MIDDLE EAST QUARTERLY
Why Israel’s Arabs Are Its Biggest Threat
Efraim Karsh
Spring 2022

…Why did Arab dissidence increase dramatically with the vast improvement in Arab standard of living in the 1970s and 1980s? Why did it escalate into an open uprising in October 2000—after a decade that saw government allocations to Arab municipalities grow by 550 percent and the number of Arab civil servants nearly treble?…The truth is that, in the modern world, socioeconomic progress has rarely been a recipe for political moderation and inter-communal coexistence but has often been superseded by nationalist, religious, and xenophobic extremism. So it has been with the Palestinian Arabs and Israel’s Arab citizens, whose political extremism and propensity for violence, from the days of the British mandate to the present, have intensified in tandem with improvement in their socioeconomic lot. READ MORE

AMERICAN THINKER Kalman J. Kaplan: Why are Israeli Arabs so defiant ? In a recent article in the Middle East Quarterly, editor Efraim Karsh argues that Israel’s Arabs are the biggest threat to Israel. At first glance, the reader may be taken aback by such a notion. Have not Israel’s Arabs become more and more integrated into Israeli society? What in the world is Karsh talking about? Consider some of the disturbing questions Karsh asks: Why did Arab dissidence increase dramatically with the vast improvement in Arab standard of living in the 1970s and 1980s?