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Arab leaders petition Supreme Court over Nation-State Law
Political and community leaders of Israel’s Palestinian-Arab population have filed a petition at the Supreme Court against the Nation-State Law.
The 60-page long petition was filed by Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, on behalf of Palestinian-Arab political leaders of Israel including the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee, the National Committee of Arab Mayors and the Joint (Arab) List party. It is the fourth such appeal against the new law.
The petition calls the Nation-State Law “racist, massively harmful to fundamental human rights” and in contradiction to the laws of occupation outlined in the Fourth Geneva Convention and explicitly rejects the national rights of the Palestinian people.
The petition criticises the law for being based “on the principle of ethnic superiority” and serves to impose a singular “constitutional identity” on all of Israel’s diverse cultural groups. The petitioners state that “there is no single constitution in the world today that declares in its laws that it will act to advance the interests of the dominant group, particularly when it concerns public resources such as land”.
The petition asks for the nullification of the new Basic Law based on its violation of global norms. The first hearing is scheduled for January.
The Meretz party filed a petition against the law at the Supreme Court last week, claiming it violates the 1992 Human Dignity and Liberty Basic Law that guarantees “human dignity” for all citizens of Israel. Immediately after the law was passed, Druze MKs Salah Saad, Akram Hasson and Hamad Amar petitioned the Supreme Court, and a further petition was filed by representatives of the Bedouin communities.
In 2007 the independent Higher Arab Monitoring Committee published a “Vision Document” which described Israel as “the result of a colonialist action initiated by Jewish-Zionist elites in Europe and the West” and called for establishing a government based on “Consensual Democracy” that would allow Arabs citizens of Israel to have a veto on national decisions, cancelling Israel’s self-definition as a Jewish state.