Israel's
Palestinians Speak Out
By
Nadim Rouhana
15 December,
2007
The
Nation
The Annapolis peace talks regard
me as an interloper in my own land. Israel's deputy prime minister,
Avigdor Lieberman, argues that I should "take [my] bundles and
get lost." Henry Kissinger thinks I ought to be summarily swapped
from inside Israel to the would-be Palestinian state.
I am a Palestinian
with Israeli citizenship--one of 1.4 million. I am also a social psychologist
trained and working in the United States. In late November, on behalf
of Mada al-Carmel, the Arab Center for Applied Social Research, I polled
Palestinian citizens of Israel regarding their reactions to the Annapolis
conference and their views about our future, and how they would be affected
by Middle East peace negotiations.
During Israel's
establishment, three-quarters of a million Palestinians were driven
from their homes or fled in fear. They remain refugees to this day,
scattered throughout the West Bank and Gaza, the Arab world and beyond.
We Palestinian citizens of Israel are among the minority who managed
to remain on our land. Like many Mexican-Americans, we didn't cross
the border, the border crossed us. We have been struggling ever since
against a system that subjects us to separate and unequal treatment
because we are Palestinian Arabs--Christian, Muslim and Druze--not Jewish.
More than twenty Israeli laws explicitly privilege Jews over non-Jews.
The Palestinian
Authority is under intense pressure to recognize Israel as a Jewish
state. This is not a matter of semantics. If Israel's demand is granted,
the inequality that we face as Palestinians--roughly 20 percent of Israel's
population--will become permanent.
The United
States, despite being settled by Christian Europeans fleeing religious
persecution, has struggled for decades to make clear that it is not
a "Christian nation." It is in a similar vein that Israel's
indigenous Palestinian population rejects the efforts of Israel and
the United States to seal our fate as a permanent underclass in our
own homeland.
We are referred
to by leading Israeli politicians as a "demographic problem."
In response, many in Israel, including the deputy prime minister, are
proposing land swaps: Palestinian land in the occupied territories with
Israeli settlers on it would fall under Israel's sovereignty, while
land in Israel with Palestinian citizens would fall under Palestinian
authority.
This may
seem like an even trade. But there is one problem: no one asked us what
we think of this solution. Imagine the hue and cry were a prominent
American politician to propose redrawing the map of the United States
so as to exclude as many Mexican-Americans as possible, for the explicit
purpose of preserving white political power. Such a demagogue would
rightly be denounced as a bigot. Yet this sort of hyper-segregation
and ethnic supremacy is precisely what Israeli and American officials
are considering for many Palestinian citizens of Israel -- and hoping
to coerce Palestinan leaders into accepting.
Looking across
the Green Line, we realize that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud
Abbas has no mandate to negotiate a deal that will affect our future.
We did not elect him. Why would we give up the rights we have battled
to secure in our homeland to live inside an embryonic Palestine that
we fear will be more like a bantustan than a sovereign state? Even if
we put aside our attachment to our homeland, Israel has crushed the
West Bank economy--to say nothing of Gaza's--and imprisoned its people
behind a barrier. There is little allure to life in such grim circumstances,
especially since there is the real prospect of further Israeli sanctions,
which could make a bad situation worse.
In the poll
I just conducted, nearly three-quarters of Israel's Palestinian citizens
rejected the idea of the Palestinian Authority making territorial concessions
that involve them, and 65.6 percent maintained that the PA also lacked
the mandate to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Nearly 80 percent
declared that it lacks the mandate to relinquish the right of Palestinian
refugees--affirmed in UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1948 and
reaffirmed many times--to return to their homes and properties inside
Israel.
Palestinians
inside Israel have developed a history and identity after nearly sixty
years of hard work and struggle. We are not simply pawns to be shuffled
to the other side of the board. We expect no more and no less than the
right to equality in the land of our ancestors. Israeli Jews have now
built a nation, and have the right to live here in peace. But Israel
cannot be both Jewish and democratic, nor can it find the security it
seeks by continuing to deny our rights, nor those of Palestinians under
occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, nor those of Palestinian
refugees. It is time for us to share this land in a true democracy,
one that honors and respects the rights of both peoples as equals.
Nadim
Rouhana is Henry Hart Rice Professor of Conflict Analysis at
George Mason University and heads the Haifa-based Mada al-Carmel, the
Arab Center for Applied Social Research.
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