136 chapter four population, within a comparative perspective. But in doing so, the authors fall short of accounting for a central feature of Palestinian presence in modern Israel, namely, their indigeneity. They assert: Generally speaking, in the constitution of a democratic nation-state, the standard provisions regarding the name of a state and its official (or ‘national’) language represent the definition of the national identity of that state; and it should be borne in mind that national language is widely regarded as a fundamental distinctive feature of modern national identity. By definition, a national minority is a community that defines its national identity by means of a different name from that which defines the identity of the state, and in most cases, its language also differs from the state language. It is the ‘national majority’ which gives the state its name and its identity (Yakobson and Rubinstein 2009, 6). As a result, the authors contend, Israeli Arabs are citizens whose national identity is different from that of the majority people in the state. They are therefore a national minority. …. [And] the Arab-Palestinian people, to which most of them regard themselves as belonging, has a right to a state of its own alongside Israel according to the principle of ‘two states for two peoples’ (Yakobson and Rubinstein 2009, 8, 118). Here, the liberal-Zionist account of the Palestinian-Arab population within Israel as a ‘minority’ community is completely lacking in both historicity and an analysis of power. The authors abruptly transition Palestinian-Arabs in Israel from a national non-immigrant collective who, while constituting a demographic minority in contemporary Israel, are nevertheless living in their historical homeland, to that of a national minority similar to other national collectives living in Israel. Defining Arabs as a national minority is a deliberate attempt to revise their historical presence on the land, thereby justifying state amendments to their political and legal claims. This redefinition and reconceptualization of Arabs in Israel is done without asking why Palestinian-Arabs in Israel are a minority or how they came to be a minority. Legally embedded and multifaceted mechanisms of population management along with a historical record of forceful displacement and ethnic cleansing campaigns which ensure the maintenance of a Jewish majority population in pre-1967 Israel and the Jerusalem area are not discussed. Indeed, this approach is particularly problematic in a context where Palestinian refugees constitute the world’s largest refugee population and where statistics of the registered Palestinian refugee population in the West Bank alone estimate a growth