Questioning ?Ethnic Democracy?: A Response to Sammy Smooha

Abstract

IN THIS ESSAY WE PRESENT a critique of the 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 democracy 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.' 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,