Newsletter
Newsletter Support JNS

Evelyn Gordon

The deal involved changes to Basic Laws that may have been necessary in these political circumstances. But any country tinkers with longstanding constitutional arrangements at its own peril.
Despite Arab gestures toward Israel that were previously considered inconceivable, the experts still insist that further progress requires Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. What makes them so sure?
Because Israelis don’t need the non-Orthodox movements to maintain a Jewish identity, they often fail to understand why these movements are genuinely important for American Jews. And because American Jews do need those movements, they often fail to understand why many Israelis dismiss them as unimportant.
A few unelected individuals have been given the power—or even worse, in the case of countries that didn’t join the court, have seized it—to criminalize decisions made by democratically elected national governments.
A court that’s biased against one country can’t be trusted to eschew bias against others.
The message of adding “equality” to the law would be that Israel’s Jewish and democratic identities aren’t equal; rather, its democratic identity has primacy over its Jewish one. That’s the very situation the nation-state law was meant to correct.
Military men are good at solving militarily problems, but they’re no better than anyone else, and often worse, at understanding political problems. Yet their facade of expertise often cows politicians into deferring to them.
Arabs didn’t come to the protest in Tel Aviv as proud Israelis who felt that Israel was betraying its best values; they came because they oppose the very existence of a Jewish state, up to and including its most innocuous symbol.
The new law isn’t meant to be read in isolation, but in concert with other Basic Laws enshrining Israel’s democratic system and fundamental human rights.