Recent growing educational, professional, and residential mobility led about a quarter of Israel’s Palestinian Arab citizens to attain middle class status. This mobility dents Israel’s customary wall of segregation and leads to greater mixing of Jewish and Arab citizens. It is suggested in this paper that the experience of these Arab citizens is best understood as an example of a coming “out of the ghetto” ordeal that parallels that of European Jews, following emancipation and Black Americans, following the end of slavery and northward migration. In each of these cases, the mobile minority encountered severe backlash in the form of surveillance of frontiers and racialized violence as means of policing social boundaries, making this a particularly fraught and dangerous period. Lehava, a Kahanist vigilante movement, plays a similar role in contemporary Israel. It is supported by part of the authorities and substitutes religious for racial criteria of policing.