Israel Shahak once remarked that for at least the last 200 years, Jews have demanded equal rights in every country in which they’ve lived – with the remarkable exception of Israel, the Jewish state. Israel has always founded its institutions on the denial of equality to non-Jews. From the beginning, a good half a century before 1948 when the state of Israel was established, Zionist ideology has held strict opposition to equality for non-Jews as a fundamental principle.