The phrase has a documentary centre, and it is one enacted text: Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, which the Knesset adopted on 19 July 2018 by a recorded vote of 62 to 55 with 2 abstentions, and whose Article 1(c) reads, in the Knesset’s own published English translation, that “the realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People.” The Israeli Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice with an expanded panel of eleven justices, dismissed fifteen petitions against that law on 8 July 2021 and upheld it, while holding that the Knesset as constituent authority is “not all powerful.” Alongside that text and that ruling sit Israel’s own population registers, which recorded 2.130 million Arab residents in September 2025, 21.5% of the 9.888 million in the Bureau’s two population groups.
Key Findings
- Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, adopted by the Knesset on 19 July 2018 by 62 votes to 55 with 2 abstentions, states in Article 7 that “the State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.”
- In HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset, decided 8 July 2021, an eleven-justice panel of the Israeli Supreme Court dismissed the petitions and upheld the Basic Law, while setting a limit: the Knesset may not, even by Basic Law, deny the core character of the state as Jewish and democratic.
- Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics recorded a population of about 10.148 million in September 2025, of which 7.758 million were counted as Jews and others and 2.130 million as Arabs, 78.5% and 21.5% of the 9.888 million in those two groups, with East Jerusalem residents and West Bank settlers inside that total.
- Sergio DellaPergola’s chapter in the American Jewish Year Book 2019 records 418,900 core Jews living in the West Bank and 221,800 in the East Jerusalem neighborhoods incorporated after 1967, against 6,001,700 within Israel’s pre-1967 borders.
- Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022) coded 26.9% of 1,504 UK Facebook comments on the May 2021 escalation as antisemitic, and 7.7% of those antisemitic comments as denying Jewish self-determination.
Which mechanisms do the published findings actually name?
Four categories of policy recur across the three documents that put the characterization into general circulation: B’Tselem’s paper of January 2021, Human Rights Watch’s report A Threshold Crossed of April 2021, and Amnesty International’s report of February 2022. Each list is the publishing organization’s own characterization, on its own definitions.
The four categories are the allocation of land and planning powers; the control of immigration and of the tracks by which citizenship is acquired; residency status and permits governing movement; and the scope of political participation. Human Rights Watch summarized the land element in its own phrase, “maximum land, minimum Palestinians,” and stated in the same 2021 report that voting rights extend to Palestinians living within Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries and not to residents of the occupied territories. B’Tselem’s 2021 paper placed restriction of migration by non-Jews among its core methods and described movement restrictions applying to Palestinians who are not Israeli citizens. Amnesty International’s 2022 report described dispossession through seizures, demolitions and evictions, and fragmentation into separate legal and territorial domains.
None of the three is a judicial determination. Each is a report issued by a monitoring organization with a stated human-rights mission, published on definitions the organization set out itself, and each states its own conclusions rather than findings made by a court or a statistical authority.
What the four categories share is that every one of them points at a body of material a reader can go and read: an enacted statute, a court judgment, a set of Israeli laws named in the debate, a national statistical release, a census. The sections below take the categories in turn and set the primary record against them, beginning with the statute the mechanism lists converge on.
Is the 2018 Basic Law the machinery that entrenches the hierarchy?
The text says what the characterization says it says. Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, adopted 19 July 2018 by 62 votes to 55 with 2 abstentions in a 120-seat Knesset, states at Article 1(c) that the right of national self-determination in Israel “is exclusive to the Jewish People,” and at Article 7 that the State “views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value.”
The rest of the enacted text is short and specific. 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 states that “the complete and united Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.” Article 4 states that “Hebrew is the language of the State,” that “Arabic has a special status in the State,” and that nothing in the article “shall compromise the status given to the Arabic language in practice, before this basic-law came into force.” Article 5 states that the State “shall be open to Jewish immigration, and the ingathering of the exiles.” The Knesset labels its English text an unofficial translation.
Two features of the text are worth stating precisely, because they bear on what kind of instrument it is. The law contains no equality clause and no individual-rights clause. It also contains no enforcement provision: no remedy, no penalty, no administrative duty attached to a named authority. Its clauses are stated as declarations of the state’s character rather than as powers or obligations, which is why the question of what a litigant could do with them reached the courts within weeks of adoption.
Israel has no single written constitution. Its Basic Laws function as constitutional instruments, and the Knesset amends them by ordinary legislative majority, which is how a seven-vote margin produced a text of constitutional rank.
Does that law create a right anyone can exercise in court?
Fifteen petitions challenging the Basic Law were dismissed by the Israeli Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice, in HCJ 5555/18 Akram Hasson v. Knesset, argued before an expanded panel of eleven justices on 22 December 2020 and decided on 8 July 2021. The law was upheld in full.
The reasoning cuts in two directions and both halves are in the judgment. The Court held that the Knesset, acting as constituent authority, is “not all powerful,” and has no authority, even by way of a Basic Law, to deny or facially contradict the core character of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. The test it set for striking such an instrument down is narrow: whether the amendment denies the core democratic identity of the state, or inflicts mortal harm on the minimal core characteristics of its identity as Jewish and democratic. The Basic Law, on the Court’s reading, did not cross that line.
The Court derived the limit from what it called the elements of the constitution developed since the founding: the Declaration of Independence, the Basic Laws, Knesset legislation and Supreme Court case law. The first of those, the Declaration read on 14 May 1948 and published in Official Gazette Number 1, pledges that the state “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex,” and 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.”
So the 2018 text stands, and it stands as a declaratory instrument whose clauses the Court read alongside the equality guarantees held in the wider constitutional set rather than above them. This is an Israeli court applying Israeli constitutional doctrine to an Israeli statute, and it is the only adjudication the enacted text has received.
Which bodies administer land, and on what recorded basis?
The population Israel counts as its own, across the territories it administers, totaled 6,665,600 core Jews at the beginning of 2019, according to Sergio DellaPergola’s annual estimate in the American Jewish Year Book 2019.
Of that total, DellaPergola’s estimate recorded 6,001,700 living within Israel’s pre-1967 borders, 418,900 in the West Bank, 221,800 in the East Jerusalem neighborhoods incorporated after 1967, and 23,200 on the Golan Heights.
Those four figures are reported separately in the yearbook because Israel’s own statistical practice does not report them separately. Hirsch-Hoefler and Ben Shitrit (2020), in a review of the Central Bureau of Statistics Yearbook from 1967 onward, document the sequence: East Jerusalem moved into the general population count for Israel proper in the 1968 yearbook; a 1970 footnote folded settlers into Israel’s total as “Israeli residents in the Administrated Territories”; by 1983 settlement localities were counted in the total number of Israeli localities; and in 1997 the separate chapter on the territories was removed. The authors call this a normalization of settlements, and that framing is theirs.
The same review records the counting edges. The Bureau excludes unrecognized outposts, of which Peace Now documented about 121 in 2019. A locality straddling the Green Line, Shani Livne, is placed by the Bureau in Israel’s South District and counted as a settlement by other monitors. Where a locality sits determines which register it appears in, and the registers do not agree.
Jerusalem shows the effect at municipal scale. The Central Bureau of Statistics recorded the city passing one million residents at the end of 2023, 60.5% counted as Jews and others and 39.5% as Arabs, with the post-1967 neighborhoods inside that single municipal population and 13,400 residents added during the year. Human Rights Watch’s 2021 report characterized land and planning policy in the phrase “maximum land, minimum Palestinians,” which is the organization’s own wording; the counting conventions above are the administrative record on which any such reading of the land question rests.
How do the permit and separation policies operate in practice?
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics counted 4,780,978 residents of the West Bank and Gaza on the reference date of 1 December 2017, 2,881,687 in the West Bank and 1,899,291 in Gaza, and states that East Jerusalem could not be directly enumerated, so administrative estimates were used there. That single line is the clearest administrative trace of the arrangement the mechanism lists describe.
The two statistical systems keep the same residents in different registers. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counts East Jerusalem residents inside the municipal population of Jerusalem and inside the national total, which is how the 39.5% Arab share of a one-million city sits within Israel’s 2025 count of 10.148 million. The Palestinian census could not reach them. Neither authority’s total is wrong on its own terms; each reflects a scope decision made before any figure is produced, and the statuses the two records keep apart are the substance of the disagreement.
On immigration, the enacted text is explicit: Article 5 of the 2018 Basic Law states that the State “shall be open to Jewish immigration, and the ingathering of the exiles.” B’Tselem’s 2021 paper placed restriction of migration by non-Jews among the methods it identified, and Human Rights Watch’s 2021 report described limits on movement from the occupied territories into Israel and a stated policy of separation between the West Bank and Gaza. Both are those organizations’ characterizations of administrative practice. No Israeli court has ruled on the aggregate characterization; the litigation record addresses individual permit and residency decisions.
Movement figures for Gaza are published by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics as estimates rather than enumeration. Its end-2025 brief puts the Strip at about 2.13 million, a decline of approximately 254,000 people, which the Bureau states is a decrease of 10.6% against pre-aggression population estimates. It separately reports roughly 2.2 million residents on the eve of the war, nearly two million of them displaced, and roughly 100,000 who have left the Strip. These are the Bureau’s own estimates of a net demographic change, attributed to deaths, missing persons, reduced births and out-migration.
What do Israel’s own statistics record about non-Jewish citizens?
Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics recorded a resident population of about 10.148 million in September 2025, comprising 7.758 million counted as Jews and others and 2.130 million counted as Arabs, with the population growing about 1.0% over the year.
Those two groups sum to 9.888 million, of which the counts are 78.5% and 21.5%; the remainder of the national total is foreign residents, counted in the total but in neither group.
The Bureau publishes separate releases for each group it counts. Its 2022 release on the Moslem population recorded 1.707 million Moslem residents at the end of 2021, 18.1% of all residents, growing 2.1% that year, with 362,000 in Jerusalem, life expectancy of 75.8 years for men and 80.7 for women, 395,348 students in primary and secondary education, and labour force participation of 39.3% among those aged 15 and over. Its December 2025 release on Christians in Israel gave a preliminary estimate of about 184,200, 1.9% of the population, with 87.7% of Christian twelfth-grade students eligible for a matriculation certificate in 2024/25 and 67.7% labour force participation in 2024. Its 2024 release on the Druze population gave a preliminary February 2024 estimate of about 152,000, against 14,500 at the founding of the state, with 83.8% of Druze households containing employed persons in 2023.
Two scope facts travel with all of these. The Bureau counts East Jerusalem residents and West Bank settlers inside Israel’s total, so the Arab share is computed on a denominator that includes both. And the Christian figure is preliminary and, by the release’s own footnote, excludes people absent from the Population Register, so it understates foreign nationals.
Human Rights Watch stated in its 2021 report that voting rights extend to Palestinians living within Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries and not to residents of the occupied territories. The registers above are the reason that sentence can be written without contradiction: the people it separates are counted by two authorities under two statuses, and the 2.130 million figure is a count of one of them.
Where does the peer-reviewed literature agree and disagree?
Four published treatments of the 2018 Basic Law disagree on the vocabulary and converge on the text. Critical Times, published by Duke University Press, ran a symposium on the law in volume 4, issue 3 (2021), analyzing it under the heading of hierarchized citizenship. The Journal of International Development studies hosted at the University of Nebraska Omaha DigitalCommons carries a further legal treatment of the same statute.
Edinburgh University Press published an article in 2024 under the title “Racial Regimes and White European Jewish Supremacy as Property,” which places the framing inside the scholarship on racial regimes and property. Against that, the Jewish People Policy Institute, an institutional research body in Jerusalem, published “From Jewish State to ‘Jewish Supremacy’,” which rejects the term itself and argues the statute states the character of the state rather than a rule of domination.
The distinction that matters for a reader is publication type, not conclusion. The Critical Times symposium and the Edinburgh University Press article are academic publications; the Jewish People Policy Institute paper is an institutional publication by an organization with a stated mission. All four examine the same short enacted text, quoted in section two above, and none of them is measuring anything: they are readings of a statute, and the disagreement between them is over characterization, not over the words on the page.
What no published source in either group supplies is an adjudicated finding. The single judicial disposition of the statute remains HCJ 5555/18, decided 8 July 2021, which upheld the law and read its clauses as declaratory of the state’s character.
How does the supremacy framing appear in measured discourse?
26.9% of 1,504 UK Facebook comments reacting to the May 2021 escalation, posted under the pages of leading British media outlets, were coded antisemitic against an IHRA-based scheme by Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022), the peer-reviewed study that also measured which frames those comments used.
Within that antisemitic UK subset, the study coded 7.7% as denying Jewish self-determination and 5.2% as using the apartheid analogy, against 39.8% invoking an “evil” stereotype and 27.9% assigning Israel sole guilt. The same study coded 12.6% of 1,500 French comments and 13.6% of 1,520 German comments as antisemitic, and reported that thread context was needed to infer the antisemitic meaning in 38.7% of UK antisemitic comments, so the coding rests on conversational context rather than keywords alone.
The self-determination frame is larger in the Twitter corpus. Jikeli and colleagues (2022), working from an expert-annotated gold-standard set of 4,016 English-language tweets, found 11.2% of conversations containing “Jews” between January 2019 and August 2020 were antisemitic under the IHRA definition, and that 15% of those antisemitic tweets fit the denial of Jewish self-determination, against about 62% fitting the paragraph on allegations of Jewish collective power.
On the relationship between the two things, the measured evidence is correlational. Harber, Bulska, Malloy and Vila (2026), across three preregistered studies including two longitudinal designs, report that a model in which conspiracy beliefs implicating Israel and Zionists mediate the association accounted for over 55% of the variance in anti-Israel attitudes, while conspiracy beliefs about Jews unrelated to Israel did not mediate it and a general conspiratorial mindset did not explain the results. The authors report an association among measured attitudes, not a causal path, and their design cannot establish direction between holding a political view and holding a prejudicial one.
Methodology and limitations
This report assembles four kinds of evidence and labels each where it appears.
Primary and official records: the enacted text of Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People in the Knesset’s published English translation, which the Knesset itself labels unofficial; the recorded Knesset vote of 19 July 2018; the judgment in HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset, delivered 8 July 2021; the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, Official Gazette Number 1, 14 May 1948; and the statistical releases of Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.
Statistical scope is not comparable across the two bureaus, and the difference is definitional rather than technical. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counts East Jerusalem residents and West Bank settlers inside its national total, and its Independence Day and Christmas releases are preliminary estimates that exclude people absent from the Population Register. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics conducted a de facto census on 1 December 2017 and could not directly enumerate East Jerusalem, using administrative estimates there; its end-2025 Gaza figures are the Bureau’s own estimates of net demographic change, not enumeration and not a casualty count. Figures from the two series are reported separately here and are never summed.
Peer-reviewed measurement: Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022) and Jikeli and colleagues (2022) coded samples drawn within keyword queries, so their shares describe those samples and not all content on the platforms; Harber and colleagues (2026) report preregistered associations, and the mediation result is correlational.
Organizational positions: the mechanism lists published by B’Tselem in January 2021, Human Rights Watch in April 2021 and Amnesty International in February 2022 are named and dated as each organization’s own characterization on its own definitions. They are not adjudications and no figure in this report is drawn from them. The scholarly readings named in section seven are characterizations of a statute rather than measurements.
Where the discourse studies are cited, the measurement is of how often a framing appears in a coded corpus, not of the framing’s accuracy.
Conclusion
The question asks how a regime perpetuates a hierarchy, and the documentary answer is narrower and more specific than the phrase suggests. One Basic Law, adopted by seven votes, states that national self-determination in Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People and that Jewish settlement is a national value. It carries no equality clause, no individual-rights clause and no enforcement provision. Israel’s highest court upheld it in 2021 while ruling that the Knesset could not, even by Basic Law, deny the state’s core character as Jewish and democratic, and read the clauses as declaratory of that character.
Around that text sit the counting arrangements. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics places East Jerusalem residents and West Bank settlers inside a national total of 10.148 million, within which 2.130 million people are counted as Arab citizens and residents with their own published series on schooling, employment and life expectancy. DellaPergola’s yearbook separates out the 418,900 core Jews in the West Bank and 221,800 in East Jerusalem that the national series folds in. The Palestinian census of 2017 counted 4,780,978 residents and could not enumerate East Jerusalem at all. Three administrative registers, one population, and the boundaries between them decide what any percentage means before the percentage is calculated.
The measured discourse is where these arguments arrive. In the UK comment corpus, 7.7% of antisemitic comments denied Jewish self-determination and 5.2% used the apartheid analogy; in the Twitter corpus, 15% of antisemitic tweets denied Jewish self-determination. A statutory clause about self-determination and a coded category about denying it are separate objects, measured by different methods, and the second is not evidence about the first.
That leaves the question this Institute exists to press. The clause is legible, the ruling is on the record, the counts are published, and the framing built on them circulates in corpora where a measurable share of the surrounding language is antisemitic by expert coding. Whether the argument travels intact from statute to comment thread, or arrives carrying something the statute never said, is a question about what happens to a legal text once it is repeated at scale, and it is worth society working out.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which body publishes Israel’s official population figures, and what territory do they cover?
Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics publishes them, and its national totals include East Jerusalem residents and West Bank settlers. Its September 2025 release recorded about 10.148 million residents. Residents of the West Bank and Gaza outside those categories are counted separately by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.
How many people live in the West Bank and Gaza, and who counted them?
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics counted 4,780,978 residents on 1 December 2017 in its third census, 2,881,687 in the West Bank and 1,899,291 in Gaza. That census is the benchmark underlying the later World Bank and UN series, which reported about 5.29 million for 2024 as a projection off it rather than a count.
Does Israel have a written constitution?
No single document. Basic Laws serve as constitutional instruments, and in HCJ 5555/18 the Supreme Court described the constitutional set as the Declaration of Independence, the Basic Laws, Knesset legislation and Supreme Court case law taken together. The Knesset amends Basic Laws by ordinary majority.
What status does Arabic hold under the 2018 Basic Law?
Article 4 states that “Hebrew is the language of the State,” that “Arabic has a special status in the State,” and that nothing in the article compromises the status Arabic held in practice before the law came into force. The Knesset’s English text is an unofficial translation.
Do Israel’s statistics count settlements separately from Israel proper?
Not since 1997. Hirsch-Hoefler and Ben Shitrit (2020) trace the sequence in the Central Bureau of Statistics Yearbook: East Jerusalem entered the general count in 1968, settlers were folded into Israel’s total by a 1970 footnote, settlement localities entered the locality count by 1983, and the separate territories chapter was removed in 1997.
How often does antisemitic content in social media corpora invoke Israel?
Jikeli and colleagues (2022) coded 13.1% of tweets containing “Israel” between January and August 2020 as antisemitic under the IHRA definition, against 11.2% of conversations containing “Jews” over a longer window. Both shares are of samples drawn within keyword queries, not of all platform content.
Sources
- Becker, Ascone and Troschke, 2022. Antisemitic Comments on Facebook Pages of Leading British, French, and German Media Outlets. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. DOI 10.1057/s41599-022-01337-8. Peer-reviewed.
- Central Bureau of Statistics (Israel), 2022. The Moslem Population in Israel: Data on the Occasion of Eid al-Adha. Media Release 217/2022. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Central Bureau of Statistics (Israel), 2024. Selected Data on the Occasion of Jerusalem Day, 2024. Media Release 165/2024. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Central Bureau of Statistics (Israel), 2024. The Druze Population of Israel on the Occasion of the Nabi Shu’ayb Festival 2024. Media Release 124/2024. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Central Bureau of Statistics (Israel), 2025. Population of Israel on the Eve of Rosh Hashana 5786. Media release 304/2025. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Central Bureau of Statistics (Israel), 2025. Christmas 2025, Christians in Israel. Media Release 413/2025. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Critical Times, 2021. Israel’s Nation-State Law: Hierarchized Citizenship (symposium). Critical Times, vol. 4, no. 3, p. 565. Duke University Press. read.dukeupress.edu. Academic journal.
- DellaPergola, Sergio, 2019. World Jewish Population, 2019. American Jewish Year Book 2019, vol. 119, Springer. jewishdatabank.org. Academic reference.
- Edinburgh University Press, 2024. Racial Regimes and White European Jewish Supremacy as Property. Holy Land Studies. DOI 10.3366/hlps.2024.0340. Academic journal.
- Harber, Bulska, Malloy and Vila, 2026. Antisemitism, Conspiracy Beliefs, and Anti-Israel Attitudes. American Psychologist. DOI 10.1037/amp0001635. Peer-reviewed.
- Hirsch-Hoefler, Sivan, and Lihi Ben Shitrit, 2020. So, How Many Settlements Are There? Counting, Tracking, and Normalizing Jewish Settlements in the Israeli CBS Yearbook, 1967 to the Present. POMEPS. pomeps.org. Organizational research report.
- Israeli Supreme Court sitting as High Court of Justice, 2021. HCJ 5555/18 Akram Hasson v. Knesset, judgment of 8 July 2021. versa.cardozo.yu.edu. Official record (court judgment).
- Jewish People Policy Institute. From Jewish State to “Jewish Supremacy”. jppi.org.il. Institutional research publication.
- Jikeli, Axelrod, Fischer, Forouzesh, Jeong, Miehling and Soemer, 2022. Differences Between Antisemitic and Non-Antisemitic English Language Tweets. Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory. DOI 10.1007/s10588-022-09363-2. Peer-reviewed.
- Knesset, 2018. Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, 5778-2018, official English translation. main.knesset.gov.il. Official record (enacted legislation).
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2018. Population, Housing and Establishments Census 2017: Final Results. Ramallah. pcbs.gov.ps. Official record (national census).
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. A Brief on the Status of the Palestinian People at the End of 2025. Ramallah. pcbs.gov.ps. Official record.
- Provisional Government of Israel, 1948. Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. Official Gazette Number 1, 14 May 1948. main.knesset.gov.il. Official record (founding instrument).
- University of Nebraska Omaha DigitalCommons. Legal analysis of Israel’s Nation-State Law. digitalcommons.unomaha.edu. Academic journal.