Loyalty Is a Two-Way Street: Israel Must Build a Genuine Partnership

The October 2026 election has given Arab political parties significant parliamentary influence. The next government should seize the opportunity to redefine the relationship between Israel and its Arab citizens—not as a matter of political arithmetic, but of national cohesion.

Israel has an opportunity to reconsider its relationship with its Arab citizens. The recent election gave the two Arab-led political lists 19 seats in the 120-member Knesset, nearly 16 percent of the legislature. Arab citizens make up approximately one-fifth of the country’s population.

More significant than the numbers is the political opening they represent. Mansour Abbas, leader of Ra’am, has signaled a willingness to negotiate and compromise in pursuit of genuine partnership with the next government. His position deserves serious consideration.

It raises a question that Israel has struggled with since its founding: Can a country expect the loyalty of citizens whom it has never quite embraced as equal partners?

The answer requires looking back to an arrangement made in 1956 that continues to shape Israeli society.

In the early years of the state, Israel generally exempted Muslim and Christian Arab men from compulsory military service. The reasons were understandable, if not uncomplicated. These citizens belonged to a wider Arab world with which Israel was at war. Asking them to serve in an army fighting other Arabs presented an obvious conflict of loyalties, or at least the appearance of one.

The Druze were treated differently. In 1956, Israel introduced compulsory military service for Druze men. The familiar account holds that Druze leaders sought conscription as a means of securing their community’s place in the new state. The historical record, as Professor Rami Zeedan has shown through archival research, is less tidy. Some influential Druze leaders supported the arrangement; others within the community opposed it. The government actively pursued conscription, and initial resistance was met with police and military enforcement.

What emerged was not simply a voluntary covenant between two communities. It was a political arrangement that helped establish a distinct Druze relationship with the Israeli state. Over time, military service became a defining feature of that relationship.

Muslim and Christian Arabs took a different path. They remained generally exempt from military service, and their relationship with the state developed accordingly. The result was a curious differentiation in civic expectations within a single citizenship framework.

The distinction matters today, not because every Arab citizen should necessarily become a soldier, but because it exposes a larger contradiction in Israeli life. The state has long expected different things from different segments of its Arab population, while struggling to articulate what equal citizenship should mean for all of them.

The recent election offers an opportunity to address that contradiction.

Abbas’s willingness to consider compromise in return for genuine partnership suggests that at least some Arab political leaders recognize that participation in government requires negotiation and accommodation. But partnership cannot be a unilateral undertaking. Arab politicians cannot be expected to moderate their positions while the Jewish political establishment continues to regard their participation in government as inherently suspect.

There is a reciprocal obligation here. Arab citizens must be willing to participate in the responsibilities of the state, just as the state must recognize them as full participants in its future.

This need not mean compulsory military service for everyone. Civilian national service—in hospitals, emergency services, education and community institutions—could provide an alternative. The principle is more important than the uniform: citizenship should involve both rights and responsibilities.

Consistency matters, too. A state cannot make shared service a defining expectation of citizenship for some communities while maintaining broad exemptions for others, including the ultra-Orthodox, without confronting the inequity.

The Druze experience offers a historical reference, not a blueprint. Muslim, Christian and Druze communities have different histories and identities. A common civic compact must respect those differences without allowing them to become permanent barriers to participation.

The next coalition government should seize this opportunity. It should not treat Arab political participation as an electoral convenience or a reluctant concession. It should make genuine partnership a national priority.

That means fair investment in Arab communities, equal access to opportunity, effective action against crime and violence, and a meaningful voice in national decision-making. It also means beginning an honest conversation about shared civic responsibilities and a framework of national service that includes all communities.

Such an initiative would require compromise on both sides. Arab political leaders would have to accept that partnership entails responsibilities as well as influence. Jewish political leaders would have to recognize that Arab citizens are not guests in the country, but stakeholders in its future.

Israel’s cohesion will not be measured solely by the number of Arab citizens who enlist or the number of Arab politicians who enter a governing coalition. It will be measured by whether a fifth of its population feels that the country belongs to them as fully as it belongs to anyone else.

This is a moment the next government should not squander. The opportunity exists to replace decades of differentiated expectations with a more coherent understanding of citizenship.

Loyalty is not simply a debt citizens owe the state. It is something the state must earn.

If Israel wants its Arab citizens to share responsibility for its future, it must first convince them that they have a future in it.