Political Parties and Electoral Politics

However much scholars from different perspectives will differ over the substance of Israeli Arab political behavior, the notion that the political behavior of Israel’s Arabs has changed radically in the past thirty years enjoys widespread agreement. Whereas in the 1960s, most of the members of Knesset represented satellite Zionist political parties, by the sixteenth Knesset in 2003, eight of the nine Arab members of Knesset represented Arab or predominantly Arab non-Zionist, if not anti-Zionist, parties (www.knesset.gov.il/mk/heb/mkindex_current.asp). So this dramatic transformation raises the question why it occurred and what its ramifications were. Israeli social scientists have addressed this question.

The debate emerged in the 1977 general elections when the DFPE, the predominantly Arab and Communist-led front, won 50 percent of the Arab vote (Ben-Dor 1980: 171–4). Many critics have claimed that since then Israeli Arabs have been “radicalizing” or “Palestinianizing” and therefore drifting out of the Israeli system into the orbit of the PLO (Israel’s ethno-national rival) or worse, from the Israeli point of view, into Palestinian Islamic fundamentalist denial of Israel. At the time, analysts thought the trend flowed from the facts that in the wake of the 1967 war, Israel’s Arab citizens renewed ties with Palestinians in the Territories coupled with an overall sharp social and economical modernization; a rapid improvement in the standard of living; a sharp increase in educational attainment (especially for women); and urbanization (albeit limited).