Nation-State Law (2018)

Israel has no written constitution. Its Basic Laws perform that function, and the Supreme Court treats them as constitutional norms against which ordinary legislation is read. The Nation-State Law, adopted in July 2018, is one of them, and clause 11 provides that it “may not be changed save by means of a basic-law, adopted by a majority of the Knesset Members.”

The Knesset’s own English text sets out three provisions that carry most of the law’s weight. Clause 1(c): “The realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People.” Clause 7: “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: “Hebrew is the language of the State”; “Arabic has a special status in the State,” with a saving clause providing that nothing in the article compromises the status Arabic held in practice before the law came into force. Clause 5 provides that “the State shall be open to Jewish immigration, and the ingathering of the exiles”; clause 3 declares “the complete and united Jerusalem” the capital.

The omissions are structural. The law makes no reference to equality, to democracy, or to the roughly one-fifth of Israeli citizens who are Palestinian. Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, records it in its Discriminatory Laws Database as a discriminatory law and petitioned against it before the Israeli Supreme Court.

B’Tselem, in its January 2021 position paper, treated the law’s enactment as the reason to publish then rather than earlier: the law “enshrines the Jewish people’s right to self-determination to the exclusion of all others,” it wrote, and “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. This signals to all state institutions that they not only can, but must, promote Jewish supremacy in the entire area under Israeli control.”

The law has also entered international litigation. In its advisory opinion of 19 July 2024 the International Court of Justice cited clause 7 directly when assessing Israel’s settlement policy, observing that pursuant to the 2018 Basic Law the State of Israel “views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation” — a state’s own constitutional text entered into the record of the case against its conduct in occupied territory.

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
• B’Tselem, This Is Apartheid, January 2021 (PDF)
• International Court of Justice, advisory opinion of 19 July 2024, paragraphs 163 and 166 (PDF)