November/December 2008-Opinion

How Israel Failed its Arab Minority
Eric alterman

With no military or state apparatus to enforce their will on a people weaker than they were before 1948, Jews almost never had power over anyone except other Jews. The question of how justly this historically oppressed nation might wield power over others, were it ever to gain any, occupied philosophers and rabbis for millennia. Today, we’ve had six decades worth of answers, and they are not very comforting.

I’m not talking about the Palestinians but the treatment by the Israeli Jewish majority of the Israeli Arab minority. Following the War for Independence (which Arabs call nakba, “catastrophe”), wouldn’t it have made moral and political sense to show the world that Jews, who had suffered as a minority almost everywhere, could rise above the treatment they had received themselves? Wouldn’t a thriving Israeli Arab population do wonders in countless ways for a state whose right to existence is still questioned by most of the Arab world? And wouldn’t it have been the “right” thing to do?

The position of Israeli Arabs is a complicated one. On the one hand, they endure myriad acts of discrimination. As just one example, it is nearly impossible for Israeli Arabs to purchase land from either the state or the Jewish National Fund, which owns most of it. On the other hand, Israeli Arabs are also inarguably better off, by almost any objective standard, than the majority Arab populations of neighboring states, whether the measurement be economic, political or social. For one thing, they can vote in free, contested elections.

The attitudes of Israeli Jews toward the Arab Israeli minority are hardening with dizzying speed, and anti-Arab attitudes are increasingly open and vocal. According to a recent public opinion poll conducted by Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, 31 percent of Israeli Jews favor transferring their fellow Arab citizens out of the country. Back in 1991, that number was 24 percent. Avigdor Lieberman, head of the hard-line Yisrael Beiteinu Party, which holds 11 seats in the Israeli Knesset, openly advocates the transfer of Israeli Arabs into a future Palestinian state. And, in a recent survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, more than half the Jewish population of Israel—53 percent—opposes full equal rights for Israeli Arabs.

For a long time, the Israeli government simply ignored its Arab citizens. “Between 1966 and 2000, there was hardly any discussion of the Arab minority,” says Shimon Shamir, who became Israel’s first ambassador to Jordan in 1995 and now teaches Middle Eastern history at Tel Aviv University. “Yes, there were books, conferences, but the government sought to avoid the difficult decisions, hoping it would go away.”

In 2000, the issue came to a head. Thousands of Israeli Arabs choked streets and threw stones in solidarity with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip following riots at the Temple Mount (ignited by Ariel Sharon’s purposely provocative visit there.) Thirteen Israeli Arabs were killed by police. Both the riots and the killings proved a shock to the body politic, and a three-person commission, chaired by retired Supreme Court Justice Theodore Orr, was formed to examine the underlying causes.

The Orr Commission’s report, issued in September 2003, found a pattern of government “prejudice and neglect” toward the Arabs that contributed to a “combustible atmosphere.” The authors concluded that the state had failed to “budget resources on an equal basis to the (Arab) sector (and)... did not do enough to promote equality in the Arab sector and did not act to uproot the phenomenon of discrimination.”

A group of prominent Israeli Arabs, alienated by both the occupation of the West Bank and their own often humiliating treatment, nevertheless did themselves no favors when, in early 2007, they issued what they called a “Vision Statement.” That document called on Israel to stop defining itself as a Jewish state and become a “consensual democracy for both Arabs and Jews.” To call this view “marginal” among Jewish Israelis would greatly overstate its popularity.

Ambassador Shamir, who served on the Orr Commission, argues that the “Vision Statement” fed into the Jewish sense of threat and that its authors “did great damage to their cause.” The dovish literary critic, Nissim Calderon, posits the unavoidable contrast between life in Israel and in places like Gaza. “Democracy is not a small thing,” he says. “Twenty minutes from here is a place run by gangsters.”

Many Israeli liberals feel that the Israeli Arabs made a terrible mistake in ending their willingness to support Israel’s leftist parties. “Beginning with the second intifada, most refused even to support Ehud Barak over Ariel Sharon, denying the distinction between the hardliners and the more moderate Labor Party,” Calderon says. “Now they speak about us as if they are part of Hamas.”

Today, an odd confluence appears between the arguments of newly militant Israeli Arabs and the forever-militant Jewish Israeli settlers. As Bernard Avishai, author of The Hebrew Republic, and Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, a literature professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, write, “The settlers say, absurdly, that if Jews have no claim to Hebron then they have none to Tel Aviv. Israeli Arabs increasingly agree.”

How sad that the one Arab-Jewish conflict that could easily have been avoided by a combination of generosity and simple good sense was ignored for so long that it now can be said to threaten everything that has come before it.

Eric Alterman is a professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College and of journalism at City University of New York’s graduate school. His latest book is Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook to Post-Bush America.