I Believe in Giving Full Credit

My letter in the Jerusalem Post:

Credit where credit is due

Sir, – In his article “An ethnocracy or multiethnic democracy?” (March 2), Seth Frantzman writes of a new code word for slandering Israel: “ethnocracy.” However, his claim that it appears to have its origins in 2002 with research grants to one Alexander (Sandy) Kedar is chronologically in error.

Sammy Smooha offered the “ethnic democracy” model in the mid-1990s, and in an article in Israel Studies, Vol. 3, in 1998, As’ad Ghanem, Nadim Rouhana and Oren Yiftachel critically engaged the theory. In the June 1998 issue of the Tel Aviv University Law Review, Yiftachel published another article entitled “Nation-Building and the Division of Space in the Israeli Ethnocracy.”

I believe credit for denigrating the State of Israel and perverting its political, social and cultural reality should be granted to those who truly deserve it.

YISRAEL MEDAD
Shiloh

and this:

Seth Frantzman writes: Mr. Medad is correct. The origin of the term being applied to Israel apparently does have an earlier pedigree than I gave it, and credit should indeed go, at least partly, to Smooha, Ghanem and Rouhana.