Samer Swaid

Since 2015, Samer has been the director of The Arab Center for Alternative Planning (ACAP), a leading NGO which represents the genuine needs and interests of Palestinian citizens in Israel on issues regarding planning, land, housing and development. He previously served as a Parliamentary Aide to Member of Knesset (Israeli Parliament) Hanna Swaid, the founder of ACAP. Samer is currently in his last stages as a PhD student at the School of Political Science in Haifa University where he focused his studies researching Palestinian discourse in Israel as a case study for national minority discourse. In 2019, he founded and managed El ‘Etelaf, a GOTV coalition formed to encourage voting in Arab society, which played an important role in raising the percentage of Arab voter turnout to 65% in the 22^nd Knesset elections, the highest Arab turnout in the past twenty years. Samer has facilitated numerous conflict-resolution based groups with Israeli and Palestinian members of society, specifically in Neve Shalom Wahet El Salam, and has been involved in numerous community-based, political, social and bi-national programmes throughout his life. He continues to be an influential member in the political scene in Israel, and in the Palestinian community in particular.

Project Description

Until the end of this year, Samer will present his PhD thesis on the subject of “The successes and failures of the minority political leadership: The issue of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel”. His research deals with the ability of minority leadership to improve its condition and contribute to various aspects of its development as a civil and political community, even without membership in a government coalition. The focus of the study is the discourse of minority leadership, in front of group members and in the majority group. His case study is the leadership of the Arab Palestinian citizens in Israel, and the main argument in the study is that the trade-off between the civil and national goals of Arab citizens in Israel is also a function of Palestinian political leadership. More specifically, the hypothesis is that the weighting of transformations between civilian and national goals is influenced by the opportunity structure on the one hand, and exploitation by the Arab leadership in Israel, on the other. Players can make a difference; improving the minority situation even without giving up key values, such as expressing national identity.

Samer wants to continue his research on different political leaderships of national minorities, with the aim of producing two articles based on his doctoral thesis, and a comparison between other minorities and the Palestinian minority in Israel.