A minority in their homeland, Palestinian citizens of Israel have faced decades of discrimination, marginalisation and violence.
They are descendants of Palestinians who survived the Nakba and remained within the de facto borders of Israel after its establishment in 1948.
Today, they number around two million, making up roughly a fifth of Israel’s population.
Although they hold Israeli citizenship, they continue to face discrimination and state repression.
Deep-rooted inequalities persist in housing, land rights, education and public services, while they struggle with high levels of violent crime and inadequate police protection.
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They have also faced deadly police violence and arrests during protests in solidarity with Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Despite these challenges, Palestinian citizens have organised politically and contested elections in their struggle for equal civil and political rights.
So who are Palestinian citizens of Israel? What challenges do they face, and how much influence could they wield over the country’s political future?
Minority in their homeland
Palestinian Arabs made up the majority of the population of historic Palestine before 1947. The territory now comprises Israel, the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Between 1947 and 1948, Zionist militias, and later Israeli forces, carried out the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to make way for the creation of Israel. Palestinians call this the Nakba, or catastrophe.
In a premeditated military campaign, Zionist forces killed thousands of Palestinians, destroyed hundreds of villages and forcibly expelled 80 percent of the Palestinian population from their homeland.
The violence was formally ended in 1949, with Israel signing armistice agreements with neighbouring Arab states, whose forces had entered the war to stop the takeover of Palestine.
Israel had captured 78 percent of historic Palestine. Around 150,000 Palestinians remained within the territory that became Israel.
Some survived because Israeli forces had not yet reached their areas, while others resisted attempts to expel them.
Nearly a quarter of those who remained were internally displaced.
They were barred from returning to their homes, many of which were in villages that had been destroyed.
Overnight, Palestinians who remained found themselves a minority in their own homeland.
Today, they make up around 20 percent of Israel’s population of approximately 10 million.
They live mainly in Palestinian-majority towns and cities across the Galilee in the north, the Triangle region in central Israel and the Naqab desert in the south.
Around 80 percent are Muslim, 10 percent Christian and 10 percent Druze.
The Israeli state and much of Israeli society commonly refer to them as “Israeli Arabs” or “Arab citizens of Israel”.
Many, however, identify as “Palestinian citizens of Israel”, “Palestinians of 1948” or “Palestinians inside Israel”.
These terms affirm their Palestinian identity alongside their status as Israeli citizens.
Military rule and resistance
Although Palestinian citizens were granted Israeli citizenship after 1948, early Israeli governments viewed them with suspicion and subjected them to state violence.
From 1948 to 1966, they lived under a military regime imposed exclusively on them, while Jewish citizens were governed by civilian law.
During this period, they faced movement restrictions, curfews, state repression and limits on their political activity.
One of the darkest episodes was the Kafr Qasim massacre.
On 29 October 1956, Israeli forces abruptly brought forward a curfew in the Palestinian village of Kafr Qasim. Hundreds of residents working outside the village were unaware of the change.
Soldiers had been given orders to shoot those who violated the curfew.
As workers returned home, troops stopped them at the village entrance and shot them at close range.
Within hours, 49 Palestinian citizens had been killed, including women and children.
Military rule finally ended in 1966.
In the years that followed, Palestinian citizens increasingly reconnected with the wider Palestinian population, particularly after Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967.
One of the most significant protests came on 30 March 1976, in response to Israeli plans to confiscate Palestinian land in the Galilee.
Israeli police violently suppressed the demonstrations, killing six Palestinian citizens and injuring hundreds.
The events became known as Land Day, commemorated annually on 30 March as a symbol of the struggle for Palestinian land and rights.
During the Second Palestinian Intifada, which began in 2000, Palestinian citizens of Israel staged mass protests against Israel’s occupation and in solidarity with Palestinians in the occupied territories.
Police responded with deadly force, killing 13 Palestinian demonstrators and arresting hundreds more.
Discrimination and crime
Beyond state violence, Palestinian citizens have faced decades of discriminatory laws and policies under successive Israeli governments.
According to Adalah, a Haifa-based legal centre defending Palestinian rights, more than 65 Israeli laws enacted since 1948 explicitly or implicitly discriminate against Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories.
These laws cover areas including land ownership, housing, public funding and family reunification.
One of the earliest examples was the Absentees’ Property Law, passed in 1950.
It classified Palestinians who had left, fled or been expelled from their homes during the 1948 Nakba as “absentees”. Their land, homes and other property were placed under state control, including assets belonging to some Palestinians who later became Israeli citizens.
In 2003, Israel passed a law restricting family reunification between Israeli citizens and spouses from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
A 2011 law empowered admissions committees in certain agricultural and community towns to assess applicants seeking to live there. Critics say the law enables discrimination against Palestinian citizens by allowing committees to reject candidates deemed incompatible with a community’s "Zionist-Jewish character”.
One of the most controversial measures came in 2018, when the Knesset passed the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People.
The law reserves the right to national self-determination in Israel exclusively for the Jewish people. It also downgrades Arabic from an official language to one with a “special status” and declares Jewish settlement a national value that the state should promote.
Alongside legal discrimination, Palestinian communities face a deepening crisis of organised crime and violent killings.
The Abraham Initiatives, an Israeli civil society organisation, has linked the crisis to what it describes as “under-policing and tense relations with the Israeli police”.
In 2023, the NGO said that 50 percent of overall violent crime in the country affects Palestinians, even though they make up only 20 percent of Israel's population.
Palestinian community representatives have accused Israeli police of turning a blind eye to the illegal arms trade, and in some cases of indirectly enabling it.
The Israeli government denies responsibility for the crime crisis.
The Palestinian death toll has risen sharply in recent years. A total of 116 people were killed in 2022, rising to 244 in 2023. Most victims were not involved in criminal activity.
In 2025, the number of fatalities reached 252, making it the deadliest year on record.
The Abraham Initiatives’ 2024 report also highlighted a stark gap in homicide investigations. Israeli police solved fewer than 15 percent of killings in Palestinian communities, compared with a clearance rate of around 65 percent for cases in which the victims were Jewish.
Political parties
To challenge discrimination, state violence and Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, Palestinian citizens of Israel have long used political organisation.
Political activity began as early as the 1950s, but military rule and state repression severely restricted their ability to organise and participate in public life.
By the 1970s, Palestinian citizens were building stronger parliamentary and grassroots movements.
In 1977, Hadash - the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality - was established. It remains one of the most prominent political forces among Palestinian citizens.
“I want change. I don't want to be treated like a second- or third-class citizen anymore. That's all,” says first-time voter Asia Egbaria. Palestinian citizens of Israel are expected to turn up in massive numbers to vote on Tuesday, in the first general elections in 2022. https://t.co/i3ZaX81spU
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) October 27, 2026
Other influential parties emerged in the following decades, including Balad, the National Democratic Assembly; Ta’al, the Arab Movement for Renewal; and Ra’am, the United Arab List.
In 1982, the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel was formed. It became a key umbrella body representing Palestinian citizens across political parties and local authorities.
The committee serves as a leading voice for the Palestinian minority outside parliament, linking local municipalities with national political movements.
Palestinian-led parties have contested Knesset elections since those parties began to emerge, but have largely remained outside governing coalitions.
In 2015, Hadash, Balad, Ta’al and Ra’am joined forces to form the Joint List. The alliance followed a 2014 decision to raise the electoral threshold from 2 percent to 3.25 percent, prompting concerns that smaller parties would struggle to enter parliament independently.
The Joint List won 15 seats in the March 2020 election, becoming the Knesset’s third-largest parliamentary bloc. Internal disagreements later fractured the alliance, weakening its collective influence.
For decades, cooperation with Palestinian-led parties was widely treated as a political taboo. Many Jewish Israeli voters opposed such partnerships, while Palestinian citizens themselves remained divided over whether joining a government could deliver meaningful change.
That barrier was broken in 2021, when Ra’am joined the governing coalition led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid. Its four seats helped secure the narrow parliamentary majority that ended Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12-year run as prime minister.
Ahead of the 2026 election, Hadash, Balad and Ta’al reunited under the Joint List, while Ra’am remained a separate party.
Together, the two electoral alliances are projected to win between 18 and 20 seats, potentially giving Palestinian-led parties renewed leverage over coalition negotiations and the formation of Israel’s next government.
Their influence could prove decisive in determining who governs - and whether Palestinian citizens can translate parliamentary representation into meaningful political change.
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