“What the War Means for Palestinians Inside Israel”, The New Yorker

By Isaac Chotiner, Q & A, October 19, 2023

A fifth of Israel’s citizens are Palestinian. How will the current conflict shape their political and cultural identity?

In the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7th terrorist attack, Israel’s military has been bombing the Gaza Strip, where it has killed more than three thousand Palestinians. Tensions are also mounting in the West Bank, where several dozen Palestinians have been killed since last week. While the media’s focus has, understandably, been on the more than thirteen hundred Israeli victims of the initial attack, and on Palestinian civilians now facing siege and aggression in the occupied territories, there are two million Palestinians living inside Israel itself, making up approximately twenty per cent of the country’s population.

I recently spoke by phone with Amjad Iraqi—an editor at +972 Magazine and a policy analyst at the think tank Al-Shabaka who comes from a family of Palestinian citizens of Israel—to discuss how Palestinian Israelis are reckoning with this month’s events, and what the war may mean for their future. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed the distinct forms of discrimination that Palestinian citizens of Israel face, how the relationship among different Palestinian communities has changed over time, and what Hamas’s tactics mean for any future state that recognizes equal rights for its inhabitants.

How would you describe the symbolic or practical relationship between Palestinians who are citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza?

Most Palestinians—about seven hundred and fifty thousand—either fled or were expelled during the 1948 war. But, after the armistice lines were created between Israel and the surrounding Arab states, you still had about a hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians on the Israeli side of the border. And the state decided to grant these Palestinians citizenship, and their descendants to this day still have that Israeli citizenship. So, historically, we are part of the Palestinian people. We originated in historical Palestine as it was understood from the British Mandate period. And we’re still part of that Palestinian society, but with this specific legal class and legal status.

How do the rights of Arab or Palestinian citizens within Israel differ from the rights of Jews in Israel?

From the early days of the state, up until 1966, Palestinians inside Israel were placed under military rule—the same infrastructure that we’re familiar with in the West Bank. There were curfews and orders and even arrests. This entailed a lot of harsh restrictions on Palestinians, including on their political organizing, and social and cultural expression. But one of the most pivotal things was that Israel confiscated masses of land—not just from Palestinian refugees who were expelled or who fled but also from Palestinian citizens inside. My home town, Tira, shrank by about a third from its original size. Military rule was lifted in 1966, and since then you’ve had this gradual progression, let’s say, of Palestinian citizens’ rights.

But, even to this day, there is an extensive legal infrastructure that inherently makes Palestinian citizens unequal to Jewish citizens. You can go all the way back to these laws that were used to appropriate land and property. But you also have things like the Law of Return, which allows Jews from anywhere around the world to come and get automatic citizenship. Meanwhile, family members of Palestinians, even those who are citizens of Israel and who originated from that land before 1948, are actively denied that right. The Citizenship and Entry Into Israel Law basically bans family unification between citizens of Israel and people in the occupied territories. This is one of the most racist laws because it is first and foremost about demographics. There is the Admissions Committees Law of 2011, which basically enables housing segregation. And these are not just ancient laws. Especially in the Netanyahu years, you had a huge proliferation of this very targeted discriminatory legislation, which inherently makes people second-class.

Do you feel that this situation has, broadly speaking, sparked camaraderie and solidarity between Palestinian communities within Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza? Or have the discrepancies between Palestinians who live in Israel and Palestinians who live in the occupied territories, for example, caused resentment instead?

It has always ebbed and flowed. In the first twenty years of Israel’s existence, Palestinian citizens inside the state were cut off from the Palestinian people. They were cut off from the rest of the Arab world. There was this enormous rupture. One second, they were part of a land that they were familiar with, and suddenly, within the space of one or two years, they became second- or third-class citizens. Their entire homeland was completely transformed and usurped.

After 1967, there’s this kind of irony that, when Israel began its occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, although it came with its own horrors for Palestinians there, for Palestinian citizens of Israel it actually opened up the community. Suddenly they were able to connect with family and others in the West Bank and Gaza. People were able to cross the Green Line. This idea of a one-state reality is not a recent invention. It happened the moment soldiers set foot in the Jordan Valley and on the Gaza coast, in 1967.

Ever since, Palestinian citizens have been reviving and restoring connections both on the personal and the collective level. And you see this steady trajectory of Palestinian generations returning to their identity of Palestinian-ness, especially this younger generation. With every passing decade, those connections only get stronger. You have organizations, you have political parties, you have cultural centers. And, even now, social media. Of course, there’s been a lot of repression and blockage, and inequality, but that was one of the openings.

Can you talk a little bit about the 2021 protests, and what they represented along these lines?

The real source and spark began in Jerusalem. You had these two struggles that were going on. One was around Jerusalem, specifically Damascus Gate, and of course the holy sites, such as Al-Aqsa, where Israeli police were using restrictions and brutality against a lot of worshippers and protesters. And, at the same time, you had this parallel struggle where Jewish settlers were basically trying to force out Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrahneighborhood.

These two parallel struggles galvanized a lot of Palestinian society across borders. And, as these struggles intensified in Jerusalem, you then had Palestinian citizens of Israel coming out into the streets. You also had Hamas enter with rocket attacks under the pretext of defending Jerusalem. And this led to a war in Gaza as well. Those events then became dual dimensions of what Palestinians call the Unity Intifada or the Dignity Intifada. This restored a sense of pride, and there was a synchronized resistance to the regime.

The flip side of that was also this violence which was being imposed by the state. You had the bombardment of Gaza. You had the brutality that was happening in Jerusalem and the threat of settler takeovers. Inside Israel, you had police brutality across Palestinian towns, and especially in mixed cities like Jaffa and Haifa, where there were some clashes between Jewish and Arab citizens. Though you had some violence on both sides, even inside the state there was a colossal asymmetry.

Has the relationship between different Palestinian communities changed with the increasing sense, among some parties, that a one-state solution might be more realistic than two states?

Palestinian citizens of Israel defy the paradigm that everyone’s been pushing for so many decades. So, yes, we’re citizens of Israel. And, yes, especially since the Oslo Accords, Palestinian citizens, or at least their political leaders, have advocated for something like a two-state framework. But the reality is that we actually exist beyond the Green Line. We transcend it. There are people who go to the West Bank to shop on a regular basis. Or to see family members. There’s a whole socioeconomic life that transcends the idea of “This side is Israel, this side is Palestine.”

The underlying core consensus of the Palestinian community in Israel is full equality for all and an end to the occupation. If you want a two-state solution, that’s fine. But we’re not interested in living in a state that deems your race or your ethnicity a determinant of your rights. The Israeli response has been that this is calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. The way Zionism has become dominant today—it cannot fathom Jewish existence in historical Palestine without an ethno-national state. It needs a Jewish state. It needs this system that insures a higher Jewish class compared with non-Jews.

So the issue is not necessarily whether you get a Palestinian state or not. The question is whether Palestinians on all sides of the Green Line are living in a system that insures that they’re actually recognized as people who belong to the land, who are not having their rights conditioned on another group getting theirs first. Even the Zionist left still sees Jewish privilege and some form of Jewish supremacy as a requirement to any future solution. For Palestinian citizens, that’s absolutely unacceptable.

Broadly speaking, how did the Palestinian Israeli community feel about the judicial protests that we’ve seen this year in Israel, which were obviously trying to oppose the Netanyahu government and essentially some more extreme forms of Zionism, but were fundamentally not challenging the occupation?

There’s a reason that hardly any Palestinian citizens came to these demonstrations. There’s a lot of debate in the community about this, but there’s a pretty core understanding that the premises of this huge fight in the Israeli political system and Israeli society is a clash of two myths. The far right and the people who are for this coup are saying that the courts have been too interventionist. The opposition, which isn’t just from the Zionist left, but includes members of the Zionist right and center, is arguing that, actually, the court is crucial for democracy. Palestinian citizens are watching all this and they’re asking, “What are these two camps talking about?” Because both are completely wrong. The Supreme Court and the Israeli judiciary have been active participants in and enablers of the Israeli state’s worst policies. A lot of the discriminatory laws that were passed in the past ten, fifteen years—most were actually openly approved by the Supreme Court despite Palestinian citizens petitioning against them and trying to challenge them in all sorts of ways. And this is not even to mention most of the policies that are upheld in the occupied territories and that shield the military from accountability.

How does Hamas view Palestinian citizens of Israel?

There’s an understanding among most Palestinian citizens, even those who don’t support Hamas, that it is one manifestation of Palestinian politics and the Palestinian struggle. In regard to the past two weeks, I think a lot of Palestinian citizens were quite shocked by what happened. On one front, I think many of them saw the first phase of the Hamas attack, targeting military infrastructure, as this inspiring moment. But there is that other dimension: the horrors and the massacres that happened in southern Israeli communities. And Palestinian citizens have this complex position because they know these places, they know some of these communities, and some of them work in these areas. They also are affected by rocket attacks that come from Gaza. So it’s a very complex place to be in whereby they understand where Hamas is coming from and align themselves with the Palestinians who are trapped in that siege, but their politics is still much more about trying to play the system to try to change the status quo. Unfortunately, even nonviolent political movements are met with a lot of repression, and sometimes crushed in the same way that armed struggle is. And this is part of the dilemma that affects all Palestinians.

I’m curious how Hamas views people like you, though, because Palestinian citizens of Israel were also killed. This would imply that Hamas sees Palestinian citizens of Israel as acceptable collateral damage or, essentially, as part of the problem, because you somehow submit to a state that’s occupying Palestinian territory.

I think it’s more complicated. I assume they are targeting Jewish Israelis, but willing to think that there will be sacrifices that have to be made. Still, even if there are differences and disagreements between Palestinian citizens and Hamas, including the question of armed struggle, there’s a core alignment about the protection of Palestinians as a whole, so there are issues that bind them despite any differences that they might have.

If they are targeting Palestinian citizens of Israel, or they don’t care about Palestinian citizens of Israel dying, that could tell us something about the movement which is more complex than that they’re just interested in Palestinian liberation.

Their tactics, especially in the past two weeks, have been brutal. And Palestinian citizens know Hamas’s tactics can often come at a cost to them, and that their own communities aren’t safe. Many Arab towns don’t have bomb shelters to protect them from rocket attacks. But the difference is the political context. Even if they’re horrified by the massacres and reject violence and call for a different kind of movement, they still understand why this is happening.

One of the things that’s been striking about the past ten days is how naïve a lot of people have been about colonial movements in history and how people have fought against them. At the same time, if you look at a lot of colonial movements, such as Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress: his vision of the future was a democratic South Africa where all people were treated the same. And Mandela, whatever his flaws when he eventually became President, tried to enact that vision. Hamas’s goal is not a one-state solution of everyone living in peace together. What about criticizing their anti-colonial vision on that score?

I think that’s right. With that said, Hamas is again just one stream of Palestinian thoughts and politics. There are other streams that go beyond that, and Palestinian citizens especially have tried to create these different understandings of what the future can look like. And so, yeah, I think a lot of people will critique Hamas’s model for the future.

Palestinian citizens have this inside position to understand Jewish Israeli society in a way that the Palestinians in occupied territories can’t, because also we see them as civilians, whereas in the occupied territories they see Israelis physically as settlers and soldiers. In any other country, the word “equality” would be the rallying cry, exactly as you mentioned about South Africa. The problem is that, in Israel-Palestine, that actually gets thrown out the window, even by people in the United States, because equality in the narrative of Israel and Zionism means the death of the Jewish state, which should tell you a lot about what the state is and what it actually desires to be. And this is not just some theoretical thing. At times, when Palestinian citizens have tried to offer so much as a bill or a political platform or even just alternate ideas, they have been arrested, they’ve been demonized, their legislation is rejected, and they’re called terrorists.

Hamas’s tactics are brutal and violent. It is also an outcome of a wider regime that is trying to dictate how politics is conducted. Even in South Africa, the way that most people have understood the end of apartheid has been very much whitewashed and simplified. It wasn’t just boycotts and sanctions. There was a huge military struggle. There was a huge civil-disobedience campaign that got very ugly. But Palestinians are not only being asked to wage the cleanest struggle in the world, they are being told not to ask for full equality. How can Israel be a democracy when, in reality, it’s asking for an exception to be a Jewish state, where Jews still get some kind of privilege? This is an indictment not only of the state but also of the fact that the international community has such a warped understanding of the situation that it thinks equality and the Palestinian demand for equality will result in the death of a state.

You’re saying that, essentially, the Zionist project has a certain lack of equality written into it. That seems right to me, but a lot of Israelis and a lot of Jews would say that you need such a state because of the huge amount of antisemitism in the world. Whatever you think about that, it does seem to me that it’s a challenge to the idea of one state living in peace if so much of the resistance to the current state, especially in the case of Hamas, entails clearly wanting to kill Jews.

The history of Zionism and the evolution of Zionism shows that it was never an inevitable trajectory, but the problem now is that everyone is saying that the only answer to Jewish safety is Zionism, and I think many Jews will be the first to tell you that that’s not the case. If one of the answers to your security and safety is to have a heavily militarized state with authoritarian powers, I’m not sure we’re learning the lessons of history. I know there’s a lot of debate, there’s a lot of pushback, especially among American Jews. We’re trying to say there’s an alternative way to think about this, not only in terms of Jewish identity outside of Israel, that there is a place for Jews in the diaspora, but also for Israeli Jews—that if they can only envision their safety and security through dominance, then this in and of itself is a huge clash of values, even within Jewish society.

There are very real historical and present reasons for Jewish society, transnationally, to be concerned, because antisemitism is still alive and well. And, yes, there are actors, including Hamas, who do have these attitudes, but this is not inevitable. This is not fate. There are other ideas that exist in Palestinian politics. But if Israel’s regime over Palestinians, which is defined by violence even outside of war, if this apartheid is still active, that is what metastasizes Palestinian violence.

When a boycott-and-sanctions movement came to South Africa, it was praised all over the world. I grew up being told that nonviolence was the best way to go, but what Palestinians are finding is that, even when you try nonviolent tactics, you are deemed antisemitic. You are still being deemed a terrorist. You are being deemed someone who’s seeking the destruction of the Jewish state. And Palestinian citizens see this literally when they use their right to vote to try to push alternate kinds of legislation, and they are deemed enemies, a fifth column.

How much fear is there that there’s going to be a backlash against Palestinians within Israel?

The dominant feeling right now among Palestinian citizens is fear. May, 2021, just gave a glimpse of how the Israeli state and society can react against Palestinian citizens in these moments. Jewish Israeli society has been growing more and more right-wing. It’s not just the politicians: it’s going all the way down, including to the media, including to universities, and to the streets—you feel that increasing racism, you feel that increasing hawkishness, including against the Arabs inside the country.

And what we’ve been seeing after these two weeks is Palestinian students on campuses being suspended or expelled by university administrations. You have universities sending out letters that threaten anyone who speaks out, saying that they could be fired or expelled. And they’re targeting Palestinians specifically. I don’t know what the numbers are now, but you have scores of citizens being arrested by the Israeli police as we speak. So we’re seeing the state really try to stifle citizens from being able even to protest.

We are watching this colossal bombardment of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and these are people we have direct family and social and national connections with. Palestinian citizens really fear the possibility of forced transfer. And, so, time will tell in the coming weeks and months how that’s going to unfold. But now we are really just feeling the hostility, to the point that fear is really permeating.

I still think that we have a lot to offer to show Palestinians and Israelis and people abroad that there is a different way, but it begins by breaking some of the paradigms that everyone’s been promoting, especially since the Oslo period. It begins with other nations learning to look at us as a community with all our imperfections, and realizing that we are trying to create a different kind of future, based on those principles of full equality and recognition of full national rights for everyone, in a shared society. ♦