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-- banned Jews from holding professional jobs to exclude them from education, politics and industry;
-- segregated Jews from Aryans; and
-- effectively denied Jews all rights, in what became a prelude to genocide, what Palestinians (and to a lesser degree Israeli Arabs) have incrementally endured for decades by racist laws, persecution, land theft, dispossession, exclusion, isolation, mass imprisonment, torture, targeted assassinations, violence, and slaughter.
Israel's direction mirror's 1930s Germany, especially under a Netanyahu/Lieberman/Shas coalition and most extremist ever Knesset, flouting democratic freedoms one law or edict at a time. Lieberman and other extremists called the new measure a first step to loyalty legislation they want enacted as well as other anti-democratic laws to be considered in the Knesset's winter session. A forthcoming article addresses them.
On October 11, Haaretz writer Carlo Strenger headlined, "Stranger than Fiction/Loyalty oath is not about Arabs, it's about hatred of liberal values," calling the measure "bad, harmful and useless," Labor Party Minister Isaac Herzog warning that it moves incrementally toward fascism.
Legal expert Mordechai Kremnitzer said it accomplishes nothing except to make Israeli Arabs feel unwanted. Others stressed Israel's deteriorating image in world opinion. Supporters, however, see the measure as a step "toward ensuring loyalty to the state by legislation," singling out Arab citizens "whom Avigdor Lieberman is alienating and insulting almost every day, and Palestinians who want to gain Israeli citizenship."
Others (including MKs Benny Begin and Dan Meridor) noted the "strange alliance" between Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel is our home) secular ultranationalists and Shas, the major ultra-Orthodox party. Why are they cooperating and allied with other hard right parties? Perhaps it's less fear of Israel's enemies and more about:
"a visceral hatred for the Western values and the liberal ethos. They all hate freedom; they all hate the idea of critical, open discourse, in which ideas are discussed according to their merit. They keep criticizing what they see as the liberal bias of the media and academia, and they have sustained attempts to curtail freedom at the universities."
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