In 2018, the nature of Israel as a state received further elaboration in law adopted by Israel’s Knesset titled Israel –The Nation State of the Jewish People. This law declared Israel to be “the nation state of the Jewish People.” The law was designated as a “basic law,” meaning that it held constitutional rank. The law declared “the development of Jewish settlement as a national value.” The law was criticized for excluding Israel’s Arab population from the country’s political constituency by declaring that Israel was the nation state of the Jewish people only. The law was also criticized for declaring settlement as a “national value,” since settlement in occupied territory is prohibited by international humanitarian law.

Chapter 6 addresses Israeli legislative policy concerning Jewish law and identity. Like the Zionist movement did early on, Israel’s national governing and judicial institutions refused until the 1980s to allow questions of identity and culture to impinge on political and legal deliberations. The Knesset and the Ministry of Justice did not base Israel’s laws on Jewish law. It was not that they were alienated from Jewish heritage and its legal element; rather they realized that these could not really be translated into laws, simply because there was no consensus on what constituted Jewish culture, and what were the proper ways to constitute a Hebrew-Israeli legal system on its basis. Even those who sought with all their might to base Israeli law on Jewish heritage did not know how to do so in practical terms. Once again, it was a meta-cultural decision to circumvent such cultural conflict