The Myth of Coexistence in Israel
May 25, 2021
Credit...Illustration by The New York Times/Photographs via Getty
By [UWSL]Diana Buttu[/UWSL]
Ms. Buttu is a lawyer, former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and Palestinian citizen of Israel.
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Secretary of State Antony Blinken is visiting Israel and plans to visit the West Bank in an attempt to bolster Friday’s cease-fire, which halted Israel’s bombing campaign in
Gaza and Hamas’s rocket attacks on
Israel. On Tuesday, Mr. Blinken spoke in Jerusalem about his intention to “
rally international support” to aid Gaza and rebuild what was destroyed.
Despite the cease-fire, protests by Palestinians in Jerusalem and elsewhere have continued, the Israeli police have
arrested scores of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Israeli settlers have
persisted in their provocations.
The fault lines in Israeli society have never been clearer and Jerusalem remains the tinder box that could ignite another catastrophic fire unless the underlying causes — Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and its highly discriminatory policies — are dealt with.
Two weeks ago, I was in my family’s home in Haifa, a city in northern Israel where both Palestinians and Israelis live. I saw groups of young men carrying Israeli flags and tire irons march by, shouting, “
The people of Israel live” and “Death to Arabs!”
My father and I watched on
live television as a crowd of Jewish men in another mixed town, Lod, asked a man if he was an Arab, then pulled him out of his car and beat him. Some Palestinian citizens of Israel vented their frustration and anger against Jewish Israelis and symbols of the Jewish state that oppresses them by
burning down a synagogue in Lod.
Haifa, whose population is 85 percent Jewish and 15 percent Palestinian, has long been presented along with Lod and other mixed cities in Israel as a model of coexistence. Which is why, in the past few weeks, the question has repeatedly been asked: How could these cities suddenly be transformed into sites of mob violence?
The truth is that the Palestinian citizens of Israel and the Jewish majority of the country have never coexisted. We Palestinians living in Israel “sub-exist,” living under a system of discrimination and racism with laws that enshrine our second-class status and with policies that ensure we are never equals.
This is not by accident but by design. The violence against Palestinians in Israel, with the backing of the Israeli state, that we witnessed in the past few weeks was only to be expected.
Palestinian citizens make up about 20 percent of Israel’s population. We are those who survived the “nakba,” the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, when more than 75 percent of the Palestinian population was expelled from their homes to make way for Jewish immigrants during the founding of Israel.
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My father was among the 25 percent of the Palestinian population that remained. He was 9 years old when he was forced out of his home in Mujaydil, a Palestinian village near Nazareth. My father and his family moved to Nazareth. Because they fled to Nazareth, a mere 1.8 miles away, Israeli laws declared him and his family as “present absentees,” which meant that Israel could take away their property.
And so it did: Israel destroyed his house, his school and his entire community to make way for Jewish immigrants. In place of Mujaydil, Israel created a Jewish-only town called Migdal Haemek. He was rendered an unwanted non-Jew in the “Jewish state” of Israel, rather than an equal citizen in his homeland.
From 1948 until 1966, he and other Palestinians in Israel lived under military rule — much like that which exists in the West Bank today — having most of their land taken from them and required to get permits to travel from one place to the next. My father had to wait years before he could make the short journey to see what had become of his home and school.
In Israel, the nakba is routinely denied or dismissed, and state funding to organizations that commemorate it is prohibited. At school, history books teach us about Jewish attachment to our land, but remain silent on the nakba. It is as though we are interlopers in our homeland.