The discriminatory laws that do not discriminate

[Little Tich]

1. Yet another piece of hasbara aimed at a "low-level information" audience.

It's only in hasbaraland that an organization that promotes equal civil rights for all Israelis can be considered to be trying to "nullify Israel as a Jewish state". The core of Adalah's advocacy is to promote equal rights for all Israeli citizens, not to give Palestinian refugees the right of return.

Here's a list of the "nefarious" activities Adalah currently is involved in:

Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel
Source: Wikipedia
(snip)

Legal advocacy
Many of Adalah's cases involve first-time legal challenges and affect Arab citizens as a collective group. Adalah’s legal advocacy focuses on appealing to the Israeli Supreme Court. Between 1996-2000, it brought over twenty cases before the court dealing with equality for Arab citizens, including language rights cases, budgets of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, health and education in the unrecognized Arab Bedouin villages in Israel.

Adalah’s legal department is divided into three units: Land and Planning; Economic, Social, and Cultural; and Civil and Political (including Criminal Justice and the Occupied Palestinian Territory).

Land and planning rights
Adalah is challenging discriminatory land and planning laws and policies in a wide range of fields. Its litigation efforts include petitioning the courts and planning committees against forced evictions and home demolitions in the Naqab; challenging the policies of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) for making land available only to Jews; challenging the state's refusal to recognize or provide services to Arab villages and neighborhoods; objecting to planning decisions which prioritize Jewish settlements over Arab towns; and seeking to overturn policies which discriminate against Arabs in the provision of mortgages and housing assistance.

Economic, social and cultural rights
Some of Adalah's main litigation includes: ensuring that the state implements a 2006 Supreme Court decision which declared that the 'National Priority Area' discriminates against Arab citizens; seeking to secure basic social services – such as water, electricity, schools, roads, and mother and child health clinics – in the Arab Bedouin unrecognized villages; challenging regulations which prohibit Arab citizens from opening their stores on Saturday (Sabbath); and achieving equal treatment for the Arabic language on road signs and in governmental operations, as befits its status official status.

Civil and political rights
Adalah's litigation activities include ensuring citizens' right to peaceful protest, including the representation of demonstrators; defending Arab MKs in political criminal cases; challenging laws which violate freedom of expression, including laws that restrict Nakba commemoration; and demanding investigations and accountability when the state employs violence against its own citizens, as it did in October 2000 with the killing of 13 Arab protesters.

Occupied Palestinian Territory
Adalah's work focuses on Gaza, occupied East Jerusalem and the rights of prisoners and detainees. Adalah monitors rights abuses in the OPT, both during and outside of military offensives, and submits impact litigation cases to expose and challenge these practices. Adalah has argued cases dealing with the denial of tort compensation to Palestinians harmed by Israeli military operations, demanding investigations into home demolitions; fighting against techniques of collective punishment imposed against the civilian population; and seeking an end to inhumane detention conditions at Israeli prisons.

Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adalah_%E2%80%93_The_Legal_Center_for_Arab_Minority_Rights_in_Israel

It's pretty clear that the writer of the OP doesn't know the difference between a democratic ethnocracy and a "normal" democracy. In all other democracies, like Germany for example, all citizens have the same rights and there are no laws giving preference to ethnic Germans, directly or indirectly. In the nation-state of the German people, all citizens are Germans, but in the nation-state of the Jews, not all citizens are Jewish - quite a fundamental difference, actually. The author of the OP makes the following argument:

A basic underlying presumption used to condemn 21 of the 57 laws, is that any enactment defining or promoting Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people discriminates against Arab citizens of Israel (e.g., the flag law and the law to support Yad Ben Zvi, a prominent institution promoting Zionist study and values). But this flawed premise would delegitimize the vast majority of the world’s democracies, which are also nation states – that is, states established by and for a predominant ethnic or religious majority. As I pointed out in a Wall Street Journal article explaining the proposed Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, “Most of the more than 60 democracies are built on the ethnic identity of a predominant group, which molds the character of the state while affording minorities full civil and religious rights. In this regard the Jewish state of Israel is a typical democratic country.”

Ethnic discrimination is still ethnic discrimination when it's done to promote the ethnic identity of the predominant group, sorry. The closest comparison to another country with a similar ethnic democratic system like Israel would be the American South during the Jim Crow era, where African-Americans were considered second-class citizens and were legally discriminated against.

Israel has a number of laws that differentiate between Jewish citizens and non-Jewish citizens, which give preferential treatment to Jewish citizens. They even have different forms of citizenship; all and only Jewish Israelis derive their citizenship from the Law of Return, while all other Israelis are considered naturalized citizens.

Adalah has a list of discriminatory laws, and from my understanding, every single one of them would be considered unconstitutional in the US or in contravention with the European Convention on Human Rights in the EU. The Adalah list can be found here:

The Discriminatory Laws Database
Source: Adalah, 30/05/2012
http://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/7771

The OP lists a number foreign donors to Adalah, which is completely in line with the current attempts among right-wingers to expose human rights NGOs as "foreign moles".

Finally, as an example of how Israel discriminates against Arabs in Israel, here's a story about how Israel rewards Arab citizens who serve in the IDF:

Palestinian mom of Israeli soldier in 21-year fight for citizenship
Source: Times of Israel, August 11, 2016

West Bank woman married an Israeli Arab and moved here decades ago; she is now ill but ineligible for medical treatment

A Palestinian woman whose late husband was an Israeli citizen and whose son serves in the Israel Defense Forces has been denied Israeli citizenship for the past 21 years.

According to a report by Channel 2 TV on Wednesday, the woman — who was not identified — was originally from the West Bank city of Jenin and moved to Israel after marrying an Arab Israeli man from Haifa over two decades ago. Her husband has since died and she is ill, but remains unable to get medical insurance or work in Israel because she is not a citizen.

Read more: http://www.timesofisrael.com/palestinian-mom-of-israeli-soldier-in-21-year-fight-for-citizenship/