← Identity/Crisis
Loading summary
Transcript26 lines
- [00:07]
A
Hi, I'm Michelle Siegel, the producer of Identity Crisis. Today we're bringing you another special episode recorded Thursday, July 9, during Hartman's community Leadership Program in Israel. Every summer, hundreds of leaders and learners gather on our Jerusalem campus to study with Hartman's leading faculty, engage with the richness of Jewish ideas, and explore the realities, responsibilities and complexities of citize in contemporary Israel. And that's some of what you'll hear in today's show. Yehuda Kertzer sits down with Rana Fahum, vice president and director of the center for Shared Society at the Shalom Hartman Institute. Here's Yehuda.
- [00:46]
B
Good evening, everyone. So a few weeks ago, I was leading tiul with one of our lay leadership groups that was here at the Machon. I did a whole tour down from the Mount of Olives through the Church of the Holy Sepulcher out to the Jewish Quarter. And at one point, as part of the Teules, even though we were focusing on ancient architecture and archeology, I pointed out to them along the way in the Muslim quarter and the Christian quarter, where you could see very large Israeli flags, usually on rooftops, but sometimes in the narrow alleyways, and talked about the displays of national symbols by Israelis as a means of signaling sovereignty, especially in occupied territory. And one of the lay leaders asked what I thought was a fair question, but one that felt obvious to me, and I realized it needed to be unpacked, was why don't we see Palestinian flags? And so I explained there's no legal prohibition for the display of Palestinian flags. The Supreme Court has been consistent in arguing that there is a carve out exception for creating the possibility of violence or incitement, but that at the same time, the police force, especially under the leadership of Itamar Ben Gvir, reads that exception very broadly and creates tremendous difficulty for anybody who actually tries to display the Palestinian flag in public, especially when it conveys national sentiment or it means to make a claim the way that the Israeli flag does. This is one of the tensions or paradoxes at the heart of the very question of national rights here in Israel. For Israelis and Palestinians, there are ultimately three discourses of rights. There is the discourse of human rights, whose antecedent is natural rights, but which really came to be articulated very fully in the 20th century. Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the recognition of the inherent dignity of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world. We have a second discourse of rights, which is civil rights. Not just civil liberties, what is prohibited from us in terms of government intrusion, but the responsibility that governments have to take to ensure that people actually have political rights. The key in this context, the difference between human rights and civil rights is the state itself. Hannah Arendt famously writing, nobody really needs human rights like that's nice to have. But if you have no political apparatus that can grant you rights, which he called if you don't have the right to have rights, then human rights can be discarded very easily wherever you happen to live. But then there's this third level which is national rights, the right to be thought of as a collective. And if you're thought of as a collective, you then become entitled to, to self determination, if not even political sovereignty in your ancestral homelands. You wind up having cultural rights, the right to raise your own flag. Now when we think about these rights stories, Jews are all over this story. The international community started thinking about human rights very differently because of the experience of the Jewish people in the Shoah. And what it translated into for Jews in the 20th century was not just that we became a people who was recognized as having human rights. Thank God for that. That's the bare minimum. But it translated into a different approach in the west of the responsibility of states to provide Jews with civil rights. And most powerfully, it manifested in the global recognition that the Jewish people had national rights. It's impossible to understand Zionism and the international recognition of Zionism without understanding that the world basically woke up and said, the Jewish people don't just need civil rights and human rights, but they need national rights. For us American Jews, we get the best of both worlds. We fight for civil rights back home. And we tend to like participating in the story of the Jewish people having national rights. When we get here, we also get very offended by the notion, I would say, as a Diaspora Jew, when someone says to us, well, yes, Jewish people in America should have civil rights, but they should stop arguing that the Jewish people should have national rights. When we are asked, let go of your Zionism in exchange for being thought of as a good civil rights entitled Diaspora Jew. But that same story that we tell for Jews exposes the predicament of the Palestinian people. The international community believes that Palestinians have human rights. In Israel, there's a very complicated story about civil rights, depending which Palestinian you are, where you live, what the law tells you and how the law is enforced. And by and large, although the international community believes that the Palestinians have national rights, Israelis do not. And that gets at this dilemma about whether Palestinians can Display a flag that signals their right to have rights on a national level within a country where their rights are treated as suspect. I'm delighted, honored, and thrilled to be joined by my friend Rana Fahum, who is the vice president of the Sholem Harman Institute. Many of you now know Rana after you've been to the Mahon before. Rana founded and directs our center for Shared Society here at the Mahon, which is really breaking new ground in a whole variety of ways. Both working in the school system between the Jewish and the Palestinian Israeli school systems to create bridges through ideas, education and relationships. Working to create a whole generation of Palestinian Israeli leadership on university campuses. Launched this year, the Hartman Institute's first Arabic language podcast broadcasting here in Israel. Rana, thanks for being here with me tonight and with all of these rabbis.
- [06:48]
C
Thank you, Yehuda, and good evening to all.
- [06:52]
B
Rana, I want you to start personally and tell a little bit of your story, maybe even some of your family story, your story, both as a Palestinian and maybe in parallel columns, how you experience your story personally as an Israeli citizen.
- [07:07]
C
Thank you for the question. I just have a couple of comments on your introduction before I go into my personal story is that when you mentioned those three sets of rights, I think they're very much connected to each other. And actually the right to have rights also tells us that once you harm the civil rights of your citizens, you also harm their human rights. Because human rights is all about dignity. And it actually says that in the resolution that you talked about in the charter that you talked about. And when you look at your citizens and you harm their right, whether in participation or in their access to power, or by deciding or putting different levels of the citizenship and in a sense putting different kinds of citizens, depending on whether you think their service is worthy and other ideas like that, it's not only you're harming their civil rights, but also you are harming their basic human rights, because this is where dignity comes in into the story. So that's the first thought. The second thought is that sometimes when we talk about civil rights, we have the illusion that you can recognize the individual personal rights of a person, but ignore the collective rights of different groups. And what usually happens is that doesn't work, not for anybody, and especially not for ethnic minorities, not only in Israel, but generally speaking. So when we talk about our civil rights and our human rights and about our national rights, I view part of my civil rights in Israel as to be part of the public sphere, for the public sphere to mirror also parts of who I am that's actually because I insist on that citizenship. And for the public sphere to represent me and for me to feel comfortable in the public sphere, it has also to have parts of my national identity. Whether it's the language that I speak, whether it tells the story and the history of the place, whether it talks about my connection to the land, and most importantly, whether the public sphere can envision the future that I want to be part of building for both of us, metaphorically speaking, my family, my personal story. So I come from big known family in the north, which has been actually a number of mayors in Nazareth before 48. And in 48, the mayor of Nazareth was Sheikh Yousef Al Fahoum, who is my grandfather. He's related, not directly my grandfather. And the story of Nazareth is very interesting because in 47, 48, most of the villages around Nazareth were demolished. Some of the villages were burned and people were displaced. Many of the people that were displaced, I think in a very natural way moved. And they sought protection in the biggest city for the Palestinian community at the time. So many of those villagers went to Nazareth. And then something very interesting happened. First of all, Nazareth had to give refugees to those villages and to protect them. And people took them into their houses. And it was obvious that the Arab troops and the Palestinians were losing the war. And because of the destructions of many villages around Nazareth, the leadership of Nazareth came together and they asked the questions, what do we do now? Okay, what is the right decision to be made? Of course, from the Israeli Jewish side at the time, there was also a decision not to destroy Naz and not to occupy Nazareth by force due to the importance of Nazareth for the Christian world and probably some other ideas that they had or reasons. And then one day, Sheikh Yusuf Al Fahum, which was the mayor, was called actually to meet with representatives of the Jewish forces and they negotiated. And he made the decision alongside with other leaders in Nazareth to surrender. And first of all, to surrender in the terms of those times was very courageous from the one side, but he was worried. And people now say that that was the reason that Nazareth stayed the biggest Palestinian city inside of Israel. And people of Nazareth were in displaced. But at the time, people didn't like the decision. And at the time he was called by some people as a traitor because they thought that you have the obligation to continue the fight for Nazareth, you know, till whatever. But he realized that we were losing the war and he decided to surrender. And a year after, he actually resigned from being the mayor of Nazareth. And since then, nobody of my family actually tried to be elected. I grew up in the light of that story, in the light of how a courageous decision which was harshly judged at a certain point later on, becomes something that people view and talk about in a very different way. And it's a story that holds the two parts of what does it mean to be a Palestinian? And what does it mean to be an Israeli? And then how would you write your history after that? What would be the story that you would tell, which, as from this specific story we know, shifted throughout the time it was told differently in the 1950s than it's told today? And then what is that? Between the act of treason, between the act of bravery, between a very courageous decision by a leader that now his leadership is acknowledged within the Palestinian community, and between the question of how do you hold this complexity of being both a Palestinian and at the same time, Israeli? I want to connect this to the flag sentiment. Of course, flags, by definition, are very political, and we instrumentalize our flags. And in a sense, when you ask me deep inside do I feel emotionally attached to the Israeli flag or do I feel emotionally attached to the Palestinian flag, my genuine answer is that I am attached to the Palestinian flag, not because I want to have an inner Palestine inside of Israel, but this is the flag that I believe that tells my story, while the Israeli flag, as a metaphor, tries to alienate me and actually to make me transparent in the best case scenario. Now, I understand that this is a complex thing because, of course, the way I feel attached to the Palestinian flag, I understand the Jewish sentiment towards the flag of Israel, and I respect that. And I think the Jews have to have a flag which represents them. But maybe we can be more creative in thinking about what would be the right combination for us in order that I wouldn't feel alienated from the flag or for all other spheres to be okay, that even if I don't feel represented in the flag, it would be a marginal issue. The Palestinian flag, to me, tells my story, tells my aspiration. It tells that I aspire for peace and for the Palestinians to have a nation of their own. And you talked about the right of Jews not only to have human rights, but to have also civil rights and to have national rights. And we discussed this before this at the time that the world gave legitimacy and admitted the Jewish right to have a national state. At the same time, they also admitted the right of the Palestinians to have their states. And it could be the case that since I'm an Israeli citizen and I always talk about the citizenship, and I fight for the Israeli democracy. And I want to be part of what's going on in Israel. The mere fact that there would be a Palestinian state, which I might not be part of, definitely won't be part of. We know that after Oslo. But it gives some kind of answer to my national aspirations, even if I'm not in Palestine to be.
- [16:14]
B
Yeah, I mean, this is so interesting because when I did a whole presentation for the Hartman board a few weeks ago on what the relationship of American Jews is to America, and one of the texts I taught was Louis Brandeis famous treatise about how becoming a Zionist and American Jewish attachment to Zionism would ennoble who American Jews are. And Brandeis memorably says every American Jew should become a Zionist, though neither he nor his descendants will ever live there. I remember I caught your eye and you were taking furious notes because it was like, that's the same. Like this Palestinian national emergence, even in the form of Palestinian statehood, would ennoble Palestinians, though they decide that they actually not going to move to Palestine. I wonder if you could also just unpack a little bit the terminology piece, because I know it's important to you to be described as a Palestinian citizen of Israel. You. That's a contentious term because some people don't like using that phrase about Palestinians. They want to call them Arab Israelis. That was the term for a long time. Can you talk a little bit about the significance of holding on to that particular expression of identity?
- [17:32]
C
It's interesting whether it's an expression of our identity or it's our identity. I mean, I am a Palestinian. To me, the use of the term Arab Israelis, and not just to me, this was a term which was initiated by the state of Israel, meant specifically to disconnect us from our Palestinian peoplehood. And for a while it actually worked because as you well know, after 48 till 66, we were put under military rule. And then if we were asked to raise the Israeli flags in our schools, we did that. And if we were to sing songs while we were under military rule about how proud we are of the state of Israel, we would. And if they called us Arab Israelis, then we would use the term of being Arab Israelis. And actually, I remember growing up in the 70s, I just gave up my age during the 70s, where when I would say Palestinian, that reaction of the grownups of the family would say, shh, shh. You know, it's like you don't want to. We always say the walls have ears. And you cannot actually talk about that. But actually, 67, as professor would Say, it reintroduced us and it reconnected us with our Palestinian hood and our Palestinian people. But at the same time, it allowed us to discover our Israeli ness in a very weird, twisted way. Because then you could talk about the fact that you have a different status than your cousin who lives in Jenin or in Nablus or in Ramallah or in Khalil, and then suddenly you realize that that legal status comes also with privileges and with the responsibilities. And then you have to ask the question of how does the citizenship look like? So from the one side, we reconnected to our Palestinian people. From the other side, we discovered our Israelness, because the military rule also ended in 66, and then began that very long journey of again engaging in who we are as people, taking pride in our language, in our culture, reclaiming our naming, which is obvious, okay? But we had to reclaim it and to come and say we want to be called Palestinians, because that's my heritage, that's my culture. And my loyalty is also lying there. What makes it threatening to Israelis. Speaking of the text that you just mentioned is that once you say my loyalties lay there, it immediately translates that if I ask you the question of whether you're with us or against us, then you're against us. And what we try to do and say, and I think the vast majority of Palestinians inside of Israel have been saying that for at least the past 40 years, is that we can live with those two identities and we can have two different sets of loyalties. And my set of loyalty towards my fellow citizens and towards Israel is different somehow different from the loyalties that a Jew would have, whether a Jewish Israeli or a Jew from America. And to understand that difference, it just means it's different. It doesn't mean it's less good or better. And then you have to capture that difference. So going back to your question, I think this is the way we view ourselves. This is the way we want to be thought of. And even insisting on us being called Palestinians at times of war and after October 7, and many of us had to pay personal price for saying that we're Palestinians and we had a regression is for me to insist, okay, that I am a Palestinian and it's not the image that you have in your mind.
- [21:41]
B
I mean, again, it echoes with Brandeis, who said in the same article, multiple loyalties are only a problem if they're inconsistent. And this insistence back my loyalties look like they're in conflict with each other because Israel is in conflict with the Palestinian people. And you live in this intermediate space of your national loyalties and your civil loyalties are in tension with each other. But in theory, they don't have to be understood as in tension with each other. I wonder if you could unpack a little bit the way this translates in terms of Palestinian peoplehood, because I can imagine a Palestinian living in Gaza may have ambivalent feelings about Palestinians who pay taxes to and live inside Israeli society. So what is the tether that connects you to Palestinians in Gaza, in the west bank, and in the Palestinian Diaspora? Because I feel like there are interesting analogues for Jews. But I don't want to view the Palestinian story through exclusively a Jewish lens
- [22:44]
C
before talking about a person from Gazi who has issues with me paying the taxes which are used to bomb the people in Gazdi, which you didn't say. But I'm going to say you have to understand that we struggle with that too. Okay. And that struggle becomes really harsh. You know, sometimes you do something which you didn't choose, but you feel it's misused, but then you come and say, I'm going to do something good maybe in order to, you know, balance it out. And when we try to bring aid into Gazde and we can't, and when we try to go and maybe volunteer in Gaza and we can't, and when we raise our voice in order to talk about morality of a war and to talk to the Israeli consciousness and we're not heard, it becomes really harsh. And of course, as every other people in the world, although we view ourselves as a nation, there are internal tensions. And as I said many times, the fact that we have different legal status. Let's put the Diaspora for a second on the side. We'll get to it. But even within Israel, Palestine, we have different legal status. We have citizens of the state, we have the West Bankers who don't have anything. And. And of course, there is East Jerusalem who are residents but not citizens of the state. And many times that creates some kind of tension, sometimes jealousy, sometimes anger, sometimes tension. But generally speaking, and especially after Oslo, there is more sense of understanding that as the Palestinian people, I was teaching about this an hour ago, as the tragedy of the Palestinians is that we have different histories, it could be also a potential for a very big strength. Because I think that now, if you talk to people in the west bank and Gaza, they do view us as people who support them, who are with them, and maybe who has more voice than they do. And our ability to influence and change and work with the Israeli government is still limited. But it's much, much more than they do. And after Oslo, we kind of realized, and I think we understood that as Palestinian citizens of Israel long before than the Palestinians in the west bank and Gaza. But I think in Israel, Palestine, it is known that we have this different status and we live peacefully with that, with a diaspora, it's a little bit different because when you talk about the Palestinians, you have to differentiate, first of all, between refugees and non refugees. We cannot compare a Palestinian who's living in Chile and is doing great. And even if he has the possibility to come back to Palestine, he probably won't or she probably won't, because they are very integrated in the places that they are in. However, they still have this connection to Palestine. They have this connection to the Palestinian people, their family, friends and relatives. They remember the scenery of their child, and this is definitely what they call home. And they will come and visit, but it doesn't mean that they'll move back. They're very well integrated the way they are. They're very happy. When it comes to the Palestinian refugees in the refugee camps, that's a completely different story. And of course, it's understandable. Up till today, they're not citizens of any other country. They keep on and out of ideology into their refugee status because they do dream of coming back to Palestine or to historical Palestine in their eyes. And here it becomes tricky. It becomes tricky because then we come into the very hard questions, the hard questions of when we talk about the Palestinian right of return, which is a universal right, okay, that's the Palestinian claim. What does it mean? Is it only a symbolic recognition of their right? And do we actually expect for all the Palestinians to come back and what moral price that would lead us to pay? And many of them might look at me and about this conversation that we're having, Yehuda, and say, what the hell is she doing? Okay, this is just normalizing the Zionist story. We know that, we are aware of that, but it doesn't break our relationship. On the contrary, I think it has the potential of actually, when we reach the point of real reconciliation between the two peoples, our understanding of the Jewish people, and specifically the Israeli Jews, might be of huge use in order to reach that process of reconciliation.
- [27:50]
B
We've talked over the years about both protests over the war that took place in the diaspora, and you and I had disagreements about some of these pieces. You, for obvious reasons, were far more accepting of whatever was going to work coming out of both diaspora Palestinians and their allies in terms of strategies to change the regime here, end the conflict, et cetera. I think, though, I've always felt like there's a little bit of, like a contradiction between two types of diasporic pro Palestinian activism, one which is universal in nature, like, take down the whole premise of the nation state and make it possible for all the people between the river and the sea to live in peace. And what that does actually to the legitimacy of the Palestinian story, right? Like that argument actually requires of Palestinians also to be less nationalistic versus a different argument which is hyper nationalistic for Palestinians and is hostile to Israeli. The legitimacy of Israeli national claims. And they are in the same rallies. So I don't know, I wonder if you could react to that, because I would imagine, like, if you're a citizen of Israel and know that you are going to stay a citizen of Israel and are dreaming for, for Palestinian nationalism to have its place in an independent Palestinian state, then the arguments for antinationalism, binationalism, the elimination of boundaries, actually feel like they could threaten your Palestinian ness. So what does it feel like to watch this being litigated out in the world in some places where it echoes with your own dreams and in other ways that it feels like it undermines them?
- [29:38]
C
You know, there are these questions about history. What if? Right. What if? And frankly, if I personally dig deep, deep in what to me is a country that I would love to live in would be a country where literally people can express who they are fully and have parts of their national collective identity be present in the public sphere and at the same time equal for all. And that could echo maybe the idea of from the river to the Sea, which is one country for two nations, or whatever version do you want. But the fact is that we have two very battered nations that are not ready and will not be ready to go for the solution. And we both both the same level, which is interesting that Israel now exists for 80 years and there is not a statehood for the Palestinians. But I think we both need to exercise our nationalism and to feel that there is this piece of land that we feel comfortable with and safe in and something that we can call ours. And it's because of the history of each nation individually. And some of that history is not necessarily relevant to the other, like the Holocaust, which is not necessarily, you know, it's not about the Palestinians and the Israelis, but it is very present in the Israeli and Jewish mentality and the history of both nations together. We need to have that place and we need to have a nation that we call a state, that we call Ours where we can exercise our national rights fully. It could be Yehuda that hundred years down the road, 150 years down the road, our grandchildren and great grandchildren will decide that they want to do this other kind of state. We don't know that. But what we know for sure that we have to have the separation now. Our history is very connected in both good and bad ways. And for us to start even a process of reconciliation, we have to separate. It's like a married couple, you know, maybe you have to separate before trying to go to a psychologist and talk out your problems. And I think that's the situation. And yes, you're right. The mere fact that we call for now for one state solution is not only talks about the Israeli nationalism, but also about the Palestinian nationalism. And the Palestinians are dying to have this, okay, meaning the two flags put and for them to feel very comfortable that this is my nation, my flag, and I actually have the right to decide on my destiny. And I think my people deserve that.
- [32:55]
B
Both of these societies are afflicted by extremists that have totally interfered in any of the process of getting to what you dream of for yourself and certainly for your children. I wonder what the activity of internal criticism for Palestinians looks like and sounds like. And I want to name that like I, as a Diaspora Jew, I struggle all the time with what is the right amount of public criticism I should air about my own people, because that's the moral obligation of being a Jew. Like we have actual Jewish law on this. If you are part of a community that is committing injustice and you don't raise your voice, you are culpable in the injustice. I feel it's part of what it means to be a Jew connected to Israel is that we are obligated to bring our voice and moral criticism. And we also operate within an environment where that criticism, internal criticism listened to outside by people who have more unfavorable understandings, is weaponized against us. And I understand that probably is a more pronounced fear for Palestinian citizens of Israel. But there has to be some amount of like what is the cheshbon ha nefesh for Palestinians about those features of Palestinian society that are also the obstacles that are standing in the way of long term peace and reconciliation with Israel.
- [34:20]
C
So we have the same concept in Islam where it says that if you something which is wrongdoing, you have to fight it with your sword. If you can't with your sword, then you have to find it. And it lists few then. And then finally it says even with your Tongue, meaning talk about it. And if you can do that, then at least with your inner intention, by not accepting the injustice. So we have the same concept in Islam and we struggle in that. Now in that sense, maybe that's the only sense we're luckier than you because we speak a language that not most of those who can weaponize that internal criticism against us. We have those conversations and they're very present, especially after October 7th within the Palestinian community and the Arabic world. And if you listen and tune into Arab channels, you would see that those questions that you're raising and the internal criticism is very, very present and it's there. But we do get defensive when you come with the other in a conversation. And that is also understandable when we talk about minorities who feel threatened, who feel threatened from, and you alluded to that yourself, that this would be weaponized against us. This would be used as if showing that the Palestinian are X, Y or Z. So that also exists. But if you look at the internal Palestinian conversation and internal Arab conversation, you would feel that this self criticism and not in order to come and say we're not good or to show how horrible we are. On the contrary, it's because we want to advance what's going on and we want to reach to a solution which is just for all, is becoming more and more apparent. Of course there are still the limitations. There are the limitations of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. There are the limitations of Hamas in Gaza, who still rules Gaz fully till today. I mean, apart from the parts that Israel has taken control of. Hamas still now runs Gazi. And of course there are the restrictions of the Israelis and the Israeli military within the west bank and the occupied territories. To us Palestinians in Israel, this kind of criticism is very much welcomed by the Israelis. And many times, yes, we feel very conscious about it, but we say it and we do it and we act it, which is the most important thing. And another way of dealing with that criticism is insisting on doing the shared society work and the cross border work and having cooperation in civil society between the Palestinian civil society and the Jewish civil society. That's being criticized by the Palestinian diaspora. But we insist on doing that. And by that you answer the criticism.
- [37:32]
B
So I'm going to ask you two specific questions about Israeli society and Palestinian citizens in particular. So the looming crisis in kind of Jewish Israel among many is around the renegotiation of the social contract that Israelis are having with each other about what its citizens owe the state. By and large, states can really only demand Paying your taxes and abiding by the laws, and you're entitled to a tremendous amount of rights as a result of that basic exchange. But because of the crisis of personnel in the army, the perception of the reality of whatever huge percentage of haredim of ultra Orthodox Jews who not only don't serve in the army, but are offended by the notion that they owe anything to the state for their own protection, has basically worn down Israeli society in its patience level. For an old bad deal of Ben Gurions, it just doesn't work anymore. And it almost feels like hanging in the background of that question is what happens to Palestinian society which cannot serve in the army, cannot participate in wars against its own people. And by and large, Israeli Jews don't want Palestinians fighting in their army alongside them. It's not like they're demanding this personnel. I guess though the question becomes what is the next stage for this notion of sacrifice for the state that is going to be asked of Palestinian Israelis in terms of this demonstration of loyalty? And what about that feels fair? And what about it feels kind of unfair?
- [39:04]
C
When we talk about citizenship, one of the things that we talk about is major element of citizenship is the collective participation. And I think the main issue in Israel we have levels of that participation. And in the public's mind, not only is the military service the highest form of service and of contributing to the state, but also within the serve for the army, it depends also on what kind of service do you do in which part of the army you participate in, et cetera. And I think our main struggle is to come and say we contribute to the state in other ways and we want our contribution to be acknowledged as such and not to be downgraded. Many times when the Israeli speaks, they speak about the ultra orthodox and the Arabs, which is a completely different story. These are two very different minorities in Israel, where one is fighting in order to be on their own in order to disconnect, and the other, meaning the Palestinians are fighting in order to integrate. The Palestinian has been fighting in Israel since the 70s in order to integrate an economy, in society, in politics, to have a say. And the fact is that we, from 2010 till 2020, we doubled our number at the universities. We are almost 40% of the Israeli health care. We want to be part of everything now. We were so concerned to have one unified party, Arab list, because we want to join that effort to change the extremely right government inside of Israel. Our fight is actually to be integrated and not to disconnect. The thing is, when you have only One way to connect which doesn't. And one suit doesn't fit all. And then any other contribution that you're making is being downgraded. Did going back that is actually harming our dignity. That is when I try to participate or maybe hand you a gift or to give something and I'm dying to be part of. And we can discuss whether we like what's going on. We like the policies, we don't like the policies, but we're trying to give and to contribute. But it's pushed back because it's not the kind of a specific service that you need to give, which is one size fits all. And you know that I can give this service. You know that I cannot participate in a military that is actually bombing Gazi. I cannot go and be part of a military which is defending the settlers while they're actually burning villages in the West Bank. And by the way, it's also a moral stand. It's not because that they are Palestinians. I think every person with a moral stand should be having those standards too. So what the state should do and what the Israeli public should do is to diversify the kind of service that you can give that attributes during COVID and we've discussed this previously, if the Palestinian health carers decided that they want to stay at home and not risk their lives every day, the health system in Israel would have collapsed. They didn't do that. On the contrary, instead of one shift, they used to do two and three and four shifts. And for a minute there, despite the pandemic, there was this true feeling of what solidarity should mean, not only in the military sense, but also in the social sense. So these are my thoughts and ideas about it. And I say that maybe, and this might sound naive to some of you, but maybe there is a much simpler solution. Maybe that load shouldn't be even the load of the young Israeli secular or religious Zionist youth. Maybe if we go on the path of peace, you wouldn't have to have a nation army or whatever you call it. Maybe we wouldn't need that. And we would start thinking about what other possibilities do we have in order to contribute to society.
- [43:46]
B
So one other kind of dilemma inside Palestinian society, inside the state of Israel, is around the amount of violence that's taking place in Palestinian communities. It's been reported on extensively. I want you to unpack a little bit the dilemma here because you hear very loud voices saying we're not being protected by the state and by the police in responsible ways. On the other hand, inviting Ben Gvir's police force into Palestinian society is exacerbating the problem. So what does Palestinian Israeli leadership actually want from the state in helping to deal with this plague of violence?
- [44:29]
C
So we're desperate that we want Ben Gvir's police force to come into our cities and towns. I think some of the leaders of the Palestinian community also talked about using some of the instruments of the Shabak, which is a huge no, no in the Palestinian community. But we are that desperate because the situation is that bad. So yes, we're that desperate. And I think that also goes to our citizenship. And it's a much larger issue. Of course, when we talk about the violence within the Palestinian community, we're talking about organized crime. And it's very important to say that it is organized crime. And many of that organized crime was initially protected by the state because the main two major organized crime families were actually collaborators from Gaza. From Gaza who came and got the Israeli citizenship. And we have records of the Shabak telling the police, just don't mess with them because we have to protect them. At the same time, they were actually doing horrible things to the Palestinian community. And it's so interesting that at the places where we ask for an autonomy, like in running education and culture, when we talk about a national autonomy, it doesn't mean that we want to have an army of our own. Not at all. We want to be part of the state. But we come and say, please allow us to run our schools, to decide what curriculum our children should have to decide what kind of civic teaching and learning, how do we learn about our history in order to engage, okay? And in terms of our cultural institutions and et cetera. And in there, we're very much monitored, okay? We have the state really, really looking after us and looking for anything that might sound, which not necessarily is the case, something which is anti the country or anti the state or anti Israel at the same time, where places we actually beg them in order to come and to interfere, they don't. And then that is a very hard feeling for you as a citizen citizen. From on the one side, you're not exercising all of your rights as a citizen that you should, including your collective right, including to come and say, I want to practice my citizenship in this and that way and to choose the way you want to practice your citizenship as long as you are a law abiding citizen. And by the way, being a law abiding citizen, as we call it, it's a very minimal citizenship. And we aspire for a maximal citizen citizenship. But in Places that we beg them to interfere and come in and help us. Because now innocent. Up till yesterday, 154Palestinian citizen was killed because of crime and organized crime in Israel, which is crazy. Israel is not just such a big country, it's a tiny country. And the number of people is, you know, to have 154 people shot dead and this is not including reporting cases of injuries and of damage to the property and, you know, of all other social problems. And the police is hands off. I know of a friend of ours in Nazareth who actually had people break into their home in order to threaten them. And he has cameras and he brought the cameras and into the police station and they told him, are you sure you want to mess with that family? And those are the hard stories that you talk about. And you feel. So I don't feel secured. It's not only about the fact that the police profiles me, but it's also about the fact that they don't protect me. And we have a joke, which is a horrible joke, okay? But the number, the amount of illegal weapons inside of the Palestinian community is unbelievable, believable. 80% of that illegal weapon comes from the army, okay? It comes from the army. It's either people sell it or people go into army bases and steal it, or soldiers sell their weapons. Now we say, you know, we have this joke, which is, again, it's a horrible joke, but I'm going to share it with you. Not if you do something, not if you're planning a terrorist attack. If the idea even crosses your mind, you will find the Shabak and the police at the entrance of your door. In here, we have murders happening. People know who killed and the police does nothing. And that is very hard on this notion of citizenship. So, yes, we want the Ben GVIR police to come, not the way they come, in order to incite problems within the villages and towns. But we want them to exercise what should be a monopoly of the state, which is using weapons and violence, which should be the monopoly of the state in order to bring law back into Palestinian villages and towns.
- [49:36]
B
So I'll ask you one last question. And I've shared this framing with you before. We've kind of joked about it a little bit, that it's like I as an American Jew and a Zionist and you as a Palestinian, citizens of Israel, we like, we share a significant other. And it's like we've met at the party, right? Which is the Israeli Jew, right? The third feature of this, the Israeli Jew here holds most of the power and we, as Jews in the Diaspora, have a deep relationship with the Israeli Jew, but we're also a little bit displaced. And you, as a Palestinian citizen of Israel, has this very complicated relationship with the Israeli Jew. But the Israeli Jew tends to hold a lot of the cards. I do think we need each other in some really interesting ways, including that actually American Jewish Zionists are fighting against forces that we think are ultimately in the long term, danger to both the state of Israel and the process of a genuine, lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians. I wonder if you have thoughts about how we can help each other.
- [50:37]
C
One of the jokes that we also share is that before coming to Hartman, I was like, you know, I didn't have lots of interest in.
- [50:46]
B
In American juice. I understand.
- [50:47]
C
I'm sorry.
- [50:50]
B
We don't take it personally. That's a lie, by the way.
- [50:53]
C
And then. And then one of the things that once, I don't know what happened, and I said, like, yeah, I said it, you know, like, that's the only thing that I'm missing. Another group of people that I care about and I have to worry about, like, really? Don't I have enough on my hands now? You have to add to my table the American Jews that I need to think about and worry about and feel connected to. And in that sense, I think many times even the conversation between us is much easier than the conversation between me and my significant other. We had a meeting a couple of weeks ago with a Jew in the UK who also expressed a very harsh conversation that she had with an Israeli Jew who said, we actually want to decide and we're not really interested in what you're saying, which was very hard on her. So in a sense, sentence, many times this conversation is easier. I think it's easier because when we talk about this experience of a minority, I don't really have, not intellectually, but from here, I don't really have to explain it to you. You get it. You understand it. Not necessarily because either you or I live in a minority mentality, but we know the dangers and how that looks like, even intuitively, without even trying to theorize it and formalize it. I think we both understand the importance of democracy and the importance that the fight for civil rights has to be ours, whether it's related to us or not. I actually quoted a piece of the article that you wrote, I think, in March 2026, that you talked about the Jewish struggle for democracy. And there too I felt, oh, my God, Yehuda is talking about the Jews in America, but he is describing my feeling as a Palestinian. There was a part where you wrote in that article that sometimes the Jews who think that the fight for civil rights has to be very limited either to the interests of the State of Israel and also interest to the Jews. And you said that that means either that they don't believe that civil rights would actually defend the Jews or protect the Jews. And when I read that, I was like, oh my God, that is the difference between the Palestinian political parties. That is the difference between the Mansurah Abbasid, between the two lists. When I fight only for what portion of the allocations of the state I need for the Palestinian people, that is the wrong fight for the Palestinians in Israel, because my real fight is the Israeli democracy and the civil rights of everybody. Eventually that very deep understanding is, I think, also something that we have in common, that it is not only about me, it's about everybody, because what's right for everybody influences also me. And because of course, the moral issues that we hold together.
- [54:15]
B
And you know, I feel regularly that in advocating for a liberal Zionist position in the Diaspora, you and your work here are the plausibility structure for that. Because if there aren't people who are advocating for liberal democracy here, then speaking about liberal Zionism outside of Israel is just talking in platitudes. It's wishing for a version of Israel that is struggling to articulate itself. Rana, I don't get to say this a lot in public, but you are one of the most courageous people I know and it's an honor to work with you.
- [54:47]
C
Thank you. It's an honor to work with you.
- [55:06]
A
Here are some other things that are happening at the Shallow Hartman Institute the Hartman Institute is at a summer camp near you. Hartman faculty, staff and interns are training over 1,000 camp staffers across North America to bring meaningful conversations about Israel, Jewish peoplehood and values to their camp communities. Many participants are connected to our Wellspring programs in Israel and North America. To learn more about Wellspring, click on the link in the show notes. Thanks for listening to our show and special thanks to our guest, Rana Fahum. Identity Crisis is produced by me, Michelle Siegel. Our Executive producer is Maytal Friedman. This is Maytal's last week at Hartman over the past nine years. Her impact and imprint on so many of the Institute's programs, including this podcast, is truly immeasurable. Thank you and Kola Kavod Mehtal. This episode was researched by Gabrielle Feinstone and edited by Josh Allen with music provided by so called transcripts of our show are available on our website. Typically, a week after an episode airs, we're always looking for ideas for what we should cover on future episodes. So if you have a topic you'd like to hear about, or if you have comments about this episode, please write to us@identitycrisicealomhartman.org for more ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute about what's unfolding right now. Sign up for our newsletter in the show Notes and subscribe to this podcast everywhere podcasts are available. Thanks for listening.