Jewish-Arab partnership is Israel’s future
On Sunday, Yehoshua Shani, the uncle of an IDF soldier who had been medically evacuated from Lebanon to Rambam Hospital last week, claimed that Arab staff had purposely mistreated his nephew. According to Shani, “all the nursing staff on duty spoke Arabic. At one point, all the families were taken out of the ward and the doors were locked. The situation needs to be understood: four seriously injured IDF soldiers, who had just returned from fighting in Lebanon, are left alone behind locked doors, without their families, while the entire staff on duty speaks Arabic.”
He claimed that his nephew was maliciously denied water and “when the staff turned him over in bed, they did so brutally, ‘like a sardine,’ and his head was slammed into the bed.” This was portrayed, not as mere impatience or carelessness, but deliberate malpractice. The uncle asked why an IDF soldier was not stationed to protect his nephew, and demanded that the IDF and the hospital open an investigation into the incident. “Not every Arab staff member is responsible for the incident,” Shani was sure to add, “but we also cannot ignore the concerns of the family members” of the wounded soldiers.
As explained by a Channel 12 news commentator, the reality of the event was clear: the soldiers were in an intensive care unit that didn’t allow for round-the-clock visitors. The nurses had other patients to attend to, and couldn’t be of constant service to the soldiers. What should have been dismissed as an Israeli “Karen” moment, where a family member believes his relatives deserve special treatment at a public hospital and is enraged when they don’t receive it, soon became a national scandal. The story was picked up by far-right Channel 14, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Defense Minister Israel Katz expressed their support for Shani’s claims and demanded an immediate investigation into the matter.
The hasty and vitriolic response of Netanyahu coalition members reveals that Shani’s accusations were well-timed. Last week, Jewish MK Yoav Segalowitz left the centrist Yesh Atid party with the stated intention of joining the conservative Arab Ra’am party as its first Jewish member. Such a move would be historic: while left-wing Jewish parties have fielded Arab political candidates for decades, and Jewish-Arab political partnership on the far-left exists through the union of Hadash-Ta’al for several electoral rounds, more conservative Jewish and Arab parties have generally been opposed to such arrangements. A centrist Jewish politician playing a prominent role in the party list of a conservative Arab party is unheard of, and poses a problem for Netanyahu’s far-right coalition, whose primary campaign strategy has been making AI videos of opposition politicians “embracing” Arabs. If such an embrace were deemed unproblematic – as it should be – the most corrupt, incompetent and poisonous coalition in Israel’s short history has no campaign strategy.
But the politicization of the non-event by far-right agents is less revealing than responses from individual Israeli commentators who sought to add fuel to the fire. One Israeli women wrote that she had her blood drawn by an Arab hospital intern who “poked and prodded and jabbed and jabbed, and instead of looking at my arm, he looked straight into my eye.” Of course, she later added, another Arab nurse then came and immediately did the job correctly. But, somehow, she was still a victim of “hostility and medical negligence.”
Another claimed that an IDF soldier told her that, after he was injured while on reserve duty, he was sent to a hospital where “the vast majority of the staff at the hospital were Arabs. They shout over your head in Arabic, without you understanding a word. It feels like I arrived at a hospital in Nablus. I’m ashamed that the State of Israel has reached this state. We are strangers in our own country.”
Here we have several insights. According to a 2023 study, over a quarter of Israeli medical staff, and almost half of all pharmacists, are Arabs. On its face, this is a significant democratic achievement for the State of Israel, defying accusations of institutional racism or discrimination. What this means on the ground is that, at any given time, a shift of hospital workers could be mostly or entirely Arabs, speaking to each other in Arabic. While Israeli Arabs must learn Hebrew to participate in the public workforce, virtually no Jews speak Arabic.
It is therefore entirely possible that a Jewish Israeli patient, while lying in bed or waiting for treatment, is surrounded by people speaking a language he cannot understand, and that every person taking care of him – from the interns to the nurses to the doctors – is an Arab. And suddenly, the Jewish patient feels vulnerable, and uncomfortable. In almost every institution and profession in the State of Israel, Jews and Hebrew are privileged. Under Netanyahu, this was even coded into law: in 2018, his government passed the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, symbolically downgrading non-Jewish Israelis to second-class status, and moving Arabic from Israel’s second official language to one with “special status” – below Hebrew.
But what good is this privilege? In more democratic arenas where Jewish-Arab partnership is stronger – such as healthcare and, increasingly albeit to a more limited extent, the high-tech sector – Israel is progressing quickly and ranked highly. In arenas where there is significant segregation and Jewish religious politicization – such as public education – Israel is ranked among the worst in OECD countries.
Following Shani’s allegations, Rambam Hospital denied any malpractice but ignored the clearly racist overtone, leading several Arab medical professionals to complain to Haaretz that they didn’t feel sufficiently supported by the medical establishment. Hadash MK Ayman Odeh was quick to denounce the far-right politicization of the incident, praising the professionalism and Jewish-Arab partnership of Israeli hospital staff. The Chair of Physicians for Human Rights Hagai Levine unequivocally wrote that the Rambam story was “a fabrication, not abuse.”
The reality is that the model of Israeli hospitals, of Hadash-Ta’al and now potentially Ra’am, is the model of Israel’s future. In healthcare, in politics, in education, in business, in almost every aspect of society. There is no Israel without Arabs. Jewish Israelis have to embrace it (and maybe learn some Arabic.)
