1
Do yourselves a favor and read the wording of the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. Then read it again – it's short. Now take a magnifying glass and look for any connection between what you just read and the mountains of invective and verbal garbage heaped on the bill by those who oppose it. It's disgraceful. Deceptive. Most of the people who talk about the law never read it – just mendacious articles criticizing it. They believe that it's a terrible law, until they read it.
It's one thing when it's the Arab factions that do not recognize Israel as the national home of the Jewish people and deny our ties to this land (some Arab MKs don't even recognize the Jews as a people); when it's the post-Zionist and anti-Zionist Left that is even talking about revoking the Law of Return; but does the Zionist Left actually oppose a law stating that "the Land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people"?
Does Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid oppose the clause which states that "The State of Israel is the national home of the Jewish people, in which it fulfills its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination"? Does Zionist Union co-leader Tzipi Livni oppose the clause which states that "the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people"? Oh, the shame of it.
It's one thing for Jewish readers of Haaretz who are ashamed of their Judaism – like German Jews were ashamed of the Jews of eastern Europe (Ausjuden) who seemed "too Jewish" – to think that any mention of the term "Jewish" in a basic law is "racism" or "fascism" or even more terrible names, but the sane, Zionist Left – if any remain?
2
Those who oppose the nation-state law play a huge part in creating the problem the law was designed to solve; it's no coincidence they went off the deep end objecting to it. It's convenient for them to obfuscate the simple fact that the nation-state law is the latest of Israel's Basic Laws and complements them – it doesn't cancel them out, as the lying propaganda claims. As part of the constitutional revolution of former Chief Justice Aharon Barak, the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty (1992) became a tool he wielded to protect human rights and Israel's democratic character. What existed before that? Did chief justices Shimon Agranat and Moshe Landau, for example, not protect human dignity and liberty? Did the Knesset members who voted on the basic laws know that Aharon Barak intended to turn them into supreme laws?
As the years passed, the first part of the "Jewish-democratic" formula came under attack. Supreme Court rulings rejected it, to the point where it became meaningless. The Israeli Left, which lost election after election, moved the battle to the courts, and made the problem worse. Opposing the nation-state law is a litmus test that proves how our democratic basic laws have been exploited – not always on behalf of human rights, but to indirectly control the people's ability (demos) to control (kratia) and decide on its own path.
3
The nation-state law is intended to balance the new equation. Rights aren't only for people; the Jewish people as a whole also has a right to its own state in the Land of Israel. It's only state. Individual rights, human rights, civil rights – everyone has them. There is no difference between the status of citizens of Israel. But only one people has national rights in the state of Israel – the Jewish people.
Israel cannot be a state of all its citizens – a Jewish, Muslim, and Christian country. We returned to Zion to re-establish our only country. In the past 3,000 years, the Jews had no national entity other than this land, which was not Israeli or Jewish. In Israel, everyone has equal rights – as individuals, not as a nation. This is the only way we will ensure our future. It's not only fair, it's moral. Incidentally, given how minorities are treated in other Arab countries, we can say with certainty that the Jewish state will guarantee equal civil rights to the minorities living in it.
4
In an article in Haaretz, I found a typical reason for opposition to the law: "the 'harm' the bill's authors caused to the Arabic language is harm in the sense of offense, not actual damage." Do you understand? We aren't even talking about identity politics anymore; welcome to the politics of feelings.
Yair Lapid said in the Knesset that Zionist visionary Ze'ev Jabotinsky would doubtlessly never have signed the nation-state bill. He has no doubt about it! Like Tzipi Livni, Lapid bandies around the name of the father of Revisionist Zionism. He should do his homework and read about the proposed constitution the Herut party submitted some decades ago. The current nation-state law pales in comparison. History will judge the opponents of the law as those who at a key point in the history of their people collaborated with the sworn opponents of Israel's Jewish identity.
