Press Release

Partners for Progressive Israel Vigorously Opposes Israel’s Nation-State Law

• Partners for Progressive Israel, a member of the American Zionist Movement and affiliated with the World Zionist Organization, expresses its absolute opposition to the ‘Nation-State Law’, recently enacted by the Israeli government.
• The main purpose of the law is to provide the legal foundation for discrimination against non-Jewish Israeli citizens.
• The law directly contradicts the universalist principles expressed in the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

• The law also aims to exploit the Jewish Diaspora in order to bolster the State’s claim to represent the Jewish People. We in the Diaspora support Israel but reject this claim. We assert that many of Israel’s current policies, most notably the Occupation, are repugnant to Jewish values historically and as they are practiced around the world.
• In expressing our opposition, we join with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, Deputy Attorney-General Raz Nizri, Former Shin Bet Head Ami Ayalon, and numerous Jewish and non-Jewish Members of Knesset including Tzipi Livni, leader of the Knesset Opposition and Tamar Zandberg, Leader of the Meretz party, and many other leading Israeli citizens who have spoken out against the law. The law has garnered opposition from many mainstream American Jewish organiza¬tions, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Union for Reform Judaism.
• We call upon the Knesset to rescind this anti-democratic and anti-Jewish law and, in its place, affirm the principles of democracy and equal civil rights for all citizens of the State of Israel.