Many Israeli officials were certainly happy to read the latest US State Department report. Their satisfaction didn't stem from any compliment offered to Israel in the 2019 Country Report on Human Rights Practices, issued March 11. Rather, the officials were pleased to discover a change of language. For the first time in these annual reports, East Jerusalem Palestinians were defined as “non-Israeli residents” instead of “Palestinians.”

All in all, this recent report is quite gloomy. It refers, among other things, to the recently enacted Nationality Law (on Israel’s Jewish nature), which “changed Arabic from an official language to a language with a 'special status,'” and emphasizing that the law recognizes only the Jewish people as having a national right to self-determination. Another point is that the law calls for “promotion of ‘Jewish settlement’ within Israel,” ignoring the right of non-Jews to settle.

The report stresses that “Arab Christians and Muslims, Druze and Ethiopian citizens faced persistent institutional and social discrimination.” There are many cited examples, including an October incident in which Israeli soldiers attacked individual Bedouins at a gas station where the soldiers received only minor sentences for their deeds. The report also refers to “Price Tag’’ vandalism acts by extreme rightist-religious groups of young Jews, most of them from settlements in the West Bank, targeting Muslim and Christian holy sites.

In the context of labor conditions in Israel, the report says that Palestinian laborers continued to suffer from abuses and labor rights abuses as a result of a lack of adequate government oversight and monitoring.