On July 9, Israel's legislature passed “Basic Law: Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People.” This act was greeted with widespread and ferocious attacks, exemplified by the publication of four caustically critical articles in the New York Times alone. These articles insinuated that Israel had abandoned democratic values and become an apartheid state or ethnocracy.
This criticism has no relevance to the facts on the ground. First and foremost, because the new law, far from changing the nature of the Israeli state, merely reiterates founding principles from the 1948 Declaration of Independence. These principles were felt by the majority of the Knesset to have been watered down during the last decades, by several Supreme Court rulings that tended toward ultra-liberal values.
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