If people took one idea from Elie Rekhess’ lecture Thursday night, he said it should be this: “The problem in Israel is that there is an Arab minority with the mentality of a majority within a Jewish majority with the mentality of a minority.”

The political conflict between Arab- and Jewish-Israelis is nothing if not complex, as the aforementioned quote from the Arab scholar Sami Mari shows, Rekhess, a visiting Jewish studies professor from Israel, told about 17 Northwestern community members in Harris Hall 205.

Although Jews are an extremely small percentage of the Middle Eastern population, they are the majority in Israel and Arabs are the minority, said Rekhess, who emphasized that his focus does not include Arabs in the Gaza Strip or West Bank.

When dealing with Arab minorities, Rekhess said, Israel’s perception of itself as either a Jewish state or a democratic state greatly affects the political conflict between Arab-Israelis and Jewish-Israelis.

“Eventually there will be a need to reformulate relations between majority and minority in Israel,” said Rekhess, a senior research fellow at Tel Aviv University. “I personally believe the Jews and Arabs can coexist in Israel.”

But the current situation presents difficulties. On one hand, if Israel wants to aspire to be truly democratic, it would cease to be a Jewish state, Rekhess said. On the other hand, if Israel maintains its current status, the integration of the Arab minority will never be a reality.

If it had to make a decision, the supreme court of Israel would choose to be democratic rather than maintain the “Jewishness” of the state, Rekhess said, although that would anger many Israeli nationalists.

Discussing Israel’s founding in 1948, Rekhess said the country tried to guarantee equal rights to both Arabs and Jews, as any democratic state would. But although Arabs continue to have equality in terms of education and socioeconomic standing, they don’t have many political rights that Jews do.

For instance, they cannot buy state land, and the Law of Return, which allows every Jew to immigrate to Israel and become a citizen, does not apply to Arabs, Rekhess said.

Eventually, Rekhess said, “Palestinianization” occurred and more Arab-Israelis began to identify with the Palestinian Liberation Organization and other Arab groups in the Middle East. They soon began to feel frustrated that they didn’t have the political rights and privileges they would have outside of Israel, leading to turmoil.

Rekhess also posed the question of how Arabs are supposed to identify with the Israeli national anthem or the Israeli flag, which contains a Star of David, since they are not Jewish.

“There is an inherent contradiction that needs to be resolved so that Arabs can feel part of the nation of Israel,” Rekhess said. “Israeli governments all along didn’t really handle the question of the Arab minority,” instead choosing temporary solutions to a long-term problem.

Unless Israel deals with the problem of Arab integration, it will become the country’s greatest conflict, Rekhess said.

For the mostly Jewish audience, hearing about Arab minorities in Israel gave them an added perspective, said Rabbi Dov Hillel Klein of Northwestern’s Tannenbaum Chabad House.

“I think it opened up many people’s eyes to the needs of the minority — the needs of the Muslims,” Klein said.