The current academic and legal campaign to constitutionalize Israel as a state that is both ““Jewish and democratic”” amounts to an act of national self-deception, rooted in the collective inability or unwillingness to accept that discriminatory policies toward the non-Jewish minority contradict democratic processes, on the part of that country's Jewish majority. The author addresses the recent efforts to create an Israeli constitution by the consent of the Jewish majority that would legitimatize the denial of equal citizenship rights for non-Jewish citizens. Because Israeli Jews have constructed opposition to the ““Jewish and democratic”” model as ““extremism,”” Palestinian citizens of Israel are forced to limit their resistance to passive rejection of the concept, refusing to acquiesce in their own subordination and denying moral legitimacy to the system that discriminates against them.

This article focuses on the development since the second Palestinian intifada of a new consensus in Israeli Jewish society with regard to the Arab minority, which the authors call "the New Zionist Hegemony." After describing the attitudes and beliefs undergirding the new consensus, the article focuses on four areas in which it manifests itself: legislation, government policies, public opinion, and public discourse. The result of the new policies is to change the meaning of citizenship for non-Jews in an ethnic Jewish state.