Arab citizens of Israel


The Arab citizens of Israel form the country's largest ethnic minority. The base of these communities are the Arab, non-Jewish former Palestinian citizens who continued to inhabit the territory that was acknowledged as Israeli under the 1949 Armistice Agreements ending the 1948 Palestine War. Notions of identity among Israel's Arab citizens are complex, encompassing civic, religious, and ethnic components. Most sources report that the majority of Arabs in Israel prefer to be identified as Palestinian citizens of Israel.
In the wake of the 1948 Palestine war, the Israeli government conferred Israeli citizenship upon all Palestinians who had remained or were not expelled. However, they were subject to martial law until 1966, while other Israeli citizens were not. In the early 1980s, Israel granted citizenship eligibility to the Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the Syrian citizens of the Golan Heights by annexing both areas, though they remain internationally recognized as part of the Israeli-occupied territories, which came into being after the Six-Day War of 1967. Acquisition of Israeli citizenship in East Jerusalem has been scarce, as only 5% of Palestinians in East Jerusalem were Israeli citizens in 2022, largely due to Palestinian society's disapproval of naturalization as complicity with the occupation. Israel has made the process more difficult, approving only 38% of new Palestinian applications from 2002 to 2022.
According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, the Israeli Arab population stood at 2.1 million people in 2023, accounting for 21% of Israel's total population. The majority of these Arab citizens identify themselves as Arab or Palestinian by nationality and as Israeli by citizenship. They mostly live in Arab-majority towns and cities, some of which are among the poorest in the country, and generally attend schools that are separated to some degree from those attended by Jewish Israelis. Arab political parties traditionally did not join governing coalitions until 2021, when the United Arab List became the first to do so. The Druze and the Bedouin in the Negev and the Galilee have historically expressed the strongest non-Jewish affinity to Israel and are more likely to identify as Israelis than other Arab citizens.
Speakers of both Arabic and Hebrew, their traditional vernaculars are mostly Levantine Arabic dialects, such as Palestinian Arabic in central Israel and Lebanese Arabic further north, particularly among the Druze. Negev Bedouins, on the other hand, speak a Northwest Arabian dialect. Because the modern Arabic dialects of Israel's Arabs have absorbed multiple Hebrew loanwords and phrases, it is sometimes called the Israeli Arabic dialect. By religious affiliation, the majority of Arab Israelis are Muslims, but there are significant Christian and Druze minorities, among others. Arab citizens of Israel have a wide variety of self-identification: as Israeli or "in Israel"; as Arabs or Palestinians; and as Muslims, Christians or Druze.

Terminology and identity

The choice of terms to refer to Arab citizens of Israel is a highly politicized issue, and there is a broad range of labels that members of this community use to self-identity. Generally speaking, supporters of Israel tend to use Israeli Arab or Arab Israeli to refer to this population without mentioning Palestine, while critics of Israel tend to use Palestinian or Palestinian Arab without referencing Israel. According to The New York Times, most preferred to identify themselves as Palestinian citizens of Israel rather than as Israeli Arabs, as of 2012. The New York Times uses both 'Palestinian Israelis' and 'Israeli Arabs' to refer to the same population.
File:Land day sakhneen.jpg|thumb|250px|Israeli Arabs at a Land Day rally in Sakhnin, 30 March 2010The relationship of Arab citizens to the State of Israel is often fraught with tension and can be regarded in the context of relations between minority populations and state authorities elsewhere in the world. Arab citizens consider themselves to be an indigenous people.

List of demonyms

Arab/Palestinian citizens of Israel may refer to themselves by a wide range of terms. Each of these names, while referring to the same group of people, connotes a different balance in what is often a multilayered identity assigning varying levels of priority or emphasis to the various dimensions which may be historic-geographic, "national" or ethnoreligious, linguistic, civic, etc.:
  • Palestinian citizens of Israel is a term that most Arab citizens of Israel prefer to refer to themselves, and which some media and other organizations use to refer to Israeli Arabs, either consistently or alternating the use of other terms for Israeli Arabs.
  • Palestinian Arabs
  • Palestinian Arabs in Israel
  • Palestinian Israelis
  • Palestinians in Israel
  • Israeli Arabs
  • Israeli Palestinian Arabs
  • Israeli Palestinians
  • Arab citizens of Israel
  • Arab Israelis
  • 48ers, '48 Arabs
Two appellations, among others listed above, are not applied to the East Jerusalem Arab population or the Druze in the Golan Heights, as these territories were occupied by Israel in 1967:
  • the Arabs inside the Green Line
  • the Arabs within.

    Demonym preferences

According to The New York Times, as of 2012, most Israeli Arabs preferred to identify themselves as Palestinian citizens of Israel rather than as Israeli Arabs. The Council on Foreign Relations also states that most members of the Israeli Arab community prefer this term. The Washington Post asserted in 2021 that "surveys showed" that Israeli Arabs preferred the term "Palestinian citizen of Israel" and that "for people who often feel caught between two worlds, however, the contours of what it means to be a Palestinian citizen of Israel remain a work in progress." However, these findings conflict with a 2017 Tel Aviv University poll which showed most Israelis self-identify as either Arab-Israeli or simply Israeli.
Similar terms that Israeli Arabs, media and other organizations may use are Palestinian Arabs in Israel and Israeli Palestinian Arabs. Amnesty reports that "Arab citizens of Israel" is "an inclusive term used by Israel that describes a number of different and primarily Arabic-speaking groups, including Muslim Arabs", Christian Arabs, Druze and Circassians. They further stated that "considering the number of those defined as Muslim Arabs and Christian Arabs together, the population of Palestinian citizens of Israel amounted to around 1.8 million" in 2019.
There are at least two terms which specifically exclude the East Jerusalem Arab population and the Druze and other Arabs in the Golan Heights: the Arabs inside the Green Line, and the Arabs within. These terms clarify that
  • Although Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1967, the vast majority of its Arab population does not have Israeli citizenship
  • Although Israel annexed the Golan Heights, that area was originally part of Syria, not Mandatory Palestine.

    Identification as Palestinian

While known officially by the Israeli government only as "Israeli Arabs" or "Arab Israelis", the development of Palestinian nationalism and identity in the 20th and 21st centuries has been met by a marked evolution in self-identification, reflecting a rising identification with Palestinian identity alongside Arab and Israeli signifiers. A number of Palestinian citizens of Israel have family ties to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as well as to Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
Between 1948 and 1967, few Arab citizens of Israel identified openly as "Palestinian", and an "Israeli-Arab" identity, the preferred phrase of the Israeli establishment and public, was predominant. Public expressions of Palestinian identity, such as displays of the Palestinian flag or the singing and reciting of nationalist songs or poetry were illegal. With the end of military administrative rule in 1966 and following the 1967 war, national consciousness and its expression among Israel's Arab citizens spread. A majority then self-identified as Palestinian, preferring this descriptor to Israeli Arab in numerous surveys over the years. In a 2017 telephone poll, 40% of Arab citizens of Israel identified as "Arab in Israel / Arab citizen of Israel", 15% identified as "Palestinian", 8.9% as "Palestinian in Israel / Palestinian citizen of Israel", and 8.7% as "Arab"; the focus groups associated with the poll provided a different outcome, in which "there was consensus that Palestinian identity occupies a central place in their consciousness". A November 2023 poll asked respondents from this demographic what the most important "component in their personal identity" was to them; 33 percent answered "Israeli citizenship", 32 percent "Arab identity", 23 percent "religious affiliation", and 8 percent "Palestinian identity".
University of Haifa professor Sammy Smooha commented in 2019, "The largest now and the most growing identity is a hybrid identity, which is 'Palestinian in Israel' or a similar combination. I think that’s what’s going to take over."
Distinction of Druze and Circassian citizens
In the Amnesty International 2022 report "Israel's Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity", the organization excludes the Israeli Arab Druze and non-Arab Circassians from the term Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel:
  • The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs officially classifies the roughly 2.1 million Palestinian citizens of Israel as "Arab citizens of Israel", reflecting their attributing a racialized non-Jewish, Arab status to all of them
  • The term "Arab citizens of Israel" includes Muslim Arabs including Bedouins, Christian Arabs, the 20–25,000 Druze, and even the 4–5,000 Circassians, whose origins are in the Caucasus but are mostly Muslim.
  • According to Amnesty, the Israeli state views and treats Palestinian citizens of Israel differently from the Druze and Circassians, who must for example serve in the army while Palestinian citizens need not serve.
  • Nonetheless, Israeli authorities and media refer to those who self-identify as Palestinians – as "Israeli Arabs".
The Washington Post included the Druze among the Palestinians. The Council of Foreign Relations stated:"The majority of Arab citizens are Sunni Muslims, though there are many Christians and also Druze, who more often embrace Israeli identity."