The nightmares of an Israeli citizen and a colonial subject

Photo of author

By Webdesk


When Zionist militias began attacking and ethnically cleansing Palestinian villages in 1948, the news reached my grandparents in the village of Reineh in Jalil, northern Palestine. Fearing Zionist violence, they packed their bags and along with their newborn baby (my uncle) and several members of their family fled to Lebanon, where they found refuge in a refugee camp in Baalbek.

Despite their misery and poverty, my grandparents remained in the camp, as news of the atrocities committed by the Zionists – what became known as the Nakba – kept coming.

A few months later, the holy month of Ramadan began and then came Eid, usually a time of happiness, when families and communities came together. But being away from their homeland, my grandparents felt a lot more pain and a sense of loss during the holidays.

The cries of women and children filled the camp and broke my grandfather’s heart, and that was when he was determined to return to Palestine. “We’re going home,” he declared. And they did, risking their lives.

My grandparents were among the few lucky Palestinians who managed to return. They were also lucky that their village and their house were still intact. But in their homeland, a new reality awaited them. Their village fell within the borders of the newly established Israeli state and they, the country’s natives, became “infiltrators” and were therefore deportable under Israeli law.

Now their struggle was to stay in their homeland.

The Israeli army regularly raided their home looking for my grandfather. Each time they found him, they drove him to the outskirts of Jenin, which was under Jordanian control at the time, and each time he returned to this village and his family.

Soon my grandparents realized that in order to stay in Palestine, they had to get permanent or semi-permanent residency from Israel – the state that occupied their land.

They despised it for what it did to them and their people, but they had to get these papers. It was the only way to survive, to be in Palestine; it was an act of sumud (fortitude).

As a result, all of their children and grandchildren, myself included, would eventually become Israeli citizens—part of the so-called ’48 Palestinian community.

Decades later, under different circumstances, I would be terrified of losing my Israeli citizenship. In recent years, successive Israeli governments have indicated that they are looking for ways to denaturalize Palestinians, deeming us a “demographic threat”.

This has fed my anxiety more and more. Several months ago I started having a recurring dream, a nightmare to be exact, in which I was stripped of my Israeli citizenship.

In one version of the dream, the Israeli authorities had made the citizenship of ’48 Palestinians resemble the permanent residence they have granted to the Palestinian Jerusalemites since the 1967 occupation of the city. centuries – can prove that the city is their “center of life”.

Considering that I have been living outside Israel for almost 15 years now, in my dream I could no longer claim my residence permit and was stripped of my citizenship by the authorities. This meant that I was permanently barred from entering or living in my homeland, unable to visit or return, which is the fate of many Palestinian Jerusalemites and Palestinian refugees.

I woke up in a panic from this nightmare with a pounding heart, sweating and breathing heavily. To calm down, I had to remind myself that this hadn’t happened yet.

My attachment to my Israeli citizenship is not a choice but a necessity. I hate that I have to keep this citizenship so that my children and I can continue to visit our home country and retain the opportunity to live there. This is the citizenship of a state that colonizes, occupies and expropriates us, and yet I must fight to keep it – just as my grandparents fought to acquire it.

My nightmares, the deep-seated fear, are not just paranoia. Israeli citizenship for Palestinians is fragile and conditional. With Israel now in power as the most far-right government in its history, Israeli ministers and lawmakers are not only publicly calling for a second Nakba, but are also actively seeking ways to expand their ability to strip Palestinians of their citizenship, as a means of eliminating the Palestinian presence in Palestine.

From day one, 75 years ago, Israel has struggled with the issue of Palestinians remaining in Palestine. David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, objected to a proposed citizenship law, arguing that it would have led to the naturalization of the remaining Palestinians. Instead, he wanted to keep them under resident status because it would have been easier to evict residents than citizens.

The citizenship law, he told his cabinet ministers, can wait. “If you have a country in a stable state, then the issue of citizenship is simple. But here you are asking to make decisions about things we don’t want to finalize… We are in an unstable and changing situation, so why put ourselves in trouble by solving this issue? I don’t understand the urgency.”

Despite Ben Gurion’s position, Israel enacted a citizenship law in 1952 that led to the naturalization of the remaining Palestinians. However, this citizenship did not give them the full rights that Jewish Israelis enjoyed. It was a racialized, inferior citizenship — one that did not allow many of the Palestinians who received it to return to their villages, homes and lands that Zionist forces had robbed them of.

More than seven decades later, Israel is taking active steps to undermine the already crippled citizenship of Palestinians and make them more vulnerable to denaturalization. Israel enjoys total impunity for its crimes on the international arena and knows it can continue to dilute what little protection its citizenship affords Palestinians.

It is now gradually advancing the Jerusalem model to apply to ’48 Palestinians, which is remarkably similar to Ben Gurion’s original plan.

Between 1967 and 2016, Israel revoked the residence of 14,595 residents of Jerusalem. The aim is to make the Palestinians’ 1948 citizenship more easily revocable as well.

The process started with the Palestinian Bedouins. In 2010, the Ministry of the Interior began a review of the Bedouin’s citizenship status, concluding that thousands of them had been “erroneously” registered as citizens under the 1952 Citizenship Act. Hundreds have so far officially lost their citizenship lost.

Subsequently, Israeli authorities began pushing for a legal framework that would allow for denaturalization based on perceived “infidelity”.

In July 2022, in the case of Alaa Zayoud, a Palestinian citizen who allegedly drove his car into Israeli soldiers, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that a “breach of loyalty” is sufficient grounds for denaturalization, even if it would render the person stateless. of this action.

The ruling, which is in direct violation of international law, affects both ’48 Palestinians and Palestinian Jerusalemites. It means Israel can prosecute on trumped-up charges and strip Palestinians of their legal status, rendering them statusless and stateless.

In the past two years alone, hundreds of Palestinians, who are Israeli residents or citizens, have been indicted on terrorism charges. Following the events of May 2021 – known as the Unity Intifada – nearly 200 Palestinians were charged with terrorist offenses simply for defending their homes, communities and holy sites against state and settler violence. They are now in danger of losing their status.

In February 2023, Israel took another step in strengthening the possibility of denaturalization by passing a law legalizing the revocation of the residence permit or citizenship of Palestinians imprisoned on terror charges who receive financial assistance from the Palestinian Authority (PA). The PA financially supports the families of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons or those killed or seriously injured by Israeli forces.

The law, together with the July 2022 Supreme Court ruling, opens the door for the mass expulsion of Palestinians. That is, a colonial apartheid state of settlers passes and enforces laws that allow for the deportation of the indigenous population, which is a violation of international law.

As we mark 75 years after the Nakba, millions of Palestinian refugees continue to be denied their right of return, while ’48 Palestinians continue to experience the violence of relying on their citizenship to remain in Palestine.

Our citizenship allows us, for now and for the most part, to remain in our homeland, but we are also trapped by its paradox. Although Israeli citizenship is part of our colonization, we are bound by it and forced to fight for it.

Our existence requires mastering this paradox, to be Israeli citizens as well as colonial subjects. But at the same time, our presence also undermines the Israeli narrative that seeks to erase the Palestinians and the history of Palestine and is yet another act of resistance to Israeli apartheid and colonization.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial view of Al Jazeera.



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