Jerusalem: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has long demanded that the Palestinians acknowledge his country’s existence as the “nation-state of the Jewish people.” On Thursday, his governing coalition stopped waiting around and pushed through a law that made it a fact.
In an incendiary move hailed as historic by Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition but denounced by centrists and leftists as racist and anti-democratic, Israel’s parliament enacted a law that enshrines the right of national self-determination as “unique to the Jewish people”— not all citizens.
The legislation, a “basic law”— giving it the weight of a constitutional amendment — omits any mention of democracy or the principle of equality, in what critics called a betrayal of Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence, which ensured “complete equality of social and political rights” for “all its inhabitants” no matter their religion, race or sex.
The new law promotes the development of Jewish communities, possibly aiding those who would seek to advance discriminatory land-allocation policies. And it downgrades Arabic from an official language to one with a “special status.”
Since Israel was established, it has grappled with the inherent tensions between its dual aspirations of being both a Jewish and democratic state. The new law, portrayed by proponents as restoring that balance in the aftermath of judicial rulings that favoured democratic values, nonetheless struck critics as an effort to tip the scales sharply toward Jewishness.
Read the article by David M. Halbfinger and Isabel Kershner in The Sydney Morning Herald (from The New York Times).