The Knesset’s passage of the nation-state bill
last month surely ranks as one the most self-defeating moves in
Israel’s history. Its passage was unnecessary, but the damage it has
wrought, one can safely say now, is incalculable. The law is
anti-Zionist in its essence: It has sowed division, spread venom,
tainted Israel’s image and weakened its national resolve. If the
Knesset’s intent was to bolster the ties between the Jewish nation and
its land, the results have been exactly the opposite: The Zionist hold
on the State of Israel has never seemed more dubious.
Take the Law of
Return, for example. Before the nation-state law, it was barely
mentioned. There was general agreement that clear-cut discrimination in
favor of Jews in acquiring Israeli citizenship was justified, or at
least understandable, against the backdrop of history and the Holocaust,
and that their favored status ends once they enter the country. When
drafters of the nation-state bill clutched at the precedent of the Law
of Return in order to defend themselves, they infected it with
obtuseness and malice of their own creation. Now the Law of Return also
seems offensive.
Take apartheid, as
another example. Making the analogy to the odious South African regime
was mostly limited up to now to clear-cut enemies of Israel. The
nation-state law shifted the comparisons to center stage.
And
even that wasn’t enough for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: To
justify his pre-planned ambush of the Druze leadership in their meeting
last week, the Prime Minister’s Office falsely disseminated the claim
that retired Israeli General Amal Assad had described Israel as an
apartheid state, so that the whole world, and not just his followers on
Facebook, would know about the comparison. Coming from a retired Druze
combat brigadier-general, a supposed symbol of equality and integration,
the apartheid analogy sounded like reliable testimony from an expert
witness.
The nation-state law
ripped off the mask that everyone had been content to live with of an
enlightened, liberal and democratic Israel that grants indiscriminate
equality to all of its minorities.
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The
law has cast a dark shadow over Israel’s attitude, not only for the
future but in the present and past as well. It revealed that even today,
Israeli Arabs are cast to the sidelines, that the Druze suffer
discrimination, despite their loyalty, and that the sentiments and
sensibilities of non-Jews as a whole are bypassed and ignored. The new
law has shown that it’s not enough for the Jews to be lords of the land.
They insist on flaunting their superiority, for the entire world to
see. If minorities don’t like it, the Knesset said, they can lump it.
The wickedness of the
law is compounded by the fact that it is completely unwarranted. It
aims to combat a threat that is a figment of the right wing’s feverish
fantasies. Israel today is more “Jewish” than ever. The negligible
demand for “a state for all its citizens” exists only on the margins.
Most of the world recognizes the right of Jews to their homeland, and
the country’s minorities have learned to live in peace with that
reality.
The Supreme Court,
which the law purports to restrain, routinely bows to security
authorities, rarely finds in favor of Palestinians, consistently upholds
Israel’s Jewish values and regularly allows the government and the
Knesset to dismember Israeli democracy, almost to their hearts’ content.
Netanyahu, along with Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, want to stifle
whatever is left of the court’s independence.
“Without the
nation-state law, the future of Israel as the nation-state of the Jews
cannot be guaranteed,” Netanyahu said at Sunday’s cabinet meeting, in
one of the most inane assertions on record. Seriously? And here we were
bamboozled to believe that the future of the Jewish state depends on its
national unity, internal cohesiveness, commitment to democracy,
struggle for equality and the sense of belonging it gives to minorities
of all stripes and colors, all values that the nation-state law
callously tramples. We had assumed that safeguarding the Jewish identity
of Israel hinges, first and foremost, on maintaining a Jewish majority,
without which, with or without the law, Israel will truly become an
apartheid state.
Turns out we were
wrong. According to Netanyahu, the 11 anemic clauses of the nation-state
law are the rock of Israel’s existence and the path to its salvation.
This is where Netanyahu would have us live: Not in the state of the
Jews, but in the state of their delusions.
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