Thousands of demonstrators gathered in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square on Saturday night to protest the controversial nation-state bill, slamming it as discriminatory and racist.
Under the banner “this is home for all of us,” public figures, lawmakers and social activists addressed the protest, which saw participants marching from Rabin Square to Beit Jabotinsky.
The bill, sponsored by Member of Knesset Avi Dikhter (Likud), would establish the status of the State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in its homeland as a unique right for the Jewish people. It would also anchor the symbols of the state, Jerusalem as the capital, the Jewish calendar as the country’s official calendar and the Hebrew language as the official language.
The participating organizations released a joint statement to the press, stating: “The nation-state law would turn racism, discrimination, and segregation into an inescapable part of our lives. More than that – racism and discrimination are becoming desired and central in the State of Israel. The nation-state law will bring exclusion and damage to minorities to terrifying levels we have never seen before. Our stance is clear: all citizens – all – are equal.”
“But the government is not willing to recognize this. Because they have no solutions for any of us – not to the housing crisis, not for the elderly and disabled, not for the high cost of living, not for the collapsing healthcare system, not to the crisis with the Jews of the Diaspora – they are legislating unnecessary, terrifying and discriminatory laws like the nation-state law. The law incites, confuses, and divides citizens of the state of Israel from one another,” the statement continued.
The public battle over this legislation should be understood as yet another expression of the seething tensions between Jewish nationalism and Western liberalism in contemporary Israeli society. The nation-state bill as a clear political triumph for the forces of narrow nationalism and many universalist Israeli and various minority communities are mobilizing to resist it.
During his address at the Mount Herzl state memorial ceremony for Z’ev Jabotinsky on Thursday evening, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (Likud) spoke about his coalition’s efforts to pass the legislation.
“In Israeli democracy, we will continue to guarantee the rights of the individual and the group, they will continue to be guaranteed, but the majority also has rights, and the majority rules,” the prime minister said. “The vast majority of the people want to ensure the Jewish character of our state for generations to come.”
“This combination of the right of the nation and the rights of the individual, this combination is the meaning of the words ‘Jewish and democratic’ state, and Jabotinsky undoubtedly believed in this principle, sanctified it, fought for it, and we continue it,” he said.
President Reuven Rivlin, however, published a letter on Tuesday against the controversial bill, taking specific issue with clause 7b, which specifically states that “the state can allow a community composed of people of the same faith or nationality to maintain an exclusive community.”
Rivlin’s letter stated that he is “concerned that the broad nature of this article, that has no balance, could harm the Jewish people and Jews around the world and in Israel, and could even be used by our enemies as a weapon.”
The president’s letter called on the special Knesset committee for promoting the nation-state bill to “take a look at Israeli society and ask: in the name of the Zionist vision, are we willing to support discrimination and exclusion of men and women based on their ethnic origin?”
Knesset Legal Adviser Eyal Yinon also wrote a letter on Tuesday to the chairman of the special committee, saying the bill in its current version “deviates significantly from the delicate balances required.”
Yinon further added that “we have not found equivalence in any constitution in the world” to the clause suggested in the bill, allowing exclusive communities. Yinon recommended that the committee not approve the bill in its current version.
Legally enshrining the rights of communities to discriminate on the grounds of nationality or faith seems not only ridiculous and unnecessarily inflammatory but also superfluous in a society where both Jews and non-Jews tend to anyway be very strongly rooted in our respective identities. While many Israelis live in cities with diverse cultures and groups, millions already live by choice in near-homogenous communities with others holding similar values and lifestyles.
The first version of the bill was approved by the Knesset in April. Tourism Minister Yariv Levin (Likud) has yet to reach an agreement on all the details prior to the vote scheduled for next Monday but he has reached understandings with most of the coalition parties on it wording.
“This law is important to us,” Prime Minister Netanyahu told the leaders of the parties in his coalition. “Just as there are laws important to you. I respect this and you should also respect that this law is very important to us.”
The government’s Bayit Yehudi faction has meanwhile threatened to block passage of the bill if the Likud abandons a clause in the law strengthening the role of traditional Jewish law in the State of Israel’s legal code.
Bayit Yehudi lawmakers have claimed that the Likud has recently signaled its willingness to abandon this clause. If it is in fact dropped, the party says it would block passage of the new version of the bill.
“It is unthinkable that there would be no mention of ‘Mishpat Ha’Ivri’ [Hebrew Law] in the nation-state bill,” said Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee Chairman Nisan Slomiansky (Bayit Yehudi).
“Likud leaders promised to include this in the law. Has the Likud really decided to abandon Mishpat Ha’Ivri?”
Slomiansky rightly identifies one of the only features of the bill that could actually lead Israel in a healthier direction. The State of Israel currently exists as something of a European-style nation-state with superficial Jewish decorations that are on the one hand too Jewish for non-Jews yet on the other not Jewish enough for many citizens deeply connected to Israel’s Torah.
A state with a deep Jewish interior is preferable to one with a hard Jewish exterior. A state structured on the basis of authentic Hebrew values from the ground up would likely possess a confidence in its own “Jewishness” that would make offensive superficial decorations unnecessary while satisfying the Jewish people’s ancient yearnings even more intensely.
In order to advance to the next stage of Jewish liberation, we need to shift away from our narrow Jewish nationalism in favor of a uniquely Hebrew universalism that reflects and expresses authentic Jewish values while focusing on the aspects of our culture we share with our neighbors and being more inclusive to non-Jewish groups in our society.
A Hebrew universalism that could successfully transcend the societal frictions between liberalism and nationalism would require Israelis to dig deeper into the wealth of our ancient sources. While this might initially make universalists uneasy, moving in this direction is likely their best hope at arriving at policies and structures that will make our country simultaneously more Jewish, democratic and inclusive of the Other.
As should be expected from Netanyahu, the nation-state bill merely aims to enshrine Israel’s shallow nationalist decorations without deepening the state’s actual Jewish character. But Bayit Yehudi lawmakers impressively zeroed in on the clause with the most substantive significance. In a Jewish state, it makes sense that the legal structure would reflect the culture and traditions of the Jewish people. Not a halakhic state where Torah observance is legally enforced but rather a legal system deriving common law from the wisdom of Israel’s sages and the precedents found in their legal deliberations. For Israeli society, judging tort cases within the context of Hebrew civilization’s conception of justice would anyway make more rational sense than doing so within the context of British legal precedents that very often don’t fit our sensibilities or prioritization of values.
