Does Israel’s Nation-State Law Define the State on Racial Grounds? Reading the Enacted Text, the Treaty Definition and the Court Record

One judicial body has ruled on Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People: Israel’s Supreme Court, which on 8 July 2021 dismissed the 15 petitions against it in HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset. No court outside Israel has adjudicated the law’s text. The dispute the question names is fought on the enacted words themselves: Article 1(c) of the Knesset’s 2018 text reserves the exercise of national self-determination in Israel to the Jewish people, and the law carries no equality clause. The treaty that defines racial discrimination in international law, adopted in 1965, both lists national origin among its grounds and exempts distinctions a state makes between citizens and non-citizens.

Key Findings

• Article 1(c) of the Knesset’s 2018 enacted text reads, in the Knesset’s own English translation, “The realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People.” The law contains no equality clause and no individual-rights clause.
• Israel’s Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice with an expanded panel of eleven justices, dismissed the petitions on 8 July 2021 and held at the same time that the Knesset has no authority, even by Basic Law, to deny the state’s core character as Jewish and democratic (HCJ 5555/18).
• The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which Israel ratified in 1979, defines racial discrimination across five grounds, “race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin,” and its Article 1(2) removes citizen-versus-non-citizen distinctions from the Convention’s scope.
• The draft bill’s community-settlement provision, which would have permitted the establishment of separate communities, was removed before passage; enacted Article 7 states that the state “views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value.”
• In the peer-reviewed study by Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022), 7.7% of the antisemitic comments coded among 1,504 UK Facebook comments turned on denial of Jewish self-determination.

Has any binding ruling found the law unlawful?

One ruling exists, and it is domestic: on 8 July 2021 the Supreme Court of Israel, sitting as the High Court of Justice, dismissed 15 petitions challenging Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People in HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset. No international tribunal has issued a judgment on the law’s text, and no state has been found in breach of a treaty on account of it.

The nearest thing to an international determination is a treaty-body output. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the body of independent experts that reviews states party to the 1965 Convention, addressed the law in its concluding observations on Israel in December 2019. Concluding observations are recommendations issued after a periodic review; they are not judgments, they bind no one, and the Convention provides no enforcement attached to them.

The distinction between the two kinds of output is what most of the disagreement over this question rests on. A judgment resolves a case between parties and creates an obligation. A treaty body’s observation records the view of a committee at a date, on the record placed before it, and invites a state to respond in its next report. Both are part of the international-law record; only one determines anything.

The 2021 judgment also does not settle the international question, and the Court did not present it as doing so. It ruled on whether an Israeli Basic Law could stand under Israel’s own constitutional arrangements. What the Court held about equality, and the limit it set on the Knesset while upholding the law, is set out below.

So the record as it stands is a single domestic judgment upholding the law, a treaty body’s 2019 recommendations addressing it, and no binding international ruling on it in either direction.

Is it said no democracy designates identity on racial grounds?

Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, published in 2019 the position that there is no democratic constitution in the world that designates the constitutional identity of the state on racial grounds, and that the 2018 law lacks any guarantee of equality. That is the claim in the question, in the words of the organization that has pressed it hardest, and two parts of it are matters of enacted text rather than interpretation.

The first is the exclusivity clause. Article 1(c) of the Knesset’s 2018 text, in the Knesset’s published English translation, which the Knesset itself labels unofficial, reads: “The realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People.” Article 1(b) states that the state “is the nation state of the Jewish People in which it realizes its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination.”

The second is the absence. The enacted text contains no equality clause and no individual-rights clause. Its articles cover the state’s symbols, its capital, language, immigration, the connection to the Jewish diaspora, settlement, the calendar, memorial days and days of rest. Equality appears nowhere among them. That absence is a fact about the text, and it is the same absence that produces the reading of these Israeli laws called Jewish supremacist.

What the two textual facts do not settle is the word the claim turns on. The law designates a national group, the Jewish people, and speaks of a national right. Whether a national designation is a racial designation is not a rhetorical question in this dispute; it is a definitional one, and the definition sits in a treaty Israel has ratified. That definition, and the carve-out attached to it, follow next.

Does racial discrimination law cover national identity clauses?

Five grounds appear in the definition. Article 1(1) of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted in 1965, defines racial discrimination as “any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin” that has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the equal enjoyment of human rights in public life. Israel ratified the Convention in 1979.

National origin is therefore inside the treaty’s subject matter, and a measure framed in national rather than colour terms is not for that reason outside it. This is the textual answer to the objection that a law about a nation cannot be about race: the drafters of the 1965 Convention wrote national and ethnic origin into the same sentence as race and colour.

The Convention’s next paragraph pulls in the other direction. Article 1(2) states: “This Convention shall not apply to distinctions, exclusions, restrictions or preferences made by a State Party to this Convention between citizens and non-citizens.” Article 1(3) preserves state provisions on nationality, citizenship and naturalization, provided they do not discriminate against any particular nationality.

Both paragraphs are operative, and the 2018 law’s clauses fall differently against them. Immigration provisions such as Article 5, which states that the state “shall be open to Jewish immigration, and the ingathering of the exiles,” govern entry and citizenship acquisition, the territory Article 1(2) and 1(3) address. The self-determination clause in Article 1(c) governs a right exercised inside the state, among citizens, where the carve-out does not reach.

Which norms do the published critiques actually invoke?

Three instruments carry nearly all of the published legal objections, and each is a treaty with a text a reader can check. They are the 1965 Convention on racial discrimination, the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. Israel ratified the second and third in 1991.

The Covenant supplies two of the three clauses most often invoked. Article 1(1) states: “All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.” Article 26 states: “All persons are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to the equal protection of the law,” and requires that the law prohibit discrimination on grounds including race, religion and national or social origin.

The bodies that have applied these texts to the 2018 law are identifiable and dated. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination addressed the law in concluding observations on Israel in December 2019, under the 1965 Convention. Adalah published a position paper on the Basic Law in July 2018, and a separate position paper in March 2019 arguing specifically that Article 7, the Jewish-settlement clause, is unlawful. A law-review article in the Loyola University Chicago International Law Review argues the law is inconsistent with the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Each of these is a different kind of document with a different weight: a treaty-body recommendation, two position papers by a litigating legal centre, and one scholar’s argument in a student-edited law journal. None is a judgment. The instruments they invoke, by contrast, are ratified treaty texts, and the equality and self-determination clauses quoted above are the operative language in the argument, whoever is making it.

What did the World Court’s 2024 opinion address?

The International Court of Justice delivered its advisory opinion on the Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem, in July 2024; the text is published in International Legal Materials. Its subject was the policies and practices applied in the occupied territories, including an analysis under Article 3 of the 1965 Convention.

Advisory opinions answer a question referred by an authorized organ. They are not contentious proceedings between states, they bind no party, and they resolve no case. The opinion’s subject matter is territorial conduct: settlement policy, land and resource administration, residency and movement in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.

Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People is a constitutional instrument of the State of Israel, and its self-determination, language and capital clauses operate on the state as a whole. The 2018 law’s constitutional-identity clauses were not the object of the 2024 proceedings, and the opinion did not adjudicate whether designating the state as the nation-state of the Jewish people is itself unlawful.

The two subjects touch at one point, Article 7. The enacted clause states that the state “views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.” A finding about settlement conduct in occupied territory and a clause declaring settlement a national value are different objects, one a practice and one a constitutional statement, and a determination about the first is not a determination about the second.

Keeping the two apart matters for reading the record accurately, because the territorial findings are the most authoritative international material in this area and the constitutional-identity clauses are the subject of the question. The same distinction runs through the separate dispute over the apartheid definition under international law, where the treaty text and the conduct alleged under it are likewise distinct objects.

How did Israel’s Supreme Court answer the equality challenge?

An expanded panel of eleven justices heard the challenge on 22 December 2020 and dismissed the petitions on 8 July 2021, with one justice dissenting, as the Library of Congress recorded in its Global Legal Monitor summary of the judgment that month. The law stands within Israel’s constitutional system.

The Court did not hold that the Knesset may enact anything it wishes in the form of a Basic Law. It held that the Knesset, acting as constituent authority, is “not all powerful” and has no authority, even by Basic Law, to deny or facially contradict the core character of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. The test it applied is narrow: whether the amendment denies that core democratic identity or inflicts mortal harm on the minimal core characteristics of the state’s identity as Jewish and democratic. The Court derived that limit from what it called the elements of the constitution built up since the founding, naming the Declaration of Independence, the Basic Laws, Knesset legislation and Supreme Court case law.

Both halves of the ruling are load-bearing. The law was upheld, and a constitutional limit was articulated that the Court held the law could have violated but did not.

On equality, the Court’s reasoning ran through the surrounding constitutional text rather than through the 2018 law. Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, enacted in 1992, remains in force, and the nation-state law is read alongside it rather than in place of it. The Israel Democracy Institute’s published explainer on the law makes the same reading: the enacted provisions are largely declaratory of pre-existing arrangements, and the rights protections that existed before 2018 were not repealed by it.

The 1948 Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, one of the elements the Court named, pledges that the state “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex.” That pledge sits in the founding instrument, not in the 2018 Basic Law.

What happened to the draft clause on separate communities?

One provision in the bill did not survive to enactment: the community-settlement clause, which in earlier drafts would have authorized the state to permit a community composed of people of one religion or nationality to maintain a separate communal settlement. It was removed before the vote. Arab Center Washington DC’s published resource on the proposed drafts records the successive versions, and the Israel Democracy Institute’s explainer records the removal.

What passed instead is Article 7 of the enacted text: “The State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.” The clause states a value and an obligation on the state to promote it. It contains no authorization to exclude anyone from a locality, and it names no mechanism.

The difference between the two versions is the difference between a permission and a declaration, and it is the reason the same article is read two ways. Adalah’s March 2019 position paper argues that Article 7 as enacted is unlawful in its own right. The Israel Democracy Institute’s explainer reads the enacted clause as declaratory, without operative legal effect on the allocation of land or admission to communities.

Reading the drafting history onto the enacted text is the most common way this article is misdescribed. The removed clause is often quoted, or paraphrased, as though it were law. It is not: the Knesset’s published text is eleven articles long, and the separate-communities permission is in none of them.

Article 4 shows a similar drafting compromise. It states that “Hebrew is the language of the State” and that “Arabic has a special status in the State,” and then adds, in Article 4(c), that nothing in the article “shall compromise the status given to the Arabic language in practice, before this basic-law came into force.” The saving clause preserves the prior position; the demotion of Arabic from official status is in the same article that freezes its practical status in place. Both readings of Article 4 are quoting real text.

Does the law breach the Convention on the Rights of the Child?

One published argument makes that case. An article in the Loyola University Chicago International Law Review argues that Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People is inconsistent with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, on two grounds: that the law privileges Jewish national self-determination, and that it recognizes the development of Jewish settlement as a national value. Israel ratified the Convention in 1991.

The Convention’s Article 2 obliges states party to respect and ensure the rights in the Convention to each child within their jurisdiction “without discrimination of any kind, irrespective of the child’s or his or her parent’s or legal guardian’s race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national, ethnic or social origin, property, disability, birth or other status.” That is the clause the argument runs on.

What the argument is, and is not, matters for weighing it. It is a law-review article: one author’s reasoning, published in a journal, subject to no adjudication. The Convention’s monitoring body, the Committee on the Rights of the Child, issues concluding observations on periodic state reports, and those, like the observations of the racial-discrimination committee, are recommendations rather than determinations. No tribunal has found Israel in breach of the Convention on account of the 2018 law.

The article is nonetheless the specific thing behind a claim that circulates in general form. Where the argument is stated as an established violation, the underlying material is a single named journal article and a treaty Israel ratified in 1991, and both are checkable.

Where do legal scholars disagree about the law’s status?

The disagreement is documented, published under names, and runs in both directions. It is not a case of one settled reading and a set of objections to it; the three research bodies below have each published a distinct reading of what the 2018 text does.

Source: Israel Democracy Institute, Nation-State Law Explainer; Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs; Institute for Palestine Studies, The Jewish Nation-State Law: Antecedents and Constitutional Implications.

Adalah’s 2018 and 2019 position papers occupy a fourth position, arguing the law is unlawful under international anti-discrimination norms and that Article 7 is unlawful in its own right. Those papers are litigation material from a legal centre that petitioned against the law, and they are the origin of most of the phrasing in which the claim now circulates.

The disagreement is not principally about the words of the statute, which all four bodies quote accurately. It is about what a constitutional declaration without an operative mechanism does. If Article 7 is declaratory, its legal effect runs through whatever administrative decisions later invoke it, and none of those decisions is in the Basic Law. If it is operative, the effect is in the text itself. The Supreme Court’s 2021 reasoning sided with the reading that the enacted law must be read alongside the existing Basic Laws rather than as displacing them, and the dissent recorded in the same judgment shows that reading was not unanimous on the bench either.

Which legal framings appear in measured antisemitic comments?

7.7% of the antisemitic comments coded in the peer-reviewed study by Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022) turned on denial of Jewish self-determination. The figure is a share of the antisemitic comments among 1,504 UK comments on the Facebook pages of leading British media outlets, coded against a scheme built on the IHRA working definition, during the May 2021 escalation.

The same corpus recorded 26.9% of the 1,504 UK comments as antisemitic overall, against 12.6% of 1,500 French comments and 13.6% of 1,520 German comments. Within the UK antisemitic set, an “evil” stereotype appeared in 39.8%, sole guilt of Israel in 27.9%, child murder or blood libel in 8.1%, the apartheid analogy in 5.2% and the Nazi analogy in 4.2%. The categories are not mutually exclusive and the figures are shares within one keyword-bounded corpus at one moment of conflict escalation, not a measure of any national population.

A second peer-reviewed corpus registers the same framing at a higher share. In the expert-annotated tweet corpus of Jikeli and colleagues (2022), 15% of the antisemitic tweets containing the word “Jews” fit the IHRA paragraph on denial of Jewish self-determination, while about 62% fit the paragraph on mendacious or stereotypical allegations about Jewish collective power.

Neither study measures the effect of the 2018 law or of any legal argument about it, and neither claims a causal path. What they measure is that the self-determination question, the exact question Article 1(c) states, is a recurring frame in content coded as antisemitic, and that it is a smaller frame in those corpora than the collective-power trope. Harber, Bulska, Malloy and Vila (2026) report, in three preregistered studies, that a model built on conspiracy beliefs implicating Israel and Zionists accounted for over 55% of the variance in anti-Israel attitudes, and that conspiracy beliefs about Jews unrelated to Israel did not mediate that association. These are associations in survey data, described by their authors as such.

Methodology and limitations

This report reads the enacted legal texts, the court record and the published legal positions on Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. It measures what the instruments say, what has been determined and by which kind of body, and how the self-determination framing appears in corpora of coded antisemitic content. It does not weigh whether the law is lawful under any instrument.

The source types are separated by weight. Treaty texts (ICERD 1965, ICCPR 1966, CRC 1989) and the Knesset’s 2018 enacted text are primary records, quoted directly. The Knesset labels its English translation of the Basic Law unofficial; all quotations here are from that translation. The judgment in HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset (8 July 2021) is a court record; the panel composition and the single dissent are drawn from the Library of Congress Global Legal Monitor summary of July 2021 rather than from the Hebrew text of the opinion.

Two categories of international output appear here and neither is a judgment. Treaty-body concluding observations, including the racial-discrimination committee’s December 2019 observations on Israel, are recommendations issued after periodic review. Advisory opinions of the International Court of Justice, including the July 2024 opinion published in International Legal Materials, answer a referred question and bind no party. Both are dated and named where they appear; neither is presented as a determination on the 2018 law.

Position papers by Adalah and the law-review article in the Loyola University Chicago International Law Review are arguments by named authors and organizations, one of them a legal centre that petitioned against the law. They are identified as such at each use.

The measured discourse figures carry their own bounds. Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022) coded 4,500 comments across three languages during one escalation in May 2021; its categories are non-exclusive and its shares are of a keyword-bounded comment corpus, not of any population. Jikeli and colleagues (2022) report shares within samples drawn by keyword query on Twitter, not shares of the platform. Harber and colleagues (2026) report correlational survey results. No causal relationship between the 2018 law and any measured discourse pattern is established by any source cited here.

Conclusion

The question asks whether the nation-state law violates international norms by designating the state’s constitutional identity on racial grounds. The record answers the two halves separately. On the first half: one court has ruled, Israel’s own, and it upheld the law on 8 July 2021 while holding that the Knesset could not have denied the state’s core character as Jewish and democratic. No tribunal elsewhere has ruled on the text, and the international material that addresses it is a treaty body’s December 2019 recommendations. On the second half: the 1965 Convention Israel ratified in 1979 puts national origin inside its definition of racial discrimination and then removes citizen-versus-non-citizen distinctions from its scope, so the word in the question has a treaty definition that reaches part of the law and not all of it.

What is not in dispute is the text. Article 1(c) reserves the exercise of national self-determination in Israel to the Jewish people. Article 4 makes Hebrew the language of the state and freezes Arabic’s practical status where it stood. Article 7 declares Jewish settlement a national value, and the draft clause permitting separate communities was struck before the vote. The law contains no equality clause, and the equality pledge in Israel’s founding record sits in the 1948 Declaration, not in the 2018 Basic Law. Every reading canvassed here, from the Israel Democracy Institute’s declaratory account to Adalah’s unlawfulness argument, quotes the same eleven articles and divides over what a constitutional declaration without a mechanism does.

The framing does not stay in the statute books. In the UK comment corpus coded by Becker, Ascone and Troschke, denial of Jewish self-determination was the frame in 7.7% of antisemitic comments; in the tweet corpus of Jikeli and colleagues it was 15%. A constitutional clause about who holds a national right and a discourse category about who is entitled to one are not the same object, and no cited work connects them causally. But they name the same subject, and the second is measurable while the first is contested. Where a constitutional text becomes the shorthand for a claim about a people rather than about a clause, what has been transmitted: the argument, or the category?

Frequently Asked Questions

Which other Basic Law governs equality in Israel?

Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, enacted in 1992, remains in force and was not repealed by the 2018 law. The Supreme Court’s 2021 reasoning in HCJ 5555/18 treated the nation-state law as one element among the Basic Laws rather than as displacing the rights protections already in place.

What does the enacted text say about Arabic?

Article 4 of the Knesset’s 2018 text states that “Hebrew is the language of the State” and that “Arabic has a special status in the State.” Article 4(c) adds that nothing in the article shall compromise the status given to Arabic in practice before the Basic Law came into force, a saving clause that preserves the prior position.

Can the nation-state law be amended?

The enacted text provides that the Basic Law may be amended only by another Basic Law passed with the support of a majority of Knesset members. That is a higher bar than ordinary legislation and lower than the entrenchment used in some constitutions, which require supermajorities or referendums.

Why does the citizen and non-citizen carve-out matter?

Article 1(2) of the 1965 Convention removes distinctions a state makes between citizens and non-citizens from the Convention’s scope, and Article 1(3) preserves nationality and naturalization law provided it does not discriminate against a particular nationality. Clauses of the 2018 law that govern immigration fall differently against that carve-out than clauses governing rights exercised among citizens.

How much legal weight do a treaty body’s concluding observations carry?

They are recommendations issued by a committee of independent experts after reviewing a state’s periodic report, and they create no enforceable obligation. The racial-discrimination committee’s December 2019 observations on Israel are of that kind, distinct in weight from a judgment of a court.

Which studies measure how self-determination framings circulate?

Two peer-reviewed corpora do. Jikeli and colleagues (2022) coded 4,016 English-language tweets against the IHRA definition and found 15% of antisemitic “Jews” tweets fit the self-determination-denial paragraph. Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022) coded 4,500 comments in three languages during the May 2021 escalation.

Sources

• Arab Center Washington DC. Proposed Basic Law: Israel, The Nation State of the Jewish People. arabcenterdc.org. Research organization resource on the bill’s successive drafts.
• 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.
• Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989. United Nations treaty text; ratified by Israel in 1991. Treaty text, primary record.
• Harber, Bulska, Malloy and Vila, 2026. Antisemitism, Conspiracy Beliefs, and Anti-Israel Attitudes. American Psychologist. DOI 10.1037/amp0001635. Peer-reviewed.
• Institute for Palestine Studies. The Jewish Nation-State Law: Antecedents and Constitutional Implications. palestine-studies.org. Research organization analysis.
• International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, 1965. United Nations treaty text, Articles 1(1), 1(2) and 1(3); ratified by Israel in 1979. Treaty text, primary record.
• International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 1966. United Nations treaty text, Articles 1 and 26; ratified by Israel in 1991. Treaty text, primary record.
• International Legal Materials, 2024. Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem (Advisory Opinion). Cambridge University Press. cambridge.org. Published text of an advisory opinion.
• Israel Democracy Institute. Nation-State Law Explainer. en.idi.org.il/articles/24241. Research institute explainer.
• Israeli Supreme Court, 2021. HCJ 5555/18 Akram Hasson v. Knesset, judgment of 8 July 2021. Court record.
• Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Published paper on Israel’s legal definition as the nation-state of the Jewish people. jcfa.org. Research institute 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, official (unofficial English translation), amendments through 1 May 2022. main.knesset.gov.il. Enacted legislation, primary record.
• Library of Congress, 2021. Israel: Supreme Court Affirms Constitutionality of Basic Law, Global Legal Monitor, 27 July 2021. loc.gov. Official government reference summary.
• Loyola University Chicago International Law Review. Article arguing Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People is inconsistent with the Convention on the Rights of the Child. lawecommons.luc.edu. Law-review article.
• Provisional Government of Israel, 1948. Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, Official Gazette Number 1, 14 May 1948. Founding instrument, primary record.