A Multicultural Entrapment

This book provides a critical look at Israel's religion and state conflict to shed new light on the constitutional forces defining Jewish-centered conflicts, rather than Palestinian-Arab centered conflicts. In particular, it highlights the ramifications of the theory and practice of multiculturalism in the context of a Middle Eastern legal order.

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The religion and state debate in Israel has overlooked the Palestinian-Arab religious communities and their members, focusing almost exclusively on Jewish religious institutions and norms and Jewish majority members. Because religion and state debates in many other countries are defined largely by minority religions' issues, the debate in Israel is anomalous. Michael Karayanni advances a legal matrix that explains this anomaly by referencing specific constitutional values. At the same time, he also takes a critical look at these values and presents the argument that what might be seen as liberal and multicultural is at its core just as illiberal and coercive. In making this argument, A Multicultural Entrapment suggests a set of multicultural qualifications by which one should judge whether a group based accommodation is of a multicultural nature.