A Covenant of Blood, a Citizenship of Paper? Media, Protest, and Contested Belonging in an Ethnonational State

In ethnonational states, the boundary between the privileged ethnic core and the citizen-’other’ is a site of constant contestation. This article examines this dynamic through Israel’s 2018 Nation-State Law and the ensuing protest by the Druze minority. The Druze, a community bound to the state by a “blood covenant” of military service, perceived the law, which constitutionally privileged Jewish identity, as a betrayal that rendered their citizenship incomplete. Employing a qualitative content analysis of 42 prime-time television news segments (July-December 2018), this study identified four dominant media frames: The Broken Covenant, The Political Arena, The Affective Turn, and The Polarized Lens. The findings illuminate “patriotic protest,” a form of dissent where a marginalized group leverages state values and “republican” citizenship discourse to demand inclusion. While this strategy earned the Druze high media legitimacy, their claims were simultaneously co-opted by partisan framing. Media discourse became a battleground for negotiating the contradictions between ethnic nationalism and civic equality, highlighting the precarious nature of minority citizenship in an ethnocratic state. This case study provides a nuanced model for understanding minority agency and the containment of dissent in deeply divided societies.