Mar 14, 2019

Israeli publicists are unlikely to advise their celebrity clients to post thoughts like those TV presenter and model Rotem Sela shared with her 800,000 or so followers: “When will anyone in this government tell the public that this is a country of all its citizens, and all people are born equal. The Arabs are also human beings.”

Sela hit the keyboard after watching a March 9 television interview with Culture Minister Miri Regev on “Meet the Press.” Regev, Sela wrote, “is sitting and explaining to Rina Matzliah that the public needs to beware, because if Benny Gantz is elected, he will have to create a government with the Arabs. Rina Matzliah is silent. And I ask myself: why doesn’t Rina ask her in shock: ‘And what’s the problem with the Arabs???’ Dear God, there are also Arab citizens in this country.”

Wonder Woman Gal Gadot and actress Maya Dagan were quick to fire off messages of support for Sela, even as social media was flooded with predictably furious reactions against Sela and her friends. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu joined in, naturally. “Dear Rotem,” he wrote in an Instagram post designed to set her straight. “An important correction: Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the nation-state law we passed, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people — and not anyone else.” Netanyahu is right. That is what the nationality law that Netanyahu and his government pushed through last year stipulates, along with additional anti-democratic legislation such as a law overriding Supreme Court rulings and another allowing Israel to expropriate private Palestinian land in the West Bank and legalize Israeli settlements built on it.

Netanyahu explained that his Likud party merely sought “to hone the central issue of these elections — it’s either a strong right-wing government led by me, or a weak left-wing government led by Yair Lapid and Gantz, with the support of the Arab parties.” Netanyahu went on to declare that the centrist Blue and White Party led by Lapid and former military chief Gantz will be unable to form a coalition government after the April 9 elections unless they have the support of the Arab parties, threatening, as usual, that such a government would “undermine the security of the state and its citizens.” Polls indicate that Gantz and Lapid will indeed require Arab support to forge a stable majority coalition. The claim that such a government would harm state security and its citizens is obviously a load of incitement and propaganda.

The only senior Jewish politician to express public support for Sela was Tamar Zandberg, chair of the leftist Meretz. Blue and White's leaders are are avoiding the discussion. The Blue and White platform merely states that the nationality law enshrined Israel’s status as the nation-state of the Jewish people, where it has uniquely realized its right to national self-determination. The platform also promises to enshrine in constitutional legislation the principle of equality in the spirit of Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence. The platform document says nothing about inviting Israeli citizens of Arab origin to form an inseparable part of their state.