128 chapter four Rubinstein hold that unlike the bi-national alternative, the Jewish state can implement protections for its minority populations. The authors praise the “formal definitions” and declarations of contemporary Israel, despite their devastating effects on its Arab citizen population, but vehemently refuse to place any value in similar political and legal arrangements in a bi-national framework. And second, with this argument, these liberal-Zionist scholars actually employ the very same rationalization they deride the non-democratic and authoritarian Arab states for using in 1947 – that a Jewish state in an Arab-Muslim region is socially and politically problematic. Here Yakobson and Rubinstein’s position, despite being seeped in liberal discourse, is in tune with the contentions of the authoritarian Arab leadership as they too consider the region’s Arab-Muslim makeup to be inherently unfavourable to the existence of a Jewish state. Indeed, similar to the so-called “Arab unwillingness to accept the existence of a non-Arab entity in the region,” Yakobson and Rubinstein also refuse to imagine an alternative to a legally inscribed racial state framework that identifies itself both in response and opposition to its minority populations (Yakobson and Rubinstein 2009, 44). More than this, the authors construct an edifice defending discriminatory Israeli policies and practices by asserting: It is generally recognized that a minority feels a stronger need than a majority to express its identity; the efforts of the minority to maintain its identity and avoid being assimilated into the ‘homogeneity’ of the majority are generally viewed with sympathy.9 Here the authors want to have their cake and eat it too. What this liberalZionist framework creates is a dynamic where Jewish-Israelis receive the privileges of both a majority and a minority population, both of which are effectively used to evade criticism of Israeli state power. In the face of the Arab majority populations in the region, Jewish-Israelis are a minority and thus, the authors argue, extensive political and legal measures to entrench the Jewish character of the state ought to be “viewed with sympathy” – irrespective of its negative effects on the rights of the Arab citizenry and broader Palestinian nation. And in the face of the Arab minority within 9 The authors hold that “[i]t must always be borne in mind that the Jewish people of Israel face not just the Palestinian-Arab people. While constituting a majority in Israel, Israeli Jews are but a tiny minority in the Arab-Muslim Middle East…” and they go on to argue that “the Arab world is, legally as well as in fact, an Arab-Muslim world; in this world, the Israeli Jews represent a small minority striving to preserve its own identity” (ibid., 45, 46).