MINORITY STATUS
The 1948 war, known by Palestinians as al-Nakba (the disaster), left a dis-oriented and fragmented Israeli Arab population. The Palestinian Arabs' fifty-year battle against Zionism had been resolved—only it had ended in total loss, irreversibly transforming their landscape. Fewer than ten thou-sand Arabs remained in Jaffa, Haifa, and Ramla-Lod, cities that before the War had collectively been home to over 175,000 people.[8] Three hundred and fifty villages vanished entirely.[9] Only the city of Nazareth had grown, from 15,540 to 16,800, as a result of the absorption of internal refugees. The 150,000 Arabs who remained reluctantly assumed Israeli citizenship. When they began to pick up the pieces, in the 1950s, Israeli Arabs made up
Zionism's attitude toward the Arabs of Palestine is the subject of con-siderable academic scholarship and debate. While the earliest Zionist “thinkers” did not consider too deeply the role that Arabs would play in their Jewish State, most adopted Herzl's optimistic line that things would “work out” amicably.[11] When Arab Palestinians became increasingly in-transigent in their rejection of any accommodation, Zionists responded by becoming more militant themselves. The Holocaust only heightened the Yishuv's sense of moral entitlement. After 1949, once this fifty-year con-flict was resolved so favorably—from the Jewish perspective—Israel's leaders were sincere in wanting to better the conditions of Arab citizens. There is no commandment that appears in the Bible more often than the injunction to treat equitably the non-Jewish residents (as well as the or-phans and widows) “who sojourn among you.”[12] This traditional precept, coupled with the general aspiration to be a liberal democracy, constituted the national ideal for the new State of Israel.
At the same time, the first half century of independence was marred by continuous enmity and intermittent violence with Palestinians and Arab nations. The country could not help but view its own Arab citizens as a se-curity threat. The expression “Respect him and suspect him” was almost an official adage. To neutralize the danger posed by a potential fifth col-umn, a strict policy of military rule was initially imposed on Arab com-munities and eased only over a period of many years. To consolidate Jewish control geographically, many Arab citizens were barred from re-turning to their original homes. Under the 1950 Absentee Property Act, they were paid compensation that fell far short of the land's actual value. As much as two million dunams, a full 40 percent of private Arab land re-sources, were confiscated during this period.[13] Today Arabs make up al-most a fifth of Israel's population but own only 3.4 percent of the land.[14]
Loss of land was the deathblow to an already beleaguered fellah econ-omy that already could not compete with the highly mechanized Jewish agricultural sector. By the 1990s, only 8 percent of Israeli Arabs made a liv-ing in agriculture.[15] Despite the painful transition, the Israeli Arab com-munity proved resilient.
In retrospect, it was the 1967 Six-Day War that served as the economic watershed for Israel's Arab citizens. The war came in the wake of the can-cellation of military rule in 1966, which freed Israeli Arabs to pursue en-trepreneurial ventures. With the new territorial acquisitions, West Bank and Gaza residents replaced Israel's Arabs in many unskilled manual tasks,
A strong commitment to education and a pragmatic approach to their circumstances strengthened the community. Because of their prolific birthrate (which for many years averaged 3.7 percent growth per year) Israeli Arabs have more than kept pace with Jewish immigration. Non-Jewish Israelis presently number over one million. Some academics like to analyze the “quiescence” of Israel's Arab minority,[17] and Palestinian na-tionalists seek perfidious, conspiratorial explanations. But most Jewish Israelis welcome their “cousins'” natural integration and genuinely appre-ciate Arab loyalty, in particular during times of strife. The extent of the Arab population's commitment to the country is reflected in polls show-ing that despite a long laundry list of complaints, only 7.5 percent of Israeli Arabs are interested in moving to a Palestinian State; only 13.5 percent wish to see Israel disappear.[18] During the 1992 elections, a time when eth-nic and national origins increasingly influenced Jewish voter affiliation, more Arabs voted for Jewish parties than for Arab ones.[19] The situation during the subsequent decade, admittedly, has beecome more polarized.
Yet because of the salience of the surrounding hostilities, Israel's Arab cit-izens will never be a conventional minority group. For the foreseeable fu-ture, they will have to wrestle with a dual affiliation that, on occasion, leads to profound contradictions and conflicts.[20] When these emotions meet ob-jective economic disadvantage, perceived discrimination, and the simmering conflict with the Palestinian nation, they can be manifested in the sort of vi-olent riots in Arab towns and cities that stunned Israeli society in October 1990.
At the same time, it remains practically impossible to generalize intelli-gently about such a diverse collection of religions, ideologies, lifestyles, and interests. Certainly, Israeli Arabs who work in the environmental field show none of the meek or embittered spirits that are sometimes used to deride this remarkable community. They most closely fit Dan Rabinowitz's description of the sophisticated modern Arab Israeli professional:
Their nonassimilating nature is perceived as permanent, acculturation notwithstanding. While consistently acquiring more of the values and the symbols of Jewish Israel and incessantly attempting to gain more