Palestinian citizens of Israel live better than Palestinians in Arab countries.

Nobody should have to choose between being a second-class citizen in their homeland or a refugee elsewhere. Palestinians should not be forced to choose between exile and apartheid.

Better according to whom? Palestinians do not seek improved living conditions under Israel's settler-colonial regime or better treatment as refugees in Arab countries. They struggle to return to their homes and lands and to live in freedom, dignity, and self-determination in their own homeland.

The comparison between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinian refugees in Arab countries pits two fragmented Palestinian populations against each other, both created by the same settler-colonial project. One group, around 800,000 Palestinians, was forcibly displaced during the Nakba of 1948 and remains denied the right to return eight decades later. The other, around 150,000 Palestinians who remained inside the newly established state after the Nakba, have been subjected to colonial and apartheid rule ever since. Israel bears responsibility for both realities: fulfilling the rights of Palestinian refugees to return, restitution, and compensation, and dismantling its settler-colonial apartheid regime across Palestine.

Even if the material conditions for Palestinians with Israeli citizenship were better than those in some Arab countries, this false comparison is designed to normalize apartheid. The question is not whether Palestinians have it worse elsewhere. The question is whether they are free in their own homeland. They are not.

This claim is as absurd as arguing that Black South Africans living under apartheid were better off than South African exiles in neighboring countries. The issue was never which group had higher living standards. It was that both were victims of the same system of racial domination.

Beyond the false equivalency in the claim, Palestinian citizens of Israel, roughly 2 million people, are not living "better." For eight decades, they have been living under a settler-colonial apartheid regime. They are subjected to more than 65 discriminatory laws governing every aspect of their lives, including land ownership, housing, citizenship, education, and public infrastructure. They continue to face land dispossession and forced displacement, while their political life is systematically repressed through criminalization, restrictions, and surveillance. The comparison to Palestinians in Arab countries is a smokescreen designed to obscure this reality.