BICOM

Tens of thousands of Arab-Israelis and Jewish citizens protested against the Nation-State Law at a rally in central Tel Aviv on Saturday.

The demonstration was organised by the Supreme Monitoring Committee and was attended by MKs from the Arab Joint List, Meretz and Zionist Union. It followed a rally the previous week when thousands of Israeli Druze took to the streets in Tel Aviv to denounce the law they say makes them second-class citizens.

Some of the people attending the demonstration on Saturday raised Palestinian flags and held up signs that read “equality” in Arabic and Hebrew. Others were heard chanting: “With blood and fire we will redeem Palestine.”

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted on his Twitter page a video from the demonstration of protesters waving the Palestinian flag and wrote: “There is no better evidence of the Nation-State Law’s necessity.”

At the weekly Cabinet meeting Netanyahu said: “Many of the demonstrators want to abrogate the Law of Return, cancel the national anthem, fold up our flag and cancel Israel as the national state of the Jewish people and turn it—as their spokespersons said—into an Israeli-Palestinian state, and others say: A state of all its citizens. It is for precisely this that we passed the Nation-State Law.”

Former MK and Chairman of the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel, Mohammad Barakeh, said the protesters had the right to wave the Palestinian flag, which he said is the symbol of the “oppressed Palestinian people”. “It is the flag that they are trying to erase from history using the law, but it is the flag of a proud people,” he added.

Druze MK Saleh Saed (Zionist Union), said that there was no justification for raising the Palestinian flag in Tel Aviv, which was “unnecessary defiance that hurts our rightful struggle against the Nation-State Law.”

He said: “There is also no justification for anti-Israeli statements. But I will continue to fight for the rights of people to express opinions different to mine. It is legitimate, it is democracy, it is Israel – the world’s strongest democracy.”