One of the key strategic elements to Israel’s control over Palestinians has been the establishment of a focused system of fragmentation of the Palestinian community. Palestinians have been forcefully divided into distinctly separate categories, each with a different legal system, economic system, leadership, and community-specific concerns. These include: Israeli Citizens, East Jerusalemites, West Bankers, Gazans, and the Diaspora (lacking any status whatsoever). Israel adamantly refuses to interact with the Palestinian people as a unified entity and insists on dealing with each component separately, sometimes making it physically impossible for members of each group to communicate with, trade with, or even intermarry with members of the other Palestinian communities.
An explicit hierarchy of rights and privileges has also been established by Israel between each category. The highest level (within the Israeli hierarchy of control) are those Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship, who managed to remain in the land in 1948. There are currently about 2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, constituting approximately 20% of the Israeli citizen population. They enjoy the highest standard of living, the greatest freedom of movement, and some of the benefits of Israeli society because they do hold citizenship. Some of them are occasionally trotted out as proof of the tolerance and equality in a “democratic” state of Israel, as promised in the not-legally-binding Declaration of Independence. ….more
