Existing and alternative policy towards the Arabs in Israel / מדיניות קיימת ואלטרנטיבית כלפי הערבים בישראל

Deeply divided societies face the difficult problem of political integration. Often the result is ethnic disruption, but many societies endeavor to escape unrest by taking one of three major directions: consensus-building, consociationalism (compromise and partnership) and domination. These alternatives can also be seen as the main policies taken by dominant majorities to handle minority problems. The Arab minority presents Israel with a severe problem of maintaining social stability. For the last thirty years the Arab citizens have remained distinct in culture and identity, separate in community, inferior in resources and dissident in basic ideology from the Jewish majority. Israel has been using the domination approach for coping with the Arab minority. The aims of the existing policy are to neutralize Arabs as a force in Israeli society, namely, to deter them from becoming a security risk, to counteract their potential challenge to the Jewish-Zionist character of the state, and to harness their resources (manpower, lands, votes, etc.) for the Jewish benefit. This informal policy is reinforced by the official policy of achieving integration and equality which are minimally implemented as mechanisms of control. The fact that Israeli Arabs generally have been acquiescent since 1948, testifies to the relative success of Israel's policy, yet the potential for conflict is still great. Loocking in other directions to attain national cohesion, several alternative policies towards the Arab minority are formulated by the author. These are "maximal incorporation", "a status of a Palestinian national minority" and "a personal choice between integration and separation". They strike a better balance among political democracy, national security and the Jewish-Zionist mold of the state. They offer Arabs a fairer deal in Israeli society. They intend to establish more cooperative relations between Arabs and Jews. They have, however, risks of their own. These alternative policies differ significantly from utopian radical solutions on the one hand and from many recently proposed reforms on the other. Their chances of being implemented are slim, however, as long as the present domination policy keeps law and order effectively and at low cost, as long as the Israeli-Arab conflict continues to legitimize the inferior status of the Arab minority and as long as the ideology of a Jewish-Zionist state remains exclusionary.