It was a small crowd, but a momentous occasion, when about 200 anti-war protesters took their places at a roadside junction in central Israel on Saturday afternoon, and began calling in Arabic and Hebrew for a ceasefire in Gaza, as passing cars honked their approval.
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, the leaders said.
A first attempt in Nazareth in November was effectively banned when police arrested community leaders and Arab Knesset members before the event began. It was months before another demonstration was approved, and about 1,500 people turned out in the small village of Kafr Kana, on 2 March.
“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.”
“We are grieving, lost. It is desperate. We were trying to do something against the war, and for that a lot of young people and women were arrested, were investigated, just because we expressed our feeling [of solidarity] with the people in Gaza, our people.”
Police commissioner Kobi Shabtai said in October that any demonstrators coming out in solidarity with Gazans would be put on buses “heading there now”. The supreme court ruled in November that an effective ban on anti-war protests in Arab areas was legal, after the police said they did not have the manpower to secure them.
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.
US President Joe Biden recently called for an “immediate ceasefire”, and was caught on microphone saying he planned a “come to Jesus” discussion with his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu about humanitarian aid for the enclave.
Aya Jabari, a nurse from Taybe, came to the protest with her three sons, Ghassan, 13, Mohammed, 11 and Abudy, six. “This was the first opportunity, so I jumped on it. It has been very difficult to speak out,” she said, carrying a sign reading “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies”.
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.
Palestinians are losing their jobs and their livelihoods, and feel stifled by a political climate that makes it almost impossible for them to criticise the campaign in Gaza.
“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 a lopsided crackdown on civil rights and freedom of speech inside Israel. “Calling for an end to the war became a symbol of treason, the whole of society feels they have a right to be a policeman to question you or even snitch on you because of a sentence like ‘stop the war,’” said Abu Al Asal.
At the meeting before the march, Areen Awieda led a workshop for women on how to express themselves on social media and at protests, without risking their physical safety, their education or their professional future.
“Women need to breathe out, to let out all this anger and suppression inside them,” Awieda said. “Psychologically we are affected deeply, because we are one people.”
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.
Many have been fired, or their jobs have vanished, as tourism – a vital industry in Arab-dominated areas of Nazareth and East Jerusalem – crumbled. And now the government is proposing a budget that will cut funding to Arab minorities by 15%.
It would be illegal to directly target an ethnic or religious minority, so instead the cuts are aimed at three “five-year plans” brought in by the previous government to boost development and target crime in Arab communities.
These cuts, if they went through, risked fuelling violence, crime and unemployment, said 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. “I work in a joint institution and I know there are Jewish partners, but the state treats us as enemies from within,” said Kilani, media coordinator at Sikkuy-Aufoq, a Jewish-Arab NGO. “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.
“As a journalist I receive a lot of stories about people who lost their jobs, or are afraid to express themselves at work, afraid to even like a story in a WhatsApp group,” she said.
For Bilal Zoabi, the conflict has been personally and professionally catastrophic. He has had to close a restaurant, and the handful of visitors to his remaining cafe and gallery barely cover running costs, while the parents of a Jewish activist friend, Maoz Inon, were killed by Hamas on 7 October.
“When I refer to the situation, it is because our friends are dying. Not just in Gaza,” he says. He set up a mourning tent outside his cafe so Inon could mourn his parents with friends from Nazareth.
Inon still visits, but most Jewish Israelis stay away. “It felt like they were seeing us as the ones who did the attacks on 7 October,” he says. Arabs are equally wary of visiting Jewish majority areas, and travel restrictions have made visiting the West Bank complicated.
“I used to like to go to Hebron [where he gets handicrafts for his gallery], now the roads are closed. I used to like to go to Tiberias [on the Sea of Galilee], now I don’t. You don’t know what the reaction will be.”
The combination of censorship, self-censorship and economic catastrophe is eating away not only at daily life, but at hopes for the future. Abu Al Asal says she no longer knows what to say to young people who are thinking of trying to study and perhaps build a life outside Israel.
University, which should be a time of exploring life and possible paths through life, has become for young Palestinians a time of self-censorship, and discrimination is rife.
“I am not sure I have enough answers for a young person who says they want to look for a future elsewhere,” said Abu Al Asal. “But I want them to feel this is our country, our land and we should be developing our community here.”
