"The law, which was passed in March 2011, allows small communities to set up admissions committees to screen potential new members based on criteria laid down in the community’s bylaws. Such committees have been standard practice in small communities for decades, but until this law was passed, they had no legal basis. Several human rights organizations, including Adalah and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, argued that the law would allow these communities to reject homosexuals, people with disabilities, Arabs or anyone else who differed from the community’s social norm. ..Though the law explicitly prohibits discrimination against members of other social groups, it permits the admissions committees to reject candidates on such vague grounds as “unsuitability to the community’s social life” or its “social-cultural fabric” or to “unique characteristics of the community as defined in its bylaws.”
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So now they can say, we aren't discriminating against Arabs. We are just rejecting people who are "unsuitable to the community's social life or socio-cultural fabric, or the the unique characteristics of the community as defined in its bylaws."
In the US HOAs enforced race restrictive covenants for decades. Then when civil rights statutes made that illegal, more sophisticated ways of creating one-race, one-class communities were devised. These days, the increasing inequality of wealth and income does most of the work.
There's more on this policy here.
There's more on this policy here.
