Police Relations with Arabs and Jews in Israel

Remarkably little research has been conducted on police relations with citizens in Israel compared with other societies that are deeply divided along ethnic lines. This paper examines the views of Arabs and Jews regarding several key aspects of policing in Israel. The fi ndings indicate, fi rst, that Arabs are consistently more critical of the police than Jews, and these ethnic differences persist net of the infl uence of other variables. Second, in addition to the role played by ethnicity in explaining public assessments of the police, a number of other variables infl uence such attitudes. The results are interpreted within the context of the divided society model of policing, which originated in research on other ethnically polarized societies. Policing Ethnically Divided Societies Ethnic minorities and the police have troubled relations in many societies ( Antonopoulos 2003; Bowling and Phillips 2003), but, in deeply divided societies, such confl icts are espe-cially deep-rooted. These societies are characterized by extreme polarization along eth-nic lines, and policing is organized fi rst and foremost ‘ for the defense of a sectarian regime and the maintenance of a social order based on institutionalized inequality between dominant and subordinate communal groups ’ (Weitzer 1995: 5). This model