“Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, with equal rights for all citizens”

The claim rests on a real feature — Palestinian citizens of Israel (about a fifth of the population) vote and sit in parliament — and on a large omission: what the law says the state is for. The Law of Return (1950) opens with “Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh,” granting Jews anywhere in the world automatic immigration and citizenship, while the roughly 726,000 Palestinian refugees of 1948 and their descendants were barred from returning at all. The Absentees’ Property Law (1950) then transferred the lands, homes and bank accounts of those refugees — people made “absent” by a war — to a state Custodian, and from there largely to Jewish state institutions.

Discrimination is not only historical. Adalah, the legal center for Arab minority rights in Israel, maintains a Discriminatory Laws Database listing over 65 Israeli laws that directly or indirectly discriminate against Palestinian citizens and residents. In 2018 the Knesset enacted Basic Law: Israel — the Nation-State of the Jewish People, a constitutional-level law declaring that “the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people,” designating “the development of Jewish settlement” as “a national value” to be encouraged, and stripping Arabic of the official status it had held since the Mandate, leaving it a “special status.” The law contains no clause affirming equality.

Finally, the phrase “Israel” quietly excludes the millions of Palestinians who have lived under Israeli military rule in the occupied territories since 1967 without citizenship or a vote in the state that controls their movement, land, water and borders. It was this combined system — within Israel and in the territories — that led Human Rights Watch in 2021 (A Threshold Crossed) to conclude that Israeli authorities were committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution. A state can hold genuine elections and still organize legal privilege by nationality and religion; the laws above are the documentation.

Sources

• Adalah — The Discriminatory Laws Database
• Final text of the Jewish Nation-State Basic Law (19 July 2018) — Times of Israel
• Human Rights Watch, “A Threshold Crossed” (2021)
• The Right of Return of the Palestinian People — UN study (1978), quoting the Law of Return