Surprise? The Jewish Nation-State Law under attack by Haaretz's Amos Schocken - by Victor Rosenthal

...Schocken and the rest of the Israeli Left passionately hate the recently passed Nation-State Law. To them, the statement that “Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people” is anathema. It is a statement of Zionism, which is Jewish nationalism. And they don’t care very much for either nationalism (except perhaps Palestinian nationalism) or anything connected with Jewishness. In fact, I suspect that they don’t care much for Jews either; but that’s another blog.

Victor Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
31 March '19..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2019/03/the-nation-state-law-under-attack/

Amos Schocken is the publisher of Ha’aretz, the employer of Gideon Levy and Amira Hass, of Rogel Alpher and B. Michael, and other writers who pour out their hatred of the Jewish state both in Hebrew and English translation. To someone like me who believes that the battle to defend Israel in the information sphere is as important as the kinetic conflict on the battlefields, Amos Schocken is the devil.

Schocken and the rest of the Israeli Left passionately hate the recently passed Nation-State Law. To them, the statement that “Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people” is anathema. It is a statement of Zionism, which is Jewish nationalism. And they don’t care very much for either nationalism (except perhaps Palestinian nationalism) or anything connected with Jewishness. In fact, I suspect that they don’t care much for Jews either; but that’s another blog.

For those who don’t know, Israel does not have a constitution as such. When the state was declared in May 1948, there was no time to create one in the midst of a war. The Declaration of Independence optimistically set a date five months in the future at which a constitution would be adopted. But the differences of opinion about the nature of the state, between religious and secular, socialist and capitalist, were so great that it was – and still is – impossible to develop a comprehensive document that everyone can agree on. Instead, it was decided on an incremental approach: to pass a series of Basic Laws that, taken together, would fully define the state. This task is still incomplete.

Surprise? Guardian flat-out lies in accusation that Israeli law codifies racism - by Adam Levick

Whilst some Guardian anti-Israel positions are merely misleading or deceptive, their assertion that the nation-state law renders Arab-Israelis “second-class citizens” is a flat-out lie.

Adam Levick..
UK Media Watch..
13 March '19..

An official Guardian editorial (The Guardian view on the Israeli elections: Netanyahu debases his office – again, March 11) included the following accusation:

Israel is not a state of all its citizens, Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu declared on Sunday. His words should be shocking, but in truth they made explicit the message of last year’s nation state law, rendering Palestinians in Israel second-class citizens.

This is completely untrue.

The Jewish Nation-State Law merely codifies, within the country’s Basic Law (a de facto constitution), Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people – a principle which is the core of Zionism. It also lists a number of manifestations of Israel’s status as a Jewish state, including the country’s flag, national anthem, calendar, language, and immigration policies.

As even the head of the left-wing Israeli Democracy Institute conceded, the impact of the law is “largely symbolic”.

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David Ben-Gurion, Zionism, and democracy - by Victor Rosenthal

...There is only one Jewish state. There are numerous versions of the democratic “state of all its citizens” in the world, but as time goes by and it becomes harder and harder for Jews to live in them, we are finding that Herzl, Ben-Gurion, and other Zionists were correct: a Jewish state is essential for the survival of the Jewish people. It was essential to create it then, and it is essential to preserve it now.

Victor Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
13 January '19..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2019/01/ben-gurion-zionism-and-democracy/

During the acrimonious debate over the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, opponents claimed it was defective because it didn’t mention “democracy” or “equality,” concepts that are found implicitly or explicitly in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, proclaimed by David Ben-Gurion on May 14, 1948. Here is the relevant passage from that Declaration:

THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

“What the hell,” stormed Tzipi Livni, “has Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got against the Declaration of Independence?” Members of what was then her party waved copies of the Declaration for emphasis.

Supporters of the law argued that it was not necessary to add such a reference to the new Basic Law, because the concepts were enshrined in other Basic Laws, and this law was intended to explicate the idea of a Jewish state – something that also appears explicitly in the Declaration.

The tension between the Jewishness of the state and the commitment to democratic governance and equal rights for all its citizens, some 21% of whom today are not Jewish, is a tightrope that Israel has been walking since 1948. It isn’t made easier by those who oppose the very idea of a Jewish state, like the Arab intellectuals who want to convert it into a binational state, the secular Left that would like it to become a democratic “state of all its citizens” like the US, or former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak, who thinks that the meaning of “Jewish state” is just “democratic state.” The Nation-State Law can be seen as an attempt to maintain the balance that these forces would destroy.

In my opinion, there has to be a priority assigned to the concept of “Jewish state” to prevent it from disappearing under the waves of equality and democracy. And to my surprise, apparently the man who proclaimed the independence of the State of Israel in 1948 agreed with me (h/t: Lise Rosenthal).

Anti-Semitic incitement that opposes the Jewish people's right to self-determination in its only homeland - by Dror Eydar

The controversy surrounding the nation-state law, which defines Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, crops up at every junction because it touches on our very existence and identity in this land.

Dror Eydar..
Israel Hayom..
16 November '18..
Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/2018/11/16/another-type-of-anti-semitic-incitement/




1.

When Lt. Col. M. was killed in the course of a botched military intelligence operation in Gaza, it galvanized a number of irresponsible lawmakers to again stir up the incitement against the nation-state law – legislation that defines Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

The law's provisions, including the assertion that only Jews have a right to self-determination, have angered Israel's non-Jewish citizens, who view the law as discriminatory and offensive.

One example of this incitement was Zionist Union MK Shelly Yachimovich's recent tweet, in which she didn't hesitate to post a photo of the slain officer – whose identity has not been released for publication – and his children, and conclude with "great pain" that "his death in battle shines an even more appalling light on the racist and despicable nation-state law, which states that citizens who aren't Jewish are second-class citizens."

Great pain? Perhaps cynical pain. The law doesn't "state" anything about the (equal) citizenship of non-Jews. It touches only on the issue of nationality, which has nothing to do with ethnic groups or minorities, which are not a nationality.

The publisher of Israeli newspaper Haaretz Amos Schocken wasn't far behind Yachimovich. He called the nation-state law "fascist" and characterized its supporters as having "divorced the principles outlined in the Declaration of Independence." He added more generally that "one need not go as far as the crematoria to identify fascism."

Schocken may not be aware of this, but the word "Jewish" and its various iterations are mentioned about 20 times in the Declaration of Independence. Only in one place, the document says "The State of Israel … will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex." Here, equality is promised in a civil context, without regard to nationality. National equality is a path toward a state that enshrines all nationalities – in other words, the death of the Jewish state.

We have grown tired of the constant "racist" and "fascist" (and worse) accusation against those who uphold our national identity. These types of stupid accusations deserve a response in the same language: Anyone who opposes the Jewish people's right to self-determination in its only homeland is an anti-Semite, even if he is a Jew. He, too, is racist – how else can you explain the desire to strip the Jews of their nationality while at the same time acknowledging the nationalities of our Muslim neighbors or of the European Christian peoples?

Israel's New Nation-State Law and Palestinian Lies - by Bassam Tawil

We are witnessing yet another remarkable mirror image brought to us by the Palestinians: once again, they seek to deny Israel precisely what they believe should come to them on a silver platter. But this is the old Palestinian story in a new bottle.

Bassam Tawil..
Gatestone Institute..
01 October '18..

For the past few weeks, the Palestinians and their leaders have been raising strident voices against Israel's new Nation-State Law, which specifies the nature of the State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. The Palestinians have condemned the law as "racist" and claimed that it paves the way for Israel becoming an "apartheid state."

This week, Palestinians declared a general strike in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to protest the law, which, they say, "eliminates the two-state solution."

It is far from clear, however, why the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip should be concerned about the new law. The Palestinians living in these areas are not Israeli citizens and are not part of the Israeli political system. The Palestinians living in these areas have their own (Palestinian) citizenship, their own flag, their own parliament and their own government. They are not affected by the law in any way. This fact renders their opposition to the law little less than ridiculous.

Because they have their own parliament and state institutions, the Palestinians are free to pass any laws they wish without seeking permission from Israel or any other party.

Most people are unaware that the Palestinians do have their own laws, including the "Palestinian Basic Law," which was passed by the Palestinian Legislative Council in 2002.

Why is it important to remind the world of this Palestinian law now?

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Why Israel Needs the Nation-State Law - by Lt. Col. (res.) Dr. Mordechai Kedar

Much has been published against the new Israeli Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. Many, both in Israel and abroad, ask: Why is it necessary? How can it comport with democracy? Where does it leave minorities, particularly Muslim-Arabs, who make up some 20% of the Israeli population?

Lt. Col. (res.) Dr. Mordechai Kedar..
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 928..
21 August '18..
Link: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/israel-needs-nation-state-law/

In order to understand the need for the new Nation-State law, we must understand the challenges to Israel’s existence in the Middle East. First of all, there is the religious aspect. According to Islam, Judaism and Christianity are din al-batel (religions of falsehood) while only Islam is din al-haqq (religion of truth). Judaism has been null and void ever since Islam came to the world, so there is no reason to establish a Jewish state.

In addition, according to Islam, Jews (and Christians) should live under Islamic rule as dhimmis (“protected as long as they behave according to the rules of Islam”) and “pay the Jizya out of hand while they are utterly subdued” (Koran 9:29). Thus, Jews have no right to a state, army, or police, and should live in a state of perpetual humiliation at the mercy of Muslims.

Next is the national aspect. The fact that Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish People is rejected by all of Israel’s Arab neighbors without exception. Consider, for instance, Article 20 of the Palestinian National Charter, which says (with my interpretations in italics): “The Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon it” (international decisions to establish a Jewish State) “are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood” (there is no Jewish history in the Holy Land). “Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.” (Therefore we Jews should leave our forefathers’ land and go back to Poland [Auschwitz], Germany [Dachau], Iraq, Morocco…)

The new law is meant to make it as clear as possible that the Jews are a nation. As the new law states, “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 national home of the Jewish people in which it fulfills its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination; and the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.”

Just as Italy is the nation-state of the Italian people and France is the nation-state of the French people, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish People.

When the ultimate American Jewish macher turns left vs. Israel - by Vic Rosenthal

...Israel is a very small country which has been in a continuous fight for its life since its founding. We need to find our friends where we can. Ronald Lauder and the liberal Jewish establishment in the US, along with their associates in the Israeli Left, in essence want us to give up our Zionist principles so that we will better fit their universalist worldview. But if we surrender Zionism, we surrender everything. If that is the condition for their friendship and support, then we must respectfully decline.

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
17 August '18..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2018/08/lauders-left-turn/

(Macher. big shot; an important person. Y.)

I recently got an email from a liberal Jewish friend in America. He’s a Zionist, he’s interested in Jewish issues, and he’s not dumb. To my horror, he highly recommended the op-ed published in the NY Times on Sunday by Ronald Lauder, President of the World Jewish Congress, billionaire heir to the Estée Lauder fortune, former US Ambassador to Austria, and the ultimate American Jewish macher.

Lauder suggests that the State of Israel is defective from a moral point of view. He suggests that Israel has changed for the worse in recent years, and blames Israel’s government for “[undermining] the covenant between Judaism and enlightenment,” so as to “crush the core of contemporary Jewish existence.”

The article – like a previous piece of his about the “two-state solution” published in March – is a sloppily constructed collection of talking points of the Israeli Left, the overall thrust of which is that Israel is turning into an undemocratic theocracy. The implication is that the “right-wing” government of Benjamin Netanyahu, which has become a tool of the ultra-Orthodox factions, must be replaced.

This thesis was promulgated back in 2016 in a piece by Ha’aretz editor Aluf Benn, which I examined here, and found to be the kvetching of a left-wing elite whose electoral strength evaporated after it almost destroyed the country, and which has been striving to come back ever since. Lauder makes similar arguments, but his examples are tuned to resonate with the liberal American public.

Lauder says that “we cannot allow the politics of a radical [ultra-Orthodox] minority to alienate millions of Jews worldwide.” If indeed that is what is going on, then one would expect that the majority of Israelis, who are also not ultra-Orthodox, would also be alienated from the government, and would not elect the Likud and Benjamin Netanyahu again and again. But as a matter of fact, despite the recent actions of the government, especially the passage of the Nation-State Law, support for it has never been higher.


Could it be that the view from Israel is different from the view from America? I think it is.

The message of the missing Israeli flags - by Evelyn Gordon

Arabs didn’t come to the protest in Tel Aviv as proud Israelis who felt that Israel was betraying its best values; they came because they oppose the very existence of a Jewish state, up to and including its most innocuous symbol.

Evelyn Gordon..
JNS.org..
15 August '18..

Ever since Saturday night’s demonstration against the nation-state law in Tel Aviv, which was organized by Israel’s Arab community, people have been talking about the presence of Palestinian flags. But too little attention has been paid to something even more disturbing—the enforced absence of Israeli ones.

Certainly, demonstrators who wave Palestinian flags while chanting slogans like “With blood and fire, we will redeem Palestine” merit attention. As Jonathan S. Tobin noted earlier this week, those protesters clearly weren’t seeking to reform Israel, but to eradicate the Jewish state.

Nevertheless, the demonstration’s organizers explicitly asked people not to bring Palestinian flags since they hoped to attract Jewish moderates rather than just the usual far-left fringe, and understood that Palestinian flags would make Jewish moderates uncomfortable. Nor is it their fault that some people ignored this request; at any demonstration with tens of thousands of participants, some people will disregard the organizers’ instructions. So while the chants and Palestinian flags certainly say something about the intentions of those particular demonstrators, they don’t necessarily indicate the views of the majority.

What’s far more telling is that the organizers also banned Israeli flags at the protest, arguing that they would make Arab demonstrators uncomfortable (here, too, some people disobeyed). They did this knowing that it would undermine their goal of strong Jewish participation since many Jews opposed to the nation-state law would still feel uncomfortable at a protest where Israeli flags were unwelcome. And this wasn’t a decision by a few rebellious protesters; it was made by the Arab community’s most representative body—the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee, which consists of elected mayors, Knesset members and other community leaders.

In other words, the organizers believed that Israeli flags were unacceptable to most of their community. So they informed Jews that no partnership was possible, even over an ostensibly major shared concern, unless the Jews agreed to forgo even the most basic symbol of their Israeli identity.

(Continue to Full Column)

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Redeeming Palestine, in Tel Aviv - by Dror Eydar

...Before the demonstration, the head of the Israeli office of the New Israel Fund, Mickey Gitzin, urged Israelis to attend the demonstration because "the future of the Israeli Left depends on a Jewish-Arab partnership." Israeli Author Nir Baram wrote that "without the Palestinian citizens of Israel, the Left has no power, no [political] bloc." After Saturday's demonstration, the future of the Israeli Left is questionable.

Dror Eydar..
Israel Hayom..
13 August '18..
Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/in-tel-aviv-aiming-to-redeem-palestine/



1.

It is not nice to generalize. So a handful of nationalist Arabs in Rabin Square in central Tel Aviv chanted "In blood and fire we will redeem Palestine," and a handful of others waved the PLO flag, and another handful quoted the late Yasser Arafat as saying a million martyrs are marching toward Jerusalem. That is a lot of handfuls.

Reading the accounts of Saturday's demonstration against the nation-state law may give the impression that it was a peaceful, pleasant protest for equality against a tyrannical, violent regime.

But here, for the benefit of those who refuse to see and hear, let us take a look at the organizer of the demonstration – the Arab Higher Monitoring Committee – and examine its opinion of Israel. It will help us understand why the New Israel Fund, Meretz, and Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken were all in attendance.

2.

In 2006, the Arab Higher Monitoring Committee published a comprehensive "vision paper," which every Jew who values life must read.

It opens with: "Israel is the outcome of a settlement process initiated by the Zionist-Jewish elite in Europe and the West and realized by colonial countries contributing to it and by promoting Jewish immigration to Palestine, in light of the results of the Second World War and the Holocaust."

According to the committee, Jews have no history in this land, no religious or cultural heritage that is thousands of years old. We are nothing but foreign invaders, European colonialists who conquered land that was not theirs. Israel is the result of a colonialist plot hatched by the Jewish elites with the help of the Europeans who wanted to "compensate" us for the Holocaust.

3.

The underlying assumption held by the authors of this document, which they define as "crystallizing facts," is that "the Palestinian Arabs in Israel are the indigenous people of the country and have a historic and material relationship with their homeland emotionally, nationally, religiously and culturally. They are an integral vital and inseparable part of the Palestinian people."

So the Arabs who demonstrated in Rabin Square on Saturday are, in their view, the "original" inhabitants of this land. Unlike us, the foreign invaders, they have emotional, religious and cultural attachments to the land. And of course, they are part of an ancient Palestinian-Arab nation that has lived here since the dawn of humanity.

The conversation about the nation-state law is vital to our existence - by Dror Eydar

...It is clear to anyone with a sound mind that the issue here is not race. The Jewish people have a right to self-determination in their only historical homeland. People who despise their enemy – an enemy who seeks to kill them and remove them from their home – are not racists. They are normal human beings. We were here long before Arab MKs Jamal Zahalka and Ahmad Tibi and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

"The School of Athens" by Raphael

Dror Eydar..
Israel Hayom..
03 August '18..
Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/2018/08/03/the-jews-deserve-justice-too/

1.

"What are you afraid of?" The opponents of the recently passed nation-state law, which enshrines Israel's status as the nation-state of the Jewish people, keep asking. They callously dismiss the fears of the Jewish majority in Israel. After all, we, the Jews, have a long history of devastation – two national destructions, hundreds of wars against foreign invaders, two exiles (one of them lasting hundreds of years and including the expulsion of Jews from almost every place they sought to settle) and one Holocaust. Does that not justify a healthy dose of fear?

Even after the establishment of the State of Israel, the persecution didn't end. I'll put it another way: People who aren't afraid may not have the best grasp on reality.

2.

Regardless, fear is not the motivation behind the nation-state law. The chief motivation driving this legislation is the understanding that over the last 25 years, the balance between the legislature and the judiciary in Israel has been upset.

Until today, we naively went to the polls and believed that our vote would decide our future. We believed that our vote would be deciding factor. Societies are made up of so many different groups with so many different beliefs, how do people decide a society's future? We get together in one place, agree on the rules of the game and take a vote. Majority rules. Once upon a time, this was done in the marketplace or the agora, but today, it is the Knesset or parliament.

But one day, we discovered that someone had changed the rules. It's not the public that decides, by way of elected representatives, but rather a small unauthorized group that simply seized the power to decide our future based on their values. The letter of the law has long ceased to guide our Supreme Court. The court interprets the law and adapts it to its own views, or, more accurately, to what the court believes the law should be, even if the legislature legislated otherwise.

3.

How did this happen? It became possible thanks to former Chief Justice Aharon Barak's constitutional revolution. He turned Israel's Basic Laws into a constitution-to-be, and with years of legal interpretation, destroyed the equal footing shared by Israel's Jewish identity and its democracy. Within the confines of the court, Israel's Jewish identity became nothing more than declarative, a thin idea that mainly adapts itself to universal values, as understood by the Supreme Court justices, and only them.

A right and obligation to defend our national home - by Dror Eydar

...Minorities in Israel have the right to live in this great civilization that has placed a wealth of treasures of knowledge, wisdom, and ancient texts at its disposal – a legacy the like of which no other civilization has left its descendants. We are offering it to the world, but to continue flourishing in cultural and religious terms, as well, we have an obligation to defend our national home. We swore enough oaths to do so in the Diaspora, another reason why we now have the law.

Dror Eydar..
Israel Hayom..
31 July '18..
Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/a-right-to-self-determination-not-racism/

1. Is the nation-state law a declaration of independence by the majority in Israel against a yearslong attempt to dictate the identity of Israel and its laws, via an unelected minority in the Supreme Court and the people in the media and academia who declare themselves responsible for setting the tone? Let's hope so. Time will tell. According to the hysteria that the Left creates using its endless mouthpieces, it appears that we have hit the bullseye: the battle for the State of Israel's Jewish identity. Some among us thought that after 2,000 years, they'd be able to establish a European country whose Jewishness was expressed only by the people living here. But a people that has been around for thousands of years cannot escape its identity and its focus on it.

2. I still haven't heard even one serious argument against Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People – only curses, invective, and childish clichés, not to mention of course tears and hurt feelings. Dear readers, read the full version of the law. (It's short.) It's the best serum for inoculation against media propaganda.

The nation-state law protects Israel from the risk of it becoming a binational state as well as from the direction in which former Supreme Court Chief Justice Aharon Barak was pushing it, what is known formally as "a state of all its citizens" but in effect means "a state of all its nations." If it weren't for this law, at the end of the current process, the Arab citizens of Israel would demand national autonomy. They already are; but without the nation-state law, the path would have been cleared for them.

3. There is no attack here on individual rights or civil rights. In Israel, everyone is equal before the law. But the nation-state law is different; it is part of an entirety that will be expressed in a future constitution, so it addresses nothing other than the issue of nationality. When it comes to this, there is no equality. In the State of Israel, there is room for only one national identity: that of the Jewish people. The nation-state law belongs to the same family of laws as the Law of Return. "Apartheid," a veteran reporter tweeted Monday about the nation-state law. According to that logic, the Law of Return is apartheid, too (and I'm familiar with the legal figure eights the Left performs to justify the Law of Return). Oh, the shame!

4. What we have here isn't racism (and may the mouths of those who call it that fill with dust). Rather, it is the simple and natural right of the Jewish people to their only national state in the world. Anyone who opposes that is racist because he does not accept the right of the Jewish people to exclusive self-determination, whereas he has no problem supporting a Judenrein Palestinian state. On the fringes of the opposition to the nation-state law there is also a denial that Jews are a people and a nation. Article 19 of the PLO charter determines that the Jews are a religion, not a people, and therefore have no right to a country of their own. Do you understand who else is in the boat with the opponents of the law?

The (Not So) Secret Reason Arabs Reject the Jewish Nation-State Law - by Bassam Tawil

The "dirty little secret" is that even if the words about equality for all citizens were added to the new law, Bahloul and some of his Arab colleagues in the Knesset would still have opposed it. They are simply vehemently opposed to the very idea of Israel being a Jewish state.

Bassam Tawil..
Gatestone Institute..
31 July '18..

The hypocrisy of the leaders of the Arab citizens of Israel, who are now crying foul over the new Jewish Nation-State Law, has, in the past few days, reached new heights.

These are the same leaders whose words and actions for the past two decades have caused serious damage to relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel, and to the interests of their own constituents, the Arab citizens of Israel.

Israeli Arab leaders, specifically the Knesset members, say they are outraged not only because the law defines Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people, but also because the new legislation does not include words about full equality of rights for all citizens.

If there ever was a tempest in a teapot, this is it. It would have been redundant to add those words: the new law does not rescind any previous law or Israel's Declaration of Independence, which already encompass all that. In Israel, there are also other Basic Laws that guarantee equal rights to all. For example, the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, passed in 1992, stipulates:

"The purpose of this Basic Law is to protect human dignity and liberty, in order to establish in a Basic Law the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state."

...

"Fundamental human rights in Israel are founded upon recognition of the value of the human being, the sanctity of human life, and the principle that all persons are free; these rights shall be upheld in the spirit of the principles set forth in the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel."

Israel's Declaration of Independence from 1948, which obviously is not affected by the new Jewish Nation-State Law, also promises equality to all citizens, irrespective of their religion or color or race. It states:

(Continue to Full Post)

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