Abstract
This article analyzes the political–economic policy of Israel, as an ethnic democracy, toward its Arab minority. Ethnic inequality between Arabs and Jews may be analyzed in three categories of rights: political rights, civil rights, and rights to public goods. The article examines whether Israel’s policy of privileging Jews over Arabs in these three rights created an ethnic hierarchy and inequality at the individual and collective levels. At the individual level, Arab–Israeli citizens pursue mainly labor-intensive professions in which their potential of finding a job is high, besides other skilled professions, such as teaching, legal, accounting, civil engineering, and medical. At the community level (macro-level), Arabs encounter discrimination in terms of the allocation of land for construction, which results in an acute housing crisis. Further, Arabs experience other problems of a high level of crime rate, something that results in the loss of a sense of self-security within Arab municipalities. All in all, while the gap between the two communities is narrowing with regard to education, it is widening in other domains, such as income per capita, population density per square kilometer, municipal infrastructure development, and sense of one’s overall security.
Keywords
Introduction
From a political and economic point of view, the role of a liberal democracy presiding over a market-oriented economy is to furnish its citizens with three bundles of rights, among others. These rights include political rights, civil rights and rights to public goods (Mukand & Rodrik, 2020). First, political rights include suffrage, enfranchising citizens, where free and fair voting rights are guaranteed by the state, and governance is transferred peacefully to the winning party. Political rights do not end up merely with electing a parliament by all adult citizens but also by having the legitimacy of potential participation in a governing coalition by any elected political party and the ability of such a party to affect the decision-making process, especially on taxation and fiscal budget allocation. These rights usually benefit the majority in a democracy, such as the working class and the middle class.
Second, civil rights include guaranteeing negative and positive freedom, equality before the law and non-discrimination. Negative freedom should guarantee freedom from interference of the state in the personal affairs of each and every citizen (Berlin, 2002; MacCallum, 2017). In terms of political economy, though, positive freedom may include a state’s responsibility of empowering members of underprivileged minority groups and facilitating social mobility, especially of citizens from the lower classes, members of minority groups, and people living in the periphery. Thus, civil rights are meant to benefit members of marginalized minorities, both as a group and as individuals.
Third, rights to public goods should include, among other things, protecting property rights that prescribe protecting private ownership of assets, security, and public safety and equality in the distribution of state-owned goods and development of the infrastructure, such as roads. While protecting property rights is usually important for the economic elite, public safety and infrastructure development are significant for the public as a whole. All in all, the distribution of state-owned goods benefits the elite as well as marginalized groups, where some of these goods, such as security, cannot be furnished by the private sector or the marginalized groups cannot afford to purchase them in the private sector (Baldwin & Huber, 2010). In other words, the state is evidently obliged to provide public goods, such as security (that should include public safety and protection of property rights), healthcare, and education, and to maintain equity in the distribution of state-owned assets and public services. The latter includes, among other things, public goods owned and furnished exclusively by the state, such as fairness in the allocation of state-owned land for private construction (Alesina et al., 1999; Peleg, 2001). All in all, these rights are supposed to facilitate prosperity, economic growth, social mobility, and maximum wealth for the greatest number of its citizens, regardless of their social affiliation.
In this regard, this article deals with the political economy of the state of Israel as an ethnic democracy and its political–economic policy toward its Arab minority in light of the three rights mentioned above (Rouhana & Huneidi, 2017). In general, the Arab population in Israel constitutes around 20% of the total Israeli society (Khalaily et al., 2023, p. 4). Under an ethnic democracy, minority groups live under the rule of the dominant majority, where Jewish or Zionist parties occupy on average around 110 out of 120 seats of the Israeli Knesset. Within the Israeli society, Israel’s Arabs are treated as the “other,” who can never be part of the consensus and cannot be fully trusted, a situation that inflicts damage on their employment opportunities.
This article distinguishes between three social segments—majority, minority, and elite—in light of the rights that each segment enjoys within an ethnic democracy (Alesina et al., 2016). Ethnic democracy by definition is when a democratic state is essentially associated merely with one dominant ethnic group (the majority) and perceives its role as to exclusively serve and facilitate the interests of this group, while the state, either deliberately or as a result of negligence, discriminates against its minorities (Shafir & Peled, 1998; Yiftachel, 1992).
Ethnic Democracy
While one of the main pillars of democracy is the rule of the majority, within an ethnic democracy, the dominant ethnic group, which usually enjoys an absolute majority within the state, rules the state political institutions by virtue of their absolute demographic majority, and its members dominate the economy, security apparatuses, and judicial and academic institutions. Further, consensus exists among members of the dominant ethnic group about the need to privilege themselves and to exclude other minorities. The concept of ethnic democracy refers to a political system, in which the democratic principles of political participation, civil rights, and political equality coexist with ethnic domination or preferential treatment of the dominant ethnic group, often at the expense of the minority group(s) (Peleg, 2001). The term ‘ethnic democracy’ is typically used in the context of political regimes that combine elements of democracy with forms of ethnic inclusion, exclusion, and hierarchy. This theoretical framework attempts to explain how ethnic identity and politics intersect with democratic institutions, leading to a system that is democratic in its procedural framework but ethnically biased in its substance (Rouhana & Ghanem, 1998).
Furthermore, identities within such a state are not associated with an inclusive secular type of identity, but with an official recognition by the state of various ethnic groups as ethno-nationals, where this policy allows the state to prescribe different policies to various groups. Likewise, ethnic identity is based on shared common heritage, religious identity, or ethnic or racial identity.
In the case of Israel, the Jewish identity was turned into the official national identity of all Israeli Jews, while the state ascribed to its Arab citizens their Arab national identity, thereby relegating them de facto and de jure as second-class citizens (Bishara, 2017). In this sense, religious/ethnic identities turn into official ones, where in the case of Jews, a person is identified as a Jew or could convert into Judaism only when the religious establishment recognizes them as such. The Jewish “Nation,” which includes in some definitions Jews all over the world, was perceived as one that preceded the Jewish state.
Thus, the creation of a binational Israeli state was conceived as a natural and inevitable outcome and extension of the pre-1948 binational identities that existed under the British Mandate in Palestine. In this regard, the Israeli identity is not recognized as an official identity by Israel, and consequently, Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel do not share any official common identity (Peleg, 2004). The state officially defines itself as a Jewish state. In this regard, the state enacted in 2018 the Jewish Nation-state Law, which states under Article 1 that “the right to exercise national self-determination in the state of Israel is solely for the Jewish people” (Jabareen, 2018; Jabareen & Bishara, 2019). The state, since its establishment in 1948, identified itself in its Declaration of Independence as a Jewish democracy. Between 1948 and 1966, Israel imposed martial law on all of its Arab citizens and Arab localities. Further, Article 7 of the Jewish Nation-state Law affirms that “The state views the development of Jewish settlements as a national value and will act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation” (emphasis added). Accordingly, the state seeks to establish settlements for Jews only while blurring the distinction between the state of Israel and the Complete Land of Israel and promoting the ideological, religious, and welfare values that privilege and benefit its Jewish ethnic group, moves that run contrary to international law.
This article examines the double-standard political and economic policies of Israel toward its Jewish and Arab citizens, where Israel explicitly privileges the former over the latter (Rouhana & Huneidi, 2017). These discriminations violate, among other things, the political and civil rights and the rights to public goods of Israel’s Arabs (Peled & Navot, 2005). Consequently, Israel has de facto created ethnic inequalities in various spheres of life between its Jewish and Arab citizens. Some scholars endeavor to provide theoretical frameworks that seek to prove that the foundations of the Israeli ethnic democracy do not negate or contradict its democratic principles, where Israel can simultaneously be both a Jewish state and a democratic one or simply a Jewish-democratic state (Smooha, 1997). In this regard, ethnic superiority is an embedded, official policy by the state, whereas in other democracies, such as the United States, discrimination against minorities as a group or individuals is implicit and systematic, but not official, or at least not until recently.
These features raise the question of whether an ethnic democracy is a democracy at all. Likewise, discrimination against Israel’s Arab minority both as individuals and as a collective is practiced on a daily basis in formal and informal manners, given that there are laws that deliberately seek to privilege the dominant group and discriminate against the “Other.” While this article deals with the political– economic aspects of Israel as an ethnic democracy, Israel’s political, Jewish national symbols, including the national anthem (Hatikva) or the flag (the Star of David), which are associated with the Jewish heritage, are beyond the scope of this article. Overall, discrimination is the reality, even if some Arabs have integrated and made progress in some high-value-added domains of Israel’s economy, such as the medical, education, civil engineering, and legal domains. This integration, however, is mainly a result of forces of demand and supply; thus, it has its own social and economic factors.
Political Rights and Political Exclusion
The form of governance in Israel is parliamentary, where the electoral system is based on proportional representation, given that the country constitutes one nationwide district and the system is a multi-party one. Under this system, there is a proportionality between the percentage of votes a party receives and the number of seats it gets in the Knesset (once it passes the 3.25% threshold). Usually, the party that wins the majority of the 120 Knesset seats forms a coalition with other smaller parties, which leaves some parties in the opposition. The main challenge facing the Israeli opposition parties is the division within their ranks. Arab parties in the Knesset encounter double exclusions. First, they have been traditionally excluded from any coalition (coalitions that included Jewish parties only) since Israel’s establishment. Yet even Jewish opposition parties often distance themselves from Arab parties and refuse to collaborate with them. This is a result of a divided and polarized multi-party system, where the opposition may include parties with ideological varieties from the left and the right with various degrees of commitment to the complete land of Israel (the view that Israel’s land extends from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea; see Figure 1). Arab parties, however, consider themselves as parties whose platform is oriented around political and policy matters.
Meanwhile, the Arab parties are weakened from being opposition parties in a system that regularly excludes them from the decision-making process and participation in the governing coalitions. Consequently, Arab parties have no clout in decisions regarding the allocation of the government’s fiscal budget or any other policies that entail the allocation of resources. Further, given the importance of the Knesset committees in promoting the interests of various constituencies, the coalition has a majority in almost all committees, and the chairman of each committee is often a member of one of the ruling coalition parties. All in all, political parties in the Knesset seek to promote their own agenda and to serve the interests of their constituencies. While the Israeli Arabs have, as a consequence, no real representation in the coalition governments, Arab parties are unable to sway the decisions of the various Knesset committees, and Arabs remain marginalized and deprived of equality in the allocation of resources distributed by the state (Pappé, 2011).
Arab parties, likewise, face two main challenges. First is the weakness of the opposition in general, given that the coalition enjoys an absolute majority in the Knesset. Thus, in practice, the executive branch dominates the legislative one. And second is the fact that Arab parties are automatically mistrusted by the Jewish parties and in the name of securitization are excluded from the decision-making process. Consequently, the exclusion of Arab parties from any governing coalition translates into the marginalization of the entire Arab minority. Hence, given the wide national–ethnic divide, Arab parties have been politically impotent parties for the most part and are seen as illegitimate partners for any coalition. Their electoral base does not translate into political strength or into passing into laws of any legislative proposal in the Knesset. This exclusion impinges on the political rights of Arabs and is manifested in their disproportionately low share of public goods and resources distributed by the state.
Under these circumstances, it is no longer a question of whether Israel’s Arabs can be trusted by the state or whether it is appropriate to assign them resources or rights versus duties, but is an attempt to negate the very essence of their political rights.
A notable example is the “Nakba Law” passed in the Knesset in March 2011, which gives the minister of finance the authority to deduct government budget from a public body that marks the day of the establishment of the state as a day of mourning. From a political–economic point of view, the Knesset approved the Law on the Basics of the Budget Amendment, which empowered the minister of finance to deduct from the budget of a state institution, such as an Arab municipality, a lump-sum that could amount to three times the expenditure incurred if that city or district observes the Independence Day as a day of mourning or in any manner desecrates the state’s flag or nation’s symbols. Thus, the minister of finance could reduce the regular budget of an Arab local authority that commemorates the Nakba (the Nakba signifies for the Palestinians their defeat in the 1948 War, which resulted in the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem). Such a proposal shows that the very political rights of Arabs are always in question. In the words of Azmi Bishara, a Palestinian scholar and former member of the Israeli Knesset, regarding the controversy of Arab citizenship in Israel:
On the one hand, it is not possible to have equal citizenship and universal citizenship in Israel because by definition, there currently exist two kinds of citizenship …: One, for Jews, which is “essential” to the state and to its Jewish citizens; the other, for non-Jews, which is “incidental” and not equal to the former, which means that there is discrimination in Israel. On the other hand, religion cannot be separated from the state. Therefore, Israel cannot be described as liberal and democratic. (Bishara, 2017, p. 146)
The encroachment on the political rights of a minority within an ethnic democracy is manifested by the absolute dominant role within the state by the most powerful ethnic group, while minorities are treated as the “Other” (Pappé, 2011). In this sense, an ethnic democracy is rich in procedural features of a democracy, where it holds free and fair democratic elections, and guarantees suffrage, but is very poor in the political and civic substances of a democracy and in the supply of equal access to public goods by all citizens, regardless of their ethnic or religious background.
Class Division Within an Ethnic Democracy
The main fault lines within an ethnic democracy are the ethnic/sectarian ones, where class affiliation and stratification run to a great extent along these ethnic divisions. The fault lines between the economic elite and the lower classes also run roughly along ethnic ones (Alesina et al., 2016). Further, the selection of a profession, a career, and an academic subject; the choice of a vocation; who does what; the division of labor; and consequently personal earnings also run along ethnic lines. Arabs, for instance, are excluded from the aviation industry and services and from the security industry. Arabs avoid specializing in such areas that require high security clearance.
The fault lines of the ethnic division within Israeli society run not only along the divide of the Arab and Jewish nationalities but also along sectarian divisions within each of these two nationalities. The Arab “nation” in Israel includes four communities: the Muslim, Christian, and Druze sects, in addition to the Bedouin society. In 1957, for instance, Israel singled out the Druze minority and made military service mandatory for Druze males. In 1962, the Knesset enacted a law that stated that the Druze as a community are non-Arabs, and therefore, they constitute a separate nationality (Firro, 1999). Based on this policy, the law of conscription applies to various communities based on their national/religious identity, where Druze and Circassian non-religious males, and Jewish secular males and females, are obliged to serve mandatory military service, while Muslim- and Christian-Arabs and ultraorthodox Jews are exempted from military conscription (Hofnung, 1995; Røislien, 2013). These laws of conscription led many young Druze males into low-security clearance jobs in the security services, mainly as prison guards. The proportional share of Druze prison guards is much higher than their presence in Israeli society: over 20% of prison guards are Druze, while the percentage of the Druze community of the entire Israeli population is less than 2% (this information is based on an interview conducted by the author with anonymous Druze prison guards). Likewise, in the past, many Druze males were stationed in high-risk positions in occupied Palestinian towns within the unit of Border Guards. These two low-skilled, “labor-intensive” professions were highly unattractive for many Jewish males, where employees in these professions earn low wages and endure high risks.
Likewise, job specialization and employment patterns are unique to each community, where Arabs are employed at high percentages in sectors that include construction or in industries and services that require low-skilled employees, such as the food industry and restaurants, cleaning, hygienic and health-related services, and transportation.
Of all Arab women, 29% are employed in education, 23% in health services, and 14% in wholesale; two out of three Arab women are employed in these three sectors (Khalaily et al., 2023, p. 14). By the same token, Arab men are employed in the following few sectors: construction, 23%; wholesale work, 16%; heavy industry, 13%; and transportation, 13% (Khalaily et al., 2023, p. 15). Apart from health services, the employment of Arabs is concentrated in labor-intensive sectors, often require minimal skills, and consequently pay low wages. Yet, there are many professions and sectors that are almost prohibited for Arabs, or at least Arabs have a minor presence in them. The presence of Arabs within academia is very slim, whereas their presence in the hi-tech, arms industries, including the aviation (Taaseya Avirit) industry and the civil aviation services (civil pilots) is almost null.
Further, most Arab men are generally trapped in low-paying employment, such as craftsmen, builders, mechanics, machine operators, drivers, and low-skilled workers (Yeshiv & Kaliner-Kasir, 2018). Relative to Jewish men, Arab men are employed at a low percentage in professions that are characterized as high skilled and that pay high wages, such as managers, academics, engineers, and technicians, and some of those with post-secondary education are engaged in trades that do not match their education. For example, according to a report by the Bank of Israel (the Israeli Central Bank), only 1% of high-tech employees in Israel are Arabs (De-Malaach, 2021).
Others avoid studying in fields where their chances of finding employment are low. Most of those with higher education are employed in the public sector in community-oriented jobs, and only a minority of academics are employed in advanced industries such as high-tech. Examining the distribution of Jews and Arabs by the level of education shows that the differences in this level explain a significant part of the differences in the distribution of professionalism and income between the two groups. One study found that the gap between Jewish and Arab male employees with a high-school certificate stands at 22%, while the gap between those with a bachelor’s degree stands at 43% in favor of Jewish employees, while the gap among Jewish and Arab female employees stands at 36% and 30%, respectively (Yeshiv & Kaliner-Kasir, 2018, p. 18). All in all, Jewish employees with the same level of education earn a much higher salary than their Arab counterparts (Haberfeld & Cohen, 2007). According to one report, the average wage in 2021 of a Jewish employee in a Jewish locality stood at 14,000 NIS (around $4,000), whereas the average wage of an Arab employee in an Arab locality was only 8,973 NIS (around $2,500) (Khalaily et al., 2023, p. 13).
In the history of the Tel-Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE), only three small Arab-owned companies were listed. No Arab-owned company was ever listed on the TASE-125, the largest 125 companies in Israel. While in a liberal democracy, the state creates an alliance with an already existing propertied elite and protects their property, in an ethnic democracy, the selection process of who would become part of or join the propertied elite is based on sectarian affiliation.
The Israeli-Arab minority is located at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, where the percentage of Arab households living below the poverty line is much higher than that of their Jewish counterparts (21% among Arabs in comparison to 16% among Jews in 2021) (Khalaily et al., 2023, p. 9). Among Jews, however, this percentage is high among ultraorthodox Jews, who prefer to devote their time to studying the Torah, rather than working at high-paying positions (Cahaner & Malach, 2022).
The Right to Public Goods: Land Allocation and Housing Construction/Demolition
The total local Arab municipalities’ jurisdiction area is about 2.5% of Israel’s entire territory (Jabareen, 2017, p. 251). Although Israel’s Arab population has increased 12-fold since 1948 to around 2 million citizens in 2020 or 21% of Israel’s population, the municipal residential construction maps/areas have been updated/expanded and legalized only after already spontaneously built new neighborhoods in Arab towns were expanded in privately owned agriculture land that is unlicensed for construction. Thus, the state often legalizes already existing neighborhoods and adds them to the municipality’s jurisdiction. The houses in these new neighborhoods were initially built without a construction permit on privately owned agriculture land (Nasser, 2012). Thus, new neighborhoods in Arab towns have been erected without an overall planning of the infrastructure, while the law bans connecting these houses to either of the grids of Israel Electric Company, the national water company (Mekorot), or the telecommunication company (Bezeq) (Israeli Knesset, 2020). The absence of planning results in underdeveloped neighborhoods, where streets are narrow and lack basic infrastructures such as sidewalks or parks. Such inadequate infrastructure is often responsible for catastrophic car accidents or even violence among neighbors over parking spots on narrow streets.
Even the most basic conception of fundamental civil human rights includes the right to shelter, sanitation facilities, electricity, running water, and telecommunication. While the state has often remained reluctant to allocate state-owned land in Arab towns for construction, the state has also banned construction on privately owned land and connection to electricity, water, and telecommunication grids under the pretext that such lands were listed either under the category of agricultural or park land; thus, the state rendered these lands forbidden for construction.
Moreover, the overall Arab privately owned land (including non-construction lands) shrank following Israel’s confiscation of private land owned by Arabs, often under the pretext of using it for security purposes. According to one source, Israel confiscated between 1948 and 1966 (the period in which Israel imposed martial law on all Israel’s Arab citizens) an area of around 1 million donums (250,000 acres; 1 donum = 1,000 square meters), the bulk of which was used to build Jewish towns (Arab Centre for Alternative Planning, 2008; Jabareen, 2017, p. 251; Soen, 2012, p. 11). The density in the Arab towns is therefore relatively high and is growing even higher, given that the expansion of Arab municipal jurisdictions was incommensurate with the pace of births. For instance, the general density in Arab local municipalities is 654 square meters per capita, in comparison to 3,855 square meters per capita in similar-sized Jewish towns (Jabareen, 2017). Since the establishment of Israel in 1948, not even one new Arab town has been established, despite the 12-fold increase in the Arab population. In addition, Jewish communal settlements have the right to select new residents in terms of their suitability to the community. These settlements were thereby able to block Arabs from purchasing real estate within the new towns on the grounds of social unsuitability. For comparison, since 1948, more than 700 Jewish settlements have been established. Between the years 2001 and 2011, only 8.5% of the land marketed by the Israel Land Administration for residential purposes was allocated to the Arab population.
Rights to Public Goods: Industrial Zones and Municipal Property Tax
The Law for the Encouragement of Capital Investments in Industrial Zones, which was enacted in 1959 and underwent a major comprehensive amendment in 2011, authorized the Israeli government to define national priority zones that would give entrepreneurs who wish to invest in them a tax holiday and subsidies for leasing land and grants, all with the aim of encouraging industrial investments in peripheral areas.
In accordance with this law, the country was divided into three national priority areas—A, B, and C—according to a model that assesses several factors, such as the geographical distance from the country’s center, socioeconomic and employment situation, proximity to state borders, security situation, sectoral affiliation, and legal political and regulatory factors. All of this was done in order to attract entrepreneurs to invest in locations deemed by the state as pivotal for the national interest. According to this division, entrepreneurs investing in priority Area A enjoy the most benefits, and entrepreneurs investing in Area C enjoy the fewest benefits (Jabareen, 2017; Machlica, 2020).
Over the years, many industrial zones were established in the periphery, which provided employment to the residents of the area and helped improve the economic and social situation in these localities. Until now, however, Arab localities in Israel have not benefited from this law in proportion to their share in the population. An example of this can be found in the government’s decision from 1998 to classify all Israeli settlements beyond the Green Line (the 1967 Israeli borders) into priority Areas A and B, but out of 492 settlements classified as national priority level A, only four were Arab settlements.
Following this policy by the government, which remained without any clear criteria, the Adalah Center (the legal center for the rights of the Arab minority in Israel) petitioned the Supreme Court, demanding that Arab settlements be added to the national priority areas. This appeal to the Supreme Court forced the Israeli government to update the national priority areas in 2012 and 2013, where some Arab settlements were added to areas at high-priority levels. Many investors, however, avoid investing in Arab localities and prefer to invest in industrial areas in Jewish localities. Among the reasons for this preference include business concerns arising from poor infrastructure, shortage of skilled labor force in the Arab localities, improper public administration, lack of public transportation, and inadequate sanitation and portable water provisioning.
The average allocation of industrial areas in Israel between the Jewish and Arab citizens is relatively skewed in favor of the former. These industrial areas not only provide employment to residents of nearby towns but also constitute a lucrative source of property-tax revenues to local municipalities. As a consequence, the bulk of these revenues accrues mainly to Jewish cities. Even when industrial zones were established near Arab towns, to utilize the unskilled labor force in these towns, these zones were annexed to the jurisdiction of Jewish municipalities.
The property-tax revenues of Arab municipalities from industrial zones and governmental offices are merely 1% and 0.2% of the total, respectively, in comparison to 99% and 99.8% in the Jewish sector, while the population of Arab towns equals to around 20% of the entire population. All in all, Arab municipalities’ overall revenues from property tax is a mere 1.6% of the total. The decision to include an industrial zone within the jurisdiction of a certain municipality is a political decision made by the Ministry of Interior Affairs.
The Administration of Development Zones (hereinafter MAZP) under the authority of the Ministry of Economy is a body whose role is to develop and establish industrial zones in national priority areas. Since its establishment in 1992 until 2011, MAZP had invested in the development and establishment of 136 industrial zones in national priority areas, in a total area of 135,000 dunams (public areas and areas designated for marketing to entrepreneurs), most of them in peripheral areas. Twenty-six of these 136 industrial areas are designated for Arabs (19%).
Over the years, the rate of investment in industrial areas in the Arab sector was lower than that among the Jewish majority. This had an impact on the revenues of Arab municipalities from property taxes, as well as on the employment opportunities of the residents of these localities. The reason for the low investment are a combination of budgetary discrimination against Arabs, as well as a lack of readiness and capacity of these localities to absorb and develop industrial areas within their jurisdiction, due to the low level of modern infrastructure and administrative and management problems within the Arab municipal councils.
Since the establishment of Israel in 1948 and until the Land Day protest on March 30, 1976, when Israel’s Arab population demonstrated against Israel’s systematic policy of confiscating private lands owned by Arab citizens, the state expropriated a great amount of donums by virtue of the Lands Ordinance, 1943 (Purchase for Public Needs), under the general pretext of “public needs.” These lands were transferred to bodies such as the Jewish National Fund and the Israel Land Administration, which serves to establish new Jewish settlements. Hundreds of Jewish settlements were established on these expropriated lands, including the new cities of Nazareth-Elit and Carmiel. The confiscations made during this period are, in the eyes of many of Israel’s Arab citizens, evidence of a trend of expropriating their lands in favor of the “Judaization” of the country.
Regarding the demolition of unpermitted houses, the Israeli state does not publish data on the number of demolished houses, and consequently, one cannot compare the number of demolished houses in the Arab and Jewish sectors. Yet, B’Tselem traces and publishes data on house demolition in Eastern Jerusalem. The Arabs in Eastern Jerusalem are residents of Israel, but not citizens. During May, June, and July of 2024, 101 buildings in East Jerusalem were demolished by an order of the city council, of which 51 were housing units. A total of 137 people, including 70 minors, lost their homes (B’Tselem). The Jerusalem City Council had accelerated the pace of house demolitions in Arab neighborhoods since the beginning of the war on October 7, 2023, and in 2023, 169 houses were demolished–around 60% more than in 2021 (see Table 1). In East Jerusalem, hundreds of demolition orders were issued against buildings constructed without construction permits. The Palestinians and human rights organizations claim that Israel pushed the Arab residents of Eastern Jerusalem to build without permits, since it is almost impossible to get construction permits in East Jerusalem. Since 2004, the Jerusalem Municipality has demolished 1,072 housing units in the eastern part of the city, leaving 3,177 people homeless.
Annual Number of Buildings Demolished in East Jerusalem.
Moreover, a report by the think-tank Bimkom shows that more than 38% of the area of East Jerusalem was confiscated for the sake of building new Jewish neighborhoods, while Arab residents receive a small number of construction permits (Bimkom, 2017).
All of this took place with the approval of the Israeli Supreme Court. The report demonstrates the deleterious paths and obstacles of reviewing new development plans in Eastern Jerusalem, which indicates the Israeli authority’s policy of procrastination that ultimately meant to thwart any detailed development plan of Palestinian neighborhoods in Eastern Jerusalem. Since 1967, Israel has expropriated more than 38% of Eastern Jerusalem’s land and built Israeli neighborhoods/settlements on it. Even though 37% of Jerusalem’s residents are Arabs, only about 15% of Eastern Jerusalem’s land (and actually 8.5% of Jerusalem’s land as a whole) is intended for residential use for Arabs (Bimkom, 2017).
In most of these cases, the Israeli Supreme Court complies with these demolition requests of the Israeli government or Jerusalem’s City Council, yet the court grants the homeowners the opportunity to demolish the houses with their own hands, and in case they refuse, then the owner has to bear the high costs of demolition by the government. While the Supreme Court understands that the government refuses to provide housing solutions to Arab residents, the high court complies with the demolition decrees.
The shrinking of, and the reluctance to expand, Arab towns’ jurisdiction not only resulted in increasing the density within these towns but also created competition among the residents (often among members of the same family) over the available resources, including land. This competition has frequently resulted in violence and homicide among neighbors or members of the same family.
Given the state’ reluctance to distribute new plots to young couples in the Arab sector, the number of construction permits issued by the state has remained scanty and insufficient. Consequently, few young Arab couples meet the requirements of being eligible to receive a mortgage. In fact, the ratio of Arabs to Jews who are eligible to receive a mortgage loan is around one tenth, while Arabs constitute one fourth of the size of the Jewish population. Young Arab couples who want to build a new house or purchase an apartment have to get non-mortgage loans at a higher interest rate and for a much shorter period than that offered by banks issuing a regular mortgage.
According to the 2016 Bank of Israel report, the main reasons for the housing plight of the Israeli Arabs are that their settlements have limited jurisdictional areas, they do not have approved and detailed master plans, they do not have a record of the rights to the land, and therefore the contractors have difficulty getting credit from the banks, and the households have difficulty taking out mortgages. In addition, there are a few private land reserves, and until recently, the state marketed a small area of plots for construction in Arab towns, and the natural birth rate is relatively high (Bank of Israel, 2017).
The Kaminitz Law
In accordance with the Government Resolution 1559, which deals with strengthening the enforcement of planning and construction laws, in particular in Arab towns, on August 1, 2016, the state enacted the Planning and Construction Law (Amendment No. 109), more commonly known as the “Kaminitz Law” (Association for Civil Rights in Israel, 2017). The purpose of this law was to tighten law enforcement against “illegal construction” and to impose severe fines and punishment on construction offenses. Yet, in actual practice, the law was mainly directed against “illegal construction in the Arab sector” (Adalah, 2007).
To achieve this goal, the law limits the discretion of judiciary courts that deal with the enforcement of construction offenses; expands the authority and scope of discretion of administrative bodies, including national planning and enforcement bodies in all matters related to the enforcement of planning laws and dealing with construction without a permit; and increases enormously the fines and prison terms for what the state renders as construction offenses. The Kaminitz Law does have implications for the enforcement of planning laws throughout the country, but its far-reaching consequences are most felt by Israel’s Arab citizens (The Authority for Real Estate Enforcement, 2023). The Arab population lives in 139 Arab municipalities, which suffer from an extremely acute housing crisis, which is the result of long-term government’s policies that have for decades avoided preparing appropriate development plans for Arab towns. This includes the state’s long-term reluctance to expand the territorial jurisdictions of Arab municipalities even to lands around these towns that are privately owned by the town’s residents. The construction without a permit is only one symptom of the state’s reluctance to instate long-term planning in the Arab society. These factors are the ones that brought many Arab citizens, inexorably, to commit construction offenses, given that these residents were not offered an alternative solution to their demand for housing. The Kaminitz Law punishes Arab citizens for constructing their houses on their privately owned land, and while these residents had no other choice, the law stands in contradiction to what can be seen as a basic human right: the right to adequate housing. The Kaminitz Law limits judicial intervention in the procedures of enforcing and planning laws, expands administrative powers to ban construction without a permit, and legitimizes the actual demolition of buildings regardless of the circumstances of the offense, even without a court order.
Construction without a permit in the Arab towns, however, does not take place in a vacuum. It is not done out of a desire to violate the laws of the state or to disregard them. Such a construction often stems from a lack of choice and is intended to seek a solution to the acute housing shortage for young couples and families. In the first 2 years of its implementation, the overall fines of almost NIS 92m (around $26m) were imposed, with an average value of NIS 388,000 ($110,000) for a single fine (Gazit, 2023).
Security as a Public Good: Insecurity and Crime in the Israeli-Arab Society
From January 2012 to June 2023, 856 Arab men and 143 Arab women (999 in total) were murdered. The average age of the murdered men and women was 33 and 34, respectively. There were 244 homicide cases in 2023, up from 116 and 124 cases in 2022 and 2021, respectively (Arie, 2024, p. 6). In 2024 and 2025, there were 237 and 255 cases of homicide in the Arab community, respectively, of which in 2025, only 24 cases were resolved (Shalan, 2026). As shown in Table 2, the total number of murders in the Jewish sector stands at around 35 cases annually. On average, only 10% of the cases of murdered Arabs were resolved and led to a conviction, in contrast to around 60% in the Jewish sector. From a political–economic point of view, there are criminal families in the Arab society that charge “protection fees” from businesses, and they seek to control lands owned by weak local Arab municipalities, to win tenders over projects offered by these municipalities among other things, such as drug dealership and money laundering. A business owner who refuses to pay the “protection fee” faces the threat of being murdered or their business vandalized. In practice, such an Arab mafia family becomes a de facto partner to a successful business owned by an Arab citizen. Table 3 shows the number of felons based on nationality (Israel Police, 2022). Notice that in the years 2021 and 2022, the number of Arab felons surpassed that of the Jews despite the fact that the Jewish population is fourfold higher than the Arab population. This high rate of felony and criminality in the Arab sector is also a result of several other factors, including poverty, high rate of unemployment, family-honor-related offenses against women (offenses directed against female members of a family, such as a sister, daughter, or wife whose conduct, such as adultery, is considered improper by the family members), overcrowded Arab towns that lead to a struggle over space, and disputes among family members over inherited property (Lavi et al., 2022).
Number of Homicides Based on Nationality in Israel.
The Number of Felons based on Nationality in Israel.
A committee of ministries’ general directors submitted a comprehensive report that aimed to deal with the crime and violence phenomena in the Arab society; it was reported that the collapse of criminal organizations in the Jewish society following the effective crackdown against them in the early 2000s resulted in extensive criminal activities shifting to the Arab society, given the minimal police presence and the lack of vigorous law enforcement in the Arab sector. The main victims of the phenomena of crime and violence in the Arab society are the Arab citizens themselves, whether they directly suffer fatalities or not. Given the fear of random violence in Arab towns, many in the Arab society have to change their habits and social life. Arab society’s leaders have demanded that the government act swiftly, decisively, and persistently in order to curb the criminal organizations that have taken over wide areas of life, after years of what amounts to a governing vacuum.
The phenomenon of crime in the Arab society in Israel has many manifestations, and its effects on the welfare of citizens is far-reaching. Other problems include the weakness of local municipalities that are unable to enforce the rule of law; the ability of criminal organizations in blackmailing, threatening, and extorting Arab mayors; the unavailability of financial services to the Arab citizens; and the failure to receive bank credit for various basic needs, which prompt some to seek loans in the black market. Many young men who are unemployed/idle and who need cash instantly are thus ready to join the ranks of the mafia (Lavi et al., 2022).
The Arab mafias exploit the weakness of Arab municipalities and the unique problems of the Arab society in order to increase their profits and influence. These organizations, for instance, charge a high interest rate on payday loans, which could reach over 10% per month. Furthermore, as part of their activities, criminal organizations take over huge amounts of capital after winning tenders by twisting the arms of Arab officials. Arab municipalities see their elected mayors threatened with violence, after certain candidates of these municipalities are forced to withdraw their candidacy. Criminal organizations sway Arab mayors in winning municipal tenders, such as hiring the services of a private company to collect property tax on behalf of the municipality or to provide the service of garbage collection, etc. They often threaten municipal candidates, mayors, and owners of small businesses and collect sponsorship fees from businesses and individuals.
The feeling among Israel’s Arab citizens is that the state security institutions (mainly the Israeli Police) and the government have turned a blind eye to the criminal pandemic within the Arab sectors, seemingly as long as the victims are Arabs and where corruption is confined to Arab municipalities. Yet, given that the majority of these homicide cases remain unresolved (almost 90%), and consequently the perpetrators remain at large, sometimes relatives of the victims seek revenge, which makes the Arab society enter a vicious circle of violence, which begets counter-violence. From a political–economic point of view, this vicious circle weakens the enforcement of property rights and discourages Arab entrepreneurs from initiating new businesses, especially a successful one, in which they would be compelled to share their profits with one organized criminal group.
Civil Rights: Inequality in Education
According to the most basic tenets of civil rights, a state is obliged not only to treat its citizens equally but also to empower them via the education system, especially members of weak social groups in order to enable them to seek social mobility.
The Arab society in Israel faces many barriers to the development of its human capital due, among other things, to the small budget of the education system and a lower general level of education in the Arab sector than in the Jewish one. The dropout rates among Arab students from schools are higher, the grade level of those who persist in their studies is lower, and the rate of those entitled to a matriculation certificate is lower than that of their Jewish counterparts. As a result, the achievements of Arab high-school students in the psychometric test, which is a precondition for the admission of a student for an undergraduate degree in an Israeli university, are lower than those of their Jewish counterparts (Abu-saad, 2004; Boshrian, 2016). While the percentage of the Arab students in Israeli higher education institutions has been on the rise in recent decades, it has remained lower in comparison to the Jewish sectors; the dropout rates of Arab students from universities are higher, the duration of their studies to obtain an academic degree is longer in comparison to the Jewish sector, and many Arab students pursue low-income professions (Yeshiv & Kaliner-Kasir, 2018).
In 2009, only 20% of Arab scientists and engineers worked in their profession, while 72% took employment in different areas other than their degrees. Meanwhile, 44% of Arabs settled with work in education, not exactly what they had trained for, getting advanced degrees with the hope of working in that field (Soen, 2012, p. 18). These gaps between the two sectors are partially a direct result of the government policy. In the words of two Israeli economists:
The disparities between the Arab and Jewish population stem from pre-labor market barriers—barriers to investing in human capital and barriers related to the labor market itself, such as discrimination, a low level of transportation and infrastructure, a lack of accessible employment areas, barriers to market entry and the weakness of the Arab local authorities. (Yeshiv & Kaliner-Kasir, 2018)
Even in matters such as daycare, we see discrimination. The proportion of children from the Arab society, who are admitted to recognized daycare centers, is only 4.5% of the country’s total, although their percentage in the population is 23.5% (State of Israel Comptroller Report, 2016). According to data from the Ministry of Finance, there is a gap of approximately 80% between the subsidy budget for daycare centers in Arab society and the subsidy budget in the Jewish society (Boshrian, 2016). Until 2011, daycare centers were not built in the Arab society, and since then, the supply of public daycare centers expanded only from 39 to about 80 (out of approximately 1,800 daycare centers in Israel) in 2016, or 4.5% of the total daycare centers in Israel. Since 2014, 20% of the development (construction) budget for daycare centers has been reserved for the Arab sector, but this allocation is not sufficient to close the existing gaps due to cumulative under-budgeting over many years (Yeshiv & Kaliner-Kasir, 2018). It is also evident that only partial implementation of the development of new daycares and the lack of allocation of subsidy budgets in the Arab sector are due to bureaucratic barriers and the limited amount of land allocated for construction, and thus, the pace of construction of the daycares remains slow.
In recent years, the Ministry of Education has implemented a differential budgeting program in elementary schools, which was supposed to improve the situation of the Arab school students and to equalize it with that of their Jewish counterparts. However, the budget data for the years 2012 and 2017, published by the Ministry of Education (Israeli Ministry of Education, 2018), show that Arab students continue to suffer from institutionalized discrimination throughout their school years, from elementary to high school. Additional data other than the allotment of the Ministry of Education are the allocations transferred directly by the local municipalities. These budgets are higher in strong local municipalities, while Arab municipalities are considered to be weak. This weakness of the latter further widens the gaps between Arab and Jewish students in the education system. Given that Arab municipalities are ranked at a much lower socioeconomic level than their Jewish counterparts, these allocations are much lower in the Arab sector (Cahan, 2009). The discrimination in the allocation of these budgets perpetuates the gap between Arab and Jewish students, and even widens it. In the words of one Arab scholar:
A Jewish pupil receives five times as many enrichment hours as an Arab pupil. Further, a research report by the All Education Movement confirms that “the current method of allocating resources creates clear discrimination between the different populations and clearly discriminates against the Arab sector” … According to the report, the average number of pupils per class in primary education in the Jewish sector stands at 25.97. The average hours per class is 43.16, and the average hours per pupil is 1.72. In Arab education, by contrast, the average number of pupils per class in primary education is 30.88; the average hours per class is 47.77; and the average hours per pupil is 1.57. “The average Jewish pupil,” asserts the report, “will study in a class with a smaller number of pupils and the average hours at his disposal is larger compared to his Arab counterparts.” (Agbaria, 2017, p. 299)
In this regard, the data published by the Israeli Ministry of Education show that the average hours per student (based on the strength/weakness of the school) in official elementary schools is lower in Arab schools than in their Jewish counterparts.
Furthermore, the fact that Jewish students serve in the Israeli army by itself entitles them to receive grants and scholarships that are allocated mainly to Israel Defense Forces (IDF) veterans. Finally, the IDF has an agreement or a plan, so-called A’tuda, with Israeli universities, where A’tuda conscripts pursue their undergraduate degree and after they are drafted into the army, where the IDF fully finances the studies of these conscripts. This program is mainly open to Jewish young men who choose to study first and then be drafted into military units that utilize their skills. Such programs are not open for young Arab men. In this regard, Tel Aviv University set the minimum age of 20 as the threshold for acceptance to its medical studies, whereas A’tuda students are allowed to embark on their studies at the age of 18 (Adalah, 2007).
Conclusion
The term “ethnic democracy” suggests a paradox: how can a system be democratic if it privileges one ethnic group over others? While political rights and civil liberties exist for all citizens, the political and social structures are designed to preserve the power of the dominant ethnic group. Democratic mechanisms (like elections) allow for some form of popular participation, but they are skewed in favor of the ethnic majority. The political economy literature on democracies has assumed that free and fair electoral democracy automatically leads to the consolidation of liberal democracy. This article has shown that an “ethnic democracy” creates its own rules that nullify liberalism. An ethnic liberal democracy is a special case. Liberalism must have a political underpinning in addition to a normative appeal in order to guarantee equality. Social segmentation, sectarian division, sectarian identity, and consciousness are commonly responsible for the consolidation of an ethnic democracy that produces a hollowed-out electoral democracy rather than a liberal one (Jamal, 2016). The categorization of political regimes, based on three types of rights (political rights, civil rights, and the provision of public goods), examined here shows that these rights operate across two basic types of cleavages in an ethnic democracy: an elite/lower-class cleavage that is mainly class-based and a majority/minority cleavage that reflects the ethnic division.
First, political rights benefit the majority, and in the case of ethnic democracy, a large ethnic group exploits its electoral size and majority in the parliament in order to privilege itself and marginalize minorities. Second, civil rights, with an emphasis on negative and positive freedom, are supposed to protect and empower a minority. But as we have seen, in Israel, this is not the case. Third, public goods, such as protecting property rights and security, are mildly enforced in and provided to the Arab sector, given the amount of violence that Arab businesses encounter from Arab criminal organizations.
A liberal democracy is expected to guarantee all three bundles of rights or at least parts of them, while the sectarian infrastructure from which an ethnic democracy emanates produces a procedural electoral democracy that hollows out all of the three sets of rights (Jamal, 2016). The Jewish majority in Israel controls key sectors of the economy, including business, industry, and the public sector, while the Arab minority has been relegated to lower-wage or less-prestigious jobs. This dynamic has been reinforced by policies that restrict access to employment and land ownership for the Arab ethnic minority. The existence of discrimination in the allocation of public goods, such as security, fighting crime, and allocating land for construction, is important for the lower classes and minorities. In the case of Israel, the state deliberately discriminates against and marginalizes its Arab minority, and the state is reluctant to provide this national minority with the essential public goods that are taken for granted by the Jewish majority. It is not possible, therefore, to consider Israel an authentic democracy for all people who live there.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.