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A recent poll by Israel's Channel 13 found that nearly one third of Israelis are considering emigrating out of the country for fear of losing their civil rights to the judicial overhaul of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government. Travel agencies and migration lawyers have reported a spike in requests from Israelis seeking to relocate from the Jewish State, Israeli doctors have told reporters they are willing to work for free abroad just to get out of Israel, and prominent High-Tech leaders are in the process of moving or considering it. Many more have taken to the streets of Tel Aviv for over 30 weeks in a row, while thousands of Israel's army reservists are refusing to report to duty.
For us Palestinians, there's something poignant in seeing Israelis take to the streets in weekly demonstrations and talk about emigrating as a result of democratic backsliding. We Palestinians in the occupied territories have been living with no civil rights at all under Israel's military rule for over 56 years now. But we are expected to just live with it, to stay quiet and keep our heads down.
Of course, I sympathize with the grievances Israelis are expressing, and I support the anti-government opposition. Yet I can't help but wonder, what if those Israelis were to live as Palestinians for a day? Would they tolerate living under a foreign belligerent occupation that gives them virtually no rights at all?
Their recent activism suggests they would not—that Israelis hold their democratic rights dear. So why do they see no problem entrapping us in a much worse situation and expecting us to live happily and thrive?
Unlike Israelis, we can't take to the streets. The Israeli authorities that control our lives are not accountable to us. In the West Bank, Palestinians are locked in separate, discontiguous cantons that represent less than 40 percent of the land meant for a Palestinian state, which is already less than 22 percent of historic Palestine. 97 percent of requests to live or build outside these confines are denied. In Gaza, Israel controls our water and electricity and where we move and even breathe, coordinating with Egypt to seal us off from the rest of the world.
Between our separate cages, there are countless military checkpoints, watch towers, heavily armed soldiers, giant walls, surveillance cameras, and AI-powered robot guns. We need to petition for security permits from the military to import or export, to travel in or out, to pray at the al-Aqsa mosque, and to seek medical treatment within the separated parts of the Palestinian territories.
And this while Israeli settlers have been stealing private land—all too often with government backing, which legalizes this blatant theft. Entire Palestinian communities have been depopulated at the whim of the military or settlers. At any given time, the Israeli military or armed Israeli settlers can and do raid and rampage Palestinian villages with virtually zero consequences, even when people are killed. The quest for justice and retribution almost always ends up going nowhere.
Meanwhile, a quarter of Palestinian prisoners in Israel are jailed indefinitely without trial or charges, including minors. The rest are tried in military tribunals where conviction rates exceed 99.7 percent. Palestinians can even get arrested for a Facebook post—both by Israel and by the Palestinian Authority, whose collusion with Israel means we have no accountability there, either. Entire families have been collectively punished and their homes demolished for the actions of one of their relatives.
Would any Israeli accept living a day under these conditions? As Israel's former Prime Minister Ehud Barak once put it, "If I were a Palestinian of the right age, I would join, at some point, one of the terrorist groups."
Now that Israelis are experiencing a glimpse of what it feels to live in fear of government tyranny and authoritarianism under the most extremist far-right coalition in the country's history, this is an opportune moment to create more sympathy and understanding of our experience as Palestinians. For Israelis can never truly live in peace, prosperity and security if Palestinians don't enjoy an equal measure of basic rights, dignity and freedom.
After all, there is a direct link between the rise of the Israeli far right with its judicial overhaul and the occupation of the Palestinians. Extremist and supremacist Israeli parties like Jewish Power or Religious Zionism rose to power on the back of the insecurity and hatred the Israeli-Palestinian conflict creates. Israel's Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir campaigned on restoring security by deporting disloyal Palestinians, reinstating the death penalty against Palestinians, granting full-impunity to Israeli soldiers and policemen who shoot to kill, and arming Israeli civilians.
Moreover, the judicial overhaul is inextricably linked to accelerating Israel's annexation of the occupied territories and crushing of Palestinians. Just last week, when Israel's Justice Minister listed five examples to justify the canceling of the "reasonableness rule" that allowed the Supreme Court to block government decisions, all the examples were about Palestinians and the occupation. And at a pro-government demonstration, Likud Knesset member Tali Gottlieb was advocating for the judicial overhaul by accusing the Supreme Court of standing in the way of home demolitions of Palestinians and preventing the IDF from taking Palestinians as human shields and revoking the rights of Palestinian "terrorists."
The Israeli pro-democracy demonstrations should not be satisfied with protecting the status quo and restoring the pre-Netanyahu normal. To truly prevent Israel's slide toward authoritarianism, they should work toward the ending the occupation and the military dictatorship of Palestinians. Let us bury the hatred, bitterness and hostility that has consumed us for six decades.
Israelis clearly value their democratic rights. I would only ask that they value ours.
Muhammad Shehada is a writer and civil society activist from the Gaza Strip and a student of development studies at Lund University, Sweden. He was the PR officer for the Gaza office of the Euro-Med Monitor for Human Rights. He is a columnist at the Forward.
The views in this article are the writer's own.
