The Palestinian Condition... The "Arabs of the Interior"

My grandmother Aïcha came into the world in the last decade of the nineteenth century, at the very moment the global Zionist movement was taking shape.

Her first two sons were born before the Great War and during it; after the armistice came her daughter and her youngest boy.

A year before the defeat of June 1967, she could be found every morning at the saraya of Sidon, happy to have obtained from the International Red Cross authorisation to visit her eldest son Tawfiq, who had become Israeli without ever having left Acre.

That authorisation was not enough on its own. For that exceptional event in a life like hers to become possible, she also needed to produce an invitation letter from her daughter Maryam the Jordanian, settled in Nablus in the West Bank under Hashemite sovereignty. But that family visit request was worthless to the Lebanese General Security without a special transit permit she had obtained from her son, a refugee in Damascus, where he had found work and shelter and finally settled.

When Aïcha, in her seventh decade, received at last the final piece of the dossier, she said it called for a celebration.

She packed her small bag for the journey from Sidon to Damascus, then Amman, then Nablus, to arrive before the appointed hour.

On the day of the meeting, she set out from Nablus towards East Jerusalem with Maryam and all the family members who could join them, a short journey, this time without a permit. She prayed first at Al-Aqsa, then made her way with her family to the barbed wire on the western edge of the city, where she met her son and his family from morning until midday, without crossing the separation point.

As evening fell, she returned unhurriedly to Nablus. She still had two days to spend in Amman at the home of my aunt’s sons, to hold her grandchildren, then a few days in Damascus where most of her scattered family had gathered, before returning to Sidon where her youngest son lived, working in Beirut at a paper factory on the Nahr corniche, in what had become East Beirut. He died there when a shell fell on the factory, the paper burned, and he was gone. But the old woman did not mourn him, for she had preceded him in her farewell to the journey of hardship, in her own bed, far from any civil war.

“The Arabs of the Interior”

This name designates the Palestinians who, for various reasons, did not leave their towns and villages when these became Israeli, at the moment of the declaration of independence on 15 May 1948, which we call the Nakba. The line of demarcation my grandmother had reached bears the name of the Green Line, and I have never understood why it was called green. Men like my uncle Tawfiq came to be known as “Arabs of the interior” (Arab al-Dakhil), or “Arabs behind the Green Line”, while David Ben Gurion’s government referred to them as the “Arabs of Israel”, at the very hour that Voice of the Arabs radio and Damascus Radio called them “Arabs of the occupied lands”.

Subsequent Israeli governments then renamed these populations according to their religious or ethnic affiliations, speaking of “Druze of Israel”, “Bedouin of Israel”, “Muslims”, “Christians of Israel”, “Circassians of Israel”, or, in a more technocratic register, “the minorities in Israel”.

Every one of these denominations, whatever form it took, proceeded from the same logic of erasure and denial of Palestinian identity. For these men and women were the indigenous people, those who had not left their land for a single moment, yet whom Ben Gurion’s government forced into internal displacement once the Palestine war had ended and the State of Israel consolidated itself through armistice agreements with the neighbouring states.

It proved an embarrassing discovery for the new authorities, who found themselves administering some 156,000 original inhabitants of the land within their young democracy. When the Israeli army seized major cities, it drove out their inhabitants by force — in Jaffa, some 71,000 people fled or were expelled before approximately 400 residents were gathered into the Al-Ajami neighbourhood; in Haifa, 75,000 people were expelled by land and sea, and some 3,200 remaining residents concentrated in the Wadi Nisnas neighbourhood. The pattern repeated itself across cities, towns and villages.

This was what led the Prime Minister to issue directives designating the Palestinians who had remained in place as a fifth column, a security threat to the nascent state and a demographic bomb to be neutralised. The government ordered them placed under military rule, at the army’s discretion, pursuant to the British Emergency Regulations of 1946.

On this period, Dr Yaïr Baumel sheds valuable light in a lecture entitled “Motivations and Constraints of the Military Government Policy”. The Israeli authorities, he writes, adopted, in the first decade of military government, a policy of transfer towards Arab citizens, which reached its peak with the Kafr Qasim massacre on 29 October 1956 [...]. It was only in the following decade that the policy of the Hebrew state changed course, when it became clear that transfer was no longer realistic or viable [...] and that the encirclement of Arab citizens and their marginalisation began [...] as a threat to the security of the state.¹

He adds that the first Israeli Prime Minister ordered the Hebrew calendar to appear only on the identity cards of Jewish citizens, so as to identify Arab citizens visually²; that Arabs were excluded from the planning of projects affecting their own lives and that the formation of Arab capital was deliberately obstructed³; and that the attempt by the head of the Kafr Yasif local council, Yanni Yanni, to establish an association of heads of Arab local authorities in the early 1960s was blocked.⁴

The Recruitment of the Druze

The Druze community in Palestine was living through a disastrous economic situation, marked by deep poverty, in the years following the proclamation of the State of Israel. The Israeli government saw in this an opening and exerted sustained pressure to compel the community to deal with it, using it as a lever in its relations with the Druze of Syria and Lebanon.

It was by working through the Israeli archives that Professor Qays Firro exposed these mechanisms, in papers presented at the same study day in Nazareth. He establishes there that Defence Minister Moshe Dayan summoned the Druze leaders in 1954, in the town of Nesher, and proposed military service to them as an economic opportunity capable of lifting them out of their crisis.⁵

The invitation extended equally to the Circassian community. To prevent any real integration within the Israeli army, the “Minorities Unit” was created, its strength never exceeding a few hundred men. Revealingly, this unit fell under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs rather than the Ministry of Defence. For Professor Qays, there was no doubt that it was a unit of propagandistic and political purpose, designed to sever the community from its roots, its Arabness and its Palestinian identity, by subjecting it and closing off every path of return.

At the same time, the nationalist movement Al-Ard was hunted down until its eradication, and the journalists and activists who had continued working individually after the Nakba found themselves progressively silenced. The policy of containment, fragmentation and forced submission followed its methodical course.

The End of Military Rule

For two decades, Israeli governments pursued the total exclusion of the Palestinian minority from the apparatuses and institutions of the state. Israeli nationality had certainly been granted, but it remained emptied of its substance, as these populations continued in practice to be subject to the supervision of the police and intelligence services. To prevent them from constituting themselves as an indigenous national group with rights, they were dispersed and divided, secondary communal identities nurtured and antagonisms between religious, confessional, tribal and family components stoked, in order to shatter any collective trust. Restrictions on freedom of movement and property were imposed on them, as well as internal displacements from their lands and homes to places assigned by the police and intelligence services.

This state of affairs lasted until the June 1967 war, in which the Israeli army seized the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Sinai and the Golan Heights. This new expansion made government through emergency law redundant, and the exceptional legislation was repealed at the end of 1968, bringing military rule to an end.

The condition of the Palestinians of the interior then entered a new phase. Recognised henceforth as citizens, they benefited from a renewed legal status opening to them the right to vote and to stand for election, access to the labour market across its various sectors, and public services in education, health and social security. In economic and social terms, the change was real and significant compared to the preceding decade.

The income gap between Palestinians and Jews has not, however, been bridged to this day. Infrastructure in Palestinian cities, towns and villages suffers from persistent underdevelopment, and the restrictions weighing on urban expansion remain severe.

From this evolution new challenges arose for the Palestinian minority, tied to land, demography, education and employment, as well as deeper questions about identity and belonging, with Israeli nationality imposed on those who constitute the indigenous people of the country. A portion of them has settled the matter by fully assuming that nationality, but the majority continues to regard itself as an integral part of the Palestinian people, while simultaneously being citizens of a state that occupies another portion of that same people. These contradictions have produced elites capable of rigorous and modern thinking on questions that others prefer to evade.

Organised Crime

Armed gangs proliferate in the cities of Lod, Ramle, Nazareth and Umm al-Fahm, recruiting unemployed young men and exploiting conditions of marginalisation, despair and hopelessness.

In 2024, the number of victims of these criminal organisations reached 235 dead, the majority of them young. In 2025, the toll worsened to 252, and investigations managed to identify those responsible in fewer than 15 per cent of cases. The Israeli security services found themselves accused, according to the version one accepts, either of tolerating the phenomenon or of deliberately sustaining it by disengaging from any serious effort at investigation. Popular anger within Palestinian society reached a critical threshold and spilled over into mass demonstrations in the cities and villages that had lost their sons.

This protest movement transformed, the previous year, into pressure on Palestinian political forces to present a unified front at the elections for the twenty-fifth Knesset. That pressure succeeded in forcing an agreement on what came to be called the “Joint List”, which brought together the Arab Movement for Change led by Dr Ahmad al-Tibi, the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality led by Ayman Odeh, the National Democratic Assembly led by Sami Abu Shehadeh, and the United Arab List of Islamists led by Mansour Abbas. The alliance did not hold: the lists stood separately and won only 10 seats against a previous tally of 15, recording their most bruising defeat in the Knesset. Meanwhile, organised crime continued its advance, claiming 66 victims in three months, among them four women and three teenagers.

The Palestinians of Israel thus reaped the bitter fruits of their political divisions. The Islamist bloc of Mansour Abbas had chosen to ally itself with the Zionist and religious parties and to participate in governments; the communist left bloc pursued its line of opposition and demands; the National Democratic Assembly had made the struggle against “Israelisation” its banner; and the Arab Movement for Change remained primarily oriented towards supporting its brothers in the West Bank and Gaza.

The Islamist bloc’s singular decision to align with the Israeli right does not, however, exempt the three secular blocs from their responsibility for this failure. Their inability to unite amplified losses in seats and deepened the political and social marginalisation of an already fragile minority, powerless before the structural challenges that run through it and unable to stem organised crime that is sustained, invisibly, by a benevolence of state.

Notes

1, 2, 3, 4 — Mada website: https://www.madarcenter.org/

5 — Same source.