Arab Israelis show increasing sense of ‘shared destiny’ with Jews and Israel – study

A new Tel Aviv University study has revealed “encouraging data regarding coexistence in Israel,” with 57.8% of Arab Israelis saying they “believe that the ongoing war has fostered a sense of shared destiny between Arabs and Jews in Israel,” the university says in a press release.

The study was conducted by the Konrad Adenauer Program for Jewish-Arab Cooperation at the university’s Moshe Dayan Center.

The announcement noted that a June 2024 survey had found only 51.6% of Arab respondents felt the same. And a similar study conducted in November 2023, just a month after the October 7, 2023, attacks, showed that “the majority of the Arab public (69.8%) said the war had harmed solidarity between Arabs and Jews,” it says.

And so “the current figure represents a statistically significant increase in this metric,” the release notes.

The press release highlights further results from the current survey:

Only 9% of Arab Israeli respondents said that “their Palestinian identity is the dominant component of their identity,” with 33.9% noting Israeli citizenship, 29.2% citing religious affiliation and 26.9% their Arab identity as the “dominant elements” in their personal identity.

Just 6.7% “think Hamas should continue governing the Gaza Strip after the war,” while 20.7% favored the Palestinian Authority, 20.1% a multinational force, 17.9% Israel and 15.8% “local Gazan entities.”

More than half of the respondents, 53.4%, said “a normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia could signal a positive regional development,” and almost half (49.2%) said that “resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should not be a precondition for such an agreement.”

A majority of Israeli-Arab respondents, 71.8%, “support the inclusion of an Arab party in the Israeli government after the next elections,” with some 47.8% supporting Arab parties joining “any government, not just a center-left coalition.”

At the same time, a “weak sense of personal security,” largely caused by “the high incidence of violence in Arab communities,” was reported by 65.8% of the respondents.

A majority, 65.1%, reported “a relatively good economic situation.”

“It appears… that under the dark shadow cast by the war over all citizens of Israel, both Arabs and Jews, meaningful bright spots are emerging, that could redefine the rules of the game in the post-war era,” says Dr. Arik Rudnitzky, project manager at the Konrad Adenauer Program for Jewish-Arab Cooperation.