Danny Danon, a member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, is proposing that all Israeli citizens – especially the 1.4 million Palestinian citizens of Israel – should be forced to declare an oath of loyalty to the political ideology of Zionism as a condition for obtaining an ID card.

Danon, a member of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, posted this message on his Facebook page:

I thought about the wording for the loyalty declaration bill: “I hereby declare my loyalty to the State of Israel as a Jewish Zionist and democratic state, and solemnly swear to maintain it values and not to engage in illegal acts against it or against any of its institutions.” I would love to hear your opinions.

Adherence to Zionist ideology a condition for obtaining an ID card

Meanwhile the right-wing website IsraelNationalNews.com quoted Danon explaining the purpose of his bill:

Loyalty to the State is something which should be obvious, but I’m afraid that in the current situation in the Arab sector loyalty has become rare, and in order to preserve this important value we’ll have to make it a condition that ID cards will be given in exchange for a declaration of loyalty to Israel.

The “Arab sector” refers to 1.4 million Palestinians who are survivors and descendants of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, who are nominally citizens of Israel but face extreme discrimination and diminished rights because they are non-Jews.

Danon’s bill is a thinly-veiled attempt to strip indigenous Palestinians forced to live under a state imposed on them by war and conquest of citizenship, quite possibly as a prelude to expelling them to ensure that Israel remains “Jewish.” After all, what kind of “democracy” can Israel be if it forces citizens to swear allegiance to particular political ideology – Zionism – which negates the rights of those citizens and expresses the state’s racial hatred toward them and intolerance of their very existence?