September/October 2009

A Moment Magazine Special Series:
Israel's Arab Citizens

Read the first article in the series, "From Arab to Palestinian Israeli"

The situation of Israel’s Arab citizens has always been immensely complex. On the one hand, Jews and Arabs have lived together side by side in what Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua calls “a kind of remarkable co-existence.” On the other hand, the unresolved Israeli-Arab conflict has cast Israel’s Arabs as perpetual outsiders and figures of suspicion by both Jews in Israel and their Arab brethren abroad.

For most of Israel’s history, the question of how they should be treated has not been clearly answered. “In 1948 when the state was born, there was no policy for a situation in which a Jewish state would be established with an Arab minority,” says historian Elie Rekhess, the Crown Visiting Chair in Middle East Studies at Northwestern University and head of Tel Aviv University’s Adenauer Program on Jewish-Arab Cooperation. “Zionist ideologies evaded the question entirely.” Faced with a minority of 100,000 Arabs, the state granted them citizenship but pursued what Rekhess describes as two diametrically opposed principles: one based on democracy, the other on security.

The escalation of the Israeli-Arab conflict in the latter decades of the 20th century exposed the widening chasm between the Jewish state and its Arab citizens. The first intifada, lasting from 1987 to 1993, ignited anger and sympathy among Israeli Arabs. Many provided the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza with money, food and clothes and joined solidarity strikes held throughout Israel. The second intifada, which began in the fall of 2000, led to greater radicalization. During the October 2000 demonstrations, 13 Israeli Arabs were killed by police, leading to a large-scale Arab boycott of the 2001 elections.

The government investigation into the October 2000 deaths was eye-opening. Beyond reprimanding the police, the 2003 Or Commission report was an indictment of the state’s neglect of its Arab minority. “The Arab citizens of Israel live in a reality in which they experience discrimination as Arabs,” the report concluded. “Although the Jewish majority’s awareness of this discrimination is often quite low, it plays a central role in the sensibilities and attitudes of Arab citizens. This discrimination is widely accepted, both within the Arab sector and outside it, and by official assessments, as a chief cause of agitation.”

In the aftermath of the report, Arab and Jewish leaders and organizations have advocated for greater equality, with mixed success. Just a year after its publication, Judge Theodore Or, the retired Supreme Court Justice who headed the Commission, himself criticized the government for not doing enough to implement its recommendations. Systemic discrimination in education, budgets for Arab towns and villages and employment opportunities has continued. Nearly half of Israel’s Arab families live under the poverty line, compared with about 15 percent of Jewish families.

The rare cases where Arab citizens were either convicted or suspected of involvement in terror attacks or their planning, combined with the Gaza War and disillusionment with the state of the peace process, have bolstered Jewish fears about a “fifth column.” The popularity of Avigdor Lieberman’s nationalist party Israel Beiteinu (Israel is Our Home) illustrates just how deeply divided Israelis remain on the status of Israel’s Arab citizens. In February’s parliamentary elections, it became the third largest party in the Knesset.

Lieberman, now foreign minister, successfully campaigned on a thinly veiled anti-Arab platform, casting doubt on the loyalty of Arab citizens with the slogan: “No Loyalty. No Citizenship.” It was Lieberman who sent a message to Israeli Arabs in a Knesset floor debate last year: “You are only temporarily here. One day we will take care of you.” Knesset bills on a loyalty oath and against public commemorations to mark the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” the term Arabs use to describe the events of 1948, have further exacerbated Jewish-Arab tensions.

While some see in Lieberman a strong leader who may succeed where dovish leaders failed, others believe that his talk of transfers and loyalty oaths is splitting the country. “What I see now is a dangerous deterioration after 60 years,” says Yehoshua, who lives in Haifa, one of the country’s most integrated cities.

Moment will explore the lives of Israel’s Arab citizens in a multipart series, covering politics, economics, education, the media, women and the growth of the Islamic movement. The series will examine future possibilities under discussion—from a shared society along the lines of Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland to separation via population and land transfer.—Moment editors