What makes this case so unique is that the Arab minority usually identifies with active enemies of its state such as the terror organizations Hamas and Hezbollah, while the state combats its flesh and blood brethren, the Palestinians, in the territories occupied since 1967. In practice however, Israeli Arabs are torn between their national Palestinian and their civic Israeli identities and they are undergoing a simultaneous process of Palestinization on the one hand and Israelization on the other (Smooha, 2005, 2007).
Another aspect of the uniqueness of the Israeli case of the minority-majority encounter emanates from the majority's decision to establish Israel in 1948 as a Jewish nation-state in which its Jewish heritage, values and symbols are the major attributes of its national identity. Hence, as a Jewish state, Israel deliberately gives legal and institutional preference to its religiously, ethnically and nationally Jewish majority, particularly in the realms of immigration laws and the State symbols.
These two aspects create tensions and conflict between the Palestinian-Arab minority and the Jewish majority. This friction finds expression in almost every aspect of the relationship between the two communities. Yet Israel is also a democracy and a modern nation-state amidst a region of authoritarian Arab regimes, and its Arab citizens, in spite of their systemic predudice, are significantly better off than their ethnic brethren in surrounding Arab countries. In Israel, the Palestinians' distinct identity and collective cultural rights are respected, they enjoy political freedom and they benefit from Israel's social welfare system, economic progress and democratic norms. This may explain why, in spite of the salience of conflict and tensions on the national level, the majority of Arabs and Jews in Israel by and large cohabitate peacefully.
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Tensions exist, however, between the two fundamental values of the state's system - Jewish and democratic. Whereas a "Jewish" state would entail (endow?) certain privileges for Jews, a "democratic" state would give equal rights to all its citizens. The question of whether or not Israel can reconcile these two basic values is debatable, in particular with regard to minority rights (Dowty, 1999; Gavison, 1999; Sa`di, 2002; Smooha, 2002). What are the essential realms in which a democratic nation-state is entitled to favor its majority's culture given that this partiality will be at the expense of the minority ethnic groups? The Jewish majority in Israel believes it is also entitled to keep its hegemony in the state's unique culture and national symbols as well as in immigration laws, just as many European democracies give preference to the culture of the majority of their populations. Are there other domains of life in which prioritizing the ethnic/cultural majority could be accepted as universal norms of democracy? For more than five decades Israel never methodically addressed this dilemma in its ideological discourse. Moreover, the Israeli government's policy towards the Arab minority was in fact ambivalent – benevolent in some respects (e.g. cultural rights) and highly discriminatory (e.g. representation in government service) in others (Yuchtman-Yaar & Shavit, 2004).
A pioneering attempt to list the minimum traits of what a "Jewish" character of the state entails within the universal norms of a democracy was made by Chief Justice Aharon Barak, former president of the Supreme Court. He listed the following five parameters for the Jewishness of the state: "…the right of every Jew to immigrate to Israel in which Jews would consist a majority; Hebrew is the State's central official language; the State's main holidays and symbols reflect the national revival of the Jewish people; and the Jewish heritage is a leading component of its religious and cultural heritage (SCJ (Bagatz) 11280/02, Piskey Din 57 (4), 1: 101)." Yet, whereas principles such as these are accepted by minorities in other democratic states, the Israeli Arab leadership has not accepted these norms because Arabs view themselves as the indigenous people of Palestine and believe they should dominate the Jewish migrant-settlers.
Barak's narrow interpretation differs from government policies of discrimination against the Arab minority in a broad spectrum of issues. A gradual improvement in promoting equal public funding for Arab localities has occurred in the last two decades. The Arab minority in Israel also enjoys cultural rights more than many other ethnic and national minorities. For example, in reference to the 1966 UN International Convention of Civil and Political Rights of Minority Peoples, and the 1995 European Convention of Protecting National Minorities, Alexander Yakobson and Justice Yitzhak Zamir argued that Israel's Arab minority enjoy the same rights and possibly even more than ethnic minorities in Western European countries (in Rekhess & Ozacky-Lazar, 2005: 19-26 and 59-83, respectively).
It is true that Israel first judaized its public space by renaming areas and expropriating vacant lands for development purposes. However, this policy was conducted in such a way as to not inflame the Arab citizens and it attempted to take their basic needs into consideration. Indeed Arabic names and heritage dominate the public sphere in Arab populated towns and villages. Some important fundamentals of Arabic culture, such as religious holidays, were preserved both on the national level as well as the local. Israel did not attempt to assimilate the Arabs within the Jewish-Hebrew culture, most significantly in the field of public education.
Although education is sponsored by the State, Arabs choose to enroll in separate schools where Arab educators teach in Arabic. This policy recognizes the Arab citizens as a cultural minority entitled to an education in their own language, while still enabling the State to regulate formal education in the Arab sector. The Arabic language—an official vernacular during the British Mandate—continues to enjoy its formal legal status as the second official language in Israel - though partially and ineffectually enforced.
In the realm of religious law, Israel established special personal status tribunals for the various religious groups, and Israeli law intervened only in a select number of universal social areas, such as the minimum age for marriage (seventeen), the prevention of polygamy, and the prevention of forced divorce on women. The religious holidays of Christians, Muslims, and Druze have been legally recognized, as have the various weekly days of rest. The national commemoration days, however, reflect only the Jewish-Zionist ethos, and there is not one national Arab day of remembrance or national Arab public holiday. Israeli Arabs, however, have created their own nationalistic commemoration days: Land Day (see below) and, since the mid-1990s, as an alternative and challenge to Israel's (Jewish dominated) Independence Day, Nakba Day (May 15), symbolizing the Palestinian view that the 1948 War and its aftermath was a "catastrophe."
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