Russian-speaking Israelis constitute one of Israel’s linguistic and cultural minorities, comparable in size to the Arabic-speaking minority, and also bound by the territory of origin – the USSR and post-Soviet countries.
If we consider the Russian-speaking Israelis as a linguistic minority, two challenges arise to ensure the rights of this social group, which is discriminated against in comparison to other linguistic minorities:
- providing financial and organizational assistance to Russian-speaking Israelis repatriating to Israel, equal to that of the Amharic linguistic minority;
- ensuring the status of the Russian language on an equal footing with that of the Arabic-speaking minority.
The need for solidarity among linguistic minorities stems from of the current political situation in Israel. There are a number of factors that contribute to the prospect of solidarity among Arab and Russian-speaking Israelis in order to protect their rights and advance their interests:
- Arab- and Russian-speaking Israelis are minorities, which reduces their ability to influence political decision-making and implementation;
- There are political forces that seek through legislative mechanisms to limit the constitutional rights of Arab and Russian-speaking minorities, as well as their ability to pursue their political, cultural, and socio-economic interests;
- a certain commonality of socio-economic problems and political interests of the Arab and Russian-speaking minorities;
- the presence of structures and instruments of solidarity and self-organization in the Arabic-speaking minority, while they are minimized in the Russian-speaking minority.
It should be taken into account that the Russian-speaking minority has much less experience not only of solidarity action, but also of self-organization. Therefore, the experience of self-organization of the Arab and Amharic-speaking minorities will be useful in turning the Russian-speaking minority into a subject of Israeli politics.