‘This Is Our Country. This Is Our Language’: Controversial Law Deems Israel Homeland of the Jewish People
USCPR Executive Director Yousef Munayyer commented in a PBS NewsHour segment on Israel’s “nation-state” law constitutionally enshrining apartheid.
NICK SCHIFRIN: The law is a basic law, akin to a constitutional amendment. And that means critics will have a hard time challenging it, says Yousef Munayyer, the executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights.
YOUSEF MUNAYYER: This now becomes a tool through which various discriminatory policies can be supported in the legal system. And thus it enshrines, in a constitutional way, a constitutional defense for discrimination against non-Jews in Israel that did not exist in this way before.
NS: Arab Israelis are more than 20 percent of Israeli citizens. They often complain of housing, education, and language discrimination. The law’s critics say that discrimination could get worse.
YM: A lot of those policies have preexisted this law. What will happen now is that they will be, of course, enshrined into law constitutionally, making legal challenges against them far more difficult, and thus embolden proponents of those laws to advance those policies in ways and in places that they have not done so before.
