Monday, November 15, 1999

Knesset lawyers advise speaker to stop bill to deny Israel's status as state of Jewish people

Knesset legal advisers attorneys Zvi Inbar and Shlomo Shoham have called on the body's presidium to invalidate a private law bill by MK Mohammed Baraka (Hadash) calling for the negating of the state of Israel as the state of the Jewish people. The bill, which carries the name "Fundamental Law: The Equality of the Arab Population", was signed by Baraka and the two other Hadash party MKs, Issam Mahoul and Tamar Gozansky.

The bill's second article states that "the goal of this Basic Law is to protect the dignity and liberty of the state's Arab citizens as Israeli citizens, and as an Arab-Palestinian national minority, in order to anchor in the Basic Law the values of the state of Israel as a multi-cultural democracy."

In a legal opinion, Inbar said that he saw both the Knesset Speaker and his deputies as "authorized to exercise their authority not to allow the proposed legislation as long as the second article is not either removed or amended in such a way that it would no longer contain the demand for negating the existence of the state of Israel as the state of the Jewish people."

Baraka said in response that he was surprised at the uproar caused by the bill, and that the bill primarily deals with the issue of equality, not semantics. "I don't deny existing descriptions at all", Baraka said, "but there is definitely room to add to them.

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