Israel’s Arabs and the Palestinian Problem (1977)

Abstract

This chapter presents both descriptive information and explanatory insights about the political circumstances and resulting political attitudes of the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel. In the 1970s, these Arabs were a religious minority in a Non-Secular state, as they had been since Israel gained its independence in 1948, and the vast majority of Palestinians living within what became Israel’s borders involuntarily left their homes and became refugees. Palestinians called this exodus the naqba, the catastrophe. Those Palestinians who remained within Israel became Israeli citizens, but as a community, Israel’s Arabs were impoverished, fragmented, and leaderless. In addition to being Israelis by virtue of their citizenship, these Palestinian Arab Israelis were also part of the larger Palestinian population that had fought against Zionist forces in the 1947–1948 war. Thus, in addition to struggling to find their place and achieve greater equality within the Israeli state, Israel’s Arab citizens were asking themselves about the meaning of their Palestinian as well as their Israeli identity. The Arab-Israeli wars of June 1967 and October 1973 intensified the salience of questions about the identity and loyalty of Israel’s Arab population, as did changes in the ideology and leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization during this period. Against this background, this chapter presents the results of a 1974–1975 survey that asked Israel’s Arab citizens about their identity as Israelis and as Palestinians, about the degree to which they judged themselves to be integrated into or alienated from Israeli society, about their attitudes toward the Arab-Israeli conflict, and about the inter-relationships among these three sets of attitudes.