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editorial



No Need For A Jewish Nation-State Law

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10 January 21 • 2016

sraeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu insists the core of
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is
Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel
as the national state of the Jewish
people. Defiant leadership among
Palestinian Arabs notwithstanding,
he’s overlooking that Israel already is a
Jewish state by self-determination and
international declaration.
Believing Palestinian defiance could
jeopardize Israel’s international stand-
ing, Netanyahu is renewing a push for
legislative enshrinement of Israel as a
Jewish state.
The JN has never favored the bill.
A nationality law, singularly, would
hardly convince the Arab world to
summarily view Israel through the lens
of a Jewish state.
Affirming Israel’s right to brand
itself a Jewish state are the U.N.
General Assembly’s 1947 Israeli
statehood declaration and the 1948
Proclamation of Independence drawn
up by Israel’s People’s Council, which
held internationally recognized gov-
erning authority as Zionism honed a
desire into reality.

OPEN APPEAL
Netanyahu makes the case that
Palestinian defiance is rooted in an
unwillingness to cross “the emotional
bridge of giving up the dream of not
a state next to Israel, but of a state
instead of Israel.” That deduction,
shared in a Dec. 6 video address at the
Saban Forum in Washington before
Israeli and U.S. leaders, is reasonable
given Palestinian intransigence toward
revived peace talks with Israel.
Netanyahu took advantage of that
public spotlight to deny Israel intends
to annex the West Bank — much like
it did the Golan Heights in 1980 fol-
lowing their seizure in the Six-Day
War of 1967. Of course, annexing
the West Bank, a large slice of which
the Palestinians envision being in a
Palestinian state, would mean the
dreaded one-state answer to a decades-
long political and cultural conflict.
The JN doesn’t waver in support of two
states for two peoples, a Jewish state and
a Palestinian state, standing side by side,
in peace — despite lingering tangled
parameters of such a scenario.
Israel is America’s closest Middle
East ally and the beleaguered region’s
only democracy with Western values
for all citizens. The ancestral home-

land of the Jewish people is not about
to lose its Jewish character or diminish
its cross-cultural freedoms.

Israel’s annexing of
the West Bank would
mean the dreaded
one-state answer to a
decades-long political
and cultural conflict.

BELOW SURFACE
The contentious bid for a nation-state
law sounds plausible — a constitution-
al-like mandate to secure Israel’s status
as a Jewish state and deter future
Israeli governments from diluting
Israel’s Jewish soul.
But a nation-state law not only is
superfluous, it also could erode Israel’s
democratic makeup and attenuate
Israel’s Arab minority.
Israel has no constitution and its
politics would never allow one. Above
all laws are 11 Basic Laws that serve as
a constitutional-like guide for Israel’s
legal system.
Time directed toward debating a
nation-state law could better be spent
on: assuring Israel’s Arab minority is
receiving all the individual liberties it
is entitled to; advancing the religious
rights of non-Orthodox Jews; and
reining in government-backed prac-
tices that discriminate against women
by invoking religious tradition. The
Netanyahu governing coalition also
must confront the boiling tension
among Arabs over Israel’s West Bank
settlements.
The Palestinians acknowledged
Israel’s Jewish character when they
bought into the Oslo peace process of
the 1990s. But they’ve resisted reas-
serting that acknowledgment in the
wake of the two terrorist uprisings that
followed.
Even as they refuse to recognize the
validity of the Jewish national state,
the Palestinians hypocritically press on
with seeking their own state outside
the strictures of formal bilateral nego-
tiations with Israel.

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