Dear
friends,
as you will be aware Israel has finally passed the
"nation state" law which formally enshrines apartheid. The
bill has been on the table since 2011 and simply the latest law put
in place by the Zionist state to reinforce the every day apartheid
already happening on the ground.
I have included below two
articles - one from Ben White discussing what the history, political
context and political reality of the law, as well as an article from
the New York Times which gives a reasonably overview of the law.
in
solidarity, Kim
**********************
Ben
White, Middle East Eye, 19 July 2018
The
law is only the latest attempt to legislate discrimination against
Palestinians
On
Thursday, the Israeli government formally passed the "Jewish
nation state"law. With the Knesset's summer recess on the
horizon, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu managed to pass
the law ahead of the break.
"This
is a defining moment in the annals of Zionism and the history of the
state of
Israel,"
Netanyahu told the Knesset after the vote.
The
initiative has risen to the top of the news agenda in Israel, with
high-profile interventions from opponents and supporters. Last
Tuesday, President Reuven Rivlin warned in a public letter of what he
believes are the dangers inherent in the law - especially an article
designed to protect and promote the existence of Jewish-only
communities.
Lobbying
efforts
Ahead
of the vote, a number of Jewish American leaders have strongly
urged Netanyahu to reconsider, intensifying their lobbying
efforts to prevent the bill's passage.
These
responses have, regrettably but predictably, been characterised by a
failure to understand or take sufficiently into account how Israel's
status as a "Jewish state" has always been reflected in
legislation and practice, and, crucially, how this has impacted on
Palestinians since 1948.
Many
discriminatory laws arealready on the books, and legal ways to create
segregated communities in Israel already exist. There is no
right to equality, and Israel is not a state of all its
citizens. The much-heralded Declaration of Independence is not a
constitutional law, and the Basic Law already privileges the
protection of a “Jewish state” over equality for non-Jewish
citizens.
As
a UN special rapporteur put it in 2012, Israeli authorities already
pursue "a land development model that excludes, discriminates
against and displaces minorities". The UN Committee on the
Elimination of Racial Discrimination has similarly noted “the
enactment of a number of discriminatory laws on land issues which
disproportionately affect non-Jewish communities”.
Indeed,
the issue of Jewish-only communities, which has dominated recent
criticism over the law passed on Thursday, is often debated without
reference to the fact that Israel already has hundreds of such
segregated communities, thanks to the role of "admission
committees".
Traced
back to the Nakba
A
decade ago, Human Rights Watch reported on how these committees "are
made up of government and community representatives as well as a
senior official in the Jewish Agency or the Zionist Organisation, and
have notoriously been used to exclude Arabs from living in rural
Jewish communities".
Such
decades-old institutionalised discrimination, which can be traced all
the way back to the Nakba, makes a mockery of the claim by the Israel
Democracy Institute's Mordechai Kremnitzer that the new law
would somehow constitute "the end of Israel as a Jewish and
democratic state".
The
new law does, however, represent an innovation, both legally and
politically, as analysedby legal rights centre Adalah in a new
position paper published on Sunday; enjoying the status of a Basic
Law, the Jewish nation state law would anchor racist practices in the
constitution.
Coverage
by Western media has, on the whole, reproduced the lacuna of the
law’s Israeli critics. Yet, the omission of the experience of
Palestinian citizens in this "Jewish and democratic” state is
compounded by an analysis that fails to look deeper into why this
legislation is being proposed at all.
The
"Jewish nation state" law is not the product of a
right-wing tussle between Likud and Jewish Home, or Netanyahu and
Naftali Bennett. Rather, tracing the origins of this proposed
legislation reveals that it is, in essence, pushback against the
efforts by Palestinian citizens over the last two decades to affirm
their national identity and demand a state of all its citizens.
Doubling
down
Not
long after former Shin Bet head Avi Dichter began efforts to pass a
"Jewish nation state" bill in 2011, Israeli journalist
Lahav Harkov – now news editor of the Jerusalem Post – praisedthe
initiative by citing “campaigns to delegitimise Israel on the rise
both inside and outside the country”.
Thus,
the response from the Israeli political establishment to a mobilised
Palestinian citizenry demanding genuine equality has been to
double-down on discrimination, and to defiantly and ever-more
explicitly assert and legally protect the existence of a “Jewish
state”.
But
this is not without its advantages, as highlighted by the furore over
the new law. For what the draft legislation threatens is not the
existence of a “democratic” Israel, but rather critics’ idea of
a “Jewish and democratic” state (or at least the plausibility of
maintaining this idea).
Through
its crudeness, the law threatens Israel’s ability to continue
long-standing, institutionalised discrimination with no international
cost, a prospect flagged through the warnings of Israel’s attorney
general and Jewish American leader Rabbi Rick Jacobs.
Demographic
war
"The
true face of Zionism in Israel," wrote Orly Noy in +972 magazine
last week, is “an inherent, perpetual demographic war against its
Palestinian citizens. If Israel seeks to be Jewish and democratic, it
needs to actively ensure a Jewish majority.”
The
"Jewish nation state" law is part of this historic and
ongoing demographic war - one that is testimony to the activism of
Palestinian citizens and an effort to stifle it.
As
Israel consolidates the de facto single state between the river and
the sea, this won’t be the last attempt to see the apartheid
reality on the ground further reflected in legislation.
-
Ben White is the author of the new book Cracks in the Wall: Beyond
Apartheid in Palestine/Israel. He is a freelance journalist and
writer and his articles have been published by Al Jazeera, al-Araby,
Huffington Post, the Electronic Intifada, the Guardian's Comment is
Free and more.
By
David M. Halbfinger and Isabel Kershner
July
19, 2018 New York
Times
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.”
