In the foreground, Yousef Jabareen, left, shakes hands with
Oded Haklai, who is flanked by Anita Shapira and Yedidfr tern.
Symposium tries to bring Israeli Jews and Arabs closer.
Dina Kraft
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Jerusalem
I
n an elegant limestone building
in a Jerusalem neighborhood that
before 1948 was home to the city's
Palestinian elite, a group of Jewish and
Arab Israeli academics recently tried to
untangle one of Israel's most complex and
charged questions: the status of its Arab
minority
"The discussion here is so important
because we are trying to see if this is
a zero-sum game or if it's possible to
find the way to coexistence," said Anita
Shapira, the Israeli historian and former
dean of Tel Aviv University who presided
over the symposium organized by the
Israel Democracy Institute.
As Israel celebrates 63 years of inde-
pendence, relations between its Arab and
Jewish citizens are marked by a palpable
and growing sense of alienation. As often
occurs on Yom Ha'atzmaut, the marking
of Israel's Independence Day served to
highlight the divisions between Israel's
Jews and Arabs.
Just a few weeks ago, the Knesset
passed a new law that mandates fines
for state-funded groups that question
the country's status as a Jewish and
democratic state. Critics say the so-called
Nakba law — aimed at outlawing mark-
ing Yom Ha'atzmaut as the Arab Day of
102
May 19 2011
Catastrophe, or Nakba — limits the right
to freedom of expression and is an attack
on the country's Arab minority.
That and other recent Knesset mea-
sures — from a bill attempting to cancel
Arabic's status as an official language in
Israel to proposals for a mandatory loy-
alty oath — have sharpened feelings of
disenfranchisement among many Arab
citizens of Israel.
"I have no problem with your religion,
but I also want you to acknowledge my
history," said Aziz Haider, a Hebrew
University sociologist, during one of sev-
eral heated exchanges at the symposium.
"There is a State of Israel and Israel's
establishment is the result of our Nakba."
Nakba is how Palestinians commonly
refer to the events of 1948, which led to
Israeli statehood but also to Palestinian
dispossession.
"Israel, instead of going toward recon-
ciliation, is headed towards confronta-
tion," Haider said.
How to reconcile an Arab minority in a
state that defines itself as both Jewish and
democratic remains one of Israel's great-
est challenges.
On the one hand, Israel's Arab citizens,
who number about 1.6 million in a coun-
try of 7.7 million, are more "Israeli" than
ever before. They are fluent in Hebrew, are
intimately familiar with Israeli culture
and are present in relatively large num-
bers as students in Israeli universities. In
recent years, the government has begun
to address the imbalance in allocating
resources among its Jewish and Arab
citizens.
On the other hand, that imbalance still
exists, Arabs still rank among Israel's
poorest citizens and they live largely apart
from Jews.
In recent years, Israeli Arabs also have
embraced a more assertive political
voice, expressing solidarity with their
Palestinian counterparts in the West Bank
and Gaza, and growing more vocal in
their criticism of the Israeli government.
Arab Israelis say they feel more threat-
ened in Israel — the current Israeli
foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman,
advocates transferring some Arab Israeli
towns to a future Palestinian state in the
event of a peace deal, and wants Arabs to
be required to take a loyalty oath to the
Jewish state — while Jews say they feel
more threatened by radicalized Arabs.
"There is a psychological problem for
both the Jews and the Arabs," Shapira
said. "The Jews today still feel as if their
majority status is under attack.
"On the Arab side, the Arabs are
not used to being a minority, and they
demand every now and then rights that
belong not only to the Arabs as individu-
als but also want collective rights. This
causes a clash."
At the symposium, Professor Yedidia
Stern, who teaches law at Bar-Ilan
University, cited a recent poll finding that
the majority of Israeli Jews are against any
notion of universal rights for minorities.
Meanwhile, political discourse among
Israeli Arabs in recent years has focused
on stripping Israel of its Jewish symbols
in the name of democracy and minority
rights, including changing the flag and
national anthem.
"For Jewish Israelis, the situation seems
very pessimistic, like we are on a col-
lision course Oded Haklai, a political
science professor at Queen's University
in Canada, said at the symposium. "But
if one looks comparatively, it can be seen
that the behavior of Arabs in Israel show
they have accepted the rules of the game
of democracy as the only game in town.
Political violence, for example, is very
rare, and that is something we take for
granted."
Issa E. Boursheh, an Arab graduate
student at Tel Aviv University, published a
personal plea for mutual understanding
in an Op-Ed in the Jerusalem Post.
"While Jewish Israelis are honoring
their heroes [on Independence Day],
Palestinian-Israelis have the right to
honor theirs:' he wrote. "The Israeli and
Palestinian narrative may never agree, but
I trust that in the long term, with proper
steps taken now, we will be able to reach a
point of understanding.
"We might never celebrate
Independence/Nakba together, but we
may be able to have sympathy toward a
hope that is not lost — to be free people
in our land." (I