Can Israel Be Jewish and Democratic?

• Israel, so the argument goes, affronts its non-Jewish citizens by identifying itself as a Jewish state and by using traditional religious emblems as official national symbols - for example, the Star of David on its flag. But are democratic principles necessarily violated when Israel asserts a Jewish identity based on the ethnic and religious heritage of its majority group.
• In fact, most democracies have laws and practices that specially recognize a particular people's history, language, culture, religion and group symbols, even though they also have minorities from other groups. In the democracies of Europe, East Asia, and those in the former republics of the Soviet Union, numerous laws and institutions favor a country's principal ethnic group but are nevertheless accepted as compatible with democratic principles.
• Christian crosses adorn the flags of Switzerland, Sweden, Greece and Finland, and the UK flag boasts two kinds of crosses. In the UK, Norway and Denmark, the monarchs head national churches.
• Ireland allows applicants of "Irish descent or Irish associations" to be exempted from ordinary naturalization rules. Poland, Croatia and Japan have similar laws of return favoring members of their own respective ethnic majorities.
• Israel was founded as a national home for the Jews, recognized as a nationality and not just a religious group. After Allied forces conquered Palestine from the Ottomans in World War I, Britain, France, Italy and other leading powers of the day supported the idea that the Jewish people, long shamefully abused as exiles throughout the diaspora, should be offered the opportunity to reconstitute a Jewish-majority state in their ancient homeland of Palestine.
• It is not antidemocratic for Israel to protect its status as a Jewish state in ways similar to those used by the French, Swiss, British, Germans, Italians, Lithuanians, Japanese and others to protect the status of their countries as national homelands.

The writer, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, served as U.S. Undersecretary of Defense from 2001 to 2005.