The Palestinian Arab minority in Israel today is highly politicized. This was not always the case. It has undergone a gradual process of politicization over time, which has reached its zenith in recent years. As the previous chapter demonstrated, over the last six decades there has been a clear trend of greater political activism and self-assertion among Palestinian citizens of Israel. In stark contrast to their political quiescence during Israel's early years (1948–1967), members of the Palestinian minority (especially its younger members) have become increasingly mobilized and vocal in expressing their dissatisfaction with their “second-class” status within Israel. During the last four decades or so, they have staged countless protests, rallies, strikes, and demonstrations. They have cast off the co-opted, acquiescent, traditional leadership that once represented them in favor of younger, bolder leaders who are willing to openly challenge the Israeli-Jewish establishment.

The main purpose of this book has been to draw attention to the escalating conflict within Israel between its Jewish majority and its Palestinian minority and to offer our ideas for how this conflict can be alleviated. This is not just an issue of domestic importance to Israel that threatens the country's internal stability and even its democratic regime. It is also an issue that is inextricably linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a conflict with massive regional and even global repercussions. We believe that the existence of a sizable Palestinian national minority within Israel has major implications for how the State of Israel should define itself and behave and for how the long-running conflict between Israel and the Palestinian nation should be resolved. Simply put, it means that it is highly problematic for the State of Israel to define itself as an exclusively Jewish state, and that it is wrong to believe that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians can be solved by the two-state solution alone, that is a Jewish state and a Palestinian state.

For most people, in Israel and around the world, “Israelis” are Jews or, more precisely, Jews who live in Israel. Israel – the Jewish state – according to this widespread perception is populated by Jews who have resurrected Jewish sovereignty in their ancestral homeland after millennia of dispersal and statelessness. Whether or not one celebrates or condemns this historical development, the Jewishness of the country's population (however secular some may be) is generally taken for granted. The equation of Israeli with Jew is constantly repeated in the media and by politicians and activists, “pro-Israel” and “anti-Israel” alike.

This common discourse has given rise to a great deal of popular confusion. All too often, people are completely unaware of the large number of non-Jewish citizens of Israel – around 1.8 million people – who make up a quarter of the country's total population of 7.5 million. One in four Israelis, in other words, are not Jewish. The vast majority of this significant non-Jewish population are Arabs, who at the end of 2009 numbered 1,526,000, a little more than 20 percent of Israel's population.

Up until this point in the book, we have focused our attention on the Palestinian minority in Israel. We have done so because it is essential to understand the developments that have taken place within the Arab community over the past few decades and especially in recent years in order to accurately assess the current state and likely future of Jewish-Arab relations in Israel. In particular, we believe that the growing political assertiveness of the Palestinian minority and its increasing demands for recognition as a national minority and for collective rights, including cultural autonomy, represent a major challenge for Jewish-Arab relations.

In this chapter, we examine the other side of the majority-minority divide in Israel – Israeli-Jewish society. We will first discuss the perceptions, beliefs, and views of Israeli Jews concerning Arab citizens of Israel and explain what gives rise to them. We will then discuss the attitudinal and political trends among Israeli Jews since the events of October 2000, which we regard as a significant turning point in Israeli-Jewish attitudes.

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing the State of Israel today is that of developing a significantly stronger, more inclusive democracy that can better balance the interests of the Jewish majority and the rights of the Palestinian minority. In the previous chapter, we outlined how Israel can successfully meet this challenge. The changes that we proposed entail a fundamental transformation of Israel's ethno-national regime. Many Israeli Jews will no doubt be strongly opposed to such a transformation and will therefore resist it. This is to be expected. Ethnic majorities in multi-ethnic states are bound to oppose changes that enhance the position of the minority, especially if those changes involve giving the minority not just equal individual rights but also collective rights. Dominance within the state is often perceived by the majority to be its right, part of the “natural order” of things. Indeed, the majority often regards its rights and privileges as guaranteeing its very survival as a group.

Our goal in writing this book is not only to provide a thorough scholarly analysis of Jewish-Arab relations in Israel but also to issue an urgent call for a major change in these relations. The book is intended to sound an alarm, to warn that, unless immediate and dramatic action is taken, the relationship between Israel's Jewish majority and its Palestinian-Arab minority will continue to deteriorate. This will put Arab-Jewish coexistence in Israel, the country's political stability, and the quality of its democracy seriously at risk. It will also undermine the prospects for a truly comprehensive and lasting solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Some may think that we are being overly alarmist and that majority-minority relations in Israel are not nearly as bad, or as unstable, as we suggest. It might even be argued that whatever the complaints and frustrations of Israel's Palestinian minority, they have never really posed a threat to the state and have always remained firmly under its control. According to this view, the predicament of the Palestinian minority in Israel today and the relationship between it and the Jewish majority – though far from ideal – is not a pressing issue or major concern, certainly not for a country that faces a host of internal challenges and external threats. We strongly disagree with this perspective.

The first part of this book dealt in detail with the internal conflict between Israel's Jewish majority and its Palestinian minority, and especially the escalation of this conflict over the past decade. The second part of this book now turns to the question of how to minimize or better manage this conflict. Eliminating the conflict entirely is not something we believe to be possible due to the depth of the cleavage between Jews and Palestinians in Israel. How, then, can Jewish-Palestinian relations in Israel be improved in any significant way? How can the State of Israel better meet the needs of its Palestinian minority and how can the sense of loyalty and belonging to the state on the part of the Palestinian citizens be enhanced? These are the central questions that will be addressed in the rest of the book.

In order to seriously tackle the contemporary internal Jewish-Palestinian conflict, it is essential to understand its underlying cause. It is our contention that the fundamental cause of the conflict lies in the character of the Israeli state itself.

No conflict in the world today receives more attention, attracts more controversy, and elicits more emotion than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet, for all the diplomatic interest, news coverage, and political passion it generates, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is widely misunderstood. For some, the conflict is about the struggle of the Jewish state to survive in the Middle East and the unrelenting opposition it faces from Palestinians determined to prevent this. For others, the conflict is about the struggle of the Palestinians to end Israel's long-running occupation over them and achieve national self-determination.

Bringing about a significant improvement in Jewish-Palestinian relations in Israel will not be easy. What can we learn from the experience of other countries where ethnic conflict is prevalent? This is the central question addressed by this chapter. In gaining insight into the Jewish-Palestinian conflict inside Israel and ways of better managing it, it is important to look at it comparatively, that is, to analyze this conflict as part and parcel of a large class of ethno-national conflicts in today's world. Although the Jewish-Palestinian conflict inside Israel might be different from other ethnic conflicts in certain respects (as every conflict is), it is surely not unique. Some analysts have an inclination to describe Israel, including majority-minority relations within it, as entirely unique. Contrary to this view, we believe that it is useful to view majority-minority relations in Israel, and ways of improving them, through a comparative lens. We also believe that it is important to take a modest view with regard to the possibilities for improving inter-ethnic relations, realizing the limits of any possible “solution.”

The history of Arab-Jewish relations in Israel and majority-minority relations around the world leads us to conclude that Israel's future depends on how it treats its Palestinian minority and more generally on the type of majority-minority relations it develops. Whereas many analysts tend to concentrate on Israel's “external Palestinian problem” – its relationship with the Palestinian population in the territories taken in the 1967 war – we believe that its “internal Palestinian problem” is equally serious. The goal of this chapter is to offer a comprehensive agenda for improving the way in which the internal Palestinian problem is managed.

This chapter provides a systematic program for transforming the relationship between the Jewish majority and the Palestinian minority in Israel, and through this transformation enhancing the quality of Israel's democracy and its long-term political stability. It argues that in order to significantly repair the deteriorating majority-minority relations within it, Israel needs to create a political structure and establish patterns of political behavior that are significantly more congruent with the actual nature of its society.