Two seemingly unconnected events in Israel in the last week reveal a nose dive to the right: passing the Nation-State Law and Hungary’s anti-Semitic Prime Minister Viktor Orban making a two-day visit. Israel is now both a far right country and allied with the far right in Europe.

Israel’s leading newspaper, Haaretz, today published an editorial titled “The apartheid prime minister” that states flatly that thanks to the new “nation state of the Jewish people” law that Netanyahu spearheaded, Israel under Netanyahu is an apartheid regime. Would that US media would follow the newspaper’s lead.

The state of Israel has always been an apartheid state. Its founding was based on denying and destroying Palestinian collective life on the land, while encouraging Jewish immigration and participation in a settler-colony, itself based on a classed racial hierarchy among Jews. –International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network response to Israel’s new nation-state of the Jews basic law.

Alan Dershowitz calls the new Israeli law declaring Israel “the nation state of the Jewish people” a mistake that was unnecessary and that will give ammunition to Israel’s critics and alienate American Jews. Israel lobby groups the ADL and J Street also say the law was unnecessary, and Israel’s Finance Minister calls it a “mistake.”

I’d made up my mind to attend the demonstration in Tel Aviv against the new nation-state of the Jewish people law, Hatim Kanaaneh writes. Then I reconsidered. I don’t trust the Israeli security services. The same extreme nationalist religious factions whose compatriot killed Rabin, have pushed for the new law for years.

The Jewish Nation-State law is making it hard to be associated with Israel, without being openly associated with an Apartheid regime. How will Daniel Barenboim handle it? By continuing “dialogue” with Israel, or finally boycotting the regime?

Western media should stop mincing words by calling the Israeli 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.

“In my experience, nothing really changed with this law. The discrimination has always been evident since the inception of the state,” Amran Abu Houf says of the law defining Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. From lack of services in Arabic to discriminatory planning and housing policies, Israel has always favored Jews over Palestinians.

“Netanyahu’s regime is digging a deep pit of fear, racism, and authoritarianism to divide us from each other. But they can never erase us from the homeland we share,” Ayman Odeh of the Palestinian Joint List said in anger after Israeli parliament passed a law declaring Israel the nation state of the Jewish people.

Yesterday, the Israeli Knesset passed a bill titled “Nation State of the Jewish People” in a preliminary vote. In explaining the need for the bill MK Avi Dichter said: “Israel is the state of all its individual citizens. It isn’t and won’t be the nation-state of any minority living in it…That is a right this bill gives to the Jewish People alone.” Jonathan Ofir says a close examination of this one statement, reveals a wealth of Zionist lies, contradictions, obfuscations, and sheer chutzpah.