Israel's Arab Minority

By D. R. ELSTON

rr HERE are just short of a quarter of a million .1 Arabs in Israel. One of them is Faris, gar- dener at the house on Mount Carmel where recently I lodged. There are many Arabs doing jobs in the Haifa district. They come down from their villages and work as building-labourers, transport workers, gardeners, waiters and so on, for which they receive the union rate of wages customary throughout the whole country.

Faris took from me a proffered cup of coffee. After we had talked idly for several minutes, I asked him if he was content to live as an Israeli. He smiled and said:

`I am well paid for my work. If I am sick I Set looked after. My three children go to school and one of them is being helped by the Govern- ment to go on to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. That is good. In our village we have electric light and we don't have to pump the water from the village well any more. It is laid on to our houses. That is much better than it used to be. But . .

Faris shrugged his shoulders and smiled again. I told him to go on, to finish the 'But .

and then he looked shyly down at his feet, saying:

'You see, I am an Arab. That does not mean that I dislike being an Israeli. It just means,

well . . He smiled again, as if at a loss, handed me back the emptied coffee cup and returned to his gardening.

I had understood what his caution, or his bashfulness, had caused him to withhold: simply the fact that he was an Arab, which is some- thing not easily defined except by such men as Abdul Nasser, who are able to reduce it to political dimensions. For the ordinary Arab it is something more than that; and far more promising, in a vague way, than a mere race. That is why he cannot assimilate. Of what ever country he may be a citizen, even Syria or Iraq or Jordan, let alone Israel, he remains

fundamentally and consciously an Arab. It is not a form of expansive nationalism. It is really a kind of daydream. And then along conies someone like President Nasser promising the substance of the daydream; and in pursuit of that promise the Arab is ready to leap from his camel or his ass, emerge from his cavelike shop, thrust aside his plough, and set out to -break windows, scream slogans, and even kill poli- ticians.

All in all, therefore, the Government of Israel thinks it proper to treat its Arab minority as a security risk. It is a more sizeable minority than you think and is spread over sizeable terri- tory. When the State was founded and the Arab attempt to botch it by military invasion had failed, there were 108,000 Arabs left on the Israel side of the demarcation lines drawn in the Armistice Agreements. The increase to nearly a quarter of a million is mainly natural, but includes some 35,000 to 40,000 persons who came back from the refugee camps under a scheme for the reunion of families. The rest of what may have been as many as 660,000, who, bewildered,' despairing and deceived by the fanciful urgings of leaders seated in Damascus and Cairo and the Old City of Jerusalem, fled behind the Arab lines throughout 1948, are still, for the most part, refugees; and look like re- maining that way so long as their plight serves political ends.

The Arabs in Israel live relatively well. I knew their towns and villages in the days of the British Mandate and lately have been among them again. There is a world, of difference be- tween now and then. Housing is more roomy and generally at a much better standard than it was. There are well-made roads and twice as many of them. As Faris pointed out, water is laid on at most houses and electric light has dispossessed the paraffin lamp. Where once upon a time only the village Mukhtar had a wireless

set, now almost every family has one and can listen freely to the Voice of the Arabs from Cairo promising the 'liberation of Palestine' be- fore very long, with President Nasser turning up at the head of the United Arab Armies of Deliverance.

Not that the Arabs of Israel particularly want to be 'delivered': at any rate, not that way. They would be much happier if there were peace between Israel and the Arab States, so that they could again feel themselves truly a part of the Arab world while continuing to enjoy good markets for their agricultural produce; good wages; good schools for their children, medical clinics and mother-and-child welfare stations, which have contributed to the improvement in health generally and to the reduction of the infant mortality rate.

But there it is. The common Arab daydream is an intrinsic, indolent, sentiment, offering small encouragement to progress. Nasser is deter- mined to transform it into an outward, active substance and to make every Arab, wherever he may be, whether in Aleppo or Galilee or Amman or Algiers, part and parcel of his own, Nasserist dream. The Israeli Arab, therefore, is in something of the same quandary the Sudeten Germans were in when Hitler insisted upon being their Fuehrer, too, and preparing for their 'liberation.' If, indeed, Nasser, with a unified Arab army behind him, should attempt the 'Liberation of Palestine,' no Israeli would ex- pect the Arab minority to turn its back upon him.

One way and another, then, the Israeli Arab is in something of a dilemma; and so is the Israeli Government, which is well aware of the offensive impression made abroad, as well a$ upon the Arabs themselves, by the application of military government over the country's pre- dominantly Arab areas. The security experts are convinced that the withdrawal of this discrimina- tory form of rule would be disastrous.

So both sides feel apprehension in this small sector of an absurdly contentious region: the Arab minority is as much subject to that appre- hension as the Israel majority.

'The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.'