Although they are treated like state bodies, these organizations are obligated through their charters to discriminate in allocating state resources and rights to Jews around the world rather than to Israelis. The aim is to exclude Palestinian citizens from major state benefits.
The JNF bans access for non-Jews to most land in Israel and develops new communities exclusively for Jews, while the Jewish Agency restricts immigration and associated perks to Jews alone.
The bill -- designed to end decades of explicit discrimination against one fifth of Israel's citizenry -- was defeated when all the Jewish parties voted against it. Zuheir Bahloul, the sole Palestinian legislator in Zionist Union, the center-left party once called Labour, was furiously denounced by Jewish colleagues for breaking ranks and voting for the bill.
That was no surprise. The party's previous leader, Isaac Herzog, is the frontrunner to become the next chair of the Jewish Agency. Israel's left still venerates these organizations that promote ethnic privileges -- for Jews -- of a sort once familiar from apartheid South Africa.
Mr Bahloul also found himself in the firing line after he submitted a separate bill requiring that for the first time, the principle of equality be enshrined in all 11 Basic Laws, Israel's equivalent of a constitution. The proposal was roundly defeated, including by his own party.
The third measure was a bill demanding that Israel be reformed from a Jewish state into a state of all its citizens, representing all equally. In a highly irregular move, a committee of Jewish legislators voted to disqualify the bill last week from even being allowed a hearing on the parliament floor.
The parliament's legal adviser, Eyal Yinon, warned that the measure would alter Israel's character by giving Jewish and Palestinian citizens "equal status." Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein called the bill "preposterous." "Any intelligent individual can see it must be blocked immediately," he said.
Law professor Mordechai Kremnitzer, meanwhile, conceded that the bill exposed Israeli democracy as "fundamentally flawed."
These three bills from Palestinian legislators might have redressed some of the inequities contained in nearly 70 Israeli laws that, according to Adalah, a legal rights group, explicitly discriminate based on ethnicity.
Paradoxically, the number of such laws has grown prolifically in recent years as Adalah and others have challenged Jewish privileges in the courts.
The Israeli left and right have joined forces to shore up these threatened racist practices through new legislation -- secure that an intimidated supreme court will not dare revoke the will of parliament.
The reality is that left-wing Israelis -- shown beyond doubt that their state is not the liberal democracy they imagined -- have hurried to join the right in silencing critics and implementing harsher repression.
Palestinian citizens who peacefully protested against the massacre of demonstrators in Gaza by army snipers were assaulted in police custody last month. One arrested civil society leader had his knee broken. There have been barely any objections, even on the left.
Today, Israelis are hunkering down. Boycott activists from abroad are denied entry. Unarmed Palestinian demonstrators have been gunned down in Gaza. And critics inside Israel are silenced or beaten up.
All these responses have the same end in mind: to block anything that might burst the bubble of illusions and threaten Israelis' sense of moral superiority.
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