Before we begin, you might notice this audio sounds a tiny bit different. That’s because we realized halfway through the editing of this episode that it’s beyond fascinating and totally exciting and uniquely important, but it’s also entirely too long for one episode, you know, for one car ride, for one set of dishes, for one jog. So we actually cut it up into two episodes telling the not told enough story of the Israeli Arabs, or should I say Arab Israelis?
Enjoy part one right now and stay tuned for next week for part two.
and elsewhere say it’s impossible to make peace between the Arabs in Israel or the Jewish people. I think they’re wrong.
I don’t usually get test anxiety. I mean, I’m in my 30s, I’m done with school, I haven’t taken a test in a long time. Okay, I just lied to you. I still sweat when I’m sleeping thinking about math tests I do not even have. Like, why did I not study for the trig test tomorrow? wait, there is none. I’m an adult without homework, but somehow, somehow when the US Census form comes to my house, I’m sweating.
I can answer most of the questions without a problem. I’m pretty good at age. I can tell you family size, no problem. Education level, gotcha. Who lives here? Easy stuff. But when we get to the question on race, I find myself combing through the options, looking for the one that fits. I’m not an indigenous American. I’m not black. I’m not native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. I’m not Hispanic or Latino. I know what I’m supposed to choose. I know that much of the US considers me white, that white technically encompasses people with roots in Europe.
the Middle East and North Africa. But there’s sterile census definitions and then there’s how we define ourselves. So like lots of other Jews I know, I pencil in white and feel weird about it. Hey, did I just coin a slogan for the experience of being Jewish American in 2024? There’s no box for a Schrodinger’s white person. That was for my philosophy nerds out there and my apologies to everyone else. There’s no box for if I don’t wear my kippah or tzitzit, I might pass.
If I went by Norm instead of Noam, if my last name were White instead of Weissman, if I weren’t so obviously Jewish, I might pass. There’s no box for, well, white supremacists don’t think I’m white, while hardcore leftists think I’m basically a glass of milk, and both are untrue for different reasons that are best boiled down to a profound ignorance of Jewish history. That was a mouthful. I know I’m not alone here. I know there’s a movement to expand the category to make Middle Eastern, North African, Arab its own thing.
And to be fair, I don’t spend a ton of my time trying to slot myself into nebulous, socially constructed categories that are only useful to government agents collecting demographic data. I get why the US collects data this way. I do. But honestly, I like the Israeli way of doing things so much better in this context. Because when I Googled sample Israel census questions, I noticed that the Jewish state very neatly skirts racial categories. It asks about religion. It asks about birthplace. Both.
of the person answering and of their parents, but that’s it. And I think that’s clever. Though of course, it comes with its own issues. On the one hand, labeling by religion doesn’t force anyone to try and stuff their identity into a demographic checkbox. Israel’s Jewish population is increasingly mixed. Who has the energy to define themselves as one quarter Tunisian, one quarter Polish, and also my mom is Mexican by nationality, but actually my family was expelled from Spain in 1492.
and lived in Syria for 430 years before bouncing off to Mexico in the 1920s and coming to Israel in the 70s. As the internet says, ain’t nobody got time for that. Yes, that was a meme for 2012. I’m hip, I’m with it, I’m cool. Okay, maybe I’m not. Then there’s the 25 % of Israel that isn’t Jewish and may or may not feel ambivalent about identifying as purely Israeli, the way I feel ambivalent about identifying purely as white in the United States. Just think of the options. There’s Arabs.
Israeli Arab, Arab citizen of Israel, Palestinian, Israeli Palestinian, Palestinian Israeli, Bedouin, Bedouin Palestinian Arab, Israeli Bedouin. Okay, okay, okay, you got a lot of options. Once more with feeling, ain’t nobody got time for that. Ain’t nobody got time for that. But like I said, labeling by religion is complicated in other ways. And you know I love a complication because that’s what this episode is all about.
The ways in which people’s actual lives are so much messier than the boxes we’re forced to corral ourselves into. The ways in which stories add depth and dimension to statistics. And there are few statistics that get as abused and misused as the statistics about Israel’s Arab population. Because it’s easy to cherry pick stats to tell a story that serves an agenda, any agenda. But I’m more interested in real people and their real experiences than in a specific agenda.
That’s my agenda. See what I did there? And that’s why we’re dedicating this episode to telling the story of Israel’s Arab population, as in the Palestinian Arabs who live inside Israel’s borders and have Israeli citizenship. So not the folks in the West Bank or Gaza or most of East Jerusalem or even the Golan Heights and not the Druze, many of whom don’t identify as Arab. But Noam, what makes you think you’re the right person to tell this story? You’re not Arab. You’re not Palestinian. Heck, you’re not even Israeli. Guilty on all accounts. It’s true.
I’m 100 % American, all grandparents born on Uncle Sam’s shores, but I’m also not Ethiopian or Mizrahi or Russian or Haredi. I don’t live in the West Bank. I wasn’t alive for much of the history we’ve covered in the past six seasons. None of this disqualifies me from talking about Israeli history. And I think that’s because this podcast doesn’t try to speak for anyone. Where possible, we want communities to speak for themselves. So you will hear from Arab citizens of Israel firsthand throughout this episode.
We won’t encapsulate every single experience, that’s impossible, but we’ve done our best to represent this population with as much detail and sensitivity as we’ve shown for other Israeli groups. A final note, terminology is loaded in this part of the world. Every term is a political choice. Do you call the West Bank or Judea and Samaria? Which one, which one, which one? The Temple Mount or Al-Aqsa? Tell me right now, I wanna hear. Do you say Israeli Arab or Arab Israeli or Arab citizen of Israel? Or Palestinian Israeli or Israeli Palestinian? Okay.
Trust me, I know, we’re gonna get into that whole mess. But unless I’m talking about someone specific who wants to be referred to in a certain way, I’m gonna use terms like Israel’s Arab citizens, mostly because it’s the most neutral and vanilla way to reference a population with mixed feelings about its own label. The story of Israel’s Arab citizens begins in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire. Before there were Israelis or Israel,
when Jews and Arabs alike were figuring out their national identities. Chapter one, before.
Isa al-Isa had serious chutzpah, though you would not have known it from his well-heeled upbringing that he’d grow up to set the world on fire. He was born in Ottoman Jaffa in 1878 to a well-off family of Orthodox Christian merchants, and he had the kind of education and family ties that once guaranteed comfort and prosperity. But Isa wasn’t interested in comfort. He cared about justice. And that’s why he started the newspaper Philistine.
his cousin Youssef in 1911. At first, they were mainly concerned with their church, or rather with unseating the Greek and Cypriot clergy who controlled it at the expense of a majority Arab population. Corner! It seems appropriate that Isa is Arabic for Jesus. Look, I’m the last person to ask about intra-church battles over ecclesiastical hierarchy, but as a guy who has spent a lot of time in synagogue, let me just say, relatable-ish.
But Issa’s newspaper was also devoted to the other cause near and dear to his heart, Palestinian autonomy. His home, Palestine, had changed hands and names many times over the centuries. Nerd Corner alert! Under the Canaanites, had been known as Canaan. Under the Israelites, it had been known as Israel, in the north, or Judea, in the south. Under the Persians, it was split into multiple provinces, including Yehud Medinata and Samaria.
When the Romans rolled in, was Judea. After they kicked out the Jews, the Roman Emperor Hadrian renamed it Syria-Palestina. That was the name that remained up until 1948. The Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Fethemids, the Uyghurids, the Mamluks, and finally the Ottomans all ruled over region known as Palestine or Syria-Palestina, or sometimes even greater, Syria.
And for my most nerdy history, nerds who are like, what about the Christian Crusaders who managed to part of this territory for 88 years? I’d assume they’d call it simply the Holy Land. Okay, that was a long nerd corner, but I see you and I hope you see me. Okay, back to our friend Isa Alisa, who started his newspaper in 1911 when the Ottoman Empire was on its last legs.
Arab intellectuals were starting to talk about national identity, even self-rule, but Isa was among the first, if not the first, to define his people as Palestinians. Which might not sound like a big deal, but here’s why it is. For most of their history, the Arabs of the Ottoman Empire were just that, Arabs living under Turkic rule. If they had to describe where they were from, they might say Jaffa, or Jerusalem, or Palestine, or…
Bilad Ash-Sham, Arabic for Greater Syria, aka the entire area we know as the Levant. Or else they would just tell you what clan or family they were from. That began to change when Jewish immigrants flooded Ottoman Palestine in the late 1800s, united under the same proto-nationalist identity. Soon after, that identity got its own name, Zionist. In other words, people who were working to build a Jewish state
In Palestine, as more more Zionists arrived, Palestine’s Arab elites began to respond with a proto-nationalist identity of their own, though their national movement looked a little different back then. In 1919, the Palestine Arab Congress declared that they, quote, consider Palestine nothing but part of Arab Syria and has never been separated from it at any stage. We are tied to it by national, religious,
linguistic, moral, economic, and geographic bounds. And that’s what makes Isa al-Isa such a visionary. Unlike the ruling elite, Isa sought to, quote, serve Palestine and the interests of the Palestinians in the first place, and to attain complete independence and the fulfillment of national aspirations and sovereignty. In other words, he was a man ahead of his time, one of the few who saw himself as a Palestinian who deserved
an independent Palestinian state, a position that Palestinian leaders wouldn’t officially adopt for a few more decades. Though let me be clear, I’ve seen this point used as a gotcha by people who then claimed that Palestinians don’t really exist. They wanted to be Syrians! They never even saw themselves as a distinct nation! Palestinian nationalism isn’t real! Ugh, and I’m not judging you if this is what you believe. This is what happens when a kernel of a fact gets twisted to serve an agenda.
It’s kind of like when the Uganda proposal went forth in 1903 and people said, the Zionists don’t really care about the Jewish land of Judea. They care about the Eastern African land of Kenya, which is what the Uganda proposal had in mind. There’s an agenda when people say that. So let’s break down the facts. First of all, last I checked, there are millions of Palestinians in the world and they’re definitely not a figment of my imagination. They exist.
I whispered that if you couldn’t hear it. You’re gonna hear from a few of them in this episode. But secondly, just like early Zionism, early Palestinian nationalism was split into factions with different leaders espousing different visions. Isa al-Isa was among the first to dream of an independent Palestine, but he certainly wasn’t the only one. And as facts on the ground changed, and changed again, more and more Palestinians would come to adopt this vision. Remember?
our old friend Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. If you don’t, I strongly recommend you check out the two links in the show notes because he’s a fascinating and very important character. Haj Amin was more or less the main Palestinian leader of the Mandate period, whether or not people want to admit that now. Not because everyone loved him, but because he had a nasty tendency to silence his opposition. In fact, Isa Alisa was among the Muftis fiercest critics, but that’s a story for another day.
Anyway, when Haj Amin was 19, he deserted the Ottoman army to fight for an independent greater Syria under the rule of a Saudi Arabian born Hashemite Emir known as King Faisal I. It’s a lot of history, it’s important. The Syrian National Congress had crowned Faisal the King of Syria in 1920, but unfortunately for Faisal, Haj Amin and the Palestine Arab Congress, his rule in Syria was very brief. A few months after his coronation, the French showed up.
and unceremoniously deposed him, and he went on to be the king of Iraq instead. We’ve covered part of his rule in another episode linked in the show notes. Soon after Faisal went off to rule Iraq, Haj Amin began agitating for an independent Palestinian state. In other words, his vision for Palestinian self-determination changed along with the geopolitical circumstances, just like the vision for Jewish self-determination. So when I say,
that Isa Alisa was ahead of his time. That’s true. But he was only ahead by a decade or so until Haj Aminah Hosseini began to espouse a similar vision. So don’t let anyone whip out out of context quotes to make you think that Palestinians don’t exist or that they really want to be Syrians or that they aren’t a real people. None of that is the full truth. The only thing that proves is that leaders respond to facts on the ground.
and what was true in 1919 was no longer true by 1929. In any event, Issa Alisa never got his wish of an independent Palestine. He died in Beirut in 1950, an exile whose native city had changed hands three times during the 70 odd years of his life. 700,000 of his countrymen had fled or been expelled from the nascent Jewish state of Israel. Roughly 300,000 of these refugees became citizens of Jordan. The other 400,000,
remained in limbo, clinging to a specific ethnic identity, but without a nationality. Palestinians without a Palestine, children of a country that had never actually existed. Palestinians call this event the Nakba or the catastrophe. But there was a third population of Palestinian Arabs whose lives had been utterly upended by the 1948 war. Their Nakba looked a little different from the rest. They had not fled to the surrounding Arab countries. They did not make that decision.
They had not been crammed into refugee camps or given Jordanian citizenship. Though some may have been internally displaced during the war, they were on the same land as before. But suddenly, that land was part of a new country called Israel, non-Jews in a Jewish state. For many, they were citizens of an enemy country. Isa Alisa, who had conceived of a Palestinian state decades before, had never planned for this scenario. He couldn’t have imagined it.
So as 700,000 Palestinian Arabs adjusted to life in exile, 150,000 newly minted Israeli citizens had to confront an unexpected question. Who were they? Chapter two, 1948 to 1966.
The excellent podcast, Unapologetic, The Third Narrative, which is co-hosted by two Arab citizens of Israel named Ibrahim and Amira, released a special episode called Nakba Stories recently. Of the three stories they featured, I can’t stop thinking about the third. About a woman who was 20 years old when the first Arab-Israeli war came to her village. Idzim was one of the wealthiest villages in Mandate, Palestine, and she describes an idyllic childhood. And then the rumor started.
In the cafes of En-Gazala, men warned one another that the Jews were coming and they were going to bomb the entire countryside. The rumors turned out to be true. Israeli warplanes shelled Idzim, forcing its inhabitants to flee. And this woman and her family became refugees on their own land. Though they’re Muslims, they fled to the Druze village of Daliat al-Karmel near Haifa, where a Druze family took them in until they found their own house. Like her old village of Idzim,
Dalyat al-Kharmel is inside Israeli territory, making this woman an Israeli Arab. A nationality born through war and displacement foisted upon her without her consent. In fact, zooming out for a second, most Israelis, regardless of ethnicity or religion, became Israeli through war, displacement, and refugeehood. Wanna hear a crazy stat, which I find mind-boggling? It’s not.
roughly one third of Israeli soldiers in 1948 were Holocaust survivors. That’s insane. And by 1951, the Jewish Israeli population would double, yes, double as the Arab world disgorged most of its Jews brutalized and penniless. But there was one key difference between all these newly minted Israelis. It’s true that all citizens, whether Arab or Jewish, had the right to vote and run for political office. In fact,
Three Israeli Arabs served in Israel’s first Knesset, or Parliament, and eight served in the second Knesset, which convened in 1951. But that’s where the similarities between Jewish and Arab citizens ended. Because while Jewish citizens were free to live their lives as they pleased, Arab citizens were soon placed under military rule, which I think perfectly embodies the contradictions of the new state. On the one hand, Israel was a democracy.
Its Declaration of Independence promised, quote, complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, irrespective of religion, race, or sex. Though nerd corner alert, the Declaration of Independence never actually uses the term democracy. See the show notes for more on that. And just so you know, we’ve got a big juicy episode coming up about the contradictions of Israeli democracy, the complexities of it all. Stay tuned.
Regardless of what the Declaration of Independence said or didn’t say, all of Israel’s citizens could vote. Minorities enjoyed representation in parliament, and the state tried, in a variety of ways we’ll describe in a sec, to integrate Arab citizens into wider Israeli society for its own reasons. On the other hand, Israeli leaders worried that they were harboring a fifth column, a potentially dangerous enemy on the inside.
This wasn’t an entirely unfounded fear. Let’s explore. Every Jew in Israel was well aware of the rhetoric that had driven Arab armies during the war of 1948, including the so-called Arab Liberation Army, whose emblem was a Jewish star pierced with a sword. Didn’t take a crazy imagination to think that the Arab world wanted to kill the Jews at this time. And every Jew in Israel was well aware that it was Palestinian Arabs who had greeted news of the 1947 partition plan
with riots and violence. Palestinian Arabs who massacred and mutilated the 35 Haganah men on a supply run in January of 1948. Palestinian Arabs who had burned alive 78 medical personnel en route to a hospital a few months later. Of course, of course, Jews had attacked Arabs as well. Stories of atrocities had swirled through Arab villages and the Haganah had laid siege to Arab villages in Haifa. In other words, the Jews and Arabs of Palestine
had just fought a zero-sum war. That’s what it was. What reason did they have to trust one another? If war came again, and there was every indication that it would, what side would these newly-minted Arab citizens of Israel be on? Just think about it. Put yourself in the shoes of the Jewish Israelis for a moment. Stop being a current 2025, 2024, whatever year it is, person and thinking from your own perspective. Put yourself in their shoes. They’d lost 1 % of their population in the War of Independence.
They remembered the riots of 1920 and 1921 and 1929 and 1936, yes, links in the show notes. They remembered how brutally their neighbors had turned on them. Imagine what it was like for them to know that the enemy that had fought them so bitterly was now part of their state. So I’m not justifying military rule, but I understand the very real fear that gripped Israeli Jews in the first few years of statehood. I get it. And I think you probably do too. Israeli leaders gripped by two competing impulses offered
citizenship to the Arabs within their borders, and then governed those citizens with military laws that limited their basic civil rights. If an Arab Israeli wanted to leave their village for any reason, they needed a permit. They also risked being detained by police or military forces en route, particularly if they were out past curfew. Yes, you heard right, curfew. Israeli Arabs literally had a curfew. If an Arab Israeli wanted to hold an assembly, well, they were out of luck.
Criticizing the authorities or flying a Palestinian flag was a risk. Reciting nationalist poetry was a risk. Singing nationalist songs? Forget it. Sure, Arab citizens could write angry letters to the editor. Sometimes they would even be published. But the smallest whiff of politically inflammatory ideas could summon a visit from the authorities. And the definition of politically inflammatory was subjective and expansive. But perhaps…
Most challenging of all, and if I’m honest with you and I try to be, this is giving me some serious twinges to say, martial law gave the military the right to seize Arab land, declared a closed military zone, and then give it to the Jewish people. By some estimates, between 48 and 67, Arab citizens of Israel lost 40 to 60 % of their land. To add insult to injury, formerly Arab towns were given new Hebrew names. The village of Ijzim was settled.
by Czechoslovakian Holocaust survivors who renamed it Karam Maharal or Maharal’s Grove. In honor of the Maharal, a medieval Czechoslovakian rabbi, the village of En-Gazala, where the rumors had swirled of an impending Jewish attack, was renamed En-Ayala, which is simply the Hebrew translation of the original name. Both mean the spring of the gazelle. Meanwhile, the Palestinian village of Tantura was renamed Dor, a nod to its biblical name.
In some ways, it’s the original name. Names are one indicator of national culture. But there are many, many others, and most of Israel’s cultural touchstones signaled to Arab Israelis that they were a minority in someone else’s country. Somewhere between invisible, which they were not, and threatening, which many thought they were, and many actually were absolutely not. The flag that fluttered above their heads wasn’t blazoned with a Jewish star, a star of David. Their unofficial national anthem spoke of a Jewish soul that looked east to Zion.
Nerd Corner alert, Hatikva wasn’t formally adopted as the Israeli national anthem until 2004, which is a fact that will never fail to blow my mind. And though they spoke Arabic at home and read Arabic newspapers and listened to Arabic radio, they were surrounded by Hebrew. Meanwhile, the Israeli government tried to integrate Arab citizens. Israel’s dominant political parties had quickly established connections with local Arab leaders, offering jobs, financial aid, and social services to Arab communities. In exchange, Arab leaders delivered
votes, and more importantly, cooperation. That’s a loaded word in Palestinian society. As early as the 1930s, Arab leaders like Haj Aminah Hosseini had picked off and silenced anyone who cooperated with the British. But there was no one to silence so-called collaborators now. Well, no one close by. From 1948 until 1967, Israeli Arab Muslims were barred from making Haj Tomeka the holiest site in Islam.
wasn’t Israel that barred them, by the way. No, not at all. It was the other Arab countries who saw them as traitors. A complicated identity. And so, whatever their personal feelings, Israel’s Arab population largely cooperated with the state. That might explain why, in the first few decades of Israel’s existence, Arab voter turnout often surpassed that of the Jewish population. In 1955, 90 % of eligible Arab voters came to the polls.
Were they there because they were strong-armed by local leaders or even military governors? Were they there because they genuinely believed in Israeli democracy? Were they there as a screw you to the wider Arab world that rejected and ridiculed them? Or was this their way of saying screw you to their new state? Because most often they voted for the Communist Party. And in Israel, the Communist Party is not Zionist. Sounds a little nuts, right? How many countries have political parties whose very platform is
this country shouldn’t exist. It’s very Israeli thing, or in the case of early Israeli communists, fine, this country exists, but it probably shouldn’t and Jewish immigrants should stop coming here. By 1969, Israel’s communist party would rebrand, adopting much harsher anti-Zionist positions, but we’ll get there. Regardless of who Arab Israelis voted for, the Knesset continued building infrastructure and schools in Arab villages and even launched
an Arabic language radio show and newspaper. But I’ll be straight with you. This wasn’t altruism aimed at making Israeli Arabs comfortable in their new country. It was politics. I have no doubt that the Knesset’s Council on Arab Education and Culture included some Jewish people and Arabs who genuinely wanted to build a vibrant democracy for all Israelis. Of course there were.
But there’s no ignoring the fact that these schools and newspapers and radio shows had another purpose too. As Mahanaser puts it in her book, Brothers Apart, officials assumed that touting the material improvements that the Israeli government made for villagers would go a long way towards winning their gratitude. So the paper reported regularly on schools being opened and roads being paved in rural villages. Similarly,
School lessons may have been delivered in Arabic, but those lessons were designed with a Zionist Jewish perspective in mind. They were the same lessons that Jewish children received, and they reinforced that there was only one population whose stories were worth telling. Early Israeli education didn’t tell Arab stories, and by the way, that includes the stories of Jews from Arab and Muslim lands. But at least the Jewish refugees from Arab countries who flooded Israel in the early 1950s were coming home to a wider Jewish community.
Israel’s Arab citizens, in contrast, were almost completely isolated from other Palestinians as well as the wider Arab world. Remember, there were no cell phones, no email, no WhatsApp. Israelis love WhatsApp. I don’t know why, but they really do. From 48 until 67, Arab Israelis had almost no contact with relatives in the West Bank or Gaza, not to mention the surrounding Arab states. Of all the Palestinians in the world, these 150,000 were unique.
They were the only population of its kind in the world, a population of Arabs that identified as Israeli, or more accurately, that accepted the label of Israeli Arab. They were the only Arabs living under a Jewish government, a minority among a minority in the wider Middle East. And as anyone who has studied Jewish history knows, being a minority can be dangerous. In October of 1956, Israel was gearing up for another war against Egypt. I promise we’ll devote an episode to this soon. We must.
Best case scenario, they’d be in and out of Egypt faster than you can say pyramid, having accomplished all their goals. Worst case scenario, the war would drag on, other Arab countries would get involved, and the Israeli-Arab villages on the Jordanian border would rise up to help the enemy. Yeesh. So as a preemptive measure against that worst case scenario, the military decided to move up curfew for its Arab citizens. Usually curfew was at 10, but effective immediately, curfew would be moved up five hours.
all Israeli Arabs would be confined to their homes at 5 p.m. on the dot. Remember, this was 1956. There was no internet, no cell phones. Agricultural workers probably didn’t have access to a radio in the fields. And so many, many Arab citizens were simply unaware that their curfew had just changed or that the penalty for breaking the curfew was death. Now, most Israeli soldiers didn’t enforce that command. When they saw Arab farmers trudging back,
from the fields after a long day totally unaware of his past curfew, they simply told them to go home quickly. It was clear these exhausted laborers were just that, working people with no intention of fighting the Israeli military. But one platoon obeyed their orders a little too zealously. As Arab citizens from the village of Far Qasim trudged home after 5 p.m., Israeli soldiers shot them, killing 49 people, including a pregnant woman and her unborn child. 49 children and grandparents and teens cut down in one terrible night.
We told this horrible story a few seasons ago, link in the show notes for more. It’s hard to overestimate the effect of that massacre on the Israeli Arab psyche. 1956 might sound like ancient history, but it wasn’t that long ago. Maybe some of you listening were alive then, or have parents who were alive then. Certainly grandparents. And when an atrocity happens within living memory, well, it leaves scars on the next generation. It just does. This is Saeed Issa, the chair of the Kfarqasam Popular Committee, speaking to the Akhivot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research.
in 2022. My grandfather, Ahmed Mohammed Fred Sous, was murdered during the first wave. He was among the cyclists who came to the village first after a regular workday. They murdered him and the cyclists who were with him. He left behind two daughters and two sons. When the massacre happened, Kfar Qasem was very small and death touched every family. Every single resident of Kfar Qasem, if you were to approach them on the street, has a direct relative who was a martyr.
That’s why the massacre for us who still live here is a personal matter for everyone. A black marble monument towers in the village square, memorializing the victims. Every year on October 29th, the town holds a somber memorial ceremony. It was at the 2021 ceremony that Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, formally apologized in Hebrew and Arabic for what he called, one of the saddest events in the history of our country. Good for him. Good for him that he did that.
But in 1956, apologies were a long way off. At first, the government tried to suppress the story entirely. But as more more details leaked in the press, Israelis began talking seriously about ending military rule for Israeli Arabs, who were again, Israeli citizens. Jews and Arabs alike, particularly those affiliated with Israel’s Communist Party, began to agitate for an end to this discriminatory treatment. The Jewish state was supposedly democratic, and it really was.
But where was the democracy? Not to mention the country was now eight years old. Its Arab citizens had had nearly a decade to organize an attack and they did not. How much longer would the Israeli government treat them like they were guilty until proven innocent? Two years after the massacre, the Israeli minister of justice, Pinchas Rosen, formed a parliamentary committee to investigate whether it’s finally time to lift martial rule. Some of the more draconian laws were relaxed in 1959, but despite two votes in the Knesset martial law,
would not be fully lifted until 1966, just in time for the Six-Day War to upend the status quo once more. So there you have it. I hope you enjoyed part one. If you’re listening to this as it comes out, well, stay tuned for next week. If you’re listening at any other time, well, run to part two and let me know what you think. Unpacking Israeli History is a production of Unpacked, a division of Open Door Media. Check out Jewishunpacked.com for everything Unpacked related and subscribe to our other podcasts and write to me, Noam.
at jewishunpacked.com. Your email might even get on the show. Pretty cool. This episode was produced by Rufke Stern. Our team for this episode includes Benjamin Wishnie, Adeel Baz, Hanser Perez, and Rob Perra. I’m your host, Noam Weissman. Thanks for joining us. See you next week.