Palestinians in a Jewish State: An Addendum
Posted on : January 28, 2018Author : AGA Admin
How long can a relatively large minority be assumed by the majority to be an enemy without in the end actually turning into one?
David Grossman[i]
For most outside observers perhaps the Palestinian population within Israel does not constitute a critical resistance to the Jewish State.Despite their deep seated grievances and spasmodic articulation of protests and acts of restricted defiance the Palestinians of Israel are not perceived as intrinsically posing a grave challenge to the Jewish state. In actuality and on the contrary, the relation between the Jewish majority and the significant Palestinian minority within the apparent confines of the Israeli state is not merely crucial to an understanding of the social and political fabric of a professedly democratic nation but also critical to any enduring and amicable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The critical subject of contention is the issue of a ‘redefinition’ of the Israeli nation that is being increasingly identified with its exclusive and definitive Jewish identity. The fundamental question at stake is the innate paradox between the ‘Jewish state’ and the ‘Israeli nation.’
At present there are around 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, comprising about 20% of Israel’s population. Even though they are by and large identified with the larger Arab world, Palestinian Arab citizens in Israel embody a national (Palestinian), ethnic/racial (Arab), linguistic (Arabic) and religious (Muslim, Christian and Druze) minority within the state. The Palestinian Arab citizens in Israel are a section of the Palestinian people who were displaced and evicted from their native land in 1948 in the aftermath of the formation of the state of Israel. While the vast majority of Palestinians were compelled to migrate and became refugees around 153,000 of them stayed back in Israel and were granted citizenship in due course of time. A section among those who stayed back were‘internally displaced,’compelled to migrate from their villages as their households were demolished.
The Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel were subject to military rule till 1966. As a result there were constraints on their freedom of movement, evictions and land appropriations. Notwithstanding the constrictions, the Palestinian community within Israel has somewhat actively resisted the state’s attempts at encroachment on their identity and language at the same time it has preserved and encouraged the linkages within the community as well as persistently advocated its rights. While remonstrations by this substantive minority community were a constant feature it reached its climax on March 30, 1976, that eventually came to be characterized as Land Day, when protests broke out as a consequence of the government’s decision to appropriate a substantive strip of Arab-owned land in the central Galilee region. Land Day is deeply emblematic for the Arab Palestinian community as it memorializes a significant alteration in the community’s combined efforts to accomplish its rights in its native land.
Israel does not have a written constitution but it identifies itself as “Jewish and Democratic.” In lieu of a written constitution, the Israeli state possesses certain Basic Laws and the Basic Law:Human Dignity and Liberty, Purpose, Article 1, State of Israel, 1992 states that “The purpose of this Basic Law is to protect human dignity and liberty, in order to establish in a Basic Law the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.” However since its inception the state of Israel through its Parliament (Knesset) has enacted a series of inequitable laws that run contrary to its professed democratic character as it has inimical implications for its largest minority community, that is, the Palestinian citizens in Israel as well as the Palestinian residents of the Occupied Territories, including East Jerusalem. The list of such enactments are innumerable but the cardinal principle behind them is a further reinforcement of the Jewish character of the state primarily at the cost of its substantive Palestinian Arab citizens.
The Palestinian citizens of Israel today as in the past have coalesced to put forth a united and comprehensive approach by way of the formation of a High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel that urges the international community to convince and compel the Government of Israel to withdraw the unequal laws and scrap the Jewish Nation-State bill that practically transforms its Palestinian citizens to second-class citizens, and infringes upon their status as a national minority. Essentially at the core of the demands of the Palestinian community within Israel is an urge to influence the state to preserve the right of equality for all its citizens in its Basic Laws and to disallow inequality founded upon“national belonging, race, religion and gender.” In 2018, the High Follow-Up Committee has been galvanizing support for its demands across the globe in the last two weeks of January, an effort that is expected to culminate on January 30, 2018 with the observance of an annual “International Day for Supporting the Rights of Palestinian Citizens in Israel.” The initial part of the two week movement incidentally coincided with the visit of the Israeli prime minister to India.
Israel, since its inception has projected itself as the only democratic state in the region. Created and built on the memories of the great injustice inflicted upon the Jews in the Holocaust and other pogroms of an earlier era, the state of Israel was erected and subsequently consolidated upon an edifice of a constructed homogenization with its emphasis on a single unified language (Hebrew) and an imagined common culture based upon Jewishness. Collectivity and communes were a crucial method employed for inculcation of a common, homogenous identity.While the state propagates the myth, the nation has demystified it. Articulations of discontent within the majority community and the substantive minority are a feature of the Israeli nation. For those at the helm of power, an acceptance of the reality and accommodation of dissent could be the first step in the establishment of a real, pluralist democracy in the state of Israel.
Priya
28/01/2018
[i] David Grossman, Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel (New York: Picador, 2003), p.203 in IlanPeleg and Dov Waxman, Israel’s Palestinians: The Conflict Within, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p.1
IlanPeleg and Dov Waxman, Israel’s Palestinians: The Conflict Within, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011)
The website of ADALAH: https://www.adalah.org/en/law/index
Document of “The High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens”, Nazareth, January, 2018.
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