Hello everyone, and welcome to the Freeman
Spogli Institute Israel Studies Winter Quarter Webinar Series. My name is Amichai Magen. I am
the visiting fellow in Israel studies here at FSI. Together with Professor Larry Diamond,
who is the William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Mosbacher
Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at FSI, we will be convening this new series
of FSI webinars this winter quarter, exploring various aspects of contemporary Israeli
politics, society, and security challenges. We open this webinar with an image of Awad
Darawshe, and we dedicate this webinar in his memory. On the morning of Saturday, October 7th,
Awad, a 23-year-old Muslim Israeli paramedic and ambulance driver, was part of a three-ambulance
team stationed at the Nova Music Festival near Kibbutz Re'im, approximately 3 miles from
the Gaza-Israel border. The Nova Festival was a weekend-long outdoor trance music
festival attended by some 3,000 people, many of them young people in their 20s,
and Awad was there to protect them. At approximately 6:30 a.m., some 50 Hamas
and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists arrived at the scene in vans and started
to spray the site with machine gun fire, and others arrived by motorized gliders. The
festival became a scene of unbelievable horror and carnage. 364 civilians were murdered
at the Nova Festival alone that morning, and many more wounded. Hamas and PIJ terrorists
perpetrated mass rape at the festival and abducted at least 40 people, many of them
young women, from the festival into Gaza. When the first shots were fired, and the revelers
began to flee in panic, Awad had a choice. He could have jumped into his ambulance and escaped
the nightmare that was unfolding all around him. Instead, Awad chose to stay and help the wounded.
His fellow paramedics begged him to leave, but Awad was resolute in his determination
to provide aid to those in need. According to the testimony of his fellow paramedics
who survived, his last words to them were, "I still have bandages in my hands. I will
be all right. You go." Perhaps he believed that because he was Muslim and spoke native
Arabic, he would be spared by Hamas. Tragically, he was not. The terrorists murdered Awad in his
paramedic uniform, attending to the wounded, and stole his ambulance, driving it, most
probably with abducted people inside, into Gaza. Indeed, on October 7th, Hamas killed dozens of
Israeli Arabs and kidnapped five, two of whom, Bilal and Aisha Al-Ziadna, were released as part
of the hostage release deal with Hamas on November 24th. But three Israeli Arabs continue to be held
as hostages for Hamas to bargain with. Awad was a hero. His tragic death is a terrible loss,
not only to the Darawshe family but to Israeli society as a whole. Awad embodied the very best
in the spirit of Israel itself: a shared Israel of Christians, Jews, and Muslims striving to build a
shared society in Israel despite all odds and all difficulties. And those odds and difficulties
are formidable, as we will hear shortly. To explore the impact of Hamas's October
7th terrorist attack on Israeli Arabs and the challenges of building a shared society in
Israel at this incredibly difficult time for all Israelis, Larry and I are joined by Muhammad
Darawshe, Awad's cousin and, full disclosure, a dear friend of mine. Muhammad Darawshe is the
director of strategy at the Shared Society Center of the Gat Kiva Educational Center in the Galilee
and is a faculty member of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He is widely consulted
in Israel and abroad as a leading expert on Jewish-Arab relations. Muhammad previously served
as the co-director of the Abraham Fund Initiatives and as elections campaign manager for the
Democratic Arab Party and later the United Arab List. He was the recipient of the Peacemakers
Award from the Catholic Theological Union and was a leadership fellow at the New Israel Fund. In
2008, Muhammad Darawshe was elected as a city council member in his beautiful hometown of
I'billin in northern Israel. And in 2009, he served as a member of the National Committee which
drafted Israel's coexistence education policy. Muhammad, in a moment, you will frame for us
the topic of a shared society in Israel, and you will offer us extensive public opinion data
on Arab-Jewish relations in Israel in the shadow of the current war. But before that, firstly, we
want to extend our deepest condolences to you, to your immediate family, to the extended
Darawshe family in I'billin and beyond. And we also want to begin by asking you what all
Israelis are asking each other today: how are you? Muhammad, over to you. Thank you very much. I feel
like most people here are actually still in pain, without closure of that pain, and not being able
to get beyond it because every single day, we see more casualties of this war that is not ending
and doesn't seem to be showing any indications of ending. So, it's like having an open wound that
still continues to burn, and at the same time, you're trying to protect the rest of the body from
having any additional wounds. It's a difficult period, a difficult time, and especially for me,
as both being an Israeli citizen and at the same time being Palestinian, where my country is
fighting my people. This is not a comfortable time to have your country fighting your people.
It's a big challenge to your sanity, actually, and especially knowing that you cannot do much
to stop it. We, as Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel, from one end, want to be loyal citizens to
the country, law-obedient citizens to the country, but also loyal to our people, and hoping for
the best for our Palestinian people. And this time does not allow you to have the ability to
do the proper balancing between these two dual identities. It brings in a lot of frustration,
a lot of agony, a lot of despair sometimes, and often it's not just the zoom out but the zoom
in. Other than losing Awad, I had many friends that lost their first kin, Jewish friends that
lost their children, their sons and daughters, and also Palestinian friends in Gaza that
lost their first kin, and in some cases, large families that lost tens of members of
the families during the strikes on Gaza. So, we're not healthy, I would say. We're maybe fine
physically, but not okay, and I would say probably will take a lot of time for healing from this
condition when you don't know when the healing is actually going to even start. So that's even
the short answer to your question of how are you. I share all of that with you, Muhammad. I think
you've captured it beautifully for all of us, just a time of tremendous anxiety and pain on
both sides. Thank you. So, if you allow me, in the next few minutes that I will talk, I will
start also by, you know, the big question is, where were you on October 7th? I was asleep. It's
Saturday, and we sleep on Saturday, and at 8:15, the phone rings, and we got the notice that Awad
was shot. We didn't know if he was dead or alive, and that uncertainty continued for six days until
after DNA tests, we were able to verify his body and bring him on his final trip to his graveyard
with about 60 ambulances that accompanied him from the company that he worked in, a company called
Magen David Adom. It was a mixed team of ambulance drivers and paramedics. More than 100 of them
were there, and those 60 ambulances, a parade for a hero. Yes, for us, he was a hero. For the
industry of paramedics and the ambulance drivers, he was a hero. For humanity, he was a hero. And
on his grave, 20,000 people accompanied him, about 18,000 from the Palestinian Arab citizens of
Israel and about 2,000 Israeli Jews from the area, including many friends. On his grave, we had a
Muslim ceremony and then we had a Jewish Kaddish ceremony. I don't know many people that have ever
got this honor and respect of having two religions praying for their soul as someone that died as a
saint, actually. He was selfless. He stayed when he had the chance to flee, and he said to his
Jewish colleagues, "I speak Arabic. I think I'm going to manage. You go. You flee for your life. I
think I'll manage." And when they found his body, they did find the bandages in his hands, bandages
that he didn't have time to put on his patients, and that were right next to him, and he didn't
also have the power to put them on his own wounds that he incurred. Like him, we had many stories of
Arab citizens that tried on October 7th to go into the war zone and try to save their Jewish friends
and Jewish employers and their Jewish suppliers of vegetables or suppliers of chicken. They went
in and out with their trucks, one truckload after the other, until they themselves got shot. We have
tens of stories like that of Arab citizens that, during this crisis, they remembered mainly their
humanity and not their ethnicity. They remembered their co-citizens and co-countrymen and not their
political identity, and they died as people that proved that humanity prevails, and they allowed
us to maintain some kind of belief that maybe one day when this is over, we can come back to that
starting point and not just keep accumulating the hate and damage to our humanity in general.
If I would move on, I would just give you maybe zoom out a little bit about the Arab citizens
in Israel. We're talking about a population that did not immigrate to Israel. Many, maybe on this
chat or in this Zoom, they would think about Arab citizens of Israel, to the Jewish State, you know,
they think of Israel as the state of the Jewish people, and they think that it was only started
as a Jewish State. Actually, that's not the story. My family has lived in the same town for
approximately 800 years. I'm the 27th generation, and my granddaughter is the 29th generation.
We're the indigenous population of this land. We are in our homeland. And my grandfather's
generation, yes, did choose to surrender in 1948, and in exchange, they were granted citizenship by
the Citizenship Law of 1949. Then we were 164,000 people. Today, we are about 1.7 million citizens.
But later on, after the 1967 war, there was an added portion, which is East Jerusalemites, who
became Israeli residents but not citizens. So, the citizens, who are referred to as Arab
Israelis or Palestinian citizens of Israel, there are different terminologies of
how people define themselves. Actually, Professor Tamar Herman from Tel Aviv University
finds 17 different self-definition combinations. Seven of them are called singular identities,
like only Arab, only Palestinian, only Israeli, only Christian, only Muslim, only Druze, or only
Bedouin. So, there are seven singular identities, but all the singular identities together barely
make 28% of the Arab population, and the rest of the population, almost 72%, have what we call
hyphenated identities. They combine more than one identity. Among two-thirds, they use the term
Palestine in their self-definition as Palestinian Israelis or Palestinian citizens of Israel or
Palestinian Arabs or things like that. But also, two-thirds use the term Israel, and that became
a stronger definition, especially after the Oslo agreements. The Oslo agreements between Israel
and the PLO were actually beginning to negotiate an end of conflict between Israel and the
Palestinians. And in most wars around the world, negotiations of peace agreements deal also
with expatriates, you know, the minorities of one nation that stay in beyond the borders of
another country. But when Israel and the PLO were negotiating during Oslo in the early '90s, neither
the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, nor the State of Israel, neither of them brought
the case of the Arab citizens to the negotiations table. Basically, it said to us, maybe you think
you're part of the problem, but you're not part of the solution. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict
does not offer a political framework for your status, which basically started an interesting
process for Arab citizens, a process which was parallel. One of it was a sped-up Israelization
process. Now that we know we're going to stay Israelis forever, let's comprehend the fact that
this is the country we live in. We need to make it our country. We need to live in Israel as Israeli
citizens. And that started two processes. One, what I call the vertical process of the political
space in which we live, challenging the definition of Israel as only the Jewish State and demanding
that Israel starts defining itself also as the state of its people and not just of its citizens,
not just a state of the Jewish people. Basically, widening the definition of the state from
just an ethnic state into a civic state, so that citizenship starts counting equal to
ethnicity. And the other process was horizontal, social-economic integration, sped-up integration.
And if I give you just some kind of indicators, around then, the percentage of Arab students
in Israeli universities was about 3%. Today, it's almost 20%. More Arab citizens are going
to Israeli universities to fit themselves to the Israeli job market because we know this is
the job market we are going to be integrating in. At the time, the percentage of Arab citizens
in civil service, people working for the central government, was about 1.7%. Today, it's almost
13.3%. The medical staff then, we were about 5% of the medical staff. Today, we are about 33% of the
medical staff. We are 24% of the doctors. We are 38% of the dentists. We are 44% of the nurses and
55% of the pharmacists. Going for jobs, basically what I call capacity building, creating capacity
that is most needed in the Israeli job market, and the Israeli Jewish community created the space
out of need. And when you had the need for the job and the need for the medical services, you got a
win-win relationship. This process is happening also right now in the high-tech industry. Just
seven years ago, we were 1% of the medical employees. Today, we are 7% of the medical
employees, but we are 23% of the engineering students in Israeli universities. So, you see a
revolution just about to start in the high-tech industry. And if you go to universities such as
the Technion, which is our version of MIT, we are 28% of the students at the Technion in Israel.
So, there's a lot of fast speeding process in the Israelization, which is mostly socio-economic.
Politically, I think we are more stuck right now than moving forward, especially under the
extreme right-wing governments. Things become much more difficult. Since 2009, we experienced
28 discriminatory laws that were passed by the Knesset under Benjamin Netanyahu's governments.
The worst of them was the Nation-State Law, which basically, in simple English, says
Israel is the state of the Jewish people, and the state allows itself to be discriminatory
in favor of the Jewish people. That's the worst law that was passed in the history of the
country. It was passed on the 19th of July, 2018, and is considered to be the most discriminatory
law against Arab citizens. Politically, we have the right to vote to the Knesset. That's
an equal right that we're not exercising as well, which means we have less political power in the
political scene because our turnout rate is much lower than the turnout of the Jewish population.
We also spread in three different political parties, one of which did not pass the threshold,
so the representation in the Knesset now is only 10 seats out of 120. That's less than half of
our potential. But there has been some kind of a glass ceiling. Sometimes it's home-brought,
from home, in which we do not want to be part of the government. Sometimes it's imposed by the
political parties, the Jewish political parties, that do not want to allow our political parties
to engage in the decision-making in the executive decision-making. So, it's a complicated story,
you know, that the political... Could I ask you to just add another sentence about our political
participation? Just to give our audience a sense, I think it's fair to say that when you compare
Israel to other democracies around the world, rates of political participation at the local and
national level are relatively very high. We're talking about a range of voter turnout in national
elections at the national level that extends, that is typically in the low 70s, and can also
rise to the mid and even upper 70s. It gets a little bit technical because at every given
moment, about 10% of potential voters in Israel are outside of the country, and in Israel, you
cannot vote from abroad unless you're a diplomat or something like that. But the Arab rates
of participation in national-level voting, am I correct if I'm wrong, they are significantly
lower. They're in their 50s, if I remember, although in local elections, they're much
higher. So maybe just help us understand that a little bit. Yes, in national elections,
the turnout rate is about 50%, although in 1992, it was 78%. So there was a collapse, or
what I say, people voting with their feet, walking out of the political system. And that
has a number of reasons. In the past, the biggest amount of votes were used to go to the national
larger political parties, such as the Labor Party, which was getting the biggest chunk of Arab votes.
And when the Labor Party was not delivering, people started moving out from there. They could
not see the alternative Arab political parties as attractive enough or effective enough in the
political scene because they're usually not integrated into the government. So they are an
expression of anger and frustration, but that's not translated into executive power where you
can deliver more chairs to classrooms or better textbooks or better jobs or housing and things
like that. So, many people got disenchanted and basically gave up on political participation. Over
the last two decades, we saw in the last elections some kind of a little bit of a rise, you know,
jumping from 44% the previous elections to about 53% in the last elections. That's because of the
entrance of a more practical Arab political party, which is called Ra'am, that spoke about wanting to
be part of the government, and actually, they were part of the previous government for the first time
in history. And that created an expanded appetite for political participation in the Arab community.
We also have the problem of being peripheral when, so usually in peripheral areas, less people
turn to vote. In the local elections, municipal elections, the turnout rate is
extremely high. It's up to almost 88%. So, people know how to practice that game of going to
the ballot stations and vote, but they're choosing not to vote in national elections. If you allow
me, I would want to share with you another thing, which is the new data that brings us to today.
Data that we, a study that we did at my center at the Gat Kiva Center for Shared Society, and
this data basically tried to examine the attitudes of Jewish and Arab citizens towards each other
during this time. It's a difficult data. Usually, we are in a much better situation, and I'm going
to share with you a few pieces of information that brings us up to date and quantify, let's call it,
the situation, quantify the problem in Jewish-Arab relations. What we see here is that the majority
of the Jews in Israel, 61%, accept the definition of Israel as a Jewish and Democratic state. It
means that 31% do not accept it. Those 31% want Israel to be defined only as Jewish. So yes, we
still have a majority that see these two values as equal values, but a significant rise in the
percentage of those that only want to see Israel as only Jewish, meaning that they delegitimize
the status of Arab citizens as equal citizens. But 61% are still believing that this combination
can work. Among Arab citizens in Arab society, you see actually a debate on this issue. 39%
accept the definition of Israel as Jewish and Democratic, and 39% do not accept that one
basically refuses to accept the Jewish nature, and only 39% see that this balance can coexist.
The next question we asked was more about trust. Usually, trust of the Arab citizens towards the
Jewish citizens and trust of the Jewish citizens towards Arab citizens is somewhere around 65% to
75%, 75% among Arabs, and about 65% among Jews. During the time of war right now, this has dropped
dramatically. Only 34% of the Jewish population trust Arab citizens, mainly because most Arab
citizens define themselves as Palestinians, and in the eyes of most Israeli Jews, Palestinians
are the enemy. Only 50%, dropping from 75%, of Arab citizens, only 50% of Arab citizens now
have trust towards the Israeli Jewish population. This is the impact of a long war. Almost one-third
of both populations has lost trust in the other just within a period of three months. That's how
dramatic the situation is. On the subject of, you know, we asked a question about opinion
about does the government of Israel, should the government invest in Arab citizens equal to
that of Jewish citizens? That's what I call the horizontal issue. We spoke about the political,
well, now we're talking about the horizontal, about government investment. You see that 42% of
the Israeli Jewish population say no, they justify discrimination, and 42% say yes. So the Israeli
Jewish population is split on this issue, which is a positive approach. I'm sorry, the negative
approach, the justification of discrimination, is equivalent to the 42% on the left side,
which say we need to maintain equality. Again, in the past, this was higher. During times of war,
even support for the socio-economic integration, equality drops dramatically. Now, we see here
a significant majority of basically the Israeli Jewish Republic and how they view Arab citizens.
56% of Israeli Jewish citizens say that they see that Arab citizens define themselves as part of
the Palestinian people but prefer to integrate as equal citizens in Israel. This is quite a maturity
in the Israeli Jewish public that, in the past, used to even refuse accepting Arab citizens
defining themselves as Palestinians. And this has moved dramatically forward. 23% also say that
they see Arab citizens as defining themselves as Palestinians, but that actually prevents them from
getting integrated into the Israeli mainstream. So, almost 23% see it as a problem, but 56% see
it as a normal, acceptable terminology. I'm not going to go through all of it. I will send it to
you, Amal. I'll send you the whole PowerPoint, and you can share it with the participants,
just for the sake of time management. We went into the current issues about October 7th events
and how did they impact the attitudes of Jews towards Arabs and Arabs towards Jews. We see a
very dramatic situation here. A combination of almost 56% of Israeli Jewish citizens see that
their attitude towards Arab citizens has become worse. 37% say didn't change, and only 4% said
it become better. Despite the fact that Arab citizens are choosing not to be part of the
war, not listening to the Hamas invitations to be part of the war and stage demonstrations or
even engage in violence against Jews, but still, 56% of the Israeli Jewish population think that
it changed their perspective and attitude towards Arab citizens to the negative, and that their
relationship attitude has worsened. Among Arab citizens, 22%, significantly less, say that their
attitude towards Jews has changed towards the worse. It's typical, by the way, that minority is
more moderate in its approach towards the majority because it's more dependent on the majority,
and their positions are less radical in their perspective. In the Jewish community, the sense of
fear and mistrust is reflecting itself in this. We asked, did the events of October 7th impact or
not impact your frequency of visits to the other side? You see that 50% of the Jewish public said
this is not even a relevant question. They did not use to go to visit Arab towns before, and it's
not changing their perspective. 31% said yes, it is decreasing the frequency of their visits to
Arab towns and villages. That's a similar number to the Arab community, which is about 34%, but
38% of Arab citizens said didn't actually change, mostly because of employment. Many Arab citizens
work in Jewish towns and villages, and they cannot actually avoid having to work in Jewish towns.
The Arab population produces only 11% of the jobs in Israel, although, including East Jerusalem,
we're 21% of the population, but we have a weaker economy. And as such, we are very dependent on
employment in the Jewish side. Running through this a bit more quickly, I'll skip this one. This
one is a very difficult one, actually. We asked, in your opinion, over time, will manifestations of
violence by Arab citizens of Israel towards Jews strengthen or weaken? People are not hopeful.
81% of Israeli Jewish public say that violence will increase, and 70% of Arab citizens are not
confident that we will manage to overcome this crisis without violence, despite the fact that
we've been able to maintain it for more than three and a half months. But there's a lot of fear.
This basically says great fear is hidden in both entities. I'm going to skip this also. Okay, here,
this is an interesting piece of data. Basically, the fact that there are no clashes, what do you
attribute that to? 50% of the Israeli Jewish public say it's because of concerns of the Arab
citizens, basically fearing the police response. They think that the Arab citizens are not going
out to the streets because they're afraid. While if you combine the two middle red lines, you see
that almost 55% of Arab citizens say it's because of their desire to live in peace with Israeli
Jews and because of a feeling of shared destiny with Jewish citizens. The majority of the Jewish
population sees the negative side, but still, you have 33% of the Jewish population that asserts the
good intentions of the Arab citizens at this time. Now, when we were trying to identify the areas
of interaction that were positive or negative, we were finding that the key areas where Jewish
and Arab citizens are maintaining a good potential for healing quickly from negativity is in the
workplace and in the universities. In other areas, such as in youth activities, personal friendships,
the matter of personal trust is preventing people to want to engage, but it's not preventing people
from wanting to continue to work together. To continue to work together seems to be little bits
of safe havens, despite the fact that they're being challenged today with phenomena of expulsion
of Arab students from universities, expulsion of Arab employees from workplaces, avoiding going
to work at each other's town or so on. But still, these are what we call islands of success,
two islands of success that have maintained relations between the communities and have not
collapsed completely. About mutual concern, we see that there's still a lot of mutual
concern about working with each other but still not throwing it completely away. The question
about the previous government, is the potential that of a joint Jewish-Arab political coalition
possible? We see that 62% of the Israeli Jewish public do not support the inclusion of an Arab
political party in the future government. This is down from 49% of the Jewish public supporting
this in May. It was 49 versus 49. There was a tie in the Jewish public on this idea. Today, it's
30 versus 62. We're losing ground for the idea of political participation in government for our
party, and also, the appetite of the Arab public has dropped. In May, the Arab interest of the Arab
community in being part of the coalition was about 72%. Now it's down to 52%. So, in general, I would
say that, you know, yes, these are very worrying. This is very worrying data. But for me, as me
and my colleagues working in this field, we're looking at what do we learn from this data? What
we learn is that there are areas where you are able to create interdependency and interest-based
relationships. These are relationships that can withstand very severe conflicts. Jewish-Arab
relations have moved through three phases. One phase we call it the coexistence phase, in which
we use the social contact theory as the tool to engage in relations between the communities.
Basically, come and eat hummus together and have break down stereotypes and humanize the other.
The problem with this theory is that over time, it does not really withstand the tensions and
the conflicts because people have what we call the returning home syndrome and get sucked back
to their stereotypical old thinking, which is easy to happen when you live separately, and 92%
of Arab and Jewish citizens live separately, and especially when we live separately and go
to school separately. Only there are only eight schools in Israel that are mixed. The rest of the
5,000 schools in Israel are separate schools. And that's where it's easy for stereotypes to
develop, especially when they are fed by the fear of security and the fear of a different
identity. The second theory which we often use is the theory of the narrative debate. Basically,
to allow the elephant in the room, talk about the conflict, talk about the problems. This is a very
enriching and very educating process. With time, we realize that the maximum you can get out of
such a debate is agree to disagree, and sometimes it's counterproductive and can create actually
more damage than good. So, for now, at Gat Kiva, we're not bringing Jewish and Arab youth together.
Usually, we have 300 kids to meet every week to do it. Today, basically, we would be forcing
narrative debate theory and identity debate theory, and a lot of disagreements will come out.
So, we focus most of our work on de-escalation, in what we call unilateral separate national
groups, where we try to make sure that things do not collapse and we do not get close to violent
interactions because then the healing capacity the day after will be much, much more difficult. The
third strategy is working with the theory, I think it was developed in Stanford, which is called
the superordinate goal theory, which focuses on mutual interests, to focus on identifying mutual
interests. We pair Jewish and Arab municipalities together, whether it is on an industrial zone or
a soccer field or a sewage system or a shared bus line, where it is mutually beneficial for both
sides. All of those types of relationships have withstood this conflict and this tension very
well. We've been placing Jewish teachers in Arab schools and Arab teachers in Jewish schools.
I started this project in 2005 with six teachers. Today, we have 2,500 cross-sector teachers.
During the war, we only lost six teachers that felt that this is impossible to continue, but
2,494 teachers continue to do it, and schools continue to have them, and they're able to contain
also the differences. But this is what you can do when you're able to have mutual interests in the
relationship. It's happening also in the medical field. In the medical field, during crises,
the percentage of Arab medical staff increases actually because many Jews go and get recruited
to the military. They're drafted. Arab citizens do not serve in the military, and the percentage of
Arab medical staff has increased to 40% during the time of war. All of them are showing up to their
shifts. All of them are doing their work as people that serve their profession. We had six cases in
which tension has resulted in the resignation of Arab citizens from the medical industry, but
it's six out of probably 11,000. So, you see that when you have mutual interests developed,
you are able to overcome the severe differences, and you're able to continue partnerships. And from
experience, we know, and I will end with that, from experience, we know that the problem
in Jewish-Arab relations in Israel usually explodes. Tension explodes on the Palestinian
issue. It happened after the second Intifada in October 2000, then this resulted in clashes
with the police, leaving 13 Arab citizens killed, and the mutual boycott which lasted for many, many
years. Actually, there is an interesting article written by Professor Sammy Smooha on this. He
calls it the lost decade in Jewish-Arab relations. And basically, he claims that it took 10 years to
heal Jewish-Arab relations after the October 2000 clashes. In May 21, we had an interesting new
test. There was also a clash between Israel and Hamas, in which there were clashes in some of
the mixed towns inside Israel. But the healing process was much, much faster. It took less
than a year and a half, in our calculations, to come back to normality and to come back to a
normal relationship. So, our healing capacity was much faster, mainly because there were no killings
by the police of Arab citizens. So, we did not accumulate what we call bad blood. It was a period
of a week where we had demonstrations, but people went onwards in their life. The third and the last
sentence I will say is that this period right now, we are managing also to avoid clashes that some
people inside Israel are trying to drag us into, namely the Minister of Internal Security, Itamar
Ben-Gvir, who has been trying to drag the Arab community into these kinds of clashes. Luckily,
the Arab community is not falling into its trap, and luckily also, we're hearing voices in
the Jewish community that are trying to prevent him from doing that, starting from the
state president, who spoke at our conference against such a thing, Benny Gantz, who's the most
popular political figure in Israel, who also has been trying to be on the right side of the issue.
But extremists are trying to derail us from this successful relationship, which we know we have to
protect. Thank you very much. Thank you, Muhammad, for this absolutely masterful overview and
analysis. I'll hand it over to Professor Diamond, and then we will have some Q&A. Larry, first
of all, Muhammad, thank you for this incredibly lucid and, I think, frankly, balanced and deeply
insightful presentation, and thank you for your willingness to share the data. I see there's a lot
of interest among our listeners in studying your slides more closely. It's hard to imagine that the
downward spiral of relations between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs will take a decisively better
turn until the fighting is over in Gaza. War is not a propitious circumstance for this, but
if we can look a bit over the horizon to that and to a situation where the active fighting
has stopped in this regard and there's a new moment for trust building, reconciliation, and
maybe even creative steps to go further than was previously gone toward the conscious integration
of Israeli Arabs more fully into Israeli society and toward peacebuilding and trust-building within
Israel, what practical steps and what policy steps do you think a future Israeli government and
future Israeli NGOs and thought leaders could take that would knit the society together
more strongly across this fault line? Well, two approaches. Policy one is to eliminate
structural discrimination, which exists in the 28 laws I mentioned. Most of the discrimination,
though, is more de facto and not de jure. The legal structure is not the worst. Still, it needs
to be cleaned up. I think we need to have a clean democratic, equal value which actually is the
promise of the Declaration of Independence. The promise of the Declaration of Independence
was social and political equality. They didn't talk about hierarchy. That's the spirit of the
founding fathers. They spoke about equality, and I think that the legal system has to provide
that equality, and the laws in the book of laws of Israel have to guarantee what the promise that
was given to my grandfather. So, one of it is institutional. The other is what I mentioned,
is more the de facto discriminatory issues, where the majority prefers people like them.
Most people like the ones that come with the right accent, maybe served in the same military
unit, maybe came from the same neighborhood, and you see this impacting actually certain
industries. So, for example, in the finance industry, that's the weakest industry in which we
have integration, only 3% of the finance industry. Why? Because this is, there's a lot of nepotism
in the finance industry. It's the rich families that hold that industry together, mostly for their
own families and their friends and their alikes, and even Jews from the periphery or Jews from a
Sephardic background are having difficulty finding their way in that industry. Also, in the high-tech
industry. But the high-tech industry has gotten a problem where they don't have enough brain power
in Israel. It's such a fast-growing industry that they need to tap into the hidden brain power
in Israel. Where is that hidden brain power? It's in the ultra-religious Jewish community, and
it's in the Arab community. The ultra-religious community does not want to study math, and they
basically say, "Count us out." That industry, the Arab community, sees this as an opportunity
and says, "Yes, we do want three times the average wage that this industry offers." And so, and
that's why they're beginning to open up their doors. The Arab community is building capacity,
the Jewish community is building doors. So, there's a bottom-up and there's a top-down
approach. Now, civil society organizations are focusing a great deal on the educational aspect. I
think that the separate and segregated educational system is the mother of all evil. That's where
stereotypes develop when you start hating the other mainly because you don't know him. That's
where you never even get a chance to debate. You know, debate maybe is not a nice thing to do, but
at least you're able to bounce your ideas. You see that most racist perspectives of Jews against
Arabs and Arabs against Jews are in areas in more remote areas, people where people do not have a
chance to interact. In towns where people have a chance to interact, you see racism dropping
dramatically. From our experience also, through our work, we see that the average racism rate
among Jewish and Arab high school kids against each other is somewhere around 60% in high school.
But when they come to an institution like ours and they go through an educational process of getting
to know the other, once they're out of the gate 3 days later, the racism rate drops to around 12%.
So, there is a cure against fear, against racism, which is trying to bring people together. We know
how to do it better today. We know that if you do three separate days of encounters, it's better
than three consecutive days because you engage actually in a discussion with them, and you
allow things to sink in their mind, and they have a dialogue with their community about these
issues. It's the same principle of vaccination. You don't get the vaccination once. You get it
over three doses so that your body knows how to manage it. We're focusing a great deal on the
mutual interests issue right now, where we pair interests, as I mentioned, with municipalities,
and in workplaces, speeding the process of integration of Arab students into the job market
so that they do not spend too much time without jobs, accumulating poverty and accumulating
frustration. And where you, when you're able to speed their entry into the job market, it speeds
their socialization in the larger Israeli society, which challenges the Israeli Jewish public
sphere into, with a significant presence of Arab middle class that has also a buying power,
that has also cultural consumption of the same cultural consumption and product consumption
of the Jewish population, which, and the Jewish population starts seeing them as equals, either as
customers or equal consumers. And you begin to see in the last two decades, with the development of
an Arab middle class, you begin to see that many Jewish businesses in large shopping centers are
beginning to employ Arab employees because they started having Arab customers. So, because they
also want to attract the customers who have the buying power. It's capacity building of that
Arab community. It's space creation in the Jewish community. And some, you know, I, although
my center calls itself the Jewish-Arab Center for Peace, I try to work on pieces of peace. You know,
take it one piece at a time. You know, we're not going to bring the capital peace concept of the
Middle East, but we're able to tackle a problem of how do you test Arab students to enter Israeli
universities. So, if you test them in Hebrew, they lose 23% of their grade. But if you test
them in their mother language, they gain 15% of their grade, which qualifies many more to enter
university. Those are the kind of issues that we tackle, to not have exams for Muslim fasting
students during the month of Ramadan after 1 pm because then their capacity to do well in exams
is damaged by about 20%. So, you pull the exams. You convince Israeli universities to have exams in
the morning and not in the afternoon, so that you can give the students the chance to get the best
out of their brain and not punish them for their cultural practices. So, these are the kind of
working solutions that we're looking for. I can't, I'm not sure we can call it peace, but it is
definitely pieces of peace. So, sorry. Thank you, Muhammad. I'm conscious of the fact that we have
a lot of questions, so we have about 20 minutes for Q&A. And I'm going to combine questions based
on the various themes that they raise. As you can imagine, Muhammad, there's quite a lot of interest
in the role and attitudes of Israeli Arabs, Israeli Arab Palestinians, towards the day
after in Gaza and also towards the Palestinian population living in Judea, Samaria, the West
Bank. So, let me read out a couple of questions and get your thoughts on that, and then we'll move
to another set of questions. Actually, these are two very good questions that I'm personally very
busy thinking about them. I'm not sure I can give a very coherent answer, you know, we're still in a
process that, you know, the target keeps changing, so you need to try to keep following it. The
Palestinian public in the West Bank and Gaza, I'm not sure what their perspective and vision about
the day after on. We know that before October 6th, the belief in a two-state solution was dropping
dramatically, and the aspirations for a one-state solution among Palestinians in the West Bank
and Gaza were rising, mostly out of believing that you cannot accomplish the two-state solution.
After President Biden brought back the idea of the two-state solution in his visit to Israel, this
seems to become a much more significant option today, although I can refer to many difficulties
in accomplishing that. You know, in order to do to have that, you need to have both willing and
capable leaderships in both Israel and Palestine. So, maybe on the Palestinian side, maybe Abu Mazen
is very willing, but he's not capable to deliver the Palestinian people, and maybe Netanyahu is
very capable, but he's not willing to deliver peace. And that was the formula which allowed
us to negotiate during Oslo with Arafat and Rabin. They were both willing and capable, and
you know, we saw that Rabin was assassinated, and since then, we got, we started derailing
from the process afterwards. I, you know, I, the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel, as I said,
want to be also loyal to their Palestinianhood. In the past, Arab citizens were seen as traitors, as
accepting Israeli citizenship. This was the case, as I said, until about the Oslo agreements when
the Palestinian leadership decided not to include us in the solution, and we were forced actually
to seek our own destiny. But in seeking our own destiny, I think we developed two strategies.
One is very strong support for the Palestinian people's quest for statehood and independence
and end of occupation. And I think if you ask around the world, which is the largest group that
supports the Palestinian, the two-state solution, I think you'll find that the Arab citizens in
Israel have the strongest level of support for that, mainly out of self-interest also. It's
like a child living in a house where parents keep fighting. Our country is at war with our
people. I said we don't want our country to be at war with our people. So, out of self-interest, we
want an end of occupation, and we don't think this relationship as is today, with fighting all the
time erupting and occupation, which is oppression against the Palestinian people, we don't want this
to continue either. We want the dignity for the Palestinian people and safety for the Palestinian
people, but I think we also understand the need for the Israeli public to have their dignity
and safety. And we know that to guarantee that, if we say to the Israeli Jewish public, they will
probably get upset at us because they want us to swear loyalty and patriotism to Israeli society,
and it's very difficult to swear loyalty. Loyalty, it's easier, but patriotism, when it's patriotism
is against the Palestinians these days, it's very difficult to, and we pay a price within
the Israeli Jewish society and towards the Palestinians. You know, towards the Palestinian
people, it's also not a problem to have loyalty, but when it comes to acts such as the 7th
of October, we cannot show any kind of sympathy for such an act. 85% of our community
opposes the attack of Hamas on October 7th. 2% supported it, and actually, 70% say that the
events of the war strengthened their Israeli identity more than before. So, yes, it does create
some kind of a discussion, dialogue, maybe debate with the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
More people are not afraid of having that debate, not afraid of creating that debate, mainly because
we see our destiny as future Israeli citizens, and our concern about the relationship with
Israeli Jewish fellow citizens is critical, but it doesn't come at the expense of the deep, sincere
will that we want to see a future Palestinian independent state that guarantees the dignity and
freedom of the Palestinian people to live in a state side by side with the state of Israel,
not replacing the state of Israel. Muhammad, that data among Israeli Arabs and their attitudes
towards the October 7th terrorist attack, first of all, I think is very encouraging. And
as you say, we see an unprecedented level of a sense of attachment among Israeli Arabs to their
society, to their country, and to the state. But that stands in very sharp contrast to the figures
that Khaled Shikaki has published recently about levels of support for the October 7th attack,
for Hamas, on display among Palestinians in the West Bank. What do you make of, I think the
figure is really staggering and very worrisome, that 82% of people polled in the West Bank
in the aftermath of the October 7th attack supported the attack, and the level of support
for Hamas has actually risen after the October 7th attack. Levels of support for Abu Mazen, for
Mahmoud Abbas, and the Palestinian Authority are worryingly low. How do we make sense of that,
and then of the gap in public opinion between Israeli Arab citizens and Palestinians living in
the West Bank? How do you think about that? Well, I've seen some of the data from Dr. Shikaki.
I think that the support, there's increased support for Hamas, not necessarily support for the
October 7th attack, which Hamas itself today says we didn't do all of the things that were done. So,
I think that there's some kind of discrepancy in these two perspectives. I don't, I doubt that most
Palestinians support that attack on October 7th in the West Bank, but yes, there is an increased
support for Hamas because of two things. One, they did bring the Palestinian State issue on the
table. They managed to convince the Palestinians that their strategy, in the violence strategy and
war, forced President Biden and many countries in the west to now put back the Palestinian issue
on the table when, before October 7th, there was zero political horizon for the Palestinians.
Now, there is maybe a narrow horizon, but at least there is a horizon. They think that this war will
end with political diplomatic negotiations. I'm not sure if that actually will materialize,
but the fact that this is on the table, they attribute that to the capacity of Hamas to
reshuffle the political scene. The other thing is that most of the Palestinians that were released
in the exchange for the Israeli kidnappees, most of the Palestinian prisoners released
are from the West Bank, which gave basically the Palestinians in the West Bank the feeling
that they are being rewarded. They're the first ones to get the rewards of the Hamas strategy,
not Palestinians from Gaza that were released. Israel did not release Palestinians from Gaza. It
released Palestinian prisoners from the West Bank, and the third reason is the feeling among
Palestinians in the West Bank that Israel does not know limits with its war against the Palestinians.
It's military effort is beyond reasonable, and the fact that there were many Palestinian civilians
killed, out of the 26,000 Palestinians killed, is very painful for the Palestinians. I think
it's very painful for the Palestinian citizens of Israel also, but in the West Bank, they probably
have a different way to express their feelings. The Arab community in Israel is much more
moderate in the way it expresses its feelings. In the West Bank, you know, remember that more
than 400 people were killed also in the last three months by the Israeli military, so they're
feeling the harsh arm of the Israeli military, and they're developing a lot of antagonism against
that. This is not happening among Arab citizens. We're not experiencing violence. If we will be
experiencing violence, I think you'll get more radical perspectives represented also among Arab
citizens. Thank you, Muhammad. Another set of questions has to do with the Abraham Accords and
the process of normalization, frankly, the warm peace that was developing between Israel and the
UAE, Morocco, Bahrain, etc., and the prospect of normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia
and Israel. Could you share with us whether, how that dynamic of normalization, which on the
one hand, you said, and I think this is a matter for debate, and that we should have a future
conversation about, but would arguably seem as a sort of a sidelining or an attempt to sort of
isolate the Palestinian question from this broader process of regional development, but on the other
hand, opened and would have continued to open incredible opportunities for Israeli Arabs, who
speak the language, know the culture, would have been in a really unique position to capitalize on
normalization of relations with Saudi at a whole variety of levels. So, how do Israeli Arabs
think about the prospect of normalization, both for themselves but also possibly as a
regional framework that would allow us to make meaningful progress towards Israeli-Palestinian
peace? I mean, the assumption that peace with Arab countries will bring us closer to peace with
the Palestinians was behind the agreement between Israel and Egypt way back in the '70s. So, this
argument has been around for almost 50 years. The similar assumption also developed when Jordan also
made peace with Israel. In the peace with Egypt, the Arab citizens did not benefit a thing.
Actually, till today, Egyptian universities do not allow Arab citizens to study in Egyptian
universities. They see us as Israelis, and it's more peace with the elite and not peace with the
people. While with Jordan, it's a different story. Arab citizens have benefited a great deal from the
peace with Jordan. Almost at one point, almost a third of our student population was studying
in Jordanian universities. That was part of the capacity building when we had problems in Israeli
universities. We sought solutions in Jordanian universities. Almost half of the medical Arab
staff in Israel studied abroad, mostly in Jordan, and that's where they got the capacity. So, we
got a lot of wonderful opportunities, which we translated into better status in Israeli society
and in the Israeli economy. There was a hope that, you know, there is a hope that more relations with
Arab countries will give us better opportunities, but at the same time, the realization among Arab
citizens is that you cannot bypass the Palestinian issue. If you bypass the Palestinian issue, it
will explode in your face. And I think that, you know, I don't need to say I rest my case. I think
also, the realization that economic peace is the guarantee for calming down, whether it is economic
peace with Hamas, you give them X million dollars a year, money through Qatar, through Israel, from
Qatar, that economic peace is the solution. That strategy also collapsed. So now, we have two
strategies collapsed: bypassing and going to regional peace, and economic peace also collapsed
dramatically. The third theory that collapsed, they called it mowing the grass. It's like you
can have small enemies here and there. You know, you keep Hamas as an enemy but in some kind of
control because you mow the grass, you cut their capacity slowly. What's happening is that you
don't know how deep the roots are. You can cut the top of the grass, but you're not cutting the
roots of it. And if you keep enemies well-nurtured for a long time, it will explode in your face,
which brings me back to the perspective that we, the Arab citizens, are not opposing the regional
peace and are part of the normalization with the regional peace. I personally was in the Emirates,
and I know of many friends that are doing business with the Emirates and with Jordan. For us, this
is not normalizing from political reasons. For us, this is cultural extension. You know, for us, the
Emirates is a cultural extension. For us, Jordan is a cultural extension for our identity. When,
when I, with my wife, we went to the Emirates, we went for cultural shows. We went for plays. We
went for theater, and not just to do shopping in the shopping malls, as the rest of the Israeli
Jews do. When we go to Jordan, we go for cultural consumption. It's part of our larger Arab
identity, which in which we feel at home. So, for us, this is the absolute normalization, and we do
not give it the Israeli Jewish or Israeli Jewish angle. We have a different angle to it. You see,
many Arab citizens, in the, you know, in America, you have the music shows where you look for the
American Idol. We participate in the Arab Idol, although we have Israeli citizenship, but we are
part of the Arab Idol because that's the music we are part of. That's the culture we are part of.
So, that relationship with Arab countries allows us to go back culturally to the hug of the Arab
world, which we feel we are part of. You know, we are Israeli citizens. That's our political
reality, but culturally, we are part of the Arab regional culture, which we want, we
aspire to re-engage with. It's significant, by the way. We run, one of our musicians run for
the Arab Idol, but they also run for the Israeli Idol, same individuals but running in the two
contests. You know, anybody who knows Israeli popular culture and popular music will know that
you cannot imagine Israeli popular culture without Israeli Arab artists and singers, never mind
our soccer league. Over 30% of professional players in the Israeli soccer league are Israeli
Arabs. Muhammad, we could go on for a long time, and again, I want this to be the beginning of our
conversation because there's so much to unravel here and to think about, but I want to end with
two difficult questions that have been posted, one by Antonia For and one by Leis Vexler. And I
think in some respects, there are sort of mirror images of one another. We've kept the difficult
to last, but I think we would be remiss if we didn't put these for you in concluding this part
of our conversation. So, I'm reading out Antonia For's question. Mr. D., Israel is often labeled
as an apartheid state. What is your view? What is the difference between South Africa's history
of apartheid and Israel being accused of this label today? Leis Vexler asks, "If a Palestinian
state was created as part of a two-state solution, how will Arab Israelis respond? To which
state would they see themselves aligned?" So, two questions. We can spend a lot of time on them.
We want your views, and then we will wrap up the webinar. For the first one, regarding apartheid,
you know, I think that first of all, I think that occupation is worse than apartheid. So, if we look
only at Israel itself, we can't refer to it as an apartheid and just compare the legal structure.
The legal structure in South Africa was formally, constitutionally hierarchic. The legal structure
in Israel, it's not like that. In Israel, you need to fulfill the promise of the Declaration
of Independence to solve the problems. In South Africa, you needed to change the Declaration of
Independence, and it's a different case here. The problem in Israel is failure in meeting the goal,
while in South Africa, it was actually meeting the goal. The goal here is to reach social and
economic equality, social and political equality. That's the Declaration of Independence. In the
process, sometimes we get derailed with this law or with this practice, but the goal, which the
majority of the population still subscribes to, is social and political equality. I believe that
we will accomplish that. I don't think we, there, we have discriminatory issues which I presented.
We're battling with them on the ground. That's why I do not also subscribe to the concept of,
you know, what do you call it? I forgot the English word, but you know, the, Muhammad,
say it in Hebrew, and we'll translate. Oh, like BDS, boycott. Yeah, I don't subscribe to BDS.
My challenge, for example, to Israeli universities is actually to have more Arab students in, to have
more scholarships in, to have more professors in, and not to pull out. I cannot pull out and simply
become a marginal society. So, it's a different strategy than the rest of how people see it,
and we are scoring points. We're not winning the battle for absolute equality and democracy,
but we are winning in points. Slow process, to my taste, it's too slow, but it's better than
just cursing the darkness. That's my approach to the matter. Whether a Palestinian state, hopefully
when a Palestinian state will be established, and I will do my utmost effort, legal effort,
to get to that, what will the Arab citizens, the Palestinian Arab citizens do? We will stay
home. For one simple reason, we are home. We are in our homeland, and what we want to convince
Israel is to act as our state as well. Israel knows how to behave to be the state of the Jewish
people and be the defender of the homeland of the Jewish people. It does not know how to behave
fully to be the state of the Israelis. That's my battle. My battle is not to run away and
escape to live in a Palestinian state where, maybe, would you want the future Palestinian state
to extend equal rights to Jews who would live in that Palestinian State? That's a question
that was posted in our Q&A. Absolutely. I think that the future Palestinian state needs
to be a democratic liberal state. If it's not, I don't think it has the right to exist as
a state, and that's the case, in my view, to every state in the world. You need to give
people equal democratic rights as equal human beings, and if Jews go there and respect the laws
and respect the right of the Palestinians also to define the Palestinian state as the homeland of
the Palestinian people, which I respect Israel as being the homeland of the Jewish people but
not only, Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people and its citizens. Palestine needs to be
the homeland of its people and its citizens, the Palestinian people and its citizens. I
think that equality, the civic equality, needs to be respected on both sides. Now, for me, as I
said, I'm not looking to move. Behind my house, there's the graveyard in which 26 generations
of my family are buried. This is home. This is homeland, and my job is to make it my country and
to make it mature to become a more democratic, more inclusive, more just, more equal. We're
in better conditions today than 20 years ago, and I think we'll be in a better condition 20
years from now than where we are today. Muhammad, the director of strategy at the Shared Society
Center of the Gat Kiva Educational Center in the Galilee and a faculty member of the
Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, thank you so much for that. From the Freeman Spogli
Institute at Stanford, thank you and goodbye.
