By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

All people born in British Mandatory Palestine between 1923 and 1948 (today's Israel) had "Palestine" stamped on their passports at the time. But when they were called Palestinians, the Arabs were offended. They complained: "We are not Palestinians, we are Arabs. The Palestinians are the Jews". Given the situation today, International institutions, including the EU and the United Nations, should demand that Israel uphold international law on minority rights. If Israel refuses to reverse its latest anti-Arab laws and continues turning a blind eye to Jewish Israeli extremism, these organizations should urge international, economic, and academic institutions connected to Israel to make their relationship with Israel contingent on the protection of Palestinian citizens. The Other War on Palestinians.

Since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, and the ensuing Israeli war on Gaza, the plight of Palestinians in the occupied territories has rightfully attracted the attention of observers in the Middle East and beyond. Lost in these discussions, however, is the fate of Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up about 16 percent of the total Palestinian population and around 20 percent of Israel’s population. They occupy a unique position in Israeli society. By their Israeli citizenship, they enjoy more rights than Palestinians in the occupied territories. But because of their Palestinian identity, they are confined to second-class citizenship by laws enshrining the country’s Jewish character and by discriminatory practices intended to prevent them from achieving equality with Jewish Israelis.

Palestinian citizens of Israel have always endured de jure and de facto discrimination, living in largely segregated communities with limited access to state resources. Their political parties have navigated the limits of participation in a system built on the ethnopolitical supremacy of Jewish Israelis, advocating in the Knesset for equality, civil rights, and greater government investment in Arab communities. But since the outbreak of the war in Gaza, their place in Israeli society has become increasingly untenable. As Jewish Israelis have lurched further to the right, their Palestinian fellow citizens have faced unprecedented levels of persecution and abuse from an Israeli government that includes overt Jewish supremacists. Jewish Israelis are increasingly rejecting the uneasy coexistence of pre–October 7 Israeli society, leading to more explicit calls to revoke the citizenship of Palestinian citizens and expel them from Israel. This turn has made it even more difficult for Palestinian political parties to operate within Israeli politics, where they already face significant constraints.

 

Same as it Was

In recent decades, despite the backdrop of increasing suppression by the Israeli government following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to government in 2009, Palestinian citizens of Israel had made meaningful if incomplete progress: reducing the earnings gap with Jewish Israelis, fighting to address the systemic underfunding of Arab communities, and becoming a powerful force in the Knesset following the creation of the Joint List, a bloc of the four main Arab parties, in 2015. But these successes were short-lived.

The Joint List attempted to integrate more deeply into Israeli politics and gain access to decision-making circles by supporting centrist Benny Gantz for prime minister and engaging in negotiations to support a government coalition opposing the right. However, its efforts were ultimately thwarted by the center-left camp in Israel after Gantz decided to form a coalition with Netanyahu rather than a government supported by the Arab parties. The dissolution of the Joint List in 2022 led to a more polarized Arab vote and an overall decline in Arab voter turnout and left the insecure position of Palestinian citizens of Israel unresolved.

The declaration of a state of war in Israel in October 2023 and the start of Israeli military operations in Gaza shortly after heralded a fundamental shift in this already precarious status. The Israeli government launched an unprecedented campaign of persecution and intimidation against Palestinian citizens of Israel, seen as a “fifth column” of internal enemies who threatened the safety of Jewish Israelis. Political figures, such as the far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Knesset members, and other public officials, issued calls for the surveillance and, in some cases, expulsion of Palestinian citizens. Kobi Shabtai, then Commissioner of the Israel Police, declared a total ban on anti-war protests in Arab towns and villages in Israel. The prohibition, which did not apply to Jewish Israelis, remained in effect until March 2024.

 

The days following October 7

The Israeli police also began monitoring the social media accounts of Palestinian citizens for expressions of sympathy for the suffering of Gazans, as well as what it deemed to be support for Hamas. The dragnet ensnared hundreds of Palestinian citizens, particularly activists and social media influencers targeted by the newly created Task Force for Monitoring Incitement Online, overseen by Ben-Gvir to track down critics of the official Israeli position on the war.

The days following October 7 saw a wave of arrests targeting dozens of Palestinian citizens of Israel, in some cases merely for posting images of children in Gaza or expressing their opposition to the war. The popular singer Dalal Abu Amneh was detained and accused of “incitement” for sharing a social media post that read, “There is no victor except God.” An Arab standup comedian was arrested for writing “The eye weeps for the residents of Gaza” in an Instagram post. These high-profile arrests have created an atmosphere of relative silence that has prevailed among Palestinian citizens in the 18 months since Israel’s ground invasion began. From October 2023 to May 2024, police indicted more than 150 Palestinian citizens for incitement to terror; no Jewish Israelis were indicted for incitement to racism or calling for genocide, both of which are considered crimes under Israeli law.

The Israeli government, with its coalition of hard-right members, including Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, seized the opportunity to advance its vision for an Israel free of Palestinians. It has used the pretext of the state of emergency to enact new anti-democratic and anti-Arab laws targeting the citizenship of Palestinian Israelis. A law passed in November 2023 grants Israeli authorities the power to revoke the citizenship of and deport relatives of those convicted of committing or supporting terrorism, charges that are almost exclusively applied to Palestinians. The government has also proposed a law that aims to impose further limits on the political representation of Palestinian citizens in the Knesset and on their participation in local elections. Several Jewish Israeli municipal leaders and the mayors of several cities have closed down or restricted access to construction sites to prevent Palestinian citizen workers from accessing them, effectively choosing not to build in their communities to not interact with Palestinian citizens of Israel.

 

No Room to Maneuver

Scarred by the shock of Hamas’s attack and seeking vengeance, sections of Israeli civil society have engaged in attacks on the civil liberties of Palestinian citizens. Israeli universities, which market themselves as liberal institutions dedicated to equality and diversity and in some cases have partnerships with Western universities, monitored their Palestinian students, suspending some from their courses and, in a few cases, even filing police complaints against them for expressing their opposition to the war or solidarity with Gazans under Israeli bombardment. Israeli high academic institutions have punished 160 Palestinian students for antiwar social media posts, including by suspending or expelling some, but have disciplined few, if any, Jewish Israeli students for racism against Palestinians.

The targeting of Palestinian citizens of Israel has not been limited to students: In March 2024, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem suspended the Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian after she accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, comments for which she was arrested and detained; the university then pressured her to resign. Violent racially motivated attacks on Palestinian citizens have also become more common, the most notable among them an incident in which a mob chanting “Death to Arabs!” trapped Arab students at the Netanya Academic College in their dormitories in October 2023.

Palestinian citizens’ leadership, accustomed to working within the confines of Israeli society, has been forced to confront unprecedented limits on political activity. The High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel, the public body that represents Palestinian citizens of Israel, voiced its opposition to the war by organizing several demonstrations against it, though they were only permitted many months after the war began and faced many limitations. The committee also provided support to civil society organizations in their efforts to combat persecution in the labor market, academia, and the broader public sphere.

Meanwhile, Arab parties and their representatives in the Knesset have resumed protests against the war within the halls of parliament and in the streets. But these measures pale in comparison to prewar activism. Israel’s criminalization of opposition to the war has created an atmosphere of widespread fear. Even as activism ramps back up among Palestinian citizens and their political leadership, the chilling effect of Israeli policies and violence has foreclosed the possibility of mass mobilization. Palestinian politics in Israel remains paralyzed, with no obvious domestic solution to the enduring discrimination or its latest intensification on the horizon.

 

Duty to Protect

The latest wave of persecution reflects the increase in anti-Palestinian attitudes among Jewish Israelis that tracks with the country’s rightward shift and long predates the war in Gaza. The impunity with which Israeli lawmakers and right-wing Jewish Israelis have targeted Palestinian citizens of Israel has been enabled by the mainstreaming of anti-Palestinian prejudice in Israeli society. According to an Israel Democracy Institute poll from 2022, 49 percent of Jewish Israelis believe that they should have more rights than non-Jewish citizens, and 79 percent of the total Jewish population in the country opposes including Arab parties in Israeli government coalitions and appointing Arab ministers to government positions. The war has only increased the prevalence of such attitudes.

Surveys conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute between September 2024 and February 2025 reveal that the majority of Jewish Israelis do not think the Israeli army is committing war crimes or acting immorally in Gaza, and 83 percent believe that its conduct during the war has been ethical. Over 73 percent of Jewish Israelis have said that they support Trump’s deportation plan for Palestinians from Gaza.

As a result, Palestinian citizens of Israel cannot rely on the Israeli government to protect them. They should, of course, continue to organize by building institutions, strengthening grassroots initiatives and community solidarity, and participating, to the extent possible, in Israeli civil society. They should also deepen their tactical and strategic partnerships with Jewish Israelis dedicated to fighting for democracy and against Jewish ethnic supremacy in Israel. But they need help from outside, as well.

Arab states better renew their engagement with Palestinian citizens of Israel after decades of isolation and disconnection by amplifying their voices in international forums, supporting their cultural and educational institutions, and, for those Arab countries with whom Israel has relations, demanding an end to state-sanctioned discrimination. And international institutions, including the EU and the United Nations, should demand that Israel uphold international law on minority rights. If Israel refuses to reverse its latest anti-Arab laws and continues turning a blind eye to Jewish Israeli extremism, these organizations should urge international, economic, and academic institutions connected to Israel to make their relationship with Israel contingent on the protection of Palestinian citizens.

Palestinian citizens of Israel better coordinate with one another and with supporters abroad. The best they can hope for in the near term, however, is to temporarily alleviate their suffering. They will not find lasting justice until Israel ends its occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, recognizes the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, and transforms from a hollow democracy built on Jewish supremacy to a genuine liberal democracy that serves all its citizens equally.

 

 

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