In the article, the author, based on the works a number of Russian and Israeli researchers, presents the confessional structure, some aspects of the legal status, political aspirations of the Arabs in the state of Israel, the emergence of the Palestinian refugee problem. The chronological framework of the article mainly covers the last decades, but if necessary by 1948–1949 – the time of the formation of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli war. In the context of the ongoing large-scale armed conflict between Israel and the Hamas movement, the sharp aggravation of the internal political situation in Israel itself, and the situation in the Middle East as a whole, real opportunities for reaching a compromise in the near future in solving the problem of Arabs in Israel seem unlikely.
Palestinian Arabs; demography of the Arab population in Israel; Islam; Palestinian refugees; Arab political parties in Israel; confessional structure of the Arabs in Israel.