This article is the second of a two-part report covering Israel’s practices towards Palestinians over the past year – showcasing a broader campaign of ethnic cleansing which transcends the war on Gaza and targets every Palestinian, even those with citizenship rights.
“It doesn’t matter where they are, right now every Palestinian is going through something,” M., 26, tells The New Arab. M. chooses to remain anonymous due to punitive measures by Israeli authorities against those testifying and speaking out against Israeli practices.
M.’s concerns are not without warrant. On 7 November last year, the Israeli Knesset passed a set of draconian laws specifically directed towards Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. The first allows the Israeli Minister of Interior, Moshe Arbel, to deport first-degree relatives of those accused or convicted of terrorism activities.
An amendment to the law further extends jurisdiction to implicate individuals and organisations who are considered to have “praised or incited terrorism”.
While the law allows individuals to retain their Israeli citizenship status, it stipulates that deportation can occur for a period ranging from seven to 15 years for Israeli citizens and 10 to 20 years for non-citizens. According to the law, individuals can be deported to Gaza as well as other destinations.
In theory, the law applies to all Israeli citizens. However, its vague criteria and broad definition of “terrorism” are discriminatorily used to criminalise Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. There were more incitement cases against Palestinian citizens in the last 14 months than there were in the last five years combined.
Sparing no one, the Israeli Knesset also enacted a temporary 5-year law which authorises the detention of minors under the age of 14 in closed facilities if they are convicted of murder involving “terrorism or terrorism activities”.
More concerning is that the law allows Israeli courts to jail minors in prison rather than juvenile facilities for up to ten days, with a possible extension if the child is deemed “dangerous”.
Judicial warfare: Caught between a law and a bullet
“As a people we are in the heart of Israel, the heart of the occupation,” Anees Safori, 35, a Palestinian from Shifa Amro in the Naqab, or Negev, tells TNA.
Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are the descendants of those who remained in the territory that became Israel after the 1948 Nakba when over 750,000 Palestinians – 80% of the population – were ethnically cleansed or fled their homes. They have never been allowed to return.
Despite being largely neglected from media coverage and political discourse, they continue to endure the violent consequences of Israel’s existential and demographic war.
The suppression of Palestinians in the Israeli state is not new. Under the leadership of Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, Palestinians in Israel were subject to martial military law for 18 years until Levi Eshkol took command as prime minister in 1963 and initiated gradual efforts to assimilate Palestinians into Israeli society.
After the 1966 lifting of martial law, Palestinians experienced gradual but limited enfranchisement. Palestinian towns and cities with the closest proximity to the West Bank such as the “Triangle area” and the Naqab (Negev) were the last areas to have martial law lifted as they were considered security risks.
In the decades to come, Israel attempted to forcibly assimilate Palestinians within the Israeli state as second and third-class citizens. This not only left Palestinians at the mercy of Israel’s state but also de jure separated the surviving population from the rest of the Palestinian people.
In recent years, however, any concept of national assimilation or social participation has gradually eroded.
Rather than use extreme violence against Palestinian citizens, like in Gaza and the West Bank, the Israeli government has instead begun restricting opportunities for their survival in society.
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Inside the belly of the beast
For decades, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship have faced discriminatory laws and violent practices at the hands of the Israeli government and Jewish nationalists. However, being reliant on the Israeli government for their most basic needs such as education, healthcare, and employment opportunities, Palestinians are forced to negotiate their identity with survival.
The Israeli educational system – which is largely segregated – is exclusively geared towards Jewish identity. Curriculums are dismissive of Palestinian history, culture, and identity, with Palestinian students exposed to material that glorifies the Zionist narrative while denying, and criminalising, the history and lived experience of Palestinians.
The word ‘Nakba’, for example, has been removed from schoolbooks for Palestinian students, while commemorating the events of 1948 are criminalised under the ‘Nakba Law’.
As Safori explains to The New Arab, “I don’t need [Israel] to bomb me. At any point, they can cut water off from me and I have nothing to challenge that. They are responsible for every aspect of our lives, our employment, our living, everything”.
The Israeli government has also systemically ensured chronic underinvestment in Palestinian communities. This includes discriminatory zoning policies that deny their capacity for expansion and the denial of access to the most basic services such as water and electricity.
Palestinians also face political persecution where community leaders advocating for Palestinian self-determination are arrested, restricted from travel, or denied access to various governmental services.
Israel has weaponised this type of control over Palestinian citizens to coercively recruit them for intelligence, using them as informers and spies.
Furthermore, the Israeli government has been accused of facilitating the rise of deadly organised crime within Palestinian communities, with police turning a blind eye or being complicit in the arming of criminal syndicates, while also denying due process to the victims.
Between 2022 and 2023, the homicide rate within Palestinian communities more than doubled, rising to 223 recorded deaths.
To put these numbers into perspective, in the same year 190 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, and in 2023 (between January and 6 October) 227 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
It was only following the Gaza war, when Israeli forces and intelligence units were preoccupied, that homicide rates went down.
Proving loyalty to their abusers: Israel’s coercive measures
The Palestinians who remained in their homes after the 1948 Nakba and found themselves as Israeli citizens have been largely absent from diplomatic negotiations and de facto abandoned from the discourse.
“Those of us living inside know the literal meaning of contradiction,” M., tells TNA. “It’s hard to explain this to others because no one lives here except us.”
For M., and the hundreds of thousands like her, this erasure has taken on new heights in recent years.
In 2018, following Trump’s unlawful declaration of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the Israeli government passed the “Nation-State Law.” Intentionally sidelining Palestinian citizens, the legislation establishes Israel as the “nation-state of the Jewish people”.
By prioritising Jewish self-determination, the Nation-State law strips Palestinians of their rightful recognition as a people with a collective national identity. This law not only marginalises them but also suppresses their right to publicly express their language, culture, heritage, and lineage, silencing them in their historic homeland and gradually erasing traces of their existence.
It follows a similar trend to Israel’s 2018 “breach of allegiance” law, which allows the Israeli government to revoke the residency status of Palestinians in Jerusalem.
For Palestinians, this is just another reminder of a slower process of ethnic cleansing, and that citizenship rights hold no value for a supremacist ethnoreligious regime.
“As Palestinians, we are now aware of being suppressed,” Safori tells TNA. “Because even if we wanted to lie to ourselves and say this is a democratic state, the state came and said this is a Jewish state, period.”
In 2021, Palestinians directly challenged this Israeli-imposed separation from the broader Palestinian population. Rejecting Israel’s colonial goals, Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Israel rose up in what became known as the “Uprising of Hope and Dignity”.
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New hope but new levels of brutality
“The Uprising of Dignity exposed the discrimination and that the whole co-existence is a delusion,” M. explains, reflecting on the years preceding the ongoing genocide. Triggered by Israel’s insistence to depopulate the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in Jerusalem, the uprising of 2021 was marked by a renewed collective Palestinian voice. Israeli authorities responded with excessive violence.
In the West Bank, the Israeli military and Palestinian Authority (PA) suppressed protests, while in Gaza Israeli bombs rained down on Palestinians, killing at least 250 people, including 66 children.
Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, meanwhile, faced a ruthless campaign dubbed “Operation Law and Order”. Thousands of Israeli forces, including counterintelligence and reserve units, were deployed to crack down on demonstrators and their families, with hundreds arrested.
In addition to tough sentences and physical and sexual assault while in detention, individuals were arrested over liking social media posts. Israeli authorities also set high fines, imposing a huge financial burden on an already impoverished population.
While the events of 2021 offered new hope for Palestinians, they also ushered in a wave of brutality that continues until today.
“The 2021 uprising heavily impacted us,” M. admits. “That year protests happened in areas we didn’t expect. It was big and reached a point where youth were burning tyres and actually disrupting life, and the youth are still paying the price.”
Living among the perpetrators of genocide
Palestinian citizens of Israel are a threat to Israel’s colonial project. While 2021 proved the potential power that unified Palestinians could have, it also emphasised their threat, setting a new precedent for the use of state-sanctioned force against Palestinians, which has increased over the last four years.
According to Safori, “It’s important for [Israel] to maintain this sense of terror [for Palestinians]”.
A campaign of repression since the Gaza war began means that Palestinians are facing punitive measures over the most banal actions.
“Recently we had a woman teacher in Tamra who shared something from the archives of the war, and they interpreted it as incitement, and Ben-Gvir even began inciting against her,” M. told TNA.
“Even when we tried to do a protest in Shifa Amro to demand the return of the body of Walid Daqqa, we found more police than people,” Safori tells TNA.
Walid Daqqa was a Palestinian writer and novelist who was killed inside Israeli prisons in April of this year. His death came after Israel refused to release him despite being terminally ill with cancer, and despite having completed his full sentence of 37 years.
An Israeli citizen, not only was Daqqa killed through intentional medical negligence, but his body – along with 238 others – is still being held by Israel as a punitive measure.
For many Palestinian citizens, the past year of Israel’s war on Gaza has made them realise that Israeli society in its entirety is engaging in ethnic cleansing. This requires not merely a negotiation with Israel’s discriminatory laws and social fabric, but also a constant and violent reconciliation of living amongst those responsible for what rights groups call a genocide.
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“Everything is a challenge,” M. says. “You have to be cautious of every word you’re saying,” she explained.
“Even going to university is not easy. You’re living with the other, and across the classroom, you can be sitting across a soldier that was doing the killing [against our people in Gaza],” M. says. “Imagine your peer is holding a rifle next to you, and that’s the norm.”
The 1.9 million Palestinian population living within Israel faces heavy surveillance and policing where their every move is watched and scrutinised. While soldiers are hailed as heroes within Israel, Palestinian civilians are treated as potential terrorists. Today, while tens of thousands of Israelis hold anti-government protests in Tel Aviv, non-violent demonstrations organised by Palestinians calling for an end to the genocide are met with ruthlessness.
“Today we are more careful about what we wear and what we say,” M. said. “Before I used to go out with earrings of Palestinian coins or the map. Now, no way. My neighbours are Jewish Israeli and they keep an eye.”
The post-7 October edition
Palestinians faced an escalation of attacks by Israeli forces and armed settlers long before Hamas’s attack on 7 October. However, it became a justification liberally used by Israel to intensify repressive practices against Palestinians, both inside and outside of Gaza.
Between the rise of state-backed organised crime, structurally decapacitated neighbourhoods, and a political vacuum, today the Palestinian community within Israel are left as sitting ducks.
Living in a state of hypervigilance and repeated patterns of abandonment, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are in a state of paralysis. “There is a kind of fear, a kind of waiting, a form of trying to process what is happening,” Safori explained. “The risk of standing up against the discrimination and racism inside Israel right now is not like [other times].”
As an existential war for Israel, Palestinian citizens also fear that they are likely to be the next target of any significant battles to come.
“We are speaking about fascists that don’t want us, and so the struggle is necessarily coming,” Safori explains to TNA. “We are the last phase of the struggle because the struggle in the end will be decisive inside, in the centre.”
Click here to read Part 1 of the series: ‘Erasing Palestine: Jerusalem as a frontline in Israel’s war’
Mariam Barghouti is a writer and journalist based in the West Bank. She has been covering the region as a reporter and analyst for ten years, served as the senior Palestine correspondent for Mondoweiss, and is a member of the Marie Colvin Journalist Network.
Follow her on X: @MariamBarghouti
