Arabs Inside: Between Rights Awareness and Existential Awareness

Author: علي حبيب الله

In a research paper recently prepared by Dr. Imtans Shahada and Raimonda Mansour, published by the Mada Al-Carmel Center in Arabic and English under the title "Consolidating and Expanding Political Persecution of Palestinians in Israel," the researchers documented a series of security practices that affected Arab citizens in light of the genocide against Gaza and beforehand, summarizing the policy of violation where the law has become more accommodating to the right-wing security inclination towards Arab citizens, especially under the current government.

The paper illustrates legal precedents that have begun to legitimize violations, including exempting the police's attorney general from the latter's obligation to obtain prior approval before commencing investigations or arrests on suspicion of committing crimes of incitement to "terrorism" or associating with a "terrorist organization." The Israeli public prosecution also granted the police permission to submit requests for extending arrests from the courts until the investigations are complete, which represented an exception that facilitated the police's arrest of hundreds of Arab citizens in the last two years.

The campaign of arrests and silencing targeted doctors, lawyers, and Arab judges, whom National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir labeled in a tweet on the "X" platform as "enemies from within." Politicians, professors, university students, religious figures, artists, workers, and service sector employees were also pursued and detained simply for expressing their opinions against the war on Gaza, the latest of which was the Knesset committee's vote to expel the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality member, Ayman Odeh, from the Knesset.

More dangerously, the Israeli security minister activated administrative arrest orders amidst the ongoing war on Gaza, targeting dozens of Arab citizens inside Israel. Since the end of what is known as military rule imposed on Arab citizens in the 1950s and 1960s, such a level of administrative arrests has not been witnessed. According to data collected by the Arab 48 website, referred to by the Mada Al-Carmel paper, as of early April 2024, about 25 Arab citizens' arrests have been documented, with their detention periods ranging from one month to six months, coinciding with the Knesset’s endorsement in July 2024, in the preliminary reading, of the Emergency Powers Law, which legitimizes the Israeli security minister's ability to arrest an Israeli citizen if he suspects that person – according to the security minister – is a member of a "terrorist organization" or poses a "source of threat" to national security, providing cover for an unruly instigator and security threat like Ben Gvir to issue dozens of administrative arrest orders under dubious security pretexts.

The ancient Romans had a system known as "Iustitium," activated by emperors in emergencies such as wars, disasters, epidemics, and even civil wars. Iustitium was considered an exception because it literally means "suspension of law,” as it is linguistically derived from the word solstitium which means "the sun stopping its course."

That system was seen as an exception because it contradicts the law, implying the total suspension of the latter due to a state of disorder affecting the state and its conditions. However, the current Israeli "exception," characterized by precedents including policies of persecution and intimidation by the current government, which Arab citizens inside Israel have not experienced in decades, does not stem from the state being in a temporary state of disorder, but from the very nature of the state itself, which is troubled under its Zionist structure and its self-definition as a Jewish state or exclusively for Jews. Therefore, the measures taken against Arab citizens are not an exception that contradicts or deviates from the legal norm, but rather an exception that substantiates the norm and indicates it, as circumstances have allowed this exception to surface again. Hence, we view administrative arrest of Arab citizens as a return, a return to what once was... the military rule to which the Arabs inside faced in the 1950s and 1960s still lingers in the memory of our community to this day.

Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben warned, in his book "State of Exception," about the relationship linking law to exception and the possibility of legalizing this latter in an attempt to strip a certain social category of its life. Agamben refers to the category of immigrants in the countries aligned with the liberal system in the West, making the lives of these individuals "bare," as Agamben describes, because those exempted from the legal norm are the outcast or the sacred man (Homo sacer) who means the cursed man, or the exiled one, or stripped of citizenship, legitimizing their violation to the extent of killing them without punishment, according to the legal – ancient Roman definition.

Agamben referenced the American Guantanamo detention center and the brutal practices there as an example of what American law considered to be an exception towards some immigrants and Muslims following the events of September 11, 2001.

However, what Agamben discussed regarding what he calls "exception," which renders the lives of a group of people bare and in which individuals are violated under legal justification, emerges from democratic systems in modern nation-states. While, the exception in the case of Israel is not such, because the latter is colonial by its very formation. Thus, the abusive practices of its security apparatuses towards Arab citizens are not an exception at the margins of its law, but because Arab citizens – in its view – are the exception in a Jewish state that continues to exclude them from full citizenship, considering them suspects in their "non-Jewishness" and "potential enemies."

Rights awareness, in its discourse directed at Arab citizens inside, despite its importance and necessity, is no longer sufficient on its own to answer the question of the phase and the shape of the Israeli government's authority therein. For the target is not only the ceiling of freedoms for which Arabs have fought for decades, as the current government continues to exploit the wartime atmosphere against Gaza to lower this ceiling, but rather Arab existence itself has become the objective in the state. Here, by existence, we mean political existence, not demographic existence – although the latter may become the subject of, and on the verge of, future questioning. While our existence, in its threatened political sense, is directly connected to our being and historical formation, which granted an official – political status against the Jewish state, defining us as the people of the land and its rightful owners.

Thus, all the measures being taken against Arab citizens by the current fascist version of the Israeli right aim to silence any politically possible Arab – official subject. Existential awareness is not a priority over legal awareness at this stage, rather the latter is an extension of the former; the persistence in preserving what rights and freedoms have been seized in a long struggle embodies an existential awareness of the form and essence of our political existence in our land.

However, existential awareness does not stand on one leg, but on two: First, it is connected to the nature of our relationship with the state in which we are supposed to be citizens, under which our legal question operates. The second is related to the essence of our relationship with each other as Arabs, as a political group, or the descendants of a unified narrative stemming from a collective political – historical reality at least of our memory, threatening our existence all, regardless of our different political and ideological orientations.

The difference should not prevent us from continuing to define ourselves as a political group, not as tribal communities and sectarian circles, as the Jewish state wants us to be, considering us "the non-Jews."

Community security, in the sense of civil peace, which has become less resilient than before, is what makes our existence as Arabs a question, and this has begun to mandate and call for awareness to answer it.