JAFFA and JERUSALEM - There are more Arabs in Israel than there are in Beirut. One Israeli in five is an Arab. They aren’t Israeli Jews. Nor are they the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza. They were born and raised in Israel. They carry Israeli passports. They have full rights of citizenship. They vote in Israeli elections, and they field their own candidates in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. They don’t clamor for a state of their own, nor do most of them wish to join a Palestinian state once it is born. They hardly - ever - have anything to do with the terrorism campaigns waged by Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, Islamic Jihad, or Hamas. They are the lucky ones who were not driven out, who did not flee to the wretched refugee camps of Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria during the Naqba - the creation of Israel - the “catastrophe.” They are Israeli Arabs, the Palestinians of 1948. And they are almost completely invisible and forgotten outside of Israel.
I wish I could tell you that Israeli Jews and Arabs have created a groovy urban Middle East melting pot culture like the Lebanese have. But I’d be fantasizing or lying. It’s not that they hate each other. But they do seem to fear each other. The sense I got from talking to various people is that many Jews are afraid the Arabs might hurt them, and most Arabs do their best to keep their heads down and steer as wide of politics and the conflict as possible.
Nevertheless, above is a picture of modern Israel: a mosque minaret rises in front of a Jewish hotel on the Tel Aviv beach.
There is a huge difference between Media Israel and the Israel that actually exists in the world. Israeli Arabs are written straight out of the manichean ethnic clashistan narrative.
I went to the Arab city of Jaffa hoping to find a few who would be willing to sit down and talk.
I hope Michael is going to expand this great series into a book.
I wonder if the map-wiper-offers ever stop to think what would become of Israeli Arabs in a "Palestine from the Jordan to the Sea". Since Israeli Arabs volunteer for the IDF in sizable numbers, I guess they don't want to find out.
"... they are almost completely invisible and forgotten outside of Israel."
ALL Palestinians outside of Intifada-land are invisible. The definition of Palestinian might as well be "Arab who can be directly employed as a military or political weapon against Israel." (An Egyptian soldier in the 1960s might have said, "It don't matter where you come from, Jack, we're all Nasser's Palestinians now.")
Which is why today nobody talks about the Palestinian al-Naqba in Jordan in 1970, or in Kuwait in 1992.