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Israel's Nation-State Bill aims to balance Jewish democratic principles

Benjamin Netanyahu is in a political fight ... a legislative one. The Netanyahu government fell partly because of a dispute over a new bill that would enshrine national rights only for Jewish citizens. Today we look at the implications of that - from different perspectives....
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The Current25:37Israel's Nation-State Bill aims to balance Jewish democratic principles - Jan 13, 2015
Benjamin Netanyahu is in a political fight ... a legislative one. The Netanyahu government fell partly because of a dispute over a new bill that would enshrine national rights only for Jewish citizens. Today we look at the implications of that - from different perspectives.

When the state of Israel was founded, in 1948, there were two main strands in the country's DNA - It was a Jewish state. And it was a democratic state. And how those two main values would interact came to be defined by decades' worth of court rulings, laws, and legal precedents.

But now, a new parliamentary bill is poised to re-set all that, and... according to critics, give primacy to one strand of that DNA.

The so-called "nation state" bill was one of the factors contributing to last month's collapse of the Israeli government. And it's in limbo now until elections in March. But the bill has sparked heated debate in the country -- and in the prime minister's own cabinet -- about the very nature of the state of Israel.

For a better understanding of what the bill is all about -- and what it might mean if it is passed into law -- we enlisted the help of Mazen Masri. He teaches at the City Law School at City University in London, England and he wrote his PhD dissertation on the implications of Israel's status as a Jewish and democratic state.

Ayman Sikseck is an Arab-Israeli journalist and novelist who was born and raised in Jaffa. His debut novel is called "To Jaffa."

Joel Golovensky helped to draft an earlier version of the bill. He's an Israeli lawyer, and also the founding president of the Institute for Zionist Strategies think-tank in Jerusalem.


This segment was produced by The Current's Gord Westmacott.

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