Ted Gurr included the Arab citizens of Israel in his seminal book, Minorities at Risk (Gurr 1993). In the minds of many Jewish Israelis, however, they are a majority that feels its own existence is at risk. This predicament where the majority within a state is a minority regionally exists elsewhere (in northern Ireland, for example). As was discussed previously, the relationship between Israel’s bi-national reality and security/insecurity (often overlooked in today’s fashionable postmodern discourse on identity), which treats ethnic problems as a normative issue confined to the domestic arena, has generated one of the most intense and protracted debates in Israeli Jewish academic circles regarding the one-million-strong Arab minority in its midst. It posed the question whether Israeli Arabs were politicizing – improving their lot through participation in Israeli politics to ensure greater equality in the allocation of resources but otherwise accepting what Amos Oz described as the “iron-wall” of the Jewish state, or radicalizing – developing opposition towards the state by linking up with outside forces of Palestinian nationalism and thus posing a potentially secessionist threat

The question this chapter poses is whether this greater participation in Israeli society and politics at the expense of direct involvement in the liberation and state-building Palestinian national enterprises, has moved upstream from political behavior to identity issues. Israel’s celebration of its fiftieth year in 1998 and the commemoration of the Nakba it engendered, presented an opportunity to compare the way Arabs in Israel commemorated and narrated the Nakba, with the way they it is commemorated in the PA across the Green Line.