Guests in their own home: John McCarthy explores the alienation of Israel’s Arab population

The ‘unrecognised village’ of Amra in the Negev

Last week, we were privileged to bring you our Annual Lecture with journalist and author John McCarthy. Despite his experience of being kidnapped and held for five years by Lebanese militants in 1986, John has remained fascinated by the Middle East, so much so that he was inspired to write his critically acclaimed 2012 book ‘You Can’t Hide the Sun: A Journey to Israel and Palestine’ following a visit to the Holy Land. There, he saw first-hand the experience of a marginalised, yet significant, population living in a land they are unable to call their own. Here, he explores this reality.   

Israelis will be voting in March for their fourth General Election in two years. In the three previous recent polls, the vote of Israel’s Arab citizens has played an important role and will do so again this time. Their support is therefore being sought by incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his mainstream rivals, as well as by the smaller parties representing the country’s Arab communities. 

Despite having visited Israel/Palestine on many occasions in the 1990s and early 2000s, it wasn’t until making a TV film there in 2006 that I came to appreciate the size and significance of the Arab community in Israel. Arab Israelis or Palestinian Citizens of Israel, as many prefer to identify themselves, make up 20% of the population.   

Although I’d met and interviewed a number of Palestinians in Israel I simply hadn’t looked beyond the image of Israel as the Jewish state; the Palestinians, in my mind, were either in the West Bank, Gaza, or further afield.  

I realised I wasn’t alone in this misconception and I decided to research and write a book about the 1 in 5 Israelis who were not Jewish, but Arab. What had been their experience since the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948?   

It’s a complex story. While the Israeli Declaration of Independence proclaimed in May 1948 that all citizen of the new state would have full equality regardless of race or faith, the Arab Israelis have faced discrimination on many fronts.   

In 1948 they were a broken community; the vast majority of their fellow indigenous Arab population of what had just become Israel, were in exile following the war between the Jewish and Arab communities of old Palestine. The Arabs that remained, unlike their Jewish fellow citizens, were placed under martial law until 1966. And though they did have the right to vote, how they voted, was controlled by local military commanders, as was any work they hoped to undertake.   

Very few were allowed to return to their pre-48 homes and as part of a process of breaking the Palestinian Arabs’ sense of belonging and community, new laws were instigated to allow the state to appropriate most of their land and property. Some 400 Arab villages were destroyed.   

The Church at the demolished Palestinian villiage of Biram in Galilee

Official maps were changed, deleting old Arab place names or replacing them with ones that had been Hebraicized. Even the word Palestine was banned from public discourse – a highly educated TV producer colleague of mine, born and reared in a Christian village in the Galilee, told me she had no idea of Palestine, let alone that she was Palestinian until the mid-70s.   

Yet despite all this the Palestinian community in Israel did not disappear and after the military period very gradually found its feet again, rebuilding its culture and developing a political presence.   

There is a weird dichotomy in Israel; in towns like Haifa one can sit at street cafes listening to people relaxing, some talking Hebrew, some Arabic. There are successful, liberated Palestinian citizens taking advantage of the opportunities open to them in a modern economy and democracy, to get a good education, set up a business get into politics and become a Member of the Knesset. Things can seem normal – as if the equality promised in the Declaration of Independence is a solid reality.  

But in many ways that is only a veneer; in fact, Palestinian Israelis have seen far less investment in their communities in terms of general infrastructure and services than have Jewish communities. And there is a disproportionate level of poverty among Arabs, along with the attendant problems of crime, drugs and violence.  

Poverty and lack of proper infrastructure are most obvious in the informal shanty towns, or "unrecognized villages," that are home to tens of thousands of the indigenous Bedouin inhabitants of the Negev desert in the south of Israel.   

The state has allocated vast land tracts almost exclusively to individual Jewish families, but only 11 Bedouin villages have been recognised as legal settlements in line with the state’s policy of concentrating as many as possible of the 200,000 Bedouin in the Negev in seven small state-built towns.   

While researching my book around 2008 I often heard a critical phrase about the state’s overall aim; “Maximum land with minimum Arabs”. Sadly, little seems to have changed. For the most part Jewish Israelis see their Palestinian fellow citizens as a concern – a potential enemy within.  

A Palestinian man in a Jerusalem cafe

And the promise of equality regardless of race or faith has been heavily qualified by the Nationality Bill of 2018. Formally the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, it defines Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and downgrades the status of Arabic from an official language to one with “special status”.  

Not surprisingly this has angered and distressed the Arab citizens in Israel. While some have felt cowed by the law, others are increasingly and assertively identifying as Palestinians in Israel. Observers argue that this runs parallel to an ongoing reframing of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a civil rights struggle.  

There are many examples of Jewish Israelis working alongside their Palestinian fellow citizens, striving for equal rights and an end to discrimination. And in these times of pandemic the contribution of Arabs working in the health and support services has been recognised and praised.   

But fear and uncertainty are still very much a part of the lives of Israel’s Palestinian citizens and whatever they might be promised by politicians eager for their support in the March elections, I fear that many will expect to gain very little and still feel themselves to be no more than ‘guests in their own home’.  

This blog is by author and journalist John McCarthy. You can purchase his book ‘You Can’t Hide the Sun: a journey through Israel and Palestine’ here.