Peace and Conflict Studies - Spring 2014

Peace and Conflict Studies Volume 21, Number 1 8 Arab-Palestinian citizens – influenced Israeli public perception of the Israeli-Arab conflict as a whole: 1. Israel and its neighbor Arab countries – In 1979 Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty and by 1981 Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula. This peace agreement demonstrated for the Israeli public that the Israeli-Arab conflict was no longer a threat to Israel’s existence; the notion that Israel could be secure due to the fact that it has peace agreements and that the land-for-peace approach could be implemented, changed the way Israeli society perceived the conflict (Horowitz & Lissak, 1990). In 1982 the Lebanon War took place and also fundamentally changed the way the Israeli public viewed relations between Israel and its neighbors; Israelis implicitly acknowledged that Israel was not only a peace-seeking country that fights no choice and just wars (Ben-Porat, 2008), but that it also initiates wars. These two developments, taken together, weakened fundamental elements of the Israeli traditional narrative, including the belief that Israel is always right, is always reaching for peace, doesn’t have a partner to sign a treaty with on the Arab side, and the popular conviction that more land equals more security. Israel appeared to its own citizens to be a country that is not always right, that has a partner for peace in the Arab world, and for which a peace agreement is essential to help stabilize the region and to ensure Israel’s security more efficaciously than victories of wars did. 2. Relations between Jewish and Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel – On March 30 th , 1976, a brutal clash took place between the Israeli police and Arab-Palestinian-Israeli citizens demonstrating against government expropriation of lands. Six Israeli Arab- Palestinians were killed in these clashes and the Arab-Palestinian minority vehemently claimed that Israeli police used disproportional force solely because the protestors were Arabs. This day, which later became known as Land Day, brought into the open the dimensions of Israeli Arabs’ distrust of the Jewish Israeli state, and is considered a landmark in the conflict between Arab and Jewish Israeli citizens (Smooha, 1993). Israeli scholars provide different explanations about the causes for the outbreak of the conflict between Jewish and Arab-Palestinian citizens in the late 1970s and through the 1980s. Some believe it emerged because of the Palestinianization of the Arab minority and the rise of Jewish nationalism after the 1967 War. Others maintain that the political change in Israel after the elections of