By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal
They go by different names. They are citizens and have full constitutional and legal rights. They are the descendants of the 150,000 Palestinian Arabs who didn’t leave the British Palestine mandate when Israel was created, and so they live within Israel’s 1949 borders.
They are the kith and kin of the hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians displaced into neighboring areas in 1948. They share history, culture, and family ties with those living in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, as well as with Palestinian diaspora populations in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and other countries.
They are Israel’s population of mostly Sunni Muslim Arabs, called, variously, Israeli Arabs, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and so on. Granted citizenship in the new state of Israel, today they constitute more than one-fifth of Israel’s population – around 2,080,000 people -- and they are a growing percentage of its inhabitants.
They mostly inhabit Arab villages, many in the so-called Little Triangle, along the 1949 Armistice Line that delineated Israel’s border with the West Bank, but some eight per cent live in cities like Acre, Haifa, Jerusalem, Lod, and Nazareth.
Palestinians in the West Bank live under quasi-military rule and enjoy no rights within Israel. But the Arab citizens of Israel have equal voting rights. They can vote for any party they wish but many support Arab political parties, which have existed since the state was established.
The 2021 election was notable for a radical change in Israeli politics, with the Ra’am Party becoming the first Arab grouping to join a governing coalition. Arab parties today hold 10 of the 120 seats in the current 25th Knesset, elected in 2022. Five are members of Ra’am, the other five with the Hadash-Ta’al Joint list. Together, these parties won 8.2 per cent of the total Israeli vote.
The reasons these numbers are lower than the overall Arab share of the population, in a proportional representation system, is due to the lower Arab turnout. In the 2022 election, the Arab turnout was 53.2 per cent, as opposed to overall turnout of 70.6 per cent. Also, not all Arabs vote for Arab lists.
Arab Palestinians in Israel speak Hebrew and are generally acquainted with Jewish and Israeli culture. They attend Israeli universities and are in civil service positions. They have worked in the foreign service and served in Israeli embassies abroad, with a handful appointed ambassadors and consuls since 1995. They have served on the Supreme Court and as judges in lower courts.
Israel’s health-care system has long employed Arab and Jewish medical professionals side by side. Their cooperation was especially visible when the country confronted the COVID-19 pandemic, as health workers treated patients from each other’s communities.
Even so, given Israel’s self-definition as the national state of the Jewish people, Israeli Palestinians, not surprisingly, feel less a part of Israeli society than the majority Jewish population.
Though Arab citizens have the same legal rights as Jewish Israelis -- the sole legal distinction between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel is that the latter are not required to serve in the Israeli army -- they tend to live in poorer cities, have less formal education, and face other challenges attributed to structural discrimination.
Tensions boiled over into a surge of sectarian violence in May 2021 that began with efforts to evict Palestinians in East Jerusalem, police raids at Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan, the outbreak of a days-long war between Hamas and Israel, and violent mob attacks against both communities.
The discord quickly reverberated across Israel, particularly in Acre, Lod, and other mixed cities. Residents closed roads, threw Molotov cocktails and rocks at Israeli forces, set fire to police cars, broke Israeli surveillance cameras, and removed Israeli flags from lampposts.
Extremists on both sides engaged in arson, looting and rioting. Jewish and Arab-owned businesses and vehicles were targeted and damaged. Synagogues came under attack as well.
According to Mossawa, a Palestinian rights group, police had arrested more than 2,150 Israeli Palestinians by June 10. In response, to address disparities in the so-called Arab sector, the government that October also approved a nine-billion-dollar, five-year plan to boost employment, improve education, health-care services and housing, and develop infrastructure, among other goals.
A report by the Bank of Israel published this year called the continued integration of Arab society in Israel “essential to promoting the welfare of the Arab residents” and enabling “the potential growth of the Israeli economy in the long term.”
It might help explain why, even though the current Gaza war has already lasted more than half a year and has resulted in many thousands of deaths and massive destruction, there has been no recurrence of the internal communal troubles of three years ago.
Arab-majority East Jerusalem, for example, has been relatively quiet since Oct. 7. East Jerusalem Palestinians are highly enmeshed in the fabric of the city, working and studying in the city’s businesses, schools, and universities.
A survey of public opinion in Arab society on the war in Gaza, conducted in December by the Center for Democratic Values and Institutions at the Israel Democracy Institute, found that more than half agreed with a statement by Mansour Abbas, the leader of Ra’am, that the Hamas attack does not reflect Arab society and Islamic values.
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