Arabs and Jews in Israel

Volume 1: Conflicting and Shared Attitudes in a Divided Society
Volume 2: Change and Continuity in Mutual Intolerance

The outside world tends to pay so much attention to the PLO and the residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, it often forgets the 800,000 or so Arabs living within Israel proper. But Israelis, who live cheek-by-jowl with this minority, pay it close attention; and Israeli academics often focus on it. Smooha, of the University of Haifa, conducted four ambitious surveys between 1976 and 1988, each of which provides extensive data on mutual attitudes between Arabs and Jews.

While his vast array of data lends itself poorly to summary, Smooha draws out key concepts for understanding the behavior of Arabs in Israel: "militancy, not radicalism; opposition, not resistance; acceptance, not rejectionism; integration, not separation; and institutional autonomy, not irredentism." Some survey results stand out: 69 percent of the Jews and 57 percent of the Arabs favored the Egyptian-Israel peace treaty, a remarkably similar set of numbers. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Smooha finds that the percentage of rejectionists among Israeli Arabs dropped by nearly 40 percent between 1976 and 1988. Of Israeli state institutions, Arabs accept medical ones by far the most, followed by the president and the court system.

Though Smooha stays away from advocacy, he does note in the preface that "Israel would consolidate rather than compromise its Jewish-Zionist character by recognizing the Arabs as a Palestinian national minority with full rights." It's hard to argue with that.

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