I have been arguing for a month that the problem in Israel is racism rather than Netanyahu. The fair objection is that I am reading motives into people I cannot see inside. So here is the version that requires no mind-reading.
The clause
On 19 July 2018 the Knesset passed Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, by 62 votes to 55 with two abstentions. A Basic Law in Israel does the work a constitution does elsewhere.
Clause 1(c): the right to exercise national self-determination in Israel “is unique to the Jewish people.”
Clause 4: Arabic was removed as an official language and given “special status” instead. Arabic is the first language of about a fifth of Israel’s citizens.
Clause 7: the development of Jewish settlement is a national value, and the state will act to encourage and promote it.
The court
On 8 July 2021 the Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice with an extended bench of eleven justices, rejected fifteen joint petitions against the law. The vote was 10 to 1. Court President Esther Hayut wrote the main decision. Justice George Karra — the Arab justice on the bench — was the sole dissenter.
Hayut held that Clause 1(c) concerns national self-determination and does not deny minorities cultural self-determination below the level of the state; that the law confers no operative personal rights based on national affiliation; that equal political and social rights for all citizens remain a fundamental principle; and that where Jewish and democratic values conflict they should be reconciled through “synthesis and harmony.”
Note what she does not say. She does not say the clause fails to reserve national self-determination to the Jewish people. She says it does, and that a democracy can carry it. Nobody on that bench argued I was misreading the sentence. Ten of them argued it was permissible.
Eight years
Four elections. Two changes of government. In 2021 Mansour Abbas took Ra’am into the Bennett–Lapid coalition, the first Arab party ever to sit in an Israeli government. That government did not repeal it. No party has proposed repeal. It was not an issue in the election on 27 October.
Why one sentence decides everything
Roughly seven million Jews and seven million Palestinians live between the Jordan and the Mediterranean under one state’s effective control. There are four possible arrangements. I have looked for a fifth and cannot find one.
Two states. Supported in the new Knesset by Yair Golan’s Democrats, with eight seats, and by the Arab parties, with nineteen. Twenty-seven of a hundred and twenty — and the nineteen are the ones every Jewish bloc refuses to govern with. Gadi Eisenkot pledged during the campaign not to partner with Palestinian Israeli parties. The arithmetic exists. The politics forbids using it.
One state in which everyone has equal rights. No Israeli party advocates this, and Clause 1(c) is the law that forbids it. A state whose constitutional law reserves national self-determination to one people cannot extend equal national standing to the other without repealing that sentence. Nobody proposes to.
One state in which they do not. Millions of people governed indefinitely, by force, with no vote in the state that governs them. This is not a forecast of permanent conflict. It is a description of what the arrangement consists of. People under permanent military rule resist, and the state suppressing them must keep suppressing them. The war is not a risk of the policy. It is the policy, running.
Removing the population. I list this not as a prediction but because men holding ministerial office have proposed it, by name, on the record. In an interview with Time conducted on 19 October and published five days before the election, Itamar Ben-Gvir said Israel must “capture all of Gaza” and that “we have to promote voluntary emigration.” He said the same of the West Bank: “We want sovereignty in Judea and Samaria, where we also want voluntary emigration,” adding, “not kicking anyone out.” Time’s reporter noted that he gave no account of which countries would receive the departing population, or of how departures from a territory under military occupation would be voluntary. In the same interview Ben-Gvir distanced himself from Meir Kahane, his own mentor, on expelling Arab citizens — “I accept that there are some Arabs who live here” — on condition that they “recognize the State of Israel as the Jewish state.” That is Clause 1(c) turned into a loyalty oath. Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit won seven seats on 27 October. He has said he wants to be defense minister.
That is the list. Two of those four doors are shut by Israeli politics, and one of them was shut by a sentence most Israelis have never read.
What cuts against me
Arab citizens vote and hold office. Nineteen seats in this Knesset. The justice who wrote the dissent was himself an Arab citizen on Israel’s highest court. This is not disenfranchisement, and I have written as though it were.
But the objection proves less than it appears to. Many states define themselves in national terms and treat their minorities decently. What none of them do is define themselves against an indigenous population that the same state governs without a vote. Israel does both at once: a fifth of its citizens hold a passport and are told in constitutional law that the country’s national purpose is not theirs, and several million more people under the same army hold nothing at all.
Golan exists. Eight seats is not zero, and “they are all the same” is false. I have said it and I was wrong. But eight seats plus the nineteen nobody will sit with is twenty-seven out of a hundred and twenty. The route out is on the ballot. It cannot reach a majority, and why it cannot is the subject of this piece.
Abbas made a defensible choice. He entered a government rather than demand repeal, because budgets and roads for Arab towns were on the table and a symbolic fight was not. I think he was probably right. It is also the strongest evidence I have: the only Arab leader ever to hold a seat at that table judged repeal unobtainable and spent his leverage elsewhere.
A distinction I have been sloppy about
Arab citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are in two different situations, and running them together is lazy. Citizens have the vote and formal legal equality, and are denied a national standing the law withholds by name. Palestinians under occupation have no vote in the state that controls them and no citizenship anywhere. Those are different injuries and the second is worse.
They matter differently here, too. The first is why the second door is locked. The second is why it has to be opened.
Saying it plainly
What I am calling the way out is one state between the river and the sea in which every person living under that state’s control has the same rights, including the vote. That is not the two-state framework most readers were raised on, and saying it puts me outside what can be said aloud in most synagogues. I would rather say it than imply it.
What would change my mind
If a major Israeli party, either bloc, puts repeal or amendment of Clause 1(c) in its platform, or a government moves on it, then the door I am calling locked is not locked, and I will say so here.
If anyone can show me a fifth arrangement, I will print it.
Why I am the evidence
I was born in Haifa. I was conscripted in 1969 and I served three years. If you had shown me Clause 1(c) when I was thirty, I would have read it and thought: yes, and?
That is not a confession. It is the evidence.
A sentence saying one people has national rights that another does not sat in plain view for most of my life, and it never once looked to me like a sentence worth arguing about. I was paying attention. I read Hebrew. I had served. It registered as nothing.
That is what uncontested means. Not that people defend it. That nobody sees it.
I am not saying Israel is doomed. I am saying Israel cannot get the thing it says it wants — a country where Jews are finally safe — while that sentence is on the books and nobody is arguing about it.
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