Non Jews still are welcome in the land, given rights, and are in the only democratic nation in the entire region.
Of course israel is the Jewish homeland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUvxePkv_10&t=13s
There’s Nothing Wrong with a Jewish State
Considering the enormous fuss it created within Israel and abroad, you’d have thought the law passed this week by Israel’s Knesset fundamentally changed the nature of the state. But although some of the country’s critics as well as Israelis and Jews who oppose the decision to enact a “nation state” law are acting as if it has created earth-shaking change, that isn’t the case.
The law changes virtually nothing about life in Israel because Israel has, from the moment it was born, been a Jewish state. Indeed, when David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister, read the country’s Declaration of Independence in Tel Aviv on May 14, 1948, he said that those assembled to ratify the document “hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in the land of Israel, to be known as the state of Israel.”
While its critics have described the passage of the new law as a provocation or, at best, unnecessary, it is an enunciation of the basic principles on which Israel was founded. As Israel is a country without a written constitution, the passage of “basic laws” such as this one serves as the outline for the ongoing construction of such a document. The Jewish state law is therefore merely a statement of national purpose rather than legislation that purports to alter the existing legal structure of Israel’s government.
The problem is that, 70 years after its founding, the fundamental principles that led to Israel’s creation are still controversial among those who oppose its existence. Even some Israelis and Diaspora Jews opposed the passage of the law, not so much because they disagreed with anything in it but because they fear that articulating these principles in this fashion will further alienate Palestinians, the Arab minority inside Israel, the international community, and even young Jews in the United States who are wavering in their support for Israel.
Those critics are probably right that the law will put some more wind in the sails of anti-Zionists who continue to spread the smear that Israel is an “apartheid state.” But the problem with this argument is that the charges made against Israel as a racist state were already being spread before this bill was signed into law. Those who have a problem with an avowedly Jewish state didn’t need this law to be against Israel’s existence.
Regardless of whether the law needed to be passed now or, as is the case, its enactment had more to do with the internal politics of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s center-right governing coalition, the charges of racism or apartheid are still false. Unlike every other nation in the region, Israel remains a democracy, in which all of its citizens have equal rights under the law. These include voting rights and representation in the country’s parliament, the Knesset. Many Arabs and minorities serve in government, particularly in judicial and diplomatic posts.
The idea of a country that is the patrimony of an ethno-religious community strikes some in the West as inherently racist. But Israel is hardly alone in seeing in seeing itself as a nation whose primary purpose is to allow one people to express their national identity.
While the country’s founding document and other basic laws guarantee equal rights for all, the purpose for which Israel was created was to give expression to the right of the Jews to self-determination in their ancient homeland. In that sense, Jews have group rights in Israel while non-Jewish minorities for the most part have only individual rights.
As in other countries where large national minority communities exist, that creates difficulties — in this case, for the 20 percent of the country that is not Jewish. Like all other countries, including democracies, Israel isn’t perfect. But the tension that stems from this situation has been exacerbated by, more than anything else, the fact that their Arab and Muslim neighbors have been seeking to destroy Israel since the day of its birth. In seven decades, Israel has grown from being an impoverished Third World state struggling to house Holocaust survivors and those Jews who were forced to flee their homes in the Arab world. Israel is now a regional superpower with a “start-up nation” First World economy. Nonetheless, it has been at war every day of its existence.
The idea of a country that is not solely the state of its citizens but the patrimony of an ethno-religious community strikes some in the West as inherently racist. But Israel is hardly alone in seeing in seeing itself as a nation whose primary purpose is to allow one people to express their national identity.
The constitutions of many other countries make clear that they exist as vehicles for a national idea in this same manner. Spain is one such example. Spanish nationality is given priority over that of ethnic minorities such as the Basques or the Catalans. The same is true of the Baltic states, all of which have substantial Russian minorities who must accept that Estonian, Lithuanian, and Latvian language and culture are the keystones of national identity. Israel is no more an apartheid state than any of those countries.
The only thing that is really unique about Israel’s insistence that it is a Jewish state is that it is the only one on a planet with dozens of states that are avowedly Muslim, Christian, or associated with another faith. Indeed, according to the Pew Research Center in October 2017,
some 27 nations designate Islam as their official state religion,
while 13 (including nine in Europe) do the same for Christianity. Another 40 nations give preferred or favored status to a particular faith.
There is nothing inherently repulsive about, or redolent of apartheid in, a law that establishes national symbols: a flag with a blue Star of David, and a national anthem, “Hatikva,” which speaks of the 2,000-year-old “hope” of the Jews to “to be a free people” in “the land of Zion and Jerusalem.” Nor is it apartheid to use the Hebrew calendar or to state the nation’s interest in ensuring the safety of Jews throughout the world.
Or at least there is nothing offensive unless you happen to think the Jews deserve to be denied basic rights of settlement, sovereignty, and self-defense in their own country — rights that no one would think of denying to anyone else. That is why such anti-Zionist bias is indistinguishable from anti-Semitism.
As for other details of the law that critics have harped on, here again, a closer look reveals nothing that would in any other context be controversial. Stating that Israel’s national language is Hebrew while recognizing Arabic’s special status is no more discriminatory than the priority given to Spanish throughout Spain.
Nor is the law’s recognition of the right to Jewish settlement a barrier to peace, since the purpose of Zionism has always been to defend the right of Jews to resettle their ancient homeland, to enable the “ingathering of the exiles” mentioned in Israel’s Declaration of Independence. That right was also in the terms of the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine, in which Britain’s obligation to encourage “close settlement” of the country by Jews was clearly specified.
The desire of so many to deny Israel the right to express its Jewish identity is exactly why a majority of the Knesset felt it necessary to remind the world that their country is and will always remain the nation-state of the Jewish people.
The State of Israel in fact already treated all these items as both custom and law before the recent bill was passed. But they remain points of contention because the country’s foes — including a BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) movement dedicated to its destruction — continue to argue against the existence of a Jewish state. That opposition against its existence was the point of the “marches of return” staged by Hamas in Gaza this past spring.
COMMENTS
Israel could have gotten along very well without a Jewish-state law and remained every bit as Jewish as it will be now. The internal political wrangling of Netanyahu’s coalition notwithstanding, the reason why so many Israelis believed that such a law was necessary has more to do with the refusal of the Palestinians and so many of their foreign enablers to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter how its borders were drawn as a condition of peace.
The new law may not help burnish Israel’s image among Americans and others who have no sympathy for expressions of nationalism, no matter how closely tied they might be to a nation that is the only democracy in the Middle East or the rights of a small people that suffered exile and persecution for two millennia. But the desire of so many to deny Israel the right to express its Jewish identity is exactly why a majority of the Knesset felt it necessary to remind the world that their country is and will always remain the nation-state of the Jewish people. That is a right that fellow democracies and decent people everywhere should support.
Get Over It—Israel Is the Jewish State
Jerusalem comes under fire for its new Basic Law, which is similar to many European constitutions.
Demonstrators attend a rally to protest against the “Jewish Nation-State Bill” in Tel Aviv, July 14. PHOTO: JACK GUEZ/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Let the hand-wringing and denunciations begin. On Thursday Israel finally expressed in constitutional law the basic achievement of Zionism: Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people. In the seven years since the new provision was first proposed, it has attracted a barrage of criticism from the U.S. and Europe. Foreign politicians have demanded Israel not pass the law, and they have not been mollified by the removal of most of its disputed provisions. A Monday headline at Foreign Policy warned that Israel was “debating democracy itself.” Arab Knesset members ripped up copies of the bill after its passage. One called it “the official beginning of fascism and apartheid.”
In reality, Israel’s Basic Law would not be out of place among the liberal democratic constitutions of Europe—which include similar provisions that have not aroused controversy. The law does not infringe on the individual rights of any Israeli citizen, including Arabs; nor does it create individual privileges. The illiberalism here lies with the law’s critics, who would deny the Jewish state the freedom to legislate like a normal country.
The nation-state law declares that Israel is a country established to instantiate the Jewish people’s “right to national self-determination.” It constitutionalizes symbols of that objective—the national anthem, holidays and so forth. There is nothing undemocratic or even unusual about this. Among European states, seven have similar “nationhood” constitutional provisions.
Consider the Slovak Constitution, which opens with the words, “We the Slovak nation,” and lays claim to “the natural right of nations to self-determination.” Some provisions are found in places like the Baltics, which have large, alienated minority populations. The Latvian Constitution opens by invoking the “unwavering will of the Latvian nation to have its own State and its inalienable right of self-determination in order to guarantee the existence and development of the Latvian nation, its language and culture throughout the centuries.” Latvia’s population is about 25% Russian.
The new Basic Law also establishes Hebrew, the primary language of 80% of Israel’s population, as the official language. Previously, Israel relied on a holdover British Mandate provision that gave official status to Hebrew, Arabic and English. Far from undermining democracy, the Basic Law puts Israel in line with other Western nations. Most multiethnic, multilingual European Union states give official status only to the majority language. Spain’s Constitution, for example, makes Castilian Spanish the official national language, and requires all citizens to know it, even if their mother tongue is Basque or Catalan.
Another controversial provision of the law declares “the development of Jewish settlement” to be a national value that the government should promote. It is understood to refer to encouraging population dispersion into the periphery of the country. This essentially restates policy adopted by the international community in 1922 in the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, which sought to “encourage . . . close settlement by Jews.” Again, the provision is only declaratory of values, and does not prescribe or authorize any particular policies. By contrast, the state constitution of Hawaii authorizes land policies to promote homesteading by ethnic Hawaiians, and provides preferential land policies for them.
Moreover, the measure comes against a backdrop of land policies that discriminate against Jews. The Israeli Supreme Court has ruled controversially that Arabs have a right to create residential communities in Israel that exclude Jews. A separate case denied the corresponding right to Jews. In Jerusalem, the Palestinian Authority prescribes the death penalty for Arabs who sell land to Jews. The new Basic Law does not even negate either of those injustices; it merely creates a normative counterweight.
Nor does Israel have official religions, and nothing in the new Basic Law changes that. In this respect, Israel is more liberal than the seven European countries with constitutionally enshrined state religions.
Perhaps the best evidence that Israel needs a constitutional affirmation of its status as the sovereign Jewish nation-state is the eagerness of so many to denounce as undemocratic measures that are considered mundane anywhere else.
Mr. Kontorovich is a scholar at the Kohelet Policy Forum, a Jerusalem think tank that has supported the Nation State bill.
The opposition to the law, as reflected in the headlines below, is based on a simple desire, stated explicitly by Hamas and Iran, that Israel be destroyed.
Headlines
Israel Bill Would Order Courts to Give Priority to Jewishness .
Israel passes controversial Jewish nation-state bill
Jewish nation state: Israel approves controversial bill
Israel's Far-Right Pushes Bill Putting Jewishness Before
Israel Bill Would Order Courts to Give Priority to Jewishness
There are MANY MANY COUNTRIES WHERE ISLAMIC law is the law of the land, forced upon non Muslims, where non Muslims have very little rights, jews cannot own land, vote etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_of_Islamic_law_by_country
There are 21 Arab countries, in all of which Islam is the enforced religion. There are another 40+ nations, where Islam is the majority and many where shariah law is enforced.
There are many western countries in the world that have similar provisions. See this piece from the WSJournal.https://www.wsj.com/articles/get-over-itisrael-is-the-jewish-state-1532039000
The Jews: by the Bible, 4000 years of history, Balfour declaration 1917, League of nations decree 1920, Remo conference 1922, UN vote 1948 all attest to the inherent Jewish nature of the state.
Of course. It is a JEWISH STATE by DESIGN.
1. Balfour declaration 1917. On November 2, 1917, Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour writes a letter to Britain's most illustrious Jewish citizen, Baron Lionel Walter Rothschild, expressing the British government's support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
2. 1920 League Of Nations Mandate For Palestine As A Jewish State ...
JEWISH RIGHTS are spelled clearly. The League Of Nations Mandate states: in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.
3. April 25, 1920, the Supreme Council of the Allied Powers (Britain, France, Italy, Japan and the US as an observer) gathered in San Remo, Italy, and ruled on the disposition of the Middle East territories previously held by the defeated Ottoman Empire. They first listened to the claims of both the Zionist Organization [later renamed the World Zionist Organization], headed by Chaim Weizmann, and the Arab Delegation, headed by Emir Faisal, at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.
After the San Remo Conference, the Jewish National Home unquestionably included all the territory west of the Jordan River.
The San Remo Conference was a momentous event in that it drafted the map of the Middle East as we know it today: Over 97% of the land was adjudicated to the Arabs, which resulted in the creation of the new, exclusively Arab states of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and, later, Jordan. The geographic region known as Palestine was designated as the Jewish National Home, to be reconstituted there in consideration of the historical connection of the Jewish people to the land.
4. UN vote 1947 On Nov. 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for Palestine to be partitioned between Arabs and Jews, allowing for the formation of the Jewish state of Israel.
5. Israel declared independence May 14, 1948. 5 Arab armies invaded. They lost. The Declaration declares Israel's Jewishness. THE DECLARATION OF THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL
May 14, 1948
On May 14, 1948, on the day in which the British Mandate over a Palestine expired, the Jewish People's Council gathered at the Tel Aviv Museum, and approved the following proclamation, declaring the establishment of the State of Israel. The new state was recognized that night by the United States and three days later by the USSR.
Text: in part
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After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.
Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. In recent decades they returned in their masses. Pioneers, ma'pilim [(Hebrew) - immigrants coming to Eretz-Israel in defiance of restrictive legislation] and defenders, they made deserts bloom, revived the Hebrew language, built villages and towns, and created a thriving community controlling its own economy and culture, loving peace but knowing how to defend itself, bringing the blessings of progress to all the country's inhabitants, and aspiring towards independent nationhood.
In the year 5657 (1897), at the summons of the spiritual father of the Jewish State, Theodore Herzl, the First Zionist Congress convened and proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country.
This right was recognized in the Balfour Declaration of the 2nd November, 1917, and re-affirmed in the Mandate of the League of Nations which, in particular, gave international sanction to the historic connection between the Jewish people and Eretz-Israel and to the right of the Jewish people to rebuild its National Home.
The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people - the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe - was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the comity of nations.
Survivors of the Nazi holocaust in Europe, as well as Jews from other parts of the world, continued to migrate to Eretz-Israel, undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland.
In the Second World War, the Jewish community of this country contributed its full share to the struggle of the freedom- and peace-loving nations against the forces of Nazi wickedness and, by the blood of its soldiers and its war effort, gained the right to be reckoned among the peoples who founded the United Nations.
On the 29th November, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of Eretz-Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable.
This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.
ACCORDINGLY WE, MEMBERS OF THE PEOPLE'S COUNCIL, REPRESENTATIVES OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF ERETZ-ISRAEL AND OF THE ZIONIST MOVEMENT, ARE HERE ASSEMBLED ON THE DAY OF THE TERMINATION OF THE BRITISH MANDATE OVER ERETZ-ISRAEL AND, BY VIRTUE OF OUR NATURAL AND HISTORIC RIGHT AND ON THE STRENGTH OF THE RESOLUTION OF THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY, HEREBY DECLARE THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ-ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL.
WE DECLARE that, with effect from the moment of the termination of the Mandate being tonight, the eve of Sabbath, the 6th Iyar, 5708 (15th May, 1948), until the establishment of the elected, regular authorities of the State in accordance with the Constitution which shall be adopted by the Elected Constituent Assembly not later than the 1st October 1948, the People's Council shall act as a Provisional Council of State, and its executive organ, the People's Administration, shall be the Provisional Government of the Jewish State, to be called "Israel".
PLACING OUR TRUST IN THE "ROCK OF ISRAEL", WE AFFIX OUR SIGNATURES TO THIS PROCLAMATION AT THIS SESSION OF THE PROVISIONAL COUNCIL OF STATE, ON THE SOIL OF THE HOMELAND, IN THE CITY OF TEL-AVIV, ON THIS SABBATH EVE, THE 5TH DAY OF IYAR, 5708 (14TH MAY,1948).
