A “Jewish State” or a “State for All Its Citizens?”: Palestinian Demands for Redefining the Boundaries of the Israeli National Identity and the Jewish Response

Öz

Abstract: The “Basic Law of Human Dignity and Liberty,” which functions as the country’s de facto constitution, has defined Israel as a “Jewish state,” thus putting the equal rights of all non-Jewish citizens within the Israeli polity into question. As a consequence of the Jewish nature of the state, the Jews have been elevated, whether they were citizens or not, into a privileged position over others and governments gave institutional and legal preference to the Jewish majority particularly in the realms of immigration laws, land allocation, and military service. By the 1990s, however, Israel’s citizens of Palestinian descent seemed to find a balance between their Palestinian and Israeli identities and this tendency was accompanied by a growing emphasis on their status as a “national minority in its historical homeland” and a political struggle for collective rights. Challenging the Jewish hegemony, they have persistently claimed to transform the Jewish state into a “state for all its citizens,” and, hence, the recognition of their status as a national minority entitled to collective rights, including the right to self-government and equal representation in the governing bodies. What has been the Israeli state response to these demands? Using qualitative data derived from several in-depth interviews with the members of the Israeli political elite conducted in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa between December 2018 and January 2020, this study argued that Israeli policy makers continued to pursue a “security-oriented” policy towards Israeli Palestinians due to their trans-border ethnic relations. As a consequence, the Palestinian demand for establishing a “state for all its citizens,” which challenged the Jewish nature of the state, has been seen as a denial of Israel’s right to exist, or to put in discussion the Jews’ right to statehood.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• Ethnic Minorities
• National Identity
• Exclusion
• Palestinian Citizens
• Israel

Kaynakça

1. U. Avnery, "A Binational State? God Forbid!", Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 28, no. 4 (1999), pp. 55-60
2. S. Boulos, "Policing the Palestinian National Minority in Israel: An International Human Rights Perspective", Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, Vol. 19, no. 2 (2020), pp. 151-74
3. A. Y. Degani, "The Decline and Fall of the Israeli Military Government, 1948–1966: A Case of Settler-Colonial Consolidation?", Settler Colonial Studies, Vol. 5, no. 1 (2015), pp. 84-99
4. H. Frisch, Israel's Security and Its Arab Citizens (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011)
5. M. Golani, The End of the British Mandate for Palestine, 1948: Diary of Sir Henry Gurney (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
6. I. N. Grigoriadis and Z. A. Elitsoy, "Inside Outsiders: Comparing State Policies Towards Citizens of Palestinian and Kurdish Descent in Israel and Turkey", Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies (2021)
7. G. Hitman, Israel and Its Arab Minority, 1948-2008: Dialogue, Protest, Violence (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2016)
8. ———, "Israel’s Policy Towards Its Arab Minority, 1990–2010", Israel Affairs, Vol. 25, no. 1 (2019), pp. 149-64

9. A. Jamal, "In the Shadow of the 1967 War: Israel and the Palestinians", British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 44, no. 4 (2017), pp. 529-44
10. ———, "Strategies of Minority Struggle for Equality in Ethnic States: Arab Politics in Israel", Citizenship Studies, Vol. 11, no. 3 (2007), pp. 263-82
11. B. Kimmerling, Clash of Identities: Explorations in Israeli and Palestinian Societies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008)
12. I. Lustick, Arabs in the Jewish State: Israel's Control of a National Minority (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980)
13. M. Naor, Social Mobilization in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948: On the Israeli Home Front (London ; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013)
14. R. Olesker, "National Identity and Securitization in Israel", Ethnicities, Vol. 14, no. 3 (2014), pp. 371-91
15. I. Peleg, "Jewish-Palestinian Relations in Israel: From Hegemony to Equality?", International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 17, no. 3 (2004), pp. 415-37
16. Y. Reiter, National Minority, Regional Majority: Palestinian Arabs Versus Jews in Israel, 1st ed. (Syracuse, NY: SyracuseUniversity Press, 2009)
17. E. Rekhess, "The Arab Minority in Israel: Reconsidering the '1948 Paradigm'", Israel Studies, Vol. 19, no. 2 (2014), pp. 187-217
18. ———, "The Evolvement of an Arab-Palestinian National Minority in Israel", Israel Studies, Vol. 12, no. 3 (2007), pp. 1-28
19. ———, "In the Shadow of National Conflict: Inter-Group Attitudes and Images of Arab and Jews in Israel", Triquarterly, Vol. 131 (2008), pp. 206-36
20. P. Rivlin, The Israeli Economy from the Foundation of the State through the 21st Century (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011)
21. N. Rouhana, "The Political Transformation of the Palestinians in Israel: From Acquiescence to Challenge", Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 18, no. 3 (1989), pp. 38-59
22. A. Rubin, "The Palestinian Minority in the State of Israel: Challenging Jewish Hegemony in Difficult Times" in Paul S. Rowe, ed., Routledge Handbook of Minorities in the Middle East (London, New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 289, 90
23. A. H. Sa'di, "Palestinian Social Movement and Protest within the Green Line" in Nadim N. Rouhana and Sahar Huneidi, eds., Israel and Its Palestinian Citizens: Ethnic Privileges in the Jewish State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 371-79
24. T. Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the Mandate, 1st American ed. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000)
25. A. Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)
26. N. Shoughry, "Israeli-Arab" Political Mobilization: Between Acquiescence, Participation, and Resistance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
27. S. Smooha, Arabs and Jews in Israel (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989)
28. ———, Index of Arab-Jewish Relations in Israel 2003-2009 (Haifa: University of Haifa, The Jewish-Arab Center, 2010)
29. ———, "The Israeli Palestinian-Arab Vision of Transforming Israel into a Binational Democracy", Constellations, Vol. 16, no. 509-522 (2009)
30. N. Sultany, Citizens without Citizenship: Mada's First Annual Political Monitoring Report: Israel and the Palestinian Minority, 2000-2002 (Haifa: Mada, Arab Center for Applied Social Research, 2003)