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Questioning "Ethnic Democracy": A Response to Sammy Smooha
IN THIS ESSAY WE PRESENT a critique of the "ethnic democracy" model, formulated by political sociologist Sammy Smooha to account for Israel's political structure. During the last two decades, Smooha's voluminous work on ethnic politics in Israel has gained a central position among social scientists in Israel and beyond. His conceptual and empirical explorations of the country's ethnic relations have laid important and insightful foundations for Israeli critical research by thoroughly documenting and explicating Israel's pervasive ethnic stratification and disparities between Jews and Palestinian-Arabs, as well as between Ashkenazi and Mizrakhi Jews.
Most notably, his "ethnic democrat" model, which provides a structural account of Arab-Jewish relations in Israel, has been widely accepted in recent literature on Israel. The most lucid elaboration and explication of the model was published recently on the pages of this journal.1 In this model, Smooha manages to combine theoretical claims about the nature of democratic states dominated by an ethnic majority, with a wealth of (mainly attitudinal) data and a new conceptualization of the Israeli case. On the theoretical level, he claims,
Ethnic democracy is located somewhere in the democratic section of the democracy-non-democracy continuum. Ethnic democracy is a system which combines the extension of civil and political rights to individuals and some collective rights to minorities, with institutionalization of majority control over the state. Driven by ethnic nationalism, the state is identified with a "core ethnic nation," not with its citizens...at the same time, the minorities are allowed to conduct a democratic and peaceful struggle that yields incremental improvement in their status.2
When turning to Israel, Smooha integrates a critical examination of ethnic relations with a thorough deconstruction of past scholarship on the state's political structure. After refuting common claims that Israel is a liberal or consociational democracy, and repudiating descriptions of the state as a non-democratic colonial system, he concludes that it is an "archetype" of a newly defined regime type -- "ethnic democracy." In his own words, the democratic and Jewish characteristics of the state coexist, and
Israel proper qualifies as a political democracy on many counts...Notwithstanding concerns that Israeli democracy is an "overburdened polity"...it has thus far functioned quite well.... Simultaneously, Israel is a special case of an ethnic...