Does Israel’s new law plant “the seeds” of apartheid?

“Israel is about to adopt one of the most controversial laws in its history,” said Osama Al Sharif in Arab News (Riyadh). Championed for years by hardliners, the Jewish nation-state bill was approved in the Knesset last week. The legislation – which will become one of Israel’s Basic Laws, giving it constitution-like status – declares that Jews alone have the right to national self-determination in Israel, and relegates Arabic to a language with “special” standing, but no official status. It also encourages the building of Jewish settlements, ascribing a “national value” to such development. Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, hailed the bill as a “defining moment in the annals of Zionism”, but Reuven Rivlin, the president, warned that it could “harm the Jewish people”. Arab critics, for their part, claimed that the law was racist and would plant “the seeds” of apartheid.

All this bill really does, said Emmanuel Navon in The Jerusalem Post, is protect the status quo. Israel doesn’t have a formal written constitution, which means that laws and symbols related to the country’s Jewish identity are vulnerable to legal petitions. For instance, the “law of return” (which grants automatic immigration rights to Jews) may one day be struck down for being discriminatory; or Israel’s flag “could be challenged in court for ignoring the feelings of the Arab minority”. A nation-state Basic Law will provide a constitutional basis to reject such petitions. As for the fact that the law declares that Israel’s official language is Hebrew, nobody objects to the French constitution, which establishes that: “The language of the Republic shall be French.”

There’s nothing wrong, per se, with the idea of a Jewish nation-state bill, said Michael Koplow in The Forward (New York). Israel is entitled to proudly declare its Zionist roots. The problem is with the execution of this concept. Nations can celebrate their collective group identity, but states have to treat their citizens equally. By expressing a clear preference for Jewish settlement over any other kind of settlement, this bill discriminates against the 20% of the country’s population that is Arab. That’s unacceptable, agreed Yohanan Plesner in the same magazine. Jewishness may be integral to Israel’s identity, but so too is democracy. A law that “seeks to define the character of the state but does not anchor the principle of civic equality” – indeed, which makes no mention of the word “equality” at all – “has no place in the law book of any democracy”.