| One could easily argue that "Jewish democratic state" is a contradiction in terms. Democracy means many things. To us it mainly means that the people choose the government; in the 19th century, as Tocqueville showed, it meant a society and government without distinctions based on class, religion, or anything else. Israel has a large number of Arab citizens. To define it as a "Jewish democratic state" creates a separate order of citizens--those not Jewish--which isn`t compatible with that definition of democracy. Even the Constitution of the US, written in a time of slavery, defined only one kind of citizen. |
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