A statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office confirmed vote, saying 22 ministers voted for the change and eight voted against it.
Now that the proposal has passed the Cabinet, it will be taken up by Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, for passage into law.
Netanyahu cited the nation’s Declaration of Independence, which says Israel is both the “national state of the Jewish people” and a democratic state “in which all its citizens — Jewish and non-Jewish — enjoy fully equal rights.”
“Democracy is the soul of Israel and we cannot do without it,” Netanyahu said, according to a statement from his media adviser.
He noted that Israel was the only democracy in the Middle East, and that “there is no other Jewish state in the world.”
“The combination of these two lofty values expresses the foundation of our national life and anyone who would like to join us needs to recognize this,” Netanyahu said.
Netanyahu announced last week he would push now for adding language to Israel’s citizenship and entry law that would declare a new citizen’s allegiance to “a Jewish and democratic state.”
After the prime minister announced the push, but before Sunday’s Cabinet vote, Arab Knesset member Hanin Zoabi said that Israel is “discriminative in its policies and laws against all who are not Zionists.” Zoabi went on to say the law “not only discriminates between Jews and non Jews, it also discriminates between Zionist Jews and non Zionists Jews.”
Another Arab Knesset member Ahmed Tibi, from the Ra’am-Ta’al party, criticized the move as well, saying that “the values of Jewish and Democratic cannot be in the same definition because democracy is the equality of all the citizens.”
“But an ethnic definition as Jewish is the preference of the Jew over that of the Arab and therefore it fixates an inferior status to 20 percent of the population,” Tibi said.
(Read More: CNN)
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