After a tumultuous year of failed peace talks with the Palestinians, a grueling war with militants in the Gaza Strip, continuing terrorist attacks and swelling criticism in Europe and the United States, Israel, still an adolescent nation, is going through something of an identity crisis.

“We believe this is the essence of what this state is about — real equality and having Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people — but more and more Israelis are asking themselves whether this combination is really an option,” said Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute. “We have constitutional principles, but we don’t have a constitution, so the basic character of the state is not really secured.”

Drafts of the so-called nationality bills would remove Arabic as an official language alongside Hebrew, increase the influence of Jewish law, reduce the power of the Supreme Court, and entrench the automatic citizenship of Jews worldwide and Jewish symbols of the state. The proposals, put off until the outcome of the parliamentary elections next year, do not mention the word “equality” or provide rights for non-Jews, though they would preserve voting rights for all citizens.

As the new legislation emphasizes, Israel would aspire to be not an Israeli homeland but one for all Jews, which Palestinian citizens find particularly offensive because their relatives are refugees who fled or were expelled in 1948. Few would dispute that, say, France can be both a French homeland and a democracy with non-French citizens, but Israel is a different case, not least because its Arab and Druse minorities are indigenous, not immigrant.

Israelis from across the political spectrum and leaders of the Jewish diaspora have denounced the proposals as superfluous, redundant, embarrassing, dangerous and ill timed. Palestinians within Israel and outside it are also virulently opposed, but they say it unmasks what they call a facade of a democracy that has long been discriminatory.