Summary
The March 22, 2011 amendment to the Budget Foundations Law (1985), popularly called the ‘Nakba Law’, enabling the Minister of Finance to cut state funding to institutions that commemorate Israel’s Independence Day as a day of mourning — in Stateless Citizenship (2013), the fourth of the post-2009 discriminatory laws examined, targeting Palestinian citizens’ collective memory (Stateless Citizenship (2013), PDF p.73-74).
Details
- The law enables the Minister of Finance to reduce or remove state funding to an organization or institution if it sponsors or advocates an initiative that challenges the existence of Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state,” or if it recognizes “Israel’s Independence Day or the day on which the state was established as a day of mourning” (PDF p.73, citing Adalah, The Inequality Report, 40).
- It outlaws the traditional marking of Israel’s official Independence Day, May 14, 1948, as a national day of mourning for the loss of their homeland and the displacement of their people; the original draft prohibited any and all commemoration of the Nakba, while the approved draft targets state-funded institutions — schools, research centres, civil society organizations and political groups — with a fine of up to ten times the funds used for the commemoration (PDF p.73).
- Human rights groups petitioned the High Court to overturn it (Jonathan Lis, Haaretz, May 4, 2011); MK Haneen Zoabi called it “a kind of law to control our memory, to control our collective memory” (PDF p.74, footnote 13).
- Molavi’s main text argues: “An integral part of the Palestinian narrative, not to mention a documented historical fact, memorialization of the experience of the Nakba is vital for the preservation of their cultural and national ties,” and that the law infringes on the rights and freedom of opinion and expression of Palestinian citizens (PDF p.74). This is Molavi’s argument, not Gerald Steinberg’s; Steinberg’s Haaretz piece is footnote 14, attached to Adalah’s statement on the NGO funding law (PDF p.74-75), and opens “All governments have interests and use power to pursue those goals.”
- Former Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman of Yisrael Beiteinu, the party that sponsored the bill, said “there is no other normal country that funds events comparing its establishment to a catastrophe” — for Lieberman, Molavi notes in the main text, the Nakba is merely being compared to Independence Day, not understood as a direct and simultaneous effect of the state’s establishment (PDF p.74; the Lieberman quotation carries footnote 13, Jonathan Lis, Haaretz, May 4, 2011).
Related pages
Stateless Citizenship (2013), Nakba, Memoricide, Haneen Zoabi, Yisrael Beiteinu