Israel Needs a Jewish-Arab Partnership. Blood Libels Threaten It.
- Aug 11
- 7 min read
Over the past few days, a disturbing claim has spread across Israeli social media, echoed by public figures and even some elected officials: that Arab doctors and nurses at Rambam Hospital in Haifa deliberately withheld medical treatment from a wounded IDF soldier because he was a soldier.
There is no evidence supporting that claim. Rambam investigated the allegations and found no wrongdoing. What began as an allegation by the soldier’s relatives was quickly amplified into a sweeping accusation against Arab medical workers - and, by extension, against Arab Israelis at large.
A Jewish-Arab partnership is not some utopian idea for the distant future, or merely a necessity that opposition parties need in order to oust Netanyahu. It matters because such a partnership is essential for Israel.
Every day, Jewish and Arab doctors, nurses, paramedics, and other healthcare workers treat Jewish and Arab patients together. They save lives together. Healthcare professionals say, time and time again, that without Arab doctors and nurses, many hospital departments would have collapsed.
And yet, a single baseless accusation can be transformed into a story about an entire population. Those who spread such claims cynically exploit the bad blood and mistrust that many Jews and Arabs feel, especially since October 7, to delegitimize an entire segment of Israeli society and, in doing so, undermine the possibility of political partnership between Jewish and Arab citizens.
This matters because such a partnership is not some utopian idea for the distant future, or merely a necessity that opposition parties need in order to oust Netanyahu. It matters because such a partnership is essential for Israel - as the democratic nation-state of the Jewish people - to flourish.
Despite the Racism, A Shared Society is Being Built
Across Israel, Arab citizens are becoming increasingly integrated into almost every aspect of Israeli society, from higher education to the healthcare system. However, there are still enormous gaps - Arab Israelis are underrepresented in spheres of power; Arab society is underfunded when it comes to education, infrastructure, and housing; and it suffers from a pandemic of organized crime that the police, under Public Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, have failed to address.
An Arab doctor who treats a Jewish patient is not merely an example of coexistence, she is part of the country’s healthcare system. An Arab entrepreneur who builds a successful company is not merely contributing to “integration”, he is contributing to Israel’s economy. A country of Israel’s size and facing its challenges cannot afford to leave a fifth of its population on the sidelines.
But the trajectory is unmistakable, and polls show that a growing share of Israeli Arabs prefer to integrate into Israel - without challenging its character and without compromising their identity.
This integration is valuable for two different reasons. The first is practical: Israel needs the talents of all its citizens. An Arab doctor who treats a Jewish patient is not merely an example of coexistence, she is part of the country’s healthcare system. An Arab entrepreneur who builds a successful company is not merely contributing to “integration”, he is contributing to Israel’s economy. An Arab police officer is not “a symbol” of trust; they are a public servant with a responsibility to protect their fellow citizens and uphold the law.
A country of Israel’s size and facing its challenges cannot afford to leave a fifth of its population on the sidelines.
But there is also a deeper reason: equal citizenship is valuable even when it produces no economic or strategic benefit.
Arab Israelis are not merely a potential source of labor and tax revenue, and they are definitely not another pool of votes on which political parties can rely. They are citizens. They deserve equal dignity, equal opportunity, and equal protection because that is what a liberal democratic society owes its citizens, especially when they are a minority in a nation-state.
Jewish-Arab Partnership Does Not Mean Pretending Everything is Fine
Let’s be honest: not everything is perfect. Far from it.
There is bad blood between Jewish and Arab citizens. There is fear and suspicion. There is historical trauma on both sides. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict affects how many Israelis see one another, and October 7 made things exponentially worse. Israel’s education system, which fails to properly teach the history of the conflict, creates generations of Israeli Jews who are not even sure what the difference is between Arabs who are citizens of Israel and Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza.
And yes, there is racism - including anti-Arab racism among some Jews and hostility toward Jews among some Arabs. We should not deny any of this. In fact, pretending these problems do not exist makes partnership harder, not easier.
Trust cannot be demanded. It has to be built through experience: through working together, studying together, treating one another’s children, and building businesses together.
The healthcare system provides perhaps the clearest example. It is one of the places where Jewish-Arab cooperation is not a slogan but a daily reality, if only because hospitals are the one place everyone has to visit every now and then - hopefully only for giving birth.
But merely living side by side and jointly building Israeli society is not enough. Just as the fact that a liberal, secular Jew from Tel Aviv and a conservative, religious Jew from Jerusalem may fight shoulder to shoulder is not enough for them to lead this country together. In both cases, a unifying vision is needed.
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A Different Kind of Israeli Politics
Ra’am is an Arab Islamist party, not a Zionist party and not a liberal party. Many of its positions, including on gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights, are not shared by everyone - including us at LIBRAEL. But over the past couple of years, Ra’am has taken a leap of faith to become a political voice for Israeli Arabs who want to integrate.
Dr. Mansour Abbas (a dentist by profession), chairman of Ra’am, has explicitly acknowledged Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and committed to keeping it that way. He has openly declared that while he does not compromise on his views on religion or family, he is not interested in imposing them on anyone else. He cut Ra’am’s ties to the Shura Council, an Islamist council of religious leaders, to ensure that his party is independent from religious doctrines. He called out, time and time again, the atrocities of October 7.
In the last week, it was reported that Abbas is considering adding Yoav Segalovich, a centrist MK from Yesh Atid and a former high-ranking police officer, as his second-in-command and as Ra’am’s nominee for Minister of Public Security, in charge of the police. Between June 2021 and December 2022, Segalovich was the deputy Minister of Public Security in the “Change Government” and led the efforts to fight organized crime in Arab society, working directly with Arab communities and leaders. What a shift from Itamar Ben Gvir.
In the previous government, Abbas demonstrated that an Arab political party could participate in the institutions of the State of Israel, including in a Zionist, center-right government. Abbas’s presence in the government had zero effect on Israel’s Jewish character or its ability to defend itself - as former minister Benny Gantz, who now opposes sitting with Abbas and calling him radical, said himself - and instead pursued practical improvements for Arab citizens from within the Israeli political system.
All of that does not mean that Jewish and Arab Israelis suddenly share the same national identity. We don’t, and that’s okay.
It means that even in nation-states, ethnic and racial minorities can and should participate in public life - and the national majority can and should open its arms to such participation, as both sides understand that it does not require agreement on everything.
The Israel We Should Build
LIBRAEL is a non-political, non-partisan organization. We do not endorse parties or candidates, and we are not asking Israelis to adopt a particular policy plan.
We are arguing for something more fundamental: that Israel’s Jewish and democratic identities are strengthened, not weakened, when its Jewish and Arab citizens are able to participate in society as equal partner.
We must be able to acknowledge Jewish fears without turning Arabs into suspects, just as we must be able to recognize Arab grievances without dismissing Jewish concerns.
There is a reason the Haifa hospital mentioned at the beginning of this op-ed is called Rambam, after Rabbi Moshe Ben Maimon - Maimonides - the Jewish scholar and doctor from Medieval Muslim Spain, who treated Muslim royalty and his fellow Jews alike. That should be our role model for such a partnership.
At the same time, we must not blind ourselves to the challenges ahead. We must be able to fight racism without denying that it exists.
We must be able to acknowledge Jewish fears without turning Arabs into suspects, just as we must be able to recognize Arab grievances without dismissing Jewish concerns.
And most importantly, we must be able to reject the idea that an Arab citizen must prove their loyalty by becoming less Arab, just as a Jewish citizen does not have to become less Jewish or less Zionist if they, like us, believe in equality.
The challenge is to turn that interdependence into trust, and that trust into partnership.
Israel’s future - as the democratic nation-state of the Jewish people - depends on it.
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