Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities

by Mahmood Mamdani

A basic law declaring “Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People,” enacted in 2018, formally and finally marks the Palestinians as beyond the bounds of the nation-state and therefore an internally colonized population. Notably, this declaration replaced the earlier notion that Israel is a Jewish and democratic state. This was always false; Israel has never been a democracy, for the majority there is defined prepolitically. Now we know that the balance of the Knesset agrees. In a democracy, majorities are formed through the political process. In a nation-state, democracy can be real only for the national majority. The permanent minority may have voting rights, but it is ever unable to exercise sovereignty. Nation-state democracy only ratifies the permanent majority, which prevents the political process from addressing the sources of its privilege.