The situation of Palestinian citizens of Israel has always been exaggerated.

If anything, the situation of Palestinian citizens of Israel has been systematically underreported and deliberately concealed. During the Nakba of 1948, around [800,000](https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/en/post-details/?postId=20069) Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their land. Around [150,000](https://badil.org/press-releases/2371.html) remained inside the newly established settler-colonial state, many as internally displaced persons, denied the right to return to homes often only meters away that had been confiscated for Jewish settlement. This reality alone warrants global outrage.

The claim of exaggeration collapses when examining the ongoing Nakba inside the Green Line. Today, Palestinians make up around 21% of the population inside the Green Line, yet Jewish Israelis control around [93%](https://badil.org/publications/al-majdal/issues/items/1319.html) of the land. Meanwhile, Palestinians face systemic forced displacement and dispossession. A clear example is the Naqab, where around [100,000](https://www.iwgia.org/en/publications/iw-2024-bedouin) Palestinian Bedouins live in "unrecognized villages," excluded from state planning and denied basic services such as water, electricity, roads, and sanitation while being subjected to ongoing demolitions. More than [10,900](https://www.adalah.org/uploads/uploads/Forced_Displacement_Naqab_2026.pdf) Palestinian structures were demolished in the Naqab during 2024 and 2025 alone.

Like all [15 million](https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/portals/_pcbs/PressRelease/Press_En_PalPeopleEnd2025E.pdf) Palestinians, the roughly two million Palestinian citizens of Israel remain subjected to the same settler-colonial apartheid system. Israel formally distinguishes between citizenship and nationality, with nationality tied to Jewish identity and serving as the basis for superior rights and privileges under Israeli law and policy. Palestinian citizens face structural discrimination under more than [65](https://www.adalah.org/en/law/index) discriminatory laws governing land ownership, housing, education, public infrastructure, and political life. The 2018 [Nation-State Law](https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/9569) further entrenched this system by declaring that "the exercise of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people."

To describe the situation as exaggerated reverses the historical record. The first eighteen years of Palestinian life inside the newly established settler-colonial state remain among the most underreported episodes of colonial violence in modern history. They [lived](https://www.palquest.org/en/highlight/14340/palestinians-under-military-rule-israel-1948-1966) under a brutal military rule that controlled nearly every aspect of life, including movement, work, and political activity, through administrative detention, curfews, land confiscation, and surveillance. In 1956, during the [Kafr Qasim massacre](https://www.palquest.org/en/highlight/14334/kafr-qasim-29-october-1956), Israeli forces killed 49 Palestinians for violating a curfew they had never been informed about. The same colonial logic later extended to the West Bank and Gaza was first imposed on Palestinians inside the Green Line.

The claim also collapses when examining the political rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel. Palestinian political parties have been banned or excluded from governing coalitions, political expression is criminalized, restricted, and surveilled, while Palestinians have faced arrests, dismissals from work, university suspensions, and even the disqualification of elected representatives or the stripping of their parliamentary immunity for political speech. The problem has never been exaggeration. It has been the systematic denial of Palestinian rights.

The crisis of organized crime in Palestinian communities inside the Green Line is another reality that has been minimized. Palestinians make up around 21% of the population yet accounted for more than [70%](https://www.english.acri.org.il/post/taking-to-the-streets) of homicide victims between 2023 and 2024. Israel facilitates the flow of weapons into these communities to divide, fragment, and weaken Palestinian society from within, a documented strategy of colonial control.