The Land Is Full by Alon Tal

The Land Is Full by Alon Tal

Author:Alon Tal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016-07-14T16:00:00+00:00


THE CULTURAL TRANSITION—ISRAELIZATION

There are those who believe that the shift into a Stage 3 demographic mode is simply a result of integration into Israeli society. Arab citizens follow Israeli politics, have overdrafts in Israeli bank accounts, wait in lines at Israeli health clinics, and study an Israeli government-approved curriculum (in Arabic). Arab Israelis also began to consume imported products, travel abroad, and watch American television shows and Hollywood movies. Gradually, they came to adopt many of the cultural norms, heroes, and aspirations of Western civilization. In so doing, wittingly or unwittingly, they distanced themselves from traditional, agrarian Palestinian ways and drew closer to an increasingly homogenized, urbanized, Western, Israeli lifestyle.

For the past thirty years, Haifa University sociologist Sammy Smooha has followed the “Israelization” process among local Arabs115 as they grew closer to the state and to Jewish norms in many spheres of life.116 Other experts challenge this view.117 There is no arguing that Israel’s Arab communities still remain distinct from the Jewish sector, both geographically and sociologically. On average, Arab Israelis are younger, less educated, and poorer than Jewish citizens. Most Israelis are unaware of just how much poorer Arab citizens are: In 2004 poverty incidence among Arab Israelis was 6.7 times higher than it was for non-Orthodox Jewish Israelis.118 Almost ten years later, in 2013, the gap had narrowed but was still substantial: 53.5 percent of Arab households were classified as “poor” by Israel’s Ministry of Welfare, as opposed to 19.9 percent in the Jewish sector.119

Younger Arab citizens have become very Israeli in their unwillingness to passively accept second-class status, as their parents did during the country’s earlier years. This was driven home to Israel’s somewhat complacent Jewish majority during the widespread demonstrations and rioting of 2000. The ensuing deaths of twelve Arab Israeli citizens led to the appointment of the Or Commission to investigate the police response and consider the discrimination that was at the heart of Arab frustration.120 Justice Or and his committee were surprisingly candid about the discrimination faced by Arab citizens and its role in fomenting the exasperation and despondency that fueled the unrest.

Arab citizens’ idiosyncratic Israeli identity became even more salient after Israel signed peace agreements in the 1990s with representatives from the Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank. The vast majority of Arab Israelis, while very supportive of the peace process, preferred not to adopt this officially recognized Palestinian national identity.121 According to a December 2014 comprehensive survey, 77 percent of Israeli Arabs said that they preferred leaving under an Israeli government than a Palestinian government.122 More than two-thirds of Arab respondents see themselves as Israelis, and 70 percent support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state where Arabs and Jews live together.123 This percentage has decreased somewhat from previous periods, but is still the view of the vast majority of Arab Israelis.

It is interesting to consider the shifts reflected in Sammy Smooha’s annual seven-hundred-person opinion surveys. Between 2003 and 2012, results revealed a steady “hardening” of attitudes among Arab Israelis toward the country and a reduced desire to integrate into society.



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