Minority and Second Class in My Own Country
Updated: 3 days ago
Haneen Shurrush Mazzawi
I was born in the U.S. My mother is American, my father is a Christian Arab, and when I was young, my life changed completely: I moved from the United States to Nazareth, Israel.
I sometimes think about that transition and what it taught me about belonging.
In America, I was simply American. I did not spend much time thinking about whether I belonged, whether my identity made me different, or whether people saw me as less because of my family background. I knew who I was.
Then I came to Israel.
I grew up in Nazareth, just across from Mary’s Well, a place of profound significance to me as a Christian, and one I am deeply proud to call home. It was there that I went to school, built my career, married, and raised my children. Nazareth, Israel is not simply the country where I live; it is home. Over the years, Arab culture became woven into the fabric of my life, shaping the way I understand family, community, language, and belonging. I came to recognize how deeply my Arab identity is connected to my family, my language, my culture, and ultimately, to my sense of self.
And yet, sometimes, I have felt like a second-class citizen.
I don’t use those words to say that every Arab citizen is treated badly, or that every Jewish Israeli makes an Arab citizen feel unwanted. My experience is my own, and Arab citizens have very different experiences from one another. But the feeling of being treated differently is something I have experienced personally, and it is difficult to ignore.
One of the things that frustrates me most is how easily the visible differences between Arab and Jewish communities can be misunderstood. People may drive through an Arab town and see roads that need improvement, schools that don’t look as well maintained, public spaces that need investment, or neighborhoods that lack the same level of organization and infrastructure they see elsewhere.
Too often, they assume that Arabs simply don’t know how to build beautiful towns, that Arab municipalities are less organized, or that Arab schools and communities are somehow less capable of creating the same kind of places they see in Jewish communities.
But many people don’t know what lies behind those differences. They don’t see the resources available to a municipality, the budgets it receives, or the limitations placed on what it can provide. It’s a known fact, that there have been noticeable inequalities in the allocation of resources to Arab education, including differences in investment and infrastructure.
When people see the outcome without seeing the circumstances that helped create it, they can mistake inequality for inability. That is deeply frustrating, because I have seen what our communities are capable of when they are given the opportunity and resources to develop.
At the same time, there is another painful reality that cannot be ignored: the violence that has taken hold in parts of Arab society. The fact that, for far too long, the safety of Arab citizens has not received the same urgency that people expect when Jewish citizens are threatened.
Organized crime has become deeply embedded in some communities, and ordinary people are paying the price. We have weekly announcements about the body counts, and its only increasing! Families live with fear, businesses face intimidation, and people can feel that the authorities are not protecting them adequately.
Crime prevention and the state’s response to violence in Arab communities is simply inadequate.
Arab lives are simply valued less when it comes to protection!
When the state fails to protect a community, it is not only that community that suffers. It damages the trust between citizens and the country they call home.
The inequality I witness daily also includes the question of land and belonging. We still live with a history in which land, homes and communities are taken, lost or claimed, while the experiences and claims of Arab families have often felt as though they could simply be overlooked.
To this day, we still witness Jewish settlers gathering on the land of Arab citizens, while protected by armed forces, stealing property and later building houses and whole towns, simultaneously, Arab's connection and legitimate right to that place can be questioned or dismissed.
For many Arabs, this is not an abstract political discussion. Land is connected to heritage, childhood homes, villages, memories and family stories. It is connected to people who lived on that land long before any of us were born.
This sense of being regarded as less worthy can also appear in something as simple as language. Arabic is my language. It is the language I grew up hearing, the language of my family, my memories, my culture and my childhood. It should be something I can speak naturally and openly.
Yet, there have been moments when I have caught myself lowering my voice or switching to English in public because I have become aware of the people around me. Not because I am ashamed of Arabic, but because I am afraid of what might change when people hear it.
There have been occasions when I have felt a clear change in someone’s attitude toward me after they heard me speaking Arabic. A look. A distance. A sudden change in tone. Sometimes I cannot know exactly what another person is thinking. But when you experience that enough times, you begin to anticipate it.
I feel awful when I realize that I am hiding part of myself to make someone else comfortable. Why should speaking my mother tongue make me feel that I need to explain myself?
During periods of heightened tension, research has also documented fears among Arab citizens about openly showing their Arab identity or speaking Arabic in public. But for me, this is not a statistic. It is the feeling of realizing that something as ordinary as speaking the language of your family can make you conscious of how other people might see you.
Perhaps the hardest part is watching this experience reach the next generation.
My children have experienced moments at playgrounds when other children have picked on them simply because they were speaking Arabic. They have been made to feel different because of the language they speak with their family.
They have also heard words no child should have to hear from another child: that they should leave the country because this is a Jewish country.
What do you say to your child afterward?
How do you explain that the community they were born into can be portrayed as an enemy of the country they live in?
How do you explain that the language they speak with their parents and grandparents, the language of their family is not something they should ever be ashamed of, yet should be cautious while using it!
I don’t want my children to grow up learning to hide. I don’t want them to learn that there are places where they should be quieter because they speak Arabic. I don’t want them to feel that they have to prove that they belong.
Another very important part of this story is that many Jewish Israelis simply do not know what everyday life is like for Arab citizens of Israel. And they're intentionally kept in the dark about it.
Many Jewish people have never had a real opportunity to know an Arab family beyond the headlines. They may never have sat in an Arab home, shared a meal with an Arab family or spent enough time with Arab people to see how similar our lives actually are and how easy it would be for all of us to live in harmony if just given the chance.
Instead, we often live side by side like strangers.
We have different communities, different schools, different social circles, and very often, different media. We can watch completely different news channels and come away from the same day with completely different understandings of what happened.
That should make us stop and think.
Think about how we live in an environment where fear and suspicion are constantly reinforced. Each community is repeatedly fed stories about the other that emphasize danger, violence, conflict, and threat through the media, the news, political campaigns, banners, elections, and countless other channels.
The upcoming elections in Israel are a case in point. Too often, political campaigns seem to gain strength not by bringing communities together, but by keeping them apart. Some of the most powerful campaign tactics rely on fear, suspicion, and portraying one community as a threat to another. In doing so, they deepen the distance between Jewish and Arab citizens and make genuine coexistence increasingly difficult.
What Israel needs is leadership that understands that security and equality are not opposites. They are connected. Building trust between communities is not a weakness; it is essential to creating a safer, stronger, and more united society.
If we could step back for a moment, if we could zoom out and see the larger picture, I believe we would be amazed by how much Arabs and Jews actually have in common, and how much we all ultimately want the same basic things: to live with dignity, security, opportunity, and peace.
Arabs and Jews share far more than we often acknowledge. Our languages, cultures, traditions, and religions are deeply interconnected, rooted in a shared history and geography. Hebrew and Arabic belong to the same Semitic language family tree, while Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all emerged from the same broader Middle Eastern religious and cultural landscape. We share prophets, stories, traditions, values, foods, customs, and places that have shaped generations.
Yet, despite these deep connections, political conflict and fear have too often taught us to see our differences before our similarities, to see one another as threats rather than as people with families, hopes, fears, and dreams of our own.
It is time for Arabs and Jews to live alongside one another without either community having to disappear, surrender its identity, or feel threatened by the existence of the other. Coexistence does not mean becoming the same. It means learning to live together while respecting what makes each community who it is.
Change is possible if we genuinely believe it, and if we have the courage to demand it.
I hope the upcoming elections will give people the opportunity to demand better leadership: leadership that chooses equality over exclusion, trust over fear, and partnership over division; leadership that understands that the security of one community cannot come at the expense of the dignity of another.
Because despite everything I have written, despite the fear, the divisions, and the moments when I have felt like a second-class citizen, there is one thing I have never stopped believing:
This is my home too.
And nothing, not fear, not politics, and not the divisions created between us, will change that.
