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Guest Essay
By Raghad Jaraisy and Ofer Dagan
Ms. Jaraisy and Mr. Dagan are co-executive administrators of Sikkuy-Aufoq, a nonprofit led by Palestinians and Jews from Israel that fights for an equivalent and shared society.
While the rest of the world watches the war in Gaza in horror, one network watches anxiously: the Palestinian citizens of Israel.
They are bound together by familial, linguistic, cultural and ancient ties with their fellow Palestinians in Gaza, as they live, run and read alongside Israeli Jews in the same country that has the misfortune of its people.
Palestinian citizens of Israel are no strangers to seeing their country of citizenship put pressure on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and their own history is filled with systematic discrimination and unpopularity of their collective identity. Israel’s war in reaction to the devastating Hamas attack of October 7 has led the Israeli government to accentuate those social, economic and legal tensions, hitting an already vulnerable people in a particularly thorny situation and threatening the fragile ties between Jewish citizens and Palestinians.
This is a mistake.
The majority of Israel’s two million Palestinian citizens, who make up about 20 percent of the national population, are committed to their Palestinian identity, language and culture. At the same time, they speak Hebrew and participate to varying degrees in Israeli politics. And sometimes they are familiar with Jewish and Israeli culture. They occupy an exclusive position, as they are consistent with perhaps the only organization that continues to forge bonds of friendship, collaboration, and solidarity – albeit inconsistent, partial, and partial – with Palestinians across the border and with Jews. citizens of Israel.
This sensitive position offers a rare commodity in the region: the ability to take a broader, more nuanced view and serve as a bridge to a lasting solution to the war and the confrontation as a whole. The ties between the two teams may simply be a long-term style in the region and a more powerful Palestinian voice in Israel could simply reinforce the call for a just and humane solution to the war by helping both peoples. Palestinian citizens of Israel deserve to be heard.
Many Palestinians in Israel were revulsed on Oct. 7 when Hamas attacked Israeli towns near the border and murdered and brutalized their residents. They also suffered their own casualties: seven of the other 240 people abducted and taken to Gaza were Arab-Palestinian citizens. More than a dozen Palestinian citizens have been killed in the Hamas attack or by rockets fired from Gaza since that day.
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