At the end of last year, the Knesset authorized a fifteen-billion-shekel plan to better the circumstances and further the integration of Israel’s Arab population over the next five years. Sanguine about the plan’s prospects, Meir Elran and Eran Yashiv outline its most significant elements and explain its importance:
Special emphasis is being placed on teacher training and professional development, learning achievements, and expanded informal education. . . . Transformation in allocation mechanisms, [however], is perhaps the most significant measure in the new program, and connotes a clear public assertion by the Israeli government that it acknowledges the ongoing discrimination in allocations to the Arab population and Arab communities. The [most] prominent objective of the program is that allocations to minorities match those to the Jewish majority.
These two components, acknowledgment and change, bespeak a fundamental political change that must be tested over time. The fact that the program was adopted by the current right-wing Israeli government, in the midst of yet another time of rising tension between the Jewish and Arab populations, reflects awareness that improving the conditions of the Arab population is in the economic and social interest of both the minority and the majority.
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