Why All the Outrage over Israel’s Nation-State Law?

After working its way through the Knesset for years, Israel’s nation-state law, whose official title is Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, finally passed on July 19 by a margin of 62 to 55 votes. Almost immediately, it was denounced in the strongest possible terms, and has continued to be denounced, by the political opposition at home, by the Palestinian Authority, and by a wide variety of observers abroad.

For Erel Margalit of Israel’s Labor party, the new law represents nothing less than “an assassination of democracy that brings to mind dark periods in history”; for Zehava Galon of Meretz, it is “a declaration of war on Israel’s Arab citizens and on Israel as a democratic and advanced society.”

In addition to such wholesale denunciations of the new law, critics at home and abroad have singled out specific clauses or allegedly hidden motives for special opprobrium. They have protested that in one key article, the law maliciously demotes Arabic from its former status as an official language of the state; that in another it expresses a lack of proper solicitude for the Jewish diaspora; that in yet another, contrarily, it expresses greater solicitude for the Jewish diaspora than for Israel’s own non-Jewish population, including, most insultingly, the Druze who loyally serve the state; and that in still another it offers a barely disguised brief for Jewish settlers in the disputed areas of the West Bank. More generally, some claim that, by egregiously omitting any reference to the principle of equality, the law subverts the very bedrock of civil liberty in a democratic society.