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The Jewish State Declares Itself a Jewish State - and Everybody Goes Crazy

(Commentary) Lahav Harkov - The Jewish Nation-State Law reflects the de facto condition inside Israel since its establishment 70 years ago and should not be earth-shattering for anyone with the slightest familiarity with the country. Two polls taken the week after the law passed showed that a majority of Israeli Jews support the law. Nothing in the law's text impinges on the individual civil rights of Israeli citizens, and it does not add any individual privileges for Jewish Israelis. As Northwestern University law professor Eugene Kontorovich argued in the Wall Street Journal, the Jewish Nation-State Law is not so different from the constitutions of many European democracies. Yet there doesn't seem to be much outrage about the Latvian constitution citing the "unwavering will of the Latvian nation to have its own state and its unalienable right of self-determination" - even though a quarter of Latvia's population is Russian. Moreover, many European countries with large minority groups have only one official language.
2018-08-17 00:00:00
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