Mideast Security and Policy Studies No. 196
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The May 2021 riots by the Israeli Arabs, like their October 2000 precursor, were not an act of social protest but a nationalist/Islamist insurrection in support of an external attack. It was not socioeconomic grievances that drove the Israeli Arabs to wreak wanton violence on their Jewish compatriots for the second time in 20 years but the growing radicalization attending the decades-long betterment of their socioeconomic condition.
If in the 1950s and the early 1960s, when the Israeli Arabs’ socioeconomic condition was at its lowest, there were hardly any manifestations of political, nationalist, or religious dissidence among them, the more prosperous, affluent, better educated, and politically aware they became, the greater their leadership’s incitement against their state of citizenship—to the point where many ordinary Arabs have come to openly challenge their minority existence in the Jewish State. Hence the October 2000 uprising after a decade that saw government allocations to Arab municipalities grow by 550% and the number of Arab civil servants nearly treble, and hence the far more violent May 2021 insurrection—after yet another decade of massive government investment in the Arab sector, including a NIS15 billion ($3.84 billion) socioeconomic aid program.
Of course, many Israeli Arabs would still be content to get on with their lives and take advantage of the freedoms and opportunities afforded by Israel, no matter how much they might resent their minority status in a Jewish state. Yet from the onset of the Arab-Israeli conflict a century ago, Palestinian Arab society has always comprised militant segments sufficiently large to allow its perennially extremist leadership to sway the silent majority into repeated disasters. As a British commission of enquiry headed by Lord Peel observed as early as 1937: “We have found that, though the Arabs have benefited by the development of the country owing to Jewish immigration, this has had no conciliatory effect. On the contrary, improvement of the economic situation in Palestine has meant the deterioration of the political situation.”
Just as Hajj Amin Husseini and Yasser Arafat immersed their hapless subjects in disastrous conflicts that culminated in their collective undoing and continued statelessness in total disregard of the massive material gains attending Arab-Jewish coexistence, so Israel’s Arab leaders used their constituents’ vast socioeconomic progress over the past decades as a vehicle of radicalization rather than moderation.
In this respect, the participation of the Islamist Ra’am party in the motley ruling coalition established after the May 2021 riots signifies the continuation of this dangerous trend rather than the growing Israelization of the country’s Arab community. Unlike the participation of the now-defunct United Arab List (not to be confused with today’s Joint List) in the 1974-77 Labor-led governments, let alone the participation of Labor and Likud Arab ministers and deputy ministers in successive governments, which implied acquiescence to Israel’s Jewish nature, Ra’am’s participation is an opportunistic ploy to strengthen the position of the Arab sector, especially Ra’am’s predominantly Bedouin constituency, vis-à-vis the state without accepting its legitimacy. And while Ra’am will undoubtedly be able to extort far-reaching short-term gains that will further erode Israel’s sovereignty and governability over its Arab minority, this development is bound to backfire in grand style by intensifying Arab radicalization and Jewish frustration, which will put the two communities on a collision course before too long.