Moriel Rothman-Zecher (an American-Israeli activist and writer who is active with Rabbis for Human Rights) (2012): “At various junctures in the process of peace-processing, Israeli leaders have waxed righteous about the need for the Palestinians to “recognize Israel as a Jewish State.” This demand is absurd on many levels, from its implicit requirement that Palestinian leaders give their seal of approval to the maintenance of Palestinian-Israelis’ second-class status to its rhetorical slight-of-hand distraction from the fact that Palestinian leaders have already recognized Israel’s right to exist as an Israeli State. But there is also an even more basic absurdity to this demand: Israel is not a Jewish state. Yes: Israel is a state in which people who are Jews are given more rights and privileges than people who are not Jews (let alone the Israeli-controlled West Bank and East Jerusalem, where the majority of non-Jews are barely given rights and privileges at all). Yes: Israel is a state in which archaic, hyper-masculine and exclusionary readings of Jewish texts are wielded against women and non-Orthodox Jews, as well as against non-Jews. But Israel is not a Jewish state in any value-based — or valuable — way… Jewish history has been transformed by Israeli policy from a rich, complex legacy of human suffering and triumph to a stale combination of archeological findings and Biblical quotes, wielded together as weapons against human beings who happen to not be Jews, to expel them from their homes and to strip them of their land and their dignity. I refuse to accept such a perversion of my history, religion and culture. Israel is not a Jewish state” (Moriel Rothman-Zecher, “Israel is not a Jewish state: on the destruction of Susya and the expulsion of South Sudanese”, The World Post, 20 August 2012: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/moriel-rothman/israel-is-not-a-jewish-state_b_1603422.html ).