If Israel is ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ why does the Knesset Refuse to Even Discuss a Bill Calling for Israel to be a State of all its Citizens?

As long as Israel is a Jewish state it can’t be a democratic state

JAMAL ZAHALKA and Haneen Zoabi. (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)

When the three members of Balad in the Knesset proposed a Bill calling for Israel to be a state of all its citizens rather than a Jewish state, all hell broke loose.  The Knesset Praesidium, a Committee responsible for the conduct of parliamentary business refused even to table it for debate – an extremely unusual occurrence – the first time this has occurred in this Knesset.

Why?  Because any challenge to the Jewish nature of the Israeli state is like going to church and challenging the existence of god.

The Jewish MK’s were unanimous in their hostility.  Possibly the most ludicrous comment of all was from Zionist Union (Labour) MK Revital Swid:

“Placing this bill on the Knesset's table may set a precedent for placing other inherently racist bills on the Knesset table,”

A bill which explicitly grants equality to all citizens without making any religious or national distinctions is apparently ‘racist’.  Clearly the word ‘racist’ has taken on an entirely new meaning in this Alice in Wonderland parliament.  Usually racism means discrimination against someone on the grounds of race, religion etc.  In Israel it means not discriminating against them.

Of course the cry goes up that ‘Israel is the only Jewish state in the world.’ The argument being that everyone has a vote in Israel. This is, however deliberately disingenuous in a state where Arabs are in a permanent minority and apart from the Communist Party all parties are either Arab or Jewish. The Israeli state is specifically constructed in order that Jews have a permanent majority. The definition of a Jew can be as flexible as racial demographics allow but the key unwritten assumption is that Arabs can never become a majority.

That was why, in 1948, 85% of Palestinians, some 3/4 million, were expelled from what became Israel.  

This was best expressed by the former leader of the Israeli Labour Party, Isaac Herzog:

In about a decade, the Arabs between the Jordan and the Mediterranean will be a majority and the Jews a minority. The Jewish national home will become the Palestinian national home. We will be again, for the first time since 1948, a Jewish minority in an Arab state. I want to separate from the Palestinians. I want to keep a Jewish state with a Jewish majority. I don’t want 61 Palestinian MKs in Israel’s Knesset. I don’t want a Palestinian prime minister in Israel. I don’t want them to change my flag and my national anthem. I don’t want them to change the name of my country to Isra-stine. (my emphasis)

When Enoch Powell, in his Rivers of Blood speech in 1968, spoke about the Black man having the whip hand over the white man’ people understood that this was an appeal to the basest racial prejudice yet such sentiments as the leader of the Israeli Labour Party expressed are par for the course in Israel.   Israeli politics are based not on class but on a racial division between Jew and Arab.

It should also be stressed that we now have one Greater Israel in all but name.  There is no Green Line dividing pre-1967 Israel from the Occupied Territories.  Yet in the West Bank there are two sets of laws – military law for the Palestinians and normal Israeli law for the settlers.  In Israel’s general elections the half a million settlers can vote but those living under occupation have no vote.  If they did then Palestinians would be in the majority and Herzog’s nightmare would come true.

Tony Greenstein

Thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel take part in the March of Return, in the lands of the destroyed village of Hadatha, near Tiberias, April 23, 2015. (photo: Omar Sameer/Activestills.org)

Rebuffed parliamentary bills foil efforts to end Israeli apartheid

10 June 2018

Just as Israel’s belligerent rule in the occupied territories is under ever greater scrutiny, so too is its claim to be a democracy conferring equal rights on all citizens

Jonathan Cook - The National – 10 June 2010

For most of the seven decades after its establishment, Israel went to extraordinary lengths to craft an image of itself as a “light unto the nations”.

It claimed to have “made the desert bloom” by planting forests over the razed houses of 750,000 Palestinians it exiled in 1948. Soldiers in the “most moral army in the world” reputedly cried as they were compelled to shoot Palestinian “infiltrators” trying to return home. And all this occurred in what Israelis claimed was the Middle East’s “only democracy”.

An industry known as hasbara – a euphemism for propaganda – recruited Jews in Israel and abroad to a campaign to persuade the world that the Palestinians’ dispossession was for the good of mankind. Israel’s achievements in science, agriculture and medicine were extolled.

But in a more interconnected world, that propaganda campaign is swiftly unravelling. Phone cameras now record “moral” soldiers executing unarmed Palestinians in Gaza or beating up children in Hebron.

The backlash, including a growing international boycott movement, has driven Israel’s right wing into even greater defiance and self-righteousness. It no longer conceals its goal to aggressively realise a longed-for “Greater Israel”.

A parallel process is overtaking Israel’s traditional left but has been far less noticed. It too is stubbornly committed to its ideological legacy – the creation of a supposed “Jewish and democratic state” after 1948.

And just as the immorality of Israel’s belligerent rule in the occupied territories is under ever greater scrutiny, so too is its claim to be a democracy conferring equal rights on all citizens.

Haneen Zoabi of Balad

Israel includes a large minority of 1.8 million Palestinian citizens, the remnants of those who survived the expulsions required for its creation. Although Palestinian citizens have the vote, it was an easy generosity after Israel gerrymandered the electoral constituency in 1948 to ensure Palestinians remained a permanent and decisive minority.

In a system of residential apartheid, Palestinian citizens have been confined to ghettos on a tiny fraction of land while Israel has “nationalised” 93 per cent of its territory for Jews around the world.

But after decades of repression, including an initial 20 years living under military rule, the Palestinian minority has gradually grown more confident in highlighting Israel’s political deficiencies.

In recent days, Palestinian legislators have submitted three legislative measures before parliament to explode the illusion that Israel is a western-style liberal democracy.

None stood the faintest chance of being passed in a system rigged to keep Palestinian lawmakers out of any of Israel’s complex but entirely Zionist coalition governments.

The first measure sought to revoke the quasi-governmental status of major international Zionist organisations like the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and the Jewish Agency.

Although they are treated like state bodies, these organisations are obligated through their charters to discriminate in allocating state resources and rights to Jews around the world rather than to Israelis. The aim is to exclude Palestinian citizens from major state benefits.

The JNF bans access for non-Jews to most land in Israel and develops new communities exclusively for Jews, while the Jewish Agency restricts immigration and associated perks to Jews alone.

The bill – designed to end decades of explicit discrimination against one fifth of Israel’s citizenry – was defeated when all the Jewish parties voted against it. Zuheir Bahloul, the sole Palestinian legislator in Zionist Union, the centre-left party once called Labour, was furiously denounced by Jewish colleagues for breaking ranks and voting for the bill.

That was no surprise. The party’s previous leader, Isaac Herzog, is the frontrunner to become the next chair of the Jewish Agency. Israel’s left still venerates these organisations that promote ethnic privileges – for Jews – of a sort once familiar from apartheid South Africa.

Mr Bahloul also found himself in the firing line after he submitted a separate bill requiring that for the first time the principle of equality be enshrined in all 11 Basic Laws, Israel’s equivalent of a constitution. The proposal was roundly defeated, including by his own party.

The third measure was a bill demanding that Israel be reformed from a Jewish state into a state of all its citizens, representing all equally. In a highly irregular move, a committee dominated by Jewish legislators voted to disqualify the bill last week from even being allowed a hearing on the parliament floor.

The parliament’s legal adviser, Eyal Yinon, warned that the measure would alter Israel’s character by giving Jewish and Palestinian citizens “equal status”. Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein called the bill “preposterous”. “Any intelligent individual can see it must be blocked immediately,” he said.

Law professor Mordechai Kremnitzer, meanwhile, conceded that the bill exposed Israeli democracy as “fundamentally flawed”.

These three bills from Palestinian legislators might have redressed some of the inequities contained in nearly 70 Israeli laws that, according to Adalah, a legal rights group, explicitly discriminate based on ethnicity.

Paradoxically, the number of such laws has grown prolifically in recent years as Adalah and others have challenged Jewish privileges in the courts.

The Israeli left and right have joined forces to shore up these threatened racist practices through new legislation – secure that an intimidated supreme court will not dare revoke the will of parliament.

The reality is that left-wing Israelis – shown beyond doubt that their state is not the liberal democracy they imagined – have hurried to join the right in silencing critics and implementing harsher repression.

Palestinian citizens who peacefully protested against the massacre of demonstrators in Gaza by army snipers were assaulted in police custody last month. One arrested civil society leader had his knee broken. There have been barely any objections, even on the left.

Today, Israelis are hunkering down. Boycott activists from abroad are denied entry. Unarmed Palestinian demonstrators have been gunned down in Gaza. And critics inside Israel are silenced or beaten up.

All these responses have the same end in mind: to block anything that might burst the bubble of illusions and threaten Israelis’ sense of moral superiority.

Knesset blocks bill to deem Israel 'state for all its citizens'

Akiva Eldar June 7, 2018

Article Summary

Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein rejected this week a law proposal presented by the Arab Joint List redefining Israel as the state of all its citizens.

REUTERS/Ammar Awad Israeli lawmakers attend a vote on a bill at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, in Jerusalem, Feb. 6, 2017.

Rarely do parliaments in democratic states flatly refuse to debate proposed bills and disqualify them before they are even put on the agenda. However, this happened June 4 when the Knesset Presidium decided in “an unusual move,” by its own admission, to reject the submission of a proposed constitutional law sponsored by three members of the Balad faction within the Arab Joint List. Their proposed basic law, titled “State of all its citizens,’’ sought to redefine the character of the Jewish state, qualifying it as giving equal status to the Jewish nationality and the Arab nationality.

Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein said this was the first time since he took office five years ago that he had recommended vetoing proposed legislation, adding that the presidium had not vetoed a single proposed bill in the current Knesset or in the previous one.

“The three [Knesset members] from Balad keep trying to garner votes through provocation,” Edelstein stated, “and we cannot lend a hand to this.” Has he really forgotten the embarrassing provocation to which his Likud Party colleague Culture Minister Miri Regev subjected him on Israel’s recent Independence Day celebrations? When she hijacked the traditional keynote address at the ceremony from the speaker for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was Regev not trying to “garner votes” among Likud members? Does Edelstein not know of any Jewish lawmakers who submit bills in order to pick up votes? “Placing this bill on the Knesset's table may set a precedent for placing other inherently racist bills on the Knesset table,” said Knesset member Revital Swid of the center-left Zionist Camp. Swid was one of seven presidium members who voted to disqualify the proposed law. Only two presidium members (both Arabs), Esawi Frej of the left-wing Meretz Party and Ahmed Tibi of the Joint List, voted “nay.”

What was the issue that so riled Jewish lawmakers from the coalition and opposition parties? Why did this proposal make them bare their teeth? What is that “precedent for other inherently racist bills” to which Swid referred? Can they be referring to a clause in the bill that recognizes the existence and rights of the two national groups — one Jewish, one Arab — living in the State of Israel? Perhaps the problem lies in its proposed system of government based on separation of religion and state, while ensuring freedom of worship for all religions? Or were they beside themselves over language stating, “The state shall respect the individual and collective identity of its citizens on an equal basis, without discrimination on the basis of nationality, race, religion, gender, language, color, political views, ethnic origin or social status"?

Indeed, the proposed law is not Zionist. Its sponsors seek to nullify the right of return that grants automatic citizenship to all Jews and to change the symbols and anthem of the state so that they provide equal expression to both nations living in Israel. What racist overtones does it contain that are any different from the ones enshrined in the proposed nationality law that enjoys the support of Netanyahu and most members of the ruling coalition? The proposed nationality law seeks to define the character of the state through constitutional-style legislation that fails to guarantee the human rights of all the country’s citizens, chief among them the right to equality, the right to language, culture and minority rights. The proposed bill enshrines racial segregation in housing and undermines the rights of one-fifth of the country’s citizens to their language, culture and identity.

“There is something highly embarrassing in viewing Israel’s definition as a state of all its people as undermining the fundamental principles of our system of government and therefore disqualifying it in advance,” wrote leading legal scholar Mordechai Kremnitzer in Haaretz on June 5. Kremnitzer, a professor emeritus of the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said, “If this is not an obvious fact, there is something fundamentally flawed in our democracy.” The latest Peace Index, issued this week, indicates that almost half of all Israelis (41%) think the country’s democracy is under severe threat. That view is held by 75% of those defining themselves as left wing and 70% of the Arabs polled.

To protect the state from any hint that its Jewish character and symbols are being eroded in favor of the principle of equality, most Knesset members are willing to destabilize one of the central pillars of democracy. At the same time, these same lawmakers support policy and legislation that deprives Israel of its Jewish majority. Since the seating of the current Knesset, 31 bills have been submitted calling for the direct annexation of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, whether by annexing the entire West Bank, annexing blocs of settlements or imposing Israeli planning and construction laws on extensive areas outside sovereign Israel. It is only thanks to human rights organizations that refuse to give in to the campaigns of incitement being waged against them that the Regularization Law, designed to authorize the establishment of settlements on private Palestinian lands, is now under deliberation by the Supreme Court.

In addition to the moral, security and diplomatic cost being exacted by the settlements on Israel, they are forcing the state to choose between turning into a binational state or an apartheid regime.  
According to data presented to the Knesset by military authorities in March, Arabs outnumber Jews in the area under Israeli control between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River — 6.8 million Arabs versus 6.5 million Jews. The latest violence along the border with Gaza clearly demonstrates that Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the enclave in 2005 failed to sever it from Israel, which continues to control its air space, territorial waters, supply of goods, water and power.

The Jewish majority in the Knesset can violate the right of Arab lawmakers to submit a bill seeking to define Israel as a state of all its citizens, even though this is an accepted definition in all democratic nations around the world. However, Israel can hardly be called a democracy when this majority refuses to represent millions of people whose fate is controlled by the state and to ensure their rights. At the same time, many Jews around the world, most of them affiliated with liberal Judaism, are having a hard time defining an occupying state that establishes settlements on stolen lands as a Jewish one.