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Israel's Arabs: Deprived or Radicalized?

(Israel Affairs-Middle East Forum) Efraim Karsh - Thanks to Israeli health care, the average Israeli Arab male can expect to live longer than his American and many European counterparts. Since Israel's founding, its Arab population has grown tenfold, while the number of Arab schoolchildren has multiplied by a factor of 40. During the past twelve years, relative investment in Arab education has far exceeded that in the Jewish sector. Contrary to the image of cramped neighborhoods and acute land shortages, population density in Arab localities is substantially lower on average than in equivalent Jewish locales. Since the late 1990s, the unemployment rate in Israel's Arab sector has been consistently lower than in Jewish development towns in the periphery. Allocations to Arab municipalities are now on a par with, if not higher than, subsidies to the Jewish sector. Thus, the Arab sector's growing defiance of the state, its policies, and its values is not rooted in socioeconomic deprivation but rather in the steady radicalization of the Israeli Arab community by its ever more militant leadership. The writer is Professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College and Principal Research Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
2013-01-09 00:00:00
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