Recently I received an e-mail from the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI): "On the 40th anniversary of 1967, the association asks citizens this question: Can the State of Israel, which for 40 years has been ruling over millions of people who are deprived of the basic human rights that are the condition for democracy, still be considered a democratic country?"

Attached to the e-mail was a position paper headed "Is This Really Democracy," together with a comment by the organization's director general, Rachel Benziman, in which she expresses her belief that "the attached document contains an opinion that is worthy and essential for you, as a leading academic, to examine in depth, with no connection to and independent of your political stance or your worldview."

Benziman's compliment did its job. I read the document and I even examined it in depth. In the introduction, the organization challenges the State of Israel's definition of itself as a democracy and the claim that "it is perceived as such by the Western world." The organization sums up its position thus: "The 40 years of the occupation are casting a heavy shadow on the democratic values of Israeli society, posing a large and threatening question with respect to Israel's definition as a democratic society. It appears that the moment has come - and perhaps it has already passed - when we will have to decide what we are giving up: the occupation or democracy, because the two cannot coexist."

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So, I'm not prepared to give up democracy. What should I do? Should I convince the government to withdraw from the territories? ACRI itself states that "occupation is a situation in which, following belligerent action, control of the territory remains in the hands of a foreign army. This is a situation that by its very nature is defined as a temporary situation, which must come to an end with the regularization of the status of the territory in the framework of a peace agreement that will put an end to the war."

From this I conclude that we must not withdraw from the territories except in the framework of a peace agreement that will regularize their status. I also know - although this does not appear in the document - that under a United Nations resolution, Israel must withdraw "to secure and recognized boundaries." Does the government of Ismail Haniyeh accept this resolution? Does it accept my right to exist in the Middle East?

Until such time as Haniyeh makes his answer heard, perhaps it is worth listening to the words of Sami Michael, the president of ACRI. In an interview he granted to the Ynet Web site in February, Michael said the following about the idea of the Jewish state: "I think that it is the most foolish thing that the Jewish people has done in the past 1,000 years. Putting down a stake in a permanent place is an invitation to a new Holocaust." And to this he added: "A Jewish state is a dream, a fiction, a journalist's romance ... to which we have related with excessive seriousness."

I invite Benziman and her colleagues in ACRI to examine the solution that their president has charted out in depth, "and this with no connection to and independent of their political stance or their worldview." As long as they do not express reservations about their president, I am not prepared to hear any preaching from them. Not on the subject of the occupation and not on the subject of democracy.

The author is a lecturer at the Tel Aviv University law faculty.