed as a Muslim or Christian. Israel law prevents intermarriage between a Jew and non-Jew or a mamzer (those born of forbidden relationships and their descendants). A Jewish Israeli who wants to convert must obtain the permission of the Ministry of Interior.
Israel is an ethno-religious state, an inspiration for all those who dream of turning their countries into the exclusive property of an ethnic, religious or ethno-religious group.
Chosen nations
Recently, an IDF soldier was photographed taking a sledgehammer to a statue of Jesus Christ in a Maronite Christian village in Southern Lebanon. A global outcry ensued forcing the Israeli government to act. The soldier who destroyed the statue was arrested as well as the soldier who photographed it, for the real problem for Israel was not the deed but its exposure.
As commentators have been swift to point out, this is no isolated incident. According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Israel army organisationally attacked churches, mosques and cemeteries in the Gaza strip from the beginning of the Gaza war. These include the Holy Family Church (Catholic) and Saint Porphyrius Orthodox Church (the oldest church in Gaza). The Religious Freedom Data Centre documented at least 201 incidents of violence against Christians between January 2024 and September 2025. In 2024, during its previous invasion of Lebanon, IDF caused serious damage to the place considered to be the burial site of St Peter by local Christians (this place is worshipped by Shia Muslims as well) in the Chamaa village in Tyre, South Lebanon.
Israel settlers, backed by the Israeli state, are making concerted and systematic effort to drive out Christians from the West Bank. The ancient Christian town Taybeh, one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, is a prominent target. According to the Gospels, this place (then known by its Greek name Ephraim) was where Jesus hid from the Sanhedrin, the Jewish religious hierarchy, before making the fateful journey to Jerusalem. The settlers began their onslaught by grabbing the surrounding land which belonging to Bedouins. Then they banned townspeople from visiting their traditional agricultural land and turned them into grazing grounds for their own flock. The townspeople can visit their olive groves and fields just for a few days in the harvesting season in the protective company of diplomats from Italian and French consulates. In 2025, settlers tried to burn the 5th century church in Taybeh and invaded the town four times. The recent approval by the Israeli government for Israelis to buy property in the West Bank has exacerbated matters. “We kept our existence and presence for the past 2000 years uninterrupted, despite all the turmoil, one empire after another, invasion after invasion, war after war,” said Rifat Cassis, a Palestinian Christian. “But since the Occupation the pressure on us comes from all sides… Israel has managed to create an atmosphere where there is no hope.”
These incidents are no accidents but the logical outcome of a worldview propagated by the Israeli state as well as Jewish extremist parties and groups. “We identify a connection between the national mood, the prevailing tensions, and the government’s backing which together foster a sense of superiority among Jews – a factor contributing to the rise in attacks against non-Jews,” according to Yisca Harani, director The Religious Freedom Data Centre,
Religious extremists played a key role in fostering this mood of Jewish supremacism. Take, for example, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual leader of the ultra-orthodox Shas Party and a chief rabbi of Israel’s Sephardim and Mizrachim Jews. “Goyim (all non-Jews) were born to serve us,” he said in 2010. “Without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the people of Israel… They need to die, but God will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one’s donkey would die they’d lose their money. This is his servant. That’s why he gets a long life, to work well for Jews.” He wasn’t any kinder to the victims of the Holocaust dismissing them as “reincarnated souls of sinners”. Today his Shas Party is the third largest in the Knesset and part of Binyamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition.
There is resistance to this hijacking of Judaism within Israel itself, both from individuals and organisations. Rabbis for Human Rights, for instance, counters this ruinous ideology by pointing to the Jewish value of Kedushat HaChaim, sanctity of all human life. But the resistance is limited to a minority of Jewish Israelis who are outside the power structures.
As Jewish American rabbi Mark Dratch wrote in response to the destruction of the statue of Jesus, “Power is the test. When we were a minority under threat, we rightly demanded respect for our sacred places and symbols. As a majority with power, that demand falls on us… When churches are desecrated and our pulpits say nothing, the silence teaches. When haredi youths spit at priests and in the Old City (Jerusalem) and the response from rabbis closest to those youth is muted, the silence teaches”. It teaches that in a state which privileges one community, everyone else are inferior beings living on sufferance.
Jewish state and Sinhala-Buddhist dream-state
Israel is probably more unpopular in the world than it has ever been. This is so even in the US with whose protection and over $3 billion in military aid annually sustains Israel as a supremacist and aggressive state. But the more Israel veers towards racism and apartheid, the more it is becoming a beacon and a model to racial/religious supremacists everywhere, from Hungary to India and Sri Lanka.
Sinhala Ravaya seems to be Israel’s chosen political partner in Sri Lanka. During a February 2026 visit to the country, first secretary Hadas Bakt paid a call on Sinhala Ravaya and its incendiary leader Akmeemana Dayaratane Thero. Soon after, Sinhala Ravaya held a ceremony in Trincomalee to distribute Israeli-donated school supplies to a group of school children. Israel’s other Sri Lankan friends include Angunugalle Sri Jinananda Thero, the monks who lodged the complaint against writer Shakthika Sathkumara, thereby pioneering the abusive use of the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights as a blasphemy law targeting Tamils, Muslims and dissenting Sinhalese. Addressing a meeting organised by pro-Israeli advocacy group, Israel Sri Lanka Solidarity Movement to mark the first anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attack, he hailed the “over-4000-year history of Lankan-Israeli diplomatic and trade ties”, proclaimed Israel and Sri Lanka to be soulmates and asked President Anura Kumara Dissanayake “to immediately open doors to Israel in Sri Lanka.”
Sinhala Ravaya has a history of violent anti-minority activism. In 2011, they, with the patronage of the Rajapaksa regime and the military, built a temple aptly named Sihalaramaya and settled several Sinhala Buddhist families in Navatkuli, in Jaffna. It demolished a mosque in Anuradhapura the same year. In 2013, it set fire to a meat stall in Tangalle, organised a march from Kataragama against beef and manhandled a group of Christian missionaries. In August 2025, Sinhala Ravaya organised a march themed “Stop weakening Buddhist power”. The marchers’ demands included “Protect Buddhist heritage in the North and the East and prevent multi-ethnic, multi-religious ideology from destroying the country.”
Sinhala Ravaya openly advocates the transformation of Sri Lanka into an ethno-religious state like Israel. “We can build an exclusively Sinhala-Buddhist state where minorities can live in freedom, just like in Israel,” its National Organiser perorated. “Israel is a Jewish state, a state for the Jews 100%. In that state members of other religions including Muslims live in freedom… Let us unite to work without delay to create a state like that in Sri Lanka.”
Organisations like Sinhala Ravaya cannot win elections in Sri Lanka. But it can pave the way for a political pendulum swing by igniting ethnic/religious tension, even violence. It was a prime mover in trying to use the Tissa Vihara issue in Jaffna and the Buddha statue issue in Trincomalee to create a Sinhala-Buddhist outburst in the rest of the country. Those attempts failed but as economic difficulties of masses mount and the government’s inefficiencies become more manifest, their chances of creating ethnic/religious tensions and exploiting them for political purposes could improve exponentially.
Israel’s official and unofficial outreach to and patronage of such extremist entities with violent pasts cannot be accidental. If that agenda succeeds, Sri Lanka would become engulfed in another vortex of violence. Because, as Israeli soldier turned peacemaker Daniel Levy said, Israel is living permanently at the end of a spear, menacing and menaced. That shouldn’t be our fate.
