Discrimination, division and demolitions: Life as a Palestinian citizen of Israel

Rebecca Stead

Palestinian citizens of Israel – who number around 1.8 million people and amount to just over 20 per cent of Israel’s population – are often ignored by the broader Palestinian narrative. Although unlike their compatriots in the occupied West Bank and besieged Gaza Strip, Palestinian citizens of Israel do not live under a formal military occupation, their lives are not without struggle. The community is discriminated against on a daily basis, denied equal access to resources, opportunities, political rights and housing.

So what does daily life look like for Palestinian citizens of Israel? Here are nine things you should know.

Palestinian history is repressed, their ancestral homes given to 

Jewish-Israelis

Most Palestinian citizens of Israel descend from those Palestinians who were not expelled outside the nascent state of Israel during the Nakba of 1948. This is not to say they were not displaced; many were forcibly driven from their ancestral villages into neighbouring population centres. Yet unlike their compatriots who found themselves in what was then the Jordanian West Bank, the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip or neighbouring Lebanon and Syria, these Palestinians were granted citizenship in the new Israeli state.

Today, the Palestinian narrative is repressed within Israel, which refers to 1948 as its War of Independence. Despite the fact that some NGOs such as Zochrot have worked to redress this erasure of Palestinian history running visits to depopulated villages which have since been covered over by national parks, forestation projects or purpose-built towns, discussions of the Nakba in schools, the public sphere or media are limited.

Israel has also sought to quash events commemorating the Nakba. In 2017, it banned the annual march held by Palestinian citizens of Israel on 15 May to remember the plight of their ancestors, and in August last year debated a bill which would see anyone carrying the Palestinian flag imprisoned.

This repression is compounded by the fact that, unlike other Palestinians who are prevented from travelling to Israel, Palestinian citizens of Israel often live mere miles from the ancestral homes to which they are barred from returning. Some Palestinian citizens of Israel have decided to reclaim their homes, for example the descendants of those expelled from the northern villages of Iqrit and Bir’im, who return annually to the village ruins.

Housing is restricted and resources for Arab-Israeli towns 

limited

Palestinian citizens cannot live wherever they like. In 2016, only four per cent of real estate was marketed to Palestinian citizens of Israel, with Jewish-Israelis often reluctant for their town to become “mixed”. As a result, many Palestinian citizens live in Arab-dominated towns like Nazareth, Umm Al-Fahm and Tayibe.

These towns are granted fewer resources than Jewish-Israeli towns; a 2015 report by TASC Strategic Consulting and Israel’s Ministries of Finance and Social Equality found that the per capita budget for the residents of Palestinian towns is ten per cent less than Jewish towns “with the weakest socioeconomic profiles”, and 45 per cent lower than affluent Jewish-Israeli towns.

Palestinian citizens are also denied the necessary permits to build their houses. According to NGO Sikkuy, “only 474 buildings in the Arab[-Israeli] community received the necessary legal arrangements in 2018,” a figure it called “a drop in the ocean compared with the 50,000 structures that were built over the years without permits in Arab communities as a result of discriminatory policies”.

House demolitions are commonplace

For Bedouin citizens of Israel – the majority of whom live in the south of the 
country in the Negev (Naqab) desert – restrictions on housing are even more 
stringent. Most Bedouin villages are deemed “unrecognised” by the state, 
meaning they are targeted for demolition.

In 2017, Israel passed the “Kaminitz Law” which made it easier for the state to demolish Palestinian citizens’ homes and force the beleaguered family to pay the demolition costs. The law has been called “sadistic” by Ofer Cassif, Knesset 
member (MK) for Israel’s Arab-dominated political party Hadash, who told 
MEMO in April:

It is terrible for someone to build their house, often with their own

bare hands, and then be forced to demolish it.

Some Bedouin villages such as Umm Al-Hiran and Al-Araqeeb have been demolished hundreds of times and their residents arrested for protesting Israel’s policy. The Palestinians living there are determined to remain steadfast, vowing to continue rebuilding their homes.

Palestinian citizens’ poverty rate is almost double 

Jewish-Israelis’

A December 2018 report found that the percentage of Palestinian citizens of Israel living below the poverty line is almost double the Israeli national average. Conducted by Israel’s National Insurance Institute (Bituach Leumi), the report found that found that 47.1 per cent of Arab-Israeli families live below the poverty line, versus a national average of 28.4 per cent.

The Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel – better known as Adalah – has found that several discriminatory laws contribute to this poverty. One example is the 2015 “Amendment No. 163 to the National Insurance Act”, which revokes child allowances from parents of children convicted of security offenses. Adalah explains that the law specifically “targets Palestinian minors who are either citizens of Israel or residents of East Jerusalem, and who are all brought before Israeli civil courts”.

Palestinian citizens are segregated from Jewish-Israelis 

in school,  hospitals

In addition to higher poverty rates, Palestinian citizens are often physically segregated from Jewish-Israelis. Although mixed schools in which Jewish and Palestinian-Israeli children can study together exist, in reality most children attend schools catering for their own community. In 2015, of the 1.6 million school students in Israel, fewer than 2,000 attended the handful of joint Jewish-Arab-Israeli schools.

Further, a report released last month found that this segregation begins at birth, with Palestinian and Jewish mothers separated in hospital maternity wards. Though the hospitals claim this policy is at the request of mothers, several women last year filed a lawsuit which included recordings of hospital staff saying “if there is pressure, we do mix the women, but try to separate them the next day”.

Their career opportunities are limited

Palestinian citizens are well-educated and have high levels of university attendance, with the number of Arab-Israeli students in Israeli universities growing by 78.5 per cent between 2011 and 2018. Similarly, the number of Arab-Israeli PhD candidates 
has more than doubled over the past decade.

However, they struggle to reach high-level career positions. A 2011 report by the Israel Democracy Institute found that “18.2% of Jews employed in Israel worked in banking, insurance and finance, and business services, as opposed to 7.8% of Arabs; approximately 10% of Jewish workers were employed in the high-tech industry, as opposed to 2.8% of Arabs”. Instead, Palestinian citizens of Israel often have low-skilled, low-paid occupations, with 43.3 per cent of male Arab-Israeli workers employed in construction, agriculture and industry.

The career trajectories of Palestinian citizens of Israel are also negatively impacted by the fact that they are exempt from Israel’s military service. When they come to apply for jobs after university, Palestinians citizens are discriminated against for not having served in the army and lack the personal connections often built among Jewish-Israelis during their national service.

They are prevented from marrying other Palestinians or Arabs

Palestinians citizens of Israel are not free to marry as they choose. In 2003, Israel passed the “Citizenship and Entry Law” which “restricts Palestinian citizens of Israel from living together in Israel with their Palestinian spouses from the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) or from ‘enemy states,’ defined by the law as ‘Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Iraq’”.

In 2012 Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the law was constitutional. Adalah 
slammed the decision, saying: “The Supreme Court approved a law the likes of which do not exist in any democratic state in the world, depriving citizens from maintaining a 
family life in Israel only on the basis of the ethnicity or national belonging of their spouse.”

Electoral participation is conditional on accepting 

Israel’s Jewish character

Unlike Jerusalemite Palestinians who are only granted residency status, Palestinian citizens of Israel are able to vote in Israel’s election. However, according to Israel’s “Basic Law: The Knesset”, any electoral candidate or party must accept Israel’s character as a “Jewish and democratic state” in order to contest.

Many Palestinian MKs have been targeted by Jewish-Israeli politicians as a result of this law, as they have tried to have them banned from electoral participation. The Balad party – which sees itself as a member of the Palestinian national movement – has been targeted continually, with prominent former Arab-Israeli MK Haneen Zoabi repeatedly attacked.

During Israel’s general election last month, the Ra’am-Balad alliance – comprised of two of Israel’s four Arab-Israeli parties that formerly made up the Joint List – was targeted under this law, with the Central Elections Committee voting to ban the alliance. Though the Supreme Court later overturned the ban, the decision was 
seen as evidence of the barriers to Palestinian citizens of Israel participating fully in the electoral process.

They are the target of incitement, racism and discrimination

Since the creation of Israel, its Palestinian citizens have been depicted as an internal threat, a “fifth column” in need of constant surveillance. Historically this was born 
out in martial law, which applied only to Palestinian citizens between 1948 and 1966.

Although martial law is no longer imposed, the rhetoric which motivated its existence remains. This was seen once again during last month’s election, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party used anti-Arab slogans and PR stunts to depict Palestinian citizens as a threat and dissuade them from going to the polls.

Netanyahu has also parroted the old trope that Palestinians do not belong in Israel because they have “22 other states to go to”. This rhetoric not only ignores the historical presence of Palestinians throughout Israel’s history and prior to the state’s creation, but their status as Israeli citizens who should be afforded the same rights as their fellow Jewish compatriots.

The Moral Travesty of Israel Seeking Arab, Iranian Money for its Alleged Nakba

by Dr Ramzy Baroud 

The game is afoot. Israel, believe it or not, is demanding that seven Arab countries and Iran pay $250 billion as compensation for what it claims was the forceful exodus of Jews from Arab countries during the late 1940s.

The events that Israel is citing allegedly occurred at a time when Zionist Jewish militias were actively uprooting nearly one million Palestinian Arabs and systematically destroying their homes, villages and towns throughout Palestine.

The Israeli announcement, which reportedly followed “18 months of secret research” conducted by the Israeli government’s Ministry of Social Equality, should not be filed under the ever-expanding folder of shameless Israeli misrepresentations of history.

It is part of a calculated effort by the Israeli government, and namely by Minister Gila Gamliel, to create a counter-narrative to the rightful demand for the ‘Right of Return’ for Palestinian refugees ethnically cleansed by Jewish militias between 1947-1948.

But there is a reason behind the Israeli urgency to reveal such questionable research: the relentless US-Israeli attempt in the last two years to dismiss the rights of Palestinian refugee rights, to question their numbers and to marginalize their grievances. It is all part and parcel of the ongoing plot disguised as the ‘Deal of the Century’, with the clear aim of removing from the table all major issues that are central to the Palestinian struggle for freedom.

“The time has come to correct the historic injustice of the pogroms (against Jews) in seven Arab countries and Iran, and to restore, to hundreds of thousands of Jews who lost their property, what is rightfully theirs,” said Gamliel.

The language – “.. to correct the historic injustice” – is no different from language used by Palestinians who have for 70 years and counting been demanding the restoration of their rights per United Nations Resolution 194.

The deliberate conflating between the Palestinian narrative and the Zionist narrative is aimed at creating parallels, with the hope that a future political agreement would resolve to having both grievances cancel each other out.

Contrary to what Israeli historians want us to believe, there was no mass exodus of Jews from Arab countries and Iran, but rather a massive campaign orchestrated by Zionist leaders at the time to replace the Palestine Arab population with Jewish immigrants from all over the world. The ways through which such a mission was achieved often involved violent Zionist plots – especially in Iraq.

In fact, the call on Jews to gather in Israel from all corners of the world remains the rally cry for Israeli leaders and their Christian Evangelical supporters – the former wants to ensure a Jewish majority in the state, while the latter is seeking to fulfill a biblical condition for their long-awaited Armageddon.

To hold Arabs and Iran responsible for this bizarre and irresponsible behavior is a transgression on the true history in which neither Gamliel nor her ministry are interested.

On the other hand, and unlike what Israeli military historians often claim, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1947- 48 (and the subsequent purges of the native population that followed in 1967) was a premeditated act of ethnic cleansing and genocide. It has been part of a long-drawn and carefully calculated campaign that, from the very start, served as the main strategy at the heart of the Zionist movement’s ‘vision’ for the Palestinian people.

“We must expel the Arabs and take their place,” wrote Israel’s founder, military leader and first prime minister, David Ben Gurion in a letter to his son, Amos in October 5, 1937. That was over a decade before Plan D – which saw the destruction of the Palestinian homeland at the hands of Ben Gurion’s militias – went into effect.

Palestine “contains vast colonization potential,” he also wrote, “which the Arabs neither need nor are qualified to exploit.”

This clear declaration of a colonial project in Palestine, communicated with the same kind of unmistakable racist insinuations and language that accompanied all western colonial experiences throughout the centuries was not unique to Ben Gurion. He was merely paraphrasing what was, by then, understood to be the crux of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine at the time.

As Palestinian professor Nur Masalha concluded in his book, the ‘Expulsion of the Palestinians’, the idea of the ‘transfer’ – the Zionist term for “ethnic cleansing’ of the Palestinian people – was, and remains, fundamental in the realization of Zionist ambitions in Palestine.

Palestinian Arab “villages inside the Jewish state that resist ‘should  be destroyed .. and their inhabitants expelled beyond the borders of the Jewish state,” Masalha wrote quoting the ‘History of the Haganah’ by Yehuda Slutsky. .

What this meant in practice, as delineated by Palestinian historian, Walid Khalidi was the joint targeting by various Jewish militias to systematically attack all population centers in Palestine, without exception.

“By the end of April (1948), the combined Haganah-Irgun offensive had completely encircled (the Palestinian city of) Jaffa, forcing most of the remaining civilians to flee by sea to Gaza or Egypt; many drowned in the process, ” Khalidi wrote in ‘Before Their Diaspora’.

This tragedy has eventually grown to affect all Palestinians, everywhere within the borders of their historic homeland. Tens of thousands of refugees joined up with hundreds of thousands more at various dusty trails throughout the country, growing in numbers as they walked further, to finally pitch their tents in areas that, then were meant to be ‘temporary’ refugee encampments. Alas, these became the Palestinian refugee camps of today, starting some 70 years ago.

None of this was accidental. The determination of the early Zionists to establish a ‘national home’ for Jews at the expense of the country’s Palestinian Arab nation was communicated, openly, clearly and repeatedly throughout the formation of early Zionist thoughts, and the translation of those well-articulated ideas into physical reality.

70 years have passed since the Nakba’ – the ‘Catastrophe’ of 1948 – and neither Israel took responsibility for its action, nor Palestinian refugees received any measure of justice, however small or symbolic.

For Israel to be seeking compensation from Arab countries and Iran is a moral travesty, especially as Palestinians refugees continue to languish in refugee camps across Palestine and the Middle East.

Yes, indeed “the time has come to correct the historic injustice,” not of Israel’s alleged ‘pogroms’ carried out by Arabs and Iranians, but the real and most tragic destruction of Palestine and its people.

– Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His latest book is The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, London, 2018). He earned a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and is a Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, UCSB.