The usual way of finding fault with the concept "Jewish State" is to endow it with a groundless anti-democratic interpretation, and then to claim that the concept is anti-democratic in its essence. But in the Partition Plan, and in its wake in the Israeli Declaration of Independence, a "Jewish State" means a state that realizes the right of the Jewish people to national independence.
Advertisement
The right of nations to self-determination is accepted as a universal democratic principle, although there are some who want to see this principle as a kind of club with a sign on the door saying "Entry to Jews is Absolutely Forbidden." The Jewish State, according to the Partition resolution, is n...

The usual way of finding fault with the concept "Jewish State" is to endow it with a groundless anti-democratic interpretation, and then to claim that the concept is anti-democratic in its essence. But in the Partition Plan, and in its wake in the Israeli Declaration of Independence, a "Jewish State" means a state that realizes the right of the Jewish people to national independence.
Advertisement
The right of nations to self-determination is accepted as a universal democratic principle, although there are some who want to see this principle as a kind of club with a sign on the door saying "Entry to Jews is Absolutely Forbidden." The Jewish State, according to the Partition resolution, is not supposed to be the state of its Jewish citizens alone: The borders of the state were supposed to include a large Arab minority, and the committee report requires the Jewish state to guarantee this minority full civic equality.

Some claim that the expression "a Jewish and democratic state" is a contradiction in terms; the Partition Plan, on the other hand, asserts that the two states, the Jewish one and the Arab one, must be democratic. Some claim that a Jewish state by necessity requires religious coercion; the Partition Plan obligated the two states to guarantee full religious freedom in their jurisdictions without getting into the complex question about the connection between the Jewish nation and the Jewish religion, or the different but very strong and meaningful connection between Arab nationalism and Islam.

The Israeli Law of Return is attacked as a discriminatory and anti-democratic law. On the other hand, the report of the UN committee in 1947 not only anticipates massive Jewish immigration to the Jewish state after its establishment (and even notes that in order to enable this immigration, the Jewish state was allotted an area relatively larger than the percentage of Jews in the population of the country), but states that the dispute between the two nations on the subject of immigration is the main reason for the need for partition and the establishment of a Jewish state in part of the country.

Partition was supposed to remove the subject of immigration from the arena of the conflict, in ot...

The Israeli Law of Return is attacked as a discriminatory and anti-democratic law. On the other hand, the report of the UN committee in 1947 not only anticipates massive Jewish immigration to the Jewish state after its establishment (and even notes that in order to enable this immigration, the Jewish state was allotted an area relatively larger than the percentage of Jews in the population of the country), but states that the dispute between the two nations on the subject of immigration is the main reason for the need for partition and the establishment of a Jewish state in part of the country.

Partition was supposed to remove the subject of immigration from the arena of the conflict, in other words, to turn it into the internal affair of the Jewish state, while the Palestinian Arabs, in their state, would no longer have to fear that Jewish immigration would turn them into a minority in their homeland. All the principles were therefore determined and formulated in 1947; since then, there is little that is new in the interminable debate on the subject.