Israel is NOT a democracy! A democracy grants equal citizenship to all its subjects. Israel's "democracy" excludes 6 million Palestinians whose lives it completely controls; it keeps 8 million more shut out in exile; & it passed a 2018 nation-state law that officially designated the 2 million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship as 2nd class citizens. That decades-long demographic engineering to maintain an 80% Jewish majority is the exact opposite of a democratic system. Liberal democracy means equal protection & rights for all citizens. Israel's ethnonationalism privileges a core national or ethnic group. The two cannot be combined! An "ethnic democracy" (Israel's system) is a contradiction in terms. It doesn't uphold the principles of political equality and non-discrimination because it structurally privileges one ethnic group over another. Institutionalized ethnic dominance inherently relegates minorities to a secondary political or symbolic status, creating systemic instability and limiting equal protection under the law. That's why Human Rights Watch concluded that Israel maintains an apartheid system between the River and the Sea, including against Palestinian citizens of Israel.