ABSTRACT
On 23 March 1999 a piece written in the political column of YediotAhronot called for its readers to vote for Azmi Bisharah, the Arab Palestinian candidate for prime minister. It read as follows: ‘the basic principles of the Left are freedom and equality…the Left demands more equitable distribution of profit and equal rights and participation of all citizens. In Bisharah’s platform the state has to be a state of all its citizens’. The writer was Tanya Reinhart, Professor of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. The phrase ‘Israel as a state of all its citizens’, which was raised by a few Arab intellectuals and politicians a decade ago, has become salient in the Jewish public discourse. It refers to a demand to change the legal, political and cultural definition of the relations between the state of Israel and its Jewish and Arab citizens, and to make it resemble the relationship between citizen and state in the Western states. The major argument made in favour of this modification with regard to the Arab-Jewish cleavage is that the ‘Jewish and democratic’ formula is an oxymoron: Israel cannot be both, and the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel cannot, and will not for long accept second-class citizenship. The state should therefore turn into a liberal civic state, which could express the multicultural reality of Jewish and Arab existence.
