IN PURSUIT OF THE “NORMAL”

Palestinian Citizenship within the Zionist Colonial Framework14

Haneen Zoabi

WHILE I WAS the first Palestinian woman to represent a Palestinian political party in the Israeli Knesset, my story is not one of the upholding of Israeli democracy, liberalism, feminism or justice; rather, my story is that of renewed conflict and dissonance between ourselves, the Palestinians, and the State of Israel. My story centers on the struggle between erasure and visibility, between silence and speaking out.

I am descended from those Palestinians whom Israel did not expel in 1948, a group often seen as the weakest link in a people dismembered, torn to pieces and scattered far apart. I grew up in Nazareth, a town that was described in the first deliberations held by the Israeli Government as “occupied,” because it fell outside the UN Partition Line. In fact, 30% of the new state that was established in 1948 was, in Israel’s own terminology, “occupied territory.” In its early years, Israel grappled with the basic question of to whom to grant its citizenship. A minority in the government believed the new state should consider the Galilee, the north of Palestine, an occupied area, exclude the Palestinians who remained there from Israel’s official census, and deny them the right to vote. However, Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, had other ideas. It was clear that the demographic reality on the ground was not conducive to the creation of a Jewish state with a durable Jewish majority. Ben-Gurion, therefore, moved to seize all land occupied by the Zionist militia and expelled the entire Palestinian population, aware that the very existence of the Jewish state was predicated on the erasure of our own. The resulting military operations succeeded in expelling as much as 85% of the Palestinians living within the 1948 borders in the Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe.

In the aftermath of the devastation of the Palestinian cities of Jaffa, Acre, Haifa, Lydda, and Ramle, and following the inflow of internal refugees from surrounding villages terrorized by the Zionist militia, our small town of Nazareth became the largest Arab city within the 1948 borders. Ultimately, Israel succumbed to pressure from the UN to grant citizenship to the Palestinians who remained inside the declared borders of 1948. However, we were not party to the process of decision-making; it was taken out of our hands. According to whom did we even desire to become Israeli citizens? And why did the UN believe that the Jewish state, which expelled the majority of our people, would treat us better as citizens than it had done beforehand? According to whom were we willing to exchange our land, homes, orchards and trees for alien citizenship in a state in which we had played no part in founding or shaping? According to whom did we wish to be deposited in what was supposed to be an outpost of “developed” Europe within the surrounding “backward” Arab region? According to whom did we want our history to be erased and replaced by an artificial, falsified historical narrative? And who expected us to express thanks and gratitude for any of it?

* * *

In 1948, 21 years before I was born, we, the Palestinians who remained in what was now termed Israel, were forcibly severed from 85% of our people. More than 570 Palestinian villages and towns were destroyed by the Zionist militia during the Nakba. They ripped apart our social fabric, destroyed the emergent middle class, together with civil society, the agricultural and industrial sectors, as well as the theaters and the sports clubs that Jaffa was famed for. It was in the aftermath of this horrendous violence that 150,000 Palestinians, members of a people catastrophically deformed and beaten, were ushered, through the gates of the military, into the politics of the newly-established State of Israel.

Our induction into citizenship came via military rule. Israel placed us, the Palestinians who remained inside its 1948 borders, in a ghetto under explicit military rule from 1948 until late 1966, cutting us off from our own people, as well as from Israeli Jewish society. It thereby denied us the opportunity to play any part in defining our new “citizenship.” We knew nothing of the state but its military, its police, its intelligence agencies, and its engineering officials, i.e. the state’s advisors for Arab affairs, responsible for crafting the new “Arab Israeli.” Losing memory and identity is no less devastating than losing a homeland and accepting one’s inferiority.

Military rule also embodied the logic of that citizenship; it made use of the military tools with which we were already familiar, now transformed into police repression and intelligence surveillance, through which the state interfered in our day-to-day lives and routinely denied us our political and individual rights. Israel’s laws, and the so-called democratic tools of its citizenship, proved to be no more than an extension of our Nakba, our dispossession.

Instead of being born into my homeland as a Palestinian citizen, then, I was born into a homeland that told a narrative that contradicted the truth of my existence. A sense of alienation from the violent entity that excised Palestine was to come to define my relationship with the Jewish state. The central question I grappled with became how I, gripped by a growing sense of alienation, could build a “political” relationship with such an entity?

The Jewish state, like all settler colonies, fortified itself by creating an intermediary class between itself and the indigenous population, in this case the Palestinians. It manipulated the selection process of Arab Members of Knesset to advance representatives who were more palatable to Israel than they were to their own people. It forged strong ties with what remained of the Palestinian leadership, including the mukhtars, or local chieftains. The appointment of school principals, teachers, and other employees was conditioned on the candidates’ approval by the Shin Bet intelligence agency, which blocked the appointment of anyone who participated in a demonstration or who was suspected of holding any affiliation to their Palestinian national identity. Today, the Israeli intelligence apparatus is still one of the main tools employed by the government in maintaining its control over Palestinian “citizens” of Israel.

* * *

We entered into politics defeated and prepared to come to terms with our defeat. Hassan Jabareen warns of the dangers of polarizing the political conditions to welcome a defeated entity into a political and victorious one. He writes, “we agreed to participate in the first Israeli Knesset elections, quickly adopting the language of rights, duty and loyalty to Israel.”15 Our participation in the Israeli political system was, in fact, participation in a colonial project, with all that entails in terms of submission and animosity, and was not based on the application of genuine liberal principles, either by Israel or by ourselves.

It might be surprising and, yes, reprehensible, to think that when I was in the fourth grade of primary school, along with my classmates I held aloft the Israeli flag and sang the national anthem. The school informed us that the Education Department would be sending an inspector to the school on Israel’s Independence Day, and that we would festoon the classroom with flags for the occasion. So that is what we did.

Two years later, I watched news reports on the massacres of Sabra and Shatila with deep shock. I understood that something significant had happened that was somehow related to my own existence but was not yet able to fully comprehend it. A short time later, I watched a large demonstration of Palestinians go by beneath the balcony of my grandmother’s house in the eastern neighborhood in Nazareth with great interest. Awareness began to take shape within me, an altering of my perception of reality. A deep feeling, older and greater than Palestine, was developing within me, a form of rebellion stemming from a profound sense of injustice.

Five years after I sang the Israeli national anthem, and two years after the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, I began listening to the Al-Asheqeen, singing along with Marcel Khalifa, and reciting the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish.

After 12 years of protesting in demonstrations and non-partisan political activism, I committed myself fully to the field of politics. In general, my own generation was less politicized than its predecessors, who in the 1970s established the multi-party Arab political apparatus that endures today.

Listening to Azmi Bishara speak about citizenship and nationalism during the Madrid negotiations in 1991, I felt that I had found the answer to the question that had long been occupying me: how to maneuver between the world of politics, which requires a deep dive into reality, and my feeling of alienation, which drives detachment from that reality.

Several years later I joined the Arab-founded Tajamoa (NDA, the National Democratic Assembly, Balad in Hebrew) political party, in 1998. Three years thereafter, I ran for membership in its Central Committee, and subsequently in its political bureau. It took only a few years for Tajamoa to be identified as a strategic threat to Israel. By 2008, Yuval Diskin, then head of Israel’s intelligence services, placed it on a list of strategic threats that also included Iran and Hezbollah.16 We took this designation as confirmation that we were on the right track.

The Tajamoa party was established as a response to the Oslo project, which demoted the Palestinian cause from one of liberation and freedom to one of border disputes. The rights of our people were written off: the Right of Return, the dismantling of the settlements in the 1967 Occupied Territories, the questions of Jerusalem, borders and Palestinian sovereignty were all left off the table in the Oslo Accords. All the root causes of Palestinians’ suffering, all Israel’s means of control and abuse, were relegated to the sidelines of the negotiations. What, then, did the parties agree on? They agreed to contrive a new false narrative with which to rebrand our reality. From the Oslo Accords onwards, the world spoke of two equal parties to the conflict. The asymmetry of the equation was brushed over and, with it, the historical context. Also excluded from the Oslo Accords were the Palestinians living inside 1948 borders, whose plight was categorized as an “internal Israeli matter.” Oslo constituted a whitewashing of Israel’s crimes, not a means of resisting them, and it was the Accords that set the Tajamoa Party in motion, as the only political party in the Knesset that was prepared to vote against them.

* * *

It was through Tajamoa that I manage to preserve my sense of alienation while engaging in parliamentary politics. Alienation arguably creates a “noble state of hostility” towards an unjust reality, hostility which, I argue, is necessary when confronting hegemony. However, our lives are defined by what we do, and action requires goals, strategy, and practical tools that a state of alienation cannot generate, but rather impedes. Political involvement without alienation, on the other hand, runs the risk of normalizing a reality in which a liberal discourse of rights and citizenship is used to mask the underlying colonial context. Thus, the fundamental question becomes how we can engage in politics, using the context of citizenship and a discourse of rights, while also nurturing, through this engagement, consciousness of our colonial reality. How do we make political gains as Palestinians, in an environment in which dozens of political participation laws aim at extricating our political action from its Palestinian context?

Tajamoa offered an answer. It was the first Palestinian political party to tackle the schizophrenic gap that occupies the space between the Israeli reality and the Palestinian “truth,” and to suggest a possibility of Palestinian political action within the context of Israeli citizenship. It did so by simultaneously rejecting and accepting this citizenship: rejecting its Zionist character but accepting its formalism. Tajamoa proposed a radical alternative, based on absolute national and individual equality. The “State of all its Citizens” became the official slogan of Tajamoa, threatening the very idea of Zionism. Since we could not envision making any real political progress without placing our work within a narrative of historical injustice, we emphasized the fact that this is our homeland, and that we are called on to make a compromise to live alongside those who choose to come here as settler-colonialists. This compromise, however, requires the latter to abandon their colonial ambitions.

We were convinced that any political action on our part that does not create a Palestinian political narrative rooted in our own history is destined to fail, not only morally, but also politically. While the political platforms of other Palestinian political parties active in Israel required them to separate identity and belonging from “pragmatic,” everyday political action, Tajamoa believes that pragmatism should not controvert our “truth” as Palestinians. Thus Azmi Bishara, the party’s intellectual founder, differentiated between “equality” (musawa in Arabic), and “integration” (indimaj); Tajamoa wants equality for Palestinian citizens, but not if it means being subsumed by Zionism, i.e., not by becoming part of the Israeli State, but rather by opposing the Zionist-colonialist logic that underpins it.

Other Arab political parties have and continue to endorse the “preservation of national identity.” However, unlike Tajamoa, they refuse to politicize identity and insist on containing it within a separate sphere from politics. Such was the political formula adopted by the Arab-founded Israeli Communist Party (or Maki; the choice of name here is significant, as is the rejection of the obvious alternative, the “Palestinian Communist Party”), for example, and subsequently the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash).

In Tajamoa, we believe that there is no separation between the Jewish state and the Zionist project. We therefore understand Israel as an ideologically-based entity, in which Zionism looms above everything else: the state, history, geography, international law and human rights. As a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship in the Zionist state, one is not permitted to object to or even question the ideological basis of the state. This dictate is understood not only by state institutions, but also by Israeli society at large: 67% of Israelis believe that issues of peace and security must be decided upon by a Jewish majority, and that there is no contradiction between Israel’s “democracy” and Jewish privilege within the state.17

Under Israeli domestic law, Israel not only stands above international law and human or democratic values, but it also redefines and subverts these universal concepts. Section 7 of the Jewish Nation-State Law, as well as dozens of land and housing laws that preceded it, legitimize the state’s promotion and establishment of exclusively Jewish towns and cities. Its citizenship laws are designed not only to bring in Jews, but also to keep out Palestinians, while allowing even the entry of non-Jews in the effort to limit the Palestinian presence within the state.18

Tajamoa set out to decouple the idea of the state from the idea of citizenship in order to make the most of the margin of freedom afforded by the state, and to expose the contradiction between what the Israeli State offers on the one hand, and the requirements of natural citizenship on the other. Azmi Bishara emphasized the fact that the rights of Palestinians predate the creation of the State of Israel, and therefore that these rights are grounded firstly in our connection to our homeland, not in our connection to the Jewish state. One can draw from this argument the conclusion that the pertinent question is not whether or not to “enter into” this citizenship, but rather how to shape it. As Palestinians, we believe that the Palestinian narrative should form the basis our citizenship; otherwise, we will be unable to reconcile ourselves with it.

Thus, while Tajamoa’s concept of “the State of all its Citizens” first took shape as a project that was liberal in its language and goals, it was never at odds with or indifferent to the Palestinian conscience and historical narrative. Indeed, it could more accurately be described as liberational than liberal. Tajamoa exposed the colonial nature of Zionism without initially using the term “colonialism,” though it gradually began to employ more radical and nationalist rhetoric after the Second Intifada.

Tajamoa was the youngest Palestinian parliamentary party and the first to include women on its parliamentary list, with women holding at least one-third of its seats. I entered the Knesset in 2010, after Azmi Bishara’s term in the Knesset, which revolutionized politics and parliamentary representation for Palestinians within the 1948 borders.

Tajamoa advanced the idea that the Palestinians inside Israel’s 1948 borders must create their own national political center. Building such a political center was imperative given that the alternative was Israelization, or the deformation of our identity and political failure within the trap of citizenship.

When I entered the Knesset in 2009, the first piece of advice I received was: “Don’t be like Azmi Bishara. Be like Ahmad Tibi” (an Arab MK who peppers his speech with nationalist rhetoric in an artificial and superficial manner). The Knesset was laying down the conditions for my acceptance in the Knesset, for my domestication. “In this home” was a phrase I often heard Palestinian Members of the Knesset from other parties insert into their speeches. The word “home,” however, jarred sharply with the sense of alienation I felt within the Knesset.

Following an interview that I gave to Channel 2, Israel’s most popular television network, in 2014, I was told that I came across as a rejectionist. As I was speaking out against Israel’s acts of aggression, rights violations and repression of the Palestinians, the host interrupted with the question, “Is there anything you like about Israel?” I swiftly responded with, “No, nothing.”19 Even those closest to me criticized my performance in the interview, for what they saw as its “over-intensity” and “negativity.” They asked why I could not have said something more agreeable, something that did not mark me out as a rejectionist. They wondered why I could not have cited the high-tech sector, for example, or the weather, or even the anti-Zionist movement. However, my priority was to convey the true nature of my relationship with Israel, and what it represents for me personally, namely alienation and rejection.

* * *

Even if we want to move on from the politics of recognition towards the politics of liberation, we must ask ourselves whether it is possible for us to engage in a fruitful dialogue with Israeli society when 70% of it believes that the Jews are God’s “chosen people,”20 when 57% are disturbed by the large number of Arab doctors working in hospitals, 40% of Jewish Israeli youth support denying the right of Arab citizens to vote,21 73% support politics of the far-right (compared to just 19% who identify as “leftists”), and when 73% support placing Arab citizens in concentration camps in the event of a war between the Jewish state and an Arab country—all percentages that are increasing over time. We must recognize that the hostility and fascism of Israeli society has surpassed that of even its most racist laws. In contending with this kind of society, the politics of recognition must play a central role.

While the Zionist state has undergone change in the decades since its establishment, it has always been in the direction of consolidating its colonial nature. Israel succeeded for the first 50 years of the state to market itself as a liberal democratic state rather than a colonial project. However, the Oslo process and the policies of the Zionist left, who, after Camp David II declared “there is no partner for peace,” led to the abandonment of their classical separationist solution of two states. That then paved the way for the emergence of a fascist state that has not even troubled itself to hide beneath the cover of liberal democratic rhetoric over the past decade.

Hence, Israel made the transition from an entity that was run by an elite group of liberal Zionists—who hid behind a veneer of democracy while steadily erasing the Palestinian presence—into an entity run by an elite group of right-wing religious-nationalist settlers. The latter have scant regard for democratic principles, and their response to the “demographic threat” posed by the Palestinians is, simply, Apartheid. The demand that Israel has made since 2003 to be explicitly recognized as a Jewish state was designed to counter any political demands by the Palestinians and led to general disillusionment with the Oslo ideal of peace and equality. The Second Intifada cemented the demise of the discourse of “coexistence” that had prevailed amongst Palestinians inside the 1948 borders, led by the Communist Party and the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash).

In the aftermath of the Second Intifada, Israel resumed and refined its policies of erasure and social engineering. It did so under the direction of the ascendant Israeli right, and their proposed Apartheid-based solution: to absorb the Palestinians, on both sides of the Green Line, while also mitigating the impact of their existence.

Ilan Pappé unearthed the memories of a Jewish immigrant who, after arriving in Palestine, wrote in a letter to his beloved in Europe, “I arrived in Jaffa and found many strangers there.” That immigrant still lives among us. After 70 years, our land, homes, orchards, and cuisine are no longer “strange” to the immigrants. They liked it all. They took it all. But they still see us as “strangers.” In 70 years, these invaders have not bothered to learn our language or get to know our history or culture. After 70 years, they demand that we lower the sound of the call to prayer, as they do in Europe. Here, “as in Europe.” Are we not still regarded as strangers here?

* * *

Initially, Israelis viewed me as harmless, innocuous. To them, I was merely a woman who made a few headlines as the first woman to enter the Knesset on a Palestinian party list. This public perception changed dramatically when I joined the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in 2010, in the hope of breaking the inhumane siege on Gaza. There were 730 passengers on board the Freedom Flotilla, including parliamentarians, journalists and human rights activists. I was on the largest ship, the Mavi Marmara, when Israel intercepted the flotilla in international waters, and Israeli commandos killed nine activists and seized our vessels. As these events demonstrated, Israel is determined not only to besiege Gaza, but to besiege and kill, “if necessary,” those who act to demand its freedom. Terrorism is not Israel’s biggest threat; its biggest threat is, in fact, freedom.

During a tumultuous Knesset session held on Wednesday, June 1, 2010, I was attacked and labeled a traitor to Israel. For me, however, the greatest act of treachery I could have committed would have been to shirk my responsibility to defend my own people under siege. As a result of my participation in the flotilla, I was barred from attending Knesset sessions for six months, placed under surveillance, stripped of some of my parliamentary rights, and even faced demands for the revocation of my citizenship. These demands were not only on the agenda of the Minister of the Interior and voiced repeatedly in the Knesset, where they were followed by attempts to prevent me from running in the Knesset elections held in 2013 and 2015, but a poll revealed that as much as 38% of the Israeli public supported the revocation of my citizenship. Thus, a significant portion of the Israeli public view Israeli citizenship as a “reward” to be bestowed on those who swear their loyalty to the “Jewish state,” a state which places itself above humanity, above rights, above history and above the law. I should stress that what was at stake was not the loss of my Israeli citizenship per se, but rather the loss of my homeland; stripping Palestinians of their citizenship is but one weapon in Israel’s arsenal, used in pursuit of its long-established policy of expulsion.

By becoming involved in the Freedom Flotilla, I confounded early expectations that I would be the “Arab liberal feminist” in the Knesset, and that I would spend my term preoccupied with the projected backwardness of my own society, perhaps taking some interest in the more mundane and “acceptable” issues of budgeting and service. Why, then, did I subvert these expectations by joining the Mavi Marmara? Why do I demand that Israel lift its siege on Gaza? What possible affiliation could I, a petite feminist who speaks of freedom, have to Gaza, a place full of “terrorists” who “force” women to wear headscarves?

Israeli “liberals” sneeringly told me, “Go to Gaza and see for yourself how Hamas treats a single woman in her forties like you.” “You spinster,” Yohanan Plesner remarked. “No man wants to touch you.” Plesner was later to become the President of the prestigious Israel Democracy Institute; his words to me speak volumes about the true nature of so-called “progressive” liberal-Zionism.22

What surprised me most during my time in the Knesset was not the attempts made by some MKs to physically attack me, nor the ferocity of their attacks. What surprised me was their astonishment that I had participated in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, and at my advocacy work to break the silence surrounding the criminal siege of Gaza. What to me seemed intuitive and self-evident, for them was incomprehensible: I belong to my people, I belong to my history, I belong to Gaza, and to all of Palestine.

In addition to a series of incitement campaigns against me, and my total of five suspensions, for a collective total of sixteen months, the Israeli Knesset passed legislation to impose new restrictions on the political activities of Palestinian Members of Knesset in response to my actions. Amongst these pieces of legislation was the 2016 Expulsion Law, more commonly known as the “Zoabi Law.”23 This law allows a majority of 90 Knesset Members to oust a serving MK for their political actions. It allows an elected representative to be suspended by their peers on ideological grounds, in a clear undermining of the democratic process. In other words, the Knesset granted a majority of its members the authority to expel their publicly elected peers.

My experience is a living example of the impossible nature of the practice of citizenship for Palestinian citizens in Israel. By refusing to normalize Zionist citizenship—even while we are locked in it—and by fostering our alienation from it, Israel has made visible the political situation of Palestinians inside the 1948 borders in its full complexity. Our insistence on the duality of our presence in Israeli politics as Palestinians, and our alienation from the colonial hegemony, is a political act of the first degree. It serves to empower the generations of Palestinians who have not lived through any victories against Zionism.

In conclusion, Israeli citizenship was not granted to Palestinians as a means of integrating them into Israeli society on an equal status basis; rather, it was the manifestation and exercise of Israel’s victory over us. Palestinians engaging in Israeli politics must preserve the clarity of the inherent contradiction between justice and colonial citizenship. We must use the tools of citizenship in order to demonstrate the colonialist essence of this citizenship, and offer an alternative, decolonized version of it. I believe that this is our strategic mission and would be our most valuable contribution to the Palestinian struggle. It is our strategic asset. And it was in recognition of the value of this asset that former Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin said in 2008 that, “Israel faces three strategic threats: the Iranian nuclear program, Hezbollah, and every citizen who opposes the Jewish Democratic State.”24

Israel cannot escape its own truth (its racist, colonialist function). Seventy years after its establishment, that truth has caught up with it, and is now on full display for the whole world to see with the legislation of the Jewish Nation-State Law. The law was officially enacted in 2018—though Israel has been implementing its provisions on the ground for decades—in an attempt to legitimize the state’s racist colonialist nature, its ethnic cleansing and regime of Apartheid.

However, it is not enough for the world merely to know Israel’s truth. What is needed now is for the latent Palestinian liberation project to regenerate and bloom. There are generations of Palestinians ready to nurture and propagate it. Just as the Jewish Nation-State Law exposes the true nature of Israel, so in turn must the Palestinian national project reveal the truth of the Palestinian people’s struggle for liberation.

Palestine has changed, and so have the Palestinians. The stranglehold of the old political guard is waning, and with it the old mentality and ways. Demands for new leadership have taken center stage. The Palestinian struggle today can be characterized as liberating and liberational. Palestine’s truth is rooted in justice, and it requires liberation of thought and imagination to balance the asymmetry of power. Such a reimagining was what we witnessed with the advent of the Uprising of Dignity (Hibat Al-Karamah) of May 2021. The uprising is a movement that embodies justice and truth through the revolutionary nature of its acts, and thereby creates the means to redress the imbalance of power.

The new Palestinian struggle must be a struggle for the new Palestine.

14 This essay was originally written in Arabic and was translated by Samah Sabawi.

15 Palestine Forum, last accessed October 1, 2021, https://rb.gy/ufbsmv

16 “Back to Basics: Israel’s Arab Minority and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” Middle East Report 119, March 14, 2012, last accessed October 1, 2021, https://www.ecoi.net/en/file/local/1048334/2016_1331806197_119-back-to-basics-israels-arab-minority-and-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict.pdf

17 “New Polls On Israeli Public Opinion - December 2012,” it.scribd.com, last accessed October 1, 2021, https://it.scribd.com/document/118421778/New-Polls-on-Israeli-Public-Opinion-December-2012

18 The State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and strengthening. Basic Law Nation State, https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/activity/Documents/BasicLawsPDF/BasicLawNationState.pdf

19 Larry Derfner, “The Most Hated Woman in Israel,” Foreign Policy, January 11, 2013, https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/01/11/the-most-hated-woman-in-israel/

20 Nir Hasson, “Survey: Record Number of Israeli Jews Believe in God,” Haaretz, January 27, 2012, https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/1.5175991

21 Or Kashti, “‘Map of Hatred’: Half of Israeli Religious Teens Would Strip Arab Right to Vote, Poll Finds,” Haaretz, February 19, 2021, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israeli-religious-teens-would-rescind-arab-vote-poll-1.9551732

22 YouTube, last accessed October 1, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uZ1SUREOOQ

23 Adalah.org, last accessed October 1, 2021, https://www.adalah.org/ar/law/view/603

24 International Crisis Group, “Back to Basics: Israel’s Arab Minority and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” Middle East Report 119, 14 March 2012, last accessed October 1, 2021, https://www.ecoi.net/en/file/local/1048334/2016_1331806197_119-back-to-basics-israels-arab-minority-and-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict.pdf