Netanyahu rebuked in citizens row

ISRAELI ARABS are not “second class voters” and all citizens have full equality before the law, President Reuven Rivlin said in an apparent rebuke of Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks on Israel’s Jewish identity.

Mr Netanyahu was widely criticised after saying on Instagram last weekend that Israel was “not a country of all its citizens.”

The Israel Prime Minsiter later told a cabinet meeting: “Israel is a Jewish, democratic state. What this means is that it is the nation-state of the Jewish people alone,” he said.

“Of course it respects the individual rights of all its citizens — Jews and nonJews alike. But it is the nation-state, not of all its citizens, but only of the Jewish people.”

The remarks triggered a flurry of commentary online and prompted President Rivlin to respond.

“I refused and refuse to believe that there are political parties that have surrendered the character of Israel as a Jewish and democratic, democratic and Jewish, state,” he said to loud applause from the audience during a ceremony on Monday.

“Those who believe that the State of Israel must be Jewish and democratic in the full sense of the word must remember that the State of Israel has complete equality of rights for all its citizens.”

Mr Rivlin added that politicians — who he did not name — had been making “entirely unacceptable remarks about the Arab citizens of Israel”.

“There are no, and there will be no, first-class citizens, and there are no second-class voters,” he said.