'An imaginary and abstract nation'


November 26, 2014
Sarah Benton

This posting has 5 items:

1) The Atlantic: A Change in Wording Sparks Huge Controversy in Israel, explains what that ‘change of wording’ means;
2) +972: Is the ‘Jewish nation-state’ bill good for anyone at all?, Dahlia Scheindlin finds 7 reasons why it isn’t;
3) Jewish Forward: If America Had Laws Like Israel, Avital Burg imagines an America in which Protestantism is enshrined as the exclusive, basic law;
4) AIC: Israel’s nation state law: Jewish sharia, Eli Abramov finds the links between fundamentalisms;
5) +972: The ‘Jewish Nation-State Law’: Turning liberal Zionism on its head, Michael Omer-Man on a ‘twisted exclusionary social contract, not with the citizens but with one specific religious/ethnic group’. This is not legitimate.


August 2014: over 200 Israeli right-wingers travelled to Rishon Letzion, Tel Aviv, to protest at the marriage of a Jewish woman, Maral Malka, 23,  to a Muslim man, Mahmoud Mansour, 26. Protesters, many of them young men wearing black shirts, denounced Malka as a “traitor against the Jewish state,” and shouted epithets including “death to the Arabs.” They sang a song that urges, “May your village burn down.” Vos Iz Neias.

A Change in Wording Sparks Huge Controversy in Israel

The question of whether the country is “Jewish and democratic” or the “national home of the Jewish people” has divided the country’s cabinet.

By Matt Schiavenzanov, The Atlantic
November 23 2014

Is Israel a “Jewish and democratic” state? Or is it “the national homeland of the Jewish people?” This academic-sounding question sparked a huge controversy on Sunday, when the Israeli cabinet voted to amend the country’s Basic Law to refer to the state as “the national homeland of the Jewish people.” Since Israel’s founding in 1948, the Basic Law has always referred to the state as “Jewish and democratic.”

The proposed change comes out of three pieces of legislation drafted by members of the Israeli cabinet and approved by lawmakers 15 to 7. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a supporter of the initiative, said the shift would not undermine the country’s long-held democratic traditions.

“There are those who would like the democratic to prevail over the Jewish and there are those who would like the Jewish to prevail over the democratic,” he said. “Both of these values are equal and both must be considered to the same degree.”

But critics of the proposed bill allege that it codifies discrimination against Israeli Arabs, who comprise 20 percent of the country’s population. A version of the bill would delist Arabic as one of Israel’s national languages, instead relegating it as one with a “special status,” and would also reaffirm the sole right of Israel’s Jewish citizens to national self-determination.

In an unusually contentious meeting featuring audible shouting from behind closed doors, Israel’s cabinet supported the law by a vote of 14 to 6. Afterwards, several members lashed out in opposition. Finance Minister Yair Lapid called the proposed change a “bad law, which is badly worded.” Others accused Netanyahu of political motives. The prime minister faces primary elections within his Likud Party in January, and some say that the bill is aimed to woo the party’s nationalist right-wing.

Isaac Herzog, the head of Israel’s left-wing Labor Party, claimed that the bill was an unnecessary, reactionary provocation.

Only a prime minister lacking in self-confidence, without a vision and a plan, needs laws that deal with the obvious that will not improve any Israeli citizens’ lives.

The controversy over the bill comes at a moment of heightened tension in Israel. The fatal police shooting of a young Palestinian man on November 10 in northern Israel sparked widespread protests and a general strike, and last week, two Palestinians armed with guns and meat cleavers attacked Jewish worshippers at a synagogue in west Jerusalem, killing four and injuring eight. In response, Netanyahu ordered the demolition of the homes of the two Palestinians, and the mayor of Ashkelon, a coastal city just north of Gaza, sparked an uproar by suspending the employment of some Arab workers in the city.

Netanyahu also criticized opponents of the law who nevertheless support the creation of a Palestinian state.

“I also don’t understand those who call for two states for two peoples, but at the same time oppose anchoring that in law,” he said. “They are quick to recognize a Palestinian national home, but adamantly oppose a Jewish national home.”



Is the ‘Jewish nation-state’ bill good for anyone at all?

A law seeking to prioritize and designate Israel as the Jewish nation-state is exposing the crazies in Israel’s government. This proposed basic law would codify and demarcate the state as something that belongs only to a subset of its citizens.

By Dahlia Scheindlin. +972
November 25, 2014

The cabinet on Sunday passed a preliminary reading of a law — with the weight of a constitutional amendment — that would declare Israel to be the nation-state of the Jewish people. In order to pass the vote, Prime Minister Netanyahu put forward 14 principles on which the basic law’s final wording will be based. Democracy is in there as an afterthought, equality treated weakly by guaranteeing individual rights, and allowing all people to preserve their culture and language.

Here are seven of the main reasons why “Basic Law: Israel – the National State of the Jewish People” is wrong for Israel and should not be passed.

No solutions. The prime minister’s 14 articles do not deal with cost of living and they do not protect the residents of Sderot or the woman whose house was burned yesterday by violent Israeli extremists. It doesn’t lower tuition fees for students or the price of chocolate pudding, connect Negev Bedouin to the water grid or create jobs for factory workers laid off in Arad. It doesn’t address the growing chasm with the Western world and the crisis of relations with the U.S. Yet this is what the government is doing while its citizens wait, and suffer.

Freeze a flawed reality. While the proposed basic law will effect little tangible change, it will go a long way toward anchoring the current situation of de facto discrimination into law. I recently got into a big argument with a foreigner who accused Israel of being racist in its “DNA.” I was heated. “Like all human beings, people can change,” I shot back. “Bad regimes can turn to other directions.”

Now the law is making exclusivity and inequality part of Israel’s legal DNA. Yes we are changing – but not in the right direction.

Clinging to crazy. The debate over the proposed Jewish nation-state law exposes the deepening isolationism of the small clutch of extremists at the country’s helm. They long ago isolated Israel from the Western and Arab worlds. Now, just as the prime minister and his henchmen contradict their own security chiefs when the latter don’t fall into line, this bill pits its plotters against Israel’s attorney general, Yehuda Weinstein. Weinstein said the proposed Jewish nation-state law dilutes democracy, sharply criticizing the government’s intention to support it. To which Likud MK Yariv Levin, one of the bill’s sponsors, snarled back:

The attorney general’s statements are arrogant and have nothing to do with his position as attorney general or with the legal world. The question of the image of the state and its fundamental values on which it will continue to be built, are given, in a democracy, to the public and only the public through its elected representatives, and under no circumstances must it become the private realm of a group of jurists who are trying to place themselves above the Knesset. (As quoted in Haaretz — my translation.)

It seems that Levin, and probably numerous other ministers, has lost his marbles. The attorney general has overstepped his boundaries by providing a legal opinion to the government about the imminent passage of a law with constitutional status? The character of the state is to be determined in a way that rejects checks and balances? The Hebrew term for attorney general is “legal advisor to the government,” for crying out loud.

Then there’s Levin’s imaginary cabal of jurists levitating themselves above the Knesset. In fact, there is a very real gang of supremacist thugs leading the country into an abyss.

Constitutional-coup.
The bill is part of a minority imposed creeping constitution instead of a healthy participatory process. Other basic laws were passed this way too, but those were more amendments; this one involves national self-definition that reads like the body of a constitution. The kind that should be put to wider public debate or at least not by an extremist coalition as part of coalition horse-trading.

What could the law mean if passed? Theoretically, but quite realistically, it could enable the High Court of Justice to uphold a law that violates the equality of Israeli citizens, since the Jewish nation-state law would provide constitutional foundations for privileging Jews over all others.

As normal as ethno-nationalism. Some insist that it is hypocritical and maybe even anti-Semitic to protest a simple law of national self-definition, when ‘France is for the French people,’ or ‘Germany is the land of the German people.’ Can we lay this argument to rest already? In those examples citizenship overlaps with nationhood. Yes, France is for the French. But what makes someone French is not birth or ethnicity alone, but citizenship.

This proposed basic law would codify and demarcate the State of Israel as something that belongs only to a subset of its citizens. State rights will not overlap with citizenship; they privilege a subset of citizens. Non-Jewish citizens have no route to sharing in the privileged national group. Being Israeli won’t be enough to live equally in this country. In fact, the state has consistently rejected the very idea that there is an Israeli nationality.

The true comparison is simple: the law says Israel is for the Jews, just as America once said America is for whites.

Avalanche of inequality.

This is a time of worsening relations between Jews and Arabs/Palestinians in Israel.

Anyone who says this law is mainly a cover for coalition and electoral politics that won’t make a difference in real life, should look at another recent example. In 2009 a politician invented a fictional concept of Arab disloyalty, to arouse nationalist jingoism and get elected. The slogan itself, “No loyalty, no citizenship,” was a political marketing ploy. Once that politician entered the halls of power, it became his legislative vision, leading to a string of nasty, exclusionary, hate-inspired bills linked to this concept. Some of them passed.

The Nakba Law rejects the history of the Arab population; the Acceptance Committee Law rejects housing integration, the amendment to the Citizenship Law rejects their presence by keeping families apart. Now the foreign minister — recently joined by the prime minister — calls to strip their citizenship altogether, for no crime at all.

What will the nationality law be the beginning of?

Stoking rage. The prime minister says the law was devised to anchor Jewish identity in the face of growing challenges to the character of the state. Here is the challenge to my identity in Israel: rising strife, and the fact that a football match between Jewish and Arab teams requires one security person for every seven fans; frenzied chants of “death to Arabs” in a growing number of situations. Doesn’t the need for peaceful relations among fellow countrymen mean anything, or is the government only concerned with the phantom threats of “delegitimization,” which if it happens, is primarily due to developments like this?

This law is fearful. It is not closing the chapter on Israel’s tense relationship between Jewish identity and the State, as I once hoped possible; it is opening the window to acid rain.

It is creating a false god, a Judaism that is primarily political, material, imposed, devoid of humanity or humility.



If America Had Laws Like Israel

By Avital Burg, Jewish Forward blog
November 25, 2014

A new proposed bill, supported by senators on both sides of the aisle, will finally define and determine the United States of America as the land of the Protestant People, the largest religious constituency in the U.S. and the group out of which America’s founding fathers and ruling leadership emerged.

The new law aims to anchor Protestant values in the laws of the land, inspired by the spirit of the American Constitution. Furthermore, the bill proceeds to state that the U.S. will continue to uphold a fundamentally democratic character. According to the new law, the United States will be fully committed to the foundations of Freedom, Justice, and Peace, in light of our Lord Jesus Christ.
At the same time, the bill suggests, the right to implement a national self-definition will be exclusively reserved for the Protestant People. According to the new bill, Protestant values will serve as inspiration to lawmakers and judges at the different levels of the United States’ legislative and judicial branches. In cases where a court of justice encounters difficulties in ruling over issues that have no readily available answers in the Law, in the Christian Canon, or in logical reasoning, it will then rule according to the principles of freedom, justice, integrity and peace stemming from the Protestant heritage.

In addition, the national emblems of the United States, such as its flag and national anthem, will be drawn directly from the tradition of the Protestant Church, and the official calendar of the U.S. will follow the Protestant liturgical year. Finally, the United States will further act to preserve and entrench the Protestant historical and cultural tradition and to cultivate it in the U.S. and abroad.

Any reader who has gotten this far would probably note that such a law could not be passed or even seriously proposed by the United States legislature. In Israel, however, it could become a fundamental law, on a level equivalent to a constitutional amendment in the United States.

The different clauses listed above are not a free interpretation of the bill or wild projections of what this bill could imply; they are the clauses of the original Hebrew bill, translated into the U.S. political context. I have simply replaced the phrase “the Jewish People” and its associated traits with the “Protestant People” and its associated traits, such as “Protestant values” and “the Christian Canon.”

There are currently close to 8 million people living in Israel, more than 20% of which are Palestinian citizens. After years of de facto discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel in various aspects of daily life, this new law, if passed, will make such discrimination official: Palestinians will become formally, legally, second-class citizens. And this is without even mentioning the Palestinians who still live under the Israeli occupation in the West Bank.

If you would oppose such a law had it been proposed in your own country, how can you support it when proposed in another country? If you would have objected to such a law because it would discriminate against you as a member of a religious or ethnic minority, how can you possibly support such a law when it is being put forward in your name, with you as the would-be member of Israel’s Jewish majority?

Avital Burg is a New York based artist and writer from Tel Aviv.



Israel’s nation state law: Jewish sharia

The nation state law currently proposed by the government is yet another signal to Israel’s Palestinian citizens: Israel is for Jews!

By Eli Aminov, AIC
November 25, 2014

Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government are currently promoting the crème de la crème of antisemitic laws: the definition of Israel as a state of the “Jewish nation”, i.e. the state of Jews of the world and not of its non-Jewish citizens. So Israel is the state of the Jewish Americans and Russians, but not of the residents of Kufr Qassem. The proposed legislation determines the superiority of the Jewish character of the state over the remains of its democratic nature. With this Israel joins those same antisemitic states or movements that discriminate amongst citizens according to their origins. The slogan of this law, whose meaning is Israel for the Jews!, is strikingly similar to antisemitic slogans. In France, for example, the central slogan of antisemitism was France for the French!

This loathsome law determines that the right to exercise national self-definition in Israel is unique to those whose mothers are members of the Jewish religion, or those who underwent a religious ceremony to join the Jewish religion. The law determines also that “Eretz Israel”, i.e. Palestine, is solely the historical homeland of the Jewish people. This antisemitic law does not recognise the fact that this land is the sole homeland of the Palestinians, whose national life was uprooted due to the Israeli takeover.

In the lands of the Mediterranean the corrupt, national regimes which led their peoples from failure to failure were finally recognised as bankrupt, but now arises the netherworld of Islamic reactionary-ism. Such foundations of fundamentalism always represented competitors to the national trends of the regimes that came to power in the region following liberation from colonialism. The Islamic movements are attempting to transform Islam into a factor that will unite the Arab world and seemingly allow it to deal with the historical tasks standing before the weakened states. The ISIS organisation is prominent amongst these foundations.

Precisely [like] this repulsive and central trend in the “new Middle East” the government of Israel is connecting. Its “winning card” is imposition of the Jewish sharia on the limited Israeli democracy. For the Jewish masses, fed continuous hatred of Arabs, and in the past year poisoned by racist incitement flowing directly from the government, this proposed legislation is clear: this is a Jewish state and because of this, Arabs out! Just like the slogans “Jews out”, which spread throughout Europe in the 1930s.


Protests about the plan of the Cinema City complex to open on … the Sabbath. In March 2014 the High Court rejected a motion, filed by a secular NGO, to let the complex near the High Court and Knesset operate on Sabbaths and Jewish holidays.

Now, as the crowning jewel the government is promoting the new nation state law. Indeed, through blood and sweat we established a race. Even amongst colonial states, Israel stands out as the sole country in the world which applied its immigration laws to residents of the indigenous nation in the area and transformed them into foreigners. If such is the situation, why does Israeli leadership, which is essentially only the leadership of the Jewish community, bother with this racial law?

The answer is simple, but few understand it: precisely because there is no Jewish people. Zionism tries again and again to build a nation on the basis of religion, i.e. a nation which exists thanks to the Jewish law (sharia) and not due to its holding of the territory of historical Palestine. If Zionism was a national movement, it would build in this land a Palestinian territorial nation whose ethnic or religious elements do not discriminate between the nation’s people. Even if Zionism would recognise the Israeli nation, the citizens of the Israeli territory would be equal citizens and all of the citizens would form a nation. However, Zionism is a reactionary movement, tied to imperialism and representing its watch dog in the region. It therefore requires an imaginary and abstract nation whose members will be willing to kill and be killed for a religion lacking in mercy. Precisely like the horrific soldiers of the Islamic state.

Eli Aminov was a member of the  Matzpen and founded the Committee for a Secular Democratic State.



The ‘Jewish Nation-State Law’: Turning liberal Zionism on its head

By Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, +972
November 28, 2014

Cementing the supremacy of national group rights over individual minority rights upends the precarious balance between Jewish and democratic, upon which liberal Zionism relies. For the ‘Nation-State Law’s authors and political patrons, however, this is just the beginning.

Liberal Zionists of all stripes tend to have one thing in common: the belief — or at least the hope — that Israel can reconcile and balance being a Jewish and a democratic state, serving both as the realization of Jewish national self-determination and as a modern liberal state that guarantees equality to all its citizens regardless of their religion or ethnic heritage.

Former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak, one of Israel’s preeminent jurists, perhaps best explained the mechanism and limitations of such a precarious balance. In the Ka’adan ruling (PDF), one of the most important contemporary legal precedents advancing equality in Israel, Barak explained that Jews may have privileged national rights when it comes to immigration, but that once inside the state’s borders, all must stand equal before the law.

It is true, members of the Jewish nation were granted a special key to enter, but once a person has lawfully entered the home, he enjoys equal rights with all other household members.
That formulation — and the ideology that relies on it — is about to be turned on its head, and along with it, the only palatable recipe for reconciling the competing values espoused by liberal Zionism.

A new proposed law moving rapidly through Israel’s Knesset with the support of the prime minister and a majority of the government would codify and constitutionalize legal discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities in Israel. The so-called “Jewish Nation-State Law” will upend Justice Barak’s “special key” theory.

Jewish national rights trump individual Arab rights

Several clauses in the draft law — and in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s principals, on which he has pledged to base its final wording — recognize national and group rights of the Jewish people inside the State of Israel while recognizing only individual (read: inferior) rights for members of religious, national and ethnic minorities.

In other words, Jews still hold have privileged status as key-holders to the gates of the country, but that privileged group status now follows them inside.

If passed into law, the bill, formally called “Basic Law: Israel — Nation-State of the Jewish People,” will have constitutional status, meaning it requires a super-majority to pass and revoke, and that Israeli courts will give it greater standing when weighing it against other laws or state practices that may contradict it. Israel does not have a formal constitution.

In just one example of discrimination in the Jewish Nation-State Law, the bill mandates that the State act to strengthen the historical and cultural heritage and tradition of the Jewish people — both in Israel and in the Diaspora. In contrast, the new law would only require the State to permit non-Jewish individuals to do the same on their own behalf.

Esteemed constitutional and human rights scholar Dr. Yousef Jabareen explains (PDF): “the preference for the Jewish majority engrained in the law paves the way for the granting of group-based rights and privileges to the Jewish majority while simultaneously justifying discriminatory and racist policy towards the Arabs on the individual and collective levels.”

Normalizing the national exclusion of Arabs

More troubling than the supremacy given to Jewish tradition and heritage over those of other indigenous and minority groups of citizens, is the supremacy the draft law gives to those ideas when it comes to judicial decisions and in justifying the violation of individual rights.

After defining the state as the national home of the Jewish people, in which the Jewish people “realizes its right to self-determination in accordance with its cultural and historic heritage,” the draft law says individual rights may be violated for the benefit of the values of the Jewish people. In other words, individual minority rights may be violated for the benefit of Jewish collective rights.

As it is, according to Adalah — the legal center for Arab minority rights in Israel, there are more than 50 laws that discriminate against Arab citizens “in all areas of life, including their rights to political participation, access to land, education, state budget resources, and criminal procedures.”

The Jewish Nation-State Law would make it much more difficult than it already is to challenge the constitutionality of such discriminatory legislation in Israel, Jabareen writes. The proposed law “not only deepens national exclusion of Arabs but also entrenches and normalizes it.”

But the primary purpose of the Jewish Nation-State Law is to constitutionalize a twisted exclusionary social contract — not between the State and all its citizens, but rather with one specific religious/ethnic group. Unlike most democracies where — at least theoretically — the state is given its legitimacy to govern by consent of the people, by giving ownership of the state to one subset of its citizens and their kin (Jews who are not Israeli citizens), the law inherently disenfranchises a significant portion of its own citizens.

That, of course, is nothing new. Among right-wing politicians in Israel, a favorite method for deriding political opponents on the Left is to accuse them of seeking “a state of all its citizens,” something most contemporary democracies aspire to.

In the Ka’adan decision, Justice Barak wrote that there is “no contradiction between the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and between the absolute equality of all of its citizens.” Whether or not he was right at the time is a wider, more contentious debate. If and when the Jewish Nation-State basic law passes, however, such a contradiction will be written into the closest thing Israel has to a constitution. And if the bill’s authors have their way, it will eventually be the bedrock of a constitution itself.

Playing the long game

The “Jewish Nation-State Law” was drafted by the Institute for Zionist Studies (IZS), a think tank that “seeks to strengthen Israel as the nation state of the Jewish People.” Its chairman, Yoaz Hendel, is a former senior official in the Prime Minister’s Office under Netanyahu.

The current version of the law, sponsored by Likud MK Yariv Levin — as well as the principles Netanyahu published as the basis for the bill’s final wording — are remarkably similar to the draft written by Hendel’s think tank.

One of the IZS’s primary raisons d’être is drafting and advancing the ratification of a constitution for Israel, something many others have tried and failed to do for decades. Realizing their short-term odds, it would seem that the IZS and its political patrons in the government have resigned themselves to a piecemeal approach to passing a constitution. Their vision for a constitution weakens judicial oversight, puts as much land as possible in Jewish hands, makes individual rights conditional on military service, and seeks to limit non-Jewish participation in government (by conditioning eligibility for public office on receiving a security clearance, a requirement that inherently discriminates against non-Jews and those who did not serve in the military).

Many observers of Israeli politics and history make the mistake of dismissing the existence of any strategic thinking, likening the state’s decision-makers to the CEO’s of its Startup Nation — all improvisation, all the time.

The Jewish Nation-State Law and its backers, like proponents of annexation initiatives and Netanyahu’s own status quo strategy vis-à-vis the occupation, are looking at the long game. It’s the same long game that early Zionist pioneers first adopted and which has become an Israeli pastime ever since: create enough facts on the ground and soon enough there’s no going back.

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