Israel's Arabs: deprived or radicalized?

Abstract

The violence wrought by Israel's Arabs on their Jewish compatriots in October 2000 was not an act of social protest as wrongly claimed by the Orr commission, but rather an internal uprising in support of an external attack. Just as the leader of the Palestinian Arabs during the mandate era, Hajj Amin Husseini, dragged his reluctant constituents into a disastrous conflict that culminated in their collective undoing, and Yasser Arafat used the Oslo accords to implicate his equally grudging subjects in the worst military confrontation with Israel since the 1948 war, rather than create the independent Palestinian state envisaged by the accords, so Israel's Arab leaders radicalized their community for decades. The more prosperous, affluent, and better educated the Israeli Arabs have become, the greater has grown their leadership's incitement against their state of citizenship, to the point where many ordinary Arabs have come to openly challenge the fundamental principles underpinning its very existence.