Palestinians’ steadfast struggle since 1948

Author: Tawfiq Abu Shomer

Palestinians who have remained on their land since 1948 will remain a thorn in Israel’s side, and Israel will continue seeking to weaken them as a prelude to getting rid of them. It has tried to strip them of their identity as Palestinians by labeling them “Arabs of Israel”; some Israelis even attempted to Judaize the Palestinian Bedouin in Ben-Gurion’s era but failed, and the residents of the village of al-Araqib rebuilt their village 242 times after it was demolished, up to July 2025.
The occupation authorities have worked to exclude Palestinians from their villages, bar them from important jobs in Israel, and imposed what is arguably the most brutal racist law — the Kaminetz Law of 2018, which gives Israel the right to demolish Palestinians’ homes while obliging the Palestinian whose house was demolished to pay the cost of the demolition. They also failed to pass the Prawer Plan law in the Negev in 2013, which aimed to confiscate the homes of 150,000 Palestinian Bedouin under the pretext of “developing” them and resettling them in government‑authorized towns.
In 2011 a polemical book was published against the Palestinians who remained on their land titled “Palestinians of Israel: A Minority Against the Jewish State,” by Professor Dan Schueftan, head of the research center at the University of Haifa.
That work incites against Palestinians from a racial perspective: it accuses Palestinians of refusing to live in Israel as a minority and of being enemies of the Jewish state, claiming they seek to establish a Palestinian state within Israel. It compares them to the ultra‑Orthodox Haredim, portraying them as lazy recipients of benefits. The book cites statements by Palestinian politicians hostile to Israel.
The author sees only two possible solutions. First: that Palestinians recognize themselves as a minority in the state of Israel, participate in all its activities while retaining their culture and identity, and refrain from acts hostile to Israel. Second: if they wish to realize their identity in another state, they should leave Israel and abandon claims to the land — in other words, be deported to other countries.
Dan Schueftan did not stop at this incitement in his book; he also accused left‑wing Israelis sympathetic to Palestinians of being responsible for the failure to integrate them into Israel’s institutions. He singled out a number of leftist organizations that support Palestinian rights, notably Breaking the Silence, Ir Amim, Sikkuy and Zochrot, among others that document discriminatory practices against the Palestinian owners of the land.
The incitement has not been limited to this racist book; it has reached Israel’s military and intelligence institutions, which continue to try to dismantle the social fabric of the Palestinian community and divide it by fomenting strife and reportedly training killing gangs in Palestinian towns and villages, alleging that the resilient Palestinian community is destroying itself. Israel Police acknowledged that 76% of homicide victims in Israel between 2021 and 2025 were Palestinians. Some 891 Palestinians were killed in these crimes over four years, a Palestinian death rate of 16 per 100,000, while the rate among Jews in Israeli society was only one per 100,000.
I will also recall another balanced book by the fair‑minded researcher Yair Buimel, reviewed by Professor Saeed Ayash in the Al‑Mashhad supplement of the Al‑Ayyam newspaper on 25/12/2007, which provided an evenhanded account of the situation of Palestinians who remained in Israel. The book documents the continuation of Judaization and land confiscation: Judaization plans turned 80% of the Arab population into refugees far from their villages. Their share relative to Jews was 15% in 1948 and, after large Jewish immigration, fell to 12%.
The book also summarizes Israeli politicians’ view of Arabs in Israel as follows: Arabs are part of the Arabs outside Israel and therefore constitute a danger. Accordingly, several measures were applied: excluding Arab towns from development plans; ignoring their presence in Israeli media discourse; deepening religious and sectarian divisions among them; isolating them from the Jewish population; excluding them from state institutions such as the army, the media, the judiciary, academic institutions and government companies; and confiscating their lands.
The author adds that the view of them changed ten years after Israel’s establishment because expulsion and the Kafr Qasim massacre in October 1956 did not succeed in removing them. As a result, Israeli political frameworks emerged to deal with this Arab reality, including the Mapai party’s committee for Arab affairs established in 1957, whose slogan was how to integrate them with the least loss. This entailed preventing independent Arab frameworks in education, economy and politics, while the office of the prime minister’s adviser on Arab affairs remained focused on security monitoring of their contacts with the Arab environment. Governmental bodies such as ministries, the Histadrut and security sectors dealing with Palestinian Arabs abolished military rule in 1967; Arabs became members of the Histadrut and medical services, and Arab students were allowed into universities, with the general aim of improving living conditions. Anti‑Arab measures proceeded along three tracks: the economic track, which included the confiscation of more than 60% of the lands owned by Arabs through laws that enabled the seizures, depriving Arabs of agriculture — their principal traditional occupation — turning them into wage laborers and preventing them from establishing industry.
The education track forced Arabs to establish an education system administered by Israel aimed at erasing Arab identity and preparing teachers for that purpose; Arabs were prevented from modernizing their education. They were also barred from forming Arab political parties since 1948; an Arab party, the “Party of the Land,” was founded in 1959 and later removed from the law.
Thus the researcher Yair Buimel diagnosed their crisis and put his finger on the wound of the Palestinians who remained on their land.
I will not forget the racial discrimination between the Jewish population and the Palestinians who remained on their land in the judicial system and trials. The Israeli court administration commissioned a study covering 1996–2005 to answer the question: is there discrimination in the judiciary between trials of Jews and trials of Palestinians?
Specialist researchers examined 1,500 cases, and the results were shocking in cases of violence, drug trafficking and weapons possession: Palestinians accounted for 48% of convictions in those categories, while Jews accounted for only 33% for the same offenses. Sentences for convicted Jews averaged nine months in prison, while convicted Palestinian Arabs received 14 months on average.
The file of discriminatory laws remains the most racist, particularly regarding the right of return for Jews and family reunification for Palestinians. A Jew enjoys the right of return to Israel without restrictions, receives an Israeli passport and is exempted from customs, while Palestinians are not even granted the right to family reunification for a spouse, even when both spouses are native to the land.
Regarding the trials of Palestinian detainees from among those who remained on the land, Israel’s internal security agency decides the prosecutions and overrides judicial rulings and legal demands by lawyers.