Partition and the Arab Palestinian Minority in Israel

In late 2006, leading Palestinian Arab intellectuals, political leaders, and activists in Israel compiled The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel. The document rejected the designation of Israel as a Jewish State, which they argued was exclusionary and denied the Arabs full equality. The document went on to de-legitimize the Zionist enterprise as "colonialist" and "imperialist", but at the same time sought to obtain recognition of the Palestinians in Israel by the Jewish majority as a national minority. This paper argues that while recognition of the Palestinians in Israel as a national minority is an eminently reasonable demand, the Jewish majority would find it difficult to accept so long as the national rights of the Jewish majority were simultaneously denied by the Palestinian citizens of Israel. It is not what the Palestinian minority in Israel demands for itself that is the problem, but rather the rights it seeks to deny the Jewish majority, especially the right to self-determination that is, inter alia, the right of the majority to define the state as it sees fit.