Basic Law: Israel – The Nation-State of the Jewish People

Theme:1967 Occupied TerritoriesCivil and Political RightsLand and Planning RightsCulture and LanguageNational Identity Symbols

Status:Active

Year:2018

Description:

The Basic Law: Israel – The Nation-State of the Jewish People, also known as the Jewish Nation-State Law (JNSL), constitutionally enshrines Jewish supremacy and the identity of the State of Israel as the exclusive nation-state of the Jewish people. As a Basic Law, it carries constitutional weight and is therefore capable of overriding ordinary legislation.

The law defines the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael)—encompassing the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza—as the historic national home of the Jewish people, and restricts the right to national self-determination within the state exclusively to the Jewish people. It establishes Jewish settlement as “a national value” that the state is mandated to encourage, promote, and consolidate. Thus, it does not merely permit discrimination but also imposes affirmative obligations on state authorities to enact it. It designates Hebrew as the sole official language of the state, downgrading Arabic from its former status as an official language to a language with “special status”. It further declares Jerusalem the “greater, united” capital of Israel, designates the Hebrew calendar as the state's official calendar, and recognizes only Jewish holidays as official state holidays.

The law provides constitutional cover for the expansion of illegal settlements in occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Syrian Golan Heights, territories annexed by Israel in violation of international law, by framing their Judaization as a national and constitutional imperative.

The JNSL has distinct characteristics of apartheid: it guarantees Israel’s ethnic-religious character as exclusively Jewish, entrenches the privileges of Jewish citizens, and constitutionally codifies exclusion, racism, and systemic inequality against Palestinian citizens, who comprise 21% of Israel’s population. In doing so, it gives constitutional force to policies of dispossession and inequality that have defined Israeli state practice towards Palestinians since 1948.

Main provisions

Article 1 — Basic principles 

1. The Land of Israel is the historic national home of the Jewish people, in which the State of Israel was established.

2. The State of Israel is the national state of the Jewish people, in which it exercises its natural, cultural, and historic right to self-determination.

3. Exercising the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.

…

Article 3 — The capital of the state

A greater, united Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

Article 4 — Language

1. The state’s language is Hebrew.

2. The Arabic language has a special status; regulation of the use of the Arabic language in or with government institutions will be according to the law.

3. Nothing in this provision is intended to harm the practical status of the Arabic language prior to the enactment of this Basic Law.

Article 5 — Ingathering of the exiles

The state will be open to Jewish immigration and the ingathering of the exiles

Article 6 — Connection with the Jewish people

1. The state shall foster the well-being of the Jewish people in trouble or in captivity due to the fact of their Jewishness or their citizenship. 

2. The state shall act in the Diaspora to preserve the affinity between the state and the Jewish people.

3. The state shall act to preserve the cultural, historic, and religious heritage of the Jewish people in the Jewish Diaspora.

Article 7 — Jewish settlement

The state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and will act to encourage it and to promote and to consolidate its establishment.

Context

An earlier version of this law was first introduced in 2011, by far-right Likud member of Knesset Avi Ditchter. When the 2018 version of the bill was passed, Ditchter made clear that it had been designed to uphold the anti-democratic values of Jewish supremacy, stating, “[W]e are enshrining this important bill into law today to prevent even the slightest thought, let alone attempt, to transform Israel to a country of all its citizens.” 

The Knesset deliberations and the general debate leading up to the enactment of the law were marked by racist rhetoric and hateful expressions. For instance, on 30 April 2018, MK Dichter asked the rhetorical question, "Who is afraid of the Nation-State Law?" Palestinian MK Yousef Jabareen responded, "I am afraid; it frightens me." Dichter retorted, "Yes, yes. I say – I will help you be afraid," and further implied that those who should fear are "the Palestinians, those around us…".

Then-Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked's statement left no doubt that in promoting the bill the legislature intended to entrench racial segregation and discriminate against Palestinian citizens. She explicitly stated that the Jewish Nation State bill’s objective is to circumvent [Israeli Supreme Court] rulings like the Qa’adan judgment, and, in contrast to that decision, she advocates for the establishment of communities exclusively for Jews. The Qa’adan judgment is one of the few Supreme Court decisions to explicitly affirm the principle of equality, holding that the state may not discriminate in the allocation of state land.

Discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel has been a consistent element of Israeli state policy since 1948. The Jewish Nation-State Law has  given discriminatory policies and practices constitutional force.

Why is it discriminatory?

By defining the State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and restricting the right to national self-determination exclusively to Jews, the JNSL grants the Jewish population alone the collective right to govern, control territory, and determine the allocation of rights and resources, rights from which Palestinian and other non-Jewish citizens are constitutionally excluded. The law contains no reference to the Palestinian population as a political community or national minority, and makes no mention of equality as a governing principle.

The law blatantly violates international law by denying the collective right to self-determination of the Palestinian people, and by stripping Palestinian citizens within the state of the collective rights they hold as a recognized national, homeland minority under international human rights law.

By anchoring the state’s democratic identity in religious-ethnic affiliation, the JNSL fundamentally undermines the principle of equal citizenship. It violates the collective linguistic, cultural, and religious rights of Palestinian citizens, approximately 1.65 million people, comprising 21% of Israel's population, most directly through its demotion of Arabic from an official language to a language with undefined “special status”, and through its designation of constitutional status exclusively to Jewish symbols, calendars, and holidays.

Article 7, which mandates the encouragement and promotion of Jewish settlement, constitutionally entrenches a state objective that structures land policy in a way that privileges one ethno-national group over others. This provision is particularly consequential when read in conjunction with Article 1, which defines the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael, encompassing all of Mandatory Palestine) as the historic national home of the Jewish people. Together, these provisions establish a constitutional framework contributing to the acceleration of illegal settlement in the 1967 Occupied Territories, in contravention of international law, and to the detriment of Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and Syrians in the Golan Heights.

Because the law has the status of a Basic Law and, thus, forms part of Israeli constitutional law, it can be, and already has been, used to justify discrimination against Palestinian citizens as non-Jews. The law lends discriminatory policies greater legal legitimacy, narrowing the scope for legal challenge, and compelling the executive, judiciary, and other state authorities to implement them.

Legal challenges to law

• On 7 August 2018, Adalah filed a petition against the JNSL to the Israeli Supreme Court on behalf of the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel, the National Committee of Arab Mayors, the Joint List parliamentary faction, and in the name of Adalah against the Knesset. On 22 December 2020, the Supreme Court held a hearing on 15 petitions against the law, and on 8 July 2021, rejected the petitions in a 10-1 decision. The one dissenting opinion was written by the only Arab justice on the court, Justice Kara. A full video of the court hearing (in Hebrew) can be found here.

International criticism

• Several UN human rights committees have criticized the JNSL. In 2020, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination expressed its concern about the discriminatory effect of the law and urged Israel to bring it into line with the ICERD. In 2019, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights stated that it was “deeply concerned” about the discriminatory effects of the law, and urged Israel to “review the Basic Law with a view to bringing it into line with the Covenant or to repealing it and to step up its efforts to eliminate discrimination faced by non-Jews…”. The Human Rights Committee, in its 2022 Concluding Observations, noted that the law may “exacerbate pre-existing systematic and structural discrimination against non-Jews in the State party.”

• In 2018, a group of four UN Special Rapporteurs expressed their “deep concern” about the JNSL, writing, “We wish to express our deep concern over the recent adoption by the Israeli Knesset of the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, which appears to be discriminatory in nature and in practice against non-Jewish citizens and other minorities and does not apply the principle of equality between citizens, which is one of the key principles for democratic political systems.“

• In the UN’s 2023 Universal Periodic Review of Israel, South Africa recommended that Israel “Repeal all legislation enshrining racial discrimination, domination, and oppression, including in the domains of citizenship and land, including Israel’s Basic Law: Israel – the Nation-State of the Jewish People, of 2018, which is used to justify the oppression and discrimination of Palestinians by Israel (South Africa).”

• Numerous Jewish-American groups have spoke out against the discriminatory nature of the law, including J Street, the Union for Reform Judaism, and the New Israel Fund, as well as the American Jewish Committee and another coalition of 14 Jewish American groups, which demanded that the bill not be passed into law.