ABSTRACT
On 13 September 1993, Israel and the PLO signed the Declaration of Principles (DOP) at an official ceremony on the lawn of the White House in Washington DC. The DOP also recognized the Palestinians as a people with equal rights to the territory of Mandatory Palestine. The DOP constituted a watershed in Israeli policy. It legitimized what had until then been condemned as a terrorist organization, whose covenant proclaimed that its purpose was the annihilation of Israel by armed conflict. Israel was relinquishing part of its religious-historical territorial heritage voluntarily and that reawakened a dormant ambivalence regarding Israeli identity. Shifts in Israeli identity formulation were found to be linked primarily to changes in Israel's frontiers, accompanied by morally convincing justifications given by the leadership. The identity dilemma of the Arab minority is of an altogether different nature, namely the tension between citizenship in Israel and membership in the Arab nation which is hostile to Israel.
