20 July 2018•Update: 20 July 2018
By Qais Abu Samra
RAMALLAH, Palestine
Israel’s “Jewish Nation-State” law promises to usher in a new phase of anti-Arab discrimination and will further undermine the Middle East peace process, Palestinian experts say.
Speaking to Anadolu Agency, Palestinian political analyst Talal Okal said the law is based on the erroneous Zionist notion of “a land without a people for a people without a land”.
As a result of the legislation, Okal said, “Palestinians in Israel will be subject to increased discrimination while the collective displacement of Palestinians [from their land] will only accelerate”.
The new law, he went on to warn, “will only serve to legitimize the eviction of Palestinians from their land to make way for new Jewish settlements”.
On Thursday, the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) passed a law that describes Israel as “the nation-state of the Jewish people”.
The legislation was approved in a vote of 62 to 55 in a tumultuous session of the assembly during which Arab lawmakers slammed what they described as “Israeli racism against the [country’s] Arab minority”.
The legislation further states that a “united Jerusalem” is the country’s capital and that Hebrew is its official language, stripping Arabic of its earlier designation as an official language while recognizing its “special status”.
Palestinian writer and political analyst Abdel Majid Sweilam, for his part, described the law as “fascist” in nature, warning that it would “officially end the peace process”.
Sweilam called for the legislation to be overturned, noting that international law “rejects the establishment of any political regime based on race or ethnicity”.
The controversial law, he added, “means there will no longer be anything preventing the Israeli government from officially supporting the settlements”, which are being illegally built on Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank.
Jihad Harb, a political science lecturer at Ramallah’s Birzeit University, says the law will surely derail any potential peace deal with the Palestinians.
“It means that Jerusalem’s status cannot be negotiated within the context of a future peace deal,” he said.
Suleiman Basharat, a researcher at the Yabous Center for Strategic Studies, warned of the law’s adverse effect on Israeli-Palestinian relations.
“It will encourage Jewish discrimination against Palestinians and the displacement of the latter, especially in mixed cities where Palestinians currently live side by side with Jews,” Basharat said.
“This law will allow the state to treat non-Jews as second-class citizens,” he added.
Basharat concluded by saying that, through the new legislation, Israel “has officially ended the peace process and given up on the possibility of reaching a political solution [with the Palestinians] based on international law”.
