NAZARETH, the largest Arab city in Israel, and Ramallah, seat of the Palestinian government in the West Bank, recently signed the first agreement twinning towns in the two places. Ramallah is paired with towns abroad, but Nazareth is different, says Maha Shihadeh, the official behind the plan. She hopes the accord could prompt pilgrims visiting Jesus's hometown to head to Ramallah as well and help it emulate Nazareth's conversion from a dilapidated town into a tourist destination.
Above all, officials hope it will go some way towards linking the fractured parts of old Palestine. “We want to reconnect,” Ms Shihadeh says, harking back to a time before Israel's creation in 1948 when Palestinians roamed unobstructed by Israeli security barriers. Her counterpart, the mayor of Nazareth, Ramez Jaraysi, says: “The two cities are Palestinian cities divided by geopolitics. We'll continue being citizens of Israel, but our nationality is Arab-Palestinian.”
In times past, Palestinians looked at their brethren who remained behind under Israeli rule as collaborators. Israeli Arabs for their part were cowed by official suspicions of disloyalty. But the number of Israeli Arabs has grown almost tenfold since 1948 to about 1.5m, and with it their confidence.
They feel spurned politically. Pluralism is not part of the Israeli government's lexicon, they complain, and the cabinet has no Arab voice. They seem to think that the desire of Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, for a Jewish state threatens its identity as a democratic one and they note that Avigdor Lieberman, his foreign minister, advocates a loyalty test which might rid Israel of many Arabs. They even mistrust Israel's supreme court, a bastion of liberalism, for recently upholding a ban on cohabitation between Israeli Arabs and their spouses from the West Bank and Gaza.
Many who used to call themselves Israeli Arabs now prefer the term “Palestinians with Israeli citizenship”. A growing number of Israeli-Arab lecturers and students are enrolling at West Bank universities. Many also go there to shop or dine, after the army lifted a ban on Israeli Arabs—but not Jews—entering West Bank cities. A recent meeting of Arab parliamentarians from Israel's Knesset and Palestine's Legislative Council discussed how, one day, to turn their common identity into a political unit.
In his recent review of Israel's strategic options, “Israeli Statecraft: National Security Challenges and Responses”, Yehezkel Dror, an academic who used to advise Israel's government, offered controversial proposals for making Israel more inclusive. He discussed adding a Palestinian stanza to the national anthem, which currently speaks only of Jewish yearning for Zion, and an Islamic crescent to the blue-and-white flag alongside the Star of David.
