The Forgotten Arab Minority of Israel

When I told people at the beginning of this year that I was moving to Israel, they were surprised, since last year I had lived, worked and studied in Syria.  “Switching sides?” I was asked.  “Moving over to the enemy,” they joked.  Then when it emerged that I was moving out here for work, the immediate assumption was that I must be going to live on a kibbutz.  Now, had I said that I was moving to the Palestinian Territories, I have no doubt that the response would have been very different; people would have supposed that I was going as an activist against Israeli occupation or to work towards ‘bringing peace and democracy’ to the region with one of the innumerable NGOs that flood the West Bank.  It seems that if you are working in Israel, you must be working with the Jewish population and if you are working in Palestine, you must be working with the Palestinians.  There is no cross-over.

“No, no,” I clarified, “I’m going to work with the Israeli Arabs.”  The common reaction was one of surprise and disbelief; “there are Arabs in Israel?  But it’s a Jewish State.”  Repeatedly I would explain that there remained an Arab minority in Israel which had not fled to other Middle Eastern countries in the 1948 war that saw Israel gain its independence and approximately 750,000 Palestinians flee the county in what is known to the Arabs as ‘al-Nakba,’ the catastrophe.  In fact,” I would continue, “this sizeable minority constitutes one fifth of the total Israeli population, some 1.6 million people out of a total of 7.7 million Israelis.”  It seems that everyone is aware of the plight of the Palestinians inside Gaza and the West Bank but nobody has even heard of those still inside Israel.

It is important to point out here that there is some disagreement as to how we should refer to these Arabs still living in Israel.  Originally, before the creation of Israel, they were Palestinians living in Palestine, which stretched from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.  Now, however, they cannot be Palestinians because they reside in the new state of Israel and not in the what we have commonly come to see as Palestine, namely Gaza and the West Bank.  They cannot, therefore, be Palestinian Israelis because this is a contradiction in terms, giving them two nationalities.  So, for political reasons, they are Israeli Arabs, a hard burden to shoulder.

Since they are Israeli, they are cut off from many of their Arab brothers and forbidden from going to most Arab countries, such as neighbouring Syria and Lebanon, even if they have relatives there as a result of al-Nakba.  Meanwhile, many Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank view them with suspicion and jealousy; suspicion because they live in Israel, working with Jewish Israelis and collaborating with them on a daily basis; and jealousy because there are 1.8 million refugees in the West Bank and Gaza, who abandoned their homes during the 1948 and 1967 wars, and who now live in cramped, squalid and poverty-stricken refugee camps, whilst Israeli Arabs retain their lands and are afforded many rights that the Palestinians are not.  Despite this, the Arab Israelis are, of course, not really a part of mainstream Israeli society because instead of being Jewish, they belong to a hostile race that surround and threaten Israel.  And so it is that Arab Israelis stand alone, isolated and forgotten amidst the struggles for Palestinian independence and Arab liberation from despotic dictators.

“Ok, so you are going to work with the Arab Israelis but what are you going to do there?”  “I am going to work for the advancement of human rights there.”  “No, no,” came the common reply, “they have human rights there.  Israel is like Europe.”  Now, anyone who thinks that they ‘have human rights’ here, clearly hasn’t been here and if they have, they either haven’t left the confines of their comfy air-conditioned bus – old city of Jerusalem – four star hotel tour, or they are ignoring a reality they don’t wish to see.

Arab Israelis are subjected to many of the same discriminatory laws and policies as Palestinians living in occupied East Jerusalem, such as, house demolitions, the denial of building permits, inadequate municipal funding and insufficient or non-existent public services.  Indeed, just walking through Arab neighbourhoods and towns in Israel, you may feel like you have entered an entirely different, less economically developed country; a country where rubbish is dumped in the middle of the town or lies uncollected for days, where loose and dangerous electric cables hang from utility poles, where schools are rundown and overcrowded and where green spaces and playgrounds barely exist.  This, of course, is in total contrast to Jewish neighbourhoods and towns, which appear to have public services of a similar standard to France or Spain.  Instead of prioritising its existing citizens and aiming to narrow the discrepancy between their living standards, however, Israel gives preference to non-Israeli Jews across the world by actively promoting their immigration to Israel and providing them with, inter alia, financial grants, income insurance and attractive financial housing schemes if they make aliya.  Meanwhile, Palestinian refugees from 1948 are refused the right to return to their lands in Israel and continue to languish in refugee camps across the Middle East.

The rights abuses committed by the Israeli authorities against its Arab citizens are most pronounced with regards to the Bedouin in the Negev desert.  These people, who traditionally used to roam freely across the desert, have now been pushed into 3% of this area in Israel since most of the desert has been claimed as State land, thereby denying the Bedouin access to their ancient grazing lands.  They have been forced to settle in ‘recognised townships,’ which have limited land space, as well as a lack of commercial infrastructure.  This means that the Bedouin cannot continue their traditional livelihood, based on farming livestock, but that they equally have little other means of securing an income.  Inevitably, this has led to an existence of poverty and despair.  Worse still, those Bedouin who have refused to give up their historic lands and move to the ‘recognised townships,’ remain in what are termed as ‘unrecognised villages.’  There are 45 of these so-called ‘unrecognised villages,’ which have populations ranging from 500 to 5,000 people.  Some 85,000 Bedouins in total are therefore subjected to repeated house demolitions and the refusal by the Israeli authorities to provide public services, such as schools, water, electricity, waste removal and medical clinics, because officially, these villages, along with their people, do not exist.

Let us now compound these rights abuses and put ourselves in between the rock of racist Israeli policy and the proverbial hard place of a highly traditional, patriarchal society.  Bedouin women are not only relegated to the position of third class citizens by the Israeli authorities (after the Jews and the ‘recognised’ Arabs) but they are also reduced to the lower ranks of society by their own communities.  Traditional gender-discriminatory practices, such as forced marriages, domestic violence, ‘honour-killings,’ polygamy and the denial of education, still remain relatively common amongst the Bedouin here, despite the fact that all of these customs are illegal in Israel.  As is to be expected from a government that does not care for its Arab minority, such practices more often than not go unpunished.  Israeli authorities consistently fail to enforce the law in these matters, feebly claiming that these are cultural issues in which they cannot interfere.

And so al-Nakba continues.  Maybe Zionist militias are no longer mobilizing to massacre the populations of entire Arab villages, as they did in 1948, but Arab villages continue to be razed and their populations dispossessed and displaced.  The ethos behind these current and historic policies remains the same; to make life for Arab Israelis in Israel so unbearable that they are ‘encouraged’ to move elsewhere.  In other words, the aim of the Israeli authorities is insidiously to purge Israel ethnically of its Arab population so that Israel can be what it was always ‘supposed’ to be, a Jewish State.