The Israeli Arabs, or 1948Palestinians, are those Arabs who remained inside the borders of what would become Israel after 1948, when most Arabs fled the country in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (see also "Nakba"). They make up roughly 20% of Israel's population. They sometimes consider themselves Palestinian, sometimes Israeli, and sometimes both. They are sometimes taken to include Druze and Circassians, and sometimes taken to exclude them; within Israeli Arabs, the Bedouin form a distinct subgroup, as do the Palestinian Christians. The noted Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, though since exiled, originally belonged to this group; other well-known Israeli Arabs include the film director Elie Suleiman and the politician Azmi Bishara.
Israeli Arabs are considered to be full citizens of the State of Israel. There are a number of Israeli Arabs sitting as members of the Knesset (Parliament), and an Arab Justice presides in the Supreme Court. To some extent Israeli Arabs face discrimination as indviduals, in part as a result of inequality in the allocation of governmental resources. The same government, however, also adopted affirmative action policies in recruiting Israeli Arabs to the civil service.
Apart from the Druze and Circassians, they are not required to serve in the IDF, although some, notably among the Bedouin, do so.
Arabs in Palestine and elsewhere continued to resist the idea, but on November 29, 1947, the United Nations (UN) passed Resolution 181, which called for a partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states.
The demoralized Arab world was unwilling to accept the Israeli victory, and shortly after the war the Arabs began to regroup for more fighting.
With the exception of Jordan, Arab countries generally refused to allow Palestinians to settle outside the camps or to be granted citizenship.
The Arab opposition to the Jewish state of Israel included neighboring Arab states and, after 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a political body working to create a state for PalestinianArabs.
Because the two Arab leaders were focused more on their own particular national interests, rather than on other Arab-Israeli issues such as the future of the West Bank and Jerusalem and the issue of Palestinian statehood, they omitted Jordan and the PLO from the planning of the war.
Israeli intelligence sources had discounted the probability of an Arab assault, and Israel's military was not fully prepared for war.
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