by Middle East Eye, The Anti Media:

Israel passed a law on Thursday giving Jews supremacy over all non-Jewish Israeli citizens, which critics and members of the state’s Palestinian minority called racist, likening the legislation to apartheid.

The “Nation State” law passed by a vote of 62-55 and two abstentions in the 120-member parliament after months of political argument. Following the vote Palestinian lawmakers shouted and tore up papers.

Parliament Speaker Yuli-Yoel Edelstein called on security to eject the Palestinian MPs, who were led out crying “You are racist”.

“This is a defining moment in the annals of Zionism and the history of the state of Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, after the vote.

Hassan Jabareen, general director of Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, said the law features key elements of apartheid, which he said “is not only immoral but also absolutely prohibited under international law”.

“The new law constitutionally enshrines the identity of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people only – despite the 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of the state and residents of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights – and guarantees the exclusive ethnic-religious character of Israel as Jewish,” he said.

“By defining sovereignty and democratic self-rule as belonging solely to the Jewish people – wherever they live around the world – Israel has made discrimination a constitutional value and has professed its commitment to favoring Jewish supremacy as the bedrock of its institutions.”

Mazin Qumsiyya, a writer and activist, told Middle East Eye that Israel was moving down a dark path.

“Colonial settler states like Israel move towards more and more extremism before they arrive at one of the three known outcomes of colonialism: the Algerian outcome (a two-tiered ethnic system), the Australian/USA outcome (genocide of natives), or the rest of the world model (coexistance in one pluralistic state),” he said.

“The Nation State law is written mostly for self-validation by racists who know the third outcome is inevitably arriving soon.”

Two Tiers

Less than 500 words long, the Nation State law accords exclusive “national self-determination” rights – the right to decide Israel’s national priorities, of both symbolic and practical importance – to Jewish people, wherever they may live, in Israel or abroad, and whether or not they even hold Israeli citizenship.

The law does not, notably, say that Palestinian and other non-Jewish citizens of Israel are entitled to equal treatment under the law.

The law also gives Hebrew superior status over Arabic, making the former the state’s only official language and demoting the latter to merely a language with a “special status”.

In effect, the Nation State law, which as a basic law holds constitutional power, means Israel’s ethno-religious character supersedes its democratic one.

The bill has been criticised by Palestinian citizens of Israel, liberal Jewish Israelis, Israel’s president and rights groups, some of whom have said the law would amount to apartheid.

“Twenty percent of the citizens will be discriminated against, by definition. What is that if not apartheid? This is racist and unprecedented legislation from a government that has lost all shame,” tweeted Joint List party chair Ayman Odeh earlier in the week, anticipating the law’s passage.

“This is a mortal wound for Arab citizens [of Israel], and for democracy, no less.”

Fellow Joint List lawmaker, Aida Touma-Suleiman, slammed the bill, saying it would “establish Jewish supremacy” and “wipe the word ‘equality’ from the political lexicon in the State of Israel.”

The Palestinian members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, were joined by Jewish liberal lawmakers and about 2,500 demonstrators on Saturday night, in a march through the main streets of downtown Tel Aviv to protest the bill.

Rights groups say Israel has been discriminating against its non-Jewish citizens ever since the state was founded in 1948, pointing to dozens of Israeli laws that mandate preferential treatment to Jews.

However, the law will have greater, more lasting impact as it enshrines a two-tiered system of rights in a basic law.

Coalition Concessions

While Netanyahu’s government has ignored the protests of Palestinian parliamentarians and left-leaning Zionist lawmakers, it altered the law’s language in recent weeks in order to secure common ground between the centre-right and far-right factions of the cabinet.

The far-right religious bloc insisted on altering a clause committing the government to “strengthen the affinity between the state and the Jewish people,” ensuring that it would only apply to foreign Jews. The religious parties feared that if, as in its original language, the bill applied to Israeli Jews as well, it would legitimate liberal streams of the Jewish religion, and weaken their own monopoly on issues of synagogue and state.

The centre-right members of Netanyahu’s coalition government worried that, were the law to include language which could be easily understood as enshrining racial discrimination into law, it could further sour Israel’s relations with the world’s western democracies, who are still its most important international allies and largest trading partners.

One clause in particluar, 7b, had attracted much concern from Israel’s allies and even its presidnet, Reuven Rivlin.

Clause 7b would have allowed Jewish-only communities, and said the “state can allow a community composed of people of the same faith or nationality to maintain an exclusive community”.

Rivlin condemned the clause, saying it would “allow any community to establish residential communities that exclude Sephardic Jews, Ultra-Orthodox people, Druze, LGBT people”.

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