FINLAND & PALESTINE Proceedings of a Joint Workshop

(4) In line with the analysis and terminology of Oren Yiftachel,
Nadim Rouhana and As'ad Ghanem, the present state of
Israel is not labeled as a democracy but as an "ethnocracy."l
The formal and non-formal identity of Israel as a Jewish
state is identified as the root cause of the inequality suffered
by the Israeli-Palestinians. As long as this identity is
maintained, real equality is impossible.
(5) Based on this analysis, the vision documents call for a profound
reformation of the Israeli state. All of the documents
agree that Israel should cease to be a Jewish state. They offer
a number of envisioned outcomes of this transformation.
These include "consociational democracy" (consensus
democracy) in the Future Vision, Ita bi-national state" (the
Haifa Declaration), or a "bilingual and multicultural state"
(the Democratic Constitution).14
The last point is without a doubt the most important new element
in the vision documents. According to the Future Vision,
only consensus democracy would guarantee both individual
and collective rights. Accordingly, in addition to their full civil
rights, Palestinian Arabs need self-rule or autonomy in terms of
education, culture, religion, and language. Further, the document
calls for a chance to "create national institutions relating
to all domains of life." It also states that the two groups
"should have mutual right to veto and self-administration, II and
that Israel should recognize the complete equality of the Palestinians
on "a collective-national basis." The Democratic Constitution
proposes a far more concrete vision in this respect. In its
important paragraph 20 on power-sharing in decision-making,
it proposes several possible models by which representatives
of the Palestinian minority may veto any bill which, in their
opinion, violates the fundamental rights of the Arab minority.
13 See e.g. Yiftachel 2006 and Ghanem, Rouhana & Yiftachel1998.
14 Waxman & Peleg, 2008, 62.
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