The Israeli President, Reuven Rivlin, has come out in opposition to the Netanyahu Government’s bill enshrining Israel as a “Jewish State”.

Rivlin said Tuesday that the legislation is unnecessary. Rivlin also called for a national referendum, rather than consideration by the Knesset of the bill to define the “Jewish State” in the country’s constitutional Basic Law.

The Netanyahu Cabinet voted 14-6 on Sunday to proceed with the legislation, merging proposals by right-wing members of the Knesset with the Prime Minister’s ideas from May. However, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni — called “flaccid” by the Prime Minister for her opposition to the bill — was able to rally enough backing to delay the vote in the Knesset by a week.

Speaking at a conference in Eilat in southern Israel, Rivlin expressed concern that the bill elevated the “Jewish State” over its democratic identity: “Does promoting this law, not in fact, question the success of the Zionist enterprise in which we are fortunate to live?”

He said the two dimensions should remain “equal”, as they are in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, where the country’s founders “in their great wisdom insisted that the Arab public in Israel [should] not feel like the Jews felt in the Diaspora”.