What Israel effectively operates on is a normalised two-tier conception of democracy. It is where political equality is recognised at the level of individual suffrage, however contested in practice, while remaining constrained by the institutional privileging of one national group over another, a principle treated as fixed and non-negotiable.
The legal significance, let alone the everyday implications for Palestinian-Israelis, lies not in individual instances of discrimination, but in whether they form part of an institutionalised system of domination, within which further exclusion can be pursued without fundamentally altering the existing political order. In other words, this version of ethno-democracy becomes the means of administering and perpetuating that hierarchy rather than a mechanism for overcoming it.
