Ethnocracy and its Impact on Israeli Society and Security

Abstract

Israel, from its very beginning, has been a widely hostile nation to the idea of Arabs as citizens, and pan-Arabisation as a socio-political principle. This perception of a state as its official decree has not gone through a change throughout the annals of time, even if it houses almost 21% Arabs, the majority of who are Palestinian Muslim citizens, parted from their homeland during the bifurcation in 1948. The Arab population  has been able to get basic citizenship rights from early on, but their political, economic and social position in the state still hangs on a thin rope. In fact, the rope has thinned even more after 1984, when the creation of a fundamentalist outfit – Hamas and the advent of Political Islam at Israel’s doorstep has created a sense of deep mistrust and discrimination, where Israel now looks at a part of its population as the perceived enemy and a threat to Jewish security in a Jewish homeland. The perception of threat, which is based on the imagination that the Israeli Arabs might swing towards fundamentalism, has made the right-wing Jewish parties peddle propaganda in the general mass.