74 chapter two the conditions for political participation as outlined in Section 7A as its party platform stated that it “will struggle for another Israel, an Israel that is for all of its citizens” (Schmidt 2001, 282). The position of the PLP was that a state defined as Jewish is unable not treat its non-Jewish citizens as equals, and that a democratic state (by any acceptable reading of the term) could not give preference to a specific social group (Peled 1992, 437). For the petitioners and some of the judges on the Supreme Court, this argument is tantamount to negating the character of Israel as the state of the Jewish people.56 In the end, though the Court decided by a reluctant majority of 3-2 to support the decision of the CEC and allow the PLP to participate in the Knesset elections, there was a general consensus among the judges that the rejection of a political party is justified if it rejects the Zionist notion that Israel is a state of the Jewish people. With such an interpretation of Section 7(A), the Court effectively sets a precedent whereby other democratic considerations in a case are rendered secondary to the primary aim of maintaining the exclusive Jewish character of Israel. In the words of Israeli scholar David Kretzmer, the Court’s decision implied that, … on the decidedly fundamental level of identification and belonging there cannot be total equality between Arab and Jew in Israel. The State is the state of the Jews, both those presently resident in the country as well as those resident abroad. Even if the Arabs have equal rights on all other levels the implication is abundantly clear: Israel is not their state (Schmidt 2001, 284; also quoted in Peled 1992, 439). For the PLP and the Arab political parties today, demanding complete equality between Jews and Arabs in Israel and extending this demand to the national character of the state renders them vulnerable to exclusion from the political process. For our purposes, what is of significance here is that despite the willingness of Arab politicians to pursue constitutional amendments through the parliamentary process, their rejection of the particularistic definition of Israel as ‘the state of the Jewish people’ necessarily leads to their legal exclusion from the process as a whole. The Israeli regime is legally, politically and conceptually designed and organized in a circular manner so as to make it literally impossible to challenge its particularistic definition as a Jewish state. This circularity cogently surfaces in 56 As Peled explains, it is important to note that the PLP did not demand that The Law of Return be annulled but, rather, that the right of return be extended to also include the Palestinian refugees (ibid., 441).