Political Economy of an Ethnic Democracy: The Case of Israels Policy Toward Its Arab Minority

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.