Middle East Quarterly

Fall 1999

Volume 6: Number 4

Israeli Arabs and the Future of the Jewish State

Eric Rozenman is a journalist in Washington, D.C.. Opinions expressed here are those of the author alone who thanks Alan M. Schneider and Toby Klein Greenwald for research assistance.

This has proved to be an interesting time for ‘Azmi Bishara, an Arab citizen of Israel and a politician. In May 1998, he denied the right of the Jewish people to a state and, in March 1999, announced his candidacy for prime minister of Israel. In May, he was one of thirteen Arab citizens elected to Israel’s parliament, the 120-seat Knesset. In June, he became, in the words of a news report, “the first member of parliament to be shot with a rubber-coated metal bullet by the Israeli police” as he took part in a protest over the demolition of an illegally built Arab house in the mixed Jewish-Arab city of Lod.1

That same report went on to describe Israeli Arabs as “marginalized.” But is this an accurate description? Or are they flourishing under the auspices of the Jewish state, as their ever-increasing presence in the Knesset and in much of Israeli life suggests? One of them, `Abd ar-Rahman az-Zu`abi, was recently appointed the first Arab to sit on Israel’s Supreme Court. Miss Israel 1999, Rana Raslan, is an Israeli Arab beauty. Arab members of the Israeli parliament twice have served as deputy speaker; Husima Jahara become the first Arab Israeli woman elected to the Knesset; and an Arab broke a taboo by being named to the parliament’s prestigious Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee.2

Beyond the headlines, too, Arab citizens of Israel seem to have imbibed the country’s pluralistic and democratic ways. Thus, in 1994, when several busloads of touring foreign journalists gathered in the community center of the new Jewish town of Katzir, built on a hilltop just inside the pre-1967 boundary, they heard a Jewish National Fund (JNF) representative explain that Katzir was built, in part, to help redress the overwhelming Arab majority in its area. Then spoke the assistant principal from a nearby Israeli Arab village who mused out loud why it should matter whether the local population is majority Arab or majority Jewish, since “we are all Israelis” with equal rights and since Israeli-Palestinian peace is on the way?

Good question. Although neither the JNF representative nor the Katzir officials replied on that occasion, the assistant principal’s point is worth some thought. Can Israel, as a Jewish state, reach such a point of amity that it makes no difference whether the population in a region is majority Arab or Jewish?

Demography

This topic begins with demography, for a Jewish country, regardless of specific synagogue-state relations, requires a dominant Jewish majority and an overriding Jewish culture. Current trends, however, call into question the country’s future as a predominantly Jewish state.

The latest annual population figures, issued in September 1998 by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, show a total of 5.99 million people, of whom 4.75 million are Jews, 887,000 Muslims, 128,000 Christians, 123,000 Druze, and 128,000 “without religious classification.”3 These figures do not include 81,400 legal and illegal foreign workers registered for benefits (among them 37,700 Palestinians), and what many Israelis believe are tens of thousands more unregistered workers—virtually all non-Jews. Nor do the statistics distinguish among the many immigrants from the former Soviet Union counted as Jews but who are not Jewish according to Jewish religious law (and whom observant Israeli Jews sometimes call “the Russian gentiles”).4

Officially, then, Jews make up 79 percent of all those inside the pre-1967 Six-Day War “Green Line"; in addition, the approximately 160,000 Jews living in the West Bank, Golan Heights, Gaza Strip, and eastern Jerusalem are counted in this number.

Discounting the small number of non-Arab Christians,5 21 percent of Israel’s citizens are Arab and 15 percent are Muslim. Note that this number is exclusively within the Green Line of 1967, and includes neither the 165,000 Palestinian Arabs in eastern Jerusalem, much less the 2 million-plus and rapidly growing Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza.

One way to analyze such numbers focuses on Israel’s pending emergence as the demographic as well as the national center of the Jewish people. The statistics establish that Israel last year was one of only four countries in which the numbers of Jews increased (the others being Brazil, Canada, and, ironically, Germany—with an estimated 70,000 Jews, many recent arrivals from the former Soviet Union).6 One commentator notes that “if assimilation trends among world Jewry continue at the present rate, the population of the Jewish Diaspora will be halved within 30 years—from an estimated 8.6 million today to about 4.4 million.”7

Another way is to recognize that the most recent statistics make Jews just 79 percent of Israel’s population, the first time since independence that Israel’s Jewish population has dropped under 80 percent, or less than four out of five citizens. This, it is important to consider, is not a statistical blip, but the acceleration of a long-term trend. At its establishment in 1948, Israel comprised 650,000 Jews and approximately 150,000 Muslim, Christian, and Druze Arabs—about an 82 to 18 percent ratio. One year later, thanks to the start of a four-year influx of Sephardi Jews from North Africa and the Middle East, Israel’s population totaled 1,173,000,8 with 87 percent Jews. That proportion remained constant through 1967. By 1987, Israel’s population had grown to 4.4 million, though the 3.6 million Jews now constituted only 82 percent of the total.9

Had the great Soviet Jewish immigration not taken place in the late 1980s and early 1990s, bringing in approximately 700,000 people in less than five years, the ratio of Israeli Jews to Israeli Arabs would be roughly 75 to 25. Without another such wave of immigration, it almost certainly will be much lower ten years from now than the present 79 to 21. In fact, from the announcement of the September 1998 figures to December 31, 1998, the Jewish percentage of Israel’s population declined another .2 percent for an annual decline of 0.8 percent.10 Although a potential influx of several hundred thousand more Jews from economically devastated Russia and Ukraine would buy Israel a reprieve from the implications of its relatively low fertility rates, it would be only a temporary one.

This trend toward a smaller Jewish majority in Israel proper results primarily from differential fertility rates. In 1959, the total fertility rate of Israeli Muslim women was 9.4 children; for Israeli Jewish women, 3.5. Since the 1970s, following the pattern of countries moving from economically developing to developed, fertility rates for all Israeli women have declined dramatically. However, the Arab/Jewish disparity remains, with the 1996 total fertility rate for Muslim women at 4.6, for Jews 2.6.11 (For comparison, U.S. Jewish women average 1.7 children each; and 2.1 is necessary for population replacement.)

Overall, Israel’s Jewish population has jumped more than seven-fold in the country’s first fifty years. But Israel’s Arab population is nearly nine times greater than it was in 1948. And, since Israel’s Arab population is much younger on average than its Jewish counterpart (18 is the median age of Israel’s Arab minority, for Israeli Jews, 30) the cohort of the Arab women of childbearing age grows more rapidly than that of the Jewish women. This differential has a dramatic impact: Israel’s total population grew by 133,000 last year, of which 80,000 individuals were Jewish; assuming the remainder were all Israeli Arabs, their numbers rose by 53,000. In other words, Arabs accounted for roughly 40 percent of Israel’s population growth. The country’s overall rate of population growth was 2.2 percent: among Arabs it was more than 4 percent and among Jews 1.7 percent.12

Lots of wrinkles further complicate the picture; here are two. In final-status negotiations with the Palestinians, Israel is likely at least marginally to expand its boundaries for military reasons, thereby adding tens of thousands more Arab citizens. Second, whereas the Arab increase results almost entirely from natural increase, with negligible numbers leaving or entering the country, the Jewish population is in great flux. The fifty years of Israel’s existence have seen a Jewish immigration of nearly 2.7 million and an emigration (according to World Jewish Congress figures) of 500,000, mostly to the United States.13 In 1998, for example, 58,000 immigrants arrived, 80 percent from the former Soviet Union, and 32,000 Israeli Jews emigrated. Jerusalem sharply exemplifies these trends: In 1967, when Israel ousted Jordanian forces from the eastern part of the city that Jews insist is their eternal and undivided capital, it included 195,000 Jews, 55,000 Muslims, and 13,000 Christians—a 75 percent Jewish majority. By 1987, this had shrunk to a 72 percent Jewish majority and by 1996 it was only 69 percent Jewish (421,200 Jews, 164,300 Muslims and 16,500 Christians).14 And in 1996, the city’s Arab population was growing “four times faster [3.7 percent to 1 percent] than the Jewish population and is expected to reach 45 percent” of the total in twenty years.15 Notwithstanding massive housing construction in new Jewish neighborhoods and the annexation of others (to pump up the figures as Jews move to the suburbs), the trend appears inevitable. Figures for 1998 from the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies showed births to Jewish families in the capital to be 68 percent of the total, down from 72 percent only a year earlier. Worried that similar patterns could produce an Arab majority within 20 years, Mayor Ehud Olmert revived his proposal to annex the suburb of Mevasseret Zion, in part to include its 22,000 Jewish residents in the Jerusalem total.

Arab Political Activity

This tendency toward a smaller Jewish percentage of the population has direct political implications. Never resigned to their status as a minority in a Jewish state, Israeli Arabs were generally quiescent from 1948 on. They found their voice in 1976, when Israeli soldiers shot and killed five young Arabs in a confrontation over land, initiating annual “Land Day” observances. The 1987-93 intifada (uprising) and the 1993 Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) refocused the attention of Israeli Arabs. They now claim a “Palestinian” nationality alongside their Israeli citizenship and make more insistent demands that social, cultural, and political equality accompany their long-standing legal equality.

A survey of Israeli Arab attitudes confirms these trends. Sammy Smouha, a sociologist, found the portion of Arab citizens of Israel willing to call themselves “Israeli Arabs” had dropped from 63 percent in 1995 to 33 percent four years later. Those willing to fly an Israeli flag on Independence Day fell from 43 percent in 1995 to 28 in 1999.16 So the problem might be unassimilability as much as marginalization.

The consequences are seen in many areas of life, starting with a new assertiveness by Israeli Arabs. In April 1998, the police demolished three Arab homes that had been built without permits in an “unrecognized” village, one of forty such locations. In response, Israeli Arabs engaged in violent clashes with the police, held a protest march, and organized a general strike. Violence erupted again in late September 1998, this time over army plans to expropriate land. Thousands of demonstrators in the village of Mu`awiya and the town of Umm al-Fahm, some throwing stones and Molotov cocktails, fought with police and soldiers. The problem quickly reached Israel’s largest Arab city as “a surge of unrest among Arabs in Israel spread to Nazareth ... after the apparent failure of an attempt by President Ezer Weizman to ease tensions.” Nazareth’s Mayor Ramez Jeraysa led a sit-in at the police station. Protests in the city deteriorated to rock and bottle throwing; police responded with tear gas.17

Beyond the violence, Israeli Arabs are speaking about Jewish conspiracies against them, a warning sign of more trouble. Khalid Khalifa of the Arab Center for Information and Documentation holds that Israeli authorities “want to expand the Jewish settlements while they refuse to let us expand.”18 Umm al-Fahm’s Mayor Ra‘d Salah Mahajna, a leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel and one of those injured in the September violence, spoke from his hospital bed about the confiscation of land as part of a “hidden” plan to seize land to set up a Jewish “settlement.” The government denied any such plan, noting it already had given more property from a nearby military reserve to the village than it now intended to seize.19

Both sides see these unpleasant developments as an augury of things to come. ‘Abd al-Wahhab Darawsha, an Arab member of the Israeli parliament, attributed the conflict to growing frustration. “I’m warning the prime minister of Israel, the minister of defense and the minister of the interior to start treating us [Israeli Arabs] as a culture, to put an end to this problem before it ignites the Arab street.”20 Alek Ron, an Israeli police commander, compared the Umm al-Fahm and Nazareth violence to the intifada.21 Elie Rekhess, a leading specialist on the Arabs in Israel, sees the violence reflecting an important change: “this trend, which has been particularly noticeable since the start of the peace process, is characterized by focusing on national issues that pertain to the Arab community inside the Green Line.” Although Israel might be resolving its conflict with the Palestinians in the territories, “it should be clearly noted that the real challenge in the coming years lies within the Green Line [i.e., within pre-1967
Israel].”22

Arab Rejection of Israel

Remarks such as those by Arab politicians should be seen in the context of a larger Israeli Arab ambivalence toward, if not rejection of, Israeli nationalism so long as it rests on Zionism (i.e., Jewish nationalism). The late Tawfiq Zayyad, mayor of Nazareth and parliament member, was also a poet whose work reflected an uncompromising streak of Palestinian Arab nationalism. More than a decade ago, his poem, “Here We Will Remain,” admonished Israeli Jews:

We will lie on your chest like a wall
Stick in your throat like a piece of glass ... .
We will sing the songs
Fill the streets with demonstrations
Fill the jails with honor and make children
Each generation more revolutionary than the one before it.23

Zayyad was hardly alone in holding these sentiments. During Israel’s fiftieth anniversary observances, ‘Azmi Bishara, now a Knesset member, explained that the Palestinian national movement is not primarily about self-determination for Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza Strip but about the return of Palestinian refugees to the land that became Israel in 1948.Bishara asserted that “the Jewish state idea is not a legitimate one and ... I am not prepared to confer historical legitimacy on Israel.” No comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace would be possible, he added, until Israel “de-Zionized,” dropped the Law of Return (which automatically permits Jews to move to Israel), and became a “state of all its citizens.” Echoing the PLO charter and Hamas, Bishara claimed that “Judaism is a religion, not a people, and the Jewish group in the world has no nationality status whatever. I don’t think this group is entitled to self-determination.”24

Tawfiq al-Khatib of the Islamic Movement, a fundamentalist Muslim organization, represents another stream in Israeli Arab thought that negates Jewish nationalism. Also a member of parliament, Khatib stated (in Hebrew) during a religious dialogue with Israeli Jews, that “there is a precedent for Muslims accepting non-Muslim rule. But in Palestine, the Holy Land? Only Muslims can rule here.” Then how, he was asked by another dialogue participant, could he take an oath to uphold the state and sit in the Israeli parliament? Khatib replied that “there is a verse in the Qur‘an which states that God doesn’t place impossible burdens on the believer. If all the Jews moved to Uganda, my problem would be solved. But it’s not going to happen. So I have to take care of the million Arabs who’ve been given Israeli citizenship.”25 Asked about his long-term solution, Khatib called for a treaty of non-belligerency between Muslims and Jews, renewed every ten years, presumably an allusion to the Prophet Muhammad’s Treaty of Hudaybiya. (On which, see page 65)

Even the Israeli Bedouin, who long have volunteered for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), where they have earned a formidable reputation as scouts and trackers, have flashed rebellious signals. A Bedouin IDF veteran killed fighting for Israel in 1996 was denied burial in a Muslim cemetery.26 In October 1998, Sheikh Sami Abu Frayh, a Bedouin religious leader from the Negev Desert, issued a decree branding any Muslim who serves in the IDF as an apostate.

Perhaps the most ominous push for Muslim political influence took place in Nazareth in early 1999. The town’s Christian mayor, Ramez Jeraysa, had helped lead protests over Israeli land confiscations near the Muslim town of Umm al-Fahm in September 1998, yet now was besieged by the Muslims of Nazareth in a land-use controversy of his own. Nazareth’s Christian establishment wanted to clear a half-acre plot for a plaza next to the Church of the Annunciation as part of year 2000 celebrations of Christ’s birth. But Muslims had plans of their own for the space, announcing plans for a huge mosque there boasting a 300-foot tall minaret that would tower over the Church of the Annunciation, to be paid for by money from Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states. This plan reflects the fact that Nazareth, which has historically always been a predominantly Christian town, today has a larger number of Muslims (40,000) than Christians (25,000). The mosque issue came to a head on Easter Sunday, when the town “exploded in a stone-throwing brawl between roving bands of Christian and Muslim youths. Windshields were smashed, homes attacked and, a few days later, Molotov cocktails were tossed at shops.”27 In June, “club-wielding Muslim protesters” attacked Jeraysa, accusing him of “ignoring their rights.”28

Were Israeli Arabs a much smaller minority—the 2 percent that the Christian Arabs and Druze each represent—such unrest and dissent would be manageable. But that is not the case now and will be even less so in the future. As Muslims in Israel increase towards making up 25 percent of the country’s total population, sentiment is growing among them not just for their recognition as a culture and for autonomy, but for ultimate political power. This fits the conclusions of a comparative historical study of Muslim populations which finds that when Muslims are part of a large majority within a state (85 percent or more), Islamic activists push for rule according to Islamic law (as in Iran or Afghanistan). When Muslims are part of a relatively small minority (under 25 percent), activists seek autonomy from the non-Muslim state (as in Kosovo or Cyprus). And when Muslims make up between 25 and 85 percent of a country’s total population, they agitate for Muslim political control of the system.29 The implication is clear: As Muslims in Israel approach the 25 percent tipping point, a struggle could well follow that would echo Muslim attempts to take power in next-door Lebanon or in distant Nigeria and Malaysia.

The Jewish Response

The standard rationale for Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip is to achieve a separation of population that will maintain Israel’s Jewish majority and its nature as a Jewish state. In a typical articulation of this concept, then-Labor Party chairman, now prime minister Ehud Barak has said:

The Jewish people cannot and should not control another people. We should separate ourselves from the Palestinians physically, following the recommendation of the American poet Robert Frost, who once wrote that good fences make good neighbors. Leave them behind [outside] the borders that will be agreed upon, and build Israel. Make the security of Israel, the future of our children, the essence of our commitment.30

But the demographic upsurge of Israel’s Arabs, their readiness for violent confrontation, and their anti-Israel ideology suggest that an Israeli withdrawal from the territories to keep Israel a Jewish state misses the point. Yes, to annex those territories and make their 2,890,000 inhabitants31 citizens would immediately render Israel a binational country (its population of 8.8 million would be just 53 percent Jewish); but existing trends within Israel proper threaten to do likewise—a generation or so later. Building New England-style fences along the Green Line only delays creeping binationalism. That is because no fences can be constructed between Arab Nazareth and adjacent Jewish Natzrat Illit (just as they cannot be between Muslim and Christian Israelis in Nazareth itself). Neither can they separate Muslim Umm al-Fahm and Jewish Katzir, or between Arab and Jewish neighborhoods in Jaffa and Lod—at least not if a unitary Israeli state is to be maintained.

The Israeli leadership, of course, is not unaware of these developments:

On July 5, [1998,] Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu held a secret discussion in a very small forum on the “growing Palestinianization and religious radicalization among Israel’s Arabs.” The first session was held in the political-security cabinet on July 1, but in view of the sensitivity of the issue, it was decided to hold a second session in a smaller forum which included the pertinent ministers, the head of the Shin Bet, and other security bodies. Security and government officials have been voicing concern in light of secret reports about the religious radicalization and Palestinianization in the Israeli Arab street.32

Why such “sensitivity of the issue” and a reluctance to address what is clearly a major issue in Israel’s future? Perhaps it has to do with the fact that many Israelis believed that the famous 1993 handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat signaled the dawn of peace, prosperity, and normality for the Jewish state. The possibility that a settlement with the Palestinian Authority might instead transfer the conflict from outside Israel to within it induces a form of denial. Whatever the reason, the reluctance inhibits normally voluble Israeli politicians from openly discussing this issue. In a rare public acknowledgment, Mayor Ehud Olmert of Jerusalem said that “It’s a matter of concern when the non-Jewish population rises a lot faster than the Jewish population.”33

Nor do Israeli commentators devote much attention to it. One exception was an article by Yosef Goell noting that Israeli Arab leaders

have been calling in recent years for the establishment of a separate Arab university, Arab cultural autonomy in Galilee, resettlement of Arabs in localities which their immediate forefathers abandoned in 1948, abrogation of the Law of Return which embodies the very idea of Israel as the state of the Jewish people, and replacing the national symbols—flag and anthem—with ones more compatible with Arab sensitivities.

Goell adds that a final settlement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority will do little to ameliorate conflict within the Green Line. Perhaps the reverse, for Israeli Arab demands “have been muted during the present effort to support the Palestinian Authority’s drive for an agreement with Israel ... But many observers expect those national demands to take center stage among the Israeli Arabs once an independent Palestine is won.”34

Other than such bold statements, the public discourse on Israeli Arabs tends to be very accommodating to Arab demands. “Post-Zionist” intellectuals, journalists, artists, and politicians take the lead in advocating an end to Israel as a Jewish state and its evolution into “a state of all its citizens.” For example, they protest the “insensitivity” of “Ha-Tikvah,” the national anthem written in 1882, with its references: “to Zion looks the Jew” and “our land of Zion and Jerusalem.” Are Israeli Arabs really supposed to sing that, let alone feel it? In 1995, the Labor deputy minister of education, Micha Goldman, told Israeli Arabs that “we surely have to consider how to allow also the Arab citizens to sing the anthem” and said he had no problem changing the words (“so long as still within our breasts the Jewish heart beats true”) that Arab citizens find most objectionable.35 In a similar spirit, editorial writers at the country’s most prestigious paperlooked askance at the first meeting of Israel’s long-dormant Public Council for Demography, “whose stated aim is to increase Jewish births in Israel.” According to the writers, it was questionable whether any such group had a place in a “pluralistic” society. Further, “any policy that encourages Jewish births exclusively is tainted by racism.”36 Jewish feminists, fearing restrictions on abortion, found it no less tainted by sexism.

Conclusion

The appointment of the first Arab justice to Israel’s Supreme Court points simultaneously to the country’s real achievements and the problems it faces. ‘Abd ar-Rahman az-Zu‘abi will be just one of fourteen justices on the bench; what will be the consequence when Arabs have three justices, reflecting their proportion of the population? And what when those numbers increase to four or five? And what would happen if twenty-four of the Knesset’s 120 legislators were Israeli Arabs, instead of the current thirteen—already up four from the previous session. The state might still be democratic, but the civic atmosphere, the public culture, would not likely be Jewish in the tacit, general sense it is today. It will especially not be so if Israeli Arabs feel energized by a new Palestinian state next door (and perhaps also by an increasingly Palestinian Jordan). It also bears noting that the Arab electorate and Arab Knesset members already have helped override Jewish majorities on such vital matters as the creation of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s coalition in 1992 and approval of the Oslo and Oslo II accords in 1993 and 1995 respectively. All seven Israeli Arab members voted for both agreements; the former passed 61 to 50, with nine abstentions; the latter passed 61 to 59.

Tension between Israeli Jews and Arabs as Knesset colleagues burst into the open at the swearing in of the new parliament on June 7, 1999. Ahmad Tibi, formerly a close advisor to Yasir Arafat, had “made a show of not singing ‘Ha-tikvah,’ the national anthem,” according to the Associated Press, explaining, “I’m not a Jew, it speaks of a ‘Jewish heart beating.’ It’s a pretty melody, but the words mean nothing to me.” 37 Tibi then took the oath of office that included a statement of loyalty to the State of Israel. At that point his fellow parliamentarian Rehavaam Ze’evi, a retired general and right-wing nationalist, shouted out the perhaps uncivil but not irrelevant question, “Do you indeed intend to stand by this oath?”

As Diaspora Jewry struggles with the issue of “continuity,” it consoles itself with the knowledge that Israel, at least, is solid. There Jewish tradition is taught in schools and the youth are not likely to marry non-Jews. True; but Israeli Jewry faces a different sort of “continuity” problem—not one of individuals but the state as a whole. For Israel truly to remain a Jewish state, its Jewish population cannot be reduced to a less than predominant majority. Nor can it acquiesce in the transformation of its public culture from pluralistic Jewish to binational or multicultural or multi-religious. How it will solve these challenges may prove more daunting even than ending the conflicts with Arabs outside its borders.

1 The New York Times, June 23, 1999.
2 Ha’aretz, July 19, 1999.
3 Central Bureau of Statistics’ spokesperson, Israeli government press office, Sept. 17, 1998.
4 Washington Jewish Week, Oct. 15, 1998.
5 Immigrants from the former Soviet Union are counted as Jews for census purposes, regardless of their actual standing in Jewish law.
6 World Jewish Congress Annual Study, reported by the JTA, Sept. 18, 1998.
7 Ha’aretz, Sept. 16, 1998.
8 The Jerusalem Report, Nov. 23, 1998, p. 54.
9 Central Bureau of Statistics response to author’s inquiry, Mar. 23, 1999.
10 Central Bureau of Statistics, Dec. 31, 1998, press release.
11 “Fertility Rates by Age and Religion through 1996,” Population Estimates (Jerusalem: Central Bureau of Statistics, 1999), pp. 3-26.
12 Central Bureau of Statistics’ spokesperson, Israeli government press office, Sept. 17, 1998.
13 Ha’aretz, Sept. 16, 1998.
14 Mitchell B. Bard and Joel Himmelbart, Myths and Facts: A Concise Record of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Washington, D.C.: Near East Research, Dec. 1992), p. 220. for 1967 and 1987; Embassy of Israel, information department spokesman, Jan. 11, 1999, for 1996.
15 Jerusalem Post International Edition, June 20, 1998.
16 Ha’aretz, May 4, 1999
17 Reuters, Apr. 29, 1998.
18 The Washington Post, Apr. 7, 1998.
19 JTA, Sept. 28, 1998.
20 The New York Times, Sept. 28, 1998.
21 JTA, Sept. 28, 1998.
22 The Jerusalem Post International Edition, Oct. 10, 1998.
23 Salmak Jayyusi, ed., Modern Arabic Poetry, An Anthology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 486.
24 Ha’aretz (Sabbath supplement), May 29, 1998.
25 Yossi Klein Halevi, “Who is a Muslim?” The Jerusalem Report, Sept. 14, 1998.
26 The Jerusalem Report, Nov. 28, 1996.
27 The Washington Post, Apr. 15, 1999.
28 JTA Daily Bulletin, June 11, 1999
29 Daniel Pipes, In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power (New York: Basic Books, 1983), p. 204.
30 Speech to B’nai B’rith International, Aug. 26, 1998.
31 Palestinian Territories and Statistical Topics and Indices (Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, May 1998), cited by the Palestine Liberation Organization, Washington, D.C., Apr. 13, 1999.
32 Ma’ariv, July 7, 1998.
33 The Jerusalem Post International Edition, June 6, 1998.
34 Yosef Goell, “The Jewish State and Its Arab Minority,” Congress Monthly, Nov.-Dec., 1998.
35 Ha’aretz, Apr. 13, 1995.
36 Ibid., July 15, 1998.
37 Associated Press, June 7, 1999.

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