Misleading Tweet by Avichay Adraee
The Claim
Arabs in Israel (1948 Palestinians) integrate in all aspects of life with Israelis that provides a lot of opportunities to make their future bright and successful.
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Emerging story
On July 20, 2020, Avichay Adraee, Israeli army Arabic spokesman, tweeted a video claiming that Palestinian citizens of Israel integrate with Israelis in all aspects of life which creates a lot of opportunities for them. The video demonstrates Arab Israeli citizens that Adraee claims they climbed the mountains and reached to the peak and are shining stars now. In the video, there were three Arab Israelis, a professor, a singer, and a news anchor that Adraee believes Israel was the reason for their success.
Misbar’s Analysis
Adraee's claim is misleading and doesn’t reflect the reality of the life of Palestinians living in the 48 lands.
These are some facts about Arab Israelis and the 1948 lands:
Arab Israelis are Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, Palestinian citizens of Israel—also now referred to as Palestinians inside Israel, ’48 Arabs, Palestinian Arabs, Palestinian Israelis, Arab-Israelis—are part of the communities that remained inside the so-called Green Line drawn between Israel and Jordan after the 1948 Nakba.
The creation of the state of Israel in May 1948 is referred to by Palestinians as Al-Nakba, the Catastrophe. More than half of the Arab population fled their homes during the war of 1948, Israel expelled 750,000 Palestinians.
Between 1896 and 1948, hundreds of thousands of Jews resettled from Europe to what was then British-controlled Palestine, including large numbers forced out of Europe during the Holocaust. Today, there are more than 7 million Palestinian refugees, defined as people displaced in 1948 and their descendants. Many still languish in refugee camps in neighboring Arab countries, waiting to return to their homeland. Israel’s total population is about 8 million, a number that includes the 1.5 million Arabs already there.
Despite the fact that the people in Adraee’s claim are Palestinians this doesn’t represent all the Palestinian citizens living in Israel.
Here are some facts about the reality of Palestinian citizens of Israel life:
In 2018, Israel passed a law that defines Israel as “the national home of the Jewish people,” with Hebrew as its official language and Jerusalem as its capital. The law states that “the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people,” thereby denying to Palestinians any national rights or existence. The UN CESCR raised deep concerns in its release about the discriminatory effect of the law on Israel’s non-Jewish population including their rights of self-determination, non-discrimination, and cultural rights.
Therefore, the UN body called on Israel to respond to its concerns regarding aggravation of already-existing ethnic segregation and increasing budgetary discrimination in other concluding observations. On August 7, 2018, Adalah filed a petition to the Israeli Supreme Court against the law on behalf of the Arab political leadership in Israel.
Moreover, for many years, the Arab Israeli (Arab) education system suffered neglect and discrimination reflected in large disparities relative to the Jewish (Hebrew) sector system — both in terms of resources allocated and in terms of academic achievements.
The budget per student in the Arab education system remains much lower than in the Hebrew education system. While NIS 20,000 was allocated per primary school student in the Hebrew stream in 2015, only about NIS 16,000 was allocated in the Arab education stream.
According to Human Rights Watch, The Israeli state directly controls 93 percent of the land in the country, including occupied East Jerusalem. A government agency, the Israel Land Authority (ILA), manages and allocates these state lands. Almost half the members of its governing body belong to the Jewish National Fund (JNF), whose explicit mandate is to develop and lease land for Jews and not any other segment of the population. The fund owns 13 percent of Israel’s land, which the state is mandated to use “for the purpose of settling Jews.”
65 Israeli laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens in Israel and Palestinian residents of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, according to Adalah, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.
Adalah's database shows how Israel's laws - dating as far back as 1939 - discriminate against Palestinians.
Ninety-three percent of the land in Israel is public and belongs to the state, JNF, or the Development Authority. Thirteen percent is controlled by the JNF, which has a "hugely influential" role in Israeli land policies.
Palestinian citizens are blocked from leasing about 80 percent of the land controlled by the state according to Adalah.
Israeli authorities have selectively enforced laws on Arab Jerusalemites. These laws, and the policies emanating from them, have defined a single, official (regional and municipal) tax system that applies to both Palestinians and Israelis, despite the fact that the income of Jewish families residing in East and West Jerusalem reaches more than three times the income of Palestinian families in East Jerusalem. This is in addition to clear discrimination in developmental budgets for East Jerusalem by occupation authorities, which has resulted in shortcomings in infrastructure, in particular public streets, and healthcare and education facilities. Moreover, these policies do not treat Palestinians as occupied people in accordance with international law; nor do they grant the status of citizenship and the rights under Israeli law that this entails. This may have contributed to demands for equality in the allocation of governmental and municipal budgets, as variations have created great gaps between Palestinian neighborhoods and Israeli colonies in East and West Jerusalem.
According to the Absentees' Property Law (1950), Palestinian refugees expelled after November 29, 1947, are "absentees" and are denied any rights. Their land, houses/apartments, and bank accounts (movable and immovable property) were confiscated by the state.
Simultaneously, the Law of Return (1950) gave Jews from anywhere in the world the right to automatically become Israeli citizens.