Palestinian Israelis?
Weingrod, Alex
My friend Mustafa likes to tell the story of the mystified Egyptian hotel clerk. On his first trip to Egypt, the clerk at Mustafa's hotel asked for his passport. Mustafa duly handed over his...
...There is, in other words, a deep inequality between Israeli Jews and Arabs at both an individual and a group level...
...Many Jews live in modern communities that are affluent by any standard...
...The first is political: Arabs now compose about 13 percent of the electorate, and in the recent voting their large turnout almost swung the election to Peres...
...Mustafa looked back at him...
...This has come about through a combination of economic forces, Israeli democracy, and the resilience and skill of the Arabs themselves...
...Military government rule was imposed upon them...
...Political mobilization has been a major means for gaining influence and resources for other Israeli minorities— Middle Eastern Jews and orthodox religious groups are notable examples—and Israeli Arabs may be able to follow the same path...
...What of the future...
...Much has changed for Israeli Arabs: but much more has also changed for Israeli Jews...
...How can that be...
...Why must they and their children study the poetry of the Hebrew renaissance, and how are they to deal with the Holocaust...
...Two recent developments may have important consequences...
...In a highly centralized state such as Israel this has made an enormous difference...
...Both Likud and Labor government policies have allocated major resources to Jews rather than to Arabs...
...until it was finally abolished in 1966 their movements were restricted, and they lived under direct police and military control...
...This article is exclusively concerned with the first category—the Arabs and their descendants who remained in Israel after 1948 and who have therefore been an Israeli minority for the past three generations...
...The second is both legal and political...
...Similar trends can be witnessed with regard to political activity...
...If, with regard to Jewish immigrants from Western and Middle Eastern countries, Israeli policy has always aimed at dissolving cultural differences in order to achieve "integration," precisely the opposite holds for JewishArab relations: each lives in separate, segregated communities that are expected to remain distinct from each other...
...Proponents of this view argue that they are loyal Israelis in every sense, but that as a minority in the Jewish state they have a right to their own "Palestinian nationhood," expressed in cultural and perhaps, in the end, political autonomy...
...They have shared the view that the Jewish majority, for whom the state was created, must be firmly established and strengthened, while the Arab minority is a danger, a potential enemy whose true loyalties are in doubt, and who should therefore be kept weak...
...There are three groups in this puzzle, and we will be concerned with only one of them...
...These changes may have the effect of increasing equality between Jews and Arabs...
...Contrasts at the community level are stark and sometimes appalling...
...What fifty years ago was a feudal peasant society has in large measure become modernized—most Israeli Arab males are now employed across the economy in semiskilled or skilled industrial, construction, and service tasks, and an evergrowing number ofArab women have also joined the workforce...
...Israel was conceived in specifically Jewish memory, and although its Declaration of Independence promises equal civil and legal rights to non-Jews, they are obviously seen as minority groups living in the majority Jewish society...
...How, or at what price, can one be both...
...But this argument (it is merely an apology) can hardly be considered relevant today...
...The issues are unlikely to disappear, even though they are often drowned out by the noise of conflict and violence between Israelis and Palestinians...
...hence their concern for civil liberties for all...
...The patterns established during the past five decades may be strong enough to withstand the conflicts still to come...
...although they were under Israeli military rule for almost three decades they are not Israeli citizens, and in almost all cases they have Jordanian passports...
...It's a complex fate, being an Israeli Arab...
...In the second group are Palestinian Arabs living on the West Bank and Gaza...
...A basic duality runs through the society: Jews and Arabs live in separate communities (Jewish Tel Aviv was build alongside ofArab Jaffa, there is both an Arab and Jewish Nazareth, and "mixed" city neighborhoods hardly exist), each attends separate schools taught in different languages, just as matters of marriage, divorce, and family are decided by separate Muslim, Christian, and Jewish religious courts and officials...
...Prejudice is still another barrier—many SUMMER • 1996 • 109 Palestinian Israelis members of the Jewish majority have strongly prejudiced views against the Arab minority...
...Inequalities These are all impressive accomplishments—but they are only one part of the tale...
...The social changes that have taken place dur108 • DISSENT Palestinian Israelis ing the past five decades are impressive...
...The Knesset recently passed laws that are meant to strengthen civil rights, and the Supreme Court has taken an activist position in disqualifying discrimination...
...For all of these reasons the "structure of opportunity" is fundamentally unequal...
...In examining this situation, Yoav Peled, a political scientist, has argued that Israeli Jews have in practice an exclusive claim to the "public good" (what he calls the "republican principle") while Arabs, a minority who cannot make that claim, are guaranteed equal citizenship rights (the "liberal principle"), and that in the circumstances of deep ethnic conflict this is "not the worst possible outcome" to the dilemmas of majority-minority, Arab-Jewish, relations...
...You speak Arabic, you are an Arab, how can you possibly be Israeli...
...But then, of course, the future will also depend on war or peace, conflict or some measure of understanding among Israel, the Palestinians, and other Arab states...
...Inequalities exist primarily because in the Jewish state governments have always favored Jews overArabs, no matter which party was in power...
...A generation ago it might have been argued that inequalities existed because each started at a different point—Arabs began in a "traditional" society while Jews were already modern and advanced...
...They wish to assert both identities and allegiances and thereby to redefine their status within Israel...
...It is mainly for these reasons that some Israeli Arabs—mainly younger intelligentsia, professionals, and some politicians— have recently sought to redefine themselves as "Palestinian Israelis...
...Mustafa duly handed over his Israeli passport, at which point the clerk called out in disbelief, "An Israeli passport?You are an Israeli...
...The majority (about 80 percent) are Muslim, while the rest are Christian and Druze...
...Similarly, as incomes and education rise a growing number have begun to pursue professional careers—to cite notable examples, Arab judges sit on leading courts, an Arab surgeon performs organ transplants, and there are sizable numbers of Arab teachers, nurses, and social workers...
...This group numbers about two million persons, and most are now part of Yasir Arafat's state-in-themaking Palestinian Authority...
...Needless to say, these proposals make the Jewish majority nervous and suspicious...
...What they (for example, Ahmad Tibi, a physician and politician, and Azmi Bishara, an academic elected to the Knesset this past May) are saying is that they are members of both the Palestinian nation and the Israeli state...
...Since then their political participation and self-confidence has certainly grown—Israeli Arabs have formed their own political parties as well as joining the major Israeli political parties, and their voting participation in local and national elections equals or is higher than among Israeli Jews...
...Many live below what the government defines as the poverty line...
...In situations where Arabs and Jews work in the same firm the Jews almost inevitably control the higher status, higher income positions...
...the figure today is roughly 900,000 (the Israeli Jewish population is about 4.2 million...
...Their "Israelization" (to use the sociologist Sammy Smooha's term) means, among other things, that they have become "more Israeli" in appearance and comportment, watch some of the same television programs as Israeli Jews, and consequently share wider ranges of cultural understandings...
...Skillful and successful Arab politicians may bring real changes to their communities, and legal rulings may also open the system more widely to minorities...
...Their paradoxical situation (by no means unique among minorities in modern nations) is one in which their alienation grows together with what can properly be called their cultural assimilation...
...Which identity comes first, Arab or Israeli...
...There is still another dimension to these issues: the fact that they are Arabs within the Jewish state poses major problems of accommodation...
...What is more, since their loyalties were thought dubious, Arabs were kept out of many positions on the grounds of "security," whether it be working for the government or teaching in a school...
...Yet in the Jewish state they are by no means equal to Jews...
...However, this has become an increasingly difficult problem for members of the Arab minority: can they, as Arabs, identify themselves with the state that defines itself in specifically Jewish terms...
...Viewed from a perspective of nearly five decades and three generations, these changes suggest that many Arabs are increasingly connected within Israeli society...
...The fact that this is the precise reversal of Jewish experience in all of the diasporas for the past two thousand years was keenly understood by the state's founders...
...Following the 1948 war the Arabs who remained in Israel were stunned by their defeat, dispirited and without effective leadership...
...The key point is that by every measure (income, occupation, education, level of social services) the Arabs remain far behind the Jews...
...Wallah, I was born forty years ago, and when I opened my eyes I was in Israel...
...What about their own poets and history—why are they not celebrated and studied in the school curriculum...
...Until now, the Arab minority and Jewish majority have managed to live together through five Israeli-Arab wars, the Palestinian intifada, and countless violent incidents and crises...
...q 110 • DISSENT 112 • DISSENT...
...Arabs may now be employed "across the economy," but they are concentrated in lower level, lower paid occupations...
...The reasons for this are not hard to find...
...And there is still a third category: following the Six Day War in 1967 the city of Jerusalem was formally annexed to Israel, and the 150,000 or so Palestinians who now reside there are subject to Israeli law while they continue to be citizens of Jordan...
...Political autonomy (in Galilee, for example, where Arabs are the majority) for Israeli Arabs...
...Religious fundamentalism has also been on the rise—just as it has been throughout the Middle East and among Israeli Jews...
...I was born there, what can I do, I'm an.Israeli...
...The outlook is uncertain, but not without hope...
...They are Israeli citizens with full political and civil rights— just like other Israelis, they vote in elections and can be elected to the Knesset, and in principle they have all of the rights and duties of Israel's Jewish citizens with the major exception of compulsory Army service...
...During the past several decades local public services—schools, clinics, hospitals, water, electricity, and sewer systems—have also been provided or installed throughout the "Arab sector," but at a much lower (in some instances shockingly lower) level than for Jewish communities...
...Peled may be right—but this is little comfort to those Israeli Arabs who, despairing of the possibility of achieving equality and increasingly alienated, wish to reconsider their relationships with the Jewish majority...
...In 1948 their population numbered about 160,000...
...All of the state's symbols, national holidays, holy days, language, myths, and a great deal more, are drawn from Jewish history and experience...
...As Israeli citizens they enjoy rights that presumably are the same as those of Israeli Jews...
...In the first group are the Palestinian Arabs and their descendants who remained in Israel following the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948...
...Complicated...
...Certainly, but this is the Middle East, where, as everyone likes to say, nothing is simple...
...AmongArabs, schools are overcrowded and often lack modern equipment, and local services such as sewers, roads, public health standards and, in rural areas, even electricity, continue to be substandard...
Vol. 43 • July 1996 • No. 3
