Israels Security And Its Arab Citizens

Although a rich literature combining international relations and domestic political developments has recently emerged, most works specializing in state-minority relations, nationalism, citizenship, and human rights have not integrated insights from the field of international relations and security affairs into their analysis. This absence is nowhere more visible than in the study of relations between the Israeli state and its Arab/Palestinian minority. This book aims to bring (back) international relations and international security perspectives into the analysis of relations between the Israeli state and its Arab minority. Drawing on international relations theory, it argues that the relationship between the Israeli state and the predominant community, as in many other cases characterized by ethno-national cleavage, was heavily influenced by the state's broader regional geo-strategic security situation. State policies toward Israel's Arab citizens moderated in the rare times of relative geo-strategic security and hardened when Israel's regional position became more precarious.

The relations between the Israeli state and its Arab citizens have been distorted by the perception that national security concerns require the full rights of citizenship to be restricted for members of the Arab community. However, the national security of the state can also be affected by a poor reputation in the international community, which plays a vital role in sustaining the existence of the state. This created a space for Arab intelligentsia to use internationalisation as a means to promote their cause. This study is designed to explore and analyse the internationalisation process and its impact regarding the Arab community in Israel. It is a beneficial source to academics, experts, policymakers, journalists and other experts and interested members of the public.

Based on his reading of top-secret files of the Israeli police and the prime minister's office, Hillel Cohen exposes the full extent of the crucial, and, until now, willfully hidden history of Palestinian collaboration with Israelis—and of the Arab resistance to it. Cohen's previous book, the highly acclaimed Army of Shadows,told how this hidden history played out from 1917 to 1948, and now, in Good Arabs he focuses on the system of collaborators established by Israel in each and every Arab community after the 1948 war. Covering a broad spectrum of attitudes and behaviors, Cohen brings together the stories of activists, mukhtars, collaborators, teachers, and sheikhs, telling how Israeli security agencies penetrated Arab communities, how they obtained collaboration, how national activists fought them, and how deeply this activity influenced daily life. When this book was first published in Hebrew, it became a bestseller and has evoked bitter memories and intense discussions among Palestinians in Israel and prompted the reclassification of many of the hundreds of documents Cohen viewed to uncover a story that continues to unfold to this day.

This volume examines the status of the Palestinian citizens in Israel and explores ethnic privileging and the dynamics of social conflict.

"In recent years, Jewish majority-Arab minority relations in Israel have become an increasingly salient issue. Many have come to understand that the Jewish-Arab cleavage is more acute and grave than any other social rift in Israeli society. This study surveys the major political and social developments in Israel's Arab society that have had a formative influence on this minority's national discourse since the 1990s. Over the last three decades, Israel's Arab society experienced national and civic mobilization processes that left a strong imprint on its collective consciousness. In tandem, the Arab sector has produced diverse political and ideological streams that aspire to promote the interests of the country's Arab citizens -- each stream according to its worldview and corresponding political agenda. Today, all the streams openly demand the state's recognition not only of the Arabs' rights as Israeli citizens, but of their rights as part of a national Palestinian minority living in a Jewish nation state"--Publisher's web site.

"The widely held assumption that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is a temporary situation and that the 'peace process' will soon bring an end to Israeli abuses has obscured the reality on the ground today of Israel's entrenched discriminatory rule over Palestinians. A single authority, the Israeli government, rules primarily over the area between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, populated by two groups of roughly equal size, methodologically privileging Jewish Israelis while repressing Palestinians, most severely in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), made-up of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza. Drawing on years of human rights documentation, case studies and a review of government planning documents, statements by officials and other sources, [this report] examines Israel's treatment of Palestinians and evaluates whether particular Israeli policies and practices in certain areas amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution."--Page 4 of cover.

The Palestinian experience of displacement within Israel, told through oral history and memory

What does police violence against minorities, or violent clashes between minorities and the police tell us about citizenship and its internal hierarchies? Indicative of deep-seated tensions and negative perceptions; incidents such as these suggest how minorities are vulnerable, suffer from or are subject to police abuse and neglect in Israel. Marked by skin colour, negatively stigmatized or rendered security threats, their encounters with police provide a daily reminder of their defunct citizenship. Taking as case studies the experiences and perceptions of four minority groups within Israel including Palestinian/Arab citizens, ultra-Orthodox Jews and Ethiopian and Russian immigrants, Ben-Porat and Yuval are able to explore different paths of citizenship and the stratification of the citizenship regime through relations with and perceptions of the police in Israel. Touching on issues such as racial profiling, police brutality and neighbourhood neglect, their study questions the notions of citizenship and belonging, shedding light on minority relationships with the state and its institutions.

"The U.S.-Israel relationship is in trouble," warn Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellows Robert D. Blackwill and Philip H. Gordon in a new Council Special Report, Repairing the U.S.-Israel Relationship. Significant policy differences over issues in the Middle East, as well as changing demographics and politics within both the United States and Israel, have pushed the two countries apart. Blackwill, a former senior official in the Bush administration, and Gordon, a former senior official in the Obama administration, call for "a deliberate and sustained effort by policymakers and opinion leaders in both countries" to repair the relationship and to avoid divisions "that no one who cares about Israel's security or America's values and interests in the Middle East should want."