Academics ignore their own ethical standards when it comes to Israeli Arabs ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Wednesday, December 03, 2025

Academics ignore their own ethical standards when it comes to Israeli Arabs

Academics in social sciences have long championed the principle that individuals and communities should be allowed to define their own identities. This is a cornerstone of modern sociological ethics.

In some cases, there are even legal standards.

In 1997, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget established clear federal standards for collecting data on race and ethnicity. These standards apply to all federally-funded research and state unequivocally:

"Respect for individual dignity should guide the processes and methods for collecting data on race and ethnicity; ideally, respondent self-identification should be facilitated to the greatest extent possible."

The standards continue: "Self-reporting or self-identification using two separate questions is the preferred method for collecting data on race and ethnicity."

These aren't aspirational goals. They're mandatory for federal research and have been adopted as policy by major academic journals. The Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ), following Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) standards, requires that researchers:

"Authors should explain whether race and ethnicity were self-identified by study participants or identified by others, providing justification if self-identification was not used."

The rationale is clear. As PLOS Global Public Health notes: "Observer classification has potential harms such as misclassification, stigmatization, and perpetuating structural racism."

Yet in academic research, there is a glaring exception to this rule: Arab citizens of Israel. In this case, academics have systematically violated their own principles.

An analysis of academic literature published in Taylor & Francis journals reveals a striking disconnect between how Arab citizens of Israel identify themselves and how academics choose to label them. Here is the breakdown of the uses of these phrases in academic papers since 2019 from my own keyword searches (1,354 results, some might be duplicates from papers using different terms in the same paper.)

Palestinian terminology ("Palestinian citizens of Israel"/"Palestinians in Israel"): 40.8%
Arab identity terminology ("Israeli Arabs"/"Arabs in Israel"): 39.2%
Israeli citizenship terminology ("Arab Citizens of Israel"/"Arab Israelis"): 18.0%
Religious terminology ("Israeli Muslims"/"Muslim Israelis"): 1.9%

But this is way out of whack with how Arab Israelis define themselves!

While there are differences in research, most show roughly what this Tel Aviv University Konrad Adenauer Program for Jewish-Arab Cooperation report said in June as how Arabs in Israel see themselves.

Arab identity: 36.2%
Israeli citizenship: 30.3%
Religious affiliation: 21.4%
Palestinian identity: 9.7%

The numbers are damning. Academics use Palestinian identity terminology at 4.2 times the rate at which the actual population self-identifies that way. Meanwhile, Israeli citizenship identity—the second-most common form of self-identification at 30.3%—is significantly underrepresented in academic literature at only 18.0%.

I've seen numbers from 3% to 15% for Arab Israelis identifying as Palestinians but no matter which statistic you choose, describing them as "Palestinians" is inaccurate and a blatant violation of social science standards.

Even more egregiously, religious identity, which 21.4% of Arab Israelis say is their primary identity component, receives only 1.9% representation in academic terminology. This is an eleven-fold underrepresentation of how more than one-fifth of the population sees themselves.

The irony here is rich. These are the same academics who would be horrified at misgendering someone or using racial terminology that a community rejects. They are the first to say that imposing external identity categories on people is a form of epistemic violence.

Progressive academics have spent decades rightfully criticizing how marginalized communities have been labeled by outsiders rather than being allowed to define themselves. They've fought against colonial impositions of identity, against medicalization of non-conforming identities, against bureaucratic categorizations that erase people's self-understanding.

But when it comes to Arab citizens of Israel, all these principles evaporate.

Why? Because the Palestinian national identity narrative serves a particular political agenda, and that agenda takes precedence over the community's actual self-understanding.

This isn't just about word choice. It reflects a deeper academic malpractice: the construction of a Palestinian national consciousness narrative within Israel that doesn't reflect the lived reality of the majority of the population being studied.

Only 9.7% of Arab Israelis say Palestinian identity is the most important component of their personal identity. Yet 40.8% of academic articles impose this identity on the entire population. This is not description - it's prescription. It's not research - it's activism masquerading as scholarship.

The data reveals something even more troubling: academics are not just slightly misaligned with the population they study. They are systematically constructing a narrative that inverts the actual priorities of that population. Israeli citizenship, which ranks second in self-identification, is deliberately minimized in academic discourse. Palestinian identity, which ranks dead last, is elevated to be the dominant frame.

This analysis reveals a fundamental crisis in academic integrity. Scholars who have built careers on respecting self-identification, who police language usage in every other context, who understand that naming is power—these same scholars are systematically imposing an identity framework on a population that has explicitly rejected it.

The evidence is clear. The numbers don't lie. Academics are using "Palestinian" to describe Arab citizens of Israel at 4.2 times the rate those citizens use it to describe themselves.

This is not research. This is ideological construction masquerading as social science.

And it's a violation of the field's own ethical standards.