Arab Knesset Members and Parties
Despite the Military Administration to which Arab citizens of Israel were subject during the first 18 years of the state's existence, Arab representatives were elected to the Knesset from the very beginning. At first they were elected on behalf of the mixed Jewish-Arab Communist Party (Maki) and minority lists affiliated with Mapai. In the Second Knesset (1951) an Arab was first elected on the list of a Zionist party, the socialist Mapam. The Labor Party first placed an Arab on its list in the elections to the Eighth Knesset (1973).

In 1965 a nationalist Arab party, al-Ard, was prevented from running in the elections to the Sixth Knesset on legal grounds. In the elections to the 11th Knesset (1984), one of the founders of al-Ard, Mohammad Mi'ari, won a seat at the head of an Arab-Jewish party called the Progressive List for Peace. However, the first purely Arab nationalist party, the Arab Democratic Party, won election to the Knesset after MK Abdel Wahab Darawsha broke away from the Labor Party in January 1988, over the government's handling of the intifada uprising that broke out in the territories in December 1987. The ADP was elected to the 12th Knesset in 1988, as was the Progressive List for Peace. The PLP failed to get into the 13th Knesset (1992). In the 14th Knesset there were 10 Arab MKs: four of the five members of Hadash, which had run together with the Democratic National Alliance; four in the ADP, which ran together with part of the Islamic Movement; one in the Labor Party, and one in Meretz.

The Arab MKs have always had to contend with the fact (as stated by an Arab MK in the early years of the state) that "my people and my country are at war with each other." They have thus had a double agenda. The first is to improve the political, social, and economic status of Israel's Arab citizens, and the second is to struggle for the national rights of their people; even though they intend to remain citizens of Israel rather than of a Palestinian state, if and when it is established. There has never been an Arab cabinet minister in Israel's governments, and none of the Arab or predominantly Arab parties has been a member in a coalition government, even though Hadash and the ADP were part of the "blocking majority" that supported the governments of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres from 1992-96.