Israel broadened a racist law that allows communities to exclude non-Jews based on “social and cultural cohesion.” Whereas judicial overhaul laws have caused an uproar, this passed with hardly any opposition.

THE SWEARING IN OF THE 37TH GOVERNMENT OF ISRAEL UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU. (PHOTO: ISRAEL NATIONAL PHOTO COLLECTION)

JONATHAN OFIR, MONDOWEISS, JULY 31, 2023

There has been a lot of noise from the Israeli protests concerning the judicial overhaul. The recent central law that was passed last week reduced the supreme court’s ability to overturn government policy, the so-called “reasonableness law.” But another law also passed just a day later — an amendment to a core apartheid law known as the “Village Committees Law” of 2010, more officially named the Cooperative Societies Ordinance. It passed without opposition, and was hardly noticed. 

Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, explained how “these committees, which to date exist in the Galilee and in the Naqab (Negev), have the power to approve or to deny applicants who wish to reside there, based on their perceived ‘social suitability’ to the ‘social and cultural fabric’ of a community. In practice, this power has led to the exclusion of Palestinian citizens of Israel from these communities, which are built on state-controlled land.”

The amendment that was passed (nr. 12) expands the existing law, which was limited to towns of up to 400 households, by introducing a new category called a “Continued Communal Town,” which allows towns with up to 700 households to have such admission committees. “Furthermore,” Adalah notes, “in five years, the Minister of Economy and Industry will be authorized to permit admissions committees in towns with more than 700. This provision, de facto, cancels the restriction on the number of households specified in the law.”

The new amendment also expands the law beyond the Galilee and Naqab. While West Bank colonial settlements are not included in the latest version that passed, “it is expected that this law will be implemented in settlements in the West Bank via military orders, rather than through Israeli domestic law,” Adalah notes. 

This is one of the central discriminatory laws that are on Adalah’s database of 65 laws that “discriminate directly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens in Israel and/or Palestinian residents of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) on the basis of their national belonging.” This is a law in so-called “Israel proper” — not a law for West Bank settlers. And its history goes much further back than this current government.

Hagai El-Ad, former head of B’tselem, pointed to the relative silence in a tweet:

“As you read news about Israel’s ‘judicial overhaul,’ here’s some apartheid context: today the Knesset approved the Admissions Committees Law expansion. How much media coverage is this getting? Almost none. This law allows for housing segregation against Palestinian citizens.” 

Noa Shpigel in Haaretz, who covered the story, noted how the original law was enacted in 2010 “to circumvent a Supreme Court ruling that banned communities from selling land to Jews only.” So they made committees that could exclude Palestinians on the basis of a supposed lack of “social suitability.” 

As for opposition to this law, it was almost nonexistent. Apart from the Palestinian-representative party lawmakers (Joint List, United Arab List), who obviously voted against the law that so openly discriminated against them, only two opposition lawmakers from Labor — Naama Lazimi and Gilad Kariv — voted against it. The law passed with an easy 42-11. Those who voted for it included lawmakers from the opposition — the centrist National Unity led by Benny Gantz. These included Gideon Sa’ar (formerly of the anti-Netanyahu “New Hope”) and Alon Schuster. 

A long list of heads of regional councils congratulated the passing of the amendment.

The text of this poster, which celebrates the vote as a moment of unity around “one of the basic values ​​of Zionism,” is really worth noting: 

“In these times of rivalry and disagreement, we witnessed this week a unique moment of unity around one of the core values of Zionism: the settlement. Ministers and lawmakers from right and left joined together in order to pass the amendment to the Cooperative Societies Ordinance, which would allow expansion of the settlement in the periphery, absorption of youth and strengthening of the communities.” 

That message, which thanked the bill’s sponsors and those who voted for the law, were the leaders of 20 regional councils in Israel, as well as others, such as head of the kibbutz movement Nir Meir, the head of the moshav movement Amit Yifrach, the head of the World Zionist Organization Yaakov Hagoel, and others. It represents a near-unanimous consensus on Jewish settlement. 

Israel’s quasi-constitutional Basic Law of 2018, known as the “nation-state law” openly declares in section 7 that “The State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.” This vote proves this truly is a core value that cuts across the Zionist political spectrum. 

Adalah points out that its petition against the original law of (2011) was rejected by the Supreme Court in 2014 in a 5-4 split decision, “emphasizing that the issue was premature for constitutional review at that time.” So the court played the liberal role of outlawing outright discrimination initially but ended up playing the agnostic on the legislation that circumvented its ruling. 

Palestinian-Israeli lawmaker Aida Touma-Sliman of the Joint List hammered the matter in her speech to the plenum:

“Let it be clear — this is one of the most naked and clear of the apartheid laws…there’s a clause that says that the minister can decide to expand the town, appropriating lands from state lands. So let me remind you – the lands that you don’t want us to use. They were mostly confiscated from our forefathers, from the villages that were destroyed in 1948, from people who were expelled from their homeland. And not only did the state steal the lands, it bars us from using them. This is one of the clear laws, that also the Supreme Court, that for thirty weeks there is a struggle to protect it – you know that the Supreme Court rejected this petition? They saw it as reasonable!…The “reasonability principle” was apparently not enough in order to erase this law.”

Needless to say, there will be no mass protests on this one. Most Israelis will probably not even hear about it. It is just a part of the quiet and consistent expansion and takeover of the Zionist project of Jewish supremacy, from the river to the sea.

Israel’s protest leaders are strengthening an ethnocratic identity that lacks all consistency with their ‘democratic’ mission. But an alternative exists.

Anti-government protesters march against the government’s judicial overhaul, Tel Aviv, July 29, 2023. (Miriam Alster/Flash90)

Ameer Fakhoury, +972 Magazine, July 30, 2023

In his recent article in +972, Prof. Menachem Klein wrote about the sociological characteristics of Israel’s pro-judicial overhaul camp and the opposition. His article included innovative arguments regarding the political mobilizing capacity of each camp, but I would like to focus here on the ideational aspects in his article.

According to Klein, “The proponents of the judicial overhaul resort to identity politics. They justify the judicial overhaul with the need to preserve the Jewish identity of the state and Jewish supremacy over non-Jews, whether the latter are citizens, residents, or subjects of the regime. By contrast, the opponents of the judicial overhaul speak in a discourse of rights,” which Klein says “undergirds their democratic-liberal identity.”

The extensive literature on identity focuses on a range of elements, including self and external definitions; perceptions about the past, present, and future; feelings; how identity guides behavior; and how identity is formed in the first place. However, these theories hardly deal with the correlation between, on the one hand, the coherence of identity and a group’s political energy — expressed, for example, in the ability of group members to come together to launch an effective collective struggle — and the political project which the group strives toward on the other.

As an identity’s internal coherence increases, so, too, does its political energy. And the higher the degree of compatibility between them and the chosen political project, the greater the ability to stabilize, preserve, and channel that energy into a social and political reality. This is probably one of the most important lessons that can be learned from the Arab Spring, where the failure to capture the impressive bursts of energy for a political project prevented its translation into a democratic political reality.

In this regard, the ethnocratic identity of the proponents of the judicial overhaul — based, as Klein rightly noted, on Jewish supremacy between the river and the sea — is immeasurably stronger than the “liberal-democratic” identity of the opposition. The identity of the supporters enjoys a high level of internal coherence, which in turn provides its members with political energy. The ideological-colonial zeal of the settlers in the West Bank, or the members of the “Torah nuclei” who settle in so-called “mixed cities” inside Israel, are good examples of this.  

Indeed, the leaders of the coup’s supporters are currently trying to increase the correlation between the group’s identity and political energy and the political project, by promoting their unification within a regime of real Jewish supremacy — and not merely an anti-liberal interpretation of an ethnocratic-Jewish regime.

By contrast, even if the camp opposing the judicial coup succeeds in generating impressive political energy, these will be very difficult to stabilize in the long run. This is because of its low degree of internal identity coherence, and because of the lack of correlation between the camp’s “pro-democracy” identity and the political model to which it aspires — namely, a liberal interpretation of a Jewish ethnocratic regime.

After all, and ironically, in their struggle for liberal democracy — which is conducted without inviting, and even rejecting, the leaders of the Palestinian citizens of Israel — the “protest leaders” are only strengthening the state’s Jewish component, acting as a vessel for a certain community that is entitled to shape the face of the state according to its founding ethos. 

This contradiction is even more stark when accounting for the military dictatorship that Palestinians are subjected to in the occupied territories. Taken together, the Israeli opposition is composed of nothing but an ethno-liberal and ethno-democratic identity that lacks all consistency, especially compared to its rivals. 

Squaring the circle

Yet there is a way out. In order to achieve internal coherence based on liberal and democratic values, which will generate and preserve enough political energy to withstand the bursts of Jewish supremacy of the opposing camp, the protest movement must decide to move away from supporting an ethnocracy in the guise of a “Jewish and democratic” state, and toward a state for all its citizens. This decision necessitates the creation of a civic national identity.

The pro-government camp has already realized this, long before the opponents. For example, speaking about the judicial reform on the right-wing Channel 14, host Yaakov Berdugo said: “We are in another event, which is much bigger than legal reform … a struggle [between] a Jewish state and a state for all its citizens. The reform is only a trigger.” Surveying the political landscape, Berdugo presumed that an Israeli movement that adopts and emphasizes a liberal-democratic discourse will inevitably end up breaking through its ethnic-cognitive walls and adopt a truly egalitarian identity achieved only in a state of all its citizens.

This is not a new idea, and it is one that faces numerous roadblocks, even beyond the inability of the protest movement to forgo its ethnocratic understanding of the state. In 2013, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected a request by a group of Israelis to declare that they were members of the “Israeli nation” and to allow them to change the nationality on their identity cards from “Jewish” to “Israeli.” The judges ruled that “it has not been proven that, legally, there is an ‘Israeli nation’ and it is not appropriate to encourage the formation of new ‘shards’ of a nation.”

As expected, the Supreme Court ruled that recognition of Israeli nationality runs contrary to the state’s Jewish character, while also harming its ties to diaspora Jewry. However, the court’s more interesting reasoning, which received far less attention, is that recognition of Israeli nationality also runs contrary to the state’s democratic character, since recognizing such a civic national identity could also harm the country’s Arab citizens.

“Official, or even unofficial, adoption of the term ‘the Israeli people’ may, instead of including the Arab minority from a national point of view, exclude it from a civic point of view,” the ruling argued. “Many in the Arab public will avoid, or even expressly refuse, to define themselves as Israelis due to the national ‘lack of neutrality’ of this name, or simply for political reasons.”

If this is the position that the Supreme Court — Israel’s “bastion of liberalism” — takes on such a question, how can one expect the opposition to try and square the circle of a unified civic national identity? Palestinian citizens themselves also find it difficult to answer this question, and tend to create an unconvincing disconnect between the structure of an egalitarian state and the unified civic nationalism it will foster.

In order to overcome the project of Jewish supremacy, the model of the citizen state must be adopted. But for this to happen, the Israeli question first needs to be answered — namely, how to create an egalitarian civic nationalism that connects the structure of the citizen state with its appropriate national-civic content. It is not enough to simply bash, even if justifiably, anti-judicial overhaul protest leader Shikma Bressler and her friends for their political and moral incoherence and the blindness of their liberal-democratic identity. Instead, they must be shown the alternative to Jewish supremacy.

In order to create this alternative, we need to hold a bi-national conversation on the Israeli question, which will take into account the religious, ethnic, and national characteristics of the two groups, the colonial structure from which they were born and shaped — and above all, the need to end the suffering of Palestinians and the military dictatorship in the occupied territories.

A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.