A window into the experience of Palestinian citizens of Israel

Native Palestinians

According to Zoabi, the Palestinian citizens of post-1948 Israel live the most complex, contradictory, and ambiguous existence of all Palestinians. In 1948, they numbered around 150,000 (out of a Palestinian population of 1.4 million). Today, they number nearly two million.

More than 750,000 Palestinians were uprooted and displaced by Zionist militias in 1948, with more than 500 villages and towns destroyed in what became known as the Nakba (Catastrophe). As Zoabi says, the world legitimised these acts of dispossession and the denial of Palestinians' human rights by recognising the State of Israel.

Native Palestinians who remained on their land were forced to hold Israeli citizenship. Zoabi sums up their thoughts as: "We do not like being citizens of this state, but we cannot imagine a future outside our homeland." Ever since, in the land of their birth, they have lived under systemic discrimination by the settler-colonial state. Yet foreigners and fellow Arabs often ask: "Why don't you just emigrate?" she says.

"The mind may suggest we leave, but the mind does not govern feelings, identity, and belonging." Hence, the tragedy of Palestinians forced to live in a "Jewish state" which would prefer them to be invisible, because their presence reminds Jewish Israelis of their "original sin".

That sin, Zoabi argues, is rooted in the Europe that committed the Holocaust against the Jews, whose descendants in Israel are now inflicting similar horrors on Palestinians in Gaza after 21 months of bombardment, starvation, and forced displacement, with the growing consensus among observers, scholars and officials labelling it a genocide.

Invisible to the Arab world

"Whenever we see a young man or woman from our Palestinian community attain a high administrative position in an Israeli hospital or university, we feel proud," she writes. "But whenever we see the Israeli flag at the Olympics, our heart aches and we find ourselves hoping their team loses… How can one be Palestinian and Israeli at the same time?" The question exposes the deep rupture between national identity (tied to Arab historical and cultural roots) and civil identity (which demands loyalty to a state that fundamentally denies that national identity).

Zoabi writes about the transformation within the Palestinian community in Israel, noting that prior to the 1978 Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement, they lived in "complete isolation from the Arab world". After the peace treaty, however, they began to visit Egypt.

Before that, Arabs didn't even know we existed, she argues. Had they done so, they might have "considered us traitors" for staying in (what became) Israel. As such, "our experience as Palestinians in Israel remained absent from the Arab world".

Conversely, she says, the Israeli state and Israeli society saw Palestinians in Israel as "a fifth column—strangers and enemies". Israel developed policies aimed at "dismantling them and obliterating their identity and culture," while communication with the broader Arab world was nearly impossible. Today, Palestinian Arabs constitute about 20% of Israel's population, with 40% under the age of 25.

Fighting marginalisation

In response to systemic marginalisation, education became Palestinians' primary weapon in the struggle to improve their circumstances under a well-armed occupying power. Some Palestinian families even sold property to finance their children's university education. As a result, 30% of Palestinian citizens of Israel now hold university degrees, of which 60% are women.

This investment has led to the rise of a Palestinian middle class within Israel. Zoabi references archived conversations from Israeli intelligence officials revealing policies aimed at keeping Palestinians impoverished, divided, and uneducated, but the Oslo Accords of the early 1990s opened a window of opportunity, allowing Palestinians to become professionals: doctors, engineers, lawyers, and entrepreneurs.

This met harsh resistance. During the Second Intifada, peaceful demonstrations by Palestinian citizens of Israel in solidarity with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were met by lethal force, with 13 killed and hundreds injured by Israeli army gunfire. In the aftermath, Zoabi became involved in the Higher Follow-up Committee for Arab Citizens in Israel.

Comprising representatives from Palestinian political parties and civil society groups, the committee drafted the Future Vision document in cooperation with Jewish organisations to address the deep mistrust between Arab citizens and Israeli institutions, particularly the police. As Zoabi sees it, however, the Israeli state "deliberately and permanently contributed to plunging the Palestinian community into organised crime," including through the proliferation of weapons, some from IDF camps.

Sowing division

Israel's aim, she says, is to sow division and unrest within the Palestinian community, distracting it from the national struggle, and the result is devastating—internal violence kills hundreds annually. According to Zoabi, this poses a threat to the future of Palestinian society in Israel no less grave than its ongoing war with the state itself.

She entered politics in response to a call from the left-wing Meretz party, which is known for advocating coexistence between Arabs and Jews, but Palestinians are generally suspicious of working with Israeli parties. Although Palestinians make up around 85% of eligible Arab Israeli voters, their political participation is limited. Family and clan affiliations help mobilise voters, but turnout rarely exceeds 50% and recently dropped to 40%, reflecting a sense of alienation and exclusion from Israeli politics.

After being elected to the Knesset, Zoabi voted for a controversial citizenship law that disproportionately impacts Palestinians in Israel, alongside Meretz and far-right politician Itamar Ben-Gvir. The backlash from her supporters was swift and harsh. Zoabi later said she regretted her vote, stating that she had yielded to party pressure. In 2021, she said in an interview that she opposed Israeli military actions in Gaza. Yair Lapid, who was Deputy Prime Minister at the time, reportedly dismissed her concerns as "trivialities".

Insight into racism

The tensions escalated further when she voted against holding a cabinet meeting in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights and opposed a conscription bill that could have opened the door to drafting Syrian Druze from that region into the Israeli military. In May 2022, a new wave of protests erupted across Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza, following the assassination of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Zoabi looks back on that time as a "moment of extreme anger" for her.

"I was ashamed to be on the side of the government, and I made the difficult decision to resign from the coalition." She concluded that racism in Israel was not in how a Jewish homeowner treats a Palestinian labourer in his garden, but in how a Jewish politician regards his Palestinian colleague in government, at the very heart of decision-making power.

Ill fortune in the Arab world has not been limited to the Palestinians. The horrors inflicted by the Assad regime on the Syrian people are no less appalling than the horrors Israel has been committing in Gaza for nearly two years. Today, Syrians live with a broken state, political abandonment, social disintegration, and an economic collapse that will take many years to recover from.

The same could be said of Lebanon's economy. In Sudan, the problems may be even worse, as two warring generals devastate the country, displacing millions and crushing the hopes of the 2018-19 revolution, while Yemen's humanitarian crisis is thought to be almost as bad as that in Gaza. For Ghaida Rinawie Zoabi, the problems are closer to home, but she no doubt knows that they are part of a bigger picture.