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Yitzhak Arad, a veteran of Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, organized an anti-Netanyahu protest the other day for residents of his assisted-living center in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Hasharon.
About 50 people attended. “We would have easily gotten a bigger crowd, but we didn’t want to violate the social distancing rules or endanger anyone’s health,” says Arad, a Holocaust survivor who served as director of Yad Vashem (Israel’s Shoah memorial center) for over 20 years.
Its Declaration of Independence guarantees “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex,” as well as a guarantee of freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture.
Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, Zeev Jabotinsky, David Ben Gurion and Golda Meir always emphasized the need to combine Jewish nationalism with universal humanism. So now, when Israel’s government appears to be tarnishing the sacred value of equality, many supporters feel it is turning its back on Jewish heritage, the Zionist ethos and the Israeli spirit.
World Jewish Congress chief and former Netanyahu confidant urges Israeli leaders to ‚rethink their destructive actions‘ in New York Times op-ed
One of the most significant threats to Jewish nationalism, as expressed in the nation-state law, is Arab representation in the Knesset, according to a portion of the Israeli population. So I tell you, the Arab citizen: Do not give the right-wing government a prize – despair and isolation. You all have the political power to reshape public discourse in Israel by participating in elections. Use it.
And to all the citizens of Israel, from every tribe, I call to join the struggle against the elimination of democracy, to develop an Israeli society, pluralistic and prosperous, with the participation of minorities in the economy and in politics.
In her speech, Livni railed against the right-wing government, called for early elections and said the opposition would pass the Declaration of Independence as a basic law in lieu of the nation-state law passed by the right-wing coalition on July 19.
The nation-state law was designed to erase the Declaration of Independence and re-invent Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, rather than as a Jewish and democratic state