“Israel's laws treat all citizens equally; the 2018 Nation-State Law was purely symbolic”

The text is short and the Knesset publishes it in English on its own website. Clause 1 opens: “The Land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish People, in which the State of Israel was established”; “The State of Israel is the nation state of the Jewish People in which it realizes its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination”; and then 1(c), the operative sentence: “The realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People.” Clause 5 provides that “the State shall be open to Jewish immigration, and the ingathering of the exiles.” Clause 7 provides that “the State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.” Clause 4 makes Hebrew “the language of the State” and gives Arabic “a special status,” ending the equal official standing it had held since the Mandate. Clause 11 makes the law amendable only by another Basic Law passed by a majority of Knesset members.

What the law does not contain is as significant as what it does. There is no clause guaranteeing equality, no reference to democracy, and no mention of the roughly one-fifth of Israeli citizens who are Palestinian. Israel has no written constitution; its Basic Laws serve that function, and the Supreme Court has treated them as constitutional norms. A constitutional-rank instruction that self-determination in the state belongs exclusively to one of its national groups, and that settlement by that group is a national value the state must promote, is not a symbol. It is the interpretive frame against which every ordinary statute and administrative decision is now read.

B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, explained in January 2021 why the enactment mattered even to those who thought the practice was already in place: “The Nation State basic law, enacted in 2018, enshrines the Jewish people’s right to self-determination to the exclusion of all others. It establishes that distinguishing Jews in Israel (and throughout the world) from non-Jews is fundamental and legitimate. Based on this distinction, the law permits institutionalized discrimination in favor of Jews in settlement, housing, land development, citizenship, language and culture. It is true that the Israeli regime largely followed these principles before. Yet Jewish supremacy has now been enshrined in basic law, making it a binding constitutional principle — unlike ordinary law or practices by authorities, which can be challenged.”

Nor does the Nation-State Law stand alone. The Admissions Committees Law of 2011 (amended in 2023) permits admissions committees in Jewish Israeli “community towns” to reject applicants for housing on grounds of “suitability for the social life in the community” and lack of suitability “with the social-cultural fabric of the community town,” with a representative of the Jewish Agency or the World Zionist Organization sitting on the committee. The “Nakba Law” of the same year authorises the Finance Minister to withdraw state funding from any body that spends money on “commemorating Independence Day or the day of the establishment of the state as a day of mourning” — a provision aimed at the commemoration of 1948 by the state’s own Palestinian citizens. Adalah’s Discriminatory Laws Database catalogues more than 65 such laws.

A state can hold competitive elections, seat opposition members from a minority community, and still write into its constitutional order that the country belongs to one national group. Those two facts are not in tension; they are simply both true, and the second is not answered by repeating the first. The relevant question is not whether Palestinian citizens vote — they do — but what the law says the state is for, and the Knesset answered that question itself in 2018.

Sources

• Basic Law: Israel — the Nation State of the Jewish People, English text published by the Knesset (PDF)
• Basic Law: Israel – The Nation-State of the Jewish People — Adalah, Discriminatory Laws Database
• “Admissions Committees Law” — Cooperative Societies Ordinance, Amendments No. 8 and 12 — Adalah
• “Nakba Law” — Amendment No. 40 to the Budgets Foundations Law — Adalah
• B’Tselem, A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid, January 2021 (PDF)