Israel won't be democratic without equality for all citizens, including Palestinians - opinion

When I came on aliyah in 1978, I joined a program called Interns for Peace. The founder was the late Rabbi Bruce Cohen, who was in Israel in 1976 and witnessed the mass demonstrations on the first Land Day of Israeli Arabs (as they were called at the time) against land expropriation. At the end of that day, March 30, 1976, six young Israeli Arab citizens were killed by the Israel Police.

Rabbi Bruce had been a community organizer in Harlem in New York City and thought the Arab communities of Israel needed to learn about community organizing. He understood they could benefit from knowing how the Jewish majority of Israel viewed them by engaging in projects of cooperation between Jewish communities and their Arab neighbors.

I joined Interns for Peace in September 1978, spent six months on Kibbutz Barkai in a training program, and then moved to the Arab village of Kafr Kara, where I lived for two years from 1979-1981.

Menachem Begin was prime minister at the time. Reading Begin’s writings and listening to him speak, I understood that he believed in the values of democracy and its most basic principle of equality between all the citizens of Israel. I wrote a letter to Begin explaining who I was, that I was a new immigrant living in an Arab village in Israel, working on building understanding and coexistence. I told him I was part of a volunteer initiative and that I thought strengthening Israel’s democracy was the responsibility of the State of Israel and not volunteers from the United States.

I received a response and an invitation to come to Jerusalem to meet with Begin’s adviser on Arab affairs. Less than one year later, in 1981, I became Israel’s first civil servant responsible for improving relations between Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens. I worked in the Education Ministry in a high-level position under minister Zevulun Hammer from the National Religious Party.

One year later, I was a partner to the establishment of the ministry’s Department for Education for Democracy and Coexistence (that no longer exists) and then became the director of the Institute for Education for Jewish Arab Coexistence that was linked to the Prime Minister’s Office and the Education Ministry.

Working intensively in those years with many leaders from the Arab community, it became apparent that as long as Israel remains in conflict with the Palestinian people, and Israel’s Arab citizens, who are Palestinians by nationality, identify with the struggle for Palestinian freedom from Israel, Israel’s Palestinian citizens will always be suspect of being loyal to the enemy and not their state.

Despite the conflict, facts prove that the majority of Palestinian citizens are law abiding and have never done anything against the security of the State of Israel. But facts do not impact reality.

Particularly after October 7, any attempt of thinking of Israel as a liberal democracy with regard to the basic human and civil rights of its Palestinian citizens is simply false.

With the growing fear by Israel’s Jewish citizens of all Palestinians, the legitimation of extremist racist political parties and politicians by our prime minister, and control of the police and security services by right-wing extremist ministers, Israel’s democratic space has shrunken significantly – mostly for its Palestinian citizens, but also for Israeli Jews who support them and support ending Israel’s occupation-expansionist policies in the West Bank, and those who opposed the continuation of the war in Gaza.

People claim that Israel does not have laws that discriminate against its Palestinian citizens. But according to Adalah (The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel), there are over 65 Israeli laws on the books that discriminate directly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens of Israel (and in many cases also affect Palestinian residents of the occupied territories) on the basis of their national belonging. These laws are identified in Adalah’s Discriminatory Laws Database.

Palestinian citizens of Israel must increase their participation in the next elections. In the last elections, 52% of eligible Palestinian citizens of Israel voted, compared to 70% of Jewish voters. If Palestinian voter participation reaches 70%, they could gain about 17 seats in the Knesset. That is a game changer. There are also Jewish citizens voting for Arab parties, which would increase their gains by one or two more seats. Jewish-Arab partnership is necessary to change the ruling regime.

Is this frightening? To many Jewish voters, the answer is yes. But it should not be. What do the majority of Israel’s Palestinian citizens want? They want equality. They want Israel to make peace with the Palestinian people on the basis of two states for two peoples – meaning that Israel would continue to exist next to a Palestinian state. Israel’s Palestinian citizens are the biggest supporters of the two-state solution.

There is a large Jewish majority within the borders of the sovereign State of Israel. The Palestinian minority can enjoy full equal rights, including the right to teach their students about Palestinian history, which should be studied by Israel’s Jewish citizens as well. Just as all Palestinian citizens of Israel learn Hebrew from first grade, Israel’s Jewish students should learn Arabic.

Arabic should be once again made an official language of the State of Israel, and Israel’s Nation-State Law should redefine Israel as the democratic nation-state of the Jewish people and all its citizens. How can more than 20% of Israel’s citizens live in a state in which they are born and have been present since its founding without the state being their state as well?

Resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is in the interest of all Israel’s citizens and would remove claims of Palestinian citizens of Israel being suspect. Israel will never be a democracy unless it guarantees the full equality of all its citizens, and all citizens must be able to feel that Israel is their state.