Policy-makers are still ignoring the presence of one nation in Israel's fourth largest city. Even though some 7,000 Arabs already live there, the Be'er Sheva municipality refuses to open an Arab school in the city, or even a mosque - apparently hoping to halt the trend. The authorities are actually proud of Be'er Sheva's Bedouin market. Every liberal Jew has his favorite hummus outlet in some mixed city. The problem is that all those things, which sometimes make Arabs feel as if they live on an Indian reservation, are gladly accepted by the Jewish establishment only as long as they are not translated into a real demand for multiculturalism.
Multiculturalism is only one possible direction for developing a mixed city.
The state needs to define for itself how it sees the future of the mixed cities within the broad picture of relations between the two peoples living in the State of Israel. The mixed city as a microcosm contains within it all of the possible variations on coexistence, a kind of workshop from which solutions can be derived. For 52 years, the state acted as though it expected the Arab residents to eventually get the hint, and leave. Instead, the Jews were the ones to leave. The Zionist response deemed appropriate to the marginalization of Arabs in mixed cities was to also neglect the Jewish residents.