liberal pretence of a jewish state137 rate of 2.4 percent per annum.16 Further, this liberal-Zionist position also lacks an analysis around the element of control. The intricate and intense manifestation of state control limiting a range of social, political, demographic, legal, and cultural developments of the Arab community within Israel is left unaddressed. It is not simply the case that the identity of Palestinians in Israel is different from that of the majority in the state. As mentioned, the Israeli regime requires a constant and ongoing re-creation of itself in opposition and response to its Palestinian-Arab citizenry. Reference is made to a Jewish majority in the state, ignoring elements of control and exclusion that are designed to maintain the dominant hold of this group within all spheres of the Israeli regime. The mandate of the Jewish state – and by extension Israeli citizenship – ensures that Arab status is always relative and inferior to that of the Jewish population. As a result, liberal-Zionist readings of Israel’s relation with its Arab minority prove incapable of meeting the political needs, and accounting for the historical development, of the Arab community inside Israel. These factors, along with the authors’ neglect of the historical record, also deconstruct the comparisons made in the book. Throughout the text, Israeli democracy is compared to the state systems, symbols and modes of representation present in other established European democracies. According to Yakobson and Rubinstein, comparisons with European democracies seek to “disprove the fashionable arguments that the Jewish state is quintessentially an exception to the norms of the democratic world,” to show that when critics of Israel “think of Europe, it is usually the Europe of ‘post-national’ rhetoric rather than contemporary Europe as it actually exists” (Yakobson and Rubinstein 2009, 198). The authors elaborate: By way of comparison, it should be noted that the gap between the immigrant Muslim minority and majority society in Western European countries is greater, in many respects … than its equivalent in Israel (Yakobson and Rubinstein 2009, 114). Of course, the authors are correct about this point. Established European democracies (too many to list here, but the examples of Britain, France, 16 United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, “Palestine refugees in the West Bank: Socio-economic trends and long-term opportunities,” April 2011, www .unrwa.org/userfiles/2011110145541.pdf. Important to re-emphasize here is the fact that this is the 2007 annual growth rate for registered Palestinian refugees in the West Bank alone. These statistics also do not include refugees in occupied East Jerusalem.