When Ariel Sharon set foot on the Temple Mount in a provocative show of Israeli sovereignty over the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosques, he succeeded in erasing more than the hope of an imminent settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
He also erased the Green Line.
If and when peace does come, it will establish internationally recognized borders defining the boundaries of the Israeli and Palestinian states. Since Israel and the surrounding Arab nations signed an armistice in 1949, there have been no official borders between the Jewish state and the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, just markings on maps known as the Green Line.
After Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan, and the Gaza Strip from Egypt in 1967, what lay on the other side of the Green Line under Israeli occupation became known to Israelis as “the territories.”
The Green Line did more than separate Israeli Jews from Palestinian Arabs, though. It also served, effectively, as a way for Israeli Jews to sharpen the distinction they made between the Palestinian Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza, and the Palestinian Arabs living as citizens in Israel.
But a new chapter was written in the book of modern Palestinian history in the days of violence that followed Sharon’s September foray. For the first time since Israel’s establishment in 1948, Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line took to the streets in pitched battles with Israeli Jews.
No longer did the Green Line serve to divide Jenin from Jaffa, Nablus from Nazareth. The holy Al-Aqsa Mosque became the center point of each and every axis, and civil war came into Israel itself.
The natural connection between Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip–who together number 4 million of the 9 million Jews and Arabs living in all three areas–had become seamless.
Since 1948 the Jewish Israeli academic community, press and public have referred to the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel as “Israeli Arabs.”
The term has been successfully exported; international press reports of the current violence in the Holy Land have been replete with references to “Israeli Arabs” in describing the spillover of clashes from the West Bank and Gaza into Arab villages and towns in Israel proper.
But the term “Israeli Arabs,” like the Green Line itself, is little more than a construct. As an occupying power, Israel has found it convenient and comforting to differentiate between the Palestinians in “the territories,” and those 1.2 million Palestinians living in the sovereign Israeli state–20 percent of its population–who have voting rights, carry Israeli identity cards and passports. To Israeli Jews, “Israeli Arabs” have been ha Aravim shelanu– “our Arabs”–and as such, seen as distinct from the throwers of stones and Molotov cocktails beyond the Green Line.
This fiction has been maintained in large part because, as a community, Palestinian Arabs in Israel, about 75 percent of whom live in all-Arab villages and towns, have not chosen the path of irredentist violence.
Muslims, Christians and Druze, they have focused their struggle on attaining equal civil rights in a peaceful manner, taking seriously the Israeli promise of democracy–despite the paradox of their citizenship in a country whose defining premise is that it is the homeland for all Jews.
After 1966, when Israel ended 18 years of martial law it had imposed on the Arab minority, the community began to organize and publish Arabic-language newspapers. It sent its sons and daughters to universities in Israel and abroad, and it began to elect a new generation of non-clan-based leaders to Arab local councils and to the Knesset–all the while continuing to speak Palestinian Arabic, cook the Palestinian chicken-and-rice maqloubah and dance the Palestinian debkah.
But as the Arab community steadily grew, its share of the Israeli pie did not. Since 1948, its population has increased 7 1/2 times. But over the same period, the state has confiscated at least a half-million acres of privately owned Arab land–mostly to accommodate the influx of Jewish immigrants–effectively ghettoizing most Arab towns and villages and causing a severe housing crisis.
The community also has endured discrimination and second-class status in many other areas of civil life, including lack of employment opportunities for Arab university graduates and inadequate public schools and local infrastructures.
The discrimination extends to political power. Not a single Israeli government coalition has invited Arab parties to participate, and no Arab Knesset member has ever been appointed a minister–despite the fact that Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak, the most peace-minded of Israel’s recent leaders, have owed their first-round election victories to the Arab vote.
Arab citizens also have experienced personal humiliation, from being turned away from “Jewish-only” public swimming pools, to being systematically profiled and interrogated at Ben Gurion Airport, to being summoned to local police stations for further interrogation upon returning from abroad.
In spite of this, however, incidents of politically motivated physical violence by Arabs against Jews in Israel have been virtually nonexistent since 1948. This is most likely because the Palestinians who remained in what became Israel did not want to be expelled and turned into refugees, as had happened to most of their brothers, aunts and cousins who ended up in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.
The Jewish majority interpreted this quiescent behavior as signs of Arab citizens’ loyalty to the state and acceptance of Israeli identity.
But in 1976 the Arab community organized a general strike known as Land Day to protest the Israeli government’s declared plan to continue confiscating Arab land. Israeli military forces killed six unarmed Arab protesters in clashes in three Galilee villages on March 30 of that year.
Land Day, however, was the exception during a half-century of peaceful, albeit uneasy, coexistence between “Israeli Arabs” and Jews. Even during the intifada from 1987 to 1993, Palestinian Arab citizens in Israel did not join in the violence. They expressed their solidarity with West Bank and Gaza Palestinians through peaceful demonstrations and charity drives, sending food and medicine over the Green Line.
But in recent weeks their anger and sense of Palestine identity proved incendiary. Fifty years of discrimination became fused with the image of Sharon on the Temple Mount, or Haram ash Sharif, and the grim reality of scores of Palestinians killed by Israeli firepower.
Palestinians in Israel went on a rampage against symbols of the state, setting fire to national forests and to banks, police stations and post offices inside their towns and villages.
Arab teens in Galilee wrapped their heads and faces in checkered keffiyeh scarves to attend the funeral of 17-year-old Asil Asli of Arrabe, a member of a Jewish-Arab coexistence group who was killed by Israeli forces.
The bearing and chants of these youths were indistinguishable from those of their counterparts in Gaza who attended the funeral of Mohammed Aldura, the 12-year-old Palestinian boy whose death the world saw on television after his father was unable to shield him from a hail of Israeli bullets.
Ten days into the violence, a Jewish mob from Upper Nazareth–having surrounded the home of an Arab Knesset member and chanted “Death to Arabs!”–descended on Nazareth. With Israeli police on the scene, one Arab resident was shot to death and another was mortally wounded.
Inside the fading Green Line and beyond it, Palestinians took to the streets in spontaneous demonstrations whose magnitude and intensity were beyond the control of their leaders. Armed confrontations spread from Gaza City up the Mediterranean coast to the town of Acre, where Jews and Arabs have lived together without violence since before 1948.
About 4 miles east of Acre on the road to Safed lies the Ahihud junction. But Palestinians in Galilee often refer to it as “Birweh,” because a village of the same name used to be there. Birweh was one of the 418 Palestinian villages that Israel depopulated and then destroyed in the wake of its 1948 independence, thus sealing the fate of their occupants, consigned to become refugees.
Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was born in Birweh. He was among the first generation of Palestinian resistance poets who wrote defiantly about their existence in the new Jewish state, putting lyric to what they viewed as life under Israeli occupation.
You are my country, Darwish wrote in his poem, “Psalm 9.” A stone is not what I am/therefore I do not like to face the sky/nor do I lie level with the ground–but I am a stranger, always a stranger.
In the wake of the recent intercommunal clashes, Jewish-Arab relations in Israel have suffered a setback whose magnitude may remain unknown for some time to come.
The Barak government has promised a five-year infusion of $1 billion to alleviate the development ills of Arab towns and villages. And there is talk of easing state land policy to enable Arab citizens to buy land for housing at reduced rates.
In the meantime, though, Darwish’s words still ring true: Jews and Palestinians inside Israel have faced off against each other as armed strangers, with more than a dozen Arab citizens dead. The fiction of “Israeli Arabs” appears to lie spent in blood-spattered streets and alleyways throughout the country, like so many bullet casings.
The Green Line, it seems, has all but vanished in the long shadow of Al-Aqsa.
