ABSTRACT
The equal treatment of individual members of minority groups is one aspect of the concept of minority rights. This chapter examines the extent to which Israel’s legal system recognizes collective rights of its Arab minority. The notion of group or collective rights relates to those spheres in which group affiliation is of great importance to the individual. The result has been that while on the individual level Arabs are recognized as members of the Arab nation, and are registered as such in the population register, on the group level there has been a definite reluctance to recognize the Israeli Arabs as a national minority. In spite of the reluctance to grant formal recognition to the Arabs as a national minority, the approach of the law to Arabs is anti-assimilationist. Arab schools spend approximately the same amount of time on studying Jewish and Arab history, whereas the time spent in the Jewish schools on the study of Arab history is negligible.
