From the ‘Unity Uprising’ to silence amid genocide: the political domestication of Palestinian citizens of Israel

The haunting reality of bloodshed in Gaza has outraged the world, but a glaring question persists: Why have Palestinian citizens of Israel (hereafter “‘48 Palestinians”) remained conspicuously silent during this genocidal war? The answer lies not only in Israel’s forceful intimidation tactics but also in the historical trajectory of Palestinian political thought and practice.

The current genocide in Gaza, begun in the wake of the resistance movement’s attack against the Israeli settlements in “the Gaza envelope” on October 7, has been a shock to the Palestinian Arab political movement inside Israel. Yet this shock, instead of being translated into action, has resulted more or less in a resounding silence even months into the genocide. This reflects a political deterioration that Palestinian citizens of Israel have experienced over the decades.

How did this deterioration take place? One of the answers relates to the political agenda, perspective, and vision among ‘48 Palestinians that limits itself to Israeli standards and boundaries. In this scenario, ‘48 Palestinians conceive of themselves as part of a political “opposition” working within the framework of the state. This “opposition” strategy has put ‘48 Palestinians in the position of constantly reacting to Israeli policies — Israel introduces a racist law, and the “opposition” strategy requires that protest is mobilized solely for the overturning of that particular law, but never challenging the “default” status quo of a racist and oppressive settler colonial state.

One of the most crucial milestones in this story is the popular uprising in May 2021, less than three years ago, when this “opposition” strategy was abandoned. The “Unity Intifada” took place in all of historic Palestine and was joined prominently and unexpectedly by ‘48 Palestinians, especially the youth, seemingly after decades of political domestication. The failure of that moment to develop a political movement helps explain ‘48 Palestinians’ silence today. This is especially tragic because the genocide unfolding in Gaza is a war on Palestinian existence everywhere, whether ‘48 Palestinian leadership acknowledges it or not.

Historical evolution of the ‘political vision’ of ‘48 Palestinians

Israel has been intimidated by Palestinians’ existence in their homeland since the state’s birth in May 1948. Zionist militias created Israel through the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the native population in 1948 while imposing military rule on the Palestinians who remained within the border of what came to be called “Israel.” 

The imposition of military rule was pushed for several reasons. In the context of our discussion, Israel aimed to fabricate a new identity — that of the “Arab Israeli.” This reformulated identity entailed the breakdown of Palestinian peasant society and the subordination of their livelihoods to the state. Additionally, Israel aimed to reinvent the political leadership and allegiances of those Palestinians, which became bound within the state’s lines and ethos. This process is explained at length in Ahmad Sa’di’s seminal work, characterizing it as a phenomenon of “thorough surveillance.”

One of the colonial goals of military rule between 1948 and 1966 was what was called the “assimilation strategy” of Palestinians, linking them materially and symbolically with the State of Israel by creating a special narrative for them that was separate from the rest of the Palestinian people. This narrative involved a separate past, present, and future, which prompted them to establish a political program and political vision. In that period, therefore, the only political vision allowed was the one driven by the Israeli Communist Party (ICP). 

To be sure, this wasn’t a pleasure for the Zionists, who preferred to undermine the presence of communists as an opposing political power. But since the communist discourse was carefully catered to fit within the Zionist parameters of recognizing the Jewish homeland and their political right to establish a state in Palestine, Communists were able to enter Israeli political life. 

The political program of the ICP focused on two main pillars.

The first pillar of the party program was the “struggle for equality” as a national minority within Israel. In the first two decades of living under military rule, the primary political slogan of the party called for the “suspension of the national oppressive policy” of the state, limiting its demands to changes within the state of Israel and its structure. Within this party program, the only legitimate role of political action was perceived as the struggle for equal rights within Israel. Such a downsized political vision impeded any anti-Zionist political future that would confront the foundations of the ethnoreligious state. In other words, the communists complied with the Zionist imperative to maintain a Jewish state, as evidenced by its signing of the Declaration of Independence. 

The second pillar of the Communist Party’s political program — which filtered into the Arab political sphere — involved expressing Palestinian Arab identity through limited cultural means. After the founding of the Israeli state in 1948, the ICP initially advocated for an Arab state alongside it based on the UN Partition Plan of 1947. Assuring Israel’s legitimacy, they overlooked its settler colonial nature and the ethnic cleansing that occurred from late 1947 to 1949.

This focus on manifesting a Palestinian Arab identity while believing in the right of Zionism to establish an ethnonational state led to a tension between the expression of that cultural identity and the political framework of Israeli citizenship. On the one hand, this dual commitment led to the emergence of intellectuals, novelists, and poets, such as Mahmoud Darwish, who expressed Arab-Palestinian identity while adhering to the party line. But the tension produced by that duality also led some of those intellectuals to defect, most prominently Darwish, who departed the ICP to join the Palestinian national movement in Beirut, drawing harsh criticism from his erstwhile comrades.

This tension continued to fester within the party, highlighted by the domination of opposition Arab forces of the ICP in 1965 and the subsequent formation of the “New Communist List” (Rakah) within the party. These tensions came to a head when an Arab group (and a Jewish minority) split from the ICP due to a dispute over the political positions of Arab national liberation movements and pan-Arab movements opposed to Zionism and imperialism. This included disagreements over support for Nasserism in Egypt, the FLN in Algeria, the Iraqi revolution, Syrian socialist nationalist political trends, and the Dhuffar Revolution in Oman, among others. A faction of Jewish ICP leaders described these various revolutionary movements and regimes as antisemitic and opposed the anti-Zionist stance of the Soviet Union. These disputes led to a split in the party in 1965, in which the Jewish Zionist faction maintained the name of the ICP, while the Arab nationalist faction retained the name “Rakah,” but by the late 1980s, the Jewish Zionists of the ICP had disappeared, and so Rakah reclaimed its old name as the ICP.

These two pillars of the ICP — pursuing the “struggle for equality” within the Israeli state while manifesting a Palestinian Arab identity — are crucial to understanding the subsequent political history of ‘48 Palestinians, shaping most political streams within ‘48 Palestinian society, especially those that operated within the Israeli Knesset. 

However, some ‘48 Palestinian movements did not submit to these two pillars that limited vast swathes of the political imagination of ‘48 Palestinians. Such movements that went against the dominant approach of the ICP were persecuted and banned in Israel. The Al-Ard Movement was banned in 1959, the Red Front organization in 1973 (a group of Arab and Jewish Marxists pushing for socialist liberation in the Arab region that opposed Zionist statehood), and the Northern Islamic movement as late as 2015.

These oppositional currents notwithstanding, the two pillars originally advocated by the ICP permeated ‘48 Palestinian political discourse, going beyond the communist party and becoming a part of the frameworks of several “Arab-Israeli” political parties.

One example is the “Democratic National Assembly,” or al-Tajammu’. Despite facing persecution in 2016, the party was neither banned nor subjected to a trial, which can be attributed to the party’s flexible political positions and acknowledgment of the boundaries of the Israeli political spectrum and political discourse. Notably, al-Tajammu’ consistently accepted the concept of Jewish self-determination in Palestine, aligning with the approach taken by the ICP, although its platform seeks to transform Israel into a democracy for all its citizens.

This differential treatment of Palestinian political parties by the Israeli state, including the systematic banning of movements that did not conform to Zionist political boundaries, is one of the ways in which those boundaries were solidified and enforced. The state then demanded that Arab political parties only operate within them, or risk repression. As long as Arab political parties participated in a system that required prior allegiance to an ethnoreligious state that relegated them to the status of second-class citizens, they ended up lending political legitimacy to their own subjugation.

The shift in May 2021

Taking into account the historical nuances that have led to the current state of political paralysis among ‘48 Palestinians, let’s revisit the Uprising of Dignity, or the “Unity Intifada” of May 2021, to understand the mindset of the protestors. Palestinians in Israel caught the settler colonial state off guard as riots erupted against police stations, burning and attacking what the state calls “mixed cities” like Akka, Haifa, and Lydd, which experienced a “security crisis,” challenging the state’s sovereignty from within for the first time since its establishment. This was expressed by fierce resistance against the expansion of settlers, the demolition of Palestinian homes, and the process of alienating them from their homeland through systematic racism in every field.

The involvement of Palestinians from ’48 in the events of May 2021 commenced with a rejection of the prevailing “opposition” framework for political action, which had previously dominated protests in ’48 Palestine. The Palestinian political parties participating in the Israeli Knesset had no agenda for creating an alternative to the Zionist polity, which limited their vision for a political future beyond Israel to advocating for periodic reversions to the status quo. This led to the atrophying of ‘48 Palestinian political institutions and the low rate of participation in actions organized by the parties — and even outside the official political parties, the rallies in solidarity with Jerusalem and Sheikh Jarrah called for by the Higher Follow-up Committee* and the popular committees (which served as an extension of the local party leadership within Arab towns and villages), had modest turnouts of 30-50 individuals. 

Then, on May 10, 2021, a significant shift occurred. What triggered this change?

On that fateful morning, Zionist forces initiated an incursion into the Al-Aqsa Mosque, aiming to clear it of perceived “saboteurs and terrorists.” Clashes ensued that resulted in over 300 injuries, 7 of which were severe, fueling profound resentment within all Palestinian circles and communities. Israel’s refusal to stop its hostile action in Jerusalem contributed to the escalation with the Palestinian resistance in Gaza and was followed by a comprehensive aggression against the coastal enclave.

This event heightened tensions among ‘48 Palestinians, culminating in the initiation of widespread protests, massive demonstrations, and clashes later that day. The protests were primarily led by unorganized, non-partisan youth — an entire generation that had been shorn of Palestinian political identification, but whose religious and patriotic sentiments drove them to confront the police. The duration of these clashes varied across towns, lasting approximately four days based on local circumstances.

The youth-led confrontations with police stations continued to spread like wildfire. We began to see all the trappings of a “real revolution” in the streets, in solidarity with Jerusalem and the victims of the brutal bombing in Gaza. This did not please the “disciplined” Arab parties such as the ICP (and its electoral list affiliated with Al-Jabha), some of which were uncomfortable with what they termed “useless actions” of violence that went beyond the “opposition only” approach. 

Instead, the youth voices led the demonstrations, then the strike, and then the popular activities — all under the title of political unity for Palestinians from the river to the sea and beyond. In other words, we began to witness a Palestinian group in ‘48 Palestine establishing a political sentiment approximating “liberation,” and which, most crucially, linked with the Palestinians of the West Bank, Gaza, and the diaspora. That is why we call it the “Unity Uprising.”

On the flip side, the Southern Islamic Party, under the leadership of Mansour Abbas, diverged from the “opposition only” stance by advocating for complete integration into the Zionist state. Abbas’s series of statements, including acknowledging the legitimacy of the State of Israel’s “Jewishness” in contrast to other Arab parties (who accept only the right to Jewish self-determination within the state) and expressing solidarity with the “tragedy” of a burnt synagogue in Lyd during the May 2021 events, marked a departure from addressing the historical plight of Lyd Arabs since the Nakba in 1948, with no regard to the remaining Palestinians long decades of suffering.

Rather than framing the May events as a response rooted in historical grievances, Abbas’s approach seemed to deviate from shared values, citizenship, and integration. His alignment with the Israeli government led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, both of whom rejected the Palestinian right to establish a state based on the 1967 borders, marked a significant shift. Bennett, in particular, has been labeled as a fascist advocate for the annexation of Area C in the West Bank.

Abbas presented a distinct political vision that extended beyond the abovementioned pillars, prioritizing the complete embrace of Israeli citizenship and alignment with the political agenda, without giving due consideration to his Arab Palestinian identity. This approach resulted in intra-Arab depoliticization, even of issues pertaining to demands for social equality in Israel, including economic opportunities, urban planning, housing, and education.

Reversing the Unity Uprising’s fortunes

In this way, the formation of the “United Arab List” led by Mansour Abbas in June 2021, only a month after the Unity Uprising after it had been violently suppressed by the Israeli authorities, constituted a significant step backward for Palestinian political consciousness in ‘48 Palestine. In essence, the approach of the United List upset the political balance established by the ICP in 1965, moving from maintaining Palestinian Arab identity and independence to total assimilation. 

This expressed itself concretely in the formation of the anti-Netanyahu coalition government signed with two prime ministers: Naftali Bennett, known for his right-wing and annexationist views, and Yair Lapid, a center-right politician from the Israeli elite. Both leaders do not recognize Palestinian rights and support the continuation of the occupation.

That coalition government was to be short-lived, as Netanyahu was back in power by the end of 2022 in the most right-wing government in Israel’s history. Meanwhile, the Arab political parties remained in a state of political atrophy, with the Mansour Abbas tendency reflecting the inability of the outdated “opposition only” strategies of the ICP (and all other Arab parties in the Knesset) to present a viable political program for ‘48 Palestinian society. In the absence of such a political project, the rise of the United Arab List is not all that surprising.

In many senses, the Unity Uprising reflected the dissatisfaction of the depoliticized and unorganized youth with this state of affairs, but since the popular revolt did not result in the formation of any underlying political movement or mass organization, the political sphere in ‘48 Palestinian society simply reverted to its default position. This is what explains the silence of ‘48 Palestinians today as Israel continues its relentless genocide in Gaza.

The prevailing political mentality of Arab Palestinian parties in the Knesset is unable to comprehend the strategic implications of this genocide for all Palestinians. The political forces claiming to represent Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are tragically unable to realize that what is happening in Gaza will reverberate for all Palestinians, including “citizens” of Israel. Adalah has already documented how much more vulnerable Palestinians in Israel are since the genocidal war began.

The war on Gaza is fundamentally a war on Palestinian existence everywhere, and it involves a restructuring of borders for each Palestinian faction through methods like forced expulsion, assimilation, or the obliteration of their political identity. The end result is the elimination of the Palestinian people. And in the absence of an alternative political vision that resists the process of Zionist colonial elimination, the Palestinian citizens of Israel will share in the same sordid fate as their Palestinian brothers and sisters.

* The High Follow-up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel is a non-parliamentary top representative unitary body for the Palestinian “Arab masses” who are citizens of the State of Israel.