Many wondered why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is quick to tweet in anger against any disrespect of Jews, was struck dumb after three Israeli Arabs were brutally beaten by a group of Jews Aug. 23 simply because they were Arabs. This was not negligence on his part, nor a lapse in judgment. The prime minister was true to his worldview, a view he expressed less than a week later at a ceremony naming Israel’s nuclear facility in the Negev Desert after the late President Shimon Peres. “The weak are collapsing, slaughtered, erased from history; and the strong, for better or for worse, are the ones who survive. The strong are respected, the strong enter into alliances … ,” Netanyahu said. The Arab doctor and his two friends who were roughed up were apparently the weak, whereas the gang of fascists who beat them were the strong, “for better or worse,” as Netanyahu put it.

On Sept. 4, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked bolstered Netanyahu’s Darwinist perspective. Speaking at an Israel Bar Association event, she threatened “a legal and political earthquake” should the Supreme Court challenge the country’s constitutional-level basic laws. Shaked was clearly referring to the top court’s deliberations in petitions against the controversial Nationality Law. Such a ruling, she added for good measure, would be “a regime earthquake.” The law, adopted in July, enshrines Israel’s status solely as the nation-state of the Jewish people. “As one who believes in democracy with all her heart, I will not concede the place of the nation,” she said in winding up her speech. “I won't concede its representative's place. I will not give up democracy, and the Knesset of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth."

With only a slim majority, this same Knesset tarnished Israel’s compendium of basic laws with legislation that strips 20% of the country’s population (Israeli Arabs) of their affinity for their homeland and only encourages the establishment of Jewish communities. It was a member of this same legislature, Moti Yogev of Shaked’s HaBayit HaYehudi party, who shouted at elected Arab lawmakers, “This is not your country.” He said that at a chance meeting at the airport this week as the Arab lawmakers headed to Brussels, making their way to seek redress from parliaments and law courts across the sea. This very same Yogev was the one who in 2015 urged the crushing of the Supreme Court with a bulldozer.

Shaked’s declared intent to strip the Supreme Court of authority to overturn a basic law, based on an interpretation of democracy as a system in which the winner takes all, leaves Israel’s Arab minorities with two options. One is to resign themselves to their new official status as second-class citizens; the other is to mobilize international law and the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights on their behalf. “Our visit to Brussels is a type of self-defense against the abuse directed by Netanyahu and his government at our public,” Joint List Knesset member Jamal Zahalka told Al-Monitor shortly after he and his fellow lawmakers met Sept. 4 with the European Union’s foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini.