Israel: a bill that raises democratic questions

News Mondays - Baptiste Michellod

On July 13, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sharply criticized the European ambassador to Israel, Emanuele Giaufret. At issue was Giaufret's intervention in the Knesset (the Israeli parliament), during which he expressed his concerns about the draft Basic Law «Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People» currently under discussion. According to the European ambassador, the legislation would seriously undermine democratic principles. What are the grounds for this concern?

First of all, it should be remembered that the Israeli state is not governed by a Constitution, but by a set of Fundamental Laws. The constitutional project never came to fruition because of the opposition between secular and religious leaders, the former wanting a liberal constitution based on the Western model, while the latter refused to allow a legal text to have any authority higher than that of the Torah. The operating framework of the Israeli state is therefore guaranteed by so-called fundamental laws, which enjoy a status superior to that of other laws.

Le projet de Loi Fondamentale «Israël en tant qu’Etat-Nation du peuple juif» entériné à la Knesset en mai 2017 est jusqu’à aujourd’hui sujet à de très vives controverses entre ces mêmes religieux et laïcs. En effet, cette législation cherche explicitement à privilégier le caractère juif d’Israël au détriment de son caractère démocratique. La loi demande notamment que «le droit à l’autodétermination nationale au sein de l’Etat d’Israël concerne exclusivement le peuple juif» (Article 1 alinéa 2), de reléguer la langue arabe à un «statut spécial» afin de faire de l’hébreu l’unique langue nationale et finalement de permettre la création de communautés autonomes basée sur une religion ou une ethnie commune – en d’autres mots, des ghettos religieux ou ethniques.

These three points should be enough to alarm any democratic observer, as they are prejudicial to a significant part of the Israeli population. If this law were to pass, one in four citizens - Muslims, Christians, Druze and others - would lose their right to self-determination and see their language, culture and history relegated to the background. This would be a terrible step backwards for democracy in Israel. Inspired by Hegel, philosopher Francis Fukuyama asserted that the desire for recognition is the driving force of human history. In his view, a society will remain imperfect and unstable until its fundamental contradictions are resolved.

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The enactment of the law «Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People» would seem to be both a step backwards for democracy and a refusal to recognize all the non-Jewish peoples who have inhabited this country for generations. What's more, this law could only aggravate the already disastrous relations between the Israeli state and the Arabs living in Israel and Palestine. Finally, by favoring its religious majority to the detriment of minorities, Israel would be sending a very paradoxical message to states in which its co-religionists live within minorities.

Finally, let's appeal to history one last time. Israel's 1948 Declaration of Independence stated: «[The State of Israel] shall ensure the fullest social and political equality to all its inhabitants without distinction of religion, race or sex.» In light of this text, the current draft law is an explicit disavowal of Israel's founding principles and liberal democratic tradition. The process of creating a Basic Law is, however, a long and complex one. Ambassador Giaufret's intervention in the Knesset is no less relevant and justified, given the radicalization of Israeli politics. We can only hope that Israeli civil society and moderate parties will succeed in putting an end to this project, which is in every way liberticidal.