Thank you very much.
Here is an updated version following the comments:

The tension today between religion and nationhood among the Jewish people can be described along two different axes:
A. Are you loyal to the Jewish people in its traditional form (that is, corporative, as we will define later)?
B. Do you believe in the existence of a commanding God?
There is a difference between the questions. The first is a question of value: are the Jewish people important to you? The second is a question of fact: do you think there is a Creator who commanded the Torah or not? According to Meir Buzaglo in his book A Language for the Faithful, a positive answer to the first question characterizes the traditional person (the question of faith is not clear in Meir Buzaglo). According to Rabbi Michael Abraham, a positive answer to the second question characterizes the religious person. Combining the two questions allows us to map them as two different axes. Thus a person can be traditional but not believing, traditional and believing, not traditional and not believing, and not traditional but believing. A traditional but non-believing person will want to integrate his life into the Jewish people in its corporative identity in its various manifestations, to marry a Jewish spouse in a religious wedding, if he is Israeli to be civically involved (even someone critical of his polis is still involved, as Jeremiah and Socrates were), if he is abroad to be connected to a Jewish community, and to maintain an emotional relationship toward the Jewish people and its political representation in the Land of Israel. A traditional and believing person will be similar to the first, but in addition to the traditional aspects will feel obligated to observe commandments and keep Jewish law. Sometimes his religiosity will cause him to be critical of certain aspects of Israeli nationalism and the State of Israel, but his loyalty to the Jewish people will mean that he keeps that criticism internal and does not break all the dishes with his secular brothers. A person who is neither traditional nor believing will tend toward assimilation and alienation from Jewish identity and his fellow Jews. For him, Jewish nationalism has no value or interest whatsoever, and he will focus his life either on his own personal good or on a universal identity with no Jewish characteristics. A believing but non-traditional person will tend to depict religion either as a completely private matter of one’s own in-group, while defining everyone outside that in-group as a mixed multitude and heretics, or as a completely universal matter with no national significance at all (Judaism is about liberal repairing of the world).
These two axes, in my opinion, allow us to formulate a shared identity core of traditional people who are loyal to the Jewish people. The second question is a question of fact that cannot serve as a social touchstone. One who believes sees himself as obligated in the commandments. For one who does not believe, the commandments have no meaning (after all, it is like mere monkey business). One can discuss whether it is possible to coerce the prevention of transgressions, but certainly one cannot coerce him to believe or to observe positive commandments. There is a certain liberation in this, and a protest against two opposite positions that are common today in the discourse. One position, which can be described as extreme Haredi, assumes that observance of commandments and faith can be imposed by force. Hence the lack of respect it adopts toward secular people in a Haredi environment (and indirectly also toward free scientific inquiry). The opposite position is common in educated secular circles and assumes that religious faith is not a statement of fact but a primitive urge that a mature person ought to overcome on the way to a rational life. According to this view, the argument over whether God exists was settled long ago, and a person who does not accept this is not rational. Since only rational people can be accepted into important positions, being a religious believer constitutes an unofficial obstacle to entering such roles (especially in what is perceived as the core of intellectual thought, such as academia, culture, and setting the cultural tone). These two positions share a common view of faith. In their eyes, faith is universal—except that while one side demands it as praise, the other demands it as blame. In the position that sees faith as a statement of fact, faith becomes a private matter. It is not connected to other people, only to the individual himself—does he believe or not?
It seems to me that in fact most of the population in the State of Israel takes this approach. On the one hand, traditionalism matters to them at one level or another (each according to his own degree). Most Israelis believe in mutual responsibility as expressed in military service or Torah study, choose a Jewish husband or wife as a partner, and live within the Jewish life-cycle. On the other hand, faith is perceived as a private matter. You can see this in reports about more and more kibbutzim opening synagogues. The kibbutzim have reached the conclusion that nowadays no one is troubled by their secular identity as the spearhead of secular Zionism. Fighting with private individuals over their private belief in God is unnecessary. So if someone is a member of the kibbutz, contributes and benefits, and also wants to pray in a synagogue because he happens to believe, then it’s a shame to fight with him. Better that he have a synagogue. There is an opposite case of Haredim who discover that they have lost their faith and move toward a secular lifestyle of general studies, military service, and integration into the workforce. Very many religious people find that religious education for children without general studies is too heavy a burden for them to bear. They prefer that the child have a path to making a living rather than burdening him from a Torah standpoint (only recently a study by the Taub Center was published that found a mismatch between Haredi and religious birthrates and the number of children studying in the Haredi and religious school systems). To grow great in Torah is a great thing, but since we are ordinary people, it is better to allow the child to succeed occupationally and socially. It seems that the State of Israel provides a framework that allows traditional people loyalty to the Jewish people by preserving the corporative framework while individuals move along their religious identity according to their free choice.
So far we have examined the issue empirically, and it still needs to be examined in principle. Is there religious significance to Jewish traditionalism as loyalty to the Jewish people? Conversely, is there legitimacy for this from a secular rational philosophical perspective? I will not deal here with the secular side. From a religious perspective, there are those (it seems to me that Rabbi Michael Abraham holds such a position) who argue that there is no religious significance to our civic involvement. There are defined halakhic obligations, but beyond that the reason for involvement lies in basic decency. By the way of the world, a person has civic obligations and should meet them. There is a great deal of strength in this position, but it seems to me incomplete and not reflective of actual behavior, which is far more committed, both on the Haredi side and on the secular side. From a religious perspective, I would therefore like to propose the following argument:
According to the Beit Yosef, the authority of the Talmud is binding because it was accepted by the entire nation. From this we learn that there is priority of the nation over the Torah. The Torah is the law of the Jewish people, but if there is no Jewish people, there is no place for the Torah. The Torah is not the matter of a sect or a group of in-group people. Nor is it some universal principle that everyone interprets according to his own opinion. The Torah is the law of the nation. It follows from this that there is ontological priority of the nation over the Torah. Before the Torah can be given, there must be a nation to receive it. This argument stands in a certain tension with Saadia Gaon’s claim that “our nation is a nation only through its Torah.” From Saadia Gaon it emerges that it is not the nation that accepts the Talmud, but the Talmud that constitutes the nation. One can suggest the following solution. What constitutes the nation is the Hebrew Bible. That is, the document that testifies to our connection with the Master of the Universe and with the Land of Israel (our deed, if we want to take a Ben-Gurionist line). The Talmud, by contrast, does not constitute us, but defines for us the correct practice according to the acceptance of the nation (something like the difference between witnesses who establish a matter and witnesses who clarify a matter). The nation exists on the basis of the Hebrew Bible, and it is the nation that accepts the Talmud as the one that clarifies the correct practice.
If this is correct, one can argue that the importance of traditionalism as loyalty to the Jewish people lies in the importance of the nation’s existence. It is indeed true that one who does not believe is prevented from deciding or from being a party to determining Jewish law, but the very fact that he is connected to the Jewish people and participates with it in the frameworks of the Jewish people (the state, the family, and the community) makes him part of what constitutes the nation as a nation. If he comes to believe, he can realize his potential and influence the determination of Jewish law itself, but even without faith, the very fact that he is part of the Jewish people enables the Jewish people to exist as one people that can receive the Torah. It seems to me that this approach explains why partnership with their secular brothers is important to Haredi circles as well, beyond any sense of civic duty that may or may not exist. They felt that as long as the nation remained a partnership, the Torah did not belong only to them but to all Jews.
From the non-believing side (if I may speak on their behalf), it seems that loyalty to the Jewish people in its historical form is expressed in accepting the national framework of the State of Israel and the religious framework of the rabbinate (it seems to me that Yeshaynt Ramon argued this in the article “Secular in Your Home, Statist When You Go Out,” Hashiloach 2). In this sense Rabbi Michi is right that it is the secular and traditional people who sustain the rabbinate. But their choice does not express hidden faith; rather, it expresses acceptance of Jewish identity and a desire to preserve connection. Jewish identity is not a crutch or an attempt at “expressing a sense of commitment to religion and Jewish history without willingness to realize them in practice. People are looking for alternatives to an identity that was once religious, so that they can feel Jewish after shedding religious identity and commitment” (“On Jewish Identity in Our Time and in General,” Rabbi Michael Abraham), but rather loyalty to corporative Jewish identity as it is given to them even in the objective reality of lack of belief in God.