Netanyahu, Bennett agree on new version of ‘separate communities’ clause

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Education Minister Naftali Bennett reached an agreement on a key change to the nation-state bill that would remove the bill’s controversial clause 7B, which permits certain kinds of small towns to reject potential residents on the basis of ethnicity or religion, and replace it with a new one celebrating “Jewish settlement” in general terms.

The last version read: “The state is permitted to allow a community, including members of a single religion or nationality, to live in separate communal settlement.”

The new version reads: “The state sees in the development of Jewish settlement a national value, and will work to encourage and advance its establishment and growth.”

The former clause has been criticized as allowing under law for discriminatory acceptance policies by Jewish or Arab towns. The latter is already being panned on the right as “toothless” and a retreat from the right’s demand for explicit legal validation of separate communal settlement, and on the left as an even more explicit legal sanctioning of discrimination because of the direct reference to specifically Jewish settlement.