You bought a house with price of $250,000. Your LTV (loan-to-value.docx

You bought a house with price of $250,000. Your LTV (loan-to-
value ratio) is 80%. You choose the 30-year mortgage with
interest rate 6%. Assuming the total transaction cost is $10,000.
Questions (5 points for each question)
1. What is your loan amount? What is your monthly payment?
What will be the loan balance at the end of nine years?
2. What is the effective borrowing cost if the loan will be
prepaid at the end of nine years?
3. In the monthly payment, how much you pay for the principle
and how much you pay for the interest in the 1st and the 2nd
month?
4. What will be your interest payments for the first 5 years (year
1 to year 5) and the last 5 years (year 26 to year 30)?
5. What is your annual percentage rate (APR)?
Problem 2 [25 points]:
You buy a house of $450,000 today. You put a down payment of
20% and borrow a fixed-rate mortgage of $360,000 with interest
rate of 4% and 15 years. After 3 years, your house is
appreciated to the value of $550,000 and market interest rate
goes up to 6.5%. How much money will you make in book after
3 years?
Is Israel Democratic? Substance and Semantics in the “Ethnic
Democracy” Debate
Dowty, Alan, 1940-
Israel Studies, Volume 4, Number 2, Fall 1999, pp. 1-15
(Article)

Published by Indiana University Press
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1
Alan Dowty
Is Israel Democratic?
Substance and Semantics in the
“Ethnic Democracy” Debate
ASTRONOMERS RECENTLY DEALT WITH THE weighty
question of whether
to continue classifying Pluto as a “planet” or to redeWne it as a
“trans-
Neptunian object.” This debate did not involve disagreement
over the
actual nature of Pluto itself; all agreed that it was smaller than
the eight
other planets, that it was composed mainly of ice, and that it
had an unusual
elliptical orbit. The question was whether to deWne the concept
of “planet”
elastically enough to include such an object, while still
excluding numerous
other objects that also orbit the sun. For the astronomers
involved, this was

largely arbitrary, since nothing inherent to the term “planet”
(original
meaning: “a wanderer”) furnished operational guidelines for
such distinc-
tions.
Similarly, there is remarkably little disagreement over the
actual sub-
stance of Israeli politics in the recent debate over “ethnic
democracy” in the
pages of Israel Studies.1 Sammy Smooha classiWes Israel in the
historically-
rare category of “ethnic democracy”; As’ad Ghanem, Nadim
Rouhana, and
Oren Yiftachel challenge the “democracy” component of that
taxonomy
and suggest instead the label of “ethnocracy,” a somewhat less
rare but still
infrequent species; Ruth Gavison argues for moving the debate
into explicit
rather than submerged normative terms, and concludes that
there is no
necessary conceptual inconsistency between a state being
Jewish and its
being a democracy. All, however, describe the actual situation
of non-Jews
in Israel, in law and in practice, in similar terms. In Smooha’s
words,
“minorities are treated as second-class citizens, feared as a
threat, excluded
from the national power structure, and placed under some
control,” while
“at the same time [they] are allowed to conduct a democratic
and peaceful
struggle that yields incremental improvement in their status.”2

The question of whether this disqualiWes Israel as a democracy
obvi-
2 • israel studies, volume 4, number 2
ously depends on the deWnition of democracy that is used. The
term “de-
mocracy,” like the term “planet,” does not have an inherent and
precise
delimitation that is Wxed for all time and is intuitively obvious
in its appli-
cation to speciWc cases. Standard dictionary deWnitions, such
as “govern-
ment by the people” or “majority rule,” do not take us very far.
Political
scientists must operationalize the concept for it to be useful
empirically, and
such deWnitions will always be arbitrary to some extent. We
usually ask only
that the analyst be clear about the deWnition being used in
order to avoid
superXuous debate over semantics—though it is useful to
remember that
deWnitions deviating widely from conventional usage, no
matter how pre-
cise, are still likely to invite misunderstanding.
Gavison points out that the use of a label loaded with positive
and
negative connotations—such as “democracy”—has especially
serious conse-
quences. This is further reason to be as precise as possible in
deWning such
concepts operationally. Gavison then deals with these

consequences on a
political and normative level. I agree that the normative aspects
of this issue
should be made explicit, and I Wnd her discussion of them
illuminating. The
focus here, however, will return to what she terms the
“scholarly” or “con-
ceptual” level, dealing with grubby issues of deWnition and
methodology.
DEFINING DEMOCRACY
Ghanem, Rouhana, and Yiftachel do begin with a clear
deWnition of democ-
racy:
We perceive [democracy] as a system of government based on
several key
principles: (a) equal and inclusive citizenship and civil rights,
(b) popular
sovereignty and universal suVrage; (c) protection of minorities;
and (d) peri-
odic, universal and free elections.3
To this the authors later add a de facto Wfth requirement: a
democracy must
have clear borders. This is because it must have a “demos,”
deWned in ancient
Greece as “an inclusive body of empowered citizens within a
given terri-
tory.” This clearly implies, they argue, clear and permanent
borders: “the
state should belong to all its citizens and only to those
citizens.”4
Ghanem, Rouhana, and Yiftachel have, therefore, supplied us

with
fairly precise and measurable criteria for diVerentiating
between a “democ-
racy” and a “non-democracy.” Fair enough. By this deWnition it
is also clear
Is Israel Democratic? • 3
that they have a very strong case for Xunking Israel. It is
diYcult to argue
(and so far no participant in this debate has argued) that
Palestinian Arabs
in Israel enjoy full equality with Jews either de jure (that is, in
terms of
constitutional and legal structures) or de facto.5 As a minority,
they are
systematically excluded from important areas of Israeli life. The
lack of clear
borders is expressed in the citizenship extended to Jewish
settlers (but not
Palestinians) living beyond the Green Line and in the
ambiguous relation-
ship of Israel to Jewish diasporas around the world. The state of
Israel is
established explicitly on an ethnic basis, and, by the above
criteria, an ethnic
democracy is, indeed, a contradiction in terms (like “hot ice,” as
the authors
put it).
Political scientists working empirically on democracy have
generally
employed much less unforgiving criteria. Some even challenge
the validity

of dealing with political democracy as a dichotomous, either-or,
concept: “I
believe that we unnecessarily compromise the concept of
political democ-
racy by considering it a dichotomous phenomenon. This leads to
a crude
lumping of countries into the same category when in reality
they have very
diVerent degrees of political democracy.”6 And those who have
chosen to
dichotomize democracies and non-democracies have proceeded
more cau-
tiously.
Dankwart Rustow, in 1967, applied the following four criteria:
1. The free Xow of information and the free expression of
opinion.
2. The competition of party programs and candidates for
electoral ap-
proval.
3. The control of the government by elected representatives.
4. Either (a) periodic changes in the composition of the ruling
majority
or (b) representation of all major electoral trends within it.
Application of these criteria to contemporary states led to a list
of 31 democ-
racies, Israel being one of them.7
In 1971, Robert Dahl suggested a set of eight requirements for
democ-
racy (which he termed “polyarchy” in order “to maintain the
distinction
between democracy as an ideal system and the institutional
arrangements

that have come to be regarded as a kind of imperfect
approximation of an
ideal”):
1. Freedom to form and join organizations.
2. Freedom of expression.
3. Right to vote.
4. Eligibility for public oYce.
5. Right of political leaders to compete for support and votes.
6. Alternative sources of information.
7. Free and fair elections.
8. Institutions for making government policies depend on votes
and
other expressions of preference.
Consequently Dahl classiWed 26 states, circa 1969, as “fully
inclusive poly-
archies,” Israel being one of them.8
G. Bingham Powell established Wve criteria for democracy in
1982:
1. The legitimacy of the government rests on a claim to
represent the
desires of its citizens.
2. The organized arrangement that regulates this bargain of
legitimacy is
the competitive political election.
3. Most adults can participate in the electoral process, both as
voters and

as candidates for important political oYce.
4. Citizens’ votes are secret and not coerced.
5. Citizens and leaders enjoy basic freedom of speech, press,
assembly,
and organization.
Powell concluded that 20 nations had continuous democratic
regimes from
1958 to 1976, Israel being one of them.9
Finally, Arend Lijphart, in 1984 and 1994, using Dahl’s criteria,
identi-
Wed 23 nations that had been continuously democratic since the
immediate
post-World II period—Israel being one of them.10
None of these operational deWnitions, it will be noted, required
equal-
ity of rights, non-exclusion of minorities, or clear and
unambiguous bor-
ders. All of them also recognized that, in Lijphart’s words,
“democratic
regimes are characterized not by perfect responsiveness but by a
high degree
of it.”11 Of course, Ghanem, Rouhana, and Yiftachel are free to
argue that a
deWnition of democracy ought to include minority rights, and to
so deWne it
themselves. Nominalists such as myself have no problem with
that so long
as it is made clear and explicit, and so long as it is applied
consistently to all states.
But the authors need to bear in mind that this usage does diVer
from that
common in political science, which may force them to remind

the reader
repeatedly of their higher standard (or Wnd another label for it).
It also
diVers signiWcantly, it should be added, from what the person
in the street
generally understands by “democracy.” One indication of this is
a recent
survey of Palestinians in which 75 percent rated the status of
democracy and
human rights in Israel as either “Good” or “Very Good,” against
67 percent
for the United States, 55 percent for France, and 32 percent for
the Palestin-
ian Authority.12
HOW DIFFERENT IS ISRAEL?
THE NEED FOR COMPARISON
How would other nations rank by the criteria that Ghanem,
Rouhana, and
Yiftachel propose? If we all agree that Israel is to be judged as
other coun-
tries are judged, a comparative perspective becomes necessary.
Such prob-
lems as minority rights in a conXict situation, security pressures
on civil
liberties, the role of religion in politics, and overwhelming
pressures on
available resources can be fully evaluated only by comparing
the Israeli case
to others, similar and dissimilar.13 The authors explicitly
recognize that

democratic/non-democratic governments exist on a continuum
and that
there is no perfect democracy, which certainly invites
comparison. (I also
understand informally that they are in fact studying other
“ethnocracies,”
though the subset of cases they Wnd comparable—Estonia,
Serbia, Malay-
sia, Sri Lanka—seems very limited.)
The lack of such comparison in the article at hand, however,
tends to
create the impression that Israel is being measured against an
ideal standard,
making any serious defect grounds for rejecting its democratic
credentials.
It is only fair to ask whether other states pass this test. Can any
nation with
ethnic problems—meaning most nations in the world today—
pass muster
regarding equality and non-exclusion of minorities in law and in
practice?
Surely the United States, with its glaring racial inequities,
would have to be
classiWed as “non-democratic” if this standard is applied
stringently.
Ghanem, Rouhana, and Yiftachel do provide grounds for
diVerentiat-
ing Israel from “truly” democratic states when they stress the
degree to
which Israeli violation of equal rights is anchored in law. While
all or most
states may fall short in practice, the authors stress the formal
structures that
legitimize this discrimination in Israel: the Law of Return and

other legis-
lation privileging Jews and Jewish values, quasi-governmental
bodies such
as the Jewish Agency or the Jewish National Fund that exclude
non-Jews,
etc.14 It might be argued that other democracies enshrine
equality and non-
exclusion at least formally, whatever their shortcomings in
practice, but that
Israel does not do even this.
Of course, Ghanem, Rouhana, and Yiftachel do not in fact limit
their
critique of Israel to formal structures. They mix law and
practice together—
and they are perfectly correct in doing so, since both must be
considered.
But even putting this aside, there are other problems with an
exclusive focus
on formal structures. In the Wrst place, it is not clear that even
by this criteria
most presumed democracies are free of sin. Several years ago,
my state
legislature decreed that henceforth the oYcial language of
Indiana was to be
English; admittedly this had little if any practical impact, but
were I a native
Spanish-speaker I would see this, quite correctly, as an insult
and even as a
discriminatory act. It certainly is not an ethnically- and
culturally-neutral

law. Many states in the modern world have adopted policies to
“protect”
their cultures against alien inXuences; are they beyond the pale?
But most importantly, actual practice is surely at least as
important, if
not more important, than oYcial structures. Judged by its oYcial
constitu-
tion and laws, the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin was one of
the most
democratic polities in human history. An analysis limited to
formal struc-
tures would be very uninstructive in most cases, like a furniture
inventory
that says nothing about a family that slouches in its chairs and
snores in its
beds. An oYcial apologist for Israel might even conceivably
make the
argument that Israel is simply being less hypocritical than other
states by
matching its formal structure to what it actually does.15
Looking at both law and practice, any comparison must begin
with a
recognition of the general tenuousness of democracy.
Democracy is a rela-
tively recent and still far-from-universal human achievement;
by Lijphart’s
criteria, there were no democracies at all until the early
twentieth century
(because women did not have the vote), and only 23 states have
been
continuously democratic since the immediate post-World War II
period. All
of these are relatively well-developed, prosperous nations; all
but Israel,

India, Costa Rica, and Japan are in Western Europe, North
America, or the
British Commonwealth.16
Israel often appears in the literature as one of the major case
studies of
democracy in a deeply-divided society. Ethnic and religious
cleavages clearly
make the achievement of democracy more diYcult; analysts
point to a
strong correlation between homogeneity and political
democracy.17 Gener-
ally, only a handful of states with deep and numerically
signiWcant ethnic
divisions have maintained stable democracies by standard
criteria: Switzer-
land, Belgium, Canada, arguably India—and Israel. Thus it is
not too
surprising that one of the weaker aspects of Israeli democracy is
minority
rights. Political scientists consider “consociational” democracy,
in which
power is shared among major groups (Switzerland is the classic
example),
to be more suitable to deeply-divided societies than simply
majoritarian
democracy in which nothing dilutes majority rule. I have argued
that Israeli
politics is basically consociational within the Jewish
community, but not in
dealing with the Jewish-Arab division.18
Consequently, I would agree with the implicit premise of this
debate:
Jewish-Arab relations within Israel are the acid test of Israeli
democracy.

Posing this in stark “either-or” terms, however, obscures the
reality that all
nation-states must in some fashion balance the demands of
cultural, ethnic,
and historical particularity against universalistic principles.
Israel faces the
diYculty, in David Kretzmer’s words, of managing the tension
between two
conceptions of nationhood: “As a democratic state Israel must
serve the
needs of all its citizens; as the state of the Jewish people its
function is to
pursue particularistic goals.”19 But Israel is hardly the only
state facing this
dilemma.
Both Smooha and his critics present Israel as a relatively
unusual case
transcending conventional categories, whether as an “ethnic
democracy”
(which Smooha opposes to either majoritarian or consociational
democ-
racy) or as an “ethnocracy” (which Ghanem, Rouhana, and
Yiftachel op-
pose to either democracy or authoritarianism). But does Israel
really repre-
sent a third type in either classiWcation? Is the ethnic element
in the Israeli
polity so strong as to constitute a diVerence in kind, and not
just a diVerence
in degree?

Neither of the two essays clearly addresses the critical issue of
the
relationship between an “ethnic” state—democratic or not—and
the basic
concept of a “nation-state” as it has been generally understood
and used in
political theory (Gavison also notes this “ambiguity between
ethnicity and
nationhood”).20 In either version, the basic concept of an ethnic
state comes
suggestively close to the classic deWnition of a nation-state. A
“nation” is
typically deWned as “a people connected by supposed ties of
blood generally
manifested by community of language, religion, and customs,
and by a
sense of common interest and interrelation.”21 This diVers
little, if at all, from
most notions of ethnicity. As the idea became prevalent that
every nation
had a right of self-determination, the dominant political model
in the world
became the nation-state: “A state organized for the government
of a ‘nation’
whose territory is determined by national boundaries, and whose
law is
determined, at least in part, by national customs and
expectations.”22
Since ethnic borders seldom correspond perfectly to political
borders,
the “national” majority in any given state constitutes a dominant
ethnic
group with respect to minorities not identiWed with that
nationhood, no

matter how democratic the procedures. All nationalisms have a
potential
problem with minority rights, as Jewish history demonstrates
only too well.
Furthermore, a hostile majority can suppress a minority by
democratic as
well as non-democratic means (as democracy is usually
deWned). The critical
question is how far ethnonational identity is intertwined with
the very
deWnition of the state, and this is a matter of degree.
In theory liberal democracy is indiVerent to distinctions among
citi-
zens. But no political system exists in a social, cultural,
linguistic, and
historical vacuum; even the most liberal regime is shaped by its
particular
context. A nation-state, formed around a central “nation”
however deWned,
bears some particularistic features. This imprint will be lighter
where the
prevailing model of nationality is assimilative and where it
corresponds to
the concept of citizenship. In this “New World” model, state
forms nation:
there is a territorial focus, citizenship is extended to those born
within its
borders (jus solis ), and naturalization is not tied to ethnicity,
culture, or
descent. Such a pattern predominates not only in New World

nations
formed by immigration, but also in some states with natural
borders (e. g.,
islands), in some older states where borders shaped identity
(France, Brit-
ain), and in newly emerging states where “artiWcial” borders
are beginning
to shape identity. Even here, however, a sense of particularity—
American-
ness, Japanness, Frenchness—remains and may be a strong
political factor.
Clearly this sense is stronger in the “Old World” model where
nation forms
state: there is an ethnic focus, with citizenship distinguished
from national-
ity and often extended on grounds of descent (jus sanguinis ),
while natural-
ization is more diYcult, since it is tied to ethnicity, culture, or
language. This
pattern predominates in some areas with well-deWned historical
nations
(Central and Eastern Europe, Asia), in newer states formed
when the
concept of nation-state was at its peak (post-World War I), and
in some
situations where the mismatch between ethnic and political
borders is
especially dramatic (Vietnam, Korea, Bangladesh, Yugoslavia).
As a product of the nation-state idea at its most intense, Israel
belongs
to the “Old World” model and ranks toward the more ethnic end
of this
continuum. It is not, however, in a category by itself; there are
many other

states in which ethnicity is likewise closely intertwined with the
deWnition of
the state. Many states, for example, confer citizenship by
descent and/or
ethnicity to those who can establish an ancestral link.23 The
Israeli Law of
Return is an unusual case of jus sanguinis in that it recognizes
an ancestral
link over two millennia, but other states have similar policies.
Germany,
which generally follows the concept of a community of descent,
has as part
of its 1949 Basic Law a provision granting the right of “return”
to refugees
of German ethnic stock, which led to a massive inXux of
“Germans” from
Eastern Europe whose ancestral link was measured in
centuries.24 The
Soviet Union, following World War II, adopted similar “laws of
return” for
persons of Armenian, Russian, Ukrainian, or Byelorussian
national origin
who wished to enter the Soviet Union and receive Soviet
citizenship.
During the decolonization process, the imperial powers (Britain,
France,
Netherlands, Italy, Belgium) readmitted “nationals” who were
generations
removed from the home country.25
Does the existence of a broader Arab-Israeli conXict make
Israel’s

minority issue unique? One of the more curious defenses of de
facto dis-
crimination is the argument that Israeli Arabs, as an ethnic
minority linked
to an external threat, represent a unique security problem. This
is not the
case: there are Greeks in Turkey and in Turkish Cyprus as well
as Turks in
Greek Cyprus; Hindus in Pakistan and Moslems in India; Tamils
in Sri
Lanka; Arabs in Iran; Albanians in Macedonia; Chinese in
Vietnam and
elsewhere in Southeast Asia; Somalis in Ethiopia; and many
potentially
hostile tribes with cross-border links in Africa. In the past, the
presence of
ethnic Japanese in the United States and Canada, Armenians in
Turkey,
Germans throughout Eastern Europe, and various “suspect”
ethnic groups
in the Soviet Union, has been a source of concern to the
governments
aVected.
The treatment of these “enemy minorities” has usually been
dismal.
The fate of Armenians during World War I, of Japanese in the
United States
during World War II, and of German minorities during and after
World
War II, testiWes to the corrosiveness of wartime suspicions. In
recent de-
cades, the expulsion of suspect minorities has been
commonplace, long
before civil strife in the former Yugoslavia gave “ethnic
cleansing” a bad

name. It is noteworthy that, among 26 ethnically-divided states
rated as
democratic (see below), only the Baltic states parallel Israel in
having size-
able minorities linked to a potentially hostile neighbor. Clearly
such links do
put minority groups in a more complicated and vulnerable
position.
One useful index related to this pattern is the exclusion of
ethnic
minorities from military service; again, Israel is not unique in
selective
conscription. Among democratic nations, Britain did not apply
the draft to
Ireland in World War I or to Northern Ireland in World War II,
while in
Canada the conscription of French Canadians was a contentious
issue in
both conXicts. Elsewhere minorities have been excluded from
the armed
forces, in whole or in part, in Burma, Fiji, Guyana, Iraq,
Malaysia, Pakistan,
Sri Lanka, and a number of African states.26 Military service
often serves
minorities as a path to gaining legitimacy and acceptance, as it
has with the
Druze community in Israel.
Israel’s link to ethnicity is not unique. But the Law of Return
and other
explicitly Jewish features do place it among the more ethnic
nation-states,
and thus among the more problematic in terms of ethnic
minorities. How
many states actually have signiWcant ethnic minorities, and

how do they fare
in democratic terms? In The Jewish State, I took a tentative stab
at this
question, admittedly very rough and incomplete. In 1995 there
were, by this
count, 71 states in the world with ethnic minorities, deWned by
language, of
over 5 percent.27 Of these 71 states, 26 (including Israel) were
ranked as
“free” on political rights and civil liberties in the annual
Freedom House
survey of 1994–1995.28
From Israel’s perspective, an important question is how many of
these
26 states practice some form of ethnic power-sharing and how
many do not,
and whether this is related to the size of minorities. Arend
Lijphart’s four
basic characteristics of consociational power-sharing are: 1)
participation in
the governing coalition or executive; 2) a high degree of group
autonomy;
3) proportionality in representation and allocation; and, 4) a
formal or
informal minority veto on matters of fundamental importance.29
Addressing
only ethnic divisions, 11 of the 26 states (not including Israel)
met at least three
of these four conditions.30

There was a clear correlation between power-sharing and the
size of the
minority. Only one of the 12 democratic states with linguistic
minorities of
less than 20 percent (Finland) used power-sharing techniques in
its ethnic
relations, while 10 of the 14 democratic states with minorities
above 20
percent did so. Clearly accommodation of ethnic groups above
this thresh-
old, in a democracy, ordinarily involves the use of explicit
power-sharing
techniques that, by their nature, dilute the prevailing ethnicity
of the state.
With an Arab minority of about 19 percent, Israel stands near
the fulcrum:
close to the upper limit on the size of minorities that states have
generally
been able to incorporate successfully into functioning
majoritarian democ-
racies, and beyond which most have found consociationalism
more appli-
cable. To judge by experience elsewhere, it would appear that
Israel might be
able to integrate this minority without wide use of power-
sharing tech-
niques, but that such techniques are clearly preferable and
perhaps even
essential.
CONCLUSIONS: ETHNICITY AND POWER-SHARING
Of what, minimally, does the “Jewishness” of the Jewish state
consist? The
Israeli Supreme Court, in dealing with the eligibility of parties
to participate

in elections, has tried to answer this question. Acceptance of
Israel “as a
Jewish state,” the court ruled, means at least (a) maintenance of
a Jewish
majority, (2) the right of Jews to immigrate, and (3) ties with
Jewish
communities outside Israel.31 None of these features are
inherently inconsis-
tent with democracy as usually deWned, and none of them are
unique to
Israel. The nation-state, based on the principle of the
sovereignty for a
particular ethnonational community, is the prevailing form of
political
organization in international relations. Most states, including
most democ-
racies, claim some kind of ethnic component in their identity,
and none exist
in a cultural vacuum. A large number of states grant citizenship
on the basis
of ethnic identity of descent. Nor is the existence of a
dispersion peculiar to
the Jewish people, save perhaps in duration and extent, and the
growth of
sentiment for “normalizing” Israel-Diaspora relations could
lessen any re-
maining diVerences (by limiting the Law of Return, reducing
the role of
world Jewry in Israel, or even reversing the Xow of inXuence as
Israel
becomes the dominant force in the Jewish world).

Israel is a democracy by the usual standards in which power-
sharing
techniques have functioned fairly eVectively among Jewish
groups, but
from which the Palestinian Arab minority has been excluded.
Given the
depth of the ethnic division, lessons from experience elsewhere,
and the
particular strengths of Israeli politics, the extension of power-
sharing—
consociational democracy—to Palestinians within Israel is
clearly the pre-
ferred option. Israeli Jews wish to remain Jewish: that, after all,
was the
basic idea of Zionism. By the same token, Israeli Arabs are a
non-assimilat-
ing minority with their own culture, language, and identity.
Democratic
governments—and even many non-democratic regimes—usually
achieve
long-term stability in such cases by power-sharing based on the
explicit
recognition of two or more ethnic communities.32
This may require development of an overarching identity, a
common
framework that transcends the division into Jew and Arab, to
counter the
feeling of Israeli Arabs that they do not belong. Though the
name Israel is
decidedly Jewish in origin, Arab citizens have often expressed
interest in
expanding the concept, as a territorial label, to encompass non-
Jews as well.
This would in essence create the common civic space that has

existed only
in theory. Israeli Arab novelist Anton Shammas has asked for “a
new deWni-
tion of the word ‘Israeli,’ so that it will include me as well. . .
.” Responding
from a Jewish perspective, A. B. Yehoshua noted that during the
First
Temple period “Jewish religious identity was not at all a
necessary element
of Israeli identity,” and projects a gradual cultural symbiosis
leading to a
common Israeli identity.33
Introduction of power-sharing would be eased by the fact that it
already works on the Jewish side. Power-sharing among Jewish
groups,
messy and contentious yet eVective, already serves as a model
of indepen-
dent organization, collective bargaining, and direct action
within the
framework of law. On the municipal level, a “system of elite
consultations”
kept Arab-Jewish peace in Jerusalem over the decades,
providing another
model.34
Whether conceived as consociationalism or not, speciWc
proposals for
Jewish-Arab accommodation tend to be similar. Most involve
explicit rec-
ognition of Israeli Arabs as a national minority with rights as a
group, such

as an act of the Knesset aYrming that “the Arab minority in the
State of
Israel is an integral part of the Jewish State and is entitled to
full recognition
of its speciWcity within the framework of law.”35 Recognition
of Arabs as a
minority could involve making state symbols and practices more
inclusive;
for example, by having “Israeli” holidays that draw in both
communities.
Secondly, following from such recognition would be group
autonomy
in cultural and educational aVairs, with the election of a
representative body
for that purpose, and possibly the establishment of an Arab-
language uni-
versity. Functional autonomy in these areas may be necessary to
counter the
growth of support for territorial autonomy or total separation.
Finally, inter-ethnic consociationalism will get a tremendous
boost
when Arab parties that accept the framework of a Jewish state
are brought
into government coalitions. Nothing else can provide as clear an
index of
the extension of Israeli power-sharing to the Arab community.
It is ex-
tremely important, as Gavison notes, that Palestinians
participate directly in
the decision-making process themselves, rather than having
these issues
handled as an internal debate among Jewish Israelis.
This is in addition, of course, to a fair allocation of resources

and
equality before the law. Nothing in the “Jewish” nature of the
state inher-
ently compels discrimination in local government budgets,
health and wel-
fare services, education, economic opportunities, or treatment in
the courts.
In fact all of the above measures could be implemented without
renouncing
the essential Jewishness of Israel as a nation-state. What they
involve is some
dilution of the relationship between ethnicity and statehood,
moving Israel
more toward the center of the spectrum on this dimension.
There always
remains some sense in which an ethnic minority “does not fully
belong” in
a nation-state with a dominant ethnic group, but Israel would
become more
of a “normal” nation-state with “normal” minority problems.
A majority in both communities—roughly two-thirds, in fact—
en-
dorse the continuation of Israel as a Jewish state, with full
recognition of
Arab rights as a national minority as a workable solution.36
This assumes, of
course, the continuation of the process of delinking the Israeli
Arab situa-
tion from developments in the West Bank and Gaza. For Arabs
within
Israel, the sense that the basic conXict was being resolved
would free them
to focus further on their own problems and demands. Resolution
of broader
Arab-Israel issues could conceivably intensify their struggle in

the sense that
they could no longer be put oV by security arguments. But on
the whole,
peace and stability on the international level should reduce
tensions within
Israel, remove legitimate security issues, help expand civil
rights, and make
Israelis more willing to accept independent Arab organizations
and Arab
control of their own education and internal aVairs. In such a
setting Arabs
could also perform military service, or another form of national
service, as
a path to integration and equality.
Reading in the other direction, this implies that there is no real
solu-
tion to ethnic relations within Israel as long as the larger
problem impinges.
The future of Israeli democracy is inextricably linked to
continued modera-
tion of the Arab-Israeli conXict and to the fate of the larger
Arab population
in the territories beyond the Green Line.
NOTES
1. Sammy Smooha, “Ethnic Democracy: Israel as an
Archetype,” Israel Studies,
2 (Fall 1997) 198–241; As’ad Ghanem, Nadim Rouhana, and
Oren Yiftachel, “Ques-

tioning ‘Ethnic Democracy’: A Response to Sammy Smooha,”
Israel Studies, 3(2)
(1998) 253–67; Ruth Gavison, “Jewish and Democratic? A
Rejoinder to the ‘Ethnic
Democracy’ Debate,” Israel Studies, 4(1) (1999) 44–72.
2. Smooha, “Ethnic Democracy,” 200.
3. Ghanem, Rouhana, and Yiftachel, “Questioning ‘Ethnic
Democracy’,” 255.
4. Ibid., 261. Emphasis in the original.
5. On de jure discrimination against non-Jews, see David
Kretzmer, The Legal
Status of the Arabs in Israel (Boulder, CO, 1990) 17–22.
6. Kenneth A. Bollen, “Political Democracy: Conceptual and
Measurement
Traps,” in Alex Inkeles (ed), On Measuring Democracy: Its
Consequences and Concomi-
tants (New Brunswick, NJ, 1991) 9–10.
7. Dankwart Rustow, A World of Nations: Problems of Political
Modernization
(Washington, DC, 1967) 94, 290.
8. Robert Dahl, Polyarchy, Participation, and Observation (New
Haven, CT,
1971) 3, 9, 248.
9. G. Bingham Powell, Contemporary Democracies:
Participation, Stability, and
Violence (Cambridge, MA, 1982) 3, 5.
10. Arend Lijphart, Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and
Consensus Govern-
ment in Twenty-One Countries (New Haven, CT, 1984) 2, 38;

Lijphart, “Democra-
cies: Forms, Performance, and Constitutional Engineering,”
European Journal of
Political Research, 25 (January, 1994) 1–17.
11. Lijphart, Democracies, 2.
12. Center for Palestine Research and Studies, survey of 7–9
January 1999.
13. The case for a comparative perspective is made
convincingly by Benyamin
Neuberger, “Israel’s Democracy and Comparative Politics,”
Jewish Political Studies
Review, 1 (Fall, 1989) 67–75, and in Michael N. Barnett (ed),
Israel in Comparative
Perspective: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom (Albany,
NY, 1996).
14. See note 5, above.
15. Does any country other than Israel tie itself in knots by
attempting to
legislate “permissible” torture, rather than simply denying that
such practices are
oYcially tolerated?
16. See note 10, above.
17. Dahl, Polyarchy, 106–21. See also the study by Pierre Van
den Berghe, “Plu-
ralism and the Polity: A Theoretical Exploration,” in Leo Kuper
and M. G. Smith

(eds), Pluralism in Africa (Berkeley, CA, 1969) 67–81.
18. Alan Dowty, The Jewish State: A Century Later (Berkeley,
CA, 1998).
19. Kretzmer, Legal Status, 176.
20. Gavison, “Jewish and Democratic?”, 52.
21. Louis L. Snyder, Encyclopedia of Nationalism (New York,
1990) 230.
22. Roger Scruton, A Dictionary of Political Thought, 2
nd
edition (New York,
1982) 313.
23. This includes some states that also recognize jus solis; a
partial list would
include Belgium, Bulgaria, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary,
Liberia, Poland,
Sri Lanka, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom as well as the
Soviet Union and
most Soviet successor states. Ruth Donner, The Regulation of
Nationality in Interna-
tional Law, 2
nd
edition (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY, 1994) 32, 69, 114–19;
United
Nations Legal Department, Laws Concerning Nationalities
(United Nations ST/
LEG/ser.B/4, 1954) 222–4, 386–7. The Israeli Law of Return
can also be defended as
a policy of selective immigration, rather than as extension of a
particular conception
of citizenship; since all states practice selective immigration,

the question then
becomes the legitimacy of selection on ethnic grounds, and
again Israel is not
unique in this regard.
24. Claude Klein, Israel as a Nation-State and the Problem of
the Arab Minority: In
Search of a Status (Tel-Aviv, 1987) 4; United Nations Legal
Department, Supplement
to the Volume on Laws Concerning Nationality (United Nations
ST/LEG/ser.B/9,
1959) 118; William Rogers Brubaker, “Immigration,
Citizenship, and the Nation-
State in France and Germany: A Comparative Historical
Analysis,” International
Sociology, 5 (December, 1990) 386–7, 396, 400; Manfred
Steger and F. Peter Wagner,
“Political Asylum, Immigration, and Citizenship in the Federal
Republic of Ger-
many,” New Political Science 24–25 (Spring, 1993) 65, 67.
25. United Nations, Laws Concerning Nationalities, 466.
26. Cynthia Enloe, Ethnic Soldiers: State Security in Divided
Societies (Athens, GA,
1980) 54–63, 78–82, 136, 182–3, 189–90.
27. Based on the data in Maps ’n Facts (Broderbund Software,
1994); closely-
related languages were grouped together and microstates were
eliminated. For
more information see Dowty, The Jewish State, 210–12.
28. Freedom in the World: The Annual Survey of Political
Rights and Civil Liberties
1994–1995 (New York, 1995) 683–4.

29. Lijphart, “The Power-Sharing Approach,” in Joseph V.
Montville (ed) Con-
Xict and Peacemaking in Multiethnic Societies (Lexington, MA,
1990) 494–5, 503.
30. The 11 states were Belgium, Benin, Botswana, Canada,
Finland, Guyana,
Malawi, Mauritius, South Africa, Spain, and Switzerland.
31. E.A. (Election Appeal) 2/88 Ben Shalom v. Chairman of
Central Elections
Committee Piskei Din, 43(2) (1988) 221.
32. This argument is developed by Oren Yiftachel, “The
Concept of ‘Ethnic
Democracy’ and its Applicability to the Case of Israel,” Ethnic
and Racial Studies, 15
(January, 1992) 125–36.
33. The exchange between Shammas and Yehoshua is in David
Grossman’s,
Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel
(New York, 1993) 257,
270–1.
34. Alex Weingrod, “Shadow Games: Ethnic ConXict and
Political Exchange in
Israel,” Regional Politics and Policy, 3 (Spring, 1993) 190–209.
35. Klein, Israel as a Nation-State, 24; see also Sammy Smooha,
“Class, Ethnic,

and National Cleavages and Democracy in Israel,” in Ehud
Sprinzak and Larry
Diamond (eds), Israeli Democracy Under Stress (New York,
1993) 325–6.
36. Sammy Smooha, Ethnic Democracy, 231–2; Hanna
Levinsohn, Elihu Katz,
and Majid Al Haj, Jews and Arabs in Israel: Common Values
and Reciprocal Images
(Jerusalem, 1995) 23.
1
Tel-Aviv University
Department of Political Science
Course: ISRAELI POLITICS
POSC 112-02, 02-May-2019
Instructor: Dr. Evgeni Klauber
Thursday, May 02, 2019
Long Paper (20%)
The following are the rules for this assignment:
1. The purpose of this assignment is to focus on comparison
between different

theories of Israeli politics and application of those theories to
the case-studies;
2. Papers will be evaluated according to their creativity, correct
usage of theories,
organization, and style. Papers will also be credited for their
ability to include
citations from the appropriate readings from the course. You
may use Wikipedia
for finding facts, and you must use course’s material for the
analysis of those
facts;
3. The value of this assignment is 20% of the final grade;
4. Type your answer 1.5-spaced, using font Times New Roman,
(size 12), wide
margins;
5. All work must be entirely your own, and it will be evaluated
according to the
acceptable standards for proper usage of concepts and theories
from the
readings;
6. Make sure you write your full name on the first page of the
assignment;
7. Your write up must include the following components: one
short essay. The
length of the assignment should not exceed 6 pages;
8. The assignment needs to be submitted printed on 23-May-
2019, 12:00 to my

mail-box in Naftali building 5 floor (mail boxes in the lobby,
mailbox #41), or
it can be emailed to me, in case you leave Israel, together with
your flight ticket
scanned and attached.
2
Here is your task:
Smooha’s notion of Israel as an ‘‘ethnic democracy’’ may be
did not flatter Israel as a
liberal democracy, yet it was an attempt to ‘normalize’ Israel

and Israeli national identity
by classifying it alongside other democracies that are ‘‘ethnic.’’
Smooha’s model came
under attack from both ‘‘left’’ and ‘‘right’’. The criticism from
the left (Yiftachel 1997,
1998, 1999; Peled 1992) considered the concept ‘‘ethnic
democracy’’ as a
contradiction in terms and consequently the countries that are
‘‘ethnic’’ as
nondemocratic, or as ‘‘ethnocracies’’ (Yiftachel 1997, 1998,
1999). Peled (1992)
have criticized Smooha’s notion of Israel as an ‘‘ethnic
democracy’’ using the notion of
"republican democracy." The main thrust of Smooha’s critics
from the right was the
well known criticism against the civic/ethnic typology of
nationalism, which is the idea
that there is no pure civic nationalism, or that there is no
‘‘neutral’’ nation state, and,
that consequently, as Alan Dowty (1999: page 9) observes,
"Israel’s link to ethnicity is
not unique." From this point of view Israel can be seen a
Western liberal democracy by
proceduralists such as Neuberger (1997), though maybe stained

(Gavison 1999).
What are the recent debates regarding Israeli political regime?
1. Open the attached Smooha's (1990) article on page 393. Go to
the paragraph
that starts with "Israel is an ethnic state…." Summarize the
ideas in this
paragraph while answering the following question: What are the
main features of
"ethnic democracy" and why, according to Smooha (1990) Israel
should be
treated as "ethnic democracy." (2-3 paragraphs). Read the
abstract of this
article on page 389, and answer the following question: What
are Smooha's
(1990) solutions to make Israeli democracy into substantial? (1-
2 paragraphs).
2. Open the attached Yiftachel's abstracts compilation on page
1. Go to the
abstract on page 1 of this document, named: Yiftachel, O.
(1997) 'Israeli
Society and Jewish-Palestinian Reconciliation: Ethnocracy and
Its Territorial
Contradictions', Middle East Journal, Vol. 51: 505-519.

Summarize the ideas
in this paragraph (abstract) while answering the following
question: What are
main features of "ethnocracy," and why, according to Yiftachel
(1997)
ethnocracy threatens Israeli-Arab reconciliation?" (2-3
paragraphs). Use my
PPT presentation on Ethnocracy (in your e-mails).
3. Open the attached Peled's (1992) article on page 433. Go to
the paragraph
that starts with "Unlike the liberal citizen, who is the passive
bearer…"
Summarize the ideas in this paragraph and the five following
paragraphs, while
answering the following question: What are main features of
republicanism (civic
virtue) and why, according to Peled (1992), ethnic minorities
are marginalized
in Western democratic societies?" (3-4 paragraphs).
4. Open the attached Gavison's (1999) article on page 11 (of the
PDF file). Go
to the section named "Further thoughts about democracy in
Israel." Read ALL

paragraphs of this section (till the end of the article on the next
page).
Summarize the ideas in this section while answering the
following question: How
does Gavison (1999) treats Israeli political regime? What are
Gavison's (1999)
solutions to make Israeli democracy into substantial one? (4-6
paragraphs).
3
5. Open the attached Dowty's (1999) article on pages 9-10. Go
to the section
that starts with "Does the existence of a broader Arab-Israeli
conflict make
Israel's minority issue unique?" Summarize the ideas on pages
9-10 while
answering the following question: How would Dowty (1999)
classify Israeli
Political Regime? (4-6 paragraphs).
6. Add your own opinion (2-3 paragraphs).
Good luck!

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