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 — Israel passed a contentious basic law on Thursday that anchors itself as the nation-state of the Jewish people, promotes the development of Jewish communities and downgrades the status of Arabic from an official language to one with a “special status.”

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, which makes up about 21 percent of a population of nearly nine million.

The law, pushed through just before the Knesset, or Parliament went into summer recess, has been advanced as a 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 that, together, serve as the country’s Constitution.

Since it was established, Israel has been grappling with the inherent tensions between its dual aspirations of being both Jewish and democratic. 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 early Thursday. “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 Parliament by a vote of 62 to 55 with two abstentions. One member was absent.

Moments after the vote, Arab members of Parliament 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 campaigns 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 lawmaker from the centrist opposition party Yesh Atid, said before the vote that the law was “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 sought 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 party, Likud, and political rivals to its right in 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 be amended only by a majority in the Knesset.

The nationality law has also drawn ire from Jews abroad. The American Jewish Committee said it was “deeply disappointed” and described the law as “unnecessary.”

It may be left to the Supreme Court to interpret how the “Jewish people” in the title of the law applies only to non-Orthodox, more liberal streams of Judaism, which are not officially recognized in Israel.

“We will use all of the legal means available to us to challenge this new law and to promote Reform and Progressive Judaism in Israel,” said Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the New York-based Union for Reform Judaism.

Some of the provisions of the nationality law had already been anchored in previous laws, such as those dealing with the “Law of return,” which guarantees that Israel as open for Jewish immigration, state symbols and Jewish festivals.

This law stipulates that Hebrew is “the state’s language” and downgrades Arabic to a language with a “special status.” The clause is not likely to have much practical meaning since a subsequent clause says, “This clause does not harm the status given to the Arabic language before this law came into effect.”

Another highly divisive clause in the draft version that legal experts said opened the way for segregated communities was replaced by one declaring, “The state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value and will act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.”

Some critics argued that this was even worse, because while the previous clause allowed for separate but equal communities, the new one could be interpreted to allow for discrimination in the allocation of resources.

Israel has long been accused of an imperfect democracy. Its Arab citizens lived under military rule until the 1960s and have suffered from institutional discrimination. Israel also controls the lives of millions of Palestinians in territories it captured in the 1967 war.

Follow Isabel Kershner on Twitter: @IKershner.