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Detail - Conflicting Goals of the State of Israel
Goto Source for this Table - essay on Israeli internal discrimination.
The conflict between democracy and the need for discriminatory practices is best illustrated by:
- on the one hand - Israel’s Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel (1948) declares that:
| "...THE STATE OF ISRAEL … will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations." (Laws of the State of Israel, 1948; State of Israel Official Website, 1998) |
- but then - the Israeli Supreme Court rules right away in 1948, in Zeev v. Gubernik, that this document cannot be used by the courts to pass judgment on the law-making activities of the Israeli legislature, the Knesset. This is one of many ways the Supreme Court weakens itself so that the Knesset is able to pass laws that legalize discrimination and other civil rights that usually a Supreme Court would not allow to stand, such as ...
- and then - in 1985, the Knesset passed a law amendment inhibiting the free speech of candidates for membership in the Knesset:
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Prevention of
participation of
candidate's list. |
"7A. A candidates' list shall not participate in elections to the Knesset if its objects or actions, expressly or by implication, include one of the following:
- (1) negation of the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people;
- (2) negation of the democratic character of the State;
- (3) incitement to racism.".
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- The irony of this law then encapsulates the conflict – because, unavoidably, advocating equal rights for all Israelis is considered to be one form of “negation of the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people”, but this by definition is itself a form of racism because it involves giving privilege to one group over all others based on what religion they are, which is then outlawed in point #3, because by definition, racism negates “… the democratic character of the State”, which is outlawed in point #2, because a true democracy could not tolerate such things as legalized discrimination or laws that contradict themselves (Kretzmer, 1990)!
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(c) Israel Law Resource Center, February, 2007.