The Fight Against the Nation-State Bill
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The passage of the nation-state law has cast a dark shadow over Israel. In one fell swoop, the bill officially replaced our country's liberal democracy with an ethnic one, codifying the primacy and exclusive nation self-determination of Jews over the 20% Palestinian-Arab minority. Our country's founders adamantly defended the notion that all people in the state must be treated equal, and enshrined the concepts of democracy and equality in the Declaration of Independence.
Peace Now fought a long campaign against this bill, including multiple actions this week, before the government rammed it through the Knesset despite the domestic and international outcry.
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Some 7,000 Israelis came out on Saturday night in Tel Aviv to a protest march, organized primarily by Peace Now and a couple others, against the government's nation-state bill. The march proceeded from Rabin Square to Dizengoff Center, where political and community leaders (Ashkenazi and Mizrahi, Arab, Ethiopian, Reform) took their turn to denounce the bill.
While the government tried to present a clean face to the bill by removing some of its most odious clauses, the fundamental problem with the bill remains: enshrining the state's Jewish character without also designating the state as a homeland for all of its citizens. Ominously, the bill's authors even omitted the words democracy and equality.
Now that the bill has been passed into law, it has officially indicated that Arabs and other non-Jewish citizens do not belong, and now threatens to open pandora's box to a national-religious agenda bent on asserting the primacy of Jews over non-Jews and shrinking individual freedoms.
Peace Now's new executive director, Shaqued Morag, served as master-of-ceremonies and delivered her own remarks:
"The bill seeks to change the rules of the game and to create here a democracy for Jews only, and for only the kind of Jews that the right-wing government deems most fit - opponents of peace, Arab haters, gender segregationists, supporters of expelling asylum seekers, and those who target the LGBT community."
Click on the image below to watch more of the march and Shaqued's speech [Hebrew]: |
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Peace Now activists also unfurled a black flag in the Knesset during a hearing the day before the final vote on the bill. The protest action, which was covered by Israeli media, sent an ominous message to the public and Knesset Members on how this bill threatens the very foundations of Israel's democracy.
Israel has long been the center for Jewish national expression by virtue of its large Jewish population. This nation-state law is not about protecting Jewish rights; it is about dominance over a marginalized, unwanted minority. In the process, Israel's already-fragile democratic character has been mutilated.
Peace Now will continue to fight against this government's authoritarian, ethnocratic agenda – in the media, in the courts, in the schools, and in the streets. We will do so for the sake of our democracy, for the minorities under assault, for our forefathers' legacy of an equal and cohesive society, and for Israel's soul. |
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The next slew of anti-democratic bills are only around the corner. Help us plan more campaigns like this one, to mount more pressure on the government and to show Israelis concerned with the direction their country is going that they are not alone. |
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Statement on Birthrighters who Attended Peace Now Tour
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Earlier this week, eight Taglit-Birthright participants left their group and held an alternative tour with Peace Now's Settlement Watch Director Hagit Ofran in East Jerusalem.
Watch the video of the Birthrighters' experience and their tour with Ofran.
During the tour, Ofran and other civil society actors took the participants to the Silwan neighborhood where they visited the Sumarin family, which the settler organization Elad is investing great efforts into evicting from their home.
According to the young women on the Birthright trip, they left the trip because the speakers did not talk to them about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the reality in Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, yet were going to take them on a politically charged tour of the City of David site, owned no less than by Elad.
Peace Now issued the following statement:
"We were pleased to meet the Birthrighters today, who insisted on becoming acquainted with reality despite all attempts by the right-wing government to conceal the occupation. The occupation cannot be hidden, and in order to reach a solution to the conflict it is essential to deal with the complex reality on all levels. We are in favor of public relations tours to Israel, but are adamantly against overt attempts to conceal the occupation and we will continue to present in every way and at every opportunity the price of occupation paid by the Palestinian population and by Israeli society."
As our statement implies, Peace Now has no fight with Birthright. What we oppose are government (or any other) efforts to insert political programming into trips like Birthright's that intentionally conceal the occupation, such as Elad tours. Elad's far-right, one-state agenda is well-known, and it is involved in the legal acrobatics underway to evict Palestinian families from their homes.
For more on the Sumarin family's struggle against eviction by the Jewish National Fund-KKL on behalf of Elad, click here.
This is the second time in two weeks that a group of Birthrighters walked off their trip because of political content. To hear about the experience from one of the first people to do so, listen to an interview here on Americans for Peace Now's podcast, Peacecast.
In light of this trend, Peace Now is currently exploring options to engage American Jews wishing to extend their trips in Israel with opportunities to hear perspectives from the Israeli peace camp, as well as from our Palestinian partners. |
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Help us provide more tours for American Jews and others looking for a fuller picture on the political situation in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. |
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Peace Now investigation on West Bank land discrimination featured in the New York Times
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Following two years of work by Peace Now and the Movement for Freedom of Information, Peace Now exposed to the Israeli public some of the most definitive proof that its control over the West Bank has long been a story of exploitation for ideological gain. Case and point: state lands Israel has allocated to settlers versus Palestinians.
The english version of the findings was first exposed to the New York Times.
Main Findings:
99.76% of state land allocated for any use in the Occupied West Bank was allocated for the needs of Israeli settlements. The Palestinians were allocated, at most, only 0.24%.
Some 80% of the allocations to Palestinians were for the purpose of establishing settlements and for the forced transfer of Bedouin communities. Only 326 dunams at most were allocated without strings for the benefit of Palestinians, and at least 121 of those dunams are currently in Area B under Palestinian control.
Most of the allocations to the Palestinians (about 53%) were made prior to the 1995 Interim Agreement (the Oslo II Agreement, in which the West Bank was divided into Areas A, B and C, and transferred control over 40% of the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority).
Such disparities, to say nothing of international prohibitions pertaining to occupation, reek of discrimination of the worst kind. The settlement enterprise is truly one of the most despicable chapters in Israel's history, and must be halted before it erodes its soul altogether.
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