What the Druze Know about Israel that Israeli Jews Have Forgotten

There is much that is true and important in Moshe Koppel and Eugene Kontorovich’s defense in Mosaic of Israel’s new Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. The law, passed by the Knesset on July 19, articulates concepts of identity and nationhood that are fundamental and agreed-upon among nearly all Israeli Jews.

Vociferous critics of the law, with their cries about the “death of Israeli democracy,” have struggled to make a substantive case for what the law will change in practice. But in the end it changes little. In a country without a formal constitution, it is a law, like other Basic Laws, of the sort that does not so much affect the day-to-day business of individuals or even the state as it is meant to sway the decisions of Israel’s judges, and especially the justices of the Supreme Court.

Even in that realm, its effect might be minimal. Expressing their hope that “some judges will . . . have the integrity to take the law seriously,” the authors frankly acknowledge that others, “unsympathetic to manifestations of nationalism[,] will have little difficulty finding the interpretive tools to construe the new Basic Law in a way that allows them to reach precisely the same conclusions they would reach in its absence.” That is, the law only provides a constitutional anchor for those judges who are already predisposed to rule in favor of “manifestations of nationalism” or are otherwise open to persuasion.