Palestinians in Israel: Integration, Autonomy or Secession
Dr. Said Zeedani

As is commonly known, the State of Israel is both a democratic state and a Jewish state, and has been since its establishment in May 1948. It is a Jewish state in the sense that it is for the Jewish people wherever they reside, whether inside Israel or in the Jewish Diaspora. The Jews inside Israel are ‘actual’ citizens of the state, while the Jews outside Israel are ‘potential’ citizens. The Israeli Law of Return is designed and intended to bridge this gap between potentiality and actuality. Needless to say, the Law of Return has been one of the defining features of the state of Israel from the very onset, and applies only to Jews.

Israel is also a Jewish state in the sense that it is committed to Jewish/Zionist values, aspirations, projects and interests; in that it gives priority to Jews over non-Jewish citizens of the state; and finally in that it excludes non-Jews from obtaining equal citizenship and from taking part in major momentous decisions that affect the nature, the future, or the order of priorities of the state.

The state of Israel privileges Jews regardless of their ideological orientation (whether religious or secular, Zionist or non-Zionist), and privileges those Jews who ideologically oppose its existence.

As a democracy, Israel is committed to treating all its citizens (whether Jews or non-Jews) equally, with equal consideration and respect. This mandate conflicts with its imperatives as a Jewish state, however, and gives rise to competing and conflicting commitments in its behavior. The practices and policies of the successive Israeli governments reflect and express these conflicting commitments. It is no accident, then, that the Palestinian citizens of Israel have been, and still are, the victims of racial discrimination for over 50 years. They have been, and still are, condemned to the inferior status of semi-citizens. That is to say, they are more than residents (or metics, in the parlance of ancient Athens) but less than equal citizens. The basic democratic principle of single and equal citizenship does not apply to Jews and non-Jews alike. This denial of equal membership in the political community is responsible for the train of abuses that pervade all spheres of allocating and redistributing socially meaningful goods (security, wealth, office, honor, grace, and political power).

Israel is a democratic state that does not even pretend or claim to be neutral toward its citizens. It is a democratic state dedicated to the Zionist idea and project, the realization of which have been at the expense if not the ruin of the Palestinians, including Israeli-Palestinians. Pervasive discrimination against the Palestinians in Israel is the necessary by-product of the marriage between Zionism/ Judaism and the idea of democracy in the state of Israel. From the perspective of the Palestinians in Israel the state is more an ethnic than a liberal democracy, more a national than a procedural republic, and more a purposive than a neutral state. The basic structures of the state manifest this bias without ambiguity or equivocation.

Israeli-Palestinians are those Palestinians who remained within the borders of Israel, and hence under Israeli sovereignty, following the tragic events known as the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948. Immediately following this war Israeli Palestinians numbered approximately 150,000; today they exceed one million and constitute approximately 18 percent of the population of the state, according to the most recent official Israeli statistics. About two-thirds of them reside in scores of townships and villages in the Galilee where they still constitute a numerical majority, despite intensive efforts by successive Israeli governments since the late 1950s to ‘redeem’ the land and ‘Judaize the Galilee'.

The remaining one-third reside in the ‘Triangle’, i.e. Arab towns and villages around and between Um Al-Fahm, Taibeh and Baqa Al-Gharbiyyeh where the Arab population numbers around 150,000, the Negev (with less than 120,000 Arab inhabitants), and the mixed cities such as Haifa where some 100,000 reside. Nearly 75 percent of Israeli-Palestinians are Sunni Moslems, more than 15 percent are Christians, and less than 10 percent are Druze. More than 15 percent of the Palestinians in Israel are so-called ‘internal refugees’, i.e. people originating from villages that were demolished in 1948, whose lands were confiscated, and who were labeled ‘present absentees'. Until this day, these displaced persons have yet to be compensated for the loss of their homes and property, or for any other form of related suffering.

Israeli-Palestinians are an inseparable part of the Palestinian people. Additionally, they are an indigenous and distinct national minority in Israel. Instead of trying to come to terms with the far-reaching implications of these two ‘brute facts’, Israeli authorities have engaged themselves, tenaciously and consistently, in a two-fold project of denying the above statements. The Israeli policies of control and containment, of divide and rule, of sticks and carrots and of treating Palestinians as religious sects or confessions rather than as a distinct national minority are all part of this denial. Whether and to what extent these policies have succeeded or failed is a worthy topic for a separate discussion. Success or failure aside, Israeli-Palestinians have not advocated or struggled for secession from the state of Israel. Secession, therefore, is not on the political agenda of Palestinians in Israel, and never has been.

The struggle of Palestinians inside Israel has been, and still is, for just peace and for full equality. Just peace entails peace between Israel and the Palestinians on the one hand, and between Israel and its Arab neighbors on the other. Full equality must allow Israeli-Palestinians to overcome their political marginalization and to escape discrimination, deprivation and neglect. It is on the struggle for equality that the following concluding remarks will focus.

Equality, as I conceive of it, entails overcoming the discriminatory distribution and redistribution of economic and social goods, and sharing in political power at the level of central government, in addition to other lower power centers. These two conditions are not likely to be adequately met unless Israel becomes a genuine liberal democracy; a state for all its citizens regardless of race, sex, color or religion.

Even if Israel becomes a genuine liberal democracy, however, the problem of the Palestinian national minority will not evaporate, as is evidenced by the predicament of indigenous national/ethnic minorities in such liberal democratic countries as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the USA. Ethnic minorities, especially indigenous ones, resist assimilation. Ethnic majorities, in contrast, tend to utilize their numerical weight or power to their advantage. Hence, for the idea of full equality to be realized, reallocation of certain powers within the state is also required, and some form of autonomy or self-government is called for.

Israeli Palestinians have been struggling for more ‘integration’ with the manifest and clear emphasis on individual liberal rights and entitlements, and for recognition by the state that they constitute a distinct national minority, with the resultant emphasis on group or collective rights.

It is my firm conviction that group or collective rights go beyond cultural rights, and include property rights and rights to internal self-government. In other words, the enjoyment of group rights by Palestinians in Israel requires more than cultural autonomy; it requires autonomy with a territorial dimension. The distinction between such jargon as 'institutional autonomy plus' and 'territorial autonomy minus' is immaterial.

To conclude, Palestinians in Israel are a distinct national minority, not a mere collection of sects or confessions. Their manifest struggle for more integration in the Israeli state and society complements, rather than contradicts, their lstruggle for some form of autonomy. In both cases, equality is the regulative idea and the desired and desirable end. In both cases, the challenges to Israeli democracy are enormous. In any case, however, neither assimilation nor violence nor secession is on the political agenda of Palestinians in Israel.