The Contradictions of State‐Minority Relations in Israel: The Search for Clarifications

Abstract

One of the best prisms to examine and evaluate the nature of the Israeli regime upon Israel’s sixty years of independence is the relationship between the state and its indigenous Palestinian minority. This relationship is important because of its implications on the identity of the state and its stability in the future. State-minority relations have undergone major developments in the last decade. The October 2000 events, in which 13 Arab citizens were killed by the police forces, mark an important indicator as to the fragility of this relationship. Despite the publication of the Or Commission Report that investigated the events and reiterated that the Israeli police forces treated Israeli Arab citizens as enemies, the Attorney General decided not to put any of the policemen to trial because of “lack of evidence.” Since October 2000, the Knesset passed several laws that have a deeply negative impact on the civil status and the political rights of the Arab minority. New official and unofficial initiatives sought to draft a constitution for the state of Israel, seeking to enshrine its character as an ethnic Jewish republic. These initiatives granted back winds to new policies of the Israeli General Security Service that declared that any challenge to the Jewish character of the state including by democratic means will be considered as a strategic threat that are deemed illegitimate. Simultaneously the Israeli Supreme Court has delivered several landmark rulings that protect basic individual liberal rights with clear collective implications for the Arab minority. The Arab minority, on its part, has been mobilizing new political and civic resources and developing new strategies of contention to improve its status in the Israeli state. Political and recently also civil institutions began reiterating the inherent contradiction between the exclusive hegemony of the Jewish majority over state institutions and resources and the probability of establishing justice and promoting democracy. In this context, political and civic leaders of the new Arab elite published new visionary documents that challenge the Jewish hegemony and demand individual as well as collective rights for the minority. Whereas these documents were introduced in order to exert pressure on the state and invite its leadership into a dialogue over state-minority relations, the Jewish majority conceived them as yet another indicator of the radicalization of the Arab minority. Understanding these developments in state-minority relations without falling into mere depiction of events could benefit from newly published theoretical and practical literature on policies of diversity regulation and conflict management. This literature draws attention to the various models of dealing with minority rights, pinpointing the advantages and limitations of each. On the other hand, examining state-minority relations in Israel may contribute to the debate regarding the advantages and limitations of various models of diversity regulation and shed light on some of their aspects that are overlooked. Minority rights and status have become a central topic in the professional literature in major fields such as constitutional law and political philosophy. Recent literature has depicted two main grand strategies for regulating diversity. One is integration and the other is accommodation.1 Whereas the first is usually applied in the case of national minorities, seeking to integrate its members into the majority society, the second is more appropriate for dealing with the basic rights of indigenous peoples. Commenting on the dominant models