What does Israel’s Arab minority really think? [View all]

[shira]

There is a huge difference between the responses of ordinary Israeli Arabs and the typical discourse of the Arab elite.

The picture is thus complicated, and the fundamental attitude of the Arab minority towards the State appears to be deeply ambivalent. But given the prolonged national conflict, with no end in sight at this point, this ambivalence should be regarded as good news. The Arab parties express the negative aspect of this ambivalence well enough; but anyone reading the survey will notice that the other aspect exists as well, and it is not at all negligible.

Proud to be Israeli. Some 44.5 per cent of Arab citizens (compared with 89 per cent of Jewish Israelis) answered affirmatively when asked whether they are ‘proud to be Israeli’ (14.1 per cent ‘very proud’, 30.4 per cent ‘quite proud’, 20.4 per cent ‘not so proud’ and 29.3 per cent ‘not at all proud’). This reflects a decline from last year, when 52.8 per cent of Arabs responded positively, but it is still within the normal fluctuations over the last decade (between more than 40 and more than 50 per cent). Some argue that a state that defines itself as Jewish cannot, by definition, inspire feelings of patriotism among its Arab citizens – these findings tell a different story. It should be noted that the expression the survey uses is not ‘Israeli citizen’ but ‘Israeli’. In theory this should be the same thing, but in fact, everyone living in Israel knows that both Jews and Arabs often use the term ‘Israeli’ as a synonym for an ‘Israeli Jew’.

To my knowledge, none of the leaders of the Arab public would adopt the label ‘Israeli’, and many reject this term explicitly. The Arab leadership also rejects the term ‘Israeli Arab’ because it sounds too Israeli. The acceptable alternative is not ‘Palestinian Israeli’ or ‘Israeli Palestinian’ but ‘Arab Palestinian citizen of Israel,’ or ‘(Arab) Palestinian in Israel’. Under these conditions, the willingness of slightly less and sometimes slightly more than a half of the Arab public to adopt the label ‘Israeli’ and express pride in it is of great significance. A few years ago I spoke with a group of British journalists who questioned me about the situation of Arab citizens of Israel. After dealing with various specific points, I asked them: do you suppose that 45 per cent of Catholics in Northern Ireland would be prepared to say ‘I am proud to be British’? One of them replied, ‘I don’t believe there are 45 Catholics in Northern Ireland who are willing to say I am proud to be British, never mind 45 per cent.’ Of course, he may have been exaggerating.

Israeli democracy. In relation to Israeli democracy, 44 per cent of Arab respondents say Israel’s democracy is at the ‘appropriate level’, 7.8 per cent say Israel is ‘too democratic’, 37.2 per cent said it is ‘not democratic enough’ and only 11 per cent that it is ‘not democratic enough by far’. The last answer corresponds to what is routinely said by virtually the entire Arab leadership. In fact, the ‘vision documents’ of the Arab leadership claim that Israel is not a democracy at all. That is not the opinion of the Arab public.

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