Israel, the Nation State of the Jewish People

Israelis wave Israeli flags as they parade around Jerusalem's Old City on May 24, 2017 to commemorate Jerusalem Day, marking the reunification of the city following the Six-Day War of 1967. (AFP PHOTO / Menahem KAHANA)

"The main problem with the bill is not what is in it but what is missing from it – which is that Israel is democratic and committed to the full equality for all its citizens."
"When the democratic component is missing, rather than strengthen Israel as a Jewish state, it provides ammunition to the enemies of Zionism who want to harm Israel’s right to self-determination."
"There is a real struggle over the soul of Israeli democracy. There has been major success in diluting problematic legislation."
"[The practical impact of the bill was currently merely] symbolic and educational. [It] won’t have immediate concrete implications."
IDI (Israel Democracy Institute) President Yohanan Plesner

"Building a Jewish homeland — through sovereignty, through culture, and through settlement — has always been the core purpose of the country."
"The bottom line is that Israel is the Jewish State, and this law tells us what that means, just as other Basic Laws tell us what goes into its democratic foundations."
David Hazony, founding editor, The Tower magazine

"We are enshrining this important bill into a law today to prevent even the slightest thought, let alone attempt, to transform Israel to a country of all its citizens."
"When I listened attentively to the Joint List MKs, it was impossible to miss their clear words: 'We, the Arabs, will win, we are in our homeland, we were here before you and we’ll be here after you'." "This Basic Law is the clear-cut answer to those who think that and it is clear: You were not here before us and you will not be here after us."
Avi Dichter, Likud party Knesset member, bill sponsor

"A hundred and twenty-two years after [the founder of modern Zionism Theodore] Herzl made his vision known, with this law we determined the founding principle of our existence."
"Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people, and respects the rights of all of its citizens."
Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu

Benjamin Netanyahu says the Palestinians must recognize Israel as a Jewish state   AFP

The land of Israel, the country was established with a sound view to recognizing a return of the Jewish people from exodus imposed upon them by the inexorable forces of territorial domination in its ancient history. Banished from the land that give Judaism its presence and purpose, the following millennia were not kind to the existence of Jews who struggled over the ages in various points of the geographic compass to endure the isolation, assaults, hostility and deadly attacks hurled against them by a world unwilling to accommodate their existence.

Jews had never, over the thousands of years that distanced them from their heritage and memory of their homeland, forgotten where they came from. Return was forever in mind, its yearning a healing mindset for those who suffered humiliation, rejection and violence, the hope always there that return was possible and when achieved it would represent salvation from slander, recrimination, threats and mass murder. The price paid before return was deemed possible by the world at large was horribly steep; six million lives for the assent to return to Zion.

Even then, the supreme world body that gave its assent,  divided the land once totally dedicated to the presence of Israelites, offering a slice to be returned, after a majority portion was allotted to Hashemites whom the British Mandate mollified with TransJordan after their ouster from Arabia when it was handed over to the Saudis. The Palestinian settlers on the land, offered an even portion to Israel's refused, fused to the fixation that the entire area was theirs alone. That fixation has never deviated; their continued refusal to recognize a Jewish state in the midst of Arab and Muslim tribal majorities still speaks to their goal.

The State of Israel has a majority Jewish population, diluted with the presence of Arabs, Christians, Druze, Kurds and others all of whom share citizenship and equal rights. The Palestinian Authority has made it quite clear that not only would they never recognize Israel as a Jewish state, nor would they ever permit the presence of a single Jew living among them within a proposed sovereign Palestinian state. Yet there are elected Arab members of the Israeli Knesset who in concert act in opposition to Jewish interests in a Jewish land that offers equality rights to all.

Israel remains a nation spurned by those whose values, culture and politics it shares in Europe who, despite Palestinian terrorism inflicted on Jews throughout the past 70 years view Israel as an 'occupier' for its forced position of military defence against a neighbouring population invested in its destruction. The move by the government of Israel to finally install formally into state law the prevailing reality that Israel is a Jewish state -- was meant to be one and has always been one that accepted within its borders a pluralist presence -- alters nothing.

The reality is that Jewishness reflects the purpose of the state. Its language is Hebrew, though it gives special considerate status to Arabic spoken by close to 20% of its population. Terrorist attacks by Palestinians against Israeli Jews accompanied the original declaration of Israel's re-founding in 1948, and the focus on 'resistance' of the 'occupation' has never deviated; threats and attacks continue, from rockets fired across from Gaza, to infiltration by Arabs into Jewish settlements to murder Jews -- to the PA authorities inciting the populace to violence and rewarding them for their efforts.

Jews have been existentially challenged for thousands of years, and those challenges continue without abatement. What better way to respond than to declare themselves in final possession of their ancestral geography from which they will never more be evacuated under violent force? Despised simply because of their ethnic origins and religious devotion, customs and traditions, the world has always been an unfriendly place for Jews. Now, back in their homeland, the world, both close by and at a distance, continues to view Jews and Israel with cynical skepticism.

At home, within themselves, psychologically secure, Israelis long accustomed to their role as strangers in the outside world, are not strangers in their inner world. Israel's ethnonationalistic existence is sound and reflective of its existential need. A quote from the nation's foundational text reflecting the United Nations' General Assembly recognition of Israel "is irrevocable. This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State".

So it is. So be it.

The opening lines of the Declaration of Independence. (photo credit: Ilan Ben Zion/Times of Israel staff)