Hardly a week goes by without some representative of Israel's Arab community coming out with a declaration against the very existence of Israel as a Jewish state. None of these declarations is a demand for equal rights for Israeli Arabs or even a call for (justifiably) recognizing them as an integral part of the Arab nation and the Palestinian people. Instead, each and every one of the declarations is an attack on the existence of Israel as the state of the Jewish people.

The latest attack in this series has been launched by MK Talab A Sana (United Arab List), who has issued a proclamation that recalls the language of UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 (November 10, 1975), which declared that "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination" and was subsequently revoked, in Resolution 46/86, on December 16, 1991. The lawmaker has stated that Zionism is "in its very essence racist and colonialist" and that such racism will vanish from the country "just as the Turks and the English disappeared."

Anyone who is familiar with the characteristic problems of national minorities in other countries - especially in the new democracies that emerged in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet empire - will immediately understand that A Sana's statement can certainly not be considered the articulation of the aspirations of a national minority.

Such statements would never be made by a representative of the Russian minority in Estonia or the Hungarian minority in Romania or the Czech Republic. This is the kind of statement that is issued by the representative of a national majority who is addressing a minority group. On various occasions, representatives of Israel's Arab community have actually and explicitly stressed that while the Arabs are a minority in Israel, the State of Israel itself is a minority within a massive Arab-Muslim majority.

These representatives of Israel's Arab population are asserting an undeniable fact: In Israeli society, the Arabs are a minority group that does not yet enjoy substantive, total equality of rights in important areas such as the budgeting of public services, access to water and land infrastructures and government representation. From this point of view, Israel's Arabs are truly the other, the different one, who is weak and an "extraordinary case" and whose treatment is a measuring-stick for determining the quality and substance of Israeli society.

On the other hand, the Jews of Israel are a small island in an Arab-Muslim ocean. They are the other in the Middle East. The Arab-Muslim ocean does not particularly like islands that are not Arab and Muslim. Christians are in danger everywhere throughout the Arab-Muslim world and their numerical presence in the Middle East is steadily declining.

A war of extermination is being conducted against the non-Muslim minority of southern Sudan, while the Bahais of Iran are suffering persecution. Egypt's Greeks, who constitute a loyal and creative minority group, were the victims of the ethnic cleansing policy pursued by the country's late dictator-president Gamal Abdel Nasser; while the Christian state in Lebanon has all but disappeared.

Israel's position is much more difficult than that of these non-Muslim minorities. Unlike the Greeks of Egypt, the Jews of Israel have no other refuge on earth. Unlike the Christians and Bahais of the Middle East, the Jews of Israel are not just a religious minority - their very existence here illustrates the self-determination of a nation that has no other state in which it can articulate the same. (If there was such a state on the face of the globe, the majority of the Jews of Israel would perhaps seek asylum there.)

Let us go back to the "prophetic vision" of MK A Sana: Will Zionism disappear from the Middle East - not like the Turks and English, who had their own respective motherlands, but rather like the Middle East's other non-Muslim minorities that have disappeared or are in the process of disappearing?

The Jewish State of Israel can be destroyed either through war or through the implementation of the Palestinians' right of return. However, if Israel were to act cautiously and wisely and if it were to forgo non-essential "assets" - such as Jewish settlements in the heart of Arab-Palestinian population centers - in exchange for international backing and domestic solidarity, such a vision would never materialize. A Sana's "prophecy" would, thus, share the fate of the Arab-Palestinian predictions regarding Israel's collapse in the war that the Palestinians and their Arab brothers and sisters launched against the nascent Jewish state in 1948 - a war the results of which were so tragic for both Arabs and Jews.

A major problem in this context is that the Western world and its media perceive Israel through the prism of its conflict with the Palestinians, a nation that has neither a state nor any political rights. From this particular perspective, Israel looks like Goliath and the Palestinians look like David.

However, if the camera were to be positioned not in front of an Israeli tank, but rather on one of the satellites scanning this region, a different truth altogether would emerge. Israel is the other; in the Middle East, Israel is a minority, Israel is David; while the Muslim majority is Goliath.