Even under pandemic, Israel can’t treat its subjects as equals
Palestinian health workers disinfect Palestinians as they cross back from Israel into the West Bank at a checkpoint in Tarqumiya, 27 March 2020
Hagai El-Ad writes in +972:
In a speech to the nation delivered in mid-March, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu awkwardly tried to address all the people who live under the effective control of his government — a difficult task when the very idea goes against his core beliefs.
Hard-pressed to find the right words to address his audience, Netanyahu came up with the following: “We can do this together. All citizens, all residents, whoever is listening to me now, follow these guidelines, and we will achieve our goal.”
If all the people who live in the territory under Israel’s control were treated as equals, Netanyahu would not have had to divide them into three categories to speak to them directly. Yet that is exactly how the Israeli regime works; it is neither humanistic nor universalistic, and relies on allocating different rights and liberties to different people according to their classification.
Let’s translate. Netanyahu’s emphasis on “all citizens” was, apparently, a rare attempt to acknowledge not only Jewish but also Palestinian citizens of Israel. By referring to “all residents,” the prime minister included more than 300,000 Palestinian non-citizens living in annexed East Jerusalem. His vague appeal to “whoever is listening to me now” hinted that the Palestinian subjects in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip may have forcibly entered into the prime minister’s consciousness.