“JEWISH AND DEMOCRATIC”? THE PRICE OF A NATIONAL SELF-DECEPTION NADIM N. ROUHANA The current academic and legal campaign to constitutionalize Israel as a state that is both “Jewish and democratic” amounts to an act of national self-deception, rooted in the collective inability or unwill- ingness to accept that discriminatory policies toward the non-Jewish minority contradict democratic processes, on the part of that country’s Jewish majority. The author addresses the recent efforts to create an Israeli constitution by the consent of the Jewish majority that would legitimatize the denial of equal citizenship rights for non-Jewish citi- zens. Because Israeli Jews have constructed opposition to the “Jewish and democratic” model as “extremism,” Palestinian citizens of Israel are forced to limit their resistance to passive rejection of the concept, refusing to acquiesce in their own subordination and denying moral legitimacy to the system that discriminates against them. FOR MANY P ALESTINIANS, and especially Palestinians who are citizens of Israel, the Israeli campaign to build an ideological rationale to justify its self-definition as a “Jewish and democratic” state is not merely a matter of subtle semantics. For them, it is a political campaign that is both unjust and hypocritical—unjust because it involves a system forcibly imposed upon them, the minority, by the majority in order to perpetuate their inequality and subordination constitu- tionally, and hypocritical because the majority insists that the inequality and subordination are simply “another form” of democracy. For the Arab elites in Israel, the campaign also evokes their political disappointment with generations of “left-wing” Israeli intellectuals and legislators who refuse to acknowledge either the fundamental contradiction between the “Jewish” and “democratic” components of the state definition, or its function as justification for the exclu- sion of an entire national group from equal citizenship. Moreover, even when a contradiction is seen, the response has been recourse to verbal and psycho- logical acrobatics attempting to reconcile the contradiction, rather than any inclination to question the reality that brought it about. This reality will be chal- lenged even less when Israel is constitutionalized as “Jewish and democratic.” NADIM N. ROUHANA is the Henry Hart Rice Professor of Conflict Analysis at George Mason University and the director of Mada al-Carmel—The Arab Center for Applied Social Research in Haifa. A longer version of this essay appeared in “Israel and the Palestinian Minority 2004: Mada’s Third Annual Political Monitoring Report” (Aug. 2005). Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. XXXV, No. 2 (Winter 2006), pp. 64–74 ISSN: 0377-919X; electronic ISSN: 1533-8614. C  2006 by the Institute for Palestine Studies. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.