From my blog.

However much Israel’s war of choice is sold to its Jewish majority as a war of necessity, this doesn’t work with Arabs. Least of all with Israel’s own 1.3 million Arab citizens, many of whom are also victims of the increasingly savage missile attacks, and nearly all of whom watch Arabic TV stations.

The television remotes are working overtime these days. The televisions are on in every Arab home in the Galilee. On Al Jazeera or the Lebanese stations, things look different. “The longer it continues the greater the anger. You can’t ignore the images, the sounds. What do you mean, where is the anger directed? At Israel, of course,” a Dir Assad resident said yesterday.

He says anyone watching the Arab channels gets a very different picture from that seen on the Israeli channels. While the Israeli channels depict a difficult but just war, the Arab satellite stations show constant attacks against civilians. The number of bodies seen on the screens every hour could change someone’s opinion of the justness of this war, and Israel is viewed as the instigator.

These Israeli Arabs, or Palestinians, were disenchanted with the “Jewish state” of Israel at the outset. This is due not only to solidarity with their kin in the occupied areas. Nor is it only due to the apartheid-like law reserving 94 percent of land for Jewish purchase only; nor to the one excluding Muslims from serving in the military (thus limiting their eligibility for social benefits) as well as in the police, the security services, and the prisons (though not as inmates); nor to a host of discriminatory statutes ranging from a 2003 “emergency regulation” restricting the right of Arabs to naturalize their families, to lower children’s allowances for non-Jews. It is due to the sum of all these, and more generally, to systematically occupying the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder:

The Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics has classified all communities in Israel into 10 clusters according to their socio-economic status. All 10 communities in the lowest cluster are Palestinian. Out of 26 communities in the second lowest cluster, 23 are Palestinian. None of the Palestinian communities ranked higher than the five lowest classifications. Moreover, almost 50 percent of the children living below the poverty line in Israel are Palestinian, despite the fact that Palestinians do not comprise more than 20 percent of Israel’s entire population. Palestinians in Israel also receive less education than their Jewish counterparts. Sixty percent of the Palestinian labor force have a maximum of nine years of education. Only five percent of Palestinians have college degrees or higher, compared to 17 percent of Jews in Israel.

In addition, Palestinians encounter problems of overcrowding. They own less than three percent of Israel’s land, and less than 50 percent of that land is under their local authority’s jurisdiction. The severe lack of appropriate, updated urban plans for their neighborhoods has created a serious housing problem. This shortage has resulted in a high population density, as well as more than 10,000 illegal houses threatened to be demolished under court order.

These data are from 2000, but things are hardly better now. For further reading, see this book entitled The Other Side of Israel, written by an Israeli Jew who, as it happens, grew up in apartheid South Africa.

On top of this one now has the simmering resentment over the brutal, meaningless destruction of Lebanon, with its consequent missile rain over Arab and Jew alike.

It’s common in Israel to talk about an ‘Arab population bomb’; indeed, several of the aforementioned discriminatory practices are justified in terms of such. But unless a constructive ‘Operation Change of Direction’ be launched, and soon, some Arab Israelis may well find themselves at their wit’s end. That could involve far uglier bombs than childbirth.