So is Israel a democracy or an ethnocracy? A direction for an answer comes out of philosopher Avishai Margalit’s brief, provocative new work, On Compromise and Rotten Compromises. Margalit, I should note, spends little space explicitly discussing Israel. He addresses a universal question: At what point does a political compromise become morally indefensible? The brief answer is that “rotten compromises” are taboo, meaning agreements that “establish or maintain an inhuman regime, a regime of cruelty and humiliation … a regime that does not treat humans as humans.” http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=is_israel_a_democracy