The question of whether Israel can be a democratic Jewish state, a liberal Jewish state, is the most important question with which the country must wrestle, and it can have no answer until we arrive at an understanding of what a Jewish state is. A great deal of pessimism is in the air. Many people attach to the adjective “Jewish” ultra-nationalistic and theocratic meanings, and then make the argument that a Jewish democratic state is a contradiction in terms, an impossibility. On the left and on the right, among the elites and the masses, people are giving up on the idea that both elements, the particular and the universal, may co-exist equally and prominently in the identity of the state. This way of thinking is partly responsible for the recent convulsions in Israeli politics, for the zealotry and the despair that run through it. Yet it is an erroneous and unfruitful way of thinking. It rigs the outcome of this life-and-death discussion with a tendentious and dogmatic conception of Judaism and Jewishness. There is another way, a better way, to arrive at an answer to this urgent and wrenching question. Let us begin by asking a different one, a hypothetical one. Let us imagine the problem in a place that is not Israel or Palestine. Could a Catalan state, if it were to secede from Spain, be a democratic Catalan state, a liberal Catalan state? Catalan nationalism is a powerful force, and many Catalans wish to establish an independent state of their own with Barcelona as its capital, based on their claim that they constitute a distinct ethnocultural group that deserves the right to self-determination. Though recent developments in Spain have shown that the establishment of an independent Catalan state is far from becoming a reality in the near future, let us nonetheless consider what it might look like. In this future state — as in other European nation-states, such as Denmark, Finland, Norway, Germany, the Czech Republic, and others that have a language and state symbols that express an affinity to the dominant national culture — the Catalan language would be the official language, the state symbols would be linked to the Catalan majority, the official calendar would be shaped in relation to Christianity and to events in Catalan history, and the public education of Catalans would insure the vitality and the continuity of Catalan culture, transmitting it to the next generation. Revenues from taxation would be distributed solely among Catalan citizens and not across Spain, and the foreign policy of the Catalan state would reflect the interests of the ethnocultural majority of the state. It is very probable that Catalunya’s immigration policy, like that of all contemporary European and Scandinavian states, would attempt to safeguard the Catalan majority in its sovereign territory. It is important to note that these aspects of a Catalan state would not reflect anything unusual in the modern political history of the West. The Norwegians, for example, demanded all these characteristics of statehood in 1907, when they seceded from Sweden (under threat of war) since they saw themselves as a separate national group. In the matter of identity, Catalunya, like Norway, would not be a neutral state in any meaningful fashion, and there is no reason that it should be a neutral state. Members of the Catalan group deserve a right to self-determination, which includes a sovereign territory inhabited by a Catalan majority in which a Catalan cultural public space is created and the culture of the majority is expressed. But this is not all we would need to know about a Catalan nation-state that purports to be a democracy. The test of the question of whether Catalunya, or any other state, is democratic is not dependent upon whether it is neutral with respect to identity. Its moral and political quality, its decency, its liberalness, will be judged instead by two other criteria. The first is whether its character as a nation-state results in discriminatory policies towards the political, economic, and cultural rights of the non-Catalan minorities that reside within it. The second is whether Catalunya would support granting the same right of self-determination to other national communities, such as the Basques. Adhering to these two principles is what distinguishes democratic nation-states from fascist ones. Ultra-nationalist states are sovereign entities in which the national character serves as a justification for depriving minorities of political, economic and cultural rights. In the shift to ultra-nationalism that we are witnessing around the world today, such states also attack and undermine the institutions that aim at protecting minorities — the independent judiciary, the free press, and NGO’s dedicated to human and minority rights. In addition, ultra-nationalists states do not support granting rights of self-determination to nations that reside within them or next to them. They generally claim that no such nations exist, or that the ethnic groups that call themselves a nation do not deserve the right to self-determination. 
The legitimacy of Israel as a nation-state should be judged just as we would judge any other nation-state, according to these two principles. If, in the name of the Jewish character of the state, the Arab minority in Israel is deprived of its rights, the very legitimacy of the State of Israel as a Jewish nation-state will be damaged. Discrimination in the distribution of state resources in infrastructure, education, and land, and the refusal to recognize new Arab cities and villages in the State of Israel, threatens to transform it from a democratic nation-state into an ultra- nationalist state. Such a threat to the democratic character of the state is posed also by recent legislative attempts (which fortunately have failed) to demand a loyalty oath solely from Israel’s Arab citizens. The threat is heightened by a political plan put forth by elements of the Israeli radical right, which, in a future agreement with the Palestinians, would deny Israeli citizenship to Israeli Arabs, by virtue of a territorial exchange that would include their villages in the territory of
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