ON 19 JULY 2018, the Israeli Knesset passed the “Basic Law: Israel – The Nation-State of the Jewish People,” the most recent in a series of such laws that effectively make up the constitution of the State of Israel. After seven years of discussion in which numerous versions of the text were considered, the law passed by sixty-two votes in favor, fifty-five against, and two abstentions. The Jewish Nation-State Law, as it is widely known, is viewed as an absolute triumph by the ultranationalist right-wing Israeli establishment. It is regarded with deep consternation by others, including self-avowed Zionists, both inside and outside Israel.
Consecrating the nature of Israel as a Jewish state in constitutional terms, the law confers the right of self-determination exclusively on Israeli Jews and all Jewish immigrants to Israel. In doing so, it turns Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who account for over 20 percent of the population, into de jure second-class citizens. Overriding the principles of equality and nondiscrimination that are at the core of democratic constitutional regimes, the law also proclaims settlement of Jews a “national value,” further blurring the distinction between the State of Israel, within its 1949 boundaries, and other areas of Palestine that have been under de facto Israeli control for more than half a century.
In this latest publication in the Current Issues in Depth series, the Institute for Palestine Studies presents two analytical commentaries on this law by legal scholars and practitioners based in Israel and the United States. The first is by Hassan Jabareen and Suhad Bishara, lawyers working with Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which is headquartered in Haifa. Jabareen is the cofounder and director of Adalah and, arguably, Israel’s foremost Palestinian constitutional attorney; Bishara, the head of Adalah’s land and planning unit, has litigated numerous constitutional cases before the Israeli Supreme Court on the land rights of both Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians living under occupation. The second essay is by Nadia Ben-Youssef and Sandra Tamari, co-founders of the US-based Adalah Justice Project, affiliated with Adalah in Haifa. Tamari is director of the Justice Project, and Ben-Youssef, a former Adalah lawyer, is the current advocacy director for the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York.
In their essay entitled “The Jewish Nation-State Law: Antecedents and Constitutional Implications,” Jabareen and Bishara lay out the far-reaching constitutional implications of the Jewish Nation-State Law. They dispute the facile notion that the Basic Law changes nothing and that it simply confirms decades-long discriminatory practice. Instead, they underline the dangers of constitutionally enshrining policies that amount to apartheid: separate rights and privileges for one section of the population. They also caution against the elimination of a constitutional distinction between areas inside the 1949 Green Line—that delimited Israel’s de facto borders and the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, which results from the law’s application “without distinction to all areas under Israeli control that encompass Jewish residents.” In other words, this law constitutes a legal prelude to full annexation of the occupied territories.
In the second essay, entitled “Enshrining Discrimination: Israel’s Nation-State Law,” Ben-Youssef and Tamari reflect on the passage of this law within a broader history of settler colonialism. The essay highlights three of the law’s central premises: the entrenched supremacy of Jewish settlers; the erasure of indigenous Palestinians; and, with reference to borders, the effective annexation of those parts of historic Palestine that were occupied in 1967. Both essays, moreover, emphasize that the Jewish Nation-State Law’s elimination of the distinction between Israel and the occupied territories effectively affirms that the only people with the right to self-determination in the entirety of Palestine are the Jewish people, extinguishing that right for the Palestinian people.
The text of the Jewish Nation-State Law can be found here.
Readers may be interested in the introduction to the petition for an order nisi, which Adalah presented to the Israeli Supreme Court sitting as the High Court of Justice on 7 August 2018 (HCJ 5866/18, The High Follow-up Committee for Arab Citizens in Israel, et al. v. The Knesset [case pending]). Alongside Adalah, the petitioners are the High Follow-up Committee for Arab Citizens in Israel, the National Committee of Arab Mayors, and the Joint List in the Knesset, which together constitute the core of Palestinian political leadership inside Israel. The petition argues that by enacting this legislation, the Knesset, “as a constituent authority, exceeded its powers in the most extreme manner” and requests the court to “order the annulment of the Basic Law.” The link to the full text of the petition in English and Hebrew can be found here.