Socioeconomic Improvements Won’t Bring Political Moderation to Israel’s Arabs

In the past several years, Israeli Arabs have attained rising wages and standards of living as well as greater levels of education; they have also become more likely to learn Hebrew and to join the IDF. Mansour Abbas has led his Islamist Ra’am party into the governing coalition, and shifted attention away from the Palestinian cause—long the centerpiece of Israeli Arab politics—and toward the bread-and-butter issues facing his constituents. Yet there have also been less encouraging signs, particularly the riots that took place last year in cities with mixed Arab and Jewish populations, and the participation of Israeli Arabs in the recent wave of terror. Efraim Karsh sees in these last developments a disturbing trend that began with the Oslo Accords: