Summary
Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein’s Israel and the Family of Nations: The Jewish Nation-State and Human Rights (2009), which Stateless Citizenship (2013) calls one of the most robust liberal-Zionist readings of Israeli politics and history, and to which Chapter 4, “Liberal Pretence of a Jewish State”, is devoted (Stateless Citizenship (2013), PDF p.142).
Details
- Its main argument: denial of the legitimacy of the concept of a Jewish state undermines universal equality by denying the Jewish people’s right to self-determination and national independence, and whatever in the country’s day-to-day reality contradicts democratic principles does not follow from Israel’s definition as a Jewish state (Yakobson and Rubinstein 2009, 2, as quoted, PDF p.142).
- Its method as Molavi presents it: citing various European and North American constitutions, norms and laws, oscillating between pragmatic, principled and impassioned lines of argumentation aimed at rendering the Zionist movement and its realization in a Jewish state immune from critique regarding its continued violations against the Palestinian people (PDF p.142).
- The sections read in this part answer its accounts of the UN Partition Plan of 1947, of the principle of ‘two states for two peoples’, and of Israel as a ‘state for all of its citizens’ (PDF p.142-149; the last of these continues in part 4).
Related pages
Stateless Citizenship (2013), Alexander Yakobson, Amnon Rubinstein, UN General Assembly Resolution 181, Israeli-Arab