Palestinians living within the Israeli state have always been second class citizens, and under the current right-wing government, hundreds of millions of shekels in public funding are being cut from these communities.

Prevented from traveling due to the coronavirus, Jewish Israelis flocked to Nazareth and Haifa this holiday season with many saying it was like “going abroad.” It is time for the Israeli public to face the fact that it is in the Middle East, and remove the barriers – both physical and mental – that keeps them from doing so.

This week, Yitzhak Rabin will be remembered in Israel as a peacemaker on the anniversary of his assassination. One fact that will be ignored however is that Rabin was one of the key perpetrators of Israel’s ethnic cleansing policy.

It is a fiction to argue that there is any “co-existence” or that there are “mixed cities” inside Israel. It is a reality of ghettos and apartheid: an ongoing colonial project of Jewish supremacy. The reality of settler-colonialism, of Judaizing Palestine, is present in Lydda, “inside Israel” as much as it is in Sheikh Jarrah, in the occupied territory.