Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

296 THE INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE
in government, with the right of veto in joint decisions, while fostering the
full autonomy of each and every group—Switzerland, Belgium and contemporary
Canada best exemplify this model. The multicultural democracy, on
the other hand, plays a less formal role in sustaining the different cultural groups
in its system. But it respects them, avoids harming them, and grants communal
rights to minorities, making no attempt to impose one particular culture. Great
Britain and the Netherlands are the leading examples in this category. The
most important quality in this catalogue, shared by all these regimes, is that
they see themselves as representing all the citizens in their states—including
societies with a hegemonic cultural-linguistic group as well as minorities.
In Smooha's opinion, Israel cannot be included in any of the above
categories, if only because it does not see itself as the political embodiment of
the civil society within its boundaries. Not only was Zionism the official ideology
that dominated the Jewish state at its birth, but its citizens are expected to
continue to fulfill its particularist aims till the end of time. While a kind of
democracy does exist within the pre-1967 boundaries of Israel—with civil
rights, freedom of expression and political association, and periodic free
elections—the absence of basic civil and political equality sets its apart from
the flourishing democracies of the West.
Despite Smooha's efforts to avoid an overly normative judgment, his
analysis implied a radical criticism of the State of Israel, though his political
conclusions were far more moderate than might have been expected. As he
saw it, there was little real likelihood that Israel would become a state of all
its citizens. Therefore, the most reasonable prospect was an improved ethnic
democracy, in which discrimination was minimized but the exclusionary core
was preserved: "The best solution for the Arabs of Israel would, of course, be
a consociational,' namely, a binational, state; but the opposition of the Jews to
such an option, which would eliminate the Jewish state, would be total, so that
its implementation would be a terrible injustice to most of the population" 72
We may or may not accept Smooha's conceptual scheme—a consociational
democracy like Switzerland, for example, is not exactly a multinational state—
or his idea that ending discrimination against a subordinate minority would
be "a terrible injustice" to the dominant majority. But there is no denying that
the Haifa scholar was the first Israeli academic to pry open the Pandora's box
that is Israel's politics of identity There had been a significant lack of theoretical
72 See also Sammy Smooha, "The Regime of the State of Israel: Civic Democracy,
Non-Democracy or an Ethnic Democracy?," Israeli Sociology 2: 2 (2000, in Hebrew), 620. See
also "The Model of Ethnic Democracy: Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State," Nation and
Nationalism 8: 4 (2002), 475-503.