Published in Haaretz

Haaretz August 25, 2016

Stop With the Nonsense That Palestinians Are a Minority in Israel

You can’t argue that the Palestinians aren’t an integral part of greater Israel; occupied and dispossessed, but integral.

by Gideon Levy

Israel is already a binational state, and has been for a long time

 •         The single-state solution is already here

 •         Is this not apartheid?

A delusion under which most Israelis live lets them invent vacuous excuses based on the virtual reality they’ve built for themselves. According to this fallacy, the State of Israel only controls its own citizens, most of them Jewish of course, but nobody counts the millions of other subjects who fall under its control at least as much, maybe more. They’re invisible.

That’s the only way one can argue comfortably and learnedly about whether Israel is a Jewish and democratic state. The discussion is a fascinating intellectual one, with only one problem: It has long since lost relevance.

A country where about half the subjects aren't Jewish can't be Jewish. If it insists on being Jewish by force, it isn’t democratic. A state where half the subjects are denied rights can't be democratic. 

The rest of the article is at this link.