Identity, Grievances, and Political Action: Recent Evidence from the Palestinian Community in Israel

In this article, the author argues that the key to ethnic protest is the identity that one holds, and argues that state-bound identities weaken the grievance-protest relationship: The closer one identifies with the state, the less likely one is to protest, even when significant grievances exist. The author uses the case of Israel and its Arab citizens is used to illustrate this relationship, and demonstrates that when Arabs identify themselves as more “Israeli,” they are less protest-prone than other Arabs with more anti-establishment identities. The author provides empirical evidence that fostering state-friendly identities may be a desirable goal for many ethnically tense states.