Abu Abed, 84, recently visited the site of his Arab village in northern Israel. He fled with his family in 1948.

By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM - As Israel marks its 60th anniversary this month, rejoicing in Jewish national rebirth and democratic values, the Arabs who make up 20 percent of its citizens will not be celebrating. More affluent and better integrated than ever in their history, freer than a vast majority of other Arabs, Israel’s 1.
3 million Arab citizens are still far less affluent than Israeli Jews and feel increasingly unwanted.
For most Israelis, Jewish identity is central to the nation, the reason they are proud to live here, the link they feel with history. But Israeli Arabs, including the most successfully integrated ones, say a new identity must be found for the country’s long-term survival. For them, Israel’s birth still represents the “nakba,” or catastrophe.
“I am not a Jew,” protested Eman Kassem-Sliman, an Arab radio journalist with impeccable Hebrew, whose children attend a predominantly Jewish school in Jerusalem.
“How can I belong to a Jewish state- If they define this as a Jewish state, they deny that I am here.”
The left and the right increasingly see Israeli Arabs as one of the central challenges for Israel’s future - one intractably bound to the search for an overall settlement between Jews and Arabs. Jews fear ultimately losing the demographic battle to Arabs, both in Israel and in the larger territory it controls.
Most say that an end to the nation’s Jewish identity would mean an end to Israel. But they fear that failure to instill in Arab citizens a sense of belonging is dangerous as Arabs promote the idea that, 60 years or no 60 years, Israel is a passing phenomenon.
“I want to convince the Jewish people that having a Jewish state is bad for them,” said Abir Kopty, an advocate for Israeli Arabs.
Across Israel, especially in the north, are the remains of dozens of partly unused Palestinian villages, scars on the landscape from the conflict that gave birth to the country in 1948.
Yet some original inhabitants and their descendants, all Israeli Arab citizens, live in packed towns and villages, often next to the old villages, and are barred from resettling them while Jewish communities around them are urged to expand.
One recent warm afternoon, Jamal Abdulhadi Mahameed drove past kibbutz fields of wheat and watermelon, up a dirt road surrounded by pine trees and cactuses, and climbed the worn remains of a set of stairs, declaring, “This was my house. This is where I was born.”
He said what he most wanted now, at 69, was to leave the nearby crowded town, come to this piece of uncultivated land with the pomegranate bushes planted by his father and work it, as generations had before him. He has gone to court to get it.
He is no revolutionary and, by nearly any measure, is a solid and successful citizen. His children include a doctor, two lawyers and an engineer. Yet, as an Arab, his quest for a return to his land challenges a longstanding Israeli policy. “We are prohibited from using our own land,” he said, standing in the former village of Lajoun, now a mix of scrub and pines surrounded by the fields of Kibbutz Megiddo. “They want to keep it available for Jews. My daughter makes no distinction between Jewish and Arab patients. Why should the state treat me differently?”
The answer has to do with the very essence of Zionism, the movement of Jewish rebirth and control over the land where Jewish statehood first flourished more than 2,000 years ago.
“Land is presence,” remarked Clinton Bailey, an Israeli scholar who has focused on Bedouin culture. “If you want to be present here, you have to have land. The country is not that big. What you cede to Arabs can no longer be used for Jews who may still want to come.”
Antagonism runs both ways. Many Israeli Arabs express solidarity with their Palestinian brethren under occupation, and some Arabs in Parliament routinely accuse Israel of Nazism.
Meanwhile, several right-wing rabbis have forbidden Jews from renting apartments to Arabs or employing them. And a majority of Jews, polls show, favor a transfer of Arabs out of Israel as part of a two-state solution, a view that a decade ago was thought extreme.
Arabs here reject that idea partly because they prefer the certainty of an imperfect Israeli democracy to whatever system may evolve in a shaky Palestinian state. That is part of the paradox of the Israeli Arabs. Their anger has grown, but so has their sense of belonging.
In fact, there is a real level of Jewish- Arab coexistence in many places, and the government has recently committed itself to improve Arab access to education, infrastructure and government employment. “We know that they need more land, that their children need a place to live,” said Raanan Dinur, director general of the prime minister’s office. “We are working on building a new Arab city in the north. Our main goal is to take what are today two economies and integrate them into one economy.”
For many Israeli Jews who long resisted the idea of a Palestinian state, it was the realization that they were losing the demographic battle to Palestinians that turned them around. Israeli Arabs are aware of the contest. And some believe time is on their side.
Abdulwahab Darawshe, a former member of Israel’s Parliament and the current head of the Arab Democratic Party, sat in his Nazareth office recently and said: “No matter what happens, we will not leave here again. That was a big mistake in 1948. Yet our identity is becoming more and more Palestinian. You cannot cut us from the Arab tree.”