The Arabs of Israel
David Gilmour
Nazareth Israel's Arab population is seldom accorded much attention in the Western press. By comparison with their countrymen in the West Bank and Gaza, the half-million Palestinians inhabiting Galilee and its adjoining regions are usually ignored. This is partly because they need to be. The position of the Arabs inside Israel is so difficult and so complicated that many of them are anxious not to attract attention. They realise that their situation is anomalous, and that an Arab minority inside a state almost permanently at war with the Arab world is bound to be regarded with suspicion by the government of that state. They know that many Israelis consider them a 'fifth column' and that some call periodically for their expulsion. Demoralised and on the defensive for most of the last 30 years, the Arabs are therefore usually careful and refrain from spectacular gestures.
Occasionally, however, some of them do stir things up and publicly question the basic assumptions of the Zionist State. The Israelis then over-react and a furious controversy takes place in the committees of the Knesset and the letter columns of the press. The most recent row began last January when a handful of students, belonging to a group called the National Progressive Movement, announced their support for the PLO. This movement, which consists almost exclusively of students, rejects the idea of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza and calls for a secular democratic state in all of Palestine. Although its leaders admit that their goal may not be attainable for 'decades' (the number of decades is not specified), they see their immediate duty as the need to 'educate' people and remind them of their Palestinian identity.
The movement attracts little support outside the student population. Many Arabs find it futile and provocative. They believe that it is jeopardising their position and handing the Israelis an excuse for continuing the oppression of their community. RAKAH, the Israeli Communist Party, which has supported the existence of Israel since the Soviet Union voted for partition in 1947, accuses them of being extremist and unrealistic. In characteristic jargon, it condemns the movement for its 'chauvinistic and petty-bourgeois ideology'. Others complain that the students are obscuring the real problems facing the Israeli Arabs. There is no point, they argue, in behaving like the Grand Mufti and insisting on a policy which cannot possibly succeed. They should concentrate on tackling the difficulties which the Arab minority actually encounters as an underprivileged section of the Jewish state.
Many of these difficulties are faced daily, for example, here in Nazareth. In fact, this town exemplifies as well as anywhere the discrimination which the Israeli government practices against its Arab citizens. Dominated by the Jewish town of Upper Nazareth, which was built on confiscated Arab lands, the old town suffers from housing shortages, underdevelopment and the absence of basic facilities. It does not possess a public library and most of the schools' classrooms are makeshift affairs, housed in rented buildings. With a population of 45,000, Nazareth's budget is slightly less than that of its Jewish neighbour, whose population barely exceeds 15,000. It has a desperate housing shortage but its inhabitants are forbidden to buy property in Upper Nazareth, which has hundreds of empty apartments, because Arabs are not allowed to live on land owned by the Jewish National Fund.
Although some of its officials admit that they have never read Marx and prefer decorating their rooms with posters of Nasser rather than Lenin, RAKAH is still far from taking the road to 'Eurocommunism'. The party's relationship with Moscow is close and its structure is organised on classic Soviet lines. Yet it is also a popular party in a very real sense and its supporters come from all sections of the Arab community, except the smaller villages (the Jewish element, through strong in the Politburo and Central Committee, is very weak in terms of electoral support): in most of the towns RAKAH polls between two thirds and three quarters of the Arab vote. This is not because the Israeli Arabs are enthusiastic Communists (RAKAH supporters outnumber members by more than 200 to one) but because the party is the only major group inside Israel which is prepared to fight for the rights of the Arab population.
Israeli Arabs are clearly divided in their attitudes to the Zionist state. Although all of them recognise the injustice done to their people by the creation of Israel, many of them concede that the state is not going to vanish and it is dangerous to go on trying to oppose it. In private, according to a recent opinion poll, half the Arab population does not recognise lsrae I's right to exist but there are only a few, like the National Progressive Movement, who refuse to accept Israel as a fact and who insist on continuing the 60year struggle against Zionism. Reluctantly, the majority has resigned itself to the RAKAH view as presented by Toufik Zayad: 'Whether I like it or not, I am an Israeli citizen and my policy is to work for equality and full national rights for my people within the framework of the Israeli state. In the Occupied Territories we support self-determination for the Palestinians and the establishment of an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza'. Contemplating the other options open to Israeli Arabs and the delicate position they occupy in the Zionist state, there seems no sensible alternative.
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