Has Israel's Arab minority reached a crossroads? - analysis

• Author: SETH J. FRANTZMAN
• Published date: 06 October 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

This helped enable a coalition of mostly Jewish parties to unseat former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu after he had clung to power for 10 years. But the participation of Ra'am is also interesting because it doesn't represent the participation of the historical Arab Left in Israel, but actually the religious Right.

This is not entirely a historical first. Arab parties have played a role in Israeli coalition politics, not only in the 1950s when some worked with the ruling Labor Party, but also in the 1990s when they remained outside the coalition but supported Yitzhak Rabin's government. Ra'am made a major choice to be in the coalition and participate openly in meetings.

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The odd thing here is that the more likely candidate for participation in a coalition to unseat Netanyahu should have been Ayman Odeh, whose roots are in the Hadash Party, which includes Jews and Arabs and has roots in Communist voters in Israel.

Yet Odeh refrained from participation, in part because he runs the Joint List, which includes Arab politicians who have hostile views about any role in an Israeli government.

In short, the radical Left which supposedly embraces coexistence opposed the coalition, while more religious right-wing Arab voters appeared to support it.

At the same time that this historic compromise was made by Jewish and Arab parties to work together in a coalition, there is also evidence that Arabs in Israel are making major strides economically.

This may represent a shift from economic success on the local level – where businesses thrived in villages but where tax avoidance, gray markets and a shadow economy also thrived – to integration.

Israel often ignored the Arab sector in the past, not developing public transport, highways or rail lines that served Arab areas. Because most communities in Israel are divided, that left a quarter of the country almost off the grid. In the Negev it left more than 100,000 people of Bedouin origin truly outside the grid, lacking basic things like electricity, health clinics, parks and schools. In other areas, it meant roads didn't have signs, and massive numbers of housing starts were undocumented or illegal. Planning was almost nonexistent.

Despite that persistent issue, today there is more recognition that integration is possible. Dror Bin, the chief executive officer of the Israel Innovation...