‘Our resilience is starting to crack’: A looming brain drain crisis threatens Israel’s Arab society
Police inspect the scene of a double homicide in the Arab city of Shfaram in northern Israel, in April 2024
Omri Zerachovitz reports in Haaretz on 13 September 2024:
Two years ago, Noor (not her real name) left Israel for Spain. It wasn’t a planned move. A few years earlier she had bought a home in Haifa, started a business and began volunteering in the community. She envisaged her future in Israel.
During the May 2021 air war with Gaza, the violent clashes between Jews and Arabs in Israel got her thinking. “That was the turning point. One day I left the office in Haifa at 5 o’clock and nobody was in the streets. It was a ghost town,” she says.
“I was with a Jewish friend and things were very tense. In one neighborhood, next to a building where I once lived, Jews were attacking Arabs in their homes, and busloads of Jews arrived from [West Bank] settlements to create disturbances.
“Something in me broke. I realized that Israel wasn’t a safe place to live in, even in a mixed [Jewish-Arab] city like Haifa. The feeling that it’s impossible to live here even at a minimal level took hold more and more. I started to suffer from chronic stress that required medical treatment. I would wake up in the middle of the night filled with anxiety. Even though I left Israel for a one-year trial period, when the year ended, I knew that going back would be really bad for my mental health. I still delude myself that I left for a temporary period that will allow me to breathe a little, get stronger and return.”
The events in 2021 also led Sham (also a pseudonym) to forgo life in Israel. She had already moved to a European country to work on her doctorate, and was sure she would return to Israel. But in 2021, she started thinking about remaining abroad.
“It wasn’t easy for me to say it, and it could still change, but at the moment, if I have children, I wouldn’t want them to grow up in Israel. When I’m in Israel I’m not only a woman, I’m an Arab woman – a minority of a minority,” she says.
As her decision was taking shape, Sham discovered that even attempts to interact with Israeli Jews in the European city where she’s living were marred by racism. “A colleague from the university suggested adding me to a WhatsApp group of Israelis. I was glad because I wanted to meet people from Israel – there’s more similarity between Jews and Arabs than between Arabs and the local population. And I also wanted to use my Hebrew,” she says.
“Five minutes later the colleague came into my office and said he had to remove me from the group ‘because most of the Israelis didn’t want an Arab in it.’ Somebody from the group said he was worried that I would send the details of the people there to a terrorist organization. I really took that hard – it took me a few weeks to get a hold of myself.”
This wasn’t the first time that Sham had been ostracized for being an Arab. In her first high-tech job in Israel, she was told that the company originally didn’t plan to interview her “because they preferred to work with Jews,” until someone noted that this was akin to antisemitism abroad.
“Arab citizens here don’t get the same rights at work,” she says. “They don’t have a career route in academia or a path of progress in high-tech. Even the ones who study engineering at the Technion [Israel Institute of Technology] you don’t see in the industry later.”
Noor, Sham and other Arab Israelis Haaretz spoke with represent a growing trend in the Arab community. “I was in Israel for a month now, and almost every person I spoke to wanted to hear about my emigration process,” Noor says.
Burned cars in the mixed Jewish-Arab city of Lod in central Israel, in May 2021
If among the country’s Jewish citizens, the war and the government’s attempt to weaken the judiciary that preceded it are the driving force of the trend, in the Arab community, the reasons are different: a lack of personal security in their neighborhoods, the deterioration of the government’s attitude toward them due to the war, and the desire to live in a place where they’re not tagged as second-class citizens. The result: Young Arab Israelis are looking for alternatives abroad.
A survey for TheMarker by marketing research firm C.I. Meida Shivuki in cooperation with Panel View for the Jewish population and iPanel for the Arab population found that 43 percent of Arab Israelis would consider leaving if they had the option, with another 17 percent undecided. For the Jewish community, the numbers were 37 percent and 19 percent – even if, for both communities, the percentage of people actually leaving the country is significantly lower.
Among the 30-39 age group in the Arab community, the figure was even higher, 52 percent, compared with 43 percent among Jews. Asked how they saw their children’s future, 68 percent of Arab Israelis with above-average incomes said they thought the children’s lives would be of poorer quality than their own. That is, the people most worried in the Arab community are the socioeconomic elites, who are the most capable of leaving.
The main reasons Arab Israelis are contemplating a move abroad lie in the economy – so say 42 percent of respondents, a shade below the 43 percent for Jews. For 30 percent of Arab Israelis it’s the “security situation,” compared with 24 percent for Jews – though it’s possible that Arabs are also referring to the loss of personal security amid the surging crime rate in the Arab community.
When the Arab participants were asked what’s keeping them in Israel, 44 percent mentioned their historical and cultural connection to the land, with 37 percent noting the desire to be close to their family.
The Arabs in Israel are a bit more pessimistic than the Jews, says Rafi Strassberg, the CEO of C.I. Meida Shivuki. “We see in Arab society, as in Jewish society, two dominant elements spurring people to consider leaving: The first is the economy, the second is security. The survey didn’t go deep into subtopics, but we can surmise that the differences between the two populations lie in the content they inject into those categories,” he says.
“For the Arabs, the economic situation – which overrode even the security situation in the survey – can include equal opportunities, the prospect of finding a job in your profession and the standard of living in the Arab communities. And the feeling of personal security is apparently influenced by the level of violence and crime.”
First stage: Moving to Jewish communities
Last year 241 Arabs were murdered in Israel; 109 in the first half of the year, the same as for all of 2022. The police’s poor performance under National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has led to a collapse of the feeling of personal security in Arab towns and villages, which many people are deciding to leave.
“It’s true that well-off Arabs have been moving to Jewish communities for a few years already,” says Amir Bisharat, the director general of the National Committee of the Heads of Arab Localities. “But the daily shootings, the crime crisis and the concerns about personal security are emptying out these communities.
Protest display against Israeli police inaction in the face of rising crime and violence in Arab society,Tel Aviv, 2023
“I don’t know people who want to leave Israel, even if they haven’t advanced here like they could have in other countries. The problem is that they move to Jewish communities and understand that their children won’t attend Arab schools. The main thing spurring them to think about emigrating is the racism that’s hurled in their face. Abroad they can send the children to far better education systems and not have to hear about murders every day and ask themselves if they’ll be the next murder victim, and also not hear their neighbors’ opinion about the war and why Israel has to level Gaza.”
The problems that led to the current state of affairs in the Arab community aren’t new, but they haven’t been addressed for decades. They include inferior schools that suffer from discrimination in budgeting, and weak Arab local governments, which includes rampant corruption and even the involvement of crime organizations. All this comes on top of the dearth of opportunities for young people.
According to data from the Central Bureau of Statistics for 2020 and 2021, 40 percent of Arab Israelis in the 18-34 age bracket live below the poverty line, compared with 14.8 percent among Jews. Only 79 percent of Arab Israelis say they are satisfied with their lives, compared with 93 percent for Jews.
Nearly half of the country’s Arabs have experienced feelings of discrimination of some sort, compared with a third for Jews. In the 18-24 age group, more than 50 percent of the men and more than 70 percent of the women aren’t even trying to look for a job.
The atmosphere of despair is especially glaring in light of what Nasreen Haddad Haj-Yahya, a partner at NAS Research and Consulting, describes as a great leap forward in recent years. “Despite the dark times, the story of Arab society is one of success,” says Haj-Yahya, whose company specializes in the Arab community.
“The numbers are amazing,” adds Haj-Yahya, who is also a partner at the Portland Trust, which strives to increase the presence of underrepresented population groups in the high-tech sector. “Participation in academia and women’s employment are soaring. Some of this happened thanks to professional bureaucrats whose heart is in the right place, but also thanks to social processes that occurred in Arab society.”
According to the Council for Higher Education and the Central Bureau of Statistics, the number of Arab students in higher education more than doubled (a 122 percent rise) in a decade, and the employment rate for women age 25 to 64 surged from 29 percent to 45 percent.
But even those who have succeeded and earn a high salary aren’t necessarily enjoying their situation. They’re discovering that success also entails fear. A young Arab working in a high-tech company says that entrepreneurs in the Arab community are afraid to launch a startup and raise funds for fear that the crime organizations will demand protection money.
“Those who want to succeed here will always be afraid for their safety and the safety of their family,” says attorney Khaled Aun, an expert in commercial litigation and land. “Rich people don’t need to have it hinted to them that it’s worth leaving.
“I met with one of my clients, a successful businessman. He said, ‘I think that my whole area of business is under threat from crime organizations. I want to look for a contingency plan, because my competitors have already felt it firsthand.'”
Some of Aun’s clients consult with him about moving to other countries, usually based on a “golden visa” under which some countries grant residence or citizenship rights if the newcomers can make an economic contribution. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” he says. “There isn’t anyone above a certain educational level who hasn’t contemplated or talked about it over a cup of coffee. The better off your socioeconomic situation, the more you think about it, both because of the violence in the streets and the war.”
‘Any identification with the suffering of Gazans ends with an arrest’
Dalal Abu Amneh
The past three years have been among the roughest for the Arab community. The violent clashes in May 2021, which were fueled by the far right, brought home the fragility of the community’s existence in Israel and provided a glimpse of a possible darker future. A year and a half after that, Israel’s Arabs found themselves having to cope with the same far right – but now it held key positions in the government.
Still, in the first year of the current government’s term, the Arab community didn’t join the protests against the effort to weaken the judiciary. “The judiciary, including the state prosecution, was never a protector of the rights of the Arab minority or of our national rights,” says Bisharat. “It didn’t annul the Nation-State Law [declaring Israel the nation-state of the Jewish people], and there’s plenty of criticism about how the courts entrenched the occupation and legitimized it over the years.”
“When all kinds of people who led the protest movement asked where the Arabs were, people in our community said, ‘Nice that they suddenly remembered. Where were they before?’ The messages of the protest movement were that we needed to return to the old order, to Jewish supremacy in an imagined democracy that doesn’t have an equal place for Arabs. Where was everybody who protested against the blow to freedom of expression when the government harassed the Arab community after October 7?”
The developments since October 7 have shocked everyone Haaretz interviewed. Ordinary Arab citizens are afraid to speak in their own names to the press. They talk about political persecution, restrictions on freedom of expression, social media posts that cost people their jobs, summonses to interrogations, and arrests, many of which ended without charges.
An example is the singer (and neuroscientist) Dalal Abu Amneh, who after October 7 wrote in a post, “There is no victor but God,” with an emoji of a Palestinian flag alongside. “That was my way, as a believing woman, to express a message of peace,” she told Haaretz in February, noting that the social media person on her managerial team added the emoji. As Abu Amneh put it, “what I wrote was aimed first and foremost at Hamas, in the sense of, ‘This is not how you will be victorious.'”
Abu Amneh was taken into custody, handcuffed and shackled. She spent three days in jail before being released to house arrest, suspected of offenses involving “conduct that might disturb the public order.” Four months later the criminal case against her was closed, but in the meantime, she was the target for months of daily harassment and demonstrations outside her home in Afula in the north, in which the city’s mayor took part.
Recently, Abu Amneh, who earned her doctorate in neuroscience from the Technion, decided to move abroad for several years with her two children after receiving an offer from a U.S. academic institution to carry out research on how music can be a bridge between people and cultures.
An arrest like the one of Abu Amneh usually requires the state prosecutor’s okay, to avoid infringement of freedom of expression. But after October 7 the police received sweeping authority to launch investigations against anyone suspected of expressing support for Hamas’ massacre. Many of the arrests turned out to be baseless.
“It was a terrible feeling,” Bisharat says. “Every post of identification with the suffering of the people of Gaza ended with an arrest, while Jews were chanting ‘Death to the Arabs’ and weren’t charged. People were taken from their homes before dawn and were blindfolded and handcuffed. “The police would take their picture with an Israeli flag next to them in order to humiliate them, and published the photos. Later, some of them became part of the [November] hostage deal as part of the quid pro quo with Hamas. Arab citizens, without trial and without an indictment, were included in Hamas’ list of people to be released [from Israeli prisons].
“That’s mind-boggling. It remains a real rift between Arab society and the state. In every Arab home, there is talk of political persecution. Parents tell their children: ‘Don’t write anything on Facebook, so you won’t get in trouble.’ Young people are deleting their Facebook accounts because they don’t need the hassle.”
According to an Arab business owner, “The situation in this country is being made intolerable. This is the way to carry out a [population] transfer of Arabs. Many people have been fired because of posts, or their academic studies have been halted. Businesses need to be able to accommodate opinions that are different. I employ Jews, and I do this because of their skills, not because of their political views.”
The Arab Israeli feminist group Kayan set up a hotline for employees trying to cope with events at work related to the war. The group received around 570 complaints between the beginning of the war and February; things like pre-dismissal hearings at work because of social media posts, messages in WhatsApp groups and even private remarks. Many of the dismissal proceedings stemmed from complaints by colleagues.
“The complaints came from everywhere: banks, high-tech, hotels, fashion chains, factories, restaurants and so on,” says attorney Abeer Baker, a legal adviser to Kayan who also represents Abu Amneh. “In the dozens of cases I examined, I didn’t encounter a single opinion that justified dismissal. There’s a muddle between illegal and inappropriate remarks.
“For example, people posted all kinds of verses from the Quran or slogans that we had always chanted at demonstrations. It’s not surprising that Arab judges who dealt with such arrests treated them differently, because they understood the context. It’s a cultural thing that involves the timing of when the remarks were made.”
The business owner adds: “Strong people [economically] will get fed up with the situation, and they have the means to leave. That way the number of Palestinians in the country will also be reduced and fewer strong, established people will remain – and their freedom will be able to be reduced and their rights infringed on, as the apartheid policy is extended from the territories into Israel.
“A few years ago, I thought that we were managing to improve the condition of the Arab community and that there was no reason to leave. Now, many students who go abroad to study don’t return. Our mental resilience is starting to crack.
“The change occurred during Operation Guardian of the Walls [the fighting with Gaza in May 2021], because we saw that at the moment of truth, the masks fall. As long as the talk is about a Jewish state, with the Palestinian issue and the occupation ignored and no recognition of an independent Palestinian state, the problem won’t be solved. Israel will deteriorate into full apartheid. Occupation and democracy don’t go together.”
The current period is also bringing to the surface the trauma of 1948. “This war is the first time the Arab community is shutting up,” says Aun, the lawyer. “This isn’t because they have nothing to say, but because they’re afraid. Arab society has lowered its head and will have a hard time lifting it again.
“We’re worried that if we open our mouths, another Nakba will happen to us. People in the government have the will and the capacity to do that. There’s no reason for what’s happening in Jit [a West Bank village vandalized by settlers] and in Khan Yunis [in Gaza] not to happen in Israel too. “I’m a Palestinian like the innocent people being killed there. There’s no reason for Ben-Gvir to hate me less than he does the people who live in Jit. Every sensible person wants his family to be in a place that’s protected.”
Ideas about emigration among Arab Israelis mirror the mindset in the Jewish community. On the one hand there is understanding for wanting to leave, on the other there is criticism for yielding to what the other side wants.
“My family will never leave,” says Noor, the woman from Haifa who emigrated. “The message they’re sending me is ‘We survived the Nakba, we’ll stay here and survive.’ … This country wants me dead, sick or disabled, and I don’t want to give in to that. I’m not optimistic, but things change. I keep remembering that decades ago there was a dictatorship in Spain, and now it’s a different world, so I want to believe that things change.”
Ali (not his real name), who is employed in high-tech in the center of the country, has been looking for a haven abroad over the past year. “How many Arab millionaires are there? How many ‘exits’ of Arab companies have there been?” he asks.
“There are barriers here, and other countries will open up opportunities for us. I have Jewish friends, and you see that both sides are becoming more extreme. This war also has a religious dimension that I have no interest in. The Jewish liberals are a group that’s shrinking all the time.”
Ali plans to find a country he can work in, especially looking for a safe place. He says he wants his children to be somewhere that “won’t judge them because their mother and father were born Arabs. Unfortunately, we’ll lose good people here in the Arab community.” Noor adds: “As long as the Jews in Israel maintain their supremacy, there won’t be a partnership between Jews and Arabs. From the outset we aren’t equal – not in [population] density, not in access to green areas.
“The state heightened the segregation and the rule of the Jews, like the situation with guns. The state is arming the Jewish citizens, and the Arab citizens are caught between a rock and a hard place: between armed Jews who can shoot them anywhere, and the crime in Arab society. So the feeling of everyday security is very different.
“It’s tough living in the mixed cities, too. In Jerusalem it’s a nightmare to rent an apartment, no matter what your job is – what makes the difference is the Arab name. Every time there was a security event, I couldn’t leave the office. You had to be wary of both the Jewish civilians and the police. When I took the bus in tense periods, I didn’t take calls in which I would have to speak Arabic.”
Haj-Yahya, from the consulting firm, insists on remaining optimistic. “When elites abandon a country, it falls apart, because they’re the ones who hold the country together. In Arab and Jewish society alike you can see people with resources looking for a way out, because they don’t see a future here.
“At the same time, my feeling is that in the end, the Arabs and the Jews are clinging to this place and don’t think there’s a better place to live. Around me there are people 40-plus – academics, people with careers – who realize that the utopian dream that something better awaits them abroad has become a bit feebler, and that things will be challenging everywhere, both in Europe and definitely in the United States.
“There are also differences between the two groups. In Jewish society people are looking to relocate both because of the judicial overhaul and the security situation, while in Arab society many from the elite feel they’re crashing into what, since October 7, is no longer a glass ceiling but a concrete one. The incitement by the government and others against the Arab community is leading many people to ask themselves what there is for them here. The severe crime crisis, which the government isn’t dealing with at all, touches almost every Arab family.
“At the same time, in Israel we have an education system that can serve us in our language, we have our extended family, a community, and we’re part of a considerable minority group. … Despite the discrimination, the racist government and the cuts in the five-year [economic development] program for the Arab community, this is my home, this is my homeland, and I’m obligated to fight for it. What’s most important now is to have strong people staying here.”
In Bisharat’s view, “The emptying out of the established, educated people from the Arab communities is weakening a society that will continue to wallow in crime, because the ones who will rise and prevent the channeling of young people to crime are the affluent. But when they leave, there is an increased load on the Arab authorities, which should be dealing more with welfare, education, at-risk youth and youths dropping out.
“This will also preserve the segregation between the Arabs and the Jews, and will leave the Arabs in the more grinding professions – more Arab construction workers, fewer Arab doctors. So it’s very important that we generate a joint effort to keep that population here, and this will happen only if we create a feeling that they have an equal and just future here.”
This article is reproduced in its entirety