“That used to be my father’s shop, right there by the mosque.”

My grandmother, Amina, speaks dispassionately as we drive back from hospital in Haifa, reflecting the systematic oppression and injustice that has accompanied her life since the establishment of Israel in 1948.

“Every time they bombed us, we fled. We walked and walked till we reached Lebanon, and then on to Homs, in Syria, to a refugee camp. We thanked God for each morsel of food. The Almighty protected us and He allowed us to return. But there was nothing left, Ibilin was gone, our homes, our land, everything…”

Amina was one of thousands of Palestinians who secretly came back after the Nakba to find their villages destroyed and their properties stolen by new Jewish “immigrants”. These returnees somehow eked out a living in the newly created state, close to their original homes, living fearfully under the spectre of a second expulsion to join their brethren scattered around neighbouring Arab countries, where they have remained for 76 years.

What of Amina’s granddaughter, Nidaa? I was born nearly 40 years ago in the Galilee village of Arraba, the oldest of three children, from the generation that has only known the reality of Israel. Our experience of the 1948 catastrophe comes only through the stories of our grandparents. But Haifa – where I have lived and worked for 10 years now – has another meaning altogether.

In Haifa, I have a steady job and earn a decent salary; I frequent the swanky cafés and shopping malls in this “city of coexistence”. But is that enough to compensate me for what I have lost? I see abandoned Arab houses and businesses, including my grandmother’s; I watch Arab neighbourhoods crumble, places that once teemed with Arab residents, an intellectual hub before the Nakba. Our awareness of this gives my generation a different meaning of Haifa, of life and of quality of life, of existence, of our role in society. Is this an identity? A sum of stories, meanings, regrets, language, and places, that turn us into a people with a past, present, and future? Yes, these are indelible proofs that embody the minutiae of our daily sensations.

However, these are the very proofs that Israel wants to remove from us, to persuade us that they do not exist, that they have no meaning. Palestinian citizens of Israel are engaged in a daily struggle over the meaning of our existence, our entitlement to a narrative, to dream and to desire, not merely to be an automaton that needs only food, water and sleep. Our ancestors do not appear in the school curriculum. We have no rights except as resident strangers. We must abandon all our feelings, all thoughts, all regrets, the sum of our identity, in exchange for crumbs of unrealised rights.

How galling that the old houses of Haifa have been turned into shops and cafés owed by European Israelis who call themselves leftists and love the Arabs, that is “us” – after kicking us out of our homes. The luxuriousness of these premises with their exclusive clientèle, my grandmother’s shop included, triggers my naïve imaginings as a hardworking Haifa gal barely getting by as she pays the exorbitant costs of living here. What if this house were mine? What if my family still lived here? How different life would be…

One thing the official narrative insists upon is that our existence is the envy of our compatriots living in the West Bank, Jerusalem, or Gaza. We should be thankful to Israel for its blessings and benevolence, no less! OK,  so let’s put these blessings on the scales, against what was taken from us. Which side would tip the scale, do you think? But no, that game is not allowed. Only the strong get to say which games we play. We must use their dice, their starting point for the game, the scoreline that they choose. History starts when they want it to start, and that includes the history of my grandmother’s house in Haifa, and the high rent I must pay to live nearby.

Israel’s response to October 7 in Gaza and the West Bank has affected Palestinian society in the 1948 territory. Campaigns of terror have restored the original face of the state and its machinery of repression that all Palestinians were familiar with. The genocide in Gaza has echoes of the Nakba. For us, the margins we once inhabited have been narrowed or erased over the past 13 months. Before the war, Israel might have allowed the occasional demonstration or sit-in. Now these are criminalized before they happen. A Palestinian citizen of Israel can be convicted for liking, or even reading, a post on social media that the authorities deem to be supporting terrorism, under an amendment to state legislation. So much for the only democracy in the Middle East! Police commissioner Kobi Shabtai said “if Arabs here want to show solidarity with Gaza, we’re happy to put them on buses to show their solidarity there permanently.”

Meanwhile, the bubble of so-called “liberal” or “leftwing” Zionism has well and truly burst. It was always a whitewash of the reality under the pretence of opposing the occupation, but now the left identifies itself with the goals of a war of extermination on Gaza. Its members take part militarily and silence anyone who opposes the killing and displacement. Only a handful of non-Zionist Jewish Israelis are left.

Courts and universities have mobilized against us. Students have been suspended and expelled after being informed on by their Jewish colleagues who pass on screengrabs of social media posts opposing the war. The University of Haifa, which once prided itself as a monument to pluralism, handed the police the names of several female Arab students who were arrested in a nighttime raid. Workplaces have not been spared either. Where once it was possible to avoid engaging in gratuitous arguments with Jewish Israeli colleagues, that option is no longer available. You are accountable for your silence just as much as for your words. So you find yourself regurgitating the Israeli narrative of October 7 and having to agree with what must happen next. You have to buy into their genocidal mindset. If you are asked to help distribute food parcels to soldiers of the occupation, or share images of solidarity with the hostages, so be it. Absence from work will not exempt you from such decrees. 

Truly the mask has fallen. The totality of Jewish civil society has been recruited into the Israeli armed forces.

Since the establishment of the state in 1948, Palestinians in Israel have always been subject to power and domination, designed to eradicate their presence over time. Half of us live below the poverty line, and we are subject to increasing rates of crime and violence owing to deliberate disregard by the state security apparatus. No one is immune from random gunfire that may break out on any Arab-populated street.  Forty percent of our young people aged 18-24 are not in work or education, and they are more likely to fall victim to violence or crime. Arab communities are 30% more likely to be killed or injured by gunfire than their Jewish Israeli counterparts. In education, the budget allocated to Jewish students in Israeli schools is three times more than Arab students. Such are the examples of discrimination in all areas of our daily lives as Palestinians citizens of Israel.

But it does not stop at that. We are not just victims of the discrimination and racism that all minorities face. We are not any normal minority. We are a component of a wider community trying to grasp its destiny. Our struggle is against an imbalance of power as deep and as vicious as anywhere on this planet. Such inequity can only be eliminated when Israel ceases to define itself as a state exclusively for Jews, and stops telling us we do not belong here; the capabilities of this state, and its future, are reserved for an exclusive and closed group, and we do not belong. There is no chance of achieving fundamental equality unless it is linked to the liberation and right of self-determination of the entire Palestinian people, including those in the territories of 1948.

This is an edited translation of an Arabic article first published on Tamooda on October 7, 2024.