ABSTRACT
Israeli authorities have always considered Arab national autonomy a threat to Jewish domination and to the state's political stability and have adopted diverse countermeasures to avert it. These include depriving Arabs of control over their own institutions, preventing them from forming independent organizations, endeavoring to dismantle their majority status in certain regions, co-opting their leaders, encouraging traditional internal divisions, and treating them as an ethnic rather than national group. Attitudes toward Arab national autonomy will be discussed in terms of a sense of nationalist consciousness, community control, representative leadership, regional self-rule, and irredentism. One component in the Israeli government's policy of preventing Arabs from developing into an autonomous national minority is to strengthen the internal communal splits along sectarian and kinship lines. The question of separate Arab politics is obviously central to Arab national autonomy. The five major options are non-autonomous integration into the Jewish parties, coalitionary Arab parties, oppositionist Arab-Jewish parties like Rakah, nationalist Arab parties, and non-participation.
