Book excerpt: Reconstructing the Civic examines the civic activism of the homeland Palestinian minority in Israel. Employing a multi-methodological and empirically rich approach, Amal Jamal blends historical description with interviews of Palestinian elites drawn from a diverse range of civil society groups such as NGOs, youth movements, and religious organizations. He also critiques the failure of Western/liberal scholarship to account for the experience of minority civil society organizations in illiberal social and political contexts, largely because this literature assumes there is an inherent relationship between civil society and democracy. Jamal places an important spotlight on the complex interplay between liberal and illiberal trends in the emergence, organization, and transformation of Palestinian civil society in Israel as well as the need to introduce an alternative ethical model that aims to reconstruct ethnic states in universal civic terms.