At the memorial service for Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion on Nov. 27, former President Shimon Peres deviated from accepted protocol for such events. In the presence of high-ranking guests and journalists from Israel and abroad, Peres called the nationality bill “an attempt to subjugate the Declaration of Independence to fleeting political needs.” The criticism directly targeted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had also come to honor the memory of the first prime minister. It was no trivial occurrence for a former president to accuse a current prime minister of making short-term capital out of the founding document of their state’s national movement.

On the face of it, Netanyahu’s motives seem clear: the coalition is unstable, elections are on the horizon, polls indicate that the public is veering to the right and the prime minister is stomping on the gas. He wants to make sure that no one passes him from the right on the way to the ballot box. This is a legitimate interpretation, but only partial and not entirely fair. Allegedly, the move aims to siphon power from Israel's radical right by attracting votes to the moderate right. In fact, Netanyahu is working to distance the possibility of establishing a Palestinian state next to Israel.

The crux of the matter lies in comments Netanyahu made at a Nov. 24 meeting of his Likud Party’s representatives in the Knesset. The prime minister pledged that the law would protect Israel as the “nation-state of the Jewish people — and only of the Jewish people.” This message fits with what Netanyahu said in the Knesset plenary March 19. “The past cannot be changed,” he cried from the benches at a session in honor of visiting British Prime Minister David Cameron. “Not the biblical past and not the post-biblical past, and not events that occurred in the Land of Israel in the 19th and 20th centuries.” He was willing to concede that “there has been a Palestinian side since 1943,” but not a year earlier.

Denying the existence of the Palestinian people and dismissing the historic link of the Palestinians to Jaffa and Hebron is a staple in Netanyahu’s close circle. In her book “Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life,” Queen Noor, the widow of Jordan’s King Hussein, writes that in a conversation with Sara Netanyahu in October 1997, the wife of the prime minister claimed that when the Jews arrived in the region, there were no Arabs there at all. According to the woman closest to Netanyahu, the Palestinians “came to look for work when we built cities. Before that, there was nothing.”