Israel’s Arabs Should Choose Participation Over Ambivalence

Arab and Jewish Israelis can no longer afford to live in parallel worlds. A shared future will only emerge if both sides choose to focus on building the future rather than relitigating the past.

If you were to walk through the streets of Tel Aviv, you would witness something special: Arab doctors from Jaffa sharing beers with Jewish programmers, their conversation sliding effortlessly between Hebrew, Arabic, and English. In the startup offices above, Druze developers debug code alongside ultra-Orthodox and secular Jewish colleagues. It is a city lined with beach bars that are far more interested in your drink order than your ethnic background. This is the miracle of cosmopolitan Tel Aviv: undeniable evidence of the possibility of Arab and Jewish coexistence. There is nothing else like it in the Middle East.

Yet just an hour north in Umm al-Fahm, you might find a teenager who refuses to speak Hebrew despite understanding every word. After 77 years of statehood, Israel’s two million Arab citizens—21% of the population, both Muslim and Christian—remain suspended in peculiar ambivalence, half in and half out of Israeli society. They’re a young population too, with a median age of 18, their futures still unwritten. It is also a community that I know well. Despite being born and raised in the United States, I am of Israeli Arab extraction and have spent considerable time visiting family across Arab Israeli towns, watching them balance between worlds in ways I never had to.

The atrocities of October 7th and its aftermath have pushed me to the conclusion that Arab Israelis must choose to fully claim their place in the only democracy in the Middle East that would have them as equal citizens. Today, the Arab Israeli community exists on a spectrum ranging from open hostility to genuine support for the state. Still, most hang somewhere in between—navigating dual worlds where they depend on Israeli healthcare and attend Israeli universities while still holding onto Palestinian identity in their hearts.

Despite what many critics claim, Israel is not an apartheid state. Arab Israelis sit on the Supreme Court, run hospital departments, and lead tech companies. They vote freely, criticize the government openly, and enjoy living standards that make them poorer on average than Jewish Israelis but richer and better educated by regional standards. Christian Arabs in Israel have the highest rates of educational attainment among all religious communities, with 63% having college or postgraduate education. Israel is fundamentally a just society, imperfect like all democracies, but one that offers Arab citizens opportunities unimaginable elsewhere in the Middle East.

Yet discrimination remains real—manifesting in scarce employment callbacks, limited municipal budgets, and suspicious glances when Arabic is spoken on buses. The result is neither systematic oppression nor genuine equality, but something more complex: a self-reinforcing cycle where discrimination breeds withdrawal, and withdrawal justifies further exclusion. Arab voter turnout lags behind Jewish participation. When crime devastates Arab towns, residents demand police intervention while refusing to cooperate with investigations. Many avoid military or national service, limiting social mixing beyond workplaces.

This ambivalence is met in kind by wider Israeli society. The nation spent its first 20 years placing Arab citizens under military rule while debating whether they constituted a fifth column. That suspicion never entirely disappeared. After October 7th, this divide became more overt. Just over half of Arab Israelis feel the prolonged war has given rise to a sense of “shared destiny” between Arab and Jewish citizens. Many were sickened by Hamas’s sadistic massacre. Some excused it, seeing only Palestinian suffering. But most kept their heads down, trapped between horror at the violence and inability to fully side with a state that has never fully accepted them.

There should be no equivocation here; Hamas is evil, radical Islamism is a scourge on the region, and the anti-Israel ideology that excuses October 7th is morally bankrupt. My cousin, a doctor who treated the wounded that day, worked through the carnage with her Jewish colleagues, yet still doesn’t feel she belongs to the country she helped heal.

This mutual standoff serves no one. It’s not good for Israel to have a fifth of its population half-heartedly bought in, their talents underutilized. Nor is it good for Israeli Arabs to refuse participation in Israel’s world-class universities, thriving tech sectors, and robust democracy out of principle or fear. Most of Israel is not like Tel Aviv; social segregation remains prevalent despite professed desires for integration. What’s needed is an express lane for those Arabs who want fuller participation. Greater integration would encourage genuine coexistence through shared enterprises and decrease racial tensions that periodically erupt into violence.

But integration cannot be one-sided. Israeli Arabs must stop being passive spectators. Vote. Run for office. Start businesses. Send your children to Hebrew schools. Serve in national service. The country will not bend to accommodate those who refuse to engage.

Existing legal structures inhibit integration. Israel’s land policy, unlike any in the developed world, keeps 93% of land under state control, creating bureaucratic barriers to voluntary integration. Land is leased, not sold, requiring government approval for transfers. Admission committees can reject buyers for “social incompatibility.” Arab towns, confined to their 1948 boundaries, now hold ten times their original population. That ambitious Arab family wanting Hebrew-speaking schools often can’t buy near Tel Aviv. The Jewish couple seeking affordable housing can’t purchase in Arab villages where prices are lower.

Land privatization wouldn’t require grand social engineering. Begin with urban areas where demand is highest, converting leases to ownership and opening state reserves for development. Within years, market forces would create the organic integration that political initiatives have failed to achieve. Yet removing bureaucratic barriers is only the first step. The deeper question is whether both sides are ready to choose a different future.

Israel must decide what kind of democracy it wishes to be: one that genuinely incorporates the fifth of its population that is Arab, or one that keeps them perpetually at arm’s length and never truly trusted. Arab Israelis face their own choice about whether to remain suspended in grievances, real and imagined, or claim their place through participation.

Tel Aviv offers a glimpse of what’s possible when people focus on building the future rather than relitigating the past. That miraculous coexistence didn’t emerge from government programs but from individuals choosing collaboration over separation. This transformation can spread beyond Tel Aviv’s startup offices and beach bars, but only if both sides find the courage to make it happen. The path forward demands that Israel become more of the democracy it claims to be, and that Arab Israelis become the citizens they have the right to be. After 77 years of ambivalence, it’s time to choose.

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