Judith Miller: Israel-Palestinian conflict – why violence has real consequences for Israel's Arabs, Hamas

Among the most challenging is the spread of the violence to Israel’s own Arab population, a development that has thrown Israeli national politics into even greater disarray and is likely to prompt Israeli Jews to reconsider their own community’s relationship with the country’s 1.9 million Israeli Arabs, or roughly 20 percent of the country’s 10 million people. Unlike the earlier Palestinian "Intifadas," the uprisings that began in 1987 and 2000 respectively that affected mainly Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the current fighting has spread to Israel’s own Arab communities, descendants of the Palestinians who remained in Israel after the 1948 war that created the Jewish state.