Israel refuses to recognize its own nationality

Israel refuses to recognize its own nationality: Israeli Supreme Court says ‘Israeli’ nationality could endanger idea of Jewish state

Omar Barghouti

Israeli apartheid enabled by the Israeli “justice” system….

From the October 4 Associated Press article, “Israeli court rejects Israeli nationality, saying it could undermine Jewish character“:

Israel’s population registry lists a slew of “nationalities” and ethnicities, among them Jew, Arab, Druse and more. But one word is conspicuously absent from the list: Israeli.

Residents cannot identify themselves as Israelis in the national registry because the move could have far-reaching consequences for the country’s Jewish character, the Israeli Supreme Court wrote in documents obtained Thursday.

The ruling was a response to a demand by 21 Israelis, most of whom are officially registered as Jews, that the court decide whether they can be listed as Israeli in the registry. The group had argued that without a secular Israeli identity, Israeli policies will favor Jews and discriminate against minorities.

In its 26-page ruling, the court explained that doing so would have “weighty implications” on the state of Israel and could pose a danger to Israel’s founding principle: to be a Jewish state for the Jewish people.

The decision touches on a central debate in Israel, which considers itself both Jewish and democratic yet has struggled to balance both. The country has not officially recognized an Israeli nationality. . .

The national population registry lists a person’s religion and nationality or ethnicity, among other details. Any Jew, no matter what his country of origin, is listed as a Jew. Arabs are marked as such and other minorities, such as Druse, are listed by their ethnicity. . .

In the Supreme Court case, the 21 petitioners argued that Israel is not democratic because it is Jewish. They say that the country’s Arab minority faces discrimination because certain policies favor Jews and that a shared Israeli nationality could bring an end to such prejudice and unite all of Israel’s citizens.

“The Jewish identity is anti-democratic,” said Uzzi Ornan, the main petitioner who runs “I am Israeli,” a small organization devoted to having the Israeli nationality officially recognized.

“With an Israeli identity, we can be secure in our democracy, secure in equality between all citizens,” said Ornan, a 90-year-old professor of computational linguistics at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.

Israeli Arabs have long contended that, despite their citizenship, they are victims of official discrimination, with their communities receiving fewer resources than Jewish towns. While some Arabs have made strides in recent years in entering the Israeli mainstream, they are on average poorer and less educated than their Jewish counterparts.

The court’s deliberation focused mainly on how an officially recognized Israeli identity could pose a threat to Israel’s founding ideals and cause disunity. The court said it was not casting doubt on the existence of an Israeli nation.

Israel remains the only country on earth, as far as I am aware, that does not recognize its own nationality, does not recognize a major part of its citizenry, the indigenous Palestinian citizens of the state, as nationals of the state, but recognizes foreigners who share the majority’s religion as nationals!

Only decades of Israeli propaganda, mainly manufactured by complicit academia and propagated by pliant journalism serving Zionism, could have covered up this profound and blatant pillar of Israeli apartheid from world public opinion.

Imagine if France, say, would not recognize its non-Catholic citizens as French nationals and would extend French nationality to all Catholics around the world, privileging them over its own citizens who are not Catholic. And of course French Catholics are not colonial settlers who gained hegemony and demographic majority through the systematic ethnic cleansing of the non-Catholic indigenous population of the land!

http://mondoweiss.net/2013/10/recognize-nationality-endanger.html