TEL AVIV — In mid-July, by a vote of 62-55, with two abstentions, the Knesset passed the Basic Law on Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. The legislation — Basic Laws in Israel enjoy constitutional status although only a simple parliamentary majority is needed to pass or repeal them — reaffirmed principles set forth in the country’s May 1948 Declaration of Independence. Nevertheless, the nation-state law has occasioned bitter controversy here. With a nationalist-infused populism roiling the United States, Britain, and Europe, the Israeli debate over the aspiration, inscribed in the country’s founding, to combine nationalism and liberal democracy has implications that transcend the Jewish state.
On Aug. 13, Haaretz contributor Uzi Baram excoriated the new law and its architects. “The nation-state law is not only an unnecessary law, it is an abhorrent law,” he stated, speaking for many on the left. It “was the product of an ultranationalist government, led by the religious right,” and was intended “to divide the public, exclude minorities and undermine the Arabic language.”
On Aug. 16 in Haaretz, Haim Ramon, a man of the center-left, published a sharp reply that gave expression to a Zionist sensibility that extends beyond Israel’s center-right. A former vice prime minister and minister of justice, he emphasized that Israel’s 1992 Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty “granted equal rights to every person in the state of Israel in the spirit of Israel’s values as a Jewish and democratic state.” But it was incomplete: “whereas the law on human dignity and liberty elaborated the individual’s rights in a democratic state, it did not elaborate the practical significance of the state’s Jewish character.” The nation-state law remedies that deficiency. It “does not come to bury the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty but to complete it.”
Whatever the actual legislative intentions and legal implications, the new Basic Law aggravated a sense of second-class citizenship among Israel’s minorities. This month Arabs, who constitute a little over 20 percent of the citizenry and who rarely serve in the army, and Druze, who represent about 1.5 percent and generally serve, attracted tens of thousands of protesters to separate political rallies in downtown Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square — the country’s premier venue for demonstrations— to decry the law.
