Hey, I’m Noam Weissman and you’re listening to Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating, and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history.
Before we start, like always shoot me a note at noam@jewishunpacked.com, love hearing from you have an having a conversation with you.
Okay. Yalla. Let’s do this.
If you haven’t to last week’s episode of Unpacking Israeli history, this week’s episode is part 2 of the story, history of Israeli Arabs, Arab Israelis or Arab citizens of Israel or Palestinian Israelis so if you haven’t listened to part 1 yet check it out. Today we’re picking up from Chapter 3, 1967-2005.
Chapter Three: 1967 – 2005
If 1948 was a nakba, or catastrophe, 1967 was a naksa. A “setback,” or “defeat.” The war created new Palestinian refugees – some of them displaced for the second time in 19 years. But it also brought together populations that had been apart since 1948. Israel now held the West Bank and Gaza, and for the first time in 19 years, Palestinian refugees and Israeli Arabs could meet and talk freely.
Remember, until 1991, it was easy to move between the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel. There were no checkpoints. No roadblocks. Nothing to separate Israeli Arabs from their brothers who had fled or been expelled. And nothing to moderate the radicalizing influence of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Remember how I said earlier that in the early days of the state, Israel’s Arab citizens largely identified as “Israeli Arabs” or “Arab Israelis”? Well, the more contact they had with other Arab communities – particularly in the West Bank and Gaza – the more likely they were to change the way they labeled themselves.
In 1964, the Arab League, with the help of the USSR, had created the PLO – the Palestine Liberation Organization, whose aim was to destroy Israel and build a country called Palestine in its place. But it was only after 1967 that they and their affiliates really began to step up their attacks on Israel. We’ve talked about a few of them: the 1972 murder of 11 Olympic athletes in Munich (link in the show notes). The 1974 massacre of 22 students and 4 teachers (link in the show notes). The 1976 hijacking of a passenger plane (I bet you can guess where to find the link).
Slowly, many young Arab Israelis began to harden their positions against Israel, much to the delight of the PLO. In 1976, the Israeli government announced a development plan for roughly 5,000 acres in the Galilee. Most of that land was already owned by the state or by Jewish citizens. Nevertheless, Arab Israelis began to riot, goaded by the PLO and the Communist Party. Every year since, Israeli Arabs, as well as Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, commemorate what they call “Land Day” with similar demonstrations that often turn violent.
But the worst was yet to come.
More and more Arab Israelis began supporting the PLO. Some even sold weapons to contacts in the West Bank and Gaza. Before 1966, Israeli Arabs had been treated as a potential fifth column, guilty until proven innocent. But by the 1970s, some actually were. And Israeli politicians – not all of them Jewish – were growing worried. After a riot in the mixed city of Akko in 1969, a Druze member of Knesset called on the Israeli government to immediately ban all contact between Arabs in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Or, as he put it, if the authorities didn’t put out the fire in their neighbor’s home, quote, “the fire will eventually burn their home as well.”
The fires began in earnest in 1987, with the eruption of the First Intifada. And they consumed some unlikely victims.
“I went through a terror attack in the First Intifada when I was five and a half years old, in the Gaza Strip.”
That was Lucy Aharish, one of Israel’s most famous journalists, who made history as the first Israeli Arab news anchor on a mainstream Hebrew-language channel. But in 1987, she was a child. An Arab Muslim who lived in the mostly-Jewish town of Dimona and attended a Jewish school. On the weekends, her parents might drive the family to Gaza, to do some shopping or relax on the beach.
But there was no relaxing that morning in 1987.
“And we just parked the car and the owner of the shop was just about to leave and to close shop, and my father’s telling him, “What’s going on? Everything is closed. Nobody’s on the streets.” And he told my father, “Well, you know, security situation lately is not that good. And the young people here are talking about Intifada. But you know what? You made it all the way from Dimona. I will open the shop for you.”
“And just when we were about to leave, the owner of the shop, just got close and said to my dad, “Just do me a favor. Until you’re leaving Gaza, just make sure that your windows are closed.” He told him, “You look Jewish.”
“Well, put the Quran, put a newspaper in Arabic on the dashboard so people will know that you are an Arab. You need to understand. You have a yellow license plate. People might confuse you with being Jewish.” And my father, I looked at him and he told him, “Tawakalt Ala Allah.” Leave it to God. And we hit the road. And it was a hot, like, Saturday morning, so my father opened the window. And everybody was, you know, laughing and joking in the car. And I was sitting right next to the window, and I started looking outside and I saw this figure coming towards the car.
He was really tall. He was thin. He had some scars on his face. He had a necklace on his neck and written on it a law: God. And something about him just fascinated me and I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
I remember watching him, but I saw something in his hand, so I was, like, a little bit scared.
And my mom is watching me going like that. And she told me, “Lucy, sit straight.” And I didn’t even look at her.
And the third time that my mom said “Lucy,” there was a huge explosion in the car. The next thing that I remember was my face hitting the ground. I was trying to lift myself up. I looked at one side. I saw my mom crying. I looked at the other side. I saw my uncle’s wife screaming to death. And I looked up and I saw my cousin going into flames. And my father’s trying to put down the fire.
…I was trying to disconnect myself, from this, from everything that I saw, from the screaming of my father, “Help us. We are Arabs like you. Help us.” Nobody reached out. Nobody helped us. Everybody were watching it like it’s a really bad action movie. I think it was after 20 minutes that there was like some army forces got in and took us out. My cousin went through a lot of—a lot of surgeries and me, for me, for a long time, I hated Palestinians. And I said it out loud. I hate Palestinians. You need to kill them. You need to murder them all.”
If there’s any story that encapsulates the confusion of having a hyphenated identity, where both sides of the hyphen seem to contradict one another, it’s this one. An Israeli Arab child, targeted by Palestinian terrorists, rescued by the IDF, saying she hates Palestinians.
I feel awful for everyone in this story. For Lucy and her family, of course, particularly her baby cousin, who survived after multiple surgeries. For her father, who yelled “I’m an Arab” and got nothing but silence in return. But I also feel awful that Lucy’s attacker was so curdled by hatred that he lobbed a grenade at a happy family with multiple children. I feel awful that for 20 minutes, people just stood there and watched, unwilling to help. Either because they, too, were full of hatred – or, more likely, because they were afraid that if they helped, they’d be branded as collaborators. And I feel awful knowing that for many years, Lucy said she “hated” Palestinians. Because the only thing that separated her from the Palestinians of Gaza was an accident of fate. And there’s something so tragic about a child growing up to hate something that lives inside them.
But if the First Intifada radicalized Lucy to hate Palestinians, at least temporarily, it also radicalized many Israeli Arabs in the opposite direction. To quote Professor Efraim Karsh, quote:
“Showing their support for their brethren in the occupied territories, Israeli Arabs committed acts of vandalism (burning forests, stoning private cars, destroying agricultural crops and equipment) and launched armed attacks on Jews within Israel proper. In the course of two years, the number of such individual attacks rose sharply from 69 (in 1987) to 187 (in 1989), and acts of sedition from 101 to 353.”
Now, in a population of nearly one million Israeli Arabs, 187 incidents is… well, it’s not good, but it’s certainly not common. Still, such incidents did nothing to bring Arabs and Jews in Israel closer together. As the 80s gave way to the 90s, more and more Israeli Arabs began identifying themselves explicitly as “Palestinians.” By 1995, the transformation was complete – nearly every Israeli Arab citizen now identified as a “Palestinian.” (And by the way, I know I say this all the time, but don’t take my word for it. Check the links for all of our evidence.)
The PLO was delighted. Even as they negotiated peace deals with the Israelis, they pumped millions of dollars and loads of propaganda into Israeli Arab towns – including videos that exclaimed “Zionist, your death is in my hands!” In the Knesset, several Arab Israeli politicians cheered on attacks against Jewish Israelis, inciting their communities to continue the struggle.
Of course, not every Arab-Israeli felt this way. Many resented that the PLO – while flooding their towns with propaganda – had deliberately excluded them from decision-making during their negotiations with the Israeli government. And while most were excited by the prospect of an independent Palestinian state, they weren’t even sure whether they wanted to live there. They had no interest in blowing up buses or “killing Zionists.” In fact, many Israeli Arabs assumed that once the conflict was solved, their own standing would improve within Israel.
I want to pause there for a second.
Think about that. Israelis and Palestinians were negotiating the prospect of a Palestinian state. Arab Israelis were hoping it would happen – even though many assumed they would remain in Israel. In other words, even if a Palestinian state were established, many Arab Israelis planned to stay put exactly where they were, in the hope that peace would bring them better conditions.
Why? Why plan to stay exactly where you are, when you’re not necessarily happy with your government or your status?
Like Israeli Jews, Israel’s Arab citizens are deeply bound to the land. But their connection to the land is often much more direct and specific. It’s a connection to a specific parcel of land: a family home, a beloved town, a grandparent’s olive grove. So when Arab citizens were internally displaced during the war, they felt like outsiders. They may have been in the same country, but they weren’t on the same specific parcel of land that they’d felt so connected to for so long. And that’s why so many decided they would stay put where they were – even if it meant living as minorities in a Jewish state.
They vowed to stay for another reason, too. For so long, they’d felt neglected and discriminated against. And for so long, the Israeli government had had an excuse: they were dangerous. They were traitors. They were a security risk. They didn’t even want to be Israelis! But when peace came, those excuses would disappear.
This is Ibrahim. He grew up in Nazareth, which is considered a cultural and commercial hub for Arab Israelis. Today, he’s a peace activist and co-host of the podcast Unapologetic: The Third Narrative, which explores what it means to be – as he calls himself – a Palestinian Israeli.
He remembers the late 1990s as a time of wild hope.
“In 1999, something like this, when I was in school, we were still drawing doves and, you know, olive branches and the word peace and and writing it in Arabic and Hebrew and Salam and Shalom and all these things, and we had – you know, a visit of a Jewish school to our school and we went to their school… That still existed in the early 2000s.”
But the Second Intifada stamped out all that promise. And that brings us to the next stage.
Chapter Four: The Second Intifada through October 7th
We’ve got a whole episode on the Second Intifada, linked for you in the show notes. But all you really need to know is this. After five years of suicide bombs, after over 1,000 Israelis and 4,000 Palestinians had been killed, the Israeli public was deeply traumatized, and largely uninterested in a two-state solution.
Meanwhile, Arab Israelis were torn. On the one hand, they were also prey to the suicide bombs that targeted universities and buses and cafes. On the other, they were heartsick watching the Israeli army try to crush the uprising. In autumn of 2000, Israeli Arabs mobilized to protest the government’s response to the violence. But the protest turned into a riot. And when the smoke cleared, 12 Israeli Arabs had been killed. It was an awful, awful time.
But Israelis are resilient. And though the trauma of the Second Intifada still lingers, Jewish and Arab Israelis alike continued to live their lives side by side. It was a sometimes uneasy coexistence, punctured by frequent episodes of distrust.
In 2006, for example, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert invited a right-wing party into his coalition government. That party’s leader, Avigdor Lieberman, made headlines with his so-called “Lieberman Plan,” which suggested that Israel transfer its Arab towns to the PA while annexing major Jewish settlements in the West Bank. If an Israeli Arab chose to stay in Israel, he or she would have to pledge an oath of allegiance to Israel. (Though, to be fair, under this plan, the oath would be mandatory for Jews, too.)
For obvious reasons, this plan didn’t sit well with many, many people. Lieberman was willing to simply “trade” a significant portion of Israel’s citizenry away to the notoriously corrupt and inept PA. I don’t know if he thought he was being generous, giving Arab Israelis a choice, but from my perspective, and certainly from the perspective of many Arab Israelis, this was a deeply insulting plan. A symbol of how little their government actually cared about them.
Still, things continued to improve. Education rates went up. In 1990, only 63% of Arab-Israeli teens were enrolled in high school. By 2015, that number had climbed to 93%, lagging behind Jewish-Israeli enrollment by only 4%. Arab Israeli women, in particular, are outshining the men. In 2010, only 13% had college degrees. In 2020, that number rose to 27%, more than doubling in just a decade.
As education levels rose, so did household income. It’s true that the average household income among Arab-Israelis is still roughly 1.9 lower than that of Jewish Israelis. But among certain populations, the gaps are closing fast. Arab Christians in Israel are among the wealthiest and most educated citizens in the entire country. Over 80% of all Arabs in Israel’s booming tech sector were educated in Christian schools – even if they’re not Christians themselves.
Of course, plenty of Muslim Israelis have found success as well. Here’s Lucy again, describing her family’s impressive achievements:
And here’s Tamer Masudin, who has one of the most complicated identities I’ve ever heard of. He’s Israeli, Arab, Bedouin, Muslim, Black – and a proud Zionist. Here’s how he describes living in Israel to my colleague, Yirmiyahu.
“I’m not Jewish, I’m Muslim, all my rights as a Muslim are preserved, I can marry who I want, I can work where I want, I can enlist in the army and defend the state of Israel. It’s not like I’m joining the Jewish army, I’m joining Israel’s army…
There’s no law that prohibits me from running as a candidate and becoming a prime minister. There is nothing that prevents it. I can work in the private sector, where I want, where I go, I can open my own practice. I don’t know, let’s say law firm here in Israel… So basically there’s no laws, there’s no things that prevent me from doing stuff as a minority, as an Arab, as an Israeli.”
Of course, those are just some experiences. There are others, too — and they’re a lot less rosy. Experiences of neglect and lack of funding. Of domestic violence, of poverty, of crime.
And yet, despite the hardships, despite the neglect, most Arab Israelis see themselves as part of Israel — even if a marginalized one.
A 2019 survey found that 46 percent of Arab Israelis identified as exactly that: “Arab-Israeli.” (14% identified as “Palestinian,” 19% chose Palestinian-Israeli, and 22% went with “Arab.”) A year later, a different survey offered another option: Israeli. Just Israeli, no qualifiers. 23% of respondents chose that label. 51% chose Arab-Israeli. Only 7 percent went with “Palestinian.”
By the way, I do need to add a caveat about polling here. Polls among Arabs are notoriously unreliable. Leaders inside the community report that many people are afraid of the repercussions of their answers, that if the information reaches the PA or other authorities, they will be targeted.
Their answers might change depending on who is asking the question.
So when they’re speaking informally among friends, they may say one thing.
When they’re responding to a poll from the West Bank, they’ll say another.
And if the Israeli state is sending out a poll, well, their answers might be different too.
There is a genuine fear of sharing real feelings. So please: take all polling with a grain of salt.
The brilliant journalist Yair Rosenberg summed up these stats, and its uncertain reliability, in an Atlantic article, writing, quote, “…for some time, Arabs in Israel have been telling a different and more complicated story about themselves than the one being told about them by activist groups and major media outlets.”
The co-hosts of The Third Narrative sum up that story as follows:
“Today, I believe I’m all of the above. I’m an Arab, I’m a Palestinian, and I’m an Israeli. My Arabness is the language, is part of being part of that Arab world. My Palestinianness, for me, is the culture, our internal culture. But our culture internally, the food, the norms, everything for me, it was Palestinian. And the third one is the Israeli is also culture, because that’s for me what Israeli is. If we talk about the fact that we’re Arab, Palestinian, and Israelis, the Israeli element is the cultural aspect. It’s not just that I grew up on the kids’ channel, but it’s also living with other Israelis, Jewish people, having friends, going to their weddings, going to their holidays, experiencing the holidays together. And I think also the other part of that is just that realization that my reality as an Israeli is not the reality of a West Bank, is not the reality of Gaza Strip, and definitely not the reality of a refugee. Our reality is because we were born in Israel, and this is part of who we are…”
But, like we said, it’s a complicated story. So while the majority of Israeli Arabs feel that Israel is a good place to live, you can’t ignore the very real tensions.
Especially during wars. Remember summer of 2021? Here’s how I described it in a previous episode:
“One of the most significant evenings of tension that Jerusalem has seen in several years. According to the Palestinian Red Crescent, more than 200 people were injured…”
“The hostilities in Israel continuing for yet another day as terrorist organization Hamas is showing no sign of slowing its rocket barrage on Israeli civilians.”
“With the weight of the Israeli Air Force on top of them, there is nowhere safe to run…”
…For the first time in Israel’s history as a state, citizen turned against citizen. In the mixed cities of Akko and Lod, Arabs set fire to synagogues. Jews pulled Arabs out of their cars and beat them.….”
It was the nightmare scenario. Israeli set against Israeli, beating and looting and vandalizing and hating. I remember how shocked I was. How horrified. How desperately I clung to the images of Jewish and Arab Israelis marching side by side, handing out flowers, refusing to hate one another.
The riots subsided within the month. Shop owners rebuilt. People replaced the property that had been vandalized and looted and smashed. Bruises faded. But the ugliness lingered. Was this the new status quo? Would Israelis find themselves facing off against one another every time tensions flared?
The answer, thank God, was no.
Because Hamas and Hezbollah do not discriminate between Arabs and Jews. When 6,000 terrorists poured into southern Israel to burn and brutalize and slaughter, they made a point of murdering and kidnapping Israeli Arabs, too.
On October 7, they stripped, beat, and eventually murdered 36-year-old Osama Abu Assa, as he pleaded with them to please, please not enter the shelter where 30-some terrified kids were hiding – including Aner Shapira and Hersh Goldberg-Polin.
They shot Abed el-Nasasra as he fled the killing fields of the Nova festival with his minibus packed to the gills with frantic, terrified young people. They killed Ibrahim Kharuba – a father of four defending the Nahal Oz military base, who used his last breaths to shout, in Arabic, “we will never surrender!”
They murdered Awad Darawsheh, a 23-year-old paramedic who came to Nova festival to save lives. (By the way, earlier in this episode, we quoted his first cousin, Mohammed Darawshe, talking about crime in Arab neighborhoods.)
They kidnapped four members of the Ziadna family, including two children. They beat Dr. Tarek Abu Arar and tied him to a post, using him as a human shield. And they forced him to watch as they shot bullet after bullet into every passing car.
They treated Israel’s Arab citizens like enemies. Like Jews. There was no mercy. No brotherhood.
So Israel’s Arab citizens geared up to fight — if not militarily, then with their words.
Mansour Abbas, the head of the Islamist party Ra’am, publicly blasted Hamas in an interview, saying, “The massacre is against everything we believe in, our religion, our Islam, our nationality, our humanity.” When the Israeli government organized a screening of a 47-minute compilation of some of the worst atrocities, he walked out in tears. And when a member of his party stated that the atrocities were faked, he demanded she resign.
In the aftermath of the massacre, 67% of Arab-Israelis reported feeling like they were a part of Israel and its problems. Some even redefined their identities. Nas Daily, a popular – honestly, I have no idea what he is. Streamer? Vlogger? Do people still vlog? I guess he’s a social media personality? – anyway, whatever he does, he’s popular. A day after the massacre, he posted the following on X:
“For the longest time, I struggled with my identity. A Palestinian kid born inside Israel… Many of my friends refuse to this day to say the word ‘Israel’ and call themselves ‘Palestinian’ only. But since I was 12, that did not make sense to me. So I decided to mix the two and become a ‘Palestinian-Israeli.’ I thought this term reflected who I was. Palestinian first. Israeli second.
But after recent events… my thoughts turned to anger. I realized that if Israel were to be ‘invaded’ like that again, we would not be safe… I do not want to live under a Palestinian government… I only have one home, even if I’m not Jewish: Israel. That’s where all my family lives. That’s where I grew up. That’s the country I want to see continue to exist so I can exist… I love Palestine and have invested in Palestine. But it’s not my home… From today forward, I view myself as an ‘Israeli-Palestinian.’ Israeli first. Palestinian second. Sometimes it takes a shock like this to see so clearly.”
But as with everything, it’s complicated.
This initial burst of patriotism and solidarity has given way to questions.
What are we really doing in Gaza?
What are we accomplishing?
How many more lives do we have to destroy, how many more civilians do we have to kill, before we decide that it’s time for the war to end?
In fact, Ayman Odeh, an Arab-Israeli member of Knesset recently called Netanyahu a “serial killer of peace” in an impassioned speech about the death toll in Gaza.
In a November 2023 interview with Foreign Policy Magazine, a Christian Arab Israeli woman named Huda, who lives in the northern Israeli-Arab town of Kafr Yasif, summed up how Arab Israelis have been treated since October 7: quote, “What am I? Too Israeli for the Palestinians and too Palestinian for the Israelis. Our identity is no identity, and we are born into confusion… Unlike Israeli Jews, I hear the screams of Palestinians in my mother tongue and I understand them. And yet, here, understanding them amounts to sympathizing with them.”
And that makes me sad. Because there is nothing wrong with sympathizing. There is nothing wrong with seeing Gaza’s civilians as fellow human beings. There is nothing wrong with hoping for a better future. In fact, it’s essential. It’s the only way forward. As Rachel Golderg-Polin, mother of killed hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin told me last summer, “hope is mandatory.” There is no future without it.
So what do Arab-Israelis hope for, as they navigate life in their fractured, impossible, miraculous, blood-stained country?
Well, that depends who you ask. Lucy, the news anchor, hopes for the end of racism.
“Yes, but there is a lot of racism towards Arabs, like every country is dealing with racism, and racism should be fought. I should fight it, and I’m going to fight it. My child won’t study in the Education Ministry of the state of Israel when this education ministry is basically telling him, you don’t have a place here, and we’re telling you this. It won’t happen. And if I need to sue the Ministry of Education of Israel, I will do it.”
Lucy, you’re speaking my language. OK, not so much about the suing part, but about the education part. Ibrahim and Amira, who co-host the Third Narrative podcast, agree. Ibrahim remembers what it was like to meet Jewish kids his age who spoke a different language.
“We put these kids together, Arabs and Jews, but we’re telling the Arab kids “you need to make the extra effort out of the two because the other kid will speak in his own language but you need to speak in his in order to communicate. Now, that’s a lot of pressure on a 10-year-old, that you’re telling him “this is a new language, you barely can speak any word of it, but here is a Jewish kid, start talking to him.”
“But if Arabic was mandatory – the same way Hebrew is mandatory for Arabs, if Arabic was mandatory for Jews, then we’ll put in a scenario. You and I are there, I’ll say a couple of words that I know in Hebrew and you’ll say a couple of words that you know in Arabic and we’ll figure it out. You know, we’re two kids, innocent, know a couple of words here and there we’ll toss it to each other and we’ll have a conversation out of, you know, both of us making effort to make that communication. But you can’t do it with putting one side all the pressure is on him.”
And his cohost, Amira, said something that I can’t stop thinking about. She pointed out that Arabs in Israel are expected to integrate into Israeli society, but that Israeli society isn’t expected to open up, in order to bring Arabs in. Arabs are accepted only when they blend in.
At the top of this episode, we talked about how the Israeli government built schools in Arab villages, insisting that every Arab child receive an education. But that education didn’t reflect all of Israel’s citizens. It only reflected a narrow slice of the story.
And so I’ll tell you what I hope for.
What if we lived in a world where the Israeli curriculum gave weight to Jewish and Arab history? Where the Israeli education system taught all students Hebrew and Arabic? Where the government instituted a mandatory national service that brought young Israelis together to solve social problems?
What if more people were brave like Lucy, unapologetic like Amira and Ibrahim, unwavering like Mansour Abbas, heroic like Awad Darashe and Ibrahim Kharuba and Dr. Tarek Abu Arar? What if more people had the visionary power of Issa al-Issa from the top of this episode?
So that’s the long and complex story of Israel’s Arab citizens, and here are your five fast facts.
- Nearly all of Israel’s 1.4 million Arab citizens are descendants of the 150,000 Arabs who remained in Israel after the 1948 War of Independence, which Palestinians refer to as the nakba, or catastrophe.
- After the war, Arab citizens of Israel were placed under military rule for security reasons. Which means that from 1948 until 1966, when martial law was finally lifted, they were second-class citizens.
- After the Six Day War of 1967, Israeli Arabs reunited with the 1.2 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, which strengthened their Palestinian identity.
- Over the years, bad actors have tried to radicalize Israeli Arabs, with mixed results. But even though tensions between Arabs and Jews in Israel might flare during times of conflict, most Arab-Israelis are loyal to the state, and in 2015, 77% of Arab Israelis said they would prefer to live in Israel than a hypothetical Palestinian state.
- Today, Israeli Arabs are still grappling with their multilayered identities. Though they still face discrimination, the gaps between Jews and Arabs in Israel have begun to close – due in part to the horrific violence of October 7th.
Those are your facts, but here’s one enduring lesson as I see it.
We talk constantly on this podcast that multiple stories can be true at once. The story of Israel’s Arab citizens exemplifies that. Because Israel is the only Middle Eastern country that treats its minorities well.
In Lebanon, Palestinians are barred from 39 professions. They can’t be doctors, or lawyers, or engineers. [Actually, nerd corner alert: to be more aaccurate, Palestinians they can be doctors in Lebanese refugee camps, but not in Lebanese hospitals or medical centers. But the point stands.]
And, along with other foreign nationals, Palestinians in Lebanon can’t acquire real estate. They have very limited access to healthcare. They can’t build or expand their homes, if they’re lucky enough to be in the position to have a home. It doesn’t matter if they’re married to Lebanese citizens or if they’ve been in the country for close to a century.
Yet no one is calling Lebanon an apartheid state.
I’m not putting Lebanon on blast because Israel is so perfect, by the way. I think I’ve been clear about the ways in which it isn’t. But Israel is the only country in the Middle East, maybe the world, that faces this kind of double standard. Many Lebanese blame the Palestinians for the atrocious behavior of the PLO in the 70s and 80s (link in the show notes for more). They justify the rules against the Palestinians by saying, “well, they dragged us into war.”
Sounds familiar, huh?
So two things can be true at once. Israeli-Arabs can be, quite literally, the happiest Arab population in the world according to the global happiness index. AND, at the same time, they can also be heavily discriminated against, their narratives questioned or silenced, their towns neglected, their loyalty called constantly into question.
So here’s the question I’ve been turning over and over in my mind.
Peace and equality – real peace and equality – require compromises. What compromises will Jewish and Arab Israelis need to make in order to build a society that is truly equal?
Will Israel need to drop its controversial Nation-State Law, which defines self-determination in Israel as the “exclusive” right of the Jewish people?
Will we change the words of HaTikvah, or add new ones, to reflect that this is a country of all sorts of people – from the devout to the secular, from Arabs to Jews to Druze to Baha’is to Christians, from Mizrahim to Ashkenazim to Sephardim to converts and so on, and so on, and so on?
What about the compromises that Arab-Israelis need to make to be at one with their state?
I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. But I do have one suggestion, which I’ve already discussed above. To me, it all comes back to language. If we truly want a peaceful, thriving, fully democratic society… we’re gonna have to start speaking the same language.
We’re going to have to teach Jewish kids to understand Arabic. We’re going to have to teach Arab kids, much earlier, to understand Hebrew. And while I think we ALWAYS need to teach about the past, I think we need to start teaching young people how to imagine a shared future.
What does that shared future look like? That’s not for me to decide. I don’t live in Israel. And, sad to say, I’m not really a young person anymore.
But I’ve spent a lot of time in Israel, talking to both Arabs and Jews. And if anyone can build a bright, beautiful future, it’s the resilient, brilliant Israelis of all religions, backgrounds, and ethnicities, bound to this land and to each other by thousands of years of history.