Special envoy to NazarethThe Basilica of the Annunciation, where according to Catholic tradition the angel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary to announce to her that she would be the mother of Jesus, was practically deserted this Saturday. Like the streets of the Old Town of Nazareth, where few shops remain open. Its inhabitants live with anguish the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, while they wonder if they themselves have a future in their land: they are Palestinians and citizens of Israel, and the two things seem more and more incompatible with each passing day.
“We don’t know what to think. How far will the destruction go? It’s not the first war we’ve lived through, but with today’s technology the devastation is very accelerated. There’s a level of violence you can digest, but we’re talking about entire families wiped out of the map, of burned forests, of old buildings destroyed forever… it takes a lot to recover from that,” explains Feras, a 25-year-old engineering student. This year will be the first that his family cannot go to his fields to harvest the olives. The first time they won’t have oil for their own and to give to friends. The fields are too close to the border with Lebanon and the Israeli anti-aircraft defense system lets through rockets that land in unpopulated areas, especially if they are fields belonging to Palestinians.
A Palestinian city in Israel
The uncertainty of the war in Lebanon is added to the suffering of the war in Gaza, which Palestinians with Israeli citizenships watch helplessly and under heavy repression. “We are mourning, it is desperate. If we try to raise our voice against the war, the police arrest us. Just to open our mouths in solidarity with our people in Gaza,” laments Samira, 95, who has not abandoned her ideas from when she started serving as a young woman in the Communist Party and the Democratic Women’s Movement of Israel. Despite everything, she continues to believe in two states, an independent Palestine next to the State of Israel, and considers that all this is not the fault of the Israelis, “but because America uses them for its own interests”.
The grandmother explains how Nazareth, unlike the surrounding towns, was not emptied in 1948, when the State of Israel was created, because its mayor surrendered when Zionist forces surrounded the city , and Ben Gurion preferred to prevent a massacre in an important city for Christianity from causing rejection in Europe. The original population of the city went from 15,000 to 35,000 inhabitants in a week, because Palestinians from nearby towns that were razed took refuge there.
The “no to war”, forbidden
Many Palestinians with Israeli citizenship have been arrested, fired or harassed simply for expressing their opposition to the Gaza war. According to the NGO Adalah, hundreds have been detained, fired or beaten for criticizing the war and expressing solidarity with the people of the Strip, often just for their social media posts. Israeli police officials threatened to “put on a bus and send to Gaza” any Arabs who expressed their solidarity. Israel’s Supreme Court said the ban on the protests was legal because police argued they did not have enough troops to control them, which has not been done with mass protests by Israeli Jews in Tel-Aviv or Jerusalem. In November, Mohammad Baraka, a former deputy and head of the High Monitoring Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel, the body that represents Palestinians living inside Israeli territory, was arrested for trying to organize an anti-war protest in Nazareth .
Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are on the ropes. This is explained to ARA by Samir, who runs a cultural cafe in the Old Town where they organize activities with Jews and Palestinians. “I don’t deny that I have an Israeli identity card in my wallet, and that I live inside Israel, but that doesn’t mean that they can take away my Palestinian identity; I don’t want to do anything illegal, but I don’t they can forbid claiming my roots. And I don’t mean, as the Jews do, about what happened here 2,000 years ago, but what happened to my father and my mother they were born in Palestine, not Israel.”
One crisis after another
Palestinians with Israeli citizenship feel they must choose between hiding their identity or risking persecution or even expulsion from their land. And it must be remembered that this does not only affect Muslims: 40% of the inhabitants of Nazareth are Christians. And they also see how the economy, based on tourism, has collapsed since October 7. Walking through the Old Town, we find many closed guesthouses and very few shops with their shutters up. They are only those that work for the local clientele: a watchmaker’s workshop, a tailor’s shop, a fruit shop and a coffee roaster that spreads its aroma through all the alleys. The war has scared away tourists: foreigners and Israelis alike. “In the last 25 years we have gone through an intifada, the 2006 Lebanon war, the global economic crisis, and just as we were starting to recover from the pandemic, two more wars have come,” laments a baker.
A customer adds another misfortune to the list: “and the mafia wars”. And he is right: Nazareth, like other localities with a Palestinian majority in Israel, has been suffering from organized crime for years. Mafia gangs extorting businesses, dealing drugs and making money on the black market for loans. “Mafias run around here, with shootings, bombs, threats… and the police do nothing, even though they act in broad daylight. It’s fine for them as long as it’s in Arab cities and neighborhoods, but if it affected a jeu Israeli, in 24 hours they would have solved it,” says the owner of the cafe. To top it all off, Netanyahu’s government is finalizing a new budget that cuts funding to promote development and fight organized crime in Arab communities.
