The Palestinians in Israel were known in Palestinian political
jargon as the "Inside Palestinians" in reference to their
geographical location inside Palestine. The Palestinian political
center moved from exile to the West Bank and Gaza after the Israeli
invasion of Lebanon in 1982, so the term "Inside Palestinians"
started to also be used for people in the West Bank and Gaza.
"Inside Palestinians " have always been on the outside of both
Palestinian and Israeli society and politics and, in a way, outside
the Israeli and Palestinian national experiences and authentic
identity. This article examine how this dual "outsiders" reality
has become the defining characteristic of the collective identity
and national existence of the Arabs in Israel, and questions
whether their conflicting political realities are in fact
reconcilable.
On the margins of Two Societies
Although the Palestinians in Israel are an integral part of the
Palestinian people by virtue of their history, culture, and
national consciousness, and although they are citizens in Israel
with legal political rights of suffrage and representation,
nevertheless they are, not fully Israelis and, in a sense, not
fully Palestinians. The essence of their political struggle over
the 53 years since their society was dismantled and exiled and they
became a minority in their own homeland has been to achieve equal
citizenship and maintain the integrity of their national identity.
However, until now, they remained on the margin of each society
with deep implications for their collective identity.
In order to understand the depth of the political quandary and its
consequences for the Palestinians' collective identity, one should
consider the extraordinary characteristics of their relationship
with Israel, "their state," on the one hand, and with the
Palestinian people, "their people", on the other. The most
meaningful elements of the relationship with Israel point to
experiences of denial and exclusion: Israel through its policies,
laws, and declared ideology questions their collective existence,
challenges the authenticity of their relationship to their land,
considers them as a threat or as adversaries, and often expresses a
wish that they didn't exist at all. On the Palestinian side, their
predicament relative to the major issues that face other
Palestinians is overlooked; their collective concerns are placed
outside the national goals of the Palestinian National Movement,
and they fall outside any negotiations between the Palestinians and
Israel.
Consider, for example, three major issues in their relationship
with Israel: Their relationship to the land as an indigenous group,
their citizenship, and the reality of being a national minority in
Israel. First, it can hardly be disputed that the Arab community in
Israel is an indigenous minority whose relationship to its
homeland, sense of belonging, and sense of ownership and right are
deeply ingrained. Yet this status, as an indigenous group is
explicitly or implicitly denied to the Palestinians in Israel; in
effect they are considered foreigners, aliens, even invaders. The
Palestinians in Israel are tolerated as guests by mainstream
Zionist ideology and by most Israelis, ironically a nation of
immigrants that conferred indigenousness upon itself. The dominant
state ideology, which considered the country the "homeland" of the
Jewish people, ingrained in the Jewish public the awareness that
Arabs have no authentic indigenous connection to the place as a
homeland.
Furthermore, only in the last few years has the Palestinian
community in Israel itself begun to claim the status of an
indigenous group, despite the fact that some of their major
grievances emanate from denial of indigenous rights (e.g.,
recognition of their identity, simple recognition that the country
is their homeland, control over their land, and cultural autonomy).
It is the Zionist perception of Arabs as alien to a "Jewish state",
that provides Zionists with justifications to expropriate private
and public land for the exclusive use of Jewish citizens, without
an eyebrow being raised by Jewish conscience or the justice
system.
Even today, tens of Arab villages and towns are not recognized by
the state (and as such receive no basic services such as access
roads, health services, and education), and about 20% of Arabs are
internal refugees whose original towns were destroyed and their
lands handed over to Jewish towns and kibbutzim. The refugees are
not allowed to return to their villages or to regain their land.
These issues remained on the back burner of Arab political agenda
because the Arab minority did not have the power to challenge this
imposed denial of their indigenous status and authentic ownership
of the homeland. These issues are gradually emerging, however,
together in parallel to growing awareness of their status of an
indigenous minority.
Citizens or Enemeies?
Consider Arab citizens and Israel's ethnic project. The most
important factor in determining Israel's approach to its Arab
citizens is that Israel is an ethnic Jewish state - an exclusionary
vision that leaves no place for non-Jews. Being Jewish rather than
being an Israeli citizen determines the borders of inclusion in the
state identity, power centers, and resource distributions. Israel
is a state in the service of the Jewish people - Israeli and
non-Israeli citizens - and not of its citizens, as in national
states. In contrast, Israel sees in the existence of the Arab
minority a hindrance to the ethnic Jewish project and therefore as
a demographic threat.
The Arabs are to be controlled--even if that means using morally
warped policies such as encouraging internal segmentation and
social tension and using cooptation -- policies that are generally
used against adversaries, not fellow citizens. In some cases, such
as in issues related to land and immigration policies, Arabs are
treated more as enemies than as citizens. This exclusion from the
state's identity and goals is blatantly reflected in fundamental
policies, basic and other laws, and numerous regulations. What
Arabs in ethno-centered Israel experience is not discrimination
similar to that of national or other minorities in nation states.
The Arabs are excluded, repelled, treated as adversary, and
considered a threat to the state for no other reason than being
what they are. Perhaps the draft law that was recently submitted to
the Knesset by MK Michael Kleiner that offers an "emigration
package" to Arabs in order to encourage them to leave the country
(in contrast to the "immigration package" given to Jews) best
represents how Arabs experience the official state policies toward
them.
It might be misleading to describe Israel's ethnic project without
referring to Israel's broad democratic margin. Although Israel's
democracy applies in full to Jews only, it provides Arab citizens
with a broad enough margin of political freedoms and social state
services to enable most Palestinians in Israel to take their
citizenship seriously and consider it an asset. Citizenship, even
if unequal, is what connects the Arabs to Israel and to the Jewish
majority because many Arabs assume that once the larger Palestinian
issue is resolved, it would be possible for Arab citizens, together
with non-Zionist Jewish allies, to work on making the fundamental
issues of equal citizenship and separation of state and religion a
central focus for the whole society. The political vision of a
state for all its citizens advanced by their secular national
leadership was widely accepted in the community as the program that
could gradually lead to a de-Zionized and democratic state.
An Unrecognized National Minority
Palestinians in Israel constitute a national minority by any
standard of demography (they are about one million citizens and
compose about 17% of the population).They have national awareness
as Palestinian Arabs and share a history with other Palestinians
and Arabs. Yet this reality is wholly unrecognized by Israel, which
refuses to see in them a national group. Their very national
existence is still psychologically and politically denied. Israel
sees in them a collection of minorities and actively implements
policies to segment this group into religious and other subgroups.
Israel, therefore, refuses to consider group rights for the Arab
community, even on the most basic level of cultural and identity
rights. Arab education, for example, is a notoriously known tool of
state control that is deplete with Zionist substance and devoid of
Palestinian national themes.
On the Palestinian side, Palestinians in Israel are in a strong
sense outsiders to the Palestinian National Movement. They never
participated in the movement nor were they represented in its
institutions. The movement that started in exile reached out to the
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, but refrained from reaching
out to the Palestinians in Israel. The Palestinians in Israel were
placed outside the strategic goals of the Palestinian people. They
are important to the National Movement to the extent that they can
offer support to the project of a Palestinian State in the West
Bank and Gaza, a project that excludes them by definition.
The Palestinians in Israel, although treated as strangers in their
own homeland, were spared the devastating experiences of refugee
life, exile and occupation, which define the core national
experience of all other Palestinians. They did not take part in
Palestinian resistance or pay the price of being under a superior
Israeli power; they were not exposed to extreme hardship or
military crackdown during the first or second Intifada. During the
two Intifadas when Palestinian life was defined by resistance,
death and destruction, closures, home demolitions, and military
curfews, and in the recent Intifada by assassinations and military
incursions, the Palestinians in Israel continued in their life
undisrupted, showing solidarity but avoiding confrontation. The
only exception was in October 2000, when Palestinians in Israel
demonstrated in identification with the Palestinians in the West
Bank and Gaza and were met by police forces that killed 13
citizens.
The predicament of the Arabs in Israel is not an urgent priority
for the Palestinian society, nor does it have a prominent place in
the leadership's stated national goals. Even Palestinian elites
often show ignorance about the predicament of the Palestinians in
Israel, oscillating between considering them collaborators with the
Israelis or models of resistance to be followed by others. In
negotiations with Israel over the last ten years, the Palestinian
team did not raise any issue of concern to the Palestinians in
Israel.
Struggles of Eternal Outsiders
Thus the essence of the Palestinians' experience since the
establishment of Israel has been rejection, exclusion and
inequality. Even without considering the psychological implications
of these experiences, the collective existential predicament has
been intensified with the conclusion that Arabs cannot be equal in
a Jewish Zionist state. It should not be surprising, therefore,
that Palestinians do not feel a sense of belonging to,
identification with, or attachment to Israel. Indeed, their Israeli
identity is devoid of the very essence that makes identity have
such a gripping force on national groups: solidarity, belonging,
group identification, loyalty, national commitment, and pride. The
characteristics which have been the exclusive privilege of the
Palestinian Arab national movement (and increasingly in recent
years the Islamic identity of a large segment of the population),
leave out the Palestinian Israelis because they do not bear the
brunt of Palestinian resistance.
The annals of the Arabs in the Jewish state have been, by and
large, a history of struggle to overcome the status of eternal
outsiders that they have been assigned by the dynamics of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This struggle has swung from one
direction to another: at times it has been for equality and full
inclusion in the Israeli system, and at others for fully asserting
their Palestinian identity. As we will see below, a major attempt
to bridge the two might have come to end in light of developments
after the recent Intifada.
During the first two decades, between 1948-1966, the Arabs in
Israel who were the remnants of a defeated and exiled nation, found
themselves under a system of military control designed to extract
their resources in favor of building the young Zionist state. They
were treated more as a defeated enemy - which they were - than as
fellow citizens, which they also were, at least legally. Their
struggle was at the time spearheaded by the Israeli Communist Party
with an agenda to lift military rule, fight legal land theft by the
state called land expropriation, and improve basic services. This
was a period of national trauma and collective fear in which the
main goal was to stay put. Neither Israeli nor Palestinian identity
was a matter of interest in the public discourse.
The period after the 1967 war witnessed the occupation of the
remainder of Palestine and renewed contact with the Palestinians
under occupation. This resulted in a gradual reassertion of
Palestinian Israelis Palestinian identity, parallel to the forceful
reemergence of Palestinian identity with the rise of the
Palestinian National Movement headed by the PLO. The 1970s
witnessed the emergence of many community-based local nationalist
organizations, the rise of student movements, the Land Day strike
in 1976, which became a landmark of successful extraparliamentary
resistance, and the creation of the Democratic Front for Peace and
Equality (DFPE), an uneasy and temporary coalition between the
Communist Party and nationalist groups. In the 1977 elections, the
DFPE received half of the Arab votes, the highest percentage the
Israeli Communist Party ever achieved. The essence of the political
struggle under DFEP leadership was for equality, (without defining
its consequences for the Israeli state and the identity of the
Arabs), and for a two-state solution (without spelling out the
nature of the Israeli state that would emerge out of that program).
Yet, it is important to notice that the essence of their struggle
in this period--until the end of the 1970s--was for equality and
inclusion within the Israeli system.
New Leadership
The late 1970s and the 1980s were characterized by the separate
organization of nationalists in the form of a list that ran for the
Knesset - The Progressive List for Peace (PLP). The PLP broke the
grip of the Israeli Communist Party on the Arab community in
Israel. The PLP was a coalition of Arab nationalist groups that
emphasized their Palestinian identity, and a small leftist Jewish
group. Indeed the Arab side in the PLP represented an accentuated
Palestinian consciousness. It stressed the community's Palestinian
roots and belonging, manifested deep identification with the goals
of the Palestinian National Movement and established contacts with
the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank and Gaza and the PLO
leadership in exile. The PLP offered no vision for the future of
Israeli citizenship or the meaning of equality. It represented a
full swing in the pendulum toward Palestinian National identity and
away from Israeli identity.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the Islamic movement also emerged as a
major political force. On the other hand, a pragmatic and
non-ideological party (called the Arab Democratic Party) that was
in essence the outgrowth of Arab representation in the Labor party
also emerged. Both the Islamic movement and the Arab Democratic
Party avoided dealing with the complexity and intensity of the
issues of Israeli citizenship and Palestinian identity.In the last
ten or fifteen years, a new secular and nationalist Arab leadership
emerged in Israel that galvanized the intelligentsia and cultural
elites in a national project that sought to erect a bridge between
equal citizenship and national idenity: The National Democratic
Alliance (NDA). This was the only major force that dealt heads on
with both poles of the Arab's identity. The NDA first ran for the
Knesset with the DFPE in 1996, when it won one seat, and later as a
separate list in 1999, when it won two seats.
Under the leadership of Azmi Bishara, a charismatic intellectual,
The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) attempts to bridge between
equal citizenship and national identity. This was the only major
force that dealt heads on with both poles of the Arabs' identity.
The NDA first ran for the Knesset with the DFPE in 1996, when it
won one seat, and later as a separate list in 1999, when it won
two. The NDA presented the first serious intellectual effort to
deal with the Israeli citizenship and Palestinian identity in a way
that pulls the Arab minority from the "outside" of each group to
the center.
The NDA presented in utmost clarity the possibility of equal
citizenship for Arab and Jew in a non-Zionist Israel that should be
transformed to a state for its citizens rather than a state for the
Jewish people. The NDA articulated some of the constitutional,
political, and social changes that would be required for such
transformation but stopped short of developing this vision into a
political program. The NDA argued that if the state were
de-ethnicized, the Arab minority could develop a proud Arab
national identity and be an integral and active part of the
Palestinian people, thus bridging the two main components of their
identity. Claiming the two components of identity requires
political transformation on the Israeli side and the side of the
Arab community itself, the nature of this transformation was
discussed and clarified only as it relates to the nature of Israel
and Israeli society.
The cornerstone of the required transformation has always been seen
as shared citizenship between Arabs and Jews. Arab citizenship,
although unequal to that of Jews, was seen by many as the
foundation for a democratizing force that could push for change in
Israeli society, together with democratic Jewish sectors. But this
cornerstone was shaken to the core after the recent Intifada. In
reaction to Arab demonstrations in October 2000, a few days after
the start of the Palestinian Intifada, Israeli police killed 13
Arab demonstrators, Jewish mobs attacked Nazareth, Arab citizens
were assaulted in the streets of Israeli cities, and angry Jewish
citizens damaged Arab businesses.
Unlike any major development in the Arab-Israeli conflict since
1967-- including the first Intifada and the Oslo agreements--the
present Intifada has permanently damaged the nature of the
relationship between Israel and its Palestinian citizens. In
particular, its first few fateful days, and specifically, Israel's
reaction to the demonstrations that erupted in various Arab
localities inside Israel, raised deep doubts among Arabs about the
value of their Israeli citizenship and ruptured the relationship
between Arab and Jew in the country. The Israeli behavior in the
West Bank and Gaza since October of last year has deepened the
split that emerged between the two communities, and perhaps caused
irreparable damage to the fabric of relationship that was already
significantly frayed.
With the shaken trust in the nature and value of citizenship, the
secular nationalist project that was conceived as a way out of the
double marginality seems to have reached a serious impasse. Both
the elites and the public recognize this impasse as an existential
predicament. The predicament emanates not only from the
irreconcilability of the realities on the ground, because most
people agree on that, but also from the failure to imagine a
reconcilable reality within secular nationalist thinking, even
theoretically. Until such a reality is imagined, the "Inside
Palestinians" will remain on the Outside of both societies and
their institutions.