Who are the Palestinian citizens of Israel and what rights do they have ?
You hit the jackpot, Palestinian citizen of Israel here. I will try my best to give you a comprehensive summary of who we are and what rights do we have.
Palestinian citizens of Israel, dubbed “Israeli Arabs” by the Israeli state to remove our Palestinian identity, are basically those Palestinians who escaped expulsion in 1948 and their descendants, we now constitute approximately 20% of Israel’s total population. Israel’s estimated 75% Jewish majority is a result of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and the continued denial of the rights of return of Palestinian refugees to this day.
Israel seized the lands both of Palestinian refugees who fled abroad and of us who stayed within its borders in the early years of its statehood. But forced displacements continue in the Naqab (Negev) Desert and elsewhere. Israel has built some 900 towns for Jewish settlers since its founding, and virtually none for us.
We are permitted to vote, stand for parliamentary election, serve in the judiciary, and practice professions. For the first time ever, an independent Palestinian political party joined the ruling Israeli coalition government in 2021.
But as in the Jim Crow era in the United States, a variety of laws, policies, and informal practices ensure that Palestinian citizens remain politically disempowered. Housing in Israel is almost entirely segregated, a condition that is permitted under Israeli law, with Israeli town admission committees assessing applicants’ “social and cultural suitability” (basically a code for excluding us of Israel from predominantly Jewish neighborhoods). Education is also separate and unequal.
In 2018, Israel passed the Jewish Nation-State Law. This law entrenches the claim that only the Jewish people have rights to national self-determination in the “Land of Israel,” demotes Arabic as an official language of the state, and establishes Jewish settlement as a national value. In other words, the Israeli legal system not only lacks an equivalent to the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, its law formalizes Jewish supremacy.
This racist legislation is only one of 65 Israeli laws that explicitly discriminate against us or privilege Jews, according to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.
A “Jewish democratic state” is just as much a contradiction as a “White democratic state” or a “Christian democratic state.” Elected officials should insist that Israel work toward a future in which it becomes a state for all its citizens, not just Jews.
That’s pretty much it.
Palestinian citizens of Israel protesting the passage of the Jewish nation-state law. Tel Aviv, August 2018. (Photo: Reuters)