124 chapter four “a territory larger than would have been justified if taking into account only the existing numerical ratios between Jews and Arabs in the country … [which] naturally increased the number of Arabs who would be included in its borders” (Yakobson and Rubinstein 2009, 18). The creation of a state for the Jews was, the authors contend, aimed at transferring the question of immigration into an internal issue of the Jewish state. From this rationale, Yakobson and Rubinstein conclude that the pan-Jewish right to Palestine was deemed to be in harmony with both the interests of the international community and democratic principles: [T]he committee saw no contradiction between providing full civil rights to the large Arab minority in the future Jewish state while allowing it to maintain its cultural particularity, on the one hand, and the Jewish character of the state by means of which the Jewish people would ‘take its place as an independent nation in the international community and in the United Nations’ … (Yakobson and Rubinstein 2009, 21). Of course, the story is a bit more complicated. The authors use the rationale of the proponents of the Partition Plan in 1947 to challenge contemporary criticisms of the inconsistency between the Jewish and democratic character of the State of Israel. However, the report of the UNSCOP, which included the Partition Plan eventually adopted by the UN General Assembly, also included explicit caveats for a range of rights and freedoms, including … full protection for the rights and interests of minorities, including the protection of the linguistic, religious and ethnic rights of the peoples and respect for their cultures, and full equality for all citizens with regard to political, civil and religious matters (Yakobson and Rubinstein 2009, 20, emphasis added). Placing the above protections, and others listed in the Partition Plan, alongside decades long state-imposed policies and practices of population transfer, displacement, home demolition, land confiscation, criminalization of family unity and more, speaks volumes. That, in 1947, the UN Committee did not see (or could not anticipate) any contradictions between providing full civil rights to Arabs and the Jewish character of the future Jewish state is, to say the least, an inadequate and irrelevant response to contemporary condemnations of the active use of Israel’s selfdefinition as a Jewish state as a tool of repression of Palestinian citizens and non-citizens. Moreover, the authors leave out the fact that the Israeli political and legal establishment itself also points to tensions between the