Why Israel Needs the Nation-State Law
Why did Israel need to pass the nation-state law? It’s a question worth pondering now that the shrieking accusations of its loudest bad-faith critics have been dispelled. The new law doesn’t state anything that the country’s Declaration of Independence had not already made clear, and it does not deprive a single individual of a single right. But why, precisely, was it necessary?
It’s a complicated question that both the law’s supporters and its detractors haven’t gotten quite right. To claim, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s critics on the left do, that the law was all sound and fury, a piece of political theater designed to drum up fear and win votes, is to give the Israeli electorate, as world-weary a bunch as any, too little credit. To state, as some of the law’s supporters have, that without it Israel would be in some kind of existential danger of losing its Jewish particularity is to trade in the same histrionics as those who breathlessly argued that the law somehow heralded the end of Israel’s commitment to democracy. If you’d like a more nuanced view, all you have to do is look at this past weekend’s demonstration in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square.
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