Opinion | The Death of 'The Good Arab'

A Palestinian woman in the West Bank in 2024.Credit: Naama Grynbaum

The dehumanization that is required to justify the mass killing in the Gaza Strip did not remain there; it leaks into the Israeli space, into the street, the language, and daily reality.

A society that is accustomed to seeing an entire Palestinian population as a legitimate target

for death struggles not to project that view onto the Palestinian citizens living within it.

The genre of "the good Arab" was always another expression of the same mechanism – a gesture that presupposes suspicion and grants legitimacy to those who were willing to show themselves to be outliers, exceptions that do not prove the rule.

A friend called me for our routine catch-up, and she did indeed catch me up on her decision to leave Israel at the end of the year. "It's no longer possible to live here, she said, between the rock of murderous crime and the hard place of fascism and the thriving genocidal consciousness. "Who understands this better than I?" I replied. There isn't anyone who doesn't think about leaving or who hasn't already left.

The conversation continued, and then she said, "Tell me, how is it that you still manage to work in news and in political writing? I'm no longer capable of watching the news anymore; everything is becoming too much to bear."

But it isn't only the news that I struggle with – even going into Jewish cities is no longer comfortable, and it feels onerous. I feel marked, exposed, preferring to avoid contact with Jewish society for now, even at the cost of a world that is increasingly shrinking around me to the point of a genuine sense of suffocation.

"Me too," I admitted. In the past two years, I have reduced my presence in Jewish spaces to the point of going abroad for a time. And then, casually, she came out with a sentence for the ages: "You know, I used to avoid reading comments by Israelis on news posts that are racist or hostile toward us; today, even the comments on ostensibly positive posts are unbearable and hate-filled."

Even for posts from the beloved genre, "Look at how good this Arab is" – the one who retrieved a stolen dog from the occupied territories and returned it to its Israeli family, or fixed a flat tire of a Jew's car. And if, amid this genre of good Arabs, Israelis demand genocide and population transfer, praise Meir Kahane and can no longer be persuaded that there are good Arabs, "what can poor little you do?" she asked, and we laughed. And also cried a little.

Israeli right-wing group Im Tirtzu holds banner saying "No victory without a Nakba," the term used for the mass expulsion of Palestinians during the war of 1948, during the Jerusalem Day march in May.Credit: REUTERS/Ammar Awad

I thought about the simmering violence within Israel. It isn't only social media or the fringes of society. The two years of the genocide served as an accelerator for trends that were already there: political and social brutalization; the institutionalization of fascism and the systematic erosion of restraint; respectful language and the boundaries of what's permitted and forbidden. Cruelty, violence and revenge stopped being seen as a deviation and became a, and sometimes almost the sole, legitimate option.

The dehumanization that is required to justify the mass killing in the Gaza Strip did not remain there; it leaks into the Israeli space, into the street, the language and daily reality. A society that is accustomed to seeing an entire Palestinian population as a legitimate target for death struggles not to project that view onto the Palestinian citizens living within it.

As a result, Israel's Arab citizens must conduct themselves with constant caution to reduce their presence and avoid friction. If once this was out of an understanding of power dynamics, today it's out of concrete fear.

The genre of "the good Arab" was always another expression of the same mechanism – a gesture that presupposes suspicion and grants legitimacy to those who were willing to show themselves to be outliers, exceptions that do not prove the rule. Even this dubious pleasure and honor has gone by the wayside.

At the end of our conversation, my friend said: "Perhaps all of this – the organized crime and rampant violence in Israel's Arab communities, the overt hatred demonstrated toward Palestinian citizens of Israel, the genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank – is meant to cause us to despair, to push us out and to empty the space of a Palestinian presence. So we'll do it ourselves to leave the land to them."

I told her that it didn't seem preposterous to me. She was silent for a moment and then said: "At this point, I no longer care, I'll do sumud," Palestinian steadfastness, "from abroad."