Israel’s 2018 Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People states that national self-determination in the State “is exclusive to the Jewish People,” while the Central Bureau of Statistics’ own preliminary count for April 2026 places 2.157 million Arabs, 21.1% of a 10.244 million population, inside the state. The word “ethnostate” suggests a state built by and for one people, and the record holds both a law reserving collective self-determination to one people and an official count of a population one-fifth outside it. The peer-reviewed typology applied to Israel, Sammy Smooha’s 1997 model of “ethnic democracy,” combines individual rights for all citizens with “institutionalization of majority control over the state,” and the word “ethnostate” appears nowhere in its 44 pages. The equality rule for citizens comes from a 2000 Supreme Court ruling, not from an enacted Basic Law.
Key Findings
- The Knesset (2018) enacted, in clause 1(c) of the Nation-State Law, that “the realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People”; the law contains no equality clause and no individual-rights clause.
- Smooha (1997), a peer-reviewed typology, classes Israel as the archetype of an “ethnic democracy,” one of four types of democracy, and places it outside the Herrenvolk type because citizenship extends to all; the word “ethnostate” appears zero times in the article’s 44 pages.
- The Knesset’s Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty (Knesset, 1992) returns zero matches for “equal,” while the Israeli Supreme Court (2000) held in Ka’adan that the State could not allocate land “on the basis of discrimination between Jews and non-Jews.”
- The Central Bureau of Statistics (2026), in its own preliminary count, places 7.790 million people, 76% of 10.244 million, in a “Jews and Others” category that also covers non-Arab Christians and people not classified by religion.
- In a 1995 survey of 1,200 Arab citizens reported in Smooha (1997), 35.3% rejected Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish-Zionist state and 6.8% denied its right to exist.
Does Israel’s own law describe it as an ethnostate?
The Knesset’s 2018 Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People states in clause 1(c), in an English translation the Knesset labels unofficial, that “the realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People.” The enacted text names a nation-state of a people; the word “ethnic” appears in none of the clauses quoted here.
Clause 1(b) sets the frame for that sentence: “The State of Israel is the nation state of the Jewish People in which it realizes its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination.” Clause 5 provides that the State “shall be open to Jewish immigration, and the ingathering of the exiles.” Clause 4(a) makes Hebrew “the language of the State,” and clause 4(b) gives Arabic “a special status in the State.” Clause 3 declares that “the complete and united Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.”
Read together, the clauses allocate collective self-determination to one people and tie immigration to the same people. That is the directional point the ethnostate question rests on, and the text states it in its own words: self-determination is “exclusive,” in a clause of its own. A fuller reading of the Nation-State Law against the racial-grounds question sets the same clauses beside a treaty definition.
Two further facts about the text bound what it establishes. First, “Jewish People” is the law’s own term; the statutory definitions that decide who counts as a Jew for immigration and population registration sit in the Law of Return, examined below. Second, the law contains no equality clause and no individual-rights clause. That absence is a fact about the text only. It records nothing about how the State treats any person or community, and the enumerated rights examined below sit in a different instrument, the 1992 Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty.
The Knesset’s English text carries the law’s amendments through 1 May 2022, and the Hebrew governs. What the text settles is narrower than the question: Israel’s highest tier of legislation describes the State as the nation-state of the Jewish people and reserves national self-determination to that people. Whether that combination meets the word “ethnostate” turns on what the word is taken to mean, and the scholarship that classifies states draws that line in specific terms.
Who calls Israel an ethnic state, and on what definition?
Sammy Smooha, in a peer-reviewed 1997 article in Israel Studies, classed Israel as the archetype of an “ethnic democracy,” which he defined as “a system that combines the extension of civil and political rights to individuals and some collective rights to minorities, with institutionalization of majority control over the state.” That is the named, dated category under which the scholarship classifies Israel.
Smooha (1997) names the mechanism in two clauses. One is “the democratic principle,” “making for equal rights and equal treatment of all citizens.” The other is “the ethnic principle,” “fashioning a homogenous nation-state and privileging the ethnic majority.” The model holds both at once, and the article applies it across the state’s first fifty years, concentrating on the cleavage between the Jewish majority and the Arab minority.
The directional point behind the question therefore has a named source: Smooha’s typology places Israel in a category built on institutionalized majority control. The word the question uses is a different matter. “Ethnostate” appears zero times in the article’s 44 pages. “Ethnic state” appears 16 times, never as a defined category with criteria. Smooha uses it loosely for states identified with one ethnic group, naming Syria, Iraq, Ethiopia and Burma alongside post-Communist states and a hypothetical future Palestinian state, and he uses it in explicit contrast to the defined type he proposes for Israel.
The concept also predates the article. Smooha’s footnote 22 cites Oren Yiftachel’s 1993 article in Ethnic and Racial Studies, “The Concept of ‘Ethnic Democracy’ and Its Applicability to the Case of Israel,” a critique of the concept published four years earlier. Smooha published the archetype statement of ethnic democracy in 1997; he did not introduce the term. The dispute signalled in Yiftachel’s title, over whether the concept fits Israel at all, was under way before the archetype appeared.
Yiftachel later proposed a rival category. In a peer-reviewed 1999 article in Constellations, he classed Israel/Palestine as an “ethnocracy,” defining ethnocratic regimes as “states that maintain a relatively open government, yet facilitate a non-democratic seizure of the country and polity by one ethnic group,” and named Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Estonia, Latvia, pre-1972 Northern Ireland and Serbia as cases. The word “ethnostate” does not appear in that paper either.
Every percentage inside the 1997 article comes from Smooha’s own 1995 survey, and the article’s count of democratic states is relayed from another author rather than measured by Smooha. The typology is interpretive scholarship: it classifies, and it supplies no rate beyond its own poll. An earlier Institute reading of the ethnostate claim and the founding record sets the same framing against Israel’s founding-era statutes.
What separates an ethnic democracy from a Herrenvolk state?
Smooha (1997) sets ethnic democracy as one of four types of democracy and places Israel outside the Herrenvolk type, a democracy in which democratic rights are reserved for the dominant group alone, on the stated ground that citizenship extends to all and the minority is not excluded from its benefits.
The typology answers the narrow version of the question directly. A state that limited citizenship and political rights to one ethnic group would fall in the Herrenvolk category; Smooha’s model places Israel elsewhere and states why. It separates Israel equally from the liberal type, because the state recognizes ethnic differences and grants some collective rights, and from the consociational type, because the state is not ethnically neutral and the minority has neither autonomy nor power-sharing.
| Type | How ethnic democracy differs from it | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Liberal | The state recognizes ethnic differences and grants some collective rights | Smooha, 1997 |
| Consociational | The state is not ethnically neutral; the minority has no autonomy or power-sharing | Smooha, 1997 |
| Herrenvolk | Citizenship extends to all; the minority is not excluded from its benefits | Smooha, 1997 |
The category is not a single-case label. Smooha (1997) names other states as ethnic democracies across dated periods: Northern Ireland from 1921 to 1972, Canada from 1867 to the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, Poland from 1918 to 1935, and Malaysia since the early 1970s, with Germany said to border on the type. On his reading, Israel shares its category with periods in the history of four other states, two of them long-established parliamentary democracies.
Two dates bound the comparison. The typology was published in 1997, 21 years before the Knesset enacted the Nation-State Law in 2018, so its classification rests on the statutes and institutions of the state’s first fifty years, not on the 2018 text. And the minority figure in Smooha’s article, close to 850,000 persons, 16% of the population within the Green Line excluding East Jerusalem, is a mid-1990s count; the Central Bureau of Statistics’ current figures appear below.
The typology’s line between ethnic democracy and Herrenvolk democracy is the line between privileged collective standing and excluded citizenship. The two remaining tests are statutory: who the law counts as a member of the majority people, and what that membership changes.
How does Israeli law decide who counts as a Jew?
The Knesset’s 1970 Amendment No. 2 to the Law of Return defines the term in section 4B: “For the purposes of this Law, ‘Jew’ means a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion.” The enacted definition combines descent, conversion and religion, and it opens by limiting itself to the Law of Return.
The right that definition attaches to dates from 1950. Section 1 of the Law of Return, in the English text the Knesset publishes, reads: “Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh.” The translator’s note defines an oleh as “a Jew immigrating, into Israel.” That page is the text as enacted in 1950, not the law in force; the 1970 amendment quoted below is one later change to it.
The same 1970 amendment extends the right beyond Jews. Section 4A(a) vests the rights of a Jew under the law in “a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew,” except “a person who has been a Jew and has voluntarily changed his religion.” Subsection (b) makes it “immaterial” whether the Jew through whom the right is claimed is alive or has immigrated. The two sections do opposite work: 4B fixes who is a Jew for this law, and 4A extends entry rights to named relatives who need not be Jews at all.
The definition travels through a second statute. The same amendment inserted section 3A into the Population Registry Law, 5725-1965, and subsection (b) provides that “Jew” in the Registry “has the same meaning as in section 4B of the Law of Return.” Subsection (a) bars registering a person as a Jew where a notification, entry or public document indicates otherwise, until that document is controverted or a competent court decides.
For the ethnostate question, the membership rule matters as much as the clause reserving self-determination. The enacted rule is not descent alone: conversion admits, membership in another religion excludes, and entry rights reach non-Jewish spouses and grandchildren. The amendment also requires that regulations under 4A and 4B be approved by the Knesset’s Constitution, Legislation and Juridical Committee. The law carries no count of any kind; figures on immigration under it belong to the Central Bureau of Statistics.
Does religious law govern Jewish marriage in Israel?
Section 2 of the Knesset’s Rabbinical Courts Jurisdiction (Marriage and Divorce) Law, as enacted on 26 August 1953, provides that “marriages and divorces of Jews shall be performed in Israel in accordance with Jewish religious law.” Membership in the majority community has carried a statutory consequence in personal status since 1953, and the consequence runs through religious law.
Section 1 sets the forum separately: matters of marriage and divorce of Jews in Israel, “being nationals or residents of the State, shall be under the exclusive jurisdiction of rabbinical courts.” Section 3 extends that exclusive jurisdiction to any matter connected with a divorce suit, “including maintenance for the wife and for the children of the couple.” Section 6 supplies enforcement: where a rabbinical court has ordered a husband to grant, or a wife to accept, a letter of divorce, a district court may, after six months and on the Attorney General’s application, “compel compliance with the order by imprisonment.”
The scope of the statute bounds what it shows. Every operative section speaks “of Jews,” and section 2 says “in Israel.” The law legislates nothing about Muslims, Christians or Druze, whose courts sit under other instruments, and it says nothing about a marriage performed abroad. Section 9 preserves a Mandate-era frame by name, article 51 of the Palestine Orders in Council, 1922 to 1947, and gives rabbinical courts jurisdiction over other personal-status matters of Jews only “after all parties concerned have expressed their consent thereto.”
The statute defines “Jew” nowhere, and it makes no cross-reference to section 4B of the Law of Return or to the Population Registry Law. The 1970 definition is expressly limited to its own law, so who counts as a Jew for marriage purposes is decided outside this text. The page quoted is the law as enacted in 1953 and carries no amendment record; the Law has been amended since.
Read beside the ethnic-democracy model, this statute is an instance of what Smooha (1997) calls the state recognizing communal difference: it assigns one community’s marriages to that community’s religious courts and religious law. The operative category in the text is a religious community, and the instrument of enforcement is a civil court acting on a religious court’s final judgment.
Where does the equality rule for Israeli citizens come from?
The Knesset’s Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, enacted in 1992 and published in an English translation the Knesset labels unofficial, returns zero matches on a full-text search for “equal,” “religion,” “race” and “nationality.” Israel’s equality rule for citizens is located instead in the 1948 Declaration of the Establishment of the State and in a 2000 Supreme Court ruling.
The rights the 1992 law does enumerate are dignity, life and body, property, personal liberty, exit from and entry to Israel, and privacy. Its purpose clause, numbered 1a in the Knesset text, embeds “the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.” Section 1 directs that rights be upheld “in the spirit of the principles included in the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel,” a direction of spirit rather than an incorporation of the Declaration’s text.
The Provisional Government’s Declaration of 14 May 1948 pledges, in the Knesset’s English text, “complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex.” The Ministry of Foreign Affairs publishes the same sentence with “inhabitants” in place of “citizens”; both are translations of the Hebrew original.
The operative rule is judge-made. In HCJ 6698/95 Ka’adan v. Israel Land Administration, decided 8 March 2000 by a five-justice panel, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected the view that Israel’s values as a Jewish state “would justify, on the level of a general purpose, discrimination by the State between its citizens, on the basis of religion or nationality.” It wrote: “There is, therefore, no contradiction between the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and between the absolute equality of all of its citizens.” On the Law of Return, the Court wrote that Jews “were granted a special key to enter,” but “once a person has lawfully entered the home, he enjoys equal rights with all other household members.” Paragraph 40A declared that the State could not allocate land to the Jewish Agency for the settlement of Katzir “on the basis of discrimination between Jews and non-Jews.”
| Instrument | Equality wording | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty | None; rights read “in the spirit” of the Declaration | Knesset, 1992 |
| Declaration of Establishment | “Complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens” | Provisional Government of Israel, 1948 |
| Ka’adan judgment | “The absolute equality of all of its citizens” | Israeli Supreme Court, 2000 |
How large is Israel’s Jewish majority, and who counts it?
The Central Bureau of Statistics’ own preliminary count for 22 April 2026 places 7.790 million people, 76% of a 10.244 million population, in its “Jews and Others” category. That 76% is not a Jewish share: “Others,” on the Bureau’s definition, covers non-Arab Christians, members of other religions and people registered as not classified by religion.
The same release counts 2.157 million Arabs, 21.1% of the population, a category the Bureau defines as Moslems, Arab Christians and Druze, and 296,000 foreigners, 2.9%, on foreigner data for the end of 2025. The three groups sum to the 10.244 million total. The estimates are preliminary and rest on the 2022 census, and since 2023 the Bureau’s population estimates include foreigners staying in Israel, so the series is not continuous with earlier years.
A count of Jews alone appears in the Bureau’s Independence Day 2024 release: 7.427 million, in a population of 9.900 million in May 2024. That series rests on the 2008 census and excludes the foreign worker population, which the Bureau estimated at 222,500 at the end of 2022. The 2024 Jews-alone figure and the 2026 “Jews and Others” figure come from different categories, different census bases and different treatments of foreigners, so subtracting one from the other yields no valid size for the Others group.
Each figure is the Bureau’s own compiled count, published by a state body and not independently verified. What the count establishes is composition: a Jewish majority, on the 2024 release’s count, and an Arab population of 2.157 million, 21.1%, on the 2026 release’s count. Composition alone does not distinguish among the types in Smooha’s (1997) typology, since every type he describes has a majority; the legal standing of each group is set by the statutes examined above, not by the census.
Which non-Jewish communities live in Israel, and how many?
The Central Bureau of Statistics counted 1.707 million Muslims (the Bureau’s “Moslem” category), 18.1% of Israel’s residents, at the end of 2021, in a preliminary figure from its own 2022 release. The Bureau publishes each community’s count in a separate release on a separate date, so the figures stand side by side and are never added into a single total.
For Christians, the Bureau’s Christmas 2025 release estimates about 184,200 in December 2025, about 1.9% of the population on the Bureau’s own base, in a preliminary figure that excludes Christians absent from the Population Register. Of Christians at the end of 2024, 78.7% were Arab Christians, and the largest Arab Christian populations were in Nazareth (18,900), Haifa (18,800) and Jerusalem (13,400). For the Druze, the Bureau’s 2024 release gives a preliminary estimate of approximately 152,000 in February 2024, against 14,500 at the founding of the State.
Geography sharpens the composition. The Bureau’s 2022 release counted 362,000 Muslims in the city of Jerusalem at the end of 2021, 37.5% of the city’s residents and 21.2% of all Muslims in Israel. Of Arab Christians at the end of 2024, 68.3% lived in the Northern District and 14.7% in the Haifa District, on the Bureau’s Christmas 2025 release.
These three communities supply the Bureau’s Arab category, with Arab Christians counted in it and non-Arab Christians counted under “Others.” They are the minority Smooha’s (1997) model describes, the population to which, on his account, citizenship extends and from whose benefits it is not excluded. The counts measure size and location; each is the Bureau’s own compiled figure, and the dates run from the end of 2021 to December 2025, so no combined minority total can be drawn from them.
How did Arab citizens view the Jewish-state definition in 1995?
In Sammy Smooha’s face-to-face survey of 1,200 Arab citizens in September to October 1995, reported in his 1997 article, 35.3% rejected Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish-Zionist state. The figure is 31 years old and predates the 2018 Nation-State Law by 23 years, so it measures reaction to the state’s definition as it stood in 1995.
The same survey found that 6.8% denied Israel’s right to exist at all, so roughly five times as many respondents rejected the state’s Jewish-Zionist definition as rejected the state itself. Larger shares objected to specific features: 75.0% objected to Israel keeping a Jewish majority, and 50.3% regarded Zionism as racist (Smooha, 1997). Each figure is a separate question, and a respondent could hold several of these views at once.
The sample bounds the reading. Respondents were men and women aged 18 or older, interviewed face to face in a statewide sample of residents within the pre-1967 borders, excluding East Jerusalem. The 1995 round was the fifth wave among Arab citizens in a series Smooha ran in 1976, 1980, 1985, 1988 and 1995, with a parallel sample of 1,200 Jewish citizens. Every percentage in the article dates to that 1995 round, not to the 1997 year of publication.
What the survey measures is the gap the ethnic-democracy model predicts: a minority that largely accepts the state’s existence while a majority of it objects to the institutionalized majority control the model describes. The figures describe opinion in 1995 and are not a reading of opinion in 2026.
Methodology
The evidence is drawn from three source types. Enacted texts come first: the Nation-State Law (2018), the Law of Return (1950) with its 1970 amendment, the Rabbinical Courts Jurisdiction (Marriage and Divorce) Law (1953) and the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty (1992), each in the English text the Knesset publishes, with the Declaration of the Establishment of the State (1948) in the Knesset’s English text. The Knesset labels its Basic Law translations unofficial; the Law of Return and Rabbinical Courts pages are scans from the Laws of the State of Israel series marked neither official nor unofficial. The Hebrew governs throughout. The 1950 Law of Return page and the 1953 Rabbinical Courts Law are texts as enacted, not the consolidated law in force.
The court record is HCJ 6698/95 Ka’adan, in the English text published by the Cardozo Israeli Supreme Court Project. Official statistics come from five Central Bureau of Statistics releases dated 2022 to 2026, each a preliminary compiled count on its own base and date; the 2026 figures rest on the 2022 census and include foreigners, and the 2024 figures rest on the 2008 census and exclude foreign workers.
The scholarship is two peer-reviewed conceptual articles, Yiftachel (1999), which defines “ethnocracy” and measures nothing, and Smooha (1997), with its own 1995 survey of 1,200 Arab citizens inside the pre-1967 borders excluding East Jerusalem; no confidence interval is reported for those shares. Word counts for “ethnostate” and “ethnic state” are taken from the full text of that article, and the absence of “equal,” “religion,” “race” and “nationality” from the 1992 Basic Law from a case-insensitive search of the Knesset’s English text. Yiftachel (1993) is cited as referenced in Smooha’s footnote 22; the absence of “ethnostate” from Yiftachel (1999) rests on a check of that paper’s full text. No statute, court ruling or statistical series among these sources defines “ethnostate” as a category with criteria.
Conclusion
So does the word fit the state the record describes? The record answers in layers rather than in one word. Israel’s 2018 Nation-State Law reserves national self-determination “exclusive to the Jewish People”; the 1970 Law of Return defines a Jew by descent, conversion and religion while extending entry rights to non-Jewish spouses and grandchildren; and since 1953 Jewish marriage in Israel has run through religious law and religious courts.
The same record carries the other layer with equal weight. No Basic Law enacts equality, yet the Supreme Court in 2000 found “no contradiction” between Israel’s Jewish character and “the absolute equality of all of its citizens.” The Central Bureau of Statistics’ own preliminary count places 2.157 million Arabs, 21.1%, in the population in 2026. The typology that classifies Israel calls it an ethnic democracy, outside the Herrenvolk type, and never uses “ethnostate” in its 44 pages. In 1995, 35.3% of Arab citizens rejected the Jewish-Zionist definition while 6.8% rejected the state.
A state that reserves collective self-determination to one people, while its highest court reads absolute civic equality out of the same values, presents two records at once. When a single word is asked to describe both, which record does it carry, and which one falls away in the carrying?
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the Nation-State Law change the status of Arabic?
Clause 4(c) of the Knesset’s 2018 Basic Law provides that “nothing in this article shall compromise the status given to the Arabic language in practice, before this basic-law came into force.” The clause preserves practice as it stood before 2018 while the law’s other language clauses reassign formal status.
What does the Nation-State Law say about Jewish settlement?
Clause 7 of the Knesset’s 2018 law states: “The State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.” The clause sets a policy value and carries no figure, map or allocation.
Can a Jew who converts to another religion immigrate under the Law of Return?
The Knesset’s 1970 amendment excludes from the extended rights in section 4A(a) “a person who has been a Jew and has voluntarily changed his religion,” and section 4B defines a Jew for the Law’s purposes as a person “who is not a member of another religion.” The exclusion turns on the claimant’s own religious history, not on that of the parent or grandparent through whom a right is claimed.
Does the 1992 Basic Law reach statutes passed before it?
Section 10 of the Knesset’s Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty provides that it “shall not affect the validity of any law that existed prior to the inception of the Basic Law.” The Law of Return (1950) and the Rabbinical Courts Jurisdiction Law (1953) both predate it.
Did the Ka’adan ruling admit the petitioners to Katzir?
The Israeli Supreme Court’s 2000 remedy, in paragraph 40B, required the State to “consider the petitioners’ request” on the principle of equality and to decide “whether it can enable” them to build there. Justice Kedmi dissented only on whether the ruling reached past allocations, writing that he concurred with the Court’s approach to equality.
How many immigrants has Israel received since 1948?
The Central Bureau of Statistics’ own count for 2026 gives over 3.5 million immigrants since the establishment of the State, about 1.68 million of them since 1990. The Bureau counted about 21,000 immigrants in the 11.75 months to 22 April 2026.
What share of the world’s Jews live in Israel?
The Central Bureau of Statistics’ 2024 release put the share at about 45% of the world’s Jewish population at the end of 2022. The same release counted about 80% of Jews in Israel as born in Israel.
Sources
- Central Bureau of Statistics, 2024. Israel’s Independence Day 2024. Central Bureau of Statistics, Jerusalem. https://www.cbs.gov.il/he/mediarelease/doclib/2024/141/11_24_141e.pdf. Official record.
- Central Bureau of Statistics, 2024. The Druze Population of Israel On the Occasion of the Nabi Shu’ayb Festival 2024. Central Bureau of Statistics, Jerusalem. https://www.cbs.gov.il/he/mediarelease/DocLib/2024/124/11_24_124e.pdf. Official record.
- Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. Christmas 2025, Christians in Israel. Central Bureau of Statistics, Jerusalem. https://www.cbs.gov.il/he/mediarelease/DocLib/2025/413/11_25_413e.pdf. Official record.
- Central Bureau of Statistics, 2026. Israel’s Independence Day 2026. Central Bureau of Statistics, Jerusalem. https://www.cbs.gov.il/he/mediarelease/DocLib/2026/117/11_26_117e.pdf. Official record.
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2022. The Moslem Population in Israel: Data on the Occasion of Eid al-Adha (The Feast of the Sacrifice). Media Release 217/2022, Jerusalem. https://www.cbs.gov.il/he/mediarelease/DocLib/2022/217/11_22_217e.pdf. Official record.
- Israeli Supreme Court, 2000. HCJ 6698/95 Ka’adan v. Israel Land Administration, judgment of 8 March 2000. English text, Cardozo Israeli Supreme Court Project. https://versa.cardozo.yu.edu/sites/default/files/upload/opinions/Ka’adan%20v.%20Israel%20Land%20Administration.pdf. Official record (court judgment).
- Knesset, 1950, amended 1970. Law of Return, 5710-1950, and Law of Return (Amendment No. 2), 5730-1970. Laws of the State of Israel, English text published by the Knesset. https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/about/history/documents/kns1_return_eng.pdf and https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/about/history/documents/kns7_return_eng.pdf. Official record (enacted legislation).
- Knesset, 1953. Rabbinical Courts Jurisdiction (Marriage and Divorce) Law, 5713-1953. Laws of the State of Israel, English text published by the Knesset. https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/about/history/documents/kns2_rabbiniccourts_eng.pdf. Official record (enacted legislation).
- Knesset, 1992, amendments through 2022. Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, 5752-1992. Unofficial English translation. https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/activity/documents/BasicLawsPDF/BasicLawLiberty.pdf. Official record (enacted legislation).
- Knesset, 2018. Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. Unofficial English translation. https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/activity/documents/BasicLawsPDF/BasicLawNationState.pdf. Official record (enacted legislation).
- Provisional Government of Israel, 1948. Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. Official Gazette Number 1, Tel Aviv, 14 May 1948; English text published by the Knesset. https://main.knesset.gov.il/en/about/pages/declaration.aspx. Official record (founding instrument).
- Smooha, Sammy, 1997. Ethnic Democracy: Israel as an Archetype. Israel Studies 2(2), 198 to 241. Indiana University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30246820. Peer-reviewed.
- Yiftachel, Oren, 1993. The Concept of ‘Ethnic Democracy’ and Its Applicability to the Case of Israel. Ethnic and Racial Studies 15(1), 125 to 136. Cited as referenced in Smooha (1997), footnote 22. Peer-reviewed.
- Yiftachel, Oren, 1999. “Ethnocracy”: The Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine. Constellations 6(3), 364 to 390. DOI 10.1111/1467-8675.00151. Peer-reviewed.