" Dominated by Zionism's particular concept of nationality, the State of Israel
still refuses, sixty years after its establishment, to see itself as a republic that
serves its citizens. One quarter of the citizens are not categorized as Jews, and
the laws of the state imply that Israel is not their state nor do they own it. The
state has also avoided integrating the local inhabitants into the superculture it
has created, and has instead deliberately excluded them. Israel has also refused
to be a consociational democracy (like Switzerland or Belgium) or a multicultural democracy (like Great Britain or the Netherlands)—that is to say, a state
that accepts its diversity while serving its inhabitants. Instead, Israel insists on
seeing itself as a Jewish state belonging to all the Jews in the world, even though they are no longer persecuted refugees but full citizens of the countries in which
they choose to reside. The excuse for this grave violation of a basic principle of
modern democracy, and for the preservation of an unbridled ethnocracy that
grossly discriminates against certain of its citizens, rests on the active myth of an
eternal nation that must ultimately forgather in its ancestral land. "

― Shlomo Sand