Mada's Research Papers

Summary:
Mada al-Carmel - The Arab Center for Applied Social Research - is pleased to announce the release of its latest publication, entitled "Deliberations on Collective Rights and the National State", which deals with issues of collective rights of minorities on comparative, normative and actual levels. This collection of articles is the result of a series of seminars arranged and chaired by Dr. Amal Jamal which ran between October 2001 and April 2002. The book includes articles by a number of Jewish and Arab scholars and lawyers who participated in the seminars, including Amal Jamal, Yossi Yonah, Gad Barzilai, As'ad Ghanem, Ilan Saban, Mohammad Dahleh and Nimer Sultany.

These articles shed light on the current political discourse on the concept of collective rights of ethnic and national minorities, an issue of increasing global relevance given the development of multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-national societies in states throughout the world. In their treatment of the specific issue of the collective rights of the Palestinians in Israel, these articles focus on the Palestinians' status as aboriginal inhabitants of the land, and emphasize the importance of this identity in their attempts to win their collective rights in a state that continues to oppress and marginalize them, while denying their existence as a national community.

In his conclusion, Amal Jamal argues that there is a pressing need to legislate for the collective rights of the Palestinian minority in the state of Israel. Critical of the liberal-Zionist discourse which reduces and limits the rights of the minority to the individual and sectarian levels, he argues that recognition of the Palestinians' collective rights is a fundamental requirement if genuine equality between the Jewish majority and the Palestinian minority is to be realized.

This publication is currently only available in Arabic.