Israeli citizen / Jewish State?

[scholarsOrAcademics]

Shlomo Sand's book: The Invention of the JEWISH PEOPLE, 2009 translated from Hebrew.


Sand 's mother tongue is Yiddish, he wrote the book in Hebrew. He lives in Tel Aviv, where he teaches history. His thesis is “Israel cannot be described as a democratic state while it sees itself as the sate of the “Jewish people', rather than as a body representing all the citizens within its recognized boundaries The spirit of Israel's laws indicated that, at the start of the twenty-first century, the state's objective was to serve Jews rather than Israelis, and to provide the best conditions for the supposed descendants of this ethnos rather than for all the citizens who live in it and speak its language”. Page ix
I first learned of this book in a NLR book review by Gabriel Pitterberg. He read it when it came out in Israel as initially written in Hebrew. I still have not digested his (Pitterberg's) critique.
From Pitterberg: “But between Graetz and Ben-Gurion stood an actual settler project, and in particular the ethnic cleansing of 1948, in which Ben-Gurion played a central role and for which the Book of Joshua was retrospectively inspirational. This creates a rupture between Graetz’s use of the Bible and Ben-Gurions that is as significant as the continuity. To ignore this difference is a flaw not only in intellectual terms, but ethically and politically, for from the perspective of the indigenous Arabs it is the only thing that mattered: Graetz’s Bible was harmless, whilst Ben-Gurion’s was eliminatory. “ page 151 in NLR #59 Sep/Oct 2009
And “Sand misses an insight into the theme of the invented Jewish ‘nation-race’, as he terms it: the context for the increasing obsession with purity was not European nationalism in the abstract, but specific and concrete settler projects in which constructing the impregnable purity of the settler nation relative to the indigenes—unless and until they were removed—was absolutely crucial.” Page 150
There is much that I have to reread in Sand's book But first I will reread YIDDISH CIVILISATION: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation, Paul Kriwaczek. 2006 One question is – the Astrakhan Khanate and the Crimean Khanate (map of Europe in the 1500's ) of Kriwaczek, is it the same as the Khazars in Sand's writing titled “REALMS OF SILENCE: In Search of Lost (Jewish) Time?

Facts on the ground, 1948,1967
In the words of Sand, the gist of the argument that Israel is not a democracy and never will be, the following is highlighted:
“The contours of the nation were not seen as laid down by language, an everyday secular culture, presence on a territory and a political desire for integration in the collective {Instead, biological origin}, combined with fragments of a 'nationalized' religion, constituted the criterion for inclusion in the 'Jewish people.' It was impossible to unite this nation on the basis of a voluntary secular membership, and it is impossible to stop belonging to the “Jewish people,” and these original elements are still in force today in Israel—this is the real source of the problem” page 323
“In parallel, in the Western world, the retreat of classical civic nationality and the rise of enclosing forms of communitarianism, bound up with cultural globalization and the upheavals if immigration, have encouraged tendencies to withdraw into as exclusive Jewish identity.”
“Israel, in the early twenty-first century, defines itself as the state of the Jews and as the property of the 'Jewish people,' in other words of Jews living anywhere in the world, and not a possession of the ensemble of Israeli citizens residing on its soil—which is why it is appropriate to define it as an ethnocracy rather than a democracy. Page 324
Facts on the Ground. 1948 (Pappe), 1967 (Peace Accord? Road Map)

[hardcover]

1. We didn't see the forest for the trees.

That concept of a Jewish state has always been so obvious that we didn't see it.
Does anyone have info on the inclusion of non Jews at the time it was created?