This proposed law that has been the subject of other diaries was dealt a serious setback:
An Israeli government committee has rejected a draft bill that would have required Israelis to take an oath of loyalty.
http://www.haaretz.com/...
The Israel Our Home party had made this loyalty oath a major part of its election campaign which let it it getting 15 Knesset seats out of 120. Israel Our Home's campaign fanned the flames of resentment against religious Israelis and against non-Jewish Israeli citizens. The resemblance of this to the kind of rhetoric we hear from the Rethugs in the US on a regular basis was chilling: That only certain types of ideologies/beliefs/values are acceptable in the society. The apparent defeat of the proposed loyalty oath shows that even in this right wing Israeli government there might be an understanding that democracy is not automatically threatened by differing views, and that loyalty oaths are not compatible with Israel being a Jewish and Democratic state.
Yet the article itself, from a newspaper that is associated with the Israeli Left, itself contains an inflammatory inaccuracy:
The bill by Lieberman's secular nationalist party was aimed mostly at Israel's Arab citizens - some 20 per cent of Israel's population - and also at the ultra-Orthodox population. Neither group does the military service, which is mandatory for most Israelis.
In fact, there is an "ultra-Orthodox" (I hate the term; they are no more or less Orthodox than I am) unit in the Israel Defense Force called Nachal Charedi, and many Arab citizens of Israel also serve in the IDF, including most Druze men (who are subject to the military draft) and some Muslims (mostly Bedouin) and Christians.
Charedi Jews who have religious objections to a secular Jewish state, and Israel's Arab citizens who face discrimination to this very day, should not be required to prove that they are not traitors! One of the essentials of a free society is that we don't criminalize thought. And perhaps getting rid of the pervasive discrimination might convince some of the minorities who clearly targeted by this proposed loyalty oath that they could be full partners in Israeli society?
I don't know that I would call the defeat of the loyalty oath a step forward, maybe just an avoidance of a step backward. But it is still good news.
UPDATE!
The misleading and inflammatory statement mentioned above has disappeared from the online version of the story. :)