Arab Citizens of Israel: How Far Have They Come?
By Robert Cherry
Wicked Son, 2026, 320 pages, $20
In his new book Arab Citizens of Israel: How Far Have They Come?, Brooklyn College economist and frequent American Spectator contributor Robert Cherry debunks much of the leftist canards surrounding the Israeli-Arab conflict. Instead, the book argues that Arab political dispossession in the Holy Land was largely a result of Arab violent, maximalist policies, and highlights the extent to which many Israeli governments, particularly the right-wing ones, tried to improve the economic lives of its Arab citizens.
The Israeli diplomat Abba Eban once famously said: “The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” In this vein, Cherry discussed the extent to which the Arabs resisted efforts by the early Zionists and then Israel to reach a political settlement over the Holy Land. Cherry states that the Arab population violently rejected any semblance of Jewish immigration and political autonomy at least as early as the 1920 Jerusalem/Nebi Musa riots.
Cherry devotes considerable attention to a subject often overlooked in Western coverage of Israel: the Israeli government’s efforts to improve the economic and social conditions of its Arab citizens.
A key antagonist who emerged in the war against the Jews was Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The Grand Mufti was later succeeded by PLO leader Yasser Arafat, who “characterized himself a disciple of the Grand Mufti and ‘was continuing the path the Mufti had paved.’” Cherry shows how the Mufti incited violent riots against the Jews in both 1921 and 1929 in the Holy Land, and against the Jewish diaspora in Iraq in 1941.
(Cherry also highlights the violent riots perpetrated by the Arab population against the Jews in the “Jewish Nakba” throughout the Middle East, including in Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Libya, and the port city of Aden in the 1940s, and also the Nazi-adjacent governmental policies in Iraq in the early 1950s. Most of the 800,000 Jews from the Middle East fled such persecution and migrated to Israel.)
But while the British and the Jews sought compromise in the Holy Land, Cherry highlights how the Grand Mufti led not only the Arab rejection of the Peel Commission, but also the murder of Arabs that supported the Commission and reconciliation with Jews generally.
When the British delegated the fate of the land to the United Nations, Cherry shows how Arab leadership maintained a maximalist view: opposing partition of the land west of the Jordan River into a Jewish and Arab state, opposing Jewish immigration, and opposing Jewish political representation. The notable exception that Cherry mentions is Transjordan’s King Abdullah, who supported partition (and was later assassinated by an Arab). Cherry asserts that the Grand Mufti and his Husseini clan used violence to dominate local Arab politics during the British mandate period. In fact, Cherry claims that while many Jews initially supported the concept of a binational Arab-Jewish state, violence against the Jews was so great that most Jews came to reject the concept of a binational state because they knew such a state could not protect them.
Continuing the Grand Mufti’s legacy, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and his delegation would go on to reject all peace proposals in Camp David in 2000, without providing any alternative maps, and then launched the Second Intifada against Israel. Cherry also points out that the crux of this and later rejections of sovereignty by the PLO was the “nakba” narrative, which had evolved to fixate on the “right of return” of all Arabs who left what would become Israel in 1947-1949, and their descendants. (Not discussed in the book is PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas’s later rejection of peace offered by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008, and by President Trump in 2020.)
A silver lining that Cherry highlights is the examples of local Arab and other minority leaders who reconciled with Israel, which stood in contrast to the mostly intransigent nationalist Arab leaders. The book gives examples of the many Druze, Bedouin, and Christian Arabs who were largely non-belligerent in Israel’s War of Independence, and the Zionists in turn spared their villages.
Cherry highlights that some Druze even defected from the Arab side to the Zionist side. He further notes that Lebanon largely remained out of Israel’s War of Independence because of the friendly relations between Lebanese Christians and (pre-Hezbollah) Shi’a Muslims with the Jews. Cherry observes as well that Christians in Haifa largely did not fight the Zionists. While the Jewish mayor of Haifa was among several Jewish leaders who urged Arabs to remain during the war — and the Jewish community even organized food relief for Haifa’s Arab residents during wartime — it was ironically the nationalist Arab leadership that pressured Arabs in Haifa and elsewhere to abandon their homes in support of the broader Arab war against Israel, threatening to brand those who stayed as traitors.
Cherry’s book highlights that the nationalist rejectionist versus local conciliatory approach among the Arabs continued into the modern period. While nationalist Arab leaders called on Israeli-Arabs to boycott Arab integration into Israel’s civil service and police force, local Arab leaders endorsed these programs.
Cherry also talks about the Jewish-Arab property rights dispute in Sheikh Jarrah in eastern Jerusalem, where several Arab residents sought compromise while the nationalist Arab leadership used intimidation to prevent them from taking an offer provided to them by Israel’s Supreme Court in 2021. Additionally, in 2016, while the three national Balad members of Knesset (MKs) visited the home of an Arab terrorist who murdered three Israeli Jews, the Arab mayor of Rahat visited the home of one of the victims. And while national Arab leaders boycotted former Israeli Prime Minister and President Shimon Peres’s funeral in 2016, 20 local Arab mayors attended.
I wrote previously for American Thinker on another example of the tension between local and nationalist Arab leadership, from 2015:
Ali Salem, the mayor of Nazareth, interrupted a live interview of a fellow Muslim Israeli Arab (Knesset member Ayman Odeh, leader of the Joint List)). In what the Washington Free Beacon described as a “startling display of prime time street theatre,” Salem heckled Odeh from his car, telling him to leave Nazareth and go to Haifa, and that Odeh’s stance on the recent incitement and violence against Israelis was “destroying” Nazareth. Salem also criticized Arab members of Knesset for their participation in violent protests, stating that “they are destroying our future, they are destroying co-existence.”
Cherry devotes considerable attention to a subject often overlooked in Western coverage of Israel: the Israeli government’s efforts to improve the economic and social conditions of its Arab citizens. He argues that many of the most significant recent initiatives came not from Israel’s political left, but from conservative governments — particularly those led by Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Likud Jerusalem mayors Nir Barkat (2008–2018) and Moshe Lion (2018–present).
Under Netanyahu, these efforts included reducing overcrowding in Arab schools, improving standardized test scores, expanding employment training programs for the high-tech sector, establishing joint Jewish- and Arab-Israeli industrial parks, encouraging investment by Israeli technology companies in Arab communities (including Nazareth), and upgrading education and infrastructure. Cherry further describes the substantial budgets allocated by Netanyahu’s governments to promote growth in the Arab sector, including funding directed toward eastern Jerusalem, sometimes despite opposition from Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich of the Religious Zionist Party.
All in all, Cherry’s book is an important contribution to understanding two often overlooked aspects of the Israeli-Arab conflict: the resistance of much of the Arab leadership to political compromise and integration with Israel, and Israel’s efforts to expand opportunities for its Arab citizens.
READ MORE from Steve Postal:
The War Israel Was Never Allowed to Win
The Missing History of the ‘Nakba’
Rubio’s Israel-Lebanon Agreement Cuts Iran Out of the Peace Process
