SEPARATE BUT EQUAL:

Out of a total population of 7.8 million in Israel, 1.6 million - 20 percent - are Arabs. Many live in Nazareth and Arab villages located mostly in the north of Israel and in so-called mixed cities such Acre, Lod, Ramle, Haifa and Jaffa.

Most are descendants of Palestinians who stayed on after the 1948 war to establish Israel in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven out. Many Arabs feel kinship with Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and Jewish rightwingers say many Arabs are disloyal to the state.

Most Arabs are exempt from service in Israel's conscript military forces, which is compulsory for Jews, and they are barely integrated into the local economy.

The government estimates that just over 50 percent of Arab families live under the poverty line.

Truly mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhoods are increasingly hard to find as Jews, often with government support, move out to more affluent neighborhoods, creating Arab ghettoes and exacerbating the feeling among Arabs that they are second-class citizens.

Dor Shaulov, a project manager at City Without Violence, a government-funded initiative aimed at reducing violence in urban areas, said Arabs tend to be in favor of mixed communities while Jews preferred to stay separate.

"When Arabs start to move in a Jewish neighborhood, the Jews start to move out," Shaulov said.

Residents in the Arab areas complain of inferior municipal services, higher unemployment rates, crowded neighborhoods, inferior health care and unfair allocation of resources in the education system and housing.

"Since 1948, there has not been one governmental housing plan in the Arab neighborhoods of Lod ... even though there have been hundreds of plans for Jews," said Faten Zinati, a municipal government employee who works in Lod.

As a result, she explains, Arabs have been forced to build homes without permits, many of which have been demolished, and the rest are under threat of demolition.

The result is that today, "the Arab neighborhoods are neglected, dirty and disordered," she said.

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