Israel’s ‘Nationality Law’: Reconsidering Settlement, Citizenship and Ethics in the Context of Occupation

Abstract

In 2018, the State of Israel enacted a new constitutional law: ‘BASIC LAW: ISRAEL-THE NATION STATE OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE’. The Law reflects diverse Zionist ideologies which were nevertheless all ‘land-centered’ rather than state-centered from an early stage; it reformulates that intellectual tradition, however, promoting Jewish settlements in conditions of occupation and celebrates, for the first time, settlement as the prime and exclusive goal of the state. Partly to facilitate this goal, and to further blur borders, the law also contracts the meaning and status of Palestinians’ citizenship in Israel, thus at least symbolically narrowing the (still significant) political-legal gap between these citizens and the Palestinians living in the West Bank. Finally, the Law seems to vacate the state from its ethical dimension and commitments as defined by its Declaration of independence (1948) — including its commitments to the democratic principles of political liberty for all and equality — thus manifesting the influence ruling and subjugating others through military government is having on Israel’s constitutional framework.