Israeli Groups’ Entitlement to Social Rights: Views of Israeli Jewish and Arab Teachers

Abstract

This study is based on distributive justice theory and research that it has produced as well as on accumulated knowledge about sociocultural reality in Israel. It demonstrates a situation in which different groups are excluded to varying degrees from the Israeli moral community as a consequence of the prevailing Jewish pioneering ethos of distributive justice. A sample of Jewish and Arab Israeli teachers was used. Out of the seven groups defined a priori, the Jewish subsample recognized five and ordered them along the anticipated social-exclusion dimension, from least to most excluded, as follows: (1) Ashkenazi/Mizrahi; (2) Haredi/Ole; (3) Druze; (4) Arabs; and (5) Foreign workers. In contrast, the distinction made by Arab respondents was dichotomous, between the Jews and the Arabs/Foreign workers, and not clear-cut at that. Furthermore, the Arab subsample ranked their “ingroup” as the most strongly entitled to social rights. The results obtained are attributed to the bifurcation of the Israeli citizenship discourse, which comprises, as an alternative to the Western egalitarian civil normative framework, an ethnorepublican discourse that implicitly promotes inequality (Shafir and Peled 2002).

Keywords:

• Distributive justice
• etic-emic
• facet approach
• Israel
• moral communities
• referential structures
• the scope of justice

ACKNOWLEDMENTS

The author thanks Nina Luskin for her editorial assistance.

Additional information

Funding

The project, funded by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, was led by Hanan Alexander and Halelli Pinson.

Notes on contributors

Clara Sabbagh

Clara Sabbagh (Ph.D. Hebrew University of Jerusalem) currently chairs the Department of Leadership and Policy in Education at the University of Haifa. She also serves as president of the Social Psychology Research Committee (RC42), International Sociological Association (ISA) and is an associate editor of the journal Social Justice Research. In the past, she has served as president (2010–12) of the International Society for Justice Research (ISJR). Her work has appeared in Social Psychology Quarterly, Social Justice Research, Journal of Social Policy, Acta Sociologica, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, and other edited volumes.