THE ARABS OF ISRAEL

...Spokesmen for Gush Emunim, wild enough in their own annexationism, keep asking American visitors: "Why do you send us these animals (the Kahaneites...

...that while Rakah politicians had no favors to dispense, they were "eloquent and talented," dealing with matters of overall policy and principle especially appealing to the Arab young who were drifting away from their parents...

...JACK COHEN, a dedicated Reconstructionist rabbi and Hillel director, has devoted 18 years to the task of reconciling Jews and Arabs...

...Individuals, groups and sometimes whole villages bartered votes for material rewards of various sorts, like a piped water supply, electricity, public buildings...

...These Arabs are not about to leave...

...Rakah, in line with Soviet policy, formally accepts the existence of Israel while strongly promoting a separate Palestinian state...

...Only a recommitment to libertarian and egalitarian ideals, and nothing less, can save the soul of Israel...

...They are descendants or survivors of an Arab minority that somehow remained in 1948 when a majority of their brethren fled the new nation of Israel...

...Eugene Weiner, a very able Israeli sociologist, doubts that any Westerner steeped in modernity can ever grasp a world view that places land above people...

...Modern miracles do happen in the Holy Land...

...Or all the aggrieved nationalities who will soon outnumber the Great Russian majority in a country where the grisliest domination still holds sway...

...64 percent consider the Zionist movement to be racist...

...On Holocaust Day, Weiner addressed 30 Arab students at the University of Haifa...

...Hence, If you take a kibbutz of 500 people and a village of 10,000 Arabs, the kibbutz may have 5,000 dunams of irrigated land with up-to-date tractors and combines alongside factories for the mechanical production of cotton goods, tinning, canning, and so forth...

...So sympathetic an observer as Weiner maintains that Arabs get much more for their taxes than Jews, that they are even more skillful at tax evasion, and that the state indirectly subsidizes their housing...

...The integration of the Arab and Jewish electorates into one political system does not imply the emergence of consensual order...

...Rakah has eaten away at the establishment's lists...

...Cohen's major function is to work at the Hebrew University with Arab students for whom he also tries to raise funds...

...Very well...

...He knew we were not living in heaven...

...But Martin Buber and Judah Magnes still look like moral heroes if only because of their sensitivity to the Arabs in whose midst they encouraged oppressed Jews to settle...

...Except for the Druzes, a separate sect whose holy men recognized the State of Israel at its inception, Israeli Arabs are not conscripted into the armed forces...

...About this Ernst Simon remarks, "We must learn their way of thinking...

...His attitude, benevolent enough in its way (Zionist leaders have always pointed with justification to the greater economic wellbeing of Arabs inside than outside Israel), was still compounded of distance and delay...

...These traditional sheep-and-cattle herders have, like Gypsies in Europe, to some extent settled down in towns and villages...

...The problem is more acute in several Arab lands where Kurds and Shi'ites and Sunnites and Coptic Christians and Greek Orthodox religionists have at one another with far more savagery than the differentiated peoples of Israel...

...When Arab met Arab in the West Bank in 1967, following its occupation by Israel, or in Jerusalem, a single city after two decades of division, coreligionists not infrequently relatives --were reunited...

...As their standard of living went up, unemployment disappeared...

...And he elevates the moral failure into an existential proposition, "People may learn from their defeats but never from their victories...

...Seldom can a historical transition be so precisely pinpointed...

...Indeed, "Israeli Arab" is no longer an acceptable term within the academic subculture that overwhelmingly defines itself as Palestinian...

...IandThou...

...In his eyes, the Six-Day War, or rather its aftermath, need not have polarized and radicalized Israel's Arabs as in fact it did...

...Neither did anyone else...

...There can be little question that land has taken on incalculable symbolic significance...

...A. Cohen, another anthropologist cited by Shokeid, discerned a slight shift away from traditional party lists as early as 1959 when Maki was the chief beneficiary...

...In Palestine, under the British, they belonged to a majority whose flight included many of their most affluent members, among them clergymen, teachers, and intellectuals...

...therefore, it actually didn't happen —nor did anything else that interferes with the "legitimate rights of Palestinian nationalism...

...The "old good Zionism" is deeply compromised when its donkey work devolves on Arabs and Oriental Jews (even if each group also has its nouveaux riches...

...to reduce xenophobia on every side, an aim that should be easier to achieve when the nation's very survival is not at stake...

...After all," says Och, "a campus is one of the few places where Arabs can function politically...

...At no point on this spectrum do we find any actual terrorists...

...In 1947 the United Nations granted one of them a state that was explicity designed as the sanctuary for what remained of a decimated and homeless people...

...The ethnically homogeneous institution can be upgraded but it also reinforces obnoxious patterns of segregation...

...Perhaps Geraisi exaggerates, but he sees 163 these collectives as hugh exploitative enterprises, representing the largest concentration of capital in the country...

...In despair over his "surreal" experience, Weiner wonders whether people who cannot share the pathos of each others' positions will be able to find any basis for rational discourse...

...The political game is anything but solitaire...

...Possibly this low blow was part of the infighting that brought Labor down a few years later...

...There is partial peace and the problem seems to be worse than ever...

...Not one can be found in any of the other six Israeli universities where, however, there are lowlier Arab academics...

...Who in this tangle of irrational forces is "misbehaving...

...What happens when communication has been effected...

...This Brooklyn-born demagogue has a final solution to the Israeli Arab problem: expulsion...

...We are in the presence of a global problem that will not wait on any eschatological solution...

...Or as Cohen indicates: The majority of electors seemed to be interested in immediate material gain rather than in the success of any particular ideology...

...A trade-off: votes for specific advantages...

...With extreme effort Och himself can lift 50 or 60 ethnically mixed students to a certain level of sympathy and understanding...

...It has almost everything to do with protest...

...its members meet regularly but have yet to attract their first Muslim...

...The other, Levi Eshkol, "momentarily forgetting that he was the Prime Minister," sighed and said, "Our old good Zionism is gone...

...Among these categories there is a frequently nebulous, sometimes clear, but never onesided connection...

...They might, however, point toward a national purpose that, in transcending mere ethnicity, could keep Israel from unthinkable alternatives...

...Their mechanism for this purpose is "the Arab list," a separate set of candidates attached to each of the ballots...

...He encountered "a perceptual block to recognizing the historical truth...

...But the argument is lame...

...And these bridges would collapse under the weight of certain proclivities that, since they cannot be hidden, should be exorcised...

...To date, the Israeli Arab dementia is different...

...It does imply, however, the emergence of a universal order in which Arabs and Jews would approach the center of power, and would be approached by those aspiring to 167 reach it, by the same norms and frameworks of political behavior...

...Not only in the name of decency but to save our skins, we 170 must address ourselves bit by bit to this issue...

...From then to now, thoughtful leaders— maybe even a few in the Likud—have had a bad conscience about "their Arabs...

...Concerning the broader subculture, Sami Smouha, that rara avis, a Sephardic professor who heads the Arab department at Haifa University, has collected solid data in a recent survey sponsored by the Ford Foundation...

...Furthermore, in his classes with their fiftyfifty mix of Jews and Arabs mutually committed to eliminating the language barrier that separates them, optimal conditions for the furtherance of understanding do exist...

...And from this too he adduces a generalization that is amply documented, say, in Crane Brinton's The Anatomy of Revolution...

...It is with such ideas that Simon, three weeks after the 1967 war, went to two key Labor party officials, both men of compassion and reason...

...Armi emphasizes the human "strain for consistency," which will work to fortify any attitude...

...In the light of such findings, it is easier to understand why a small group of Hebrew University Arab students should have called a press conference not long ago expressly to endorse the PLO program and its tactics...

...Pending a wholesale political change for the better, amicable if short-lived association goes on here and there...

...No other policy or practice, with its implication that Jews "truly" love the land and Arabs do not, has provoked as much resentment as this one...

...For they were so identified and so identified themselves, with whatever misgivings, until June of 1967...

...Arab leaders maintain (and Smouha confirms) that since 1948 about 60 percent of their land has been taken from them by confiscation, expropriation with minimal compensation, or "seizure," the word Menahem Begin for obscure lawyerly reasons prefers, even though in English, and no doubt in Hebrew, it sounds worse...

...No deal...

...Who are these Arabs, these "full citizens of a democratic and pluralistic state...

...Algerians in France...

...Moreover, if this altruistic Jew can admit, "Every time a terrorist bomb goes off my conscience gets a little weaker," what dare we expect of lesser mortals...

...One said that it was already too late...

...Street names are Jewish...

...Mostly, but not invariably, it leads to Heartbreak House...

...No doubt, in the great scheme of things it is...

...It is necessary now to plan for the peace that may break out, which will surely expose domestic troubles and internal fissures that boil and fester even as they are more than halfhidden from the world...

...Jews, but not Jews alone, have a right to be proud of Eretz Yisrael...

...So the Arab village, like the West Bank, has become a reservoir of cheap labor...

...Habash...

...Israeli Arab women work, when they do, in Jewish agriculture and to a lesser degree in light industry...

...While encyclopedic on the situation as a whole, he is least anxious at this moment about the area of his own official concern...

...I would say the same for Jack Cohen, another wide-awake idealist who acts on the principle Yaron enunciates: "If you can't do_ good, at least refrain from doing evil...

...Yehoshua Armi, a social psychologist, has applied findings from his field to various kinds of present and prospective Arab-Jewish contact...

...On the plus side, girls are freer to choose their own mates and this, with less poverty, helps to reduce prostitution...

...Their men are concentrated in the building trades, where they may prosper, or in low-level service occupations, as waiters and cleaners, but hardly at all in industry, which is preponderantly military and therefore related to national security, where the Arab is suspect...

...Talk to them or their champions...

...Other isolated or uncoordinated, mainly economic improvements did take place—and some of these exacerbated the trouble...

...On the whole, Oriental Jews have been well integrated into preexisting parties— with a strong tilt toward the Likud bloc...

...Nazism is history, and history is "out" these days...

...To do so, from Yaron's angle of vision, is to invite the same fate that American liberals experienced when blacks ordered them to "get off their backs...

...It follows that contact will be most deleterious wherever the participants stress status in a threatening or rigid political context—the perfect formula for an intensification of hostility...

...Objectively, Palestinians have come to be Arabs: (I) in conquered areas...

...On this matter, however, the Arab bete noire is not so much Begin as his Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon...

...Else why would Sadat have taken his unforeseeable initiative...

...Addressing an international conference on Peace in the Middle East at Tel Aviv University, he rejected integration as impossible on account of cultural differences and, even-handedly, cast aside the idea of segregation, "which could lead to Arab irredentism...

...At the very least it can teach Arabs that not all Jews are monsters (or supermen) and teach Jews that not all Arabs are bomb-throwers...

...Ernst Simon, an eightyyearold scholar (and so much the activist that he apologized for chatting with me instead of attending a Peace Now demonstration), carries on in the spirit of Buber...

...to rear up a larger Arab intelligentsia (whatever the risks —for the risks of not doing so are even greater...

...Although some Arab students, but always fewer and fewer, may camouflage their involvement, practically all of them plunge into the vortex of regional, national, and local politics...

...Why can't Israel ceremonially celebrate an Arab hero...

...BERNARD OCH, Jack Cohen's protege and opposite number in Haifa, is just such a dedicated Jew...

...Cramped for space, Arabs have taken to building vertically instead of horizontally: different segments of the same clan are beginning to occupy additional floors instead of adjacent structures...

...Yaron accepts Buber's basic assumption, that "every real life is an encounter...

...Yaron insists that if Buber were alive today, he too would repudiate binationalism as unrealizable or undesirable —and would also hold that some kind of Palestinian state is absolutely necessary: "Martin Buber was not a naive man...

...This produced astonishment...

...So it is best to leave him anonymous...

...What then...

...and 64 percent back abolition of the Law of Return (which permits any Jew to achieve instant Israeli citizenship...

...Or is it a vaguer manifestation of nationalism grown out of a sense of mistreatment both by other Arabs and by Jews...

...So much thunder on the right predictably evoked applause on the left...

...In 1947 the mandatory area west of the Jordan River was partitioned...

...On its right are those who adhere to Arab affiliates of the established parties, people who are stigmatized as opportunists even if the preferment they seek is for Israeli Arabs in general...

...In short, and in Poli-Sci jabberwocky, only "symmetrical symbiosis" is worth pursuing...

...Preclude that change as an essential ingredient of any peace package, and even for a benevolent man like Yaron, apartheid is a genuine possibility that will become a certainty if right-wingers have their way and Israel gains long-time control over a million more Arabs in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip...

...For without it, specifically in the case of deracinated Bedouins, "They will go to the nearest Jewish city and become proletarians without skills, in other words, a propertyless urban lumpenproletariat...

...You might say, as some apologists do, that the government has provided health and child care as well as work in exchange for the loss of land that Arabs have suffered...

...Only So-and-So is then the exception...

...Two states were to be created, one for Arabs and one for Jews, but Jordan annexed the West Bank while the attenuated State of Israel came into beingz 169 as it is woven into their flag...

...Perhaps an early warning system of sympathetic criticism is in order...

...Those who stayed on numbered about 125,000...

...At first they were widely held to be traitors or collaborators, subverting the grand Arab design by their cooperation with an "illegitimate," i.e., a Jewish state...

...For a preliminary assessment, one consults Dr...

...Simon pictures the situation as follows: Had the Arabs won they would have made a massacre...

...You will behold an aggrieved minority, one that is unhappy for all the reasons with which I have barely dealt here, and so many more that it would take a book to explain them...

...Maybe...

...Arabs comprise 2 or 3 percent of the total student population...

...Moshe Sharon, otherwise well-known for his hawkishness, spoke of "young Arab intellectuals who are law-abiding citizens [but] feel frustrated, discriminated against and alienated...

...Relatively leaderless, they were nevertheless touched in an inchoate way by the decolonization of old Arabia and its attendant struggles 161 for power...

...their poor English, a language that is essential in Israeli higher, and supposedly lower, education...

...In their petition, they wrote that "the time has come to return us to our home village of Kaddita, which is still vacant and waiting...

...Listen to the naturally sanguine educator Kalman Yaron, who directs the Hebrew University's Martin Buber Institute for Adult Education where some 400 students assemble, Jews to learn Arabic, Arabs to learn Hebrew...

...Superpowers acted decisively after World War II to fulfill a promise set forth in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 that guaranteed a perennially persecuted people its own Jewish homeland...

...it has so far lost 10 percent of its Jewish citizens to New York, Los Angeles, and the glittering Diaspora at large...

...For it is Sharon who proclaims and implements "Judaization" of the Galilee and the Negev, just those areas most heavily populated by Arabs...

...For that year Israel's Bureau of Statistics found among its most significant data that all Israeli (Zionist) Labor parties had lost Arab voters to the Arab New Communist Rakah...

...We won and not only did not murder anybody but felt guilty about the Arabs our army killed in battle...

...With face-to-face contact, Israel's Arabs developed a new perspective on their lives...

...That danger grows in proportion as detribalized Arabs come to resemble "lonely Africans" and other lost souls of the Third World...

...But Allon's outbursts are gentle compared with a statement made early in 1979 by the protean Moshe Dayan, formerly a Labor leader and then a Likud minister...

...Probably not...

...They do less well academically than Jewish students...

...Yaron, a devotee of what some Zionists once derisively labeled the Buberoisie, is a true believer in the "I-Thou" relationship, but he realizes that it takes contact on an equal footing to engender empathy, rapport, sensitivity, or whatever else you choose to call the x-factor in human interaction...

...Pan Arabism with an undercurrent of state nationalism reached them but did not greatly affect their conduct...

...If Israeli Arab grievances turn largely on land, life chances, and discriminatory treatment related to growth and development in all spheres, then it is surely land that looms largest...

...As Moshe Shokeid, an anthropologist immersed in the analysis of Israeli electoral trends and campaign strategies, has written: "Middle Eastern Jewish immigrants and Arabs were impelled into a political order designed by the veteran Jewish population...

...The municipality of Nazareth, where Jews and Arabs coexist without overt friction, decided to support these demands...

...It was also the moment to administer positive shock therapy —more and more humane treatment...

...Some who tried to cross the border were sent back...

...Nor will the pressure of sheer numbers soon cease...

...This process raises the specter of displaced persons rotting in their own country...

...Young Arabs tend to be on the left wing of Rakah as many older Arabs are likely to be on the right —both factions conforming to an old principle of politics, namely, that the smaller a party the larger its wings...

...President Jimmy Carter, and Sadat...

...Now, merely by natural growth, they are over half a million strong, constituting 15 or 16 percent of the total population...

...With victory we were fools...

...By contrast, the village may have from two to five dunams of inadequately irrigated land, far less capital, and no industry...

...As quoted in the New York Times, Dayan threatened Israeli Arabs that if they did not "behave," they would find themselves in the same position "as their brothers of 1948"— across the border...

...Does this designation presuppose a state...

...that conventional Arab candidates were "mediocre at best," devoid of ideology and given over to the method of favor dispensation, with such Jewish leaders as Golda Meir, Abba Eban, and Yigal Allon speaking on their behalf...

...It resounds through Hatikvah, their anthem, *In 1922 Britain partitioned Mandatory Palestine, with Transjordan parceled out as Arab territory...

...If Moshe Sharon had not articulated a widely held but mostly unspoken notion it would not be worth mentioning...

...One of his functions is to work with approximately 600 Arab students at the University of Haifa (10 or 12 years ago there were no more than 40...

...For, although most Israeli Arabs go up in the world, some experience downward mobility leading to such spiritual and material deterioration that they are at last a danger...

...Smouha reports, as of June 1979, that: 50 percent of Israel's Arab population rejects the state's right to exist...

...Theories abound, among them that Arab youth were coming into their own (how could it be otherwise when the average age of Israeli Arabs is fifteen and a half), that a higher standard of living diminished their dependence on the Jewish establishment...

...With some unfamiliar touches...

...Not the Israeli Arabs...

...Sharon flailed the government for its failure to provide adequate educational facilities in Arab population centers, which are reportedly short more than 2,000 classrooms...

...Are they simply odious to other Arabs...

...They studied Hebrew with some success, sent several representatives to the Knesset, and gradually adapted to or passively accepted a society that seven Arab nations had sought to throttle at birth...

...Although crazies of the left and the right leave him equally apprehensive, only a right-wing Jewish hothead ever threatened his life...

...He was referring to nonexistent terrorists...

...Let me just touch upon something else, namely, the embitterment of Arabs who complain that they have been symbolically obliterated from a state that is both de facto and de jure pluralistic (at the same time that it is exclusivistic...

...and to ameliorate the multitude of social problems that beset all Israelis...

...The Arab electorate, while now split this way and that, is steadily more committed, at least in parliamentary contests, to one party, which is Rakah, the Communist party of Israel...

...At best it would be a question of the long haul...

...Yet when he felt used by extremist Arab students going through Maoist and PLOist phases, Cohen lost patience with them and withdrew his cooperation from their Committee for two or three years...

...165 It is altogether otherwise with Arab students who are as outspoken in their identification with the Palestinian cause as they were totally isolated from it until 1967...

...The moment passed and about this Simon reflects, "Without victory we would have been dead...

...Then, in Simon's opinion, the Israeli public must make sure it's an airport that really needs building and that the land will not be used instead to raise more onions and tomatoes...

...All along, the Israeli government did some good for its Arab citizens...

...Incredibly enough, illiteracy is one of these...

...Some Arabs were intimidated that year by Deputy Prime Minister Allon, a normally conciliatory man, "who, campaigning for the Labor party, plainly warned his Arab audiences that if they voted for Rakah, their future requests would go unheeded" (Shokeid...

...It will take a lot less time than having them learn ours...

...The university also boasts several Arab professors...

...Over what...

...Must it also uproot as many as 10,000 Bedouins...

...Despite dark premonitions, the everyday reality of Arab-Jewish life is quiet and civilized...

...Henceforth they too were to be Palestinians...

...Uncommon or not, it does affect Arab and Jewish students...

...In fact, the Israeli forest of symbols is entirely Jewish...

...Demographers who study the large families and growing life expectancy of these people project a figure of 1 million Arabs in the Jewish homeland by 1990...

...No less a figure than King Hussein has declared, "I can understand that Sadat would forgo the rights of people, but how could he forgo the rights of land...

...Arab delinquency is on the increase but remains inconsequential by comparison with that of technologically more advanced countries...

...There is another side to this issue...

...No major party has conferred "full membership," that is, an integrated list, upon Arab voters...

...Simultaneously they experienced an "identity crisis" and its resolution...

...Much has been done and much more remains to be done before the millennium—which will arrive anyhow, like Kafka's Messiah, "on the day after the day after...

...Well, what are the alternatives...

...bureaucratic categories are not...

...Yaron is one, and he believes that in both camps there are plenty of other "exceptions...

...2) in Arab states where many of them swell refugee camps or work in oil fields, and (3) most paradoxically, in Israel as citizens...

...Upon resigning his post, Sharon submitted to an interview published in the Israeli daily Maariv...

...The old parties, including the Old Communist Maki, were founded by European Jewish immigrants...

...Once, when hospitalized, he had Arab friends visit him at his bedside...

...It also allows for one year's remediation in the form of preparatory studies that do not help enough to put young Arabs on par with more mature Jewish students Both contingents are strongly motivated to succeed in academia but for opposite reasons...

...Where is it written that no Arab judge should sit on the secular Supreme Court...

...Even if we see that game as a grim contest between Arabs and Jews, then, as Jack Cohen put it to me, "Each side is in an untenable position: Palestinians in the Arab world and Jews in the whole damn world...

...Modernization brings its usual plus and minus factors...

...Despite a hundred impediments, the odds in Israel are not as poor as in other places...

...A democratic Israel, sliced out of British Mandatory Palestine, came into being.* That state, however, was formally identified not with all its citizens but rather more narrowly with a majority of them...

...And with all that, full equity will still not have been achieved...

...This association fostered a special consciousness of kind...

...And heightened Arab consciousness, a major consequence of the Six-Day War, was merely the prelude to a deeper subjective transformation that followed the Yom Kippur War of 1973...

...Despite the agit-prop of professional 166 ideologues, no one supposes that Rakah's growth has much to do with Communism of any stripe...

...Already proportionally a bigger ethnic group in Israel than blacks in the United States, their continued increase is taken for granted...

...In any case, Rakah keeps growing at the polls, from 28.5 percent of the Arab vote in 1969 and 40.3 in 1973 to 50 percent in 1977...

...Arab disaffection from the major parties, above all Labor, could conceivably produce a metamorphosis (some day...

...I oversimplify, but with all such conclusions, plus their subtler convolutions and variations, Yaron would certainly concur...

...By immemorial custom wives and children help on farms and in homes...

...In a fairly advanced country such as Israel, with a population of 3.5 million people, nearly I million are functional illiterates...

...Being thrust together in classrooms or brought together by peace-makers results in a greater all-around ability to cooperate...

...Doctrinaire Marxists used to argue that, short of socialism, nothing much could be done for the black minority in this country...

...It is hard to take an optimistic view of this trend, but Moshe Shokeid manages: I suggest that a single political system for both Arabs and Jews is replacing the previous dual political system in which different rules of behavior applied for each group...

...He may regain power and recover a measure of hope...

...What of the Chinese in Malaysia or those ruthlessly deported from Vietnam, who, any Israeli Jew will tell you, are generically no different from the million Jews forced out of Arab countries after 1948...

...Time bombs tick away and jolt us only when they erupt...

...Why, "asymmetrical symbiosis" or an indefinitely prolonged Israeli dominance of Jews over Arabs...

...Weiner is struck, for instance, by the polite academic interchange between Jewish war widows and Arab students...

...Anything less than that in the volatile, insecure, and unstable situation that Israel confronts would pose a deadly danger to Jewish ethics and to liberal democracy...

...to fight for civil and political equality...

...Once viewed as a possible bridge to peace, they are now generally regarded as an obstacle even to rapprochement...

...Buber spoke everlastingly in the interest of constructive plans for colonization, education, and industrialization that would take Jews and Arabs into account...

...Thirty-eight families on Friday signed a petition which was sent to Prime Minister Menahem Begin, U.S...

...To Och, with his American antecedents, it appears that Arab, student politics is a delayed expression of '60sstyle radicalism...

...After that, officials should arrange adequate compensation, sufficient and comparable room, and enough money for resettlement...

...He emphasized the necessity of industrializing Israeli Arab villages whose people travel daily to Jewish towns and settlements to work in Jewish establishments for Jewish bosses...

...Israeli Jews signalize their arrival after 2,000 years of exile as "a nation among the nations" on every bit of currency, on every postage stamp they issue...

...But are officials unable to do anything about so understandable a source of Arab outrage...

...The cry of second-class citizenship could be heard but it was scarcely more audible among Arab Israelis than among Sephardim, the so-called Oriental Jews (coming from Arab countries), currently awakening to their subordination...

...Meanwhile, the authorities contend that to yield would be to set a bad precedent...

...Long possession is intelligible to them...

...For what is a Palestinian...

...in 31 years they have yet to fire their first shot at an Israeli policeman...

...And David Ben Gurion, at least in his official capacity, never visited an Israeli Arab village...

...Golda Meir is said to have exclaimed that for some time she lost sleep every night thinking about the birth of another Arab child in Israel...

...Who for more than 30 years in all of Islam has really wanted them...

...Much careful research from Tocqueville to the present suggests that economic progress without enhancement of political rights tends to make for revolution...

...It makes strong antagonism stronger and weak antagonism weaker...

...One supposes, on the contrary, that a bad precedent now has been set and should be upset before time runs out on men who if they endlessly equivocate will cease to be "the authorities...

...Here's a man who cherishes persontoperson contact wherever it occurs: "That is our island of sanity...

...To illustrate this point, Simon draws upon European history...

...And that, if it were not so problematic, would be that...

...Until recently they also encompassed Arabs and Oriental Jews who arrived after 1948...

...The disintegration of Lebanon, which ostensibly provided a model of Christian-Muslim amity, dealt a death blow to their splendid idea...

...Geraisi claims that investment in kibbutzim is much higher than in cities and towns with proportionately less money, water, and machinery...

...Sharon was praised for his courageous criticism...

...Arabs get fewer housing grants or loans, only 1 percent of the government housing budget and, naturally, nothing at all from the Jewish Agency, which has a four-year, billion-dollar building program in the works...

...What of black Africans in the Southern Sudan...

...Okay," said Weiner, "Let's recognize those rights but let's also recognize that Hitler slaughtered millions of Jews...

...It is evidently accurate to say of all such Arab faculty that they are ultracautious, outwardly apolitical, and necessarily dependent on Jewish colleagues whose good will they need for professorial advancement...

...The ensuing calamity would destroy Israeli society from within...

...Which is to say, the majority of these students felt that all talk of the Holocaust was Jewish propaganda...

...And the United States, where black nationalism has gone into eclipse, is not surrounded by Africans as Israel is by Arabs...

...Armi's best prognosis is for jointly beneficial enterprises that enjoy institutional support...

...The authorities suggested they settle in other villages in the Galilee and offered to supply them with loans and land...

...Although Shokeid may be right, hardly anyone agrees with him...

...Where concretely has the Israeli establishment failed...

...They're here to stay" is a unanimous judgment expressed all over Israel...

...The old parties did and do nevertheless attempt to attract the Arab electorate...

...Cohen remembers being introduced some years ago to a wealthy Lebanese-American from whom he solicited financial support for those students only to be told that "Our community is not interested in helping Israelis...

...Let one be appointed...

...And yet he admits, somewhat inconsistently, that there is no breach between Arab students and their elders, few of whom act or think like New Leftists...

...Many complex variables will have to work in a positive direction to produce the happy outcome he envisages...

...He actively participates in the Rainbow Club for theologians of every persuasion...

...most come from an intellectually impoverished background where parents rarely talk to their children, etc...

...Gestures and tokens would not carry us very far...

...Is this a trifling matter...

...Today "rejectionist" Arabs expect them to tarry in Israel as the spearhead of a great force that will finally be organized to disestablish that state...

...This is the first time since the establishment of the state that Israeli Arabs have appealed to any Arab ruler to intervene in their dispute with Israeli authorities...

...Even so, it is assumed in some quarters that Rakah's 1969 election returns could have been higher...

...But fathers in the traditional society of Arab village life are still the providers...

...What had happened...

...Bedouins move about or sit on territory in the Negev for which they have no written documents that certify formal ownership...

...In the spring of 1979 this dispatch, datelined Safad, appeared in the Jerusalem Post: 164 Residents of the Arab village of Akraba, near here, appealed to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat on Friday to help them return to the village from which they were evacuated in 1948 for security reasons...

...But it is the loss that incenses them whereas the benefits have served to raise expectations beyond any realistic chance of fulfillment...

...Obviously the question would occur only to someone for whom the alienation of land is an unspeakable crime...

...In that case the abstraction, the negative stereotype and the hate will persist...

...By 1969, the protest escalated dramatically...

...The basic fact to Cohen and anyone else with a scintilla of historical sense is this: within Israel from the day of its inception there have been two peoples who not only want but feel that they need the same thing...

...They, along with imported Arab labor that daily crosses and recrosses the Green Line, comprise the cheap labor supply for collectives whose Jewish founders used to make a religion of manual labor...

...In his circumscribed realm Cohen does a great deal of good...

...The familiar story...

...Consider Och's dilemma on the same campus...

...It was borne in upon them that they had kinsmen not so far away who ran their own government and others who would in all likelihood soon run theirs...

...162 Binationalists no longer exist in Israel...

...Concerning that proposal an American like myself must be as ambivalent as he is about "Negro" colleges...

...There can be no more difficult place than the Middle East in which to master such a role...

...Modernization produces typical discontents and little else— unless its fruits are equitably distributed...

...Let there be peace and the problem will solve itself...

...Preconceptions, unsurprisingly, make a great difference...

...He said so at the time in a broadside bearing the title "Wanted: A Positive Shock Therapy...

...Under the circumstances, one must counter the notion...

...Many Jews, mostly WASPS (White - Ashkenazi - Sabras-with-Proteczia), have resettled in other parts of the world...

...But the incomprehension is more profound than that...

...Until 1967 Jack Cohen never heard the word Palestinian from an Arab student...

...About this one, however, there is little doubt...

...If Dayan had meant that free exercise of the franchise by Arabs in a manner uncongenial to him could result in their expulsion, he would indeed have taken a big step toward the sociopathic view of Meir Kahane...

...The lands they traversed as nomads may be taken from them on juridical grounds foreign to their premodern way of thinking...

...But even then the basic relationship between Arab candidates and prevailing parties was mutually opportunistic...

...87 percent favor an immediate return to the pre-1967 borders...

...Whereas 36 percent of all Jewish women are in the labor force and most of them high in its echelons, only 10 percent of Arab women work away from home, doing menial and difficult tasks, mostly picking produce on nearby moshavim and kibbutzim...

...to the Arabs the Jewish presence is a historical accident...

...In his Institute he sees people from both sides developing "friendships and quite close relations...

...alas it evaporated by June 1979...

...He summarizes their reasoning as follows: the Holocaust should not have happened since it now serves Jewish purposes...

...The condition of Israel's Arabs, those within the Green Line, or pre-1967 borders, provides a particularly serious case in point...

...Thus neither in a small group nor in the larger society nor on the international scene is it permissible for Jews to be patronizing to Arabs...

...Practice magnanimity in the ArabJewish interest...

...For instance, the average Arab student is years younger than his Jewish counterpart...

...These vordim by their probably permanent departure are draining the Israeli population...

...And Yaron concedes that, as things stand, binationalism would only be a more benign form of apartheid, tranquilized at best by Coca-Cola culture...

...Their safest course is to shut up...

...Israel may strive to assure a possible degree of justice within the limits of "military security"—which may be unattainable in any case—and, finally, in Simon's prescription, have the goodness to be conscience-stricken about all that remains undone...

...Some weeks ago the villagers asked authorities to build a new village for them or to return them to their former village...

...Israel's Arabs, unwelcome in nations more fully inhabited by their fellows, are in any case attached to the territory they have long occupied...

...In certain circumstances it adds up, but only to a hill of beans without deepgoing social, economic, and political change...

...There he criticized the Begin regime for promoting "a vast gap" between Israeli Jews and Arabs...

...In 18th-century France, while extremely poor proletarians fought for the king, comparatively affluent pettybourgeois peasants joined the revolution...

...Ordinary daily contact, without condescension, can work little wonders...

...They make full use of that right...

...And no case at all can be made for refusing to permit the return of Arabs to villages from which they were forcibly removed decades ago...

...This kind of contact on a tiny scale 168 of course produces that measure of trust without which not even little bridges can be built...

...Sami Geraisi, a learned and moderate Christian Arab, employed in Nazareth by the Department of Labor and Welfare as director of Probation Services for Arab youth...

...q 171...

...From a practical standpoint the problem of housing —indeed a major, and grossly unequal, matter for most Israelis derives directly from the shrinkage of Arab land...

...The truth is this: the world's classic minority must learn how to be a responsible majority in one place...

...Only a limited number of more or less powerless Israeli Jews, and a smaller number with power, are committed to that end...

...That leaves most Arab students free to enter the university directly after high school...

...They appear to be speaking for more of their companions than was hitherto suspected...

...But what if some Jews do act badly and if some Arabs come in to throw bombs...

...Simon believes that 1967 presented a maximum opportunity...

...Was Dayan even transiently converted to the school of Meir Kahane whose thugs have taken to uprooting olive vines and violently entering Arab homes in and around "occupied" or "administered" Nablus...

...The words are those of Moshe Sharon, formerly Menahem Begin's adviser on Arab affairs...

...So pronounced is this tendency that one hears talk in Israel about founding a separate Arab university...

...By the late '70s one heard nothing else...

...About the sliver of the Levant that is Israel, one formulation is the most depressing: "To the Jews, the Arab presence is a historical accident...

...It is almost but not yet too late to begin again...

...And then Kahane comes to the campus or a PLO bomb explodes hereabouts," and the delicate fabric of interaction is blown to hell...

...Study Israel's Arabs...

...Kahane is giving fanaticism a bad name...

...But there we have it —wound in a convoluted historical matrix of symbols and attitudes...

...Let us grant that a new military airport must be built in the Negev...

...But Arabs continue to live in a state from which they feel increasingly alienated...

...Neither White America nor Jewish Israel has any reason for complacency, but on the record others are failing miserably even when nationality is religiously defined as in Northern Ireland...

...The Jewish student wants to get ahead in a society with which he already identifies whereas the Arab youngster with national aspirations wants to be a better Palestinian...

...The criteria of adequacy and sufficiency ought to be negotiable...

...To the left of Rakah are followers of Arafat and the even more immoderate Dr...

...Och and others point to the difficulty these young Arabs have in dealing with abstract ideas (where have we heard that before...