Palestinian and left-wing lawmakers warn the Nation-State law will enshrine 'Jewish supremacy' in Israel. Israel passed a law on Thursday to declare that only Jews have the right of self-determination in the country, something members of the Arab minority called racist and verging on apartheid.

The "nation-state" law, backed by the right-wing government, passed by a vote of 62-55 and two abstentions in the 120-member parliament after months of political argument. Some Arab lawmakers shouted and ripped up papers after the vote.

"This is a defining moment in the annals of Zionism and the history of the state of Israel," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Knesset after the vote.

Largely symbolic, the law was enacted just after the 70th anniversary of the birth of the state of Israel. It stipulates that "Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish people and they have an exclusive right to national self-determination in it".

The bill also strips Arabic of its designation as an official language alongside Hebrew, downgrading it to a "special status" that enables its continued use within Israeli institutions.

Israel's Arabs number some 1.8 million, about 20 percent of the 9 million population.

The bill has drawn the ire of Palestinian citizens of Israel, liberal Jewish Israelis, Israel’s president and rights groups, some of whom have said the law would amount to apartheid.

“Twenty percent of the citizens will be discriminated against, by definition. What is that if not apartheid? This is racist and unprecedented legislation from a government that has lost all shame,” tweeted Joint List party chair Ayman Odeh earlier in the week, anticipating the law’s passage.

“This is a mortal wound for Arab citizens [of Israel], and for democracy, no less.”

Fellow Joint List lawmaker, Aida Touma-Suleiman, slammed the bill, saying it would “establish Jewish supremacy” and “wipe the word ‘equality’ from the political lexicon in the State of Israel.”

The Palestinian members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, were joined by Jewish liberal lawmakers and about 2,500 demonstrators on Saturday night, in a march through the main streets of downtown Tel Aviv to protest the bill.

Rights groups say Israel has been discriminating against its non-Jewish citizens ever since the state was founded in 1948, pointing to dozens of Israeli laws that mandate preferential treatment to Jews. 

However, if passed the Nation-State law would have greater, more lasting impact as it would enshrine a two-tiered system of rights in a basic law.

In Israel, basic law is the local equivalent of constitutional law, requiring government bodies to interpret policy accordingly.

In the language of the draft law, “the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” 

The law also gives Hebrew superior status over Arabic, making the former the state’s only official language and demoting the latter to merely a language with a “special status”.

It accords exclusive “national self-determination” rights – the right to decide Israel’s national priorities, of both symbolic and practical importance – to Jewish people, wherever they may live, in Israel or abroad, and whether or not they even hold Israeli citizenship.

The law does not, notably, say that Palestinian and other non-Jewish citizens of Israel are entitled to equal treatment under the law.

Coalition concessions

While Netanyahu’s government has ignored the protests of Palestinian parliamentarians and left-leaning Zionist lawmakers, it altered the law’s language in recent weeks in order to secure common ground between the centre-right and far-right factions of the cabinet.

The far-right religious bloc insisted on altering a clause committing the government to “strengthen the affinity between the state and the Jewish people,” ensuring that it would only apply to foreign Jews. The religious parties feared that if, as in its original language, the bill applied to Israeli Jews as well, it would legitimate liberal streams of the Jewish religion, and weaken their own monopoly on issues of synagogue and state. 

The centre-right members of Netanyahu’s coalition government worried that, were the law to include language which could be easily understood as enshrining racial discrimination into law, it could further sour Israel’s relations with the world’s western democracies, who are still its most important international allies and largest trading partners.

The centre-right  were accommodated, and a clause permitting “followers of a single religion or members of a single nationality to establish separate communal settlement” was watered down, while still mandating state support for Jewish-only communities.

Prior to the law’s passing, over 900 locales in Israel – approximately three-quarters of all townships in the country – already forbade non-Jews from living within their municipal borders. 

Sanctioning the state to diminish the property rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel is seemingly backed by widespread popular support. An Israel Democracy Institute poll published in November found that two-thirds of Israeli Jews believe that the right of Palestinian citizens of Israel to buy land in the country should be curtailed, while a quarter of Israeli Jews said any such purchases should be forbidden altogether.

In recent weeks, a family of Palestinian citizens of Israel who purchased a home in the northern city of Afula was protested by hundreds of locals, including the former mayor, who told local press, “'the residents of Afula don't want a mixed city, but rather a Jewish city, and it's their right. This is not racism.”

Adalah, the legal centre for Arab minority rights in Israel, has panned the Nation-State law, saying it “discriminates against the Arabs in the fields of citizenship, property and land, language and culture, and justifies their inferiority in all spheres of life by excluding them from the political community that constitutes the sovereign in their homeland.”

“No country in the world today is defined as a democratic state where the constitutional identity is determined by ethnic affiliation that overrides the principle of equal citizenship,” the group said in a statement.

 

Middle East Eye

18-07-2018

http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-pass-law-enshrining-jewish-supremacy-878258111