Israeli Arabs torn between Israeli citizenship and Palestinian identity
Audio 03:23
Clashes between Israeli security forces with demonstrators in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem, May 14, 2021. © AP / Mahmoud Illean
By: Bruno Daroux Follow
7 mins
Back to the violent clashes that set the mixed cities of Israel ablaze.
Clashes sometimes going as far as lynching between Jewish and Arab Israeli citizens.
How to explain such an explosion of violence between Arab Israeli citizens and Jews?
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We can say that it is a 70-year past that resurfaces, a past that does not pass for the Israeli Arabs - or more precisely the descendants of the Palestinians who remained there in 1948, just over 150,000 people at the time. , when
the creation of the State of Israel
caused the forced displacement of 700,000 other Palestinians to makeshift camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and of course in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
It was the Nakba, the catastrophe, which was "
not a passing calamity, but the worst crisis that has happened to the Arabs
", as the Syrian intellectual Constantin Zureiq wrote at the time, that conceptualized this concept of catastrophe.
From the outset, the Israeli state was seen as a colonizer of Arab lands, fueling a bottomless pit of resentment.
In 2011, the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury wrote: “
the Nakba is not only an event, but also a process that has never stopped
”.
For him - and for all Palestinians, it is a process of dispossession of territories occupied by the Arabs in 1948 - for the benefit of the Jews.
Including in Israel - and therefore to the detriment of the Israeli Palestinians.
Persistent discrimination
Today, Israeli Arabs represent 21% of the Israeli population.
Officially, they have almost the same rights as Israeli Jews.
They participate in political life and vote.
They cannot, however, perform their military service in the IDF.
In practice, there is still a lot of discrimination, particularly in terms of access to housing.
To this situation has been added since the 2000s the rise in power of nationalist and ultra-religious Jewish parties.
A racialist and Jewish supremacist word is released in the political space, minority, but very active.
Then comes the fundamental “Nation-State” law in 2018, which defines Israel as “
the national home of the Jewish people
”, and Jerusalem as the “
complete and unified
”
capital of Israel
.
► Also to listen: Conflict in the Middle East: "The Palestinians of Israel are second-class citizens"
The drop of water that broke the camel's back
It is in this context that the case of the district of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem arises, again and always a story of housing and territories, legitimacy and conflicting claims.
Undoubtedly the straw that broke the camel's back of injustices felt by Israeli Arabs, which will provoke violence between Jews and Arabs in mixed towns.
Expressions of minority hatred, but heightened by angry Palestinians and nationalist Jews stoking the fire.
Even though in recent months, cohabitation, always a little wary, was nevertheless peaceful, even united in the common ordeal of Covid-19.
This Saturday, the Palestinians commemorate the 73rd edition of the Nakba, a past disaster and yet so present among these Israeli Arabs still torn between their Israeli citizenship and their Palestinian identity.
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Israelo-Palestinian conflict
Israel
Palestinian territories
Jerusalem