The litmus test for measuring the extent of democratization of any given society is the legal status of minorities and their enjoyment of equal civic and human rights. The less discriminatory the society is against minorities, the more democratic it is. In this respect, Israel is struggling. Egalitarianism in terms of safeguarding basic civic and human rights for all is still in the making. Israel has navigated between liberalism, on the one hand, and promoting its religion and nationality as a Jewish state, on the other. Throughout the years, Israeli leaders have given precedence to Judaism and Jewishness over liberalism. While sometimes their language uttered liberal values, Israeli leaders’ actions were perfectionist in essence, preferring one religion and one nation over others. While accommodations were sought and some compromises were made, the underlying motivation was not to achieve just egalitarianism. This chapter argues for accommodating the interests of the Israeli-Arabs/Palestinians, and that Israel should strive to safeguard equal rights and liberties for all citizens – notwithstanding religion, race, culture, ethnicity, colour, gender, class or sexual orientation.

Chapter 1 offers a critical overview of how the Israeli regime is classified, addressing two fundamental issues in the debate over its suitable classification: the definition of democracy and the parameters of the unit of analysis. In providing a detailed description of the local dispute among students of Israel, it shows that very few local scholars or studies have provided explicit descriptions of the assumptions and premises on which their arguments are based. Rather than seeking to understand the Israeli regime from a theory-driven, comparative perspective and contextualizing it within the field of regimes and democratization, their primary goal appears to be determining whether Israel is, in fact, a democracy. This chapter also examines how Israel is categorized in cross-national regime indexes, demonstrating that such indexes cannot be exploited to bypass the local dispute. In so doing, it exposes the limits of restricting the focus to the classification of the Israel regime, arguing that this debate can never be conclusively resolved. Finally, it lays the foundation for the alternative approach to describing the Israeli case.