Arab citizens of Israel

Arab citizens of Israel

عرب ٤٨‎ المواطنون الفلسطينيين في إسرائيل‎ עֲרָבִים אֶזרָחֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל‎
Map of Arab localities in Israel, 2015
Total population
Green Line, 2023: 2,065,000 (21%)[1][2] East Jerusalem and Golan Heights, 2012: 278,000 (~3%)
Regions with significant populations
State of Israel
Languages
Arabic[a] and Hebrew
Religion
Islam (84%)[b] Christianity (8%)[c] Druze (8%)[3]
Related ethnic groups
Middle Eastern peoples

The Arab citizens of Israel form Israel’s largest ethnic minority.^[4][5] They are mostly former Palestinian citizens who have continued to live in what became Israel, and their descendants.^[6] The majority of Arabs in Israel now prefer to be identified as Palestinian citizens of Israel.^{[7][8][9][10]}

Following the establishment of Israel in the wake of the 1948 Palestine war, it conferred its citizenship to the Palestinian Arabs who remained or were not expelled from its territory, but they were put under military law and discriminated against until 1966. After the 1967 Six-Day War, which resulted in an ongoing occupation of several territories, Israel annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in the early 1980s, thereby granting citizenship eligibility to the two territories' Palestinian and Syrian populace respectively.^[11] Acquisition of Israeli citizenship there is scarce as only 5% of Palestinians in East Jerusalem were Israeli citizens in 2022, largely due to Palestinian society's disapproval of naturalization as complicity with the occupation. After the Second Intifada, the opposition loosened, but Israel made the process more difficult, approving only 34% of new Palestinian applications.

According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, the Israeli Arab population stood at 2.1 million people in 2023, accounting for 21% of Israel's total population.^[1] The majority of these Arab citizens identify themselves as Arab or Palestinian by nationality and as Israeli by citizenship.^[12][13][14] They mostly live in Arab-majority towns and cities, some of which are among the poorest in the country, and generally attend schools that are separated to some degree from those attended by Jewish Israelis.^[15] Arab political parties traditionally did not join governing coalitions until 2021, when the United Arab List became the first to do so.^[16] The Druze and the Bedouin in the Negev and the Galilee have historically expressed the strongest non-Jewish affinity to Israel and are more likely to identify as Israelis than other Arab citizens.^{[17][18][19][20]}

Speakers of both Arabic and Hebrew, their traditional vernacular is mostly Levantine Arabic, including Lebanese Arabic in northern Israel, Palestinian Arabic in central Israel, and Bedouin Arabic across the Negev. Because the modern Arabic dialects of Israel's Arabs have absorbed many Hebrew loanwords and phrases, it is sometimes called the Israeli Arabic dialect.^[21] By religious affiliation, the majority of Arab Israelis are Muslims, but there are significant Christian and Druze minorities, among others.^[22] Arab citizens of Israel have a wide variety of self-identification: as Israeli or "in Israel"; as Arabs, Palestinians, or Israelis; and as Muslims, Christians or Druze.^[23]

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