Mr. Netanyahu has been pushing forward a plan to ‘formalize’ Israel's status as "the Jewish state”. The bill was approved by the Cabinet Sunday, but a parliamentary vote scheduled for Wednesday was postponed for a week to allow time for a compromise proposal.
Israeli PM stressed the bill is "expressing the fact that Israel is the national state of the Jewish people and only theirs, alongside preserving the rights of every single citizen of the state of Israel". The new legislation has been criticized as excessive, undemocratic and racist.
In fact, Israel's declaration of independence of 1948 has already defined the country as both Jewish and democratic. Therefore the bill’s critics, including the country’s President Reuven Rivlin, maintain that the new legislation is not only excessive, but also harmful. They say it undermines the declaration of independence, which gives equal rights to the country’s minorities, including Israeli Arabs.
“We don’t need legislation to make Israel a Jewish state, and you cannot make it a Jewish state by legislation,” Moshe Arens, former defense and foreign minister, wrote in his Haaretz comment on Wednesday. “But not only is the proposed law unnecessary, it is harmful. A quarter of Israel’s population is not Jewish, and probably the most important item on the nation’s agenda should be their integration into the fabric of Israeli society and their participation in the Israeli economy, giving them the feeling of being at home, of being equal citizens.”
Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, leader of Hatnuah, warned that the bill's passage could topple Netanyahu's coalition and force early elections.
Says Efraim Inbar, Professor of political studies, Bar-Ilan University; Director, Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies:
Everybody agrees that to specify that the state of Israel is the state of the Jewish people is a good idea. And what we see here is the personal rivalries coming out and creating some kind of controversy about something, which is basically within the consensus of the Israeli politics and society.
As far as I understand, the President says that this bill undermines the democratic principles?
Efraim Inbar: I fail to see why it undermines any democratic principle. First of all, the law is not fully detailed yet. And I think the Israeli democracy is a strong democracy, and there is no reason to believe that any law legislated by the Knesset endangers the Israeli democracy. Basically, it says that Israel is a nation state which gives some kinds of precedents to the Jewish culture, to the Jewish law, to the Jewish calendar, to the Hebrew language and doesn’t affect the status of non-Jews in Israel, because they enjoy the full equality under the Israeli law.
As far as I understand, in 1948 the state was already defined as both – Jewish and democratic, right? So, what is the purpose of introducing a new legislation?
Efraim Inbar: I think this is a good question. It is not always clear why there is a need for this type of law. I think we see that some politicians smell the elections soon and they want to make sure that they impress the electorate, that they have good nationalistic credentials. And it is much ado about nothing, I think. The Israeli politics and decisions will continue exactly as before. It is not going to affect or create a new cleavage in the Israeli society. And I must say that the energy displayed by so many politicians is surprising me.
Says Arik Elman, an Israeli political and PR consultant and commentator:
The Prime Minister has proposed his own version of the basic law which defines Israel as the national state of the Jewish people. And in it he incorporated certain ideas of those who criticized the previous proposals, in order to enhance the element of equality and the principle that the both aspects of the character of the state of Israel – Jewish and democratic – are equally underlined and supported in the new law.
So, from the Prime Minister’s point of view, this law satisfies the demands of those who wanted to be sure that no harm comes to the rights of non-Jews in Israel, and that the democratic character of the state is not damaged in any way by giving the new enhanced status for the issue of the Jewish character of Israel.
But what is the current status of Israel now?
Arik Elman: The situation is a bit complicated, because, as it is known, Israel does not have a completely unified constitution. In the declaration of independence issued on May 14, 1948, Israel was already defined as a Jewish democratic state. Since then and after the courts have decided to take the declaration of independence as a sort of founding document which is supposed to provide inspiration for the legislation and jurisprudence in Israel, there were several basic laws enacted which were supposed to enforce and preserve, and define the democratic character of the Israeli state.
They defined the process of election as the free, fair, secret and on the basis of universal franchise. They defined the rights of men, including the habeas corpus and the rest, the property rights, the freedom of speech and so on and so forth. Also, this work is not finished completely. For example, Israel does not have the basic law which defines and guarantees the freedom of speech. No one has got around to making the Jewish aspect of the character of the state enshrined in the basic law as well.
One of the reasons why the issue was brought in the agenda of the current coalition, when it was formed a year ago, was that there are the attempts from several quarters to deny or to delude the target of the Jewish character of the state under the various pretexts. One of them is the struggle to define the religious and nonreligious or to separate between the religion and the state.
The other claim, which, as it is used to be said, is very fringe but it still exists, is of people who claim that Israel is the home to a new nation. And it is not just Jews and Arabs, but there is a coagulation of both into a new historic entity which is the Israeli people, which I think could remind certain listeners with the good memory something about the attempts to create a new Soviet nation in the former Soviet Union.
All those attempts and the activities of the Supreme Court have caused the many Israelis to worry that as long as the Jewish nature of the state remains unprotected by the status of the basic law, it can be deluded and defined down to a mere rhetoric, and in the end to be completely cancelled. So, this is why the request to create equality between the two aspects came into being.
And of course, besides the declaration aspect of this, there is still much doubt and discussion even between those who support the basic idea of what exactly is the Jewish character, what is it that is the Jewish state, who is a Jew, where the Judaism as the religion ends and the Jewish nationality begins.
So, all those aspects and all those questions remain unsolved and they are discussed. And considering that Israel as a nation is very young in the historical terms, not even 70 years old and the process of absorption of the new groups of immigrants continues, the final answers to those questions would not be given neither during this debate, nor many years since.
So, now we are talking about basically a declaration that Israel is determined to preserve itself as it was from the very beginning, as it was in the goal of the Zionist movement and, apart from the declaration, to preserve itself as a national home of the Jewish people.
Says Shlomo Aronson, Professor of political Science, Hebrew University:
The present status is dictated by the Israeli election system. It is something which, I would say, is a sort of impossible form of government, which reminds me of the Weimar Republic and the French Third Republic, and things like that. We have very many political parties, because of the absolutely disproportional electoral system.
That is to say – practically everyone can be elected to the Knesset. The threshold is very low, in comparison, for example, to the German threshold of 5%, not to mention the Turkish threshold, which is 10%. Ours is much lower. And as the result of it everybody can compete and try to be elected. And the result is a very large number of political parties. There is no way to create something like the American or the British two-party system in Israel, or something similar to that.
So, Mr. Netanyahu can mobilize about, say, 20-25% of the votes and he is supposed to be the leader of the largest party, but he has only 25%. He needs more. So, he agreed to a coalition with Mr. Lieberman. And both of them have something like 30-35% of the votes, which is not enough to make any serious decisions, let’s say with regards to the two-state solution and everything like this.
And on the other hand, Likud, Mr. Netanyahu’s party is very much under the influence of the far right in the Israeli political scene. And as the result of it, he cannot ignore the far right. He would like not to, he would like to proceed with something which would be much more in the middle of the road, but he depends upon the people in the right side of Likud, of his own party and who joined his party thanks to the system which allowed them to make a coalition with Netanyahu.
So, he is very much dependent upon the far right and, at the same time, he wouldn’t like to go all the way to the far right. He is theoretically obliged to the two-state solution. But within the Likud and in the coalition which Likud created with Lieberman and with the others, he is dependent on them. So, he must maneuver in such a way that will please everyone and doesn't please anybody. This is the general background of the mess in which we find ourselves now.
Why would the opponents to Mr. Netanyahu’s proposal say that it is undermining the democracy in Israel?
Shlomo Aronson: No, the point is that the Israeli democracy is a pluralistic democracy in which the minorities have a very large degree of influence, in which you have to reach a compromise with the far right that penetrated your own coalition that is your own partner to the coalition that exists since two years. You cannot ignore them. At the same time, you cannot accept their policy and their ideas about the situation on the Temple Mount and so on.
So, he is maneuvering, he is dancing, he is behaving like someone who could somehow survive, otherwise the Knesset will be dissolved and the new elections will, perhaps, make the situation a little better.
But as the European experience shows, all kinds of maneuvers with the far right are rather tricky.
Shlomo Aronson: The point is that when we discuss the Israeli far right, we have to discuss the Palestinians and we have to discuss our members of the Israeli Parliament. And they are more or less associated with Hamas, not with Abu Mazen. Abu Mazen is supposed to be our partner for peace.
But the members of the Israeli Parliament are against Abu Mazen. And they are more or less, not all of them, of course, but enough of them are identifiable with Hamas.
Right! But hasn’t Hamas already compromised itself to a degree?
Shlomo Aronson: The point is that Hamas is still very much active. This morning the Israeli intelligence uncovered a Hamas operation in planning that was supposed to blow up the Israeli stadium in Jerusalem. Some people among the members of our Israeli Parliament are identifiable with Hamas and not with Abu Mazen. And the far right is of course exploiting it.
So, do you see any way out of this tricky situation?
Shlomo Aronson: If there is no way out of it, there will be new elections and Netanyahu will try to build a different coalition, depending on the results of the elections. That will give him more room to maneuver in the middle, whereas now he is pushed to right which he wants to avoid.
What are the Israeli Arabs going to do in that situation?
Shlomo Aronson: This depends very much upon the results of the coming elections, if any. There are legislations that are being brought to the Knesset about one of them, a lady. According to this legislation she should be removed from the Parliament, because she actively joined the activity against Israel, the episode of the Mavi Marmara – the ship that was supposed to reach Gaza. And she was the part of the anti-Israeli operation and she is the member of the Israeli Parliament. The issue is whether the members of the parliament can remove one of them – this lady – from the house, which is very tricky from the democratic point of view.
But it is tricky from all points of view, because if she is removed from the Parliament, the reaction is bound to follow. And if the woman is associated with Hamas, so we are having the new round of violence.
Shlomo Aronson: But Hamas is continuing the whatever activities that they are planning inside Israel, I'm not talking about Gaza this time. I'm talking about the relations of the Israeli intelligence about blowing up a crowded stadium in the middle of Jerusalem.
If you think about what is going on in Syria, if you think about the Daish, if you think about the situation in Iraq, if you think about Mr. Obama’s weakness – all these things create here an almost crazy situation in which Mr. Netanyahu is trying to navigate his way, maybe, to the new elections.
Whom of his allies can he rely on, both inside Israel and outside of Israel? Is there any force which could help him out?
Shlomo Aronson: The allies which he has theoretically and not so theoretically are, to begin with, Egypt under Gen. Sisi, who is basically an ally of Israel. Maybe, Saudi Arabia.
We’ll see what happens in Congress when the Republicans take over the House and the Senate. So, the issue for Netanyahu from the point of view of his timetable is the new Congress under the Republicans. And the effect of, let’s say, the new Israeli elections will make his life a little easier.
There is one more thing we have to take into consideration. And this is the role of Qatar. Qatar has financed Hamas. It is Qatar which is behind everything that happened in the Arab Spring in favor of the more radical Islamist elements, including in Egypt. It is a very rich and influential country with its own television station. Which is, altogether, Hamas is totally anti-Israeli. And this makes the life in this region even more complicated.
But Qatar is generally known to be a key US ally in the region.
Shlomo Aronson: Partially, it is the US ally because of the American base in Qatar. But, at the same time, it is a very rich country with is a lot of money, which financed the Muslim Brothers in Egypt and many other Islamist activities in the region.
Does it also finance the anti-Assad coalition in Syria?
Shlomo Aronson: As far as we know, they are Islamists. And the issue is what they believed that would happen in Syria is a matter of Assad’s survivability. That is to say – if Assad survives – and he seems to be able to – they will see how to work together with him. So, it is a matter of what happens on the ground in Syria and in Iraq. And accordingly, Qatar will support the more radical Muslim Brother option in the whole ME.
So, could Qatar be somehow limited in its activity of financing the Islamists?
Shlomo Aronson: They are limited to an extent. But at the same time, the role of Al Jazeera – the Qatari TV station – in supporting the MB in Egypt and now in supporting everything that has to do with the Muslim Brotherhood, all this is still going on.
