This volume examines the status of the Palestinian citizens in Israel and explores ethnic privileging and the dynamics of social conflict.

Minorities face particular social strains, and these are often manifested in their overall mental health. In Israel, just under a quarter of the citizens are Arab Palestinians, yet very little has been published exploring the spectrum of mental health issues prevalent in this population. The work collected here draws on the first-hand experience of experts working with Israeli Palestinians to highlight the problems faced by service users, their families, and their communities. Palestinians in Israel face unique social, gender, and family-related conditions that also need reliable research and assessment. Mental Health and Palestinian Citizens in Israel offers research and observation on three central topics: socio-cultural determinants of mental health, mental health needs, and mental health service utilization. From suicidal behaviors and addiction to generational trauma and the particular concerns of children and the elderly, this broad and careful collection of research opens new dialogues on treatment, prevention, and methods for providing the best possible care to those in need.

“Nassar brings to life the artistic prowess, rallying cries, and dashed dreams of the leading Palestinian litterateurs in Israel.” —Shira Robinson, author of Citizen Strangers When the state of Israel was established in 1948, not all Palestinians became refugees: some stayed behind and were soon granted citizenship. Those who remained, however, were relegated to second-class status in this new country, controlled by a military regime that restricted their movement and political expression. For two decades, Palestinian citizens of Israel were cut off from friends and relatives on the other side of the Green Line, as well as from the broader Arab world. Yet they were not passive in the face of this profound isolation. Palestinian intellectuals, party organizers, and cultural producers in Israel turned to the written word. Through writers like Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al-Qasim, poetry, journalism, fiction, and nonfiction became sites of resistance and connection alike. With this book, Maha Nassar examines their well-known poetry and uncovers prose works that have, until now, been largely overlooked. The writings of Palestinians in Israel played a key role in fostering a shared national consciousness and would become a central means of alerting Arabs in the region to the conditions—and to the defiance—of these isolated Palestinians. Brothers Apart is the first book to reveal how Palestinian intellectuals forged transnational connections through written texts and engaged with contemporaneous decolonization movements throughout the Arab world, challenging both Israeli policies and their own cultural isolation. Maha Nassar’s readings not only deprovincialize the Palestinians of Israel, but write them back into Palestinian, Arab, and global history.

In Stateless Citizenship, Shourideh C. Molavi examines the mechanisms of exclusion of Palestinian citizens in the Zionist incorporation regime, and centres our analytical gaze on the paradox that it is through the provision of Israeli citizenship that Palestinians are deemed stateless.

Examines how Israeli Palestinians have fared under Jewish rule, revealing both Israels attitude toward minorities and Palestinians attitudes toward the Jewish state and analyzes the Israeli state's policy towards its Palestinian citizens.

Palestinians in Israel considers a key issue ignored by the official "peace process" and most mainstream commentators: that of the growing Palestinian minority within Israel itself. What the Israeli right-wing calls "the demographic problem," Ben White identifies as "the democratic problem," which goes to the heart of the conflict. Israel defines itself not as a state of its citizens, but as a Jewish state, despite the substantial and increasing Palestinian population. White demonstrates how the consistent emphasis on privileging one ethno-religious group over another cannot be seen as compatible with democratic values and that, unless addressed, will undermine any attempts to find a lasting peace. Individual case studies are used to complement this deeply informed study into the great, unspoken contradiction of Israeli democracy. It is a pioneering contribution which will spark debate among all those concerned with a resolution to the Israel/Palestine conflict.

“A remarkable book . . . a detailed panorama of the many ways in which the Israeli state limited the rights of its Palestinian subjects.” —Orit Bashkin, H-Net Reviews Following the 1948 war and the creation of the state of Israel, Palestinian Arabs comprised just fifteen percent of the population but held a much larger portion of its territory. Offered immediate suffrage rights and, in time, citizenship status, they nonetheless found their movement, employment, and civil rights restricted by a draconian military government put in place to facilitate the colonization of their lands. Citizen Strangers traces how Jewish leaders struggled to advance their historic settler project while forced by new international human rights norms to share political power with the very people they sought to uproot. For the next two decades Palestinians held a paradoxical status in Israel, as citizens of a formally liberal state and subjects of a colonial regime. Neither the state campaign to reduce the size of the Palestinian population nor the formulation of citizenship as a tool of collective exclusion could resolve the government’s fundamental dilemma: how to bind indigenous Arab voters to the state while denying them access to its resources. More confounding was the tension between the opposing aspirations of Palestinian political activists. Was it the end of Jewish privilege they were after, or national independence along with the rest of their compatriots in exile? As Shira Robinson shows, these tensions in the state’s foundation—between privilege and equality, separatism and inclusion—continue to haunt Israeli society today. “An extremely important, highly scholarly work on the conflict between Zionism and the Palestinians.” —G. E. Perry, Choice

An estimated 3,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel currently volunteer to serve in the Israeli military, a force fighting other Palestinians just miles away in occupied territories. Surrounded takes a close look at this controversial group of soldiers, examining the complex reasons these people join the army and the wider implications of their decisions in terms of security and citizenship. Most observers perceive a clear and powerful divide in the political tensions and open hostilities between the State of Israel and the Palestinian people, but often fail to notice those who straddle this divide—Palestinian citizens of Israel. These soldiers comprise no more than half a percent of this population, but their stories provide a powerful vantage point from which to consider a question faced by all Palestinians in Israel: to what extent are they, in fact, Israeli? Surrounded contains over seventy interviews with soldiers, and provides a unique glimpse of their conflicting experiences of acceptance, integration, and marginalization within the Israeli military. Concluding with comparisons to similar situations around the world, the book upends nationalist understandings of how wars and those who fight in them work. A key to a more complex understanding of ethnic conflict, this gripping and revealing look at a select group of soldiers will immensely alter ideas about the reasons why people choose to fight, particularly on "the wrong side" of a war.

He discusses the consequences of Israel's ideology, policy, and practices toward the Arab minority; the effect of major developments in the Arab world, particularly in the Palestinian communities in exile and in the West Bank and Gaza; and the impact of changes within the Palestinian community in Israel such as demography, level of education, socio-economic structure, and political culture.

"The widely held assumption that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is a temporary situation and that the 'peace process' will soon bring an end to Israeli abuses has obscured the reality on the ground today of Israel's entrenched discriminatory rule over Palestinians. A single authority, the Israeli government, rules primarily over the area between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, populated by two groups of roughly equal size, methodologically privileging Jewish Israelis while repressing Palestinians, most severely in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), made-up of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza. Drawing on years of human rights documentation, case studies and a review of government planning documents, statements by officials and other sources, [this report] examines Israel's treatment of Palestinians and evaluates whether particular Israeli policies and practices in certain areas amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution."--Page 4 of cover.