Israel Passes Law Anchoring Itself as Nation-State of the Jewish People

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A protest in Tel Aviv this month against the new law, which has been advanced as flagship legislation of the most right-wing and religious governing coalition in Israel’s 70-year history.CreditAbir Sultan/EPA, via Shutterstock

By Isabel Kershner

July 19, 2018

JERUSALEM — Downgrading the status of the Arabic language from an official one to one with a “special status” and promoting Jewish construction, Israel on Thursday passed a contentious basic law anchoring itself as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

In essence, the law enshrines the Jewish people’s exclusive right to self-determination in Israel, differentiating between that collective, national right, and the individual rights of the country’s citizens, who include Arabs.

The law is largely symbolic and declarative, but opponents say it harms the delicately balanced relationship between the Jewish majority and the Arab minority that makes up about 21 percent of the country’s population of nearly nine million.

Pushed through just before the Knesset, or Israeli Parliament, went into summer recess, the law has been advanced as flagship legislation of the most right-wing and religious governing coalition in Israel’s 70-year history.

It was enacted after a decade of political wrangling and hours of impassioned debate in Parliament, and it is one of more than a dozen basic laws that are difficult to overturn and, together, serve as the country’s Constitution.

Israel has been grappling with the inherent tensions between its dual aspirations of being both Jewish and democratic ever since the country was established. The new law, hailed by its supporters as “historic,” was denounced by detractors as discriminatory, racist and a blow to democracy.

“This is a defining moment in the annals of Zionism and the annals of the state of Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said soon after the vote in the early hours of Thursday morning. “We have determined in law the founding principle of our existence. Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people, and respects the rights of all of its citizens.”

But if the law was meant to give expression to Israel’s national identity, it exposed and further divided an already deeply fractured society. It passed in the 120-seat Knesset by a vote of 62 to 55 with two abstentions. One member was absent.

Moments after the vote, Arab members of Knesset ripped up copies of the bill, while crying out, “Apartheid!” Ayman Odeh, the leader of the Joint List of predominantly Arab parties, which holds 13 seats and is the third-largest bloc in Parliament, waved a black flag in protest. Members of the right-wing governing coalition applauded.

“The end of democracy,” declared Ahmad Tibi, a veteran Arab legislator, charging the government with demagogy. “The official beginning of fascism and apartheid. A black day (another black day),” he wrote on Twitter.

Adalah, a legal center that advocates for Arab rights in Israel, said in a statement, “This law guarantees the ethnic-religious character of Israel as exclusively Jewish and entrenches the privileges enjoyed by Jewish citizens, while simultaneously anchoring discrimination against Palestinian citizens and legitimizing exclusion, racism, and systemic inequality.”

Yael German, a legislator from the centrist Yesh Atid party, which sits in the opposition, described the law ahead of the vote as “a poison pill for democracy.”

Empowered by the ascendancy of a friendly American administration led by President Trump, and increasingly allying itself with illiberal democracies in Europe, Mr. Netanyahu’s government has made efforts to exercise more control over the news media, curtail the authority of the Supreme Court and undermine the police amid attempts to thwart or minimize the effect of multiple corruption investigations against the prime minister. The police have already recommended that Mr. Netanyahu be charged with bribery in two cases.

Some supporters of the nationality law lamented that many of its proposed and more influential clauses had been watered down to allow its passage. Critics decried it as a populist measure that largely sprung from the competition for votes between Mr. Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party and political rivals to its right with elections due next year.

Unlike previous drafts of the nationality bill, the version that passed omits any mention of democracy or enunciation of the principle of equality in what critics called a betrayal of Israel’s foundational document, its Declaration of Independence.

That declaration, signed by the state’s founders ushering in independence in 1948, proclaimed that Israel “will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants” and will “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.”

Two other basic laws, on human dignity and on liberty and freedom of occupation, enacted in the 1990s, determine the values of the state as both Jewish and democratic.

“I don’t agree with those saying this is an apartheid law,” said Amir Fuchs, an expert in legislative processes and liberal thought at the Israel Democracy Institute, an independent think tank in Jerusalem. “It does not form two separate legal norms applying to Jews or non-Jews,” he said. But he added, “Even if it is only declarative and won’t change anything in the near future, I am 100 percent sure it will worsen the feeling of non-Jews and especially the Arab minority in Israel.”

The basic laws, enacted in the absence of a single constitution, legally supersede the Declaration of Independence and, unlike regular laws, have never been overturned by Israel’s Supreme Court. Basic laws can only be amended by a majority of 61 in the Knesset.

Follow Isabel Kershner on Twitter: @IKershner.