Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June/July 2017, pp. 16-17, 19

The Nakba Continues

Jewish Nation-State Bill Looks Ahead to Rule Over Palestinian Majority

By Jonathan Cook

NEW LEGISLATION TO cement Israel’s definition as a state belonging exclusively to Jews around the world is a “declaration of war” on Israel’s Palestinian citizens, the minority’s leaders have warned.

The bill, which defines Israel as the “national home of the Jewish people,” passed its first vote in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, on May 10, after it had receved unanimous backing from a government committee.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has vowed to get the measure on to the statute books as soon as possible, but it must first be redrafted by the Justice Ministry.

Among its provisions, the legislation—popularly known as the Jewish Nation-State Bill—revokes the status of Arabic as an official language, even though it is the mother tongue of one in five citizens: Israel’s large minority of 1.7 million Palestinians.

The legislation affirms that world Jewry has a “unique” right to national self-determination in Israel, and calls for the government to further strengthen ties to Jewish communities outside Israel.

It also increases the powers of so-called “admissions committees,” which block Palestinian citizens from living in hundreds of exclusively Jewish communities that control most of Israel’s land.

Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked has suggested that the redrafted bill, due within two months, will be even more hard-line, requiring judges to prioritize Israel’s Jewish character over democratic principles. She said the legislation “will make the presence of Jewish values felt as a tool for judges.”

In addition, critics are concerned that the legislation is intended to stymie any prospects of reviving peace talks with the Palestinian leadership in the occupied territories. On a visit to the region in late May, U.S. President Donald Trump indicated that he is preparing to relaunch the long-stalled peace process. In a keynote speech, he said, “Peace won’t be easy. We all know that—both sides face tough decisions, but Israelis and Palestinians can make a deal.”

Netanyahu, however, has already stated that he will insist on a precondition that Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, recognizes Israel as a Jewish state. The new bill will effectively set out the terms of the state Abbas is expected to recognize.

Justifying the legislation to his Likud party supporters, Netanyahu said: “The bill establishes the fact that the State of Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people in our historic homeland.”

He added: “There is no contradiction at all between this bill and equal rights for all citizens of Israel.”

However, leaders of Israel’s large Palestinian minority strenuously disagreed.

Knesset member Ayman Odeh, head of the Palestinian-dominated Joint List party, warned that the legislation would ensure “the tyranny of the majority over the minority.”

Under the bill, Hebrew alone will be an official language, with Arabic accorded only “special status.” Palestinian citizens already complain that most public services and official documents are not provided in Arabic.

“The aim is to portray institutional racism in Israel as entirely normal, and make sure the apartheid reality here is irreversible,” Haneen Zoabi, a Palestinian Knesset member, said. “It is part of the right’s magical thinking—they are in denial that there is an indigenous people here still living in their homeland. We are not about to disappear because of this law.”

Zoabi and two other Palestinian legislators were ejected from the chamber after protesting against the bill at its first reading on May 10.

In strictly legal terms, the Jewish Nation-State Bill offers limited changes. Since its founding in 1948, Israel has defined itself as a state of the Jewish people rather than of all its citizens, including its Palestinian minority.

The Law of Return of 1950 allows only Jews to immigrate to Israel and receive citizenship. Adalah, a legal rights group for Israel’s Palestinian citizens, has documented dozens of laws that explicitly discriminate against Palestinian citizens.

Aeyal Gross, a constitutional lawyer, wrote in the Haaretz daily that “a democratic state cannot identify itself with only part of its population.”

Legislation declaring Israel the nation-state of the Jewish people has been under periodic debate since its author Avi Dichter, a former head of Israel’s Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence service, unsuccessfully introduced a first draft in 2011. Dichter said the new bill included changes “to expand the basis of supporters” among the Zionist parties.

Masud Ghanaim of the Joint Arab List pointed out a problem for Jewish religious parties in supporting such legislation: “How can this government bring a law that Israel is the state of the Jewish people, while the argument is still going on among Jewish communities about who is a Jew?”

Orthodox rabbis recognize as a Jew only someone with a Jewish mother. The Law of Return, on the other hand, allows anyone with a single Jewish grandparent to immigrate as a Jew.

The other difficulty with the bill—this time for the political left—has been explained by Hassan Jabareen, the head of Adalah.

He noted that Israel’s Labor party founders—today associated with what is called the Zionist Camp—originally had tried to avoid too much legislation that overtly discriminated on an ethnic basis, preferring to promote an image abroad of Israel as a liberal democracy. Instead the state concentrated on racist administrative practices.

The right wing under Netanyahu had jettisoned this tradition, said Jabareen.

“The Netanyahu government’s goal is to make Jewish supremacy apparent and to make Arab citizens explicitly inferior—both in the Arabs’ own eyes and in the eyes of Jews. As such, the Nation-State legislation is anti-Arab and racist at its core,” he wrote.

“For these reasons, the debate between the two camps is not about whether discrimination should or should not be stopped, but rather about how to continue it.”

CONTINUING DISCRIMINATION

Writing in Haaretz, Ravit Hecht noted that the “most common criticism of the new nation-state bill among the Zionist center left is that it’s unnecessary, since it merely confirms well-known axioms embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”

Zeev Elkin, a government minister, used those grounds during a parliamentary debate to try to cajole the opposition parties to back the bill: “Give me one line that bothers you. Much of what appears here already appears in the state’s law books.”

The new legislation, however, is significant for reasons beyond its immediate legal implications.

Not least, it gives Israel’s self-definition as the nation-state of the Jewish people something akin to constitutional standing, observed Ali Haider, a human rights lawyer and former co-director of Sikkuy, an organization lobbying for equal citizenship rights.

The bill, if passed, will join a handful of Basic Laws intended to provide the foundations of any future constitution. (Israel has not had one since its founding.) Such laws take precedence over ordinary laws and are much harder to repeal.

“This is a very dangerous step,” Haider explained, “because it makes explicit in a Basic Law that all Jews, even those who are not citizens, have superior rights in Israel to those citizens who are Palestinian.”

An alternative draft of the new law, which promised equal rights to all citizens, was effectively blocked by the government in January, when it came up for consideration.

According to Haider, the new version would provide the constitutional foundation to justify a tide of other laws intended to marginalize Palestinian citizens and erode their rights as citizens.

An Expulsion Law passed last year gives the Knesset the power to expel Palestinian members if they make political statements the Jewish majority disapprove of. Another bill before the Knesset, the Muezzin Law, silences the Muslim call to prayer.

Such laws are almost certain to be challenged in Israel’s Supreme Court. “The judges will be much more reluctant to intervene if the Jewish Nation-State Bill is in force,” Haider said. “They will feel under pressure to ignore basic democratic principles and give priority to Israel’s Jewish character.”

He added that there would be little opposition from the Jewish public. A survey by the Israel Democracy Institute last December found that more than half of Israeli Jews wanted any citizen who rejected Israel’s definition as a Jewish state stripped of basic rights.

Another key goal of the bill for the Netanyahu government is its likely impact on any moves to revive peace talks with the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s government no longer even pays lip service to the idea that it might agree to a Palestinian state. Most debates in the Israeli cabinet focus instead on intensifying settlement building and preparations for annexing areas of the West Bank.

Zoabi noted that since Netanyahu came to power in 2009, he has worked tirelessly to persuade Washington to accept his new precondition for talks that the Palestinian leadership recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

The new bill would place Abbas in a tricky position, allowing him to enter talks with Israel only if he first agrees to sacrifice the rights both of Israel’s Palestinian citizens to equal citizenship and of millions of Palestinian refugees to return to their former homes.

“This law is aimed not only at Abbas but at Trump,” said Zoabi. “It gives him a map instructing him exactly what can be negotiated over and what the terms of a solution must look like.”

Dichter, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, indicated the diplomatic use to which it would be put.

Telling the Israeli website Ynet that “The Palestinian aspiration to eliminate the Jewish people's nation-state is no longer secret,” he said that Israel must make “demands of its enemies to recognize it as the nation-state of the Jewish people.”

Netanyahu echoed Dichter, saying that the bill was “the clearest answer to all those who are trying to deny the deep connection between the people of Israel and its land.”

It is probably not coincidental that the Nation-State Bill is being fast-tracked, as far-right ministers in Netanyahu’s government have drafted separate legislation to apply Israeli laws in the West Bank. This is a key plank in efforts by Jewish settlers and their supporters in government to annex the West Bank by stealth.

Marzuq al-Halabi, a Palestinian journalist writing for the Israeli website +972, warned that on the back of the Nation-State Bill the government would seek to redraw Israel’s borders to include parts or all of the West Bank.

The resulting “apartheid regime” would then “create…‘justified crimes’ against the Palestinian people, such as population transfer or removal,” he wrote.

A Haaretz editorial agreed that Netanyahu was laying the groundwork for annexing the West Bank without conferring rights on its Palestinian population.

The new law, it said, was intended as “the constitutional cornerstone for apartheid” in Israel and the occupied territories, allowing Israel to “maintain control over…a Palestinian majority living under its rule.” ◙

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Jonathan Cook is a journalist based in Nazareth and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. He is the author of Blood and Religion and Israel and the Clash of Civilisations (available from AET’s Middle East Books and More). Copyright © Abu Dhabi Media Company. All rights reserved.