Silenced for months, Arab Israeli towns hold first Gaza war protests
Palestinian citizens of Israel tell of fear and grief, when showing solidarity with Gaza could risk arrest
Emma Graham-Harrison in Tayibe and Quique Kierszenbaum in Nazareth
Sun 10 Mar 2024
More than five months into the war, with more than 30,000 killed, it was the first time that residents of the Arab town of Tayibe have had a chance to come out and protest. It was also only the third anti-war demonstration organised by Palestinian citizens of Israel to get approval from security authorities.
A first attempt in Nazareth in November was effectively banned when police arrested community leaders and Arab Knesset members before the event began.
“We were forbidden [everything] since the war started,” said veteran activist Nisreen Morqus, the general secretary of the Movement of Democratic Women in Israel, Tandi, an Arab-Jewish group which organised the protest. “You can see there are demonstrations in Tel Aviv every week. But they only give us permission inside our villages, not in Tel Aviv, not on the main road.”
Morqus said the approval for this protest may have come simply because “we kept on asking”, but there had also been a growing international focus on civilian victims of Israel’s campaign, including 300,000 people at risk of starvation in north Gaza.
Israel’s Jewish and Arab populations already lived fairly segregated lives, but divisions widened into chasms in the wake of the 7 October cross-border attacks by Hamas, which killed about 1,200 people, including Arabs, and saw more than 240 kidnapped to Gaza, and after the Israeli assault that followed.
“I am third generation in Nazareth, I grew up feeling I had the right to say what I felt. This is the first time I have had to measure what I said,” said Reham Abu Al Asal, head of the Nazareth regional division of Na’amat, the women’s trade union. “For the first time in my life, I was afraid.
She decided to call online for an end to the war on Gaza on 16 October. “I knew from the moment I put up the post, that I might have to pay a personal price.”
There have been dozens of Israelis detained, fired or harassed for criticising the war or expressing solidarity with civilians in Gaza – mostly, but not all, members of the Arab minority. In addition to constantly being pushed to chose between their identity as Palestinians and as citizens of Israel, the Arab community is being devastated economically by fallout from the conflict.
Saja Kilani, a Palestinian Arab journalist and activist from Nazareth: “Last year 244 people were killed in violent ways in our community, and this year there have been 32 deaths linked to crime already.”
She worries that few Jewish Israelis want to understand Arab fellow citizens. “On Israeli media we hardly exist, we have no problems and very few representatives, we are invisible. They are not willing to hear Palestinians talking about Palestinian problems.”