122 chapter four disenfranchisement, legally entrenched discrimination, and a range of other violations. Even the most liberal Zionists consider exclusive Jewish demographic domination and territorial control as vital for the existence of a Jewish national home, regardless of its legal, political and human costs. And with these two factors as priorities, the liberal-Zionist ideology proves incapable of implementing even the most basic principles of liberalism. In Israel and the Family of Nations: The Jewish Nation-State and Human Rights (2009), Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein delineate one of the most robust liberal-Zionist readings of Israeli politics and history. Though hardly representative of the increasingly hawkish mainstream Israeli political attitude, the authors put forward a liberal account of the Zionist project through systematic academic argumentation designed to counter both Israeli and non-Israeli voices of criticism against the Zionist regime. Citing various European and North American constitutions, norms, and laws, the book oscillates between pragmatic, principled and impassioned lines of argumentation aimed at rendering the Zionist movement – and its realization in the form of a Jewish state – immune from critique regarding its continued violations against the Palestinian people. Yet, heavily lacking in any analysis of power, the logical and political coherence of the liberal-Zionist positions presented in this book are only sustained through selective readings of international legal texts, historical experiences and current political realities. The UN Partition Plan of 1947 Simply put, Yakobson and Rubinstein’s main argument is that … it is the denial of the legitimacy of the concept of a Jewish state that undermines the principles of universal equality, since it denies the right of the Jewish people to self-determination and national independence. …. Whatever, in the country’s day-to-day reality, contradicts democratic principles does not follow from Israel’s definition as a Jewish state (Yakobson and Rubinstein 2009, 2). The authors provide an account of debates held among members of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly leading up to their adoption of Resolution 181 on November 29, 1947 which called for the partition of Palestine into two independent states, one Arab and one Jewish, with Jerusalem and Bethlehem under special protection by the international