Israel’s Basic Law: Israel, the Nation-State of the Jewish People passed the Knesset 62 to 55 on 19 July 2018, and its Article 1(c) states that the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people; the enacted text carries no equality clause. The state’s founding declaration, read in Tel Aviv on 14 May 1948, pledges complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex. Between those two texts sit recorded votes, three reviews commissioned by Israeli governments that reached three different conclusions, and High Court judgments that in 2000 and again in 2021 barred allocating land by nationality.
Key Findings
- Basic Law: Israel, the Nation-State of the Jewish People (Knesset, 2018) reserves national self-determination in the state as “unique to the Jewish people” in Article 1(c) and names “the development of Jewish settlement” a national value in Article 7. It passed 62 to 55.
- The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel (Provisional Government of Israel, Official Gazette Number 1, 14 May 1948) pledges “complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex.”
- Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the vote “a defining moment in the annals of Zionism” in the Knesset on 19 July 2018; Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejected the apartheid characterisation in February 2022; and the Attorney General defended the law’s constitutionality before the High Court in HCJ 5555/18. Each is a party’s own statement of its own position.
- Israel’s High Court of Justice upheld the Basic Law 10 to 1 in July 2021 (HCJ 5555/18) while holding that Article 7 cannot authorise allocating land or resources by religion or nationality, a limit the court first set in Ka’adan (HCJ 6698/95, 2000).
- Of three government-commissioned reviews, the Sasson Report (2005) found unlawful state funding of West Bank outposts, the Levy Report (2012) proposed retroactive authorisation and was adopted by no cabinet, and Ruth Gavison (2015) advised against legislating national identity three years before the Knesset did so.
What do the government’s binding texts actually state?
Israel has two constitutional-register texts on national identity, and they were written 70 years apart. Basic Law: Israel, the Nation-State of the Jewish People, enacted by the Knesset on 19 July 2018 by a vote of 62 to 55, states in Article 1(c) that “the exercise of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” The enacted text contains no equality clause.
Its other operative clauses are short and quotable. Article 1(a) calls the Land of Israel “the historical homeland of the Jewish people, in which the State of Israel was established.” Article 4 makes Hebrew the state’s language and gives Arabic “a special status in the state,” with Article 4(c) providing that the clause does not harm the status Arabic held before the law came into effect. Article 7 states: “The state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value and will act to encourage and to promote its establishment and consolidation.” Article 7 is the clause most often quoted in the argument over the laws described as Jewish supremacist.
The earlier text runs the other way on equality. The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, read on 14 May 1948 and published in Official Gazette Number 1, declares the establishment of “a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel,” and in the same document pledges that the state “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex” and “will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture.” It appeals to “the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel” to participate “on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.” The Knesset’s published English text reads “all its citizens” in that sentence; other widely used translations render the word as “inhabitants,” which is why the wording of the 1948 pledge is itself part of the dispute.
Who calls the agenda supremacist, and who rejects the label?
It is often said that Israel’s government pursues a Jewish supremacist agenda. Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, publishes the most itemised version of that position: a Discriminatory Laws Database that the organization described in November 2025 as documenting about 100 Israeli laws discriminating against Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians under Israeli occupation, on its own inclusion criteria.
Two other organizations state the characterisation directly. B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, published a position paper on 12 January 2021 describing “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea” and applying the term apartheid to it. Human Rights Watch, in a report dated 27 April 2021, concluded that Israeli authorities pursue “an overarching government policy to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians.” Both are advocacy-mission organizations stating their own legal and political conclusions; neither is an official finding, a court holding, or a measured share.
The rejections are on the record and equally dated. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking in the Knesset on 19 July 2018 after the Basic Law passed, called the vote “a defining moment in the annals of Zionism and the annals of the State of Israel,” framing the law as an affirmation of Jewish self-determination rather than a rule about the rights of others. Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in a statement issued in February 2022, rejected the apartheid characterisation as false and as a delegitimisation of the state. Before the High Court in HCJ 5555/18, the Attorney General of Israel defended the Basic Law’s constitutionality, arguing that it defines the character of the state and does not displace the equality guarantees the court reads into Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty. Each of those is a party’s own statement of its own position.
The disagreement, then, is not about which sentences the state enacted. Both sides quote the same Article 1(c) and the same Article 7. The disagreement is over what to call the arrangement those sentences describe, and the two labels, Jewish self-determination and Jewish supremacy, are applied to an identical text.
What did the government’s own reviews conclude?
Three reviews commissioned by Israeli governments have examined settlement and national-identity policy, and they reached three different conclusions, of which one shaped official practice, one was never adopted and one was overtaken.
The Sasson Report, submitted in March 2005 by attorney Talia Sasson at the request of the Prime Minister’s Office under Ariel Sharon, examined unauthorized West Bank outposts and found that Israeli state bodies, including government ministries and the Settlement Division, had channelled public funds and resources to outposts established without the planning, land and ministerial authorisations Israeli law requires. It was a government-commissioned finding of unlawful state conduct, published by the state itself.
The Levy Report, delivered in July 2012 by a committee chaired by former Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy at the request of Prime Minister Netanyahu, argued the opposite frame: that the West Bank is not occupied territory in the legal sense the international debate assumes, and that outposts built with state involvement should be authorised retroactively. No Israeli cabinet adopted the report. That is the load-bearing fact about it: a government commissioned a review, received a recommendation to regularise the settlements at issue, and left it unadopted.
The third review concerned the identity question directly. In 2013 Justice Minister Tzipi Livni asked Professor Ruth Gavison, a constitutional scholar, to advise on whether Israel’s status as a Jewish and democratic state should be anchored in a constitutional text. Gavison submitted her recommendations to the Justice Ministry in 2015 and advised against legislating a definition of national identity, on the reasoning that such a law would sharpen internal division without resolving it. The Knesset legislated three years later.
Read together, the three documents describe a state apparatus that has repeatedly turned its own scrutiny on settlement and identity policy, produced findings that cut in opposing directions, and acted on some of them and not others. Whether that pattern is consistent with a single coordinated agenda is a judgment about intent; what the record supplies is the commissioning, the conclusion and the disposition of each review, with dates.
How have Israel’s courts answered the agenda question?
Israel’s High Court of Justice upheld the 2018 Basic Law in July 2021 by 10 to 1 in HCJ 5555/18 (Hasson v. Knesset), rejecting petitions to strike it down, and the majority held at the same time that Article 7’s settlement clause cannot be read to authorise allocating land, resources or rights by religion or nationality.
That limit did not begin with the Basic Law. In Ka’adan v. Israel Lands Administration (HCJ 6698/95), decided in March 2000, the court held that the state may not allocate land on the basis of nationality, and that it may not achieve indirectly through an intermediary body what it is barred from doing directly. The judgment concerned an Arab citizen couple refused a plot in a communal settlement administered through the Jewish Agency, and it is the anchor precedent Israeli courts return to on nationality-based allocation.
The court has also ordered demolitions running against settlement expansion. In Netiv Ha’avot (HCJ 7292/14, 2016), the High Court ordered the removal of 17 homes in a West Bank outpost built on land privately registered to Palestinian owners, and the state carried out the demolitions in 2018.
Three judgments do not describe an entire legal order, and none of them is a ruling on the word supremacy, a term that appears in advocacy documents rather than in Israeli judgments. What they establish is narrower and checkable: the constitutionality of the Basic Law was litigated and upheld; the clause most often quoted as the agenda’s legal engine was read down in the same judgment; the rule against allocating land by nationality predates the Basic Law by 18 years and survived it; and Israeli courts have ordered structures removed from land registered to Palestinian owners. A government operating under a court that rules this way is a documented fact about how far any policy can run before it meets a domestic legal limit, and it sits in the record alongside the enacted text.
What would settle the question, and what does the record hold?
An agenda is a claim about intent, and no instrument in this record states one. The closest the record comes is an enacted text: Article 1(c) of the 2018 Basic Law, which reserves national self-determination in the state to the Jewish people, alongside Article 7, which makes the development of Jewish settlement a national value.
What the record holds runs in both directions, and every item in it is dated and checkable. On one side: a Basic Law with an exclusivity clause, a settlement clause, no equality clause, and a 62 to 55 majority behind it; a government-commissioned finding in 2005 that state bodies had funded outposts unlawfully; a database of about 100 laws compiled by Adalah on its own criteria and described by it in November 2025; and the published conclusions of B’Tselem in January 2021 and Human Rights Watch in April 2021.
On the other: a founding declaration that pledges complete equality of social and political rights; a 2012 review recommending retroactive authorisation of settlements that no cabinet adopted; a 2015 recommendation from the government’s own commissioned scholar against legislating identity at all; a High Court holding in 2000 that land may not be allocated by nationality, including through an intermediary body; a 2021 judgment upholding the Basic Law while reading its settlement clause as no authorisation for allocation by religion or nationality; and a 2016 order to remove 17 homes from privately registered Palestinian land.
A finding of agenda would require evidence of coordinated intent across these instruments. The instruments record what was enacted, what was commissioned, what was adopted, what was declined and what was struck down. That is what is available to weigh.
Methodology
This report measures the documentary record and the stated positions of the parties, not the underlying contested claim. It makes no determination on whether the characterisation Jewish supremacy applies to Israeli government policy, because that is a normative and legal conclusion rather than a measured quantity.
Sources are drawn in the Institute’s priority order and labelled by type. Primary and official records supply the enacted and adopted texts: Basic Law: Israel, the Nation-State of the Jewish People (Knesset, 2018), with its recorded vote of 62 to 55; the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel (Provisional Government of Israel, Official Gazette Number 1, 14 May 1948), quoted from the Knesset’s published English text; three judgments of the High Court of Justice (HCJ 6698/95, HCJ 7292/14, HCJ 5555/18); and three reviews commissioned by Israeli governments (Sasson, 2005; Levy, 2012; Gavison, 2015). Statements by the Prime Minister’s Office, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Attorney General are a party’s own statements of its own position and are attributed as such.
Monitoring and advocacy organizations are named in the body as the holders of a position, labelled by mission, and never presented as measured shares or official findings. Adalah’s count of about 100 laws, published in November 2025, is that organization’s own tally on its own inclusion criteria; the underlying law-by-law list is published by Adalah and no independent replication of the criteria was located. The characterisations published by B’Tselem on 12 January 2021 and Human Rights Watch on 27 April 2021 are those organizations’ own legal conclusions.
Limitations. The Knesset’s English text of the 1948 Declaration renders one contested word as “citizens” where other translations read “inhabitants,” and the choice changes the scope of the equality pledge. The Knesset publishes its English text of the 2018 Basic Law as an unofficial translation. No instrument in the assembled record states an intent behind the enacted texts, and none is inferred here.
Conclusion
So does the record answer the question in the terms it is asked? It answers a narrower version of it. Israel enacted a constitutional-register text in 2018 that reserves national self-determination to the Jewish people and names Jewish settlement a national value, passed it 62 to 55, and left it without an equality clause. It also holds a founding declaration pledging complete equality of social and political rights, a High Court that has barred allocation of land by nationality since 2000 and read the settlement clause down while upholding the law in 2021, a 2005 state-commissioned finding that public money reached outposts unlawfully, a 2012 report proposing to regularise them that no cabinet adopted, and a 2015 recommendation from the government’s own commissioned scholar against legislating identity that the Knesset did not follow.
The label is where the record stops and the argument begins. Adalah lists about 100 laws on its own criteria, B’Tselem published the phrase regime of Jewish supremacy in January 2021 and Human Rights Watch published the finding of an overarching policy of domination in April 2021; the Prime Minister in July 2018, the Foreign Ministry in February 2022 and the Attorney General before the High Court called the same arrangement Jewish self-determination. Both readings quote the same sentences.
An agenda is a claim about purpose, and purpose is what these instruments do not record. They record decisions and their dispositions: a clause enacted and the same clause read down, a review commissioned and left unadopted, a recommendation sought and not followed, a demolition ordered and carried out. Where a state has turned its own scrutiny on its own conduct and come back with opposite answers, does a coordinated purpose explain the sequence, or is it what the label supplies where the sequence does not?
Frequently Asked Questions
How many people live in Israel, and how does its own statistics bureau classify them?
Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reported a population of about 10.148 million in September 2025, comprising roughly 7.758 million Jews and others and 2.130 million Arabs, 78.5% and 21.5% of the 9.888 million in those two groups, with annual growth of about 1.0%. The Bureau’s categories are its own: “Arabs” covers Muslims, Arab Christians and Druze, and “others” covers non-Arab Christians, other religions and residents not classified by religion.
Whom does Israel’s official population count include, and whom do international monitors count separately?
Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counts East Jerusalem residents and West Bank settlers inside Israel’s total, and its Jerusalem Day release for 2024 reported the city’s population passing one million at the end of 2023, 60.5% Jews and others and 39.5% Arabs. B’Tselem publishes its West Bank settlement count and its East Jerusalem count as separate series. The two conventions produce different totals for the same people.
What historical events does the 1948 Declaration cite as the basis for the state?
The Declaration’s own recitals name the First Zionist Congress of 1897 convened by Theodor Herzl, the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917, the League of Nations Mandate, and the UN General Assembly resolution of 29 November 1947, which the text calls a recognition that “is irrevocable.” Those are the founding document’s assertions about its own basis, not independent historical findings.
What else does the 2018 Basic Law say beyond the self-determination clause?
Article 1(b) states that Israel is the nation state of the Jewish People, “in which it realizes its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination.” Article 3 names “the complete and united Jerusalem” the capital, and Article 5 provides that the state “shall be open to Jewish immigration, and the ingathering of the exiles.” The Knesset publishes its English text as an unofficial translation.
How many unauthorized outposts did the 2005 government review count, and on whose land did they stand?
The Sasson opinion recorded 105 unauthorized outposts known to its author in March 2005, a count the opinion itself says “probably does not reflect the true number of outposts in the area.” Of those, 26 stood on state land, 15 on private Palestinian property, 7 on survey land and 39 on mixed land, with the rest unresolved at the time of writing. The Prime Minister’s Office published the English summary.
What does the 1948 Declaration say directly to Arab residents of the state?
It appeals “to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.” That sentence sits in the same document as the declaration of “a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel,” which is why both sides of the identity argument quote the founding text.
Sources
- Central Bureau of Statistics, 2024. Selected Data on the Occasion of Jerusalem Day, 2024. Media Release 165/2024. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. Population of Israel on the Eve of Rosh Hashana 5786. Media release, September 2025. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Gavison, R., 2015. Recommendations to the Minister of Justice on the constitutional anchoring of Israel’s status as a Jewish and democratic state. Submitted to the Israeli Ministry of Justice. Government-commissioned review.
- High Court of Justice of Israel, 2000. HCJ 6698/95, Ka’adan v. Israel Lands Administration. Court ruling (official record).
- High Court of Justice of Israel, 2016. HCJ 7292/14, Netiv Ha’avot. Court ruling (official record).
- High Court of Justice of Israel, 2021. HCJ 5555/18, Hasson v. Knesset. Court ruling (official record).
- Knesset, 2018. Basic Law: Israel, the Nation-State of the Jewish People. Enacted 19 July 2018. Official record.
- Levy, E., Shabtai, T., and Baker, A., 2012. Report of the Commission to Examine the Status of Building in Judea and Samaria. Submitted to the Prime Minister of Israel, July 2012. Government-commissioned review.
- Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Israel, 2022. Statement rejecting the apartheid characterisation of Israeli policy. February 2022. gov.il. Official record (party’s own statement).
- Prime Minister’s Office of Israel, 2018. Statement of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the passage of Basic Law: Israel, the Nation-State of the Jewish People, 19 July 2018. Official record (party’s own statement).
- Provisional Government of Israel, 1948. Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. Official Gazette Number 1, Tel Aviv, 14 May 1948; Knesset English text at main.knesset.gov.il. Primary and official record.
- Sasson, T., 2005. Summary of the Opinion Concerning Unauthorized Outposts. Commissioned by the Prime Minister’s Office of Israel, March 2005. Government-commissioned review.