Under Israeli apartheid, Palestinians are divided between four land units, subject to varying degrees of domination.
It’s important to understand the different ways apartheid is expressed against Palestinians across the units.
This post is dedicated to Palestinians in the heartland.
Palestinian citizens of Israel are the Palestinians who avoided or resisted ethnic cleansing during the Nakba, and remained within the territory that became the State of Israel.
Unlike Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, Palestinians in the heartland have Israeli citizenship and can vote in Israeli elections.
While they’re in the highest tier of rights afforded to Palestinians in the apartheid hierarchy, they’re treated as inferior to Jewish Israelis and face racist policies.
Adalah Legal Center has compiled a database of 66 racist Israeli laws.
History
When Israel was established in 1948, it imposed military rule on its Palestinian citizens. Israel viewed them as enemies of the state, and used various tactics to control them & expropriate their lands:
- Confining them to enclaves & restricting their movements with a permit system
- Laws to confiscate Palestinian-owned land
- Suppressing resistance to its oppressive policies
- Night curfews; Palestinians who stayed out past curfew could be killed by Israeli forces
- Arbitrary detention without charge or trial
- Creating segregated “closed zones” which Palestinians were forbidden from entering
- Monitoring them through police and intelligence services
Only Palestinian communities were subject to military rule, while Jewish communities enjoyed civilian governance.
Despite lifting military rule in 1966, Israel maintains racist policies towards its Palestinian citizens aimed to confiscate land, segregate them, and prevent them from gaining political influence.
Racial Classification
Israel’s apartheid regime rests on a differentiation between “citizenship” (ezrahut) and “nationality” (le’om).
While these terms are interchangeable in most of the world, their distinction is key in Israel. Israeli courts have explicitly rejected the idea of an “Israeli nationality”, instead maintaining a “Jewish nationality” & an “Arab nationality”. Membership of each national group is based on their ethnic or religious background.
Jewish nationality is afforded to Jews worldwide, even those without Israeli citizenship, as long as they fit within Israel’s definition of “Jewish” in its 1950 Law of Return. This legal distinction is what allows non-Israeli Jews to move to Israel & even to its settlements in the West Bank, for example.
The constitutional 2018 Nation-State Law states that “the right of national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people”, clarifying that the state exists only to serve people based on whether they’re Jewish nationals, not Israeli citizens.
“There is no Israeli nation that exists separately from the Jewish nation”.This enables Israel to “provide basic rights to land residency, housing, movement, and employment on a discriminatory basis with the explicit purpose of privileging its Jewish population”.
Different Property Rights
Israel incorporates institutions like the Jewish National Fund (JNF) into its legal system, which guarantees Jewish control over natural resources and land.
The JNF’s mandate states:
“The loyalty of the JNF is given to the Jewish people and only to them is the JNF obligated…The JNF does not have a duty to practice equality towards all citizens of the state”
The JNF plays a prominent role in the Israel Land Authority (ILA), which manages 93% of state-owned land. The JNF directly owns 13% of this land, and makes up nearly half of the ILA’s governing board.
This means that this 13% of land is legally off limits for Palestinians, and when the ILA leases JNF land, it can only do so to Jewish Israelis. The remaining 80% of land is allocated on a discriminatory basis.
Segregation
Palestinians are excluded from living on Israeli lands through regional ‘selection committees’, which “set the criteria for who can live in almost 70% of Israel’s towns”.
These committees are authorized to reject residency applications based on the “social and cultural fabric of the town” – allowing them to reject Palestinians based on their identity, and segregate Jewish and Palestinians.
Palestinians citizens can’t buy or lease approximately 80% of land in the heartland due to state policies and land laws.
Resources
Less than 0.5% of government properties are located in Palestinian municipalities. Not a single governmental hospital, university, military base, or administrative center is located in a Palestinian municipality.
Israel also segregates its school systems for Palestinian and Jewish students. Palestinian schools are more understaffed, overcrowded, and have fewer facilities than their Jewish counterparts.
In 2013, Israel spent 4.5 times more per student in Jewish localities than those in Palestinian ones.
45% of Palestinians in the heartland live below the poverty line, compared to just 13% of Jewish Israelis.
Judaization
Israel uses discriminatory laws such as the Absentee Property Law & the Land Acquisition Ordinance to “Judaize” areas, maximizing Jewish control over the land, while concentrating Palestinians—who constitute 21% of Israeli citizens–into just 3% of land.
The most successful efforts of “Judaization” are the Negev (Naqab) and Galilee region. An example was the confiscation of 1.2km2 of Palestinian-owned land to create the Jewish-only ‘Upper Nazareth’, and its continued expansion. Meanwhile to its south, Nazareth, the biggest Palestinian-majority city in the heartland, has not been allowed to expand at all, despite the fact that its population has more than tripled since 1948.
“I intend to Judaize the Galilee” – former Israeli Transportation Minister Bezalel Smotrich in 2019
Unrecognized Villages
The Negev (Naqab) region is home to several Palestinian Bedouin communities, whose existence Israel refuses to recognize. These communities are disconnected from basic infrastructure, electricity and water utilities.
The Planning and Building Law of 1965 designated these villages as ‘non-residential”, and illegal, allowing Israel to target them for demolition.
Between 2013 and 2019, over 10,000 Palestinian Bedouin structures were demolished, with an entire village destroyed.
The regime aims to concentrate Bedouins in government-approved shanty towns, and convert their lands into Jewish settlements.