Publications

Since the publishing of the Future Vision documents in 2006 and 2007 by a group of Arab-Israeli intellectuals under the auspices of the Council of Arab Mayors, there has been a clear increase in the tension between the State of Israel and the Arab minority living within it. The manifestations of protest by Arab youth in 2015 occurred against the backdrop of what was defined in Israel as a wave of terror in East Jerusalem and the West Bank,which began in October of that year. They brought into focus the public and political discourse on the relations between the state and the Arab population. Unlike the events of October 2000 (which took place in the context of the Second Intifada and broke out in the previous month, during which Israeli Arab demonstrators clashed with the security forces), in 2015 public figures in the Israeli Arab community worked to contain the protests and to prevent an escalation; this effort did not, however, manage to eliminate the tension created in Arab-Jewish relations. The events, and in particular the terrorist attack carried out in the center of Tel Aviv on January 1, 2016 by an Arab citizen with the assistance of members of the Arab minority in Israel, reinforced the questions relating to two main aspects of the relations between the Arab population and the state.

The first is the future of relations between Jews and Arabs in the State of Israel. Since 2007, various Israeli governments have adopted a dialectic policy toward the Arab minority. This policy is based on two main principles that, at first, appear to oppose but, in fact, complement one another and create a uniform strategic logic: on one axis, the various governments have acted, whether actively or passively, to exclude the Arab minority from the political and cultural mainstream, while along the other axis, they have implemented a series of measures to integrate the Arab sector within the Israeli economy. The Knesset has become the arena for the main events along the first axis. Various laws have been proposed that have an anti-Arab element and seek to limit the collective rights of the Arab minority. One example is the initiative by members of Knesset from the Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu parties in the summer of 2014 to cancel the status of Arabic as an official language of the state. The process to marginalize Arabs in Israeli politics culminated in raising the election threshold to 3.25 percent prior to the twentieth Knesset elections (which were held on March 17, 2015). This move aimed to reduce the number of Arab parties in the Knesset but, in fact, led to the unification of the Arab political camp for the first time in the history of Arab representation and to the creation of the Joint Arab List after many years of internal political rivalries.

The second axis consists of measures taken by Israel’s governments to encourage the inclusion of the Arab sector in the national economy. These measures correspond to the neo-liberal approach of the center-right governments to increase national output by bringing weak sectors of Israeli society into the workforce. This was part of the effort to reduce subsidies to these sectors and thus reduce the burden on the state budget and on the middle class. It was directed at two main sectors: the ultra-Orthodox andthe Arabs. The Netanyahu-Lapid government (January 2013–March 2015) tried to assimilate the former economically and socially by limiting the draft exemption for yeshiva students. With regard to the Arab sector, efforts were made to reduce socioeconomic inequality by increasing the level of government investment in specific spheres, such as the local authorities, education, and housing.3 The main effort to include the Arab population economically came from the Prime Minister’s Office and the Authority for the Economic Development of the Arab, Druze, and Circassian Sectors. The Authority was established by a government resolution on February 15, 2007 and has been headed ever since by Aiman Saif, who has worked to increase Arab participation in the workforce, particularly women, and to encourage the growth of small businesses in the Arab sector as a way of increasing the supply of jobs.

Thus, government policy has headed in two opposing directions at the same time with efforts made to marginalize the Arab minority in the political and cultural domains, on the one hand, and to include it in the economy, on the other. Economic inclusion was, to a large extent, intended to offset the negative effect of the political and cultural exclusion. It also prevented ferment in the Arab sector by creating an economic horizon that would improve the standard of living and increase employment options. This policy illustrates the basic government approach to the Arab minority since the end of the 1960s, whereby the state has tried to curb the development of Palestinian national sentiment by offering certain parts of the Arab population compensation in the form of individual self-realization. This was accomplished by opening up the government bureaucracy, particularly the various government ministries, to some of the young and educated members of the Arab sector.

The policies adopted by Israeli governments since 2009 that were based on the exclusion/inclusion of the Arab minority have largely rested on the conceptual platform formulated after the establishment of the state, even if some of its components have changed somewhat over time. For example, the effort made by the early governments to prevent the transformation of the Arab minority into a separate national Palestinian minority was replaced by attempts to distance them from the political and cultural domain. The strategic goal, however, has remained almost identical: a public civil domain in which Jews have absolute domination. Furthermore, the effort to include educated Arabs in the Israeli government and bureaucracy—which characterized the 1970s—has been replaced in the past decade by attempts to include the Arab sector in the general Israeli economy. Here too, the strategic goal has remained the same: to create a domain in which the Arab population could develop while downplaying the significance of political exclusion.

At the time of the protests by Arab youth following the wave of violence in East Jerusalem and the West Bank in 2015, the question was raised whether these protests were related to the policy adopted by Israeli governments toward the Arab sector since 2009, and, more specifically, to what extent the protests could be viewed as an expression of the Arab minority’s frustration with government policy over the previous decade.

The second aspect of the relations between the State of Israel and the Arab minority came to the forefront as a result of the terrorist attacks in the fall-winter of 2015–16 and relate to the Arab minority’s pattern of activity and the connection between that pattern and government policy. Since 1948, when the Arabs became a minority in Israel, the rift between the two sectors has become one of the main sources of tension defining Israeli society.

The presence of a significant demographic minority that is emotionally and historically tied to the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza has complicated the relations between the state and its Arab citizens. The increasingly apparent permanence of the Arab minority, which was accelerated by the Six Day War, and the understanding of the Israeli government and the Arabs themselves that their political reality as a minority in a Jewish state is not reversible, as was hoped by some Israeli leaders and some of the Arabs, did nothing to reduce national tensions. Furthermore, Israeli attempts to weaken the Palestinian identity of the Arab minority, cut them off from the Palestinian system in the West Bank and Gaza, and transform the Palestinians citizens of Israel into “Israeli Arabs” did not bring about their full integration within the State of Israel.

In the decades since the Arab population was transformed from a demographic majority into a minority within the Jewish state, this sector has continued to express its unhappiness with the historical circumstances that brought this about. The 2015 protest itself was aimed at the policy adopted by all of Israel’s governments, which marks the Arab population as a security threat and a potential fifth column and exacerbates their economic and civil inequality.

The ability of the Arab minority in Israel to express their discontent regarding the existing situation has been influenced by a variety of factors, among them the extent of government and security supervision. Since 1948, the Arab minority have developed various tools and adopted various forms of protest in order to express—somewhat passively—their dissatisfaction with the situation and their desire for change. These tools of resistance were intended to achieve one of two goals. The intent was either to partially alter the existing reality by, for example, changing the policy for awarding government compensation to the Arab population. Or, at the very least, the goal was to transform the conditions defining Arab-Jewish relations in Israel by, for example, changing the character of the state and its governing principles, which perpetuate discrimination against Arabs and create a glass ceiling that prevents their full integration into Israeli society.

Despite the range of resistance methods developed by the Arab minority, academic research has focused primarily on violent political resistance. Likewise, among the Jewish public and certainly the security and intelligence mechanisms, attention has concentrated on the violent component within the Arab minority’s pattern of resistance. The main question that periodically arose in the public and security discourse was whether an outbreak of violence would take place in the Arab sector and most importantly when—questions that were also asked in the context of the Palestinian reality in the West Bank and Gaza. This testifies to the Jewish view of Arab society in Israel as a security threat. This view is based on the memory of the roots of the Jewish-Palestinian struggle in the 1920s and 1930s (specifically, the events of 1929 and 1936–39) and also, it seems, of the deep psychological foundations characterizing Israeli society, the circumstances of its establishment, and the subsequent levels of national anxiety.

It is hard to ignore the fact that this analysis is one-dimensional with regard to the way in which the Israeli establishment and the Jewish public perceive Arab society in Israel. The adoption of such a narrow perspective does not allow for a more nuanced and holistic view of the Arab population. A renewed examination of the Arab minority’s pattern of resistance not only sheds new light on Arab society in Israel and provides insight into the changes it has undergone, both socially and politically, since becoming a part of Israeli society, but it also illuminates the important transformation processes experienced by the Arab minority. Such a reexamination is particularly important for Israeli decision makers, since it can provide both the tools needed to analyze Arab society and the ability to identify—even by examining the patterns of resistance—the possible opportunities to achieve the government’s policy goals among this population.

This memorandum considers the historical trends in the development of the Arab sector’s patterns of resistance and identifies the factors that have affected them while also mapping and examining the various methods of resistance within the Israeli sociopolitical context from 1948 until today. Primarily, it attempts to predict and assess the characteristics of the next stage of the Arab minority’s resistance. Chapter 1 identifies the boundaries of the research and the definitions necessary for the rest of the analysis. Chapter 2 describes the factors determining the Arab minority’s patterns of protest. Chapter 3 presents the various methods of resistance from a historical and political context, and chapter 4 deals with the question of future patterns of resistance. Chapter 5 assesses the implications of the events and patterns studied and offers policy recommendations for confronting the challenges posed.
It should be noted that the memorandum does not deal with the Bedouin in the Negev. There have been phenomena of resistance among this community, some even of a violent nature. This is to be viewed against the background of the government programs to formalize the status of the Bedouin population in the Negev and the changes taking place in this sub-region, particularly the transfer of IDF bases to the region. However, the Bedouin population is unique in its geographic, social, and cultural context and, despite the interest of many in the Arab sector to include them within the Arab-Muslim rubric, the boundaries separating the two populations have remained intact. It is, therefore, more appropriate to examine the patterns of resistance in the Bedouin sub-sector as a separate topic and not as part of the current study. Likewise, the Arab population in East Jerusalem is not part of this study. This, similarly, should not take away from the importance of studying this population, especially in view of the fact that the wave of terror ongoing since the spring of 2015 began in East Jerusalem.

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Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1: Concepts and Definitions

The Concept of Protest

The Concept of Resistance

Protest and Resistance in the Context of the Arab Minority in Israel

Chapter 2: Factors Influencing the Character of the Arab Minority’s Resistance and Methods of Protest 

The Nature of Leadership

The Gaps Between the Majority and the Minority

The Power of the State

The Minority and the Majority Society

External Conflicts

Global Influences

Chapter 3: Characteristics of the Arab Minority’s Resistance and Its Development over Time 

Violent Resistance

Cultural Resistance

Political Resistance

Intellectual Resistance

Chapter 4: The Future Character of Resistance in the Arab Secto

Arab Society After the Future Vision Documents

Seeds of Change and the Growth of the Idea of Social Resistance

Prologue to the New Social Resistance in the Form of Internal Sectoral Convergence

Chapter 5: The Implications for Israel and Recommendations for Action

Implications

Recommendations

Notes