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Israeli Law Declares the Country the ‘Nation-State of the Jewish People’

Charlemagne

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Israeli Law Declares the Country the ‘Nation-State of the Jewish People’

By David M. Halbfinger and Isabel Kershner

July 19, 2018

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 Mr. 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 favored democratic values, nonetheless struck critics as an effort to tip the scales sharply toward Jewishness.

Its passage demonstrated the ascendancy of ultranationalists in Israel’s government, who have been emboldened by the gains of similarly nationalist and populist movements in Europe and elsewhere, as Mr. Netanyahu has increasingly embraced illiberal democracies like that of Hungary — whose far-right prime minister, Viktor Orban, arrived in Jerusalem for a friendly visit only hours before the vote.

With the political opposition too weak to mount a credible threat, and with the Trump administration providing a never-before-seen degree of American support, Mr. Netanyahu’s government, the most right-wing and religious coalition in Israel’s 70-year history, has been pressing its advantages on multiple fronts.

It has sought to exercise more control over the news media, erode the authority of the Supreme Court, curb the activities of left-wing advocacy groups, press ahead with moves that amount to de facto annexation of parts of the West Bank, and undermine the police by trying 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 inquiries.

But none of these expressions of raw political power has carried more symbolic weight than the new basic law.

“This is a defining moment in the annals of Zionism and the annals of the state of Israel,” Mr. Netanyahu said after the bill was enacted in the early morning after hours of impassioned debate, just before the Knesset, or Parliament, went into summer recess.

“We have determined in law the founding principle of our existence,” he said. “Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, and respects the rights of all of its citizens.”

Opponents say the law will inevitably harm the fragile balance between the country’s Jewish majority and Arab minority, which makes up about 21 percent of a population of nearly nine million.

If the new 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 lawmakers 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.

“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.

Yael German, a lawmaker from the centrist opposition party Yesh Atid, called the law “a poison pill for democracy.”

The law is now one of more than a dozen basic laws that together serve as the country’s Constitution and can be amended only by a majority in the Knesset. Two others, on human dignity and on liberty and freedom of occupation, both enacted in the 1990s, determine the values of the state as both Jewish and democratic.

The basic laws legally supersede the Declaration of Independence and, unlike regular laws, have never been overturned by Israel’s Supreme Court.

Dan Yakir, chief legal counsel for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, said that while largely only declaratory, the new law “will give rise to arguments that Jews should enjoy privileges and subsidies and rights, because of the special status that this law purports to give to the Jewish people in Israel.”

“In that regard,” he added, “this is a racist law.”

He noted that a right to equality in Israel had been derived, by interpretation of the Israeli Supreme Court, from the Basic Law on Human Dignity, but that the new law was explicit in elevating the status of Jews.

“There is a plausible argument that the new basic law can overrule the right of equality that is only inferred, and is not specified anywhere in our constitution,” he said.

Adalah, a legal center that campaigns for Arab rights in Israel, warned that the law “entrenches the privileges enjoyed by Jewish citizens, while simultaneously anchoring discrimination against Palestinian citizens and legitimizing exclusion, racism, and systemic inequality.”

Some supporters lamented that many of the law’s more polarizing clauses had been diluted to assure passage. Critics decried it as a populist measure that largely sprang from the perennial competition for votes between Mr. Netanyahu’s conservative party, Likud, and political rivals to its right.

“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 research group 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 law, which also was subtly changed where it addresses the Jewish diaspora to mollify ultra-Orthodox leaders, who feared it could promote Jewish pluralism in Israel, also drew protests from overseas.

“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.

Many North American Jews have grown increasingly alienated from Israel over the Netanyahu government’s hawkishness and coercion by the strictly Orthodox state religious authorities. They remain angry nearly a year after Mr. Netanyahu reneged on an agreement to improve pluralistic prayer arrangements at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, once a hallowed symbol of Jewish unity, and promoted a bill enshrining the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate’s monopoly over conversions to Judaism in Israel.

The new law stipulates that Hebrew is “the state’s language” and demotes Arabic to “special status,” though it is a largely symbolic sleight 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, which experts said would have opened the door to legalized segregation, was replaced by one declaring “the development of Jewish settlement as a national value” and promising “to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.”

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

Proponents of the new law cite continuing demographic threats: Some in Israel’s Arab minority are demanding collective rights and already form a majority in the northern Galilee district. Others view it as a largely pointless expression of nationalism that lays bare basic insecurities in a hostile region and will serve only to fan tensions at home and beyond.

Avi Shilon, an Israeli historian who teaches at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and New York University’s campus in Tel Aviv, noted that Mr. Netanyahu and Likud were the ideological heirs of the right-wing Zionist Revisionist movement of Zeev Jabotinsky, which believed that words could shape reality.

That view is in contrast with those held by the Labor Zionist founders of the state, led by David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister, who placed more faith in deeds and actions.

“The great spirit of Ben-Gurion and the founding fathers was that they knew how to adjust to the times,” Mr. Shilon said. “Mr. Netanyahu and his colleagues are acting like we are still in the battle of 1948, or in a previous era.”

A former Labor Party legislator, Shakeeb Shnaan, a member of Israel’s small, Arabic-speaking Druze community, whose men are drafted for compulsory service in the military, pleaded emotionally for the bill’s defeat. His son was one of two Druze police officers killed in a shooting attack a year ago while guarding an entrance to Jerusalem’s holiest site for Jews and Muslims. The perpetrators were Arab citizens of Israel.

“The state of Israel is my country and my home, and I have given it what is most dear to me, and I continue, and I will continue, to serve it with love,” he said, before adding: “The nationality law is a mark of Cain on the forehead of everyone who votes for it.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/world/middleeast/israel-law-jews-arabic.html
 

Liminal

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Officially an apartheid state. Self determination for Jews only, not all citizens.

But this is the only logical outcome of Zionism.
 

toguy5252

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Officially an apartheid state. Self determination for Jews only, not all citizens.

But this is the only logical outcome of Zionism.
Which Islamic states do you consider officially apartheid states? Just curious.
 

canada-man

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https://972mag.com/why-israel-imposes-sharia-law/5824/

Israeli family law is in the hands of the religious courts, and has been so since the creation of the country. Everyone has heard of the travesty that is the rabbinical court system, but few people realize that there is also a publicly-funded Sharia court system: some 19% of the population of Israel is Muslim, and naturally they are not expected to have rabbis marry and divorce them. There are eight Sharia courts in Israel: in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa, Be’er Sheva, Nazareth, Acre, Taybeh, and Baka Al Garabiya.

Why does Israel maintain such courts? Because family law is mostly out of the reach of the civil courts. You can’t have a civil marriage in Israel. You can’t even have a civil divorce, even assuming you were married elsewhere. Why not? Because in a civil court, the government will have to acknowledge “miscegenation”, marriages between Jews and non-Jews. Most Jew are opposed to that, sometimes violently – the 50 rabbis who yesterday demanded that Jews will refrain from renting apartments to non-Jews based their demand, inter alia, on the fear of “miscegenation” – yet nobody wanted a Nuremberg-like laws. That would be hard to explain away. The result was the empowerment of the religious courts, who preceded Israel, by the young state. Since religious courts would not permit intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews, and would demand conversion, and since wishing to marry a Jew would automatically disqualify a gentile from conversion to Judaism, this seemed like a neat solution.
 

basketcase

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https://www.timesofisrael.com/final-text-of-jewish-nation-state-bill-set-to-become-law/

The full text is there. Not exactly anything new or spectacular or offensive (except to those people who want Israel destroyed and Jews removed from the area). Even the original partition plan referred to Israel as "The Jewish State".

I'd rather the part about promoting settlements not be there but it is better than the original proposed text that allowed ethnocentric communities to be exclusive (and even that applied equally to Jewish and Arab towns).
 

Frankfooter

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https://www.timesofisrael.com/final-text-of-jewish-nation-state-bill-set-to-become-law/

The full text is there. Not exactly anything new or spectacular or offensive (except to those people who want Israel destroyed and Jews removed from the area). Even the original partition plan referred to Israel as "The Jewish State".

I'd rather the part about promoting settlements not be there but it is better than the original proposed text that allowed ethnocentric communities to be exclusive (and even that applied equally to Jewish and Arab towns).
Tell that to the ICC.
They are taking victim statements now.

Oh right, Israel aren't victims, they are the oppressors and the ICC is only taking statements from Palestinians.
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/o...ims-war-crimes-palestine-180720083114607.html

Never mind, just keep it filed for your defence later.

By the way, Uri Avnery thinks you're stupid.

Israelis Just Keep Killing People, Stealing Land
by Uri Avnery Posted on July 20, 2018
One can look at events in Gaza through the left or through the right eye. One can condemn them as inhuman, cruel and mistaken, or justify them as necessary and unavoidable.

But there is one adjective that is beyond question: They are stupid.

If the late Barbara Tuchman were still alive, she might be tempted to add another chapter to her groundbreaking opus "The March of Folly": a chapter titled "Eyeless in Gaza".

The latest episode in this epic started a few months ago, when independent activists in the Gaza Strip called for a march to the Israeli border, which Hamas supported. It was called "The Great March of Return", a symbolic gesture for the more than a million Arab residents who fled or were evicted from their homes in the land that became the State of Israel.

The Israeli authorities pretended to take this seriously. A frightening picture was painted for the Israeli public: 1.8 million Arabs, men, women and children, would throw themselves on the border fence, break through in many places, and storm Israel’s cities and villages. Terrifying.

Israeli sharpshooters were posted along the border and ordered to shoot anyone who looked like a "ringleader". On several succeeding Fridays (the weekly Muslim holy day) more than 150 unarmed protesters, including many children, were shot dead, and many hundreds more severely wounded by gunfire, apart from those hurt by tear gas.

The Israeli argument was that the victims were shot while trying to "storm the fences". Actually, not a single such attempt was photographed, though hundreds of photographers were posted on both sides of the fence.

Facing a worldwide protest, the army changed its orders and now only rarely kills unarmed protesters. The Palestinians also changed their tactics: the main effort now is to fly children’s kites with burning tails and set Israeli fields near the Strip on fire.

Since the wind almost always blows from the West to the East, that is an easy way to hurt Israel. Children can do it, and do. Now the Minister of Education demands that the air force bomb the children. The Chief of Staff refuses, arguing that this is "against the values of the Israeli army".

At present, half of our newspapers and TV newscasts are concerned with Gaza. Everybody seems to agree that sooner or later a full-fledged war will break out there.

The main feature of this exercise is its utter stupidity.

Every military action must have a political aim. As the German military thinker, Carl von Clausewitz, famously said: "War is but a continuation of politics by other means."

The Strip is 41 km long and 6 to 12 km wide. It is one of the most overcrowded places on earth. Nominally it belongs to the largely theoretical State of Palestine, like the West Bank, which is Israeli occupied. The Strip is in fact governed by the radical Muslim Hamas party.

In the past, masses of Palestinian workers from Gaza streamed into Israel every day. But since Hamas assumed power in the Strip, the Israeli government has imposed an almost total blockade on land and sea. The Egyptian dictatorship, a close ally of Israel and a deadly enemy of radical Islam, cooperates with Israel.

So what does Israel want? The preferred solution is to sink the entire strip and its population into the sea. Failing that, what can be done?

The last thing Israel wants is to annex the Strip with its huge population, which cannot be driven out. Also, Israel does not want to put up settlements in the Strip (the few which were set up were withdrawn by Ariel Sharon, who thought that it was not worthwhile to keep and defend them).

The real policy is to make life in Gaza so miserable, that the Gazans themselves will rise and throw the Hamas authorities out. With this in mind, the water supply is reduced to two hours a day, electricity the same. Employment hovers around 50%, wages beneath the minimum. It is a picture of total misery.

Since everything that reaches Gaza must come through Israel (or Egypt), supplies are often cut off completely for days as "punishment".

Alas, history shows that such methods seldom succeed. They only deepen the enmity. So what can be done?

The answer is incredibly simple: sit down, talk and come to an agreement.

Yes, but how can you sit down with a mortal enemy, whose official ideology totally rejects a Jewish State?

Islam, which (like every religion) has an answer to everything, recognizes something called a "Hudna", which is a lasting armistice. This can go on for many decades and is (religiously) kept.

For several years now, Hamas has been almost openly hinting that it is ready for a long Hudna. Egypt has volunteered to mediate. Our government has totally ignored the offer. A Hudna with the enemy? Out of the question! God forbid! Would be terribly unpopular politically!

But it would be the sensible thing to do. Stop all hostile acts from both sides, say for 50 years. Abolish the blockade. Build a real harbor in Gaza city. Allow free trade under some kind of military inspection. Same for an airport. Allow workers to find employment in Israel, instead of importing workers from China and Romania. Turn Gaza into a second Singapore. Allow free travel between Gaza and the West Bank by a bridge or an extraterritorial highway. Help to restore unity between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Why not? The very idea is rejected by an ordinary Israeli on sight.

A deal with Hamas? Impossible!!! Hamas wants to destroy Israel. Everybody knows that.

I hear this many times, and always wonder about the stupidity of people who repeat this.

How does a group of a few hundred thousand "destroy" one of the worlds most heavily armed states, a state that possesses nuclear bombs and submarines to deliver them? How? With kites?

Both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin pay us homage, the world’s fascist dictators and liberal presidents come to visit. How can Hamas pose a mortal danger?

Why doesn’t Hamas stop hostilities by itself? Hamas has competitors, which are even more radical. It does not dare to show any sign of weakness.

Some decades ago the Arab world, on the initiative of Saudi Arabia, offered Israel peace under several conditions, all of them acceptable. Successive Israel governments have not only not accepted it, they have ignored it altogether.

There was some logic in this. The Israeli government wants to annex the West Bank. It wants to get the Arab population out, and replace them with Jewish settlers. It conducts this policy slowly, cautiously, but consistently.

It is a cruel policy, a detestable policy, yet it has some logic in it. If you really want to achieve this abominable aim, the methods may be adequate. But this does not apply to the Gaza Strip, which no one wants to annex. There, the methods are sheer folly.

This does not mean that the overall Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is any more wise. It is not.

Binyamin Netanyahu and his hand-picked stupid ministers have no policy. Or so it seems. In fact they do have an undeclared one: creeping annexation of the West Bank.

This is now going on at a quicker pace than before. The daily news gives the impression that the entire government machine is now concentrating on this project.

This will lead directly to an apartheid-style state, where a large Jewish minority will dominate an Arab majority.

For how long? One generation? Two? Three?

It has been said that a clever person is able to extricate himself from a trap into which a wise person would not have fallen in the first place.

Stupid people do not extricate themselves. They are not even aware of the trap.
 
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canada-man

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The Palestinians are an invented people




“There is no such country as Palestine! ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria.”

“Palestine and Transjordan are one.”

King Abdullah, Arab League meeting in Cairo,12 April 1948


“The truth is that Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan.”

– King Hussein of Jordan, in 1981


Abdul Hamid Sharif, Prime Minister of Jordan declared in 1980,

“The Palestinians and Jordanians do not belong to different nationalities. They hold the same Jordanian passports, are Arabs and have the same Jordanian culture.”




The “Palestinian” flag design is the same as the flag of the failed union of Jordan and Iraq called the Arab Federation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Federation


palestinians are a myth says hamas member "they are just saudis and egyptians"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwBSWN4s9JU



-Professor Azmi Bishara(Arabic: عزمي بشارة)-- a "palestinian arab"

"There is no "palestinian nation" !
when were there any Palestinians??? LOL
until the end of the 19th century, Palestine was the south of "Greater Syria" another resent invention.
there is only an arab nation !
the word "palestine" its self is a colonial invention used by the romans in order to erase the jewish identity of judea and israel.
even the "Palestinian National Charter" recognizes all the jews living in the region prior to the 1948 war as "palestinians" !
its an intellectual fad, divorced from the concerns of uneducated people"

-Zuheir Mohsen (Arabic: زهير محسن)- top p.l.o member responsible for damur massacre.

"The "Palestinian people" does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a "Palestinian people".."
 

basketcase

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Dec 29, 2005
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.
By the way, Uri Avnery thinks you're stupid.
Who the hell is Avnery and why would anyone care what he thinks? ( I know you like posting what Jews say on the rare occasions they excuse Hamas like you do and automatically dismiss what Jews say as fake news when you don't like it)

And weren't you just dismissing a link of mine because it was an opinion piece (but I'm sure your blog selections are so much more informative)?
 

basketcase

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The Palestinians are an invented people...
But they exist now.

Yes there is no difference ethnically between Palestinians and the non-Hashemite Jordanians. Also Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and much of Jordan were all part of the same province under the Ottomans but recent history has made them an identifiable people (sadly much of it because their brothers have kept them locked in camps for political advantage).

Sadly the Palestinian leadership haven't learned from their brothers in Egypt and Jordan and seen fit to accept the idea of peace beside Israel.
 

Liminal

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https://www.timesofisrael.com/final-text-of-jewish-nation-state-bill-set-to-become-law/

The full text is there. Not exactly anything new or spectacular or offensive (except to those people who want Israel destroyed and Jews removed from the area). Even the original partition plan referred to Israel as "The Jewish State".

I'd rather the part about promoting settlements not be there but it is better than the original proposed text that allowed ethnocentric communities to be exclusive (and even that applied equally to Jewish and Arab towns).
Yes, nothing exclusive about the state enshrining only Jewish settlements.

7 — Jewish settlement

A. The state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value and will act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.

Officially an apartheid state. Officially violating international law in the Occupied Territories.

 

basketcase

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Yes, nothing exclusive about the state enshrining only Jewish settlements.
...
Where does it say non-Jewish settlement is illegal? As I said I would rather there be no promotion of settlements but it is hardly racist and more importantly, Israel has shown a willingness to abandon settlements in a peace plan. Too bad Abbas is rejecting even the idea of a peace plan now.

And quoting Mandela is just a reminder that the Palestinian leadership still refuse to do what Mandela did and embrace peace.
 

Frankfooter

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So you just reinforce that your are criticizing something you haven't even read just because you hate Israel existing.
I don't like apartheid.
Were Israel to be a country with equal rights and the rule of law, I would fully support.
I support Canadian values like equal rights.

Why won't you?
 

Liminal

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Mar 21, 2003
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Where does it say non-Jewish settlement is illegal? As I said I would rather there be no promotion of settlements but it is hardly racist and more importantly, Israel has shown a willingness to abandon settlements in a peace plan. Too bad Abbas is rejecting even the idea of a peace plan now.

And quoting Mandela is just a reminder that the Palestinian leadership still refuse to do what Mandela did and embrace peace.
You've got a bad case of cognitive dissonance.
 

Liminal

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Mar 21, 2003
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Where does it say non-Jewish settlement is illegal? As I said I would rather there be no promotion of settlements but it is hardly racist and more importantly, Israel has shown a willingness to abandon settlements in a peace plan. Too bad Abbas is rejecting even the idea of a peace plan now.

And quoting Mandela is just a reminder that the Palestinian leadership still refuse to do what Mandela did and embrace peace.
You've got a bad case of cognitive dissonance.


 
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