“The illusion of citizenship has gone”: Israel’s Arabs look to the future

By Riya al Sanah - Janan Bsoul - Tanya Habjouqa

The latest round of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has seen an unusual surge in violence between Arab and Jewish communities inside Israel. Around a fifth of Israel’s population are Palestinian Arabs, whose existence is very different from those living under occupation in the West Bank or Gaza. Though theoretically equal under the law, many of them face discrimination on a daily basis.

This month, as fighting between Israel and Hamas intensified and protests erupted over the eviction of Palestinian families in Jerusalem, violence flared within Israel. Mobs on both sides assaulted civilians in some of the worst inter-communal strife of recent years in mixed cities where Jews and Arabs live alongside each other. Arab rioters have burned synagogues and far-right Jewish groups have smashed Arab shops, businesses and homes.

“Our harmonious co-existence was always a myth”

Riya al Sanah, HAIFA

Watching the scenes of protest and destruction across Israeli cities in recent days, many people have expressed shock at the breakdown of relations between Jewish and Palestinian citizens. Yet in Haifa, the biggest Israeli city with a mixed population, our apparently harmonious co-existence was always a myth.

Haifa is often hailed as a model of how two communities can live together. More than 10% of the city’s 250,000 residents are Palestinian Arabs. The two populations share public resources like hospitals and universities, though schools are segregated. The city hosts a vibrant political cultural scene for Palestinians.

For all its superficial co-existence, Haifa is a racially divided and segregated city. No checkpoints or barbed wire demarcate the spaces, as in the West Bank, but everyday life for Palestinians in Haifa is a world apart from that of Jewish Israelis, blighted by systematic discrimination.

The commercial relationship of Jewish-Israelis with the Palestinian side of the city is restricted mainly to buying cheap goods and services. You see them on Saturdays in the Wadi al-Nisnas neighbourhood devouring falafel and hummus.

The Palestinian city is self-contained: I rarely speak anything other than Arabic. Most of the city’s Palestinian residents live in four impoverished neighbourhoods, which are also host to Palestinian-run schools. Palestinians typically work either in construction or as unskilled labourers in refineries, factories, at the port or in businesses owned by Jewish-Israelis.

Those who want higher-status jobs at these firms face obstacles, not least the reaction that an Arab surname provokes during recruitment. Palestinians who do get better-paid industrial jobs receive regular “check-ins” from Israel’s security services.

Haifa was a mostly Palestinian-Arab city until shortly before the state of Israel was created in 1948. Most of the Arab population was driven out and many were forbidden from returning. Bit by bit, their vacant properties have been confiscated and sold off to private developers. The Wadi al-Salib neighbourhood was once the bustling heart of a Palestinian city; today it is a prime destination for Israeli property developers. Palestinian homes are bulldozed and luxury apartments built, often marketed as “authentic homes” from which to commute to Tel Aviv, Israel’s economic centre.

It’s against this backdrop of discrimination and dispossession that anger over government policies in East Jerusalem recently erupted. When activist groups in Haifa called for a demonstration on May 9th, the police used riot techniques to disperse them. Many were arrested. The next day, a spontaneous demonstration by young people was repressed even more firmly.

We are used to protests being repressed. What is new about the current situation is the proliferation of armed Israeli ultra-nationalist groups inside Haifa. Militias came to a Palestinian demonstration in Haifa on May 11th chanting “death to Arabs”. Scores of Palestinians and their properties were attacked that night. For the past week right-wing mobs have rampaged in other mixed cities too. Oppressive police tactics are mainly used to protect one side. More than 700 Palestinians of Israel were arrested in one week.

Palestinian communities have organised themselves in response to attacks . Local medical teams have helped the injured. Therapists have given free consultations to the families of detainees and children traumatised by the violence. Food parcels are being distributed. Legal teams are coming together to represent those arrested in court.

This week marks a new beginning. Old arrangements are crumbling and new ones are taking their place. The sense of unity between the city’s Palestinians, as well as the feeling of belonging to a broader Palestinian collective, has been remarkable. No matter what happens, we have rediscovered our collective spirit.

Riya al Sanah is a Palestinian activist and research co-ordinator at Who Profits

“The state likes to remind me that I’m a Palestinian whenever the security situation becomes tense”

Janan Bsoul, TEL AVIV

When Hamas began firing rockets into Israel last week, Jewish-Israeli friends, people I’ve lived and worked alongside all my adult life, began making their expectations of me clear. I’ve experienced this before. I must condemn the violence of “my people”. I must call it terror. And I must agree that Israel is the victim, not the aggressor.

The state likes to remind me that I’m a Palestinian whenever the security situation becomes tense. Some people even suggest I should thank the state for rescuing me from the barbarism of Palestinian society. Though never explicitly stated, it’s clear in such moments that my right to belong in the country I was born in depends on my response.

As an urbanite living in Tel Aviv, I’ve been largely spared the kind of pressures that have caused Palestinian communities across Israel to erupt in protest in recent weeks. I moved from Jerusalem in 2014 because it felt increasingly oppressive to be a Palestinian in a city with so many religious and nationalist extremists.

In Tel Aviv, a hedonistic, secular city, I work in the media and spend most of my time surrounded by left-wing Jewish-Israelis. I speak fluent Hebrew and I’m often told that I don’t even have an Arabic accent. I’m usually reminded of my ethnic identity only when I’m talking to my brother in Arabic over coffee (during tense times, this is guaranteed to draw looks from other customers) or when I’m subjected to the special screening that people with surnames like mine go through at Ben Gurion airport.

The past two weeks, however, have stirred up some difficult feelings. I work as a translator for humanitarian organisations and often see raw images of devastation and suffering from the aerial bombardment of Gaza. This is wrenching, not so much as a Palestinian, but as a human being. The older I get, the more rounds of fighting I live through, the harder this is to process.

This time, however, there are other triggers: extremists chanting “death to Arabs” in Lod, Haifa and Jaffa. Inter-communal violence has happened before, but right now it feels like the existing tensions are on steroids. Violent mobs and die-hard supremacists are burning everything and intimidating everyone.

I feel physically threatened even in Tel Aviv. I sometimes feel like I’m having a breakdown. It's lonely. When I wrote about some of the difficulties Arab citizens of Israel face in an opinion piece recently, a Jewish-Israeli friend told me that my article had been so provocative I’d essentially given Israeli nationalist extremists an excuse to attack Arabs.

I increasingly feel that a Palestinian can never be a genuinely equal citizen of Israel, even those of us who have only ever lived on the Israeli side of the green line that marks the state’s internationally recognised boundary. Some of this is due to having a different formal status – Arabic was recently demoted from being one of the state’s official languages, for example.

But our sense of being second-class is mostly to do with how we are seen by our Jewish fellow citizens. Even the more doveish ones emphasise our difference. This is particularly visible in the mixed cities where ethnic and cultural differences are reinforced by economic ones. Well-off Jewish-Israelis have been buying houses in Palestinian neighbourhoods for their “authentic” scenery, yet they expect the Palestinian inhabitants responsible for the place’s authenticity to be invisible.

Unthreatening, loyal, grateful, authentic – it’s a restrictive identity to have to perform as the bombs rain down on Gaza. The air-raid sirens echoing through Tel Aviv as the rockets of “my people” fall here affect me too. I am confused and anxious. I didn’t choose to be born here but I have nowhere else to go. This is the only place I call home. I certainly don’t feel it is entirely mine, but I refuse to accept that it is entirely someone else’s.

Janan Bsoul is a writer and translator

“Were you with the Palestinians? What do they say about us?”

Tanya Habjouqa, LOD

When I arrived in Lod on Saturday morning the city was reeling from several days of violence. One Palestinian had been shot dead. The trees around the synagogue were scorched. Burned-out cars were everywhere, some belonging to Jews, some to Palestinians.

I met one large Palestinian family who said that eight cars in their street had been burnt and that the windows of their grocery store had been smashed. The young children apparently woke up during the attack and asked if they were going to be killed. Over and over again, Palestinians told me that the police had not stepped in to stop the violence.

By Saturday, security forces were all over the city. I was stopped several times by men in plain clothes asking who I was and what I was doing there. Lod stayed quiet that day, but the paranoia and mistrust were palpable.

I tried to find out what was going on around the synagogue and the children’s nursery where settlers from the West Bank and other non-state groups seemed to be stationed. People around the synagogue treated me with suspicion, but also some curiosity. One policeman asked me: “Were you with the Palestinians? What do they say about us?”

When I was walking in the Palestinian neighbourhoods later in the evening, people were also wary of me. I heard whispers as I went by: “Who is she? Who is she with?” After I took a photo of a tear-gas canister on the ground, the whispers seemed to die down. Palestinians were apparently reassured that I was “with” them, because I was documenting the actions of Israeli police.

The overall impression I had was of a community in shock that the kind of scenes they were used to seeing on TV footage in the occupied territories were happening here inside Israel. Relatives in the West Bank were now ringing them and asking how they were, instead of the other way around. People kept saying that their illusion of citizenship had gone. Now they were finally waking up.■

Tanya Habjouqa is a photographer based in Jordan

PHOTOGRAPHS: TANYA HABJOUQA