Arab citizens of Israel

The Arab citizens of Israel form the country's largest ethnic minority. The base of these communities are the Arab, non-Jewish former Palestinian citizens (and their descendants) who continued to inhabit the territory that was acknowledged as Israeli under the 1949 Armistice Agreements ending the 1948 Palestine War. Notions of identity among Israel's Arab citizens are complex, encompassing civic, religious, and ethnic components. Most sources report that the majority of Arabs in Israel prefer to be identified as Palestinian citizens of Israel.

In the wake of the 1948 Palestine war, the Israeli government conferred Israeli citizenship upon all Palestinians who had remained or were not expelled. However, they were subject to martial law until 1966, while other Israeli citizens were not. In the early 1980s, Israel granted citizenship eligibility to the Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the Syrian citizens of the Golan Heights by annexing both areas, though they remain internationally recognized as part of the Israeli-occupied territories, which came into being after the Six-Day War of 1967. Acquisition of Israeli citizenship in East Jerusalem has been scarce, as only 5% of Palestinians in East Jerusalem were Israeli citizens in 2022, largely due to Palestinian society's disapproval of naturalization as complicity with the occupation. Israel has made the process more difficult, approving only 38% of new Palestinian applications from 2002 to 2022.

According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, the Israeli Arab population stood at 2.1 million people in 2023, accounting for 21% of Israel's total population. The majority of these Arab citizens identify themselves as Arab or Palestinian by nationality and as Israeli by citizenship. They mostly live in Arab-majority towns and cities, some of which are among the poorest in the country, and generally attend schools that are separated to some degree from those attended by Jewish Israelis. Arab political parties traditionally did not join governing coalitions until 2021, when the United Arab List became the first to do so. The Druze and the Bedouin in the Negev and the Galilee have historically expressed the strongest non-Jewish affinity to Israel and are more likely to identify as Israelis than other Arab citizens.

Speakers of both Arabic and Hebrew, their traditional vernaculars are mostly Levantine Arabic dialects, such as Palestinian Arabic in central Israel and Lebanese Arabic further north, particularly among the Druze. Negev Bedouins, on the other hand, speak a Northwest Arabian dialect. Because the modern Arabic dialects of Israel's Arabs have absorbed multiple Hebrew loanwords and phrases, it is sometimes called the Israeli Arabic dialect. By religious affiliation, the majority of Arab Israelis are Muslims, but there are significant Christian and Druze minorities, among others. Arab citizens of Israel have a wide variety of self-identification: as Israeli or "in Israel"; as Arabs or Palestinians; and as Muslims, Christians or Druze.