The Palestinians in Israel
The Palestinian citizens in Israel number over 1 million persons, or more than 16% of the total population of Israel. They reside in three main areas: northern Galilee, the central Triangle, and the southern Negeb. In terms of the rural/urban divide, 29% live in ten Arab towns (in essence large villages with the municipal status of a city), 55% in more than 100 Arab villages, 8% in six mixed Arab-Jewish cities, and 8% in over 40 unrecognized villages. Of the 156,000 Palestinians who remained in Israel after the 1948 war, more than 20% were displaced from their towns and villages and became internal refugees, whose original villages and towns were destroyed and taken over by Israel. (See Mada al-Carmel’s Website).
Between the years 1948-66, the Palestinians in Israel lived under military administration, applied only to them, despite their status as citizens of the State. The military rule restricted Palestinians’ economic and social rights, including their freedom of movement, speech, and assembly. It was also the main tool used by the State to control Arab development and confiscate Palestinian resources, in particular land. By 1998, over 80% of privately owned Palestinian land had been systematically expropriated by the state for exclusive use by Jewish citizens.
Military rule ended in 1966, but the institutionalized discrimination against the Palestinians in Israel did not. Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, has reported that at least 17 Israeli laws directly discriminate against Palestinian citizens. This discrimination includes explicit exclusion from certain government jobs, restricted land and water rights, and poor educational opportunities. The end result is that Palestinians in Israel face daunting social, economic, political, and cultural challenges.
Socially, the Palestinians in Israel have been caught between intense contradictory forces of modernity and traditionalism without national social institutions concerned about their development or empowered to act effectively on their behalf. Massive land expropriation and rapid proletarianization were not accompanied by parallel economic development. With rapid demographic increase, built-up areas in Arab villages swelled in size, but the infrastructure remained strangulated. These villages lack essential services such as water and electricity supplies and education and health services.
The distorted development of Arab towns was part and parcel of a truncated social development that inevitably introduced what many in the community describe as a distortion into the social identity. Generally speaking, this identity is characterized by the adoption of external manifestations of modernity and the emulation of Western Jewish culture (and reactions to such manifestations in large segments of the society), existing in many cases alongside a hard core of parochial values of religious and family identity and other social values that control social and political behavior.
The state’s political control also contributed to distorted political development. Due to the state’s overwhelming focus on security concerns and its explicit goal of serving Jewish society first and foremost, Palestinians are subject to discriminatory policies. Until the 1970s, social and political changes in the Palestinian community were viewed as manifestations of threatening extremism. Based on their distance from the mainstream Zionist hegemony, Arab political movements that place Arab needs first are described with pejorative terms like “radical,” “extremist,” and “rejectionist.” Israeli analysts traditionally deny, ignore, or misdiagnose the Arab’s central political dilemma or existential predicament, which emanate from formal state policies, institutional foundations, and ideological commitments that make equality unattainable.
The peace process that culminated in the 1993 Oslo Agreement opened the way for a broader discussion of Palestinian social and civil life in Israel. The agreements made it clear that the Arabs in Israel will remain there by Palestinian consent, lending a sense of finality to their status as Israeli citizens who have to struggle for their own collective status. Today, Palestinian citizens of Israel can better articulate their political, social, and economic rights, and there are increasing forces within the Israeli political and academic establishment who are willing to listen to the emerging Palestinian voices.
Before the recent Intifada, the relative relaxation of security concerns and the growing awareness of Arab concerns within the Israeli establishment contributed to some change. There is a shift to greater openness in the judicial system, new voices in Israeli academia, and increasing awareness within the political establishment itself that many policies are discriminatory and have deleterious effects. All these changes come at a time when a renewed sense of political will is emerging in the Arab community. This new Arab determination stresses national identity and equal and democratic citizenship and is grappling with what that entails in terms of state policies, distribution of resources, and indeed the state structure itself. There is potential for a new discourse to emerge that could make it possible to begin addressing the underlying structural problems inherent in the state's treatment of its Palestinian citizens. The deep effects of the recent Intifada on the Arab and Jewish societies in Israel make this task even more urgent.