Palestinian citizens of Israel — a tweetstorm
[This is an unrolled thread of information about the Palestinian citizens of Israel, exactly as I tweeted it.]
A (LONG) THREAD about Israel/Palestine & Palestinians with Israeli citizenship.
#RoshHashana & #YomKippur mark the annual high point of American synagogue attendance. Holiday sermons acknowledge this in many ways, not least with many loving references to Israel & Israelis.
In most synagogues, though, 21% of all Israelis, fully a fifth of the population, will go unmentioned & unacknowledged (indeed, many American Jews seem almost unaware of their existence) because they’re Palestinian.
1.9 million Israelis — called “Israeli Arabs” in Hebrew but more accurately described as “Palestinian-Israelis” — are the descendants of Palestinians who didn’t leave/weren’t successfully pushed out when Israel was established.
I spent many, many yrs writing about & advocating around Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank & Gaza Strip; like most people engaged in the Israel/Palestine discourse, I’ve only occasionally reported on, written about, or discussed the realities of Palestinian-Israelis.
They’re often described as 2nd-class citizens (’אזרחים סוג ב); in the brutal hierarchy of need, their plight falls short of Gazans, who live under siege & regular military assault, or West Bankers, who face a brutal occupation marked by daily humiliation & human rights abuses, so
Palestinian-Israelis are forgotten on all sides, which is how Israel wants it. Israeli authorities, military & civil, have consistently done all they can to divide & conquer the Palestinian people & prevent them from realizing either their national dreams, or cultural unity.
(btw who am I that I’m going on about this? I’m Am-Israeli; married to a Jewish Jerusalemite; kosher-keeping/synagogue-going Zionist [aka Jewish natlist]; covered the conflict for the foreign press for many yrs, including suicide bombings; MA in MidEast Studies etc. Now you know)
There’s a brutal logic to this, & it’s the logic of nationalism. Two natlist movements went to war over the same piece of land; one side won. Israel does everything it can to make sure it won’t have to re-write its understanding of nationalism to allow for that of Palestinians.
The upshot for Palestinian-Israelis is that they’re treated as a 5th column, always. They’re not simply 2nd class citizens, w/ all that suggests in terms of education, infrastructure, & healthcare, voter suppression & police brutality. They’re treated as enemies, lying in wait.
In 2015 Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu warned Jewish voters that Arabs were “voting in droves”; on election day Sept 2019, he went on Facebook to warn of long lines at Arab voting places: “You must go vote Likud to stop a last-minute leftist-Arab government!”
What’s crucial to understanding this is that Netanyahu is not, by any means, an outlier. Warnings about the threat of Arab birth rates, or Arab political organization, or Arab ANYthing is bog-standard behavior on the part of Israel’s Jewish politicians — even the “centrist” ones.
To the extent that Palestinian-Israelis ever appear in a positive light in Jewish discourse, either in the US or Israel, it’s as a token for Israel’s democracy. As in: “Look at what the Arab world did to the Jews in 1948! Israeli Arabs get to vote!”
The framing is always one of largess. “We” let “them” have citizenship rights — those rights aren’t inalienable. “We” are better than dictatorships — not held to a higher, democratic standard. (Indeed, rightwing politicians regularly threaten to revoke Pal-Israelis’ citizenship.)
And I could talk about this until I’m blue in the face — describe it, quote Netanyahu (who’s also Prime Minister of those drove-voting Arabs), dig up stats (for every 2 shekels in education for Jewish kids, Arab kids get 1.6; Arab infant mortality rate are 3x higher than J rates)
But I want to show you a video.
It’s a video I happened to come across after #RoshHashana, while looking for happy videos about something else. But for Palestinian-Israelis, any happy moment is almost certainly going to be tempered by the peculiar status of being a near-invisible, 2nd class citizen/enemy.
Americans, Jewish & otherwise, sometimes know that Israel regularly demolishes Palestinian homes in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem. They more rarely know that the legal excuse is almost always that the building didn’t have the necessary permits.
Very, very occasionally, you’ll find an American (Jewish or otherwise) who knows that those permits are almost never issued, as part of a long-standing, multi-pronged Israeli policy of squeezing the Palestinians on the West Bank & in East Jerusalem on any and all fronts.
These demolitions are perhaps unsurprising — it’s a war. It’s still a war. At least when you live under military occupation, no one expects your occupier to be particularly careful of the niceties of human rights laws.
What nearly no one knows is that such demolitions also happen inside Israel, w/ the same legal basis as under occupation. A Palestinian family expands; builds an addition; didn’t get a permit (bc permits aren’t given); authorities come & demolish whatever the state deems illegal.
Over the past several mos, demolitions have ramped up in the Wadi Ara area, possibly to allow expansion in a Jewish town (Katzir), possibly to free up land for Israel’s (illegal) separation barrier along the border w the occupied West Bank, possibly to remind everyone who’s boss.
Simply put: Building permits are granted on the basis of nationality. Citizens living in Katzir have no problem getting building permits; citizens living across the valley do.
If you want to learn more about these demolitions, or about the realities of life for Israel’s Palestinian citizens, you can do so here https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190318-government-tears-down-homes-of-palestinian-citizens-of-israel/ and here https://imemc.org/article/israeli-forces-demolish-palestinian-homes-in-arara/ and by going to adalah.org. Please do.
For now, though, here’s the video, 50 seconds of a raid on the tiny, *tiny* village of Khor Saqr, in Wadi Ara. I want to remind you that everyone in this video is an Israeli citizen. This is what Israel’s democracy looks like, for 1.9 million Israelis (credit: Maan News)
