Whenever Israel is accused of being undemocratic or being an Apartheid state, one of the main counter-arguments used by its advocates is that everyone in Israel is politically equal. They’ll often cite examples of “Arab” judges or members of Knesset to reinforce their point. We have specifically discussed the issue of Apartheid more thoroughly in [This article], and while they are connected, the goal of this article is to inspect the narrower claim that every Israeli citizen is equal.
While such a claim is very attractive to defenders of Israel, how realistic is it?
At first glance it does seem that all citizens in Israel enjoy the same rights, they can all vote, for example, among many other rights granted by citizenship. However, after a more thorough look it becomes clear that this talking point is only held together by the omission of one very important fact:
Israel distinguishes between citizenship and nationality.
What does this mean?
For example, you can be a citizen of Israel but be a Druze national, or a Jewish national. Your nationality is determined by your ethnicity and it cannot be changed or challenged. But how is this relevant to the original question being discussed?
It is relevant because many of the rights you are accorded in Israel stem from your nationality not your citizenship. Meaning an “Arab” Israeli citizen and a Jewish Israeli citizen, while both citizens, enjoy different rights and privileges determined by their “nationality”. Seeing how Israel is an ethnocracy it is not a mystery who this system privileges and who it discriminates against [You can read more about this here].
This is not merely discrimination in practice, but discrimination by law. Adalah have composed a database of discriminatory laws in Israel that disfavor non-Jewish Israelis. For example, the Law of Return and Absentees’ Property Law are but two examples of flagrant racism and discrimination in the Israeli legal system [You can read more about this here].
This is not some old, odd oversight, but a very deliberate part of the design of Israeli society. This is periodically reinforced whenever some Israelis petition the Supreme Court to recognize an Israeli nationality that does not discriminate based on ethnicity. A recent example of these petitions was in 2013, where the Supreme Court rejected such an idea on the grounds that it would “undermine Israel’s Jewishness“.
It says quite a lot about Israel that a unifying egalitarian identity not based around ethnicity would “pose a danger to Israel’s founding principle: to be a Jewish state for the Jewish people“, as the court ruled. The fact that such discrimination is seen as a cornerstone of Israeli society only reinforces its colonial ethnocratic nature, and undermines any claims to equality among citizens.
But this kind of discrimination is only the tip of the iceberg, as it only covers some aspects of de jure inequality among Israelis. Inspecting the de facto discrimination against non-Jewish Israelis shines an even brighter light on Israel’s ethnocratic hierarchy.
Almost half of all Palestinian citizens of Israel live under the poverty line, with a considerable percentage close to the poverty line. They also have a considerably lower life expectancy, a higher infant mortality rate, less access to education and resources as well as less municipality and government funding. Should you be interested in delving into some of the more detailed aspects of this discrimination, you can read Adalah’s The Inequality Report. It is an excellent overview of many issues facing Palestinians within the green line. Another report shining the light on Israel’s discrimination is “Discrimination against Palestinian Citizens in the Budget of Jerusalem Municipality and Government Planning: Objectives, Forms, Consequences” by the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute.
Additionally, you could read this report from the Adva center which illustrates quite clearly how this discrimination touches almost every aspect of life.
Furthermore, most land inside the green line is off limits to Palestinian citizens of Israel. A large percentage of land in Israel is under the control of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which has a:
“specific mandate to develop land for and lease land only to Jews. Thus the 13 percent of land in Israel owned by the JNF is by definition off-limits to Palestinian Arab citizens, and when the ILA tenders leases for land owned by the JNF, it does so only to Jews—either Israeli citizens or Jews from the Diaspora. This arrangement makes the state directly complicit in overt discrimination against Arab citizens in land allocation and use…”.
The JNF is not the only entity blocking Palestinian citizens of Israel from purchasing, leasing or renting land and property, but also the so-called regional and local councils, which account for the vast majority of land. These councils have the authority to block anyone from settling in these areas that do not seem like a “good fit” for the community there. For example, a religious community would not want to allow secular residents from moving in on the grounds that it would be against the spirit of their communities. In practice, this has translated into a virtual ban on non-Jewish Israelis moving into Jewish areas. In a Statement submitted by Habitat International Coalition and Adalah to the United Nations, it was estimated that almost 80% of the entire country is off limits to lease for Palestinian citizens of Israel. You can click here to read their full statement.
No matter how you look at it, Israeli society is a heavily segregated and hierarchical one. Whether through the legal system or just the attitudes of average Jewish Israelis, the ethnocratic nature of Israel and its obsession with ethnic gerrymandering always rises to the surface. Some would deny it, citing standards of living or some random “Arab” judge as a refutation of this point, but as discussed in [this article], none of these claims dispute the extreme inequality -by design- of Israeli society. This denial is not unique to Israelis, we saw similar sentiments among white Americans who denied the existence of white supremacy, even though they reaped its benefits either directly or indirectly.
Ultimately, the goal of this article is not to advocate for a “more just” or equal settler-colonial state. As Audre Lorde observed, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. A just society is the complete antithesis to an ethnocracy, which elevates one group of people over the rest by virtue of their blood. It falls on us, however, to advocate for decolonization, where justice is its cornerstone rather than ethnic supremacy.
Sound utopian?
Perhaps, but to quote Pliny the elder, how many things, too, are looked upon as quite impossible, until they have been actually effected?
- Adalah, The Inequality Report The Palestinian Arab Minority in Israel, March 2011.
- Yiftachel, Oren. Ethnocracy: Land and identity politics in Israel/Palestine. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
- White, Ben, and Haneen Zoabi. Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, discrimination and democracy. London: Pluto Press, 2012.
- Huneidi, Sahar S. Israel and its Palestinian citizens: Ethnic privileges in the Jewish State. Cambridge University Press, 2017.
- Khamaisi, Rasim. Discrimination against Palestinian Citizens in the Budget of Jerusalem Municipality and Government Planning: Objectives, Forms, Consequences. Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute, April 8th, 2020.