Let's Talk About Israeli Arabs

And avoid knee-jerk responses

A group of Jewish and Arab medical professionals at Rambam hospital in Haifa in a campaign for coexistence

Last week, relatives of four soldiers wounded in Lebanon claimed on social media that the Arab night-shift staff at Rambam hospital mistreated the soldiers. The administration of Rambam hospital flatly denies it. The far-right in Israel is calling for all kinds of measures - having IDF soldiers protect wounded soldiers, having only Jewish medical staff take care of them, etc. It’s creating a storm in Israel, so I thought that this would be a good opportunity to return to a still-relevant topic that I raised several months ago.

In my earlier post, “The Bibiggest Lie In Israel Today,” I exposed the fraudulent claim being constantly pounded out by Bibi, the Likud and his other groupies: that it’s traitorous to vote for Bennett, since he is ready to include Mansour Abbas’s Arab party in a coalition. Now, aside from the fact that Bennett has ruled this out, and that the best way to ensure that there is no pressure for it to happen is to encourage more people to vote for Bennett, what Bibi and co. are not revealing is that Bibi himself was ready to do the same back in 2021. Yinon Magel of Channel 14, Bibi’s most dedicated acolyte, announced at the time that the Right is very much in favor of cooperation with Arabs, and that he personally would like to see Mansour Abbas as a minister! And in order to try to placate the more right-wing religious elements of his coalition, Bibi arranged for the endorsement of R. Shmuel Eliyahu and R. Tau.

But there was a question that I did not discuss in that post. How was this possible? How could Bibi and these prominent right-wing religious rabbis approve of including an Arab party in the government?

The answer is as follows.

Jews often don’t like to think about this fact and its ramifications, but one fifth of Israel’s population - over two million people - are Arabs. Amongst this population, there is a very wide range of attitudes to the Jewish state.

At one end of the spectrum, you have those who are implacably hostile to Israel, like former MK Haneen Zoabi, and even supportive of terrorist attacks against it. At the other end, there are not just Druze, but also Muslim Arabs who serve in the IDF. Lucy Aharish, a prominent Muslim Arab television news anchor, was a powerful voice condemning Hamas and expressing solidarity with the families of fallen soldiers. And, of course, there are people at every level in between these two extremes.

Then there’s the economic factor. Much of the Arab population is very poor, and the community is a net drain on the economy. But it is far, far less of a drain than, say, the charedi community. In addition, there is no ideology of deliberately not working, as there is the charedi community. And especially when it comes to the medical field, Arabs particularly excel - they are fully forty percent of the medical workforce in Israel.

So, what do you do with such a community? While the knee-jerk reaction of many Jews is that “they are all the enemy, we must not ever cooperate with them or help them!” this does not make any sense from a strategic perspective (and arguably not from a Torah/ ethical perspective either). The two million Arab citizens of Israel are not going anywhere. And so the choices available to Israel are as follows: Do we want to influence them to be more like Haneen Zoabi or more like Lucy Aharish? Do we want them to be more economically productive or less economically productive?

Mansour Abbas is not a Zionist. However, he is a revolutionary among leaders of Arab parties. He has rejected the practice that Arab politicians exist to further the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. He has publicly stated in both Hebrew and Arabic speeches that Israel is and will remain a Jewish state (which is more than charedi leaders are willing to do). He seeks funds in order to improve economic growth for Arab society (again in contrast to charedi leaders). And he has spoken in support of national service (also in contrast to charedi leaders).

Again, Mansour Abbas is no Zionist. He has made problematic statements, and elements of his party have been linked with an organization funding Hamas (though then again, there were Jews who saw Hamas as an asset and helped them obtain enormous sources of funding to control Gaza - Bibi and co.) But if you want to understand how Bibi and prominent Religious Zionist rabbis were ready to include Mansour Abbas in the government, this is the explanation.

Now let’s put the topic of political appointments aside and discuss this week’s controversy. Much of the debate is revolving around protecting wounded soldiers from the possibility of maltreatment vs. harming the work environment for Arabic medical staff. But there’s also another issue to consider.

If you want to decrease the number of Arabic medical staff, who are you going to replace them with?! Israel is already facing a severe and worsening shortage of medical workers, lagging significantly behind developed world benchmarks. And nearly half of all practicing doctors in Israel are over 55, with there soon being a mass retirement wave of physicians who originally immigrated from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s.

Meanwhile nearly a fifth (and sharply rising) of Israel’s Jewish population are charedi. And they are not producing any physicians or other professional medical workers, since they don’t teach biology. You get some religious and even charedi baal-teshuva American immigrants who are physicians, but the numbers do not come close to compensating for the number of medical professionals retiring or leaving the country in the past few years.

The knee-jerk tribalists can never see any further than “Jews good, Arabs bad.” But thoughtful people can see that in terms of ideology, economics, and Israel’s long-term well-being and survival, it’s more in Israel’s interests to cooperate with certain Arabs than with certain Jews.