the israeli incorporation regime73 the state. Previous to this amendment, Ministers were only required to pledge an oath to the state.54 Taken together, the above legislative amendments alter the parliamentary dynamic in Israel and wholeheartedly deny Arab political representatives the means of addressing the needs and demands of their displaced and marginalized community. But this is not a novel development in the Israeli political scene. In 1985, the The Basic Law: The Knesset was amended by adding Section 7(A) which held that an MK or political party can be prohibited from running in the elections if they demonstrate, through their “aims or actions, expressly or by implication, … denial of the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people; denial of the democratic nature of the Jewish state; [or an] incitement to racism” (Schmidt 2001, 280). As evident, the first clause hinges political participation on the explicit recognition of Israel as a ‘state of the Jewish people’, thereby providing legal status to the notion that Israel is not a state of all of its citizens, including both Arabs and Jews. During debates held in the Knesset at the time with regards to the first clause of Section 7(A), former Arab MK Tawfik Toubi stated, To say today in the law that the State of Israel is the state of the Jewish people, means saying to 16%55 of the citizens of the State of Israel that they have no state and they are stateless, that the State of Israel is the state only of its Jewish inhabitants, and that Palestinian Arab citizens … reside and live in it on sufferance and without rights equal to those of Jewish citizens … (Schmidt 2001, 280). Indeed, the exclusion of Arabs from political participation that resulted from this amendment became evident in 1988, when the Supreme Court was faced with the issue of how to interpret the first clause of Section 7(A). The case of Ben-Shalom v. Central Elections Committee for the 12th Knesset (1988) elucidates the particular circularity of the Israeli regime at political, structural and discursive levels that obstruct and delimit Palestinian participation and development. On the eve of the 1988 Knesset elections, members of the Israeli right-wing Likud and ultra-nationalist Techiya (Renaissance) Party unsuccessfully petitioned the Central Elections Committee (CEC) of Israel to disqualify the joint Jewish-Arab Progressive List for Peace (PLP). According to the petitioners, the PLP did not satisfy 54 Legislative Bill no. 5/18, proposed on April 1, 2009. See Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, The Inequality Report, 54. 55 As mentioned in the Introduction of this book, today the Palestinian citizen population totals around 20.5% of the total population of Israel.