Arab citizens: an unfinished process of integration

Laurence Louer (1)

1 CERI - Centre de recherches internationales (Sciences Po, CNRS)

Nearly 20 percent of Israelis are Arabs, in other words about 1,300,000 people descended from some 160,000 Palestinians who remained in the territory of the State of Israel after 1948. Their percentage in the population is constantly rising, so tha Israeli demographers predict that Arabs will represent as much as one-third of the Israeli population by 2050. In recent years, Arabs have regularly been in Israeli headlines for various reasons. In 1999, for the first time, a young Arab won the Miss Israel competition. Five years later, in 2004, an Arab team won the Israeli Cup, beating the major Haifa club by four goals. Even more importantly, Arabs proved to have significant political influence in the 1980s and 1990s, for instance allowing the coalition led by Yitzhak Rabin to remain in power after the 1993 Oslo Accords. In 2000 there were massive Arab protests against the repression of the second Intifada in the Palestinian territories, and the unprecedented violence in confrontations with the police once again made Arab citizens the main topic of the Israeli press.
How should this increasing visibility of the Arab citizens of Israel be interpreted?

Keywords: political influence; Arab citizens of Israel; integration; discrimination

Domains: Humanities and Social Sciences; Political science; Humanities and Social Sciences; Sociology

Laurence Louer. Arab citizens: an unfinished process of integration. Alain Dieckhoff. Routledge handbook of modern Israel, Routledge, pp.114 - 122, 2013, 9780415573924. ⟨hal-03393991⟩