For most people, in Israel and around the world, “Israelis” are Jews or, more precisely, Jews who live in Israel. Israel – the Jewish state – according to this widespread perception is populated by Jews who have resurrected Jewish sovereignty in their ancestral homeland after millennia of dispersal and statelessness. Whether or not one celebrates or condemns this historical development, the Jewishness of the country's population (however secular some may be) is generally taken for granted. The equation of Israeli with Jew is constantly repeated in the media and by politicians and activists, “pro-Israel” and “anti-Israel” alike.

This common discourse has given rise to a great deal of popular confusion. All too often, people are completely unaware of the large number of non-Jewish citizens of Israel – around 1.8 million people – who make up a quarter of the country's total population of 7.5 million. One in four Israelis, in other words, are not Jewish. The vast majority of this significant non-Jewish population are Arabs, who at the end of 2009 numbered 1,526,000, a little more than 20 percent of Israel's population.