The Western Wall and Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Journalist Henriette Chacar, who once praised anti-Israel comedian John Oliver as “doing a better job providing context than seasoned journalists,” recently demonstrated what passes for context by her standards.

In her July 27 Reuters article about how Israeli Arabs are (largely) staying away from the domestic Israeli protests — titled “Arabs in Israel stay on sidelines of raging democracy battle” — Chacar claimed: “Largely self-identifying as Palestinian, they have long pondered their place in politics, balancing their heritage with Israeli nationality.” [Emphasis added.]

In fact, polling data mostly shows that the opposite is true. Israeli Arabs largely do not identify as Palestinians.

A 2019 Israel Democracy Institute report found that only 13 percent of those surveyed identify as Palestinian (“Jews and Arabs: Conditional Partnership”). Other surveys have similar findings. For example, a 2017 study by Arik Rudnitzky and Itamar Radai found that only 8.9 percent of Israeli Arabs identify as “Palestinian in Israel/Palestinian citizen in Israel” and 15.4 percent identify as “Palestinian” (“Citizenship, Identity and Political Participation… ” p. 22).

A third study, conducted in 2020 by Camille Fuchs of Tel Aviv University, found only 7 percent of non-Jewish people in Israel identify as Palestinian. Similar findings are apparent in the 2017 Shaharit survey.

In response to CAMERA’s request for substantiation of Chacar’s claim, Reuters cited a 2019 Reuters piece (“In Israel, members of Palestinian minority embrace Palestinian identity”) along with a Foreign Policy article from the same year (“Palestinian in Israel”).

Both articles provide largely anecdotal information, and neither seems to support Reuters’ newer claim that Israeli Arabs “largely” identify as Palestinians.

Reuters wrote in 2019 that “many now reject” the Israeli-Arab label, and quotes an Arab psychologist who says “more and more [are] identifying very frankly and very loudly as Palestinians.” And then it quotes professor As’ad Ghanem who alleges — with no substantiation — “The majority think that they want to be identified as Palestinian.” His source for this claim is not provided.

The Foreign Policy piece also states that the term “Israeli-Arab” “is increasingly unpopular.”

The biggest exception to the anecdotal nature of the two articles appears in Foreign Policy, which reports: “Only 16 percent of this population wants to be called ‘Israeli Arab,’ according to a 2017 survey the University of Haifa professor Sammy Smooha provided to Foreign Policy.”

Professor Smooha’s 2017 survey is indeed an outlier compared to numerous other polls painting a very different picture. Even so, by itself, the statistic showing that 16% of surveyed Arab citizens of Israel said they define their personal national identity as “Israeli Arab,” is not particularly revealing. Wrested from the broader answers, this lone data point doesn’t say much. We could equally say that the same 2017 carried out by Smooha found only 5% identified as “Palestinian.” (And, in 2019, that number dropped to 2%.)

In that same 2017 Smooha poll, where “only 16%” self-defined as “Israel-Arab,” another 8% chose “Arab”; 8% said “Arab in Israel”; and 4% said “Israeli.” So adjusting for rounding errors, 37% that year didn’t include “Palestinian” in any combination, while 60% did include “Palestinian” in various combinations, including “Israeli Palestinian.”

This isn’t to say that, even in Smooha’s polling, “Palestinian” is more a popular self-identification than alternatives, as Reuters suggests. In his 2019 poll, more respondents included “Arab” in their identity than “Palestinian.” (Tellingly, that same poll found 71 percent of the population accepting of the “Israeli-Arab” label to varying degrees, raising questions about Reuters’ decision that same year to report “many now reject” the label.)

Thus, the bottom line is that while polling data largely shows that Israeli Arabs largely don’t identify as Palestinian, Reuters apparently relied on the rare or lone exception to substantiate Chacar’s dubious claim that Israeli Arabs largely self-identify as Palestinian. And even then, they stripped nuance from the poll’s responses.

Tamar Sternthal is director of the Israel office of CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis) and Gilead Ini is a senior research analyst at CAMERA.