Media Analysis

Israeli ‘nation-state’ law follows in footsteps of Jim Crow, Indian Removal Act, and Nuremberg Laws

Roughly eighty years after Nazi Germany enacted what became known as the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935, Israeli lawmakers in July 2018 have codified a new Jewish supremacy law, which effectively mirror the Nazi-era legislation of ethnoreligious stratification of German citizenry.

Rights exclusive to Jewish citizens

Dubbed the “nation state” law, its first clause stipulates that “actualization of the right of national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” In other words, the 1.7 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, the native inhabitants who managed to remain in their homes when European Jews conquered Palestine in 1948, shall be without sovereignty or agency, forever living at the mercy of Israeli Jews.

One of the early anti-Semitic laws in Germany, the first of the Nuremberg Laws, was the Reich Citizenship Law, which likewise deemed citizenship privilege exclusive to people of “German or kindred blood.” Since there was no scientifically sound way to distinguish Jewish Germans from the rest of German society, as they were racially white Europeans and ethnically German, lawmakers looked to genealogy for Jewish grandparents. That will not be necessary for indigenous Palestinian citizens of Israel because, since its creation in 1948, Israel put protocols in place to ensure that non-Jews do not assimilate into mainstream Jewish society.

Ethnoreligious purity

This brings us to the second Nuremberg Law: Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, which sought to prevent mixing of Aryan blood, dubbed “race defilement.”

In Israel, anti-miscegenation laws are already in place, masquerading as traditional values where marriage can only be performed by religious officials. The Orthodox rabbinate has exclusive purview over Jewish marriages, where Jewishness is a narrowly defined bloodline and interreligious marriage is strictly forbidden.

Exclusivity of Jewish symbols

The Reich Flag Law, part of the Nuremberg Laws, established that black, red, and white were the national colors, and the swastika flag was the new national flag. The second clause of Israel’s nation-state law regarding national symbols indicates that “the flag of the state is white, two blue stripes near the edges, and a blue Star of David in the center.” Two days after it was passed, Israeli police and military soldiers arrested a Palestinian boy for holding a Palestinian flag outside al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

Judaizing Jerusalem

The third clause of the nation-state law reiterates Israel’s illegitimate claim to the whole of Jerusalem as its capital, an illegal and internationally unrecognized claim that has been emboldened by Donald Trump’s move of the US embassy to Jerusalem. Interestingly, however, this new law does not define state borders and Israel remains the only country in the world without declared borders. This is not surprising, as Israel is a still expanding settler-colonial state, even though its admission to the United Nations in 1948 was based on its claim to only the 1948 armistice line, which does not include Jerusalem or any other part of the West Bank.

Erasing Arabic

This new law also marks the beginning of the erasure of Arabic from the land, as it decrees Hebrew to be the only official language of the state, while Arabic has “special status.” The fourth clause further explains that use of “the Arab language [sic]” institutionally “will be regulated by law.”

Colonizing the whole of Palestine, Ghettoizing and robbing Palestinians

As for the 4.5 million indigenous Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank who do not have Israeli citizenship, the nation-state law alludes to their fate in the seventh clause, which states: “The state views Jewish settlement as a national value and will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development.”

Simply stated, Israel will continue to work in earnest to build Jewish-only colonies on seized Palestinian land, ostensibly where a Palestinian state was to be formed per the Oslo Accords.

We can expect that more settlement will simply accelerate Israel’s ongoing displacement of Palestinians to replace them with imported Jews. We know from the past fifty-one years of settlement construction that this process is accomplished by systematic dispossession, marginalization, ghettoization and robbing of indigenous Palestinian inhabitants. This process more closely resembles the Manifest Destiny removal and marginalization of First Nations in North America.

Western media should stop mincing words by calling the nation-state law “controversial” when in fact it is encoding the worst human impulses into law, the likes of which are found in Nazi Germany, Jim Crow America, the Indian Removal Act and other abominable moments in human history.

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A good article. Just a couple of comments. In Nazi Germany, under the Nuremburg Laws, citizenship was removed from German Jews they became aliens. This was of course because German nationality and citizenship were coterminous whereas in Israel of course nationality and citizzenship are separate.

Israeli Arabs can therefore retain their citizenship since it means nothing. The only important nationality is Jewish. In essence therefore Arabs in Israel are aliens with certain rights.

Thanks a million times over to Susan Abulhawa for writing this piece and to Mondoweiss for posting it! But this daily reader of Mondoweiss wants to see more of this TRUTH BE TOLD posting on this site, as well as on others. Be assured that I will be forwarding this piece to Zionist publisher A.G. Sulzberger and to all of his Zionist minions at the New York Times, including the Jerusalem bureau and its Zionist propaganda staff. This piece validates what both gentile and true practitioner of Judaism have known all along: Zionist Israel is brutal, racist, genocidal, ethnic cleansing, land stealing, fascist and terrorist–and there is absolutely nothing Jewish about it, NOTHING!

Congratulations to MW for publishing such a clear analysis.
The only way to refer to this law is as the Nuremberg Law, indeed.

good article will spread it on social media engines

I know someone who was working in the West Bank – in Ramallah, I think – in 1985. An Israeli official told her that he was going to the US to tour the Indian reservations, “to see how they do it.”
He also said that their plan for Jerusalem was to make it a Jewish city, with a few Arab “pockets,” “for color.”