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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nAlready in the first years of Israel, after it was clear that the attempt to push out the Arabs that remained within its boundaries at the end of the war would not succeed, repeated efforts were made to reach a sort of unwritten deal with the Arab population of Israel. Because of its disconnected and patronizing character, which resembles a current initiative to resolve the conflict, we can call it here, under the inspiration of Donald Trump, \u201cthe deal of the previous century.\u201d As part of the \u201cdeal,\u201d it was proposed that Israel would allocate resources to improving the individual rights, the economic development, and the civil equality of the Arabs. The Arab communities would flourish and thrive, the education system (under the tight supervision of the Israeli intelligence services) would educate to \u201cIsraeliness,\u201d would not allow \u201cradical national voices,\u201d and pave the way of the young men and women, who would be denoted as the \u201ceducated Arabs,\u201d to academe and the labor market. Health services would provide for the needs of the population, and in general there would be full equality between Jews and Arabs on the civil level. In exchange for all these good things, the Arab population must let go of its Palestinian identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The transaction did not succeed for several reasons. One is that the state did not keep its side of the contract it wrote, and distributed the public goods mainly to the Jewish public. Thereby it failed at the economic development of the Arab population and created astounding economic disparities between Jews and Arabs. The second reason is an ongoing failure, that continues to this day, to guarantee civil equality. The third reason the transaction failed is that even if the state had fulfilled its part of the deal, the vast majority of the Arab public was not willing in the first place to ignore and renounce its Palestinian identity for any wealth in the world. Although it did adopt affiliation and other components to its identity, and like in the words of Nazih Kheir sometimes found itself going to sleep with its Israeli affiliation and waking up with its Palestinian sadness, it still did not abandon its deep and primordial attachment to its mother language, its childhood landscape, and the collective memory it carries with it. Nor did it lose the solidarity with its brothers and sisters living under military rule and denied rights. Why have many of the Arab citizens of Israel remained Palestinian? To this there are none better than the words of the Zionist ideologue Ahad Ha\u2019am: \u201cAsk the fire why it burns. Ask the sun why it shines. Ask the tree why it grows. Now ask the Jew why he is a Jew. He can be nothing but what he is.\u201d Neither can we, Palestinians, abandon the important components that shape us, we cannot uproot them from our hearts. As long as the economic development of the Arab population remains stipulated on the demand or insistence that it give up one of the affiliation components of most of the Arabs in Israel \u2013 Palestinianness \u2013 it is bound to fail.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In an essay by Jewish author Jean Am\u00e9ry, \u201cHow Much Home Does a Person Need?\u201d which appears in the book \u201cBeyond Guilt and Atonement,\u201d Am\u00e9ry explains that for him money can be a temporary substitute for a homeland, sometimes even to the point where the Latin saying \u201cubi bene ibi patria\u201d \u2013 where there is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","journal":[4072],"class_list":["post-2451712","journalpost","type-journalpost","status-publish","hentry","journal-issue-09"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n