Arabs who live in Israel do not make up, together with the Jews, a single, democratic Israeli nation. It is, furthermore, difficult to describe the system in Israel as apartheid or as a form of herrenvolk democracy, in which democratic rights are restricted to a specific segment of the populace. For, the argument goes, Arabs in Israel are not excluded from democracy in Israel, albeit a democracy for the Jews. Officially, they are considered equal in their individual rights. When control of the state rests in the hands of a national, ethnic or cultural majority, there can be no question of any talk about a civil nation.
Experience suggests that coexistence is possible under such circumstances.
However, and as mentioned above, this theoretical model remains an attempt at rationalising the existing reality, rather than an attempt at making use of the theory of democracy as a tool for reaching a critical understanding of a given reality. The primary flaw in this theory is that it posits the autonomous administration of the national minority, on one hand, and liberal democracy on the other, as two separate and distinct things. It also assumes that there could be no meeting ground whatsoever between liberal democracy, which does not take full account of the particularity of both Arab and Jewish cultural groups, and consociational democracy which provides a framework for the coexistence of distinct national groups but not for the rights of individuals as citizens. In all events, Arab and Jewish democrats have no other model to accommodate them, and rather than attempting to construe the current realities as democratic, but of a special variety, it would be more constructive to use theory in order to expose the flaws or absence of democracy as it is applied in Israel. The reason for trying to avert the struggle for equal rights is understandable, for any such struggle cannot but question the very essence of the foundation of the Jewish state.