having fought in Israel's wars for generations, the bill relegated them to second-class status. According to Dr. Rami Zeedan, who is himself an Israeli Druze, the main problem in the law in the eyes of the Israeli Druze is ignoring the definition of "Israeli" as the nation of the state, while the Druze hold this as integral part of their social self- identification. The Assembly of Catholic Ordinaries of the Holy Land asked the government to rescind the law. When the law passed, Israeli Arab parliamentary members of the Joint List ripped up copies of the bill and shouted, “Apartheid,” on the floor of the Knesset. Ayman Odeh, the then leader of a coalition of primarily Arab parties in opposition, said in a statement that Israel had “passed a law of Jewish supremacy and told us that we will always be second-class citizens”. Mass protests were held in Tel Aviv following the law, which critics labelled as racist towards the country's Arabs. In particular, many Arabs were angered by the law's downgrading of Arabic from an official language to one with an ambiguous "special status". Palestinians, liberal American Jews, and many Israelis on the left denounced the law as racist and undemocratic, with Yohanan Plesner, the head of the non-partisan Israel Democracy Institute, calling the new law “jingoistic and divisive” and an “unnecessary embarrassment to Israel”. Likud MK Benny Begin, son of the party's co-founder Menachem Begin, expressed his concern about the direction of his party; in his opinion, it is moving a little further away from human rights. The Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel said that the law "contains key elements of apartheid", which is not only immoral, but absolutely prohibited under international law". Adalah Director Hassan Jabareen said that the law would make Israel an exclusively Jewish country, which "made discrimination a constitutional value and made its attachment to favouring Jewish supremacy the reason for its institutions". Shimon Stein and Moshe Zimmermann commented that the new law calls into question the equality of Arabs living in Israel concerning the loss of Arabic's status as an official language, also claiming that "only" the country's Jewish settlements and Jewish immigration are considered fundamental values. They claimed that the first clause, which states, "The land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people, in which the State of Israel was established", opens up a loophole