For six years, as far back as when he was a member of Knesset for the Kadima Party, Avi Dichter tried unsuccessfully to advance his Nationality Law, a Basic Law that could be revoked only by special majority that would define Israel as the state of the Jewish people, with all that this implies legally and legislatively. On May 7, Dichter, who is now the Likud chairman of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, registered a personal achievement when the Ministerial Committee on Legislation agreed to approve the law and pass it through the Knesset's legislative process as a government proposal.

The Nationality Law is controversial in Israel because it disrupts the delicate balance between the two main features of the country as both Jewish and democratic. The law provides legal sanction to efforts to bolster Israel's Jewish identity at the expense of other values, such as the equal and respectful treatment of minorities. One example of this is the law's designation of Hebrew as the country's sole official language (contrary to Hebrew and Arabic currently), a fact that ignores the 1.8 million Arabs who make up almost one-quarter of the population. Moreover, Israel’s Declaration of Independence, the founding document establishing Jewish sovereignty over the land of Israel, already validates Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people.

While Dichter celebrated his victory with all sorts of announcements to the press and media interviews, he also discovered that like many of his coalition colleagues before him, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stole the show from him. Netanyahu hasn't been particularly involved over the past few years in getting this law passed, fearing that it could cause him considerable public damage. Now, however, he realized that this display of nationalism will be well-received by the Israeli public, so he placed it at the top of the agenda at the Likud faction meeting on Monday. Dichter was forced to keep his mouth shut. He could only stare while the prime minister denied him the chance to take any credit for this achievement.

Netanyahu is well-known for stealing credit from others. Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon and Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz can both testify to that, as they watched Netanyahu take credit for several of their own achievements over the past few years. In the case of the Nationality Law, however, what Netanyahu did takes the whole idea of stealing credit to a different level. This isn't some construction project intended to ease Israel's housing crisis (Kahlon), nor is it some ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new railroad line (Katz). It is legislation promoting a particular world view, much like other recent right-wing legislation. And so, it is similar to the Muezzin Law, which limited hours of loudspeakers calling to the mosques, and legislation against left-wing organizations, which are designed to intensify nationalist sentiment among the Jewish population.