The Invisible Palestinians

The Hidden Struggle for Inclusion in Jewish Tel Aviv

Andreas Hackl

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780253060839
• eBook ISBN: 9780253060853
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Within the heart of the Jewish city of Tel Aviv, there is a hidden reality—Palestinians who work, study, and live as an unseen minority without access to equal urban citizenship.

Grounded in the everyday lives of Palestinians in Tel Aviv, The Invisible Palestinians offers an ethnographic critique of the city's self-proclaimed openness and liberalism. Andreas Hackl reveals that Palestinians' access to the social and economic opportunities afforded in Tel Aviv depends on keeping a low profile, which not only disrupts opportunities for true urban citizenship but also draws opposition from other Palestinians. By looking at the city from the perspective of this hidden urban minority, Hackl uncovers a critical opportunity to imagine and build a more inclusive and just future for Tel Aviv. 

An important read, The Invisible Palestinians explores the marginalized urban presence of both Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinian laborers from the West Bank in this quintessential Jewish Israeli city. Hackl reveals a highly diverse Palestinian population that includes young people, manual workers and middle-class professionals, residents and commuters, students, artists, and activists, as well as members of an underground Palestinian LGBT community who carefully navigate their place in a city that refuses to recognize them.

ONE

A JOURNEY WITHOUT ARRIVAL?

Palestinian Mobility into the Jewish City

JUST AS SETTLER-COLONIAL CITIES HAVE a difficult relationship with their surroundings, so too does Tel Aviv: created by pioneers as a modern Jewish space, in contrast to Palestine and its southern neighbor Jaffa, it emerged in an Arab region as an essentially non-Arab place. The destruction of Palestinian urbanism and the displacement of Palestinians from the wider area of today’s Tel Aviv enabled its emergence as a space that seemed to have no Arab history and characteristics. Colonizers often frame cities in such a way, as places that are not indigenous.¹ As it was nicknamed the “First Hebrew City,” many Jews learned to imagine Tel Aviv as a place that lay outside of everything Palestinian. While we can say that some Palestinians have always worked and spent time in this settler city, their urban presence is not only invisible in space but also in memory, as this presence appears to have little transgenerational continuity. The Palestinians mostly come and go, some because they are legally prevented from putting down roots, such as labor commuters from the West Bank, and others because they do not want to stay in a city that feels hostile and foreign. Not only did most of them begin their journey into Tel Aviv fairly recently; they also seemed to never fully arrive.

Their suspended arrival resembles some of the so-called arrival cities around the world, where marginalized newcomers often fail to acquire a sense of urban citizenship and upward mobility.² Among Palestinians in Tel Aviv, a limiting regime of mobility conflates with self-limiting dispositions to create a different kind of arrival city for Palestinian citizens of Israel and for Palestinian labor commuters from the West Bank, who are subject to a restrictive legal regime. Their combined experiences show how the Israeli state has long used different legal statuses and various identification cards as bordering mechanisms that produce uneven mobility based on ethnonational and geographic distinctions.³

Yet, despite these differences in status and class, Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinian labor commuters from the West Bank experience similar patterns of circular mobility and urban invisibility in relation to Tel Aviv. As both groups approach the city primarily as a temporary space, this is mirrored by how the city approaches them: as temporary guests rather than urban citizens who are allowed to belong to this place. “Palestinian Tel Aviv” thus entails a highly unstable presence of a diversity of individuals who approach the city primarily as a journey for pragmatic reasons of work or education. These journeys rarely translate into long-term residence in the city.

In a way, all large cities experience a fluctuation in the comings and goings of newcomers. Because Tel Aviv is also the quintessential Jewish city, this fluctuation gains an ethnonational dimension. The Palestinians’ commutes and shallow immersion help maintain the city’s essentialized Jewish character. Their restricted mobility within and beyond the city, therefore, becomes a crucial component in their conditional inclusion as an invisible and unrecognized urban minority. By looking at these connections and movements we can understand better how access to this city is hierarchized along ethnonational lines.⁴ Who can become mobile toward a city and by what means defines who can become a recognized part of it. It is not only much harder for Palestinians to feel at home in Tel Aviv than it is for most Jewish Israelis but also much more difficult to get there in the first place. These two aspects of urban marginalization are interconnected, the one determining the other.

This complex relationship between mobility and equality is best described through mobility equity: differently situated people often have very different capacities to turn geographic mobility into social upward mobility, depending on class background, gender identity, or ethnic identity.⁵ We will see that Palestinian citizens of Israel, along with Palestinian labor commuters from the West Bank, have varying capacities and potentials to move in spatial and social terms when it comes to accessing Tel Aviv.⁶ This mobility inequity between Palestinian and Jewish citizens is inherent in a highly unequal geography caused by territorial fragmentation between Arabs and Jews in Israel.⁷ Palestinians are concentrated in the periphery of the economy and experience discrimination on public transportation and in Tel Aviv’s labor market. Most live in relatively poor municipalities with few employment opportunities and industries. They have suffered from a long-standing lack of adequate access to public transportation.⁸ All these relative disadvantages form part of a rationalized regime that regulates and governs the mobility of some people differently from others,⁹ especially in relation to the region’s major globalized metropolis. Because Tel Aviv is a key urban space for social mobility and professional advancement, the Palestinians’ restricted mobility in geographic terms ultimately translates into limited mobility in social terms.

PALESTINIAN CITIZENS BETWEEN MARGINALIZATION AND CIRCULATION

Unequal mobilities are full of contradictions: although Palestinian citizens of Israel lack adequate access to effective public transportation, they make up a significant share of Tel Aviv’s bus drivers. Their selective inclusion and mobilization inside and outside of the city made it possible. The company Dan, which runs the bus services in greater Tel Aviv, sends shuttle services into the hometowns of some 140 Palestinians so they can drive the city’s residents to work on time. “There are ten of these shuttle busses between the north and Tel Aviv every day,” a human resources manager at Dan told me. He admitted that Jewish workers who live outside of Tel Aviv usually did not need any such shuttles because they simply come by bus or train. He added: “There is a train connection every night and they can come easily, but Arabs from their towns would not get here by public transport, they would need three or four hours. There is no good public transportation.” Some changes to that situation have been underway, with a new train line linking the Galilee region to the main coastal line toward Tel Aviv, for the first time, in addition to new bus routes through towns previously circumvented by Israel’s national carrier.¹⁰

Although they face a lack of mobility in their own towns, Palestinian bus drivers are pulled into Tel Aviv for work. According to Omar, who I met as he drove one of Dan’s buses, “There was a lack of bus drivers about six years ago and this gap was mostly filled with Arabs from the north.” Speaking during the holy month of Ramadan, when many of the drivers fasted and could be seen praying on carpets in parking lots or behind their parked buses, Omar said that he could never imagine living in Tel Aviv, because to him it was “the heart of Israel.” At the same time, moving in and out all the time was exhausting: “I am moving 240 kilometers each day to get here and then I am driving in the bus. Each way home is one and a half hours. There are busses that are organized which bring us to work and back home. I get up at half past 8 and will be back around 12 at night. It’s hard in Ramadan now.” Even if he wanted to, he could not participate in the city’s life, saying, “I can’t take part in anything in Tel Aviv. The time is dead, I don’t have any time. And getting a room is too expensive.”

This makes clear that improving transportation alone is unlikely to improve Palestinian citizens’ access to Tel Aviv in a more sustainable way. Their community has suffered from political marginalization, widespread poverty, low education levels, limited geographic distribution, and inadequate resource allocation on the part of the public sector as well as discrimination and the difficulties of getting to work.¹¹ This overall situation has limited their capacity to move into Tel Aviv and make use of its economic opportunities. Even for those middle-class professionals who have the necessary skills and aspirations, commuting resembles an ongoing uphill struggle for rights and social mobility.¹²

An added problem is that permanently living in Tel Aviv is not only expensive but also unrecognized as a viable option among most Palestinian citizens. While young men often have houses built for them in their parent’s towns, waiting to be used once they marry, unmarried women can find it particularly difficult to justify living in Tel Aviv. Overall, resettling in Tel Aviv remains an unusual thing to do even for those who have the means to rent or buy property there. As parents expect their children to return home after university or work, the wider community considers holding onto a family’s land a primary objective. Commuting into Israeli cities has nonetheless become a dominant response to their overall marginalization and lacking employment opportunities in their hometowns. For those who found a job or enrolled at a university, the real challenges of the journey of Tel Aviv often began soon after arrival.

These challenges have little to do with the distance of travel because even the blockaded and impoverished Gaza Strip is little more than an hour car drive away from Tel Aviv. Many places in the West Bank would be a short trip away if it were not for the long queues at Israel’s military checkpoints and the difficulties of obtaining a work permit. Within the small country of Israel, almost all Palestinian citizens could potentially reach Tel Aviv as daily commuters. The real challenge lies in this potentiality, which too many Palestinians struggle to realize even if they wanted to. Take the one place that is closer to Tel Aviv than any other Palestinian town or neighborhood: Jaffa. Even from such close proximity—essentially forming one interconnected built-up space—Palestinian citizens face major obstacles on their journeys into Tel Aviv. This is especially so among Palestinian women from low socioeconomic backgrounds who have lived in Jaffa or other nearby towns. As socioeconomic, cultural, and political sources of immobilization intersect, powerful boundaries manifest themselves among some people while they are entirely invisible to others.

MOVING BEYOND JAFFA: GENDERED IMMOBILITY AND THE FEAR OF TEL AVIV

Jaffa has always had an ambivalent relationship with Tel Aviv. It was the port city many prestate Jewish immigrants saw upon their arrival. Yet, Tel Aviv grew quickly and eventually conquered and encompassed Jaffa under one municipality in 1950. Long neglected as a “dilapidated South Side,” Jaffa has gradually been redeveloped and is now increasingly gentrified with a luxury real estate market and weekend leisure “tourism” from Tel Aviv and abroad.¹³ Consequently, the inequalities between locals and wealthy newcomers widen. How can Jaffa’s Palestinians make use of Tel Aviv as it increasingly enters Jaffa?

The answer to this question is not simple and requires an analysis both of factors external to the Palestinian community and of many internal dynamics. The case of Palestinian women from Jaffa is particularly revealing as it shows how the racialized exclusion of Palestinians from Tel Aviv combines with class- and gender-related obstacles to urban mobility and boundary crossing. For some Palestinian women from working-class households with low educational backgrounds, the iconic clock tower of Jaffa marks a rigid boundary that is difficult to cross. “This clock-tower is the border for them. Everything beyond is Tel Aviv,” said Bushra, who, when I met her, helped women in Jaffa searching for jobs in the surrounding Jewish metropolitan area. Sitting in a café next to the clock tower square, she explained that some of the women felt so insecure about Tel Aviv that she had to accompany them to their job interviews, unless their husbands insisted on doing so themselves.

Bushra worked for an NGO called Arus al-Bahr, which translates to “Bride of the Sea”—one of the nicknames of Jaffa. Their offices were a twenty-minute walk south of the clock tower. During one of my visits, Safa, the NGO’s founder, opened the door and welcomed me in. She was born in Jaffa in 1975. When Israel conquered the town in 1948, her maternal family fled toward Gaza; only some were allowed to return. Safa was, in many ways, a pioneer among Palestinian women in Jaffa because she attended a Jewish school in Tel Aviv from the age of sixteen, which proved to be an important stepping-stone into a successful career. Her parents had hoped this would make it easier for her to go to a university. Her story remains an exception, she explained, adding that many of the women she tried to help were talking about working in Tel Aviv as if it were another country.

Most of these women were married with children and came from low socioeconomic backgrounds and educational levels. Some were never formally employed before. Asked if they wanted to work in Tel Aviv, “for most, the first reaction is: ‘It’s not for me, I am scared,’” said Safa after a meeting with some of the women at their office. According to her, they often feared that Jewish Israelis would not accept them as they were and “that they will stare at us.” Those who wear a headscarf knew that they would be discriminated against in Tel Aviv’s job market because of that alone. Safa’s plan was to conquer these fears and overcom...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Using the Settler City; Immersive Invisibility and the Palestinian Struggle for Urban Access in Tel Aviv
• 1. A Journey without Arrival? Palestinian Mobility into the Jewish City
• 2. A Middle-Class Gateway to Tel Aviv: Palestinian Citizens at Israel’s Liberal University
• 3. Working in the City: Palestinian Middle-Class Citizens and Labor Commuters between Anonymity and Forced Invisibility
• 4. Playing in Tel Aviv: Leisure and Fun in the Palestinian Underground
• 5. A Cultural Exile: Palestinian Artists in Tel Aviv between Individual Liberation and Political Co-optation
• 6. The Urban Politics of (In)visibility: Marginalized Activism and the Nonrecognition of Palestinian Tel Aviv
• 7. When the Liberal Bubble Bursts: Violent Events and the Circular Temporality of Exclusion and Stigmatization
• Conclusion: A Settler-Colonial City for All Its Residents? Palestinian Tel Aviv and the Future of Liberal Urbanism in Israel/Palestine
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author