Israeli Arabs: 'Who are we and what do we want?'

According to a recent New York Times news item, "A group of prominent Israeli Arabs [in a report issued in December 2006] has called on Israel to stop defining itself as a Jewish State and become a 'consensual democracy for both Arabs and Jews,' prompting consternation and debate across the country." The report is called "The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel" and the strategies in the report will be implemented by The National Committee of the Local Arab Authorities in Israel.

The term "Israeli Arabs", as used above by the New York Times, is widespread inside and outside Israel, both in the media and in scholarly articles. The emphasis is on the second word -- "Arabs" rather than on the qualifier "Israeli". The alternative term "Palestinian Israelis" would come as a rude shock to many Israelis, even secular nationalists, conditioned as they are to think of the Palestinians amongst them (20 percent of the population) as a people who had no hand in the agrarian or industrial building of the Zionist State. These people are tolerated at best, so long as they submit themselves to the Zionist ideal. Arab Israelis, for example, must acknowledge "the existence of the state of Israel as the state of the Jewish people" before they can even participate in the political process (1992 Basic Law).

In one way, the subtext for this usage emphasizes the Zionist narrative: Jews (the majority of whom come from outside Israel) have a God given right to live in historic Palestine, but the indigenous Palestinian is a generic Arab with only a tenuous sense of belonging to a specific geographic area. The term "Israeli Arabs" includes Muslim and Christian Arabs, the remnant of indigenous Palestinians that had escaped the ethnic cleansing of 1948, now numbering 1.3 million strong. Significantly, it does not include Jewish Arabs, who are referred to, instead, as "oriental Jews". Nor does it include the dispossessed Bedouins (about 100,000), who are denied legal recognition and herded in the arid northeastern part of the Negev (the western and fertile part having been reserved for Jewish settlers).

But the term also accurately reflects the sense of schizophrenia as well as exclusion that Palestinians with Israeli IDs feel. As people residing in a State formed against their will, they are not Israelis, but "Palestinian Arabs in Israel, the indigenous peoples, the residents of the State of Israel, and an integral part of the Palestinian People and the Arab and Muslim and human Nation." In their own words, they are simply "in Israel" and must now resolve their identity and take responsibility for themselves: "who are we and what do we want for our society?"

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