138 chapter four and Switzerland come to mind) have a long and devastating record of anti-immigrant, and particularly anti-Muslim (or Islamophobic) racism, realized through socio-cultural vilification, state policies and legislation. They are right to point out that the international reality is not in conjunction with the concept which considers a modern, liberal democracy as a ‘culturally neutral and a nationally colourless entity’. But despite this reality – one that still does not excuse exclusionary Zionist policies and practices – their comparison does not hold in the case of Israel. The Arab minority population in the Jewish state is placed beside minority populations in European states in a manner that blurs the historical record of the respective countries. Arab existence in Israel is a different set of affairs, because preservation of the Jewish state, its symbols and values, is contingent on the denial of their indigenous status and presence of Arabs in their historical homeland. In this sense, Arab presence in modern Israel is not the result of the same socio-political, economic, legal and historical dynamics that, for example, may have resulted in an immigrant Muslim population in France, Germany and other European states. Mechanisms of population control, displacement, land confiscation, ethnic cleansing and transfer do not operate in the European case studies cited by these liberal-Zionist scholars in the same multifaceted manner as they do in Israel. And while the increasingly repressive treatment of immigrant minority communities in European democratic societies is certainly worthy of condemnation, the target of the said mechanisms in Israel differs in that that target is an indigenous non-migrant population. Such comparisons serve the two-pronged purpose of simultaneously demoting Palestinians in Israel from an indigenous population to a ‘tolerated’ minority group without the same historical and cultural ties to the space, and vindicating Israel’s colonial incorporation regime and ethnic cleansing practices by placing Zionist democracy on par with European democracies. Israeli Demographobia In addition to control over the land, demographic control is also a cornerstone to the Zionist project. The Zionist settler-colonial paradigm dictates that the ‘right’ people – namely Jews – must settle the land and that this population must constitute a majority of the total population of the state to maintain its Jewish character. A recurring concern for Israeli national security officials, and a stimulant of periodic geographic and topographic changes to the state, demographobia, or the pathological fear of and