April 14, 2022
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Israeli citizens of Palestinian descent
In the Tel Aviv suburb of Bnei Brak, a community center for fundamentalist Jews, thousands turned out in recent days for the funeral of a slain policeman.
The deceased was an Arab-Israeli Christian, Amir Kuri. He was shot by a Palestinian gunman with an automatic weapon. Curry’s wife called her husband a “hero” in Israel in her eulogy.
Curry is one of Israel’s roughly 1.9 million citizens of Arab descent.
Coincidentally, the attackers who killed four Israeli police officers in a local shopping mall in late March were also Arab-Israelis.
A series of events have made this special group living in Israeli society – the Arab Israelis once once more become the focus of public opinion.
Arab-Israeli History
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Arab Israelis and their Jewish supporters protest once morest the authorities’ purchase of a house in Jaffa, near Tel Aviv, April 2021
People often refer to Israel as a Jewish state, but not all Israeli citizens are Jewish. Arab minorities make up regarding 20 percent of Israel’s population, out of a national population of regarding 9 million.
The vast majority of them are Palestinians who insisted on staying following Israel declared statehood in 1948. Immediately following Israel’s declaration of statehood, the Arab coalition launched a massive offensive. In that war, as many as 750,000 people either fled on their own or were driven from their homes by the fighting.
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Arab Israeli citizens have the right to vote and stand for election, but many accuse the government of systematic discrimination once morest them
Those who left their homeland during the 1948 war ended up settling in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and surrounding refugee camps.
The Palestinians who stayed in Israel then called themselves Arab Israelis, Israeli Palestinians, or simply Palestinians.
The vast majority of Arab Israelis are Muslims, but there are also some Christians among them. Christians are the second largest group of Arab Israelis. They have had the right to vote and be elected since Israel’s first elections in January 1949.
social integration issues
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The two communities work well together during the COVID-19 pandemic
Israel’s Arab and Jewish communities spend most of their time with little interaction, but during the Covid-19 crisis, the two communities have worked closely together towards a common goal.
One area where social integration is doing better is the national health system. Arab Israelis make up 20%, 25% and 50% of Israeli doctors, nurses and pharmacists, respectively. In the healthcare system, Jewish and Arab patients share medical resources during the pandemic.
However, the number of Arab-Israelis in the security forces is much lower. Since the founding of Israel, the military and defense have been the keys to the nation’s survival; every Jewish Israeli is required to participate in military training and military service. The security forces play a “central” role in Israeli society.
Although Arab-Israelis can also join the military and police, they are not subject to Israel’s mandatory military service and are therefore relatively few in the military.
institutional discrimination
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Arab Israelis often complain of unequal treatment
In theory, Arab Israelis have the same rights as Jewish citizens, but they often complain of systemic discrimination in Israel.
In recent years, the Arab community has experienced a wave of violent crime related to illegal guns, domestic disputes and organized crime.
Most murders in Israel take place in minority Arab communities, who complain that the police are not interested in solving the cases.
In 2021, according to a report by Israel’s Ha’aretz, the Israeli police solved only 23 percent of Arab murders that year, compared with the Jewish community’s 71 percent rate.
The Israeli police responded that they invested heavily in the Arab community but faced issues of trust and cooperation in investigating crimes there.
Arab Israelis also complained regarding the confiscation of their land by the government and accused Jewish authorities of systematic discrimination once morest them in the state budget (but it should be noted that the Israeli Arab political party – the United Arab List – is currently part of the ruling coalition government ).
“Second class citizen”
Likewise, many Arabs complained that Israeli citizenship laws favored Jews, who were automatically granted an Israeli passport no matter where they came from.
Instead, they disenfranchised the expelled Palestinians and their children.
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Arab-Israelis protested the demolition of their houses because they did not have the correct building permits.
In 2018, the Knesset passed a controversial “nation-state law” that removed Arabic as an official language along with Hebrew and declared that only Jews had the right to national self-determination.
Israeli Arab lawmaker Ayman Odeh said at the time that Israel had passed a “Jewish supremacy” law that would tell Arab-Israelis that they would always be “second-class citizens.”
Then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged to ensure civil rights, but said it was up to “the majority”.
Several human rights groups have issued statements regarding the lack of equal rights for Arab Israelis.
Amnesty International says Israel has institutionalized discrimination once morest Palestinians living there.
A report published by Human Rights Watch in April 2021 accused Israeli authorities of a policy of apartheid once morest Palestinians living inside the territory and in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Israel’s foreign ministry denounced the report as (extremely) “ridiculous and false”.
