Social Identity and the Readiness for Social Relations Between Jews and Arabs in Israel

This paper examines the social identity of Arabs and Jews in Israel and its relationship to the readiness for establishing and maintaining intergroup contact. Social identity is defined in terms of self-esteem and the national, civic, religious, familial, residential, and vocational subidentities. The structural coherence of the indentity system was demonstrated for both Jews and Arabs, but while subidentities among Jewish subjects tend to be positively interrelated, there is strain within the Arab system, revealed by a negative correlation between the national and civic subidentities, among others. Readiness for relations with members of the other group is higher for Arabs than for Jews and also more clearly related to several subidentities. Jewish readiness for social relations with Arabs is weakly related to the identity system. Identity variables may be promising mediators between situational antecedents and intergroup attitudes, but mainly for members of the minority.