“Nation-states can also be democratic,” wrote Amir Fuchs in his response (“Not just for Jews,” August 12) to Upper Nazareth Mayor Shimon Gapso’s proud declaration that, in effect, to be a true Zionist is to be a racist one.

One might have expected a self-described researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute to actually deal with the nature of democracy in backing up his assertions. A couple of insights from someone who apparently deals with the subject professionally would have been nice. But Fuchs doesn’t provide the goods, sufficing instead with a long quote from David Ben-Gurion’s 1948 declaration of independence.

If words were deeds and assertions were reality, all of us would be as rich as Bill Gates – or as noble as Mother Theresa. But they’re not, we’re not – and Ben Gurion’s stirring paean to democracy has absolutely no bearing on how the country functions today, more than two generations after its founding.

Ben Gurion may even have meant what he said, but, let’s face it, he wasn’t exactly an expert on democracy. Having been born in Tsarist Russia and lived almost his entire life under the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate, Ben Gurion had no personal experience of democracy. The same is true of most of his colleagues. As The Incredible String Band put it in the Sixties, “you know all the words and you sing all the notes, but you never quite learned the song.”

Ben Gurion’s milieu was Zionist and he and his generation was making it up as they went along. Democracy might have sounded like a nice adjunct to Jewish hegemony, but it was far from being a tried and tested recipe for a government dominated by one ethnic group. In modern English, we would call it a “wish-list.”

Mayor Gapso is living proof that Ben Gurion’s wish didn’t pan out. The UN may have reversed itself in 1991 and decided that Zionism did not, in fact equate with racism, but the Gapsos of the world – and they are abundant – are doing their best to prove otherwise.

Which leaves us with the original question: is the concept of “a democratic and Jewish state” a contradiction in terms or can an ethnically-based entity actually achieve true democracy?

Fuchs seems to believe that equal civil rights is the key. As long as all citizens, whatever their ethnic origin, can vote freely and are equal before the law, the state is democratic. Symbols, he infers, can be reserved for the ethnic majority and he makes no reference to the actual functioning of democratic institutions. At what point would rigged elections or practical discrimination, for example, disqualify a state from having democratic status? Fuchs doesn’t say.

Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe just held elections and its legal system is not officially discriminatory. Yet, in practice, the country is a totalitarian nightmare. Is it still a democracy in Fuchs’ book?

Fuchs’ idea of democracy seems to accord closely with the Ethnic Democracy model coined by Haifa University sociologist Sammy Smooha. According to Smooha’s analysis, Israel is not a liberal democracy, because it favors one ethnic group; not a consociational democracy (like Belgium), because ethnicity is not a major principle in the organization of the state; and not a Herrenvolk democracy (such as apartheid South Africa), because civil and political rights are extended to individuals, while minorities have some collective rights.

Describing Israeli democracy, Smooha writes: “Although enjoying citizenship and voting rights, the minorities are treated as second-class citizens, feared as a threat, excluded from the national power structure, and placed under some control. At the same time, the minorities are allowed to conduct a democratic and peaceful struggle that yields incremental improvement in their status.”

Smooha places the ethnic democracy model somewhere in “the democratic section of the democracy-non-democracy continuum.” In other words, it is more democratic than non-democratic, but not as democratic as many others.

As described by Smooha, Israel’s democracy is a pale and insipid version of Ben Gurion’s dream and of the liberal democracy that most of us like to think we live in. And even Smooha errs in Israel’s favor. He distinguishes between collective and individual rights, without acknowledging that limitations on collective rights often entail the violation of individual rights, thus breaching the ”fundamental democratic principle of individual civil equality” (from a paper by Asʻad Ganim, Nadim N. Rouhana and Oren Yiftachel.)

Even more to the point, Israel’s already-limited democracy is a moving target. Ongoing Judaization of the country, including immigration, discriminatory land practices, the recent surge in proposed anti-democratic legislation and, above all, the de facto ban on Arab participation in power, contributes to a constant slide down Smooha’s continuum in the direction of non-democracy.

The bottom line is that, so long as Israel continues to occupy the Palestinian territories without enfranchising their citizens, it is, at best, a non-democratic Herrenvolk state. And even if a Palestinian state were to be established, the determination to maintain Jewish hegemony in a binational context would push us to the outer edges of the democratic nations.

So much for “Jewish and democratic.” It was a nice thought, though.

