The Arabs in Israel

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Abstract
This study uses the case of Israeli Arabs to analyze the impact of the system of controls in creating psychological quiescence in a subordinate minority. A theoretical framework, which accounts for both the aggregate process of ethnic political behavior and reduces the ethnic phenomenon to individual terms, is used. It provides a systematic insight into the way in which the attitudes of the minority are manipulated in order to subordinate them to the requirements of the superordinate majority. The three dimensions that are most pertinent to understanding the attitudinal prerequisites for creating quiescence are the degree of perceptual consensus, intracommunal consensus, and intercommunal conflict. The empirical analysis indicates that the system of controls to which the Israeli Arabs have been subjected may have lowered the level of both their perceptual consensus and intracommunal consensus. This, in turn, might have decreased the amount of inter-communal conflict between the Arabs and the Jews, thus sparing Israel most of the consequences of ethnic strife, which came to characterize other ethnically divided societies.

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