Where
We Are
The central element of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is demographics.
When Israel’s first prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, declared independence, he pronounced Israel will be a Jewish and Democratic state. Neither he nor any subsequent government defined what “Jewish,” “Democratic,” or “State” would mean. This ambiguity left wide possibilities for interpretation. Some political leaders conclude it to mean a democratic state with some Jewish-cultural or Jewish-religious aspects and some even as a Jewish-religious state in the fashion of the biblical kingdom of Judah. For most, a Jewish state means a majority of Jewish citizens with preferential rights for Jews. In recent years more and more Israeli politicians have begun advocating for a Jewish-only state.
When Israel was created, two-thirds of the Palestinians fled, and were expelled by the Jewish militias that later united to become the Israeli army. Today, the majority of these refugees remain within 100 km of their original lands, languishing in UNRWA refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank, and Gaza. Their demand to have their right of return recognized is the central issue of peace talks since the Oslo Peace Process began.
In the first years of the state, the nascent Israeli government passed the Absentee Property Law (1950), confiscating the lands left behind by the refugees, the Anti-Infiltration Law (1951) forbidding those who fled to return, and the Law of Return (1950) enshrining that only Jewish people will have a path to citizenship in the new state. As a result, a striated system of rights has been created between Jewish and non-Jewish citizens.
That system led to a social hierarchy not only between the Jews and non-Jews, but also among the incoming Jewish immigrations, with the Ashkenazi (European) Jews enjoying the loots of war, and subsequent Mizrahi Jewish (Middle Eastern and North African), Ethiopian, and Soviet Jewish immigrants suffering from worse living standards, finding themselves on the bottom of the Israeli social hierarchy. Below them still, however, are the Israeli non-Jewish communities – the Palestinians, Bedouin, Druze, Circassian…
Today, roughly half (48%) of Israeli Jews support the ethnic cleansing of non-Jews from the country and the overwhelming majority (79%) feel they deserve unspecified “preferential treatment” over non-Jewish minorities in Israel.
In 1967 the Six Day War saw an overwhelming Israeli victory. Israeli forces conquered territory three times the size of the country prior.
Many of the territories occupied by Israeli forces included the refugee camps to which Palestinians were expelled twenty years earlier. Now that they fell under Israeli control, the people who live on this territory should have become Israeli citizens. This, however, would undermine Israel’s fragile Jewish majority, once again testing the fragile and ambiguous struggle between being a Jewish or democratic state.
Afraid of mounting international criticism over a prolonged Occupation violating the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Israeli government decided to reclassify the conquered territories as “Held,” deciding this reclassification frees it from its obligations under international law. As a result, millions of Palestinians got stuck in the middle, becoming stateless on their own ancestral lands. To this day, they remain stateless.
Funded by the government of Israel, Jewish settlers have capitalized on the legal limbo that persists in the occupied territories, agitating Palestinians to leave and then annexing their lands.
This status quo remains. A failed peace process has left the Palestinian Territories further divided, with an ever-shrinking territory on which a future possible state has been promised. With the exception of occasional terrorist attacks, for most Israelis, the conflict is increasingly evaporating behind clouds of collective denial, segregation walls, checkpoints, and semantics.
A century of dispossession, of cycles of displacement, resistance, violence, bombardment, and terrorism left Israelis and Palestinians blind to each other's humanity. When in 2003 the Israeli government decided to build an eight meter-high cement wall to annex parts of and separate the West Bank from Israel, the mental walls that separated the two peoples cemented as well. A tiered system of rights, of parallel roads, tunnels, bridges, towns led to a segregated sense of existence. Raising generations behind these mental walls entrenched in the populations something even more dangerous than hatred, more dangerous than despair. It gave birth to generations growing up without hope.
The choice to decolonize was therefore first and foremost an action of hope. An action aimed at not only demolishing the physical and mental walls that separated Israelis and Palestinians, as well as Palestinians from each other, but to also to connect the struggle for freedom in Palestine/Israel to the decades-long struggles of colonized peoples from around the globe.
When in 2018 the Truth & Reconciliation Commission launched the Thirty Years of Decolonization period, it brought Israeli and Palestinian designers, architects, economists, educators, and municipal planners together for the first time. For the first time, Palestinian refugees, prevented from returning to their ancestral lands, were able to design a decolonized future alongside their relatives, still living in their original homes. For the first time, the entire system of ethnic domination was disrupted and subverted. It was decolonized. For the first time, Israelis and Palestinians began building a future based on common space.