156 chapter five become like all other nations standing in its own right in its sovereign state,” while the latter were to first migrate to Israel to then contribute to building the state.10 As a result, the petition held, the designation of “Jewish” is not merely limited to Jewish-Israeli citizens and therefore another national classification is necessary. This petition was predictably rejected by the Jerusalem District Court Judge Noam Sohlberg on the grounds that the matter was “not justiciable.” Significantly, for Justice Sohlberg, the fact that the appeal included Jews, Arabs and Druze citizens, among others, rendered it un-justiciable. Unlike the Tamarin petition, which the Supreme Court had agreed to consider, the implications of Sohlberg’s verdict would be to include non-Jews in the ‘Israeli’ nation. He writes: I don’t think we can treat the two cases similarly …. In the present case, people of many different religions, cultures and nationalities, Jews, Arabs, Druze and others, have joined together. This was not true in the previous case, which involved only a Jew. It is not at all the same to recognize Israeli nationality for a Jew as it is for members of other nations.11 Though this implies that Justice Sohlberg may have reached a different conclusion had all of the applicants been Jewish, it is evident that the Zionist national consensus to which he subscribes prevents him from considering non-Jews as belonging to an ‘Israeli’ nation, even prior to the acknowledgment that such a nation exists. The ‘Jewish’ and ‘Israeli’ are synthesized to such a degree in the Zionist framework that the acknowledgment of the latter by the court would be equivalent to it “creat[ing] something out of nothing.”12 In hearing the appeal of the petition in 2010, the Supreme Court fiercely rejected Justice Sohlberg’s argument that the petition was “not justiciable,” but it also strongly indicated that it was likely to refuse the appeal. The degree to which the Israeli Knesset and courts can exercise their authority on the question of the relationship between a ‘Jewish’ and an ‘Israeli’ nationality was also pointed to by former President of the Supreme Court, Justice Aharon Barak. In The Hebrew Republic (2008), Israeli academic Bernard Avishai explains: In May 2006, Barak’s court in effect answered the petition, with a ruling in an entirely different case. The suit in question challenged army deferrals for 10 Dan Izenberg, “Supreme Court to decide if there is an ‘Israeli nation’,” The Jerusalem Post, March 07, 2010, http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=170360. 11 Sohlberg quoted in ibid. 12 Ibid.