For most of the past century, Israelis and Palestinians have been sworn enemies, locked in a seemingly endless war. From the outside, the battlefield appears black and white: two opposing sides facing off, with zero common ground.
Zoom in closer, though, and an unexpected front emerges, a third group that exists between both identities.
These are the Arab citizens of Israel, who live stuck between two opposing worlds, caught in a high-wire act over a field of landmines, deeply aware that both sides are scrutinizing their every move.
The 2.1 million Arab citizens of Israel make up a fifth of the country’s population. Many of them have relatives and friends among the millions of Palestinians who live right across the de facto borders that separate Israel from the West Bank and Gaza. This makes the war between Israel and the Palestinians deeply personal.
This complex identity began in 1948, when the State of Israel declared independence. While for Israel, the conflict that erupted after is known as the War of Independence, for Palestinians, it’s known as the Nakba or the “catastrophe,” referring to the creation of the Jewish state and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
The war was fierce and bloody, and both Israelis and Palestinians paid a terrible price. Israel lost 1% of its population, with thousands more displaced. Most Arab Palestinians lost their homes, as 700,000 fled or were expelled, creating a nation in exile. From across a border bristling with barbed wire, Palestinians crowded into squalid refugee camps, all the while dreaming of home.
That home was gone, though. Many Arab villages became Israeli towns. Hebrew rang out in the market stalls. Streets were renamed after Jewish heroes. As the surrounding Arab world spat out its Jews in rage and revenge, Israel’s Jewish population more than doubled, reshaping the demographics of the state.
But not every Palestinian became a refugee. About 150,000 Palestinian Arabs stayed in what became Israel. From their front row seats, they watched Mandate Palestine transform into the Jewish state. In the catastrophe, they’d lost a national homeland, but they had also gained a country.
Why did some Palestinians decide to stay in a state built for and by Jews?
For peace activist Mohammad Darawshe‘s family, it was about survival.
“I remember talks with my grandfather. It’s about survival. It’s better to stay in our towns and villages than to become refugees. We have some of our family that became refugees in 1948, and they’re still refugees still today. So I don’t think that the Arab political leadership had any strategy at the time other than just to live day by day and see if it works.”
Regardless of why his family stayed, Darawshe has dedicated his life to Arab-Jewish coexistence in the land of Israel. His grandparents’ choice to stay in 1948 set the course for the rest of his life. To a certain extent, that’s true of all Arab citizens of Israel.
Not everyone was given a choice whether to stay or to go, though.
If you ask peace activist Ibrahim Abu Ahmed, his status as an Israeli citizen is an accident of history, rather than the result of a calculated decision.
“In 1948 when the war broke out, my great-grandfather went to fight in the war. He was shot and killed. And my grandma, at the age of seven, lost her dad. So my grandma and all her siblings tried to find somewhere to go,” Abu Ahmed explained.
“They started marching north, trying to get to Lebanon, far away from the clashes, far away from the war. And when things are better, [they said] ‘we’ll come back’,” Abu Ahmed added. “On their way to Lebanon, they realized that Turan raised the white flag, there were no more clashes in Turan, and they were able to return. So they did a u-turn, came back here, saw so much destruction after they left, and things that happened to their house and to everything that they left behind. But the community was still there, so they resettled in their own community.”
“You know, my grandma was born in the West Bank, the area that today is known as the West Bank. If they stayed, today, they would’ve been Palestinians in the West Bank, along with all their descendants. If they continued marching to Lebanon, we, their descendants, would’ve been Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. So our citizenship as the generations after was defined by where our grandparents ended up physically at one point in time in 1948, so our citizenship wasn’t a decision. It was a circumstance, a geographic circumstance.”
First steps in a democracy
Despite the difficulties, these newly minted Arab citizens of Israel decided to make the best of those circumstances. They’d already survived the Ottoman Empire and British rule. In the new state, they would finally have some say in how they were governed, because when the Israeli Prime Minister declared independence, he promised all Palestinian Arabs who wished to be a part of the state “full and equal citizenship.”
“They did believe the promise in the Declaration of Independence. They took it seriously,” Darawshe said of his grandparents.
Promises are one thing, reality is another.
The reality was that Jews and Arabs had very little reason to trust each other. They’d just fought a bitter, existential war. The borders of the new state weren’t borders at all, but highly porous armistice lines that let countless infiltrators through. Hundreds of Jewish Israelis lost their lives to these intruders.
The war may have ended, but Israel was still surrounded by hostile neighbors. Would the 150,000 Arab citizens of Israel be loyal to their state, or were they an enemy from within?
No one knew the answers to these questions, but the Israelis weren’t going to take any chances. As a result, the government developed some contradictory policies around its Arab citizens.
On the one hand, Arab citizens had every right to vote and to run for political office. Three Palestinians served in the country’s very first Parliament. Just as it did for Jewish citizens, the government built infrastructure in Arab villages – paving roads, building schools, even launching Arabic-language radio shows and newspapers.
However, these efforts weren’t entirely altruistic. Israeli officials were savvy enough to understand that the best way to quell a potential uprising was to make Arab citizens feel like a part of the state, but it’s difficult to feel like a part of the state when you live under strict military law.
“Arab citizens were put in some kind of containment situation between 1948 and until 1966, in which Israel wasn’t sure it wanted to have Arab citizens or not. They imposed the military administration to contain the Arab citizens and prevent them from integration in Israeli society,” Darawshe explained. “The leading theory then was that there might be an opportunity for population exchange between Israel and the Arab countries, that Israel would get rid of those leftovers of the Palestinians and instead get the Jews from Arab countries.”
Of course, that never happened. The surrounding countries refused to recognize Israel’s existence, so there were no deals, no population exchanges, no Palestinian state. Instead, 700,000 Palestinians lived in exile, as 150,000 Arab citizens of Israel navigated their unexpected and often harsh status quo.
They needed permits to travel outside their villages. Even if they got those permits, they risked being detained by the police or military. They couldn’t hold political assemblies or fly a Palestinian flag. The smallest whiff of subversion, and they’d find themselves up close and personal with the Israeli authorities.
Even with these difficulties, there was no mass uprising, no homegrown terror.
The calls to lift the military rule grew louder and louder, from Arabs and Jews alike. It took 18 years, but in 1966, the last of the military laws was finally lifted, and Arab citizens of Israel were finally equal under the law. Israel started talking in terms of coexistence.
This coexistence came with a price, though. These citizens were caught between a state that distrusted them and an Arab world that saw them as traitors, which might be one reason why most of Israel’s Arab citizens more or less accepted the label Israeli Arabs – at least, for the first two decades of the state.
The Six-Day War changes everything
In 1967, things became even more complex.
Egypt, Syria, and Jordan had been threatening war for months, so Israel brought the war to them and, in the process, wrested control of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights.
For the Israelis, it was a shocking victory, but for the Arab world, it was a naksah, or “setback.”
For Palestinians specifically, the war was complicated. It brought millions of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza under Israeli control, but it also reconnected a people that had been split for 19 years.
For the first time in nearly two decades, Palestinian refugees could finally reunite with relatives who had stayed in Israel. It was a joyous reunion: a divided population rediscovering its other half.
“We are one people, the people who are in Gaza, in West Bank, in the North, in the Galilee, in Nazareth, in wherever are we are the Arabs who live in Israel or in Palestine, in West Bank or in Gaza, we are the same Palestinian, the same people,” Sami Jabali, the co-founder of the Liwan Culture Café, explained. “In general, we speak the same style, have the same humor, jokes, attitude, culture, food, so it’s really easy to click because we come from a very, very similar background.”
For all its joy, though, the new borders brought new complications.
Today, fences, checkpoints, and walls separate Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. Back then, those barriers didn’t exist. Everyone was going back and forth constantly. Palestinians in Gaza took day trips to Tel Aviv. Jewish Israelis shopped for cheap produce in West Bank market stalls. Arab citizens visited relatives they hadn’t seen in years. There were no checkpoints, no fences, no soldiers with guns guarding the borders. Just people, mingling and influencing one another, for better and for worse.
How the PLO affected Arab Israelis
That’s exactly when the Palestine Liberation Organization, which is exactly what it sounds like, really stepped up its game. Its chosen method of “liberating Palestine” was attacking Israel and Israelis – whether at the Olympics, in schools, or even midair.
For most Jewish Israelis, the PLO was Public Enemy Number One. But when the PLO flooded Arab towns with propaganda, some young Arab citizens joined the fight against Israel.
By the late 1980s, some Arab citizens had set up a roaring weapons trade between Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, while others vandalized property or attacked Jews directly.
There’s a bitter irony in all of this. Until 1966, Arab citizens had been treated as a potential fifth column – guilty until proven innocent. By the late 80s, this tiny but violent fringe began to confirm some Israeli Jews’ darkest fears about their Arab neighbors.
While it took a lot to build up trust, it took very little to shatter it, and this was only one of many crises of trust to come.
The Oslo Accords and a new complexity
In the 1990s, Israel and the PLO finally agreed to recognize one another.
“There was a euphoric feeling in the 1990s,” Abu Ahmed reminisced. “I remember going to kindergarten and having the teachers ask us to draw pictures of doves and write the words, Salaam, Shalom, and Peace in all languages. People really believed that something great was about to happen.”
The Oslo Accords were supposed to pave the way towards a Palestinian state. They created a Palestinian government in the West Bank and Gaza, giving Palestinians some measure of autonomy for the first time in their history, but they had another, unexpected result. They allowed Arab citizens of Israel to fully and publicly explore their identities, to decide for themselves whether they were Israeli or Palestinian or somewhere in between.
Oslo made it okay to identify, at least in part, as Palestinian. For many, this was a no-brainer. Of course, they’re Palestinian.
For some, their Palestinian identity is exclusive. They are Palestinian. Nothing more, nothing less, nothing else, even if they live in Israel.
Activist and educator Shareef Safadi is one of those people.
“I have a real surprising identity, actually. I am Palestinian. I mean, other than the piece of paper that I carry, I don’t feel that [the Israeli identity] includes me. The flag does not include me, it does not represent me,” Safadi said.
“The thing is what the word Israel today and politics represents. As Palestinians, you associate the word Israeli with the occupation, with the killing of your own people, and all of the different ways of oppression. So I cannot be on the same side, under the same umbrella, under the same name that is used to oppress my people.”
This is where two narratives collide: where Jewish Israelis talk about rebirth, about return, about the justice of Zionism – and where Arab citizens see their continued dispossession, their replacement, their oppression.
When you frame it this way, of course, these identities can only be one or the other, zero sum, the return of one people automatically dispossessing another.
Most Arab citizens of Israel don’t feel this way, at least not entirely. It’s more complicated, more nuanced.
Abu Ahmed describes the Arab Israeli identity as a spectrum with two extremes.
“On one side, you have somebody who sees themselves as an Israeli, just Israeli, an Arab Israeli. That person has no personal connotation or feeling of connection to Palestinian peoplehood or the Palestinian people, or the Palestinian conflict, or the Palestinian struggle,” he explained. “On the other side of the spectrum, you have someone who sees themselves as only Palestinian, and if the state is wiped and disappears tomorrow morning, great, if not, it’s the reality.”
“The vast majority of the people of our community are not on these outliers, these polarized outliers,” Abu Ahmed stressed. “They actually live on the spectrum somewhere, and your position on the spectrum is not static; it changes throughout your life, it changes with experiences, with growing up, and also with things that are happening on the ground.”
On the opposite end of that spectrum from Safadi is Cpt. Ali Kashkoush, a high school teacher and an officer in the IDF.
“Everyone knows that we, the citizens of the State of Israel, have one identity, which is the Israeli identity, and you are Israeli in every way. You carry the identity of the State of Israel. Your flag is the flag of Israel. Your governmental and civil institutions are Israeli institutions, and you always go to them. How is it possible that within this reality, you’d want to create another one? Another reality that will distract you from your thinking and distract you from your ambitions, and not only that, but you will not reach what you want.”
For a lot of Jewish Israelis, Kashkoush’s narrative is enticing because it doesn’t ask us to look inside ourselves. It doesn’t ask us to consider that maybe things are more complicated; instead, it’s reassuring.
We’re all Israeli. We’re all in this together. We’re all doing just fine. Maybe, in some sense, that’s true. Maybe, for some people, that feels true. But it’s not a common sentiment, because the state isn’t just one thing. There are good parts, and there are bad parts, and then there are parts that can’t be slotted so neatly into a binary.
“Most people say, this is a zero-sum game. How can you be both Palestinian and Israeli? Well, this creature called Arab citizens of Israel thinks it can be,” Darawshe said.
Zuhria Azab, general manager of the Masira Fund and Center, is on another part of this identity spectrum.
“I don’t know myself without the Israeli identity. I was born with this identity, but I know that since the day I was born, we are essentially Palestinians. We are Palestinians in the first place,” Azab said. “My mother and father were born before the State of Israel and lived through the Nakba. They told us the whole story of asylum.”
Azab’s experience of “Israeli-ness” is also an experience of being an outsider. While she’s an Israeli in many senses, she’s not necessarily a “full” one.
“I have an Israeli identity card like anyone else, but I am different,” Azab explained. “I mean, the state, in its content, symbolism, and definition, is known as the Jewish state to begin with. It excludes me for my origin, for my nationality. The Jewish identity in this country gives preference to its holder. It means that just because you were born Jewish, you are better. You are being prioritized over me, the Arab minority. There is no doubt that racial discrimination is being practiced and is still being practiced against Arab minorities, and that’s what made the Arabs return to their Palestinian roots.”
These are difficult words to hear for a Jewish Israeli who wants to believe that the state is as democratic as its Declaration of Independence promised, but a democratic country shouldn’t shy away from difficult truths, even ugly ones.
Step one of being a democracy is hearing what our fellow citizens are telling us. Step two is doing something about it, or at least trying to understand what we can do, because there is a lot to do.
“Just because you spoke Arabic, they’re all staring at you. If you go out, for example, wearing a hijab, you immediately become something else. You leave your town, and three or four kilometers later, you become a total stranger. Being a stranger in your own country is a very difficult thing.”
The spectrum of identity after October 7
The Oct. 7 attacks shook this spectrum of identity again.
Every single Israeli citizen, no matter their background, was jolted by Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7. For some, the spectrum disappeared entirely. If they didn’t feel Israeli before, they were absolutely Israeli now.
The popular streamer Nas Daily released a statement on social media rebranding himself not as a Palestinian-Israeli, but as an Israeli Palestinian, with his Israeli identity coming first and foremost. He wasn’t the only one.
Abu Ahmed disagreed, stressing that Hamas’ actions don’t represent or diminish his Palestinian identity.
“People tried to distance themselves very quickly from Hamas’ actions on October 7,” Darawshe added. “I heard many people saying, ‘This can’t be done in our name as Muslims. This can’t be done in our name as Palestinians. This is too savage for our Arab values and culture.’ And actually, there was a study by the Hebrew University that showed that 70% of Arab citizens say that their sense of Israelis has increased after October 7.”
Hamas didn’t discriminate between Arabs and Jews. They didn’t ask if their victims served in the military, or who they voted for, or what they believed. They didn’t care if you were just a kid, with your whole life ahead of you.
“Our relative, Awad, was a 23-year-old paramedic who worked at the Nova Party,” Darawshe said. “He refused to evacuate the scene after the attack. They told him, ‘It’s dangerous, you need to leave.’ And his choice was no. He said to them, ‘I speak Arabic. I think I’m going to manage.’ For us in the family, this was a very traumatic event, but also a source of pride in his actions. He chose to sacrifice himself for his humanity. For us, he died as a hero, fulfilling the values that we believe in.”
The continuation of the war, though, has made things more complicated. Many Israeli citizens, Arab and Jewish alike, have called for the war to end, and they’re paying for it, particularly Arab citizens.
When Darawshe’s daughter posted on social media about the devastation of Gaza, she got a surprise visit from the authorities and was put under house arrest for several days.
Both Jews and Arabs have used social media to inflame tensions, but few Jewish Israelis have faced the same repercussions as Arab citizens like Darawshe’s daughter. That’s because there is still a gulf between Arabs and Jews in Israel.
Learning to live together
Ordinary people like Darawshe and Abu Ahmed are working hard to bridge that gulf, but those bridges are delicate and frail. That work is essential, though, for all of Israel’s citizens and Israel’s future.
“I know that the Jews are the minority in the Middle East, and that’s why you need friends,” Darawshe stressed. “We are your potential best friend in the region. You need us to prove to the rest of the Arab world that Jews and Arabs can live together. If you can’t prove it on your home base on square one, why should someone in Saudi Arabia believe that you mean well? If you prove that Jews and Arabs can live together, this is Israel’s best export to the Arab world.”
What would an equal partnership look like, in which both Jewish and Arab citizens find themselves on equal footing in their shared country?
Abu Ahmed believes that progress will come only when Jews and Palestinians recognize that their fates are bound together. “There’s no Palestinian liberation without Israeli security, but at the same time, there’s no Israeli security without Palestinian liberation. These two things have to come together,” Abu Ahmed said.
It’s a major shift in mindset, and it’s going to take time and effort from everyone. Full acceptance and integration might not happen in our lifetimes, but as the rabbis tell us in Ethics of the Fathers, a Jewish book of wisdom compiled nearly 2,000 years ago: “It is not your duty to finish the work. But neither are you at liberty to neglect it.”
