Boas Evron traces the violent fissures in Israeli society to a basic incompatibility between the concept of a democratic, secular state, on the one hand, and an integral nation defined on a religious basis, on the other. Surveying the full sweep of Jewish history, Evron argues that the Jews were never a territorial nation. Judaism is instead a religious civilization for which the diaspora was not a historical coincidence but a necessary condition of its existence. He concludes that Israel should become a territorial state accommodating its sizeable non-Jewish minority in a truly democratic way.