Arab Israelis are loyal to the State of Israel.

This myth instrumentalizes the Israeli citizenship granted to Palestinians inside the Green Line as evidence of equality and loyalty to the Israeli state. The reality is the opposite. After the Nakba of 1948, around 150,000 Palestinians who remained inside the newly established state (today more than two million) were granted Israeli citizenship. That legal status did not exempt them from the same Zionist settler-colonial apartheid regime imposed on the rest of the Palestinian people, erase their Palestinian national identity, or transform them into supporters of the Israeli state.

Palestinian citizens of Israel have consistently resisted Israel's systematic campaign to erase their Palestinian national identity and force their submission to its settler-colonial regime. Under Israel's oppressive military rule (1948-1966), they organized politically through nationalist movements such as the Land Movement (al-Ard), founded in 1959 and banned by Israel in 1964, and through the Israeli Communist Party, which was a hub for political mobilization and cultural life. Later, movements such as Sons of the Land (Abna' al-Balad), political parties such as the National Democratic Assembly (Tajammu'), representative bodies such as the High Follow-Up Committee, and civil society organizations such as Baladna and Adalah have continued to resist as part of the broader Palestinian liberation struggle.

Two powerful grassroots protests shatter this myth. The first was the March 30, 1976 mass protests against Israel's expropriation of Palestinian land in the Galilee, commemorated annually as Land Day across Palestine and in exile. The second was the 2021 Unity Uprising, which began as protests against ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem, and spread across Palestine and into exile, including in cities like Haifa, Lydd, and Jaffa, where Palestinian citizens of Israel organized mass protests and strikes. Both illustrate the enduring resistance of Palestinian citizens of Israel to land dispossession, forced displacement, and fragmentation.

If Palestinian citizens of Israel were truly loyal to the Israeli state, why are two of Palestine's greatest poets, both Palestinian citizens of Israel, remembered for words such as these? "The only value for the occupied is the extent of his resistance to occupation." -- Mahmoud Darwish"In Lidda, in Ramla, in the Galilee, we shall remain like a wall upon your chest." -- Tawfiq Zayyad

Palestinian citizens' resistance has never been absent. It has been systematically suppressed. From its establishment, Israel imposed an eighteen-year military rule deliberately designed to suppress their political life and national identity. Every aspect of their lives was controlled through military permits, administrative detention, curfews, land confiscation, restrictions on movement and work, and surveillance. Although military rule formally ended in 1966, repression continued through bans on protests, police brutality, restrictions on political organizing, surveillance, and even the criminalization of social media expression.

Since 2023, repression against Palestinian citizens of Israel has sharply intensified. Protests have been criminalized and met with mass arrests and police violence. Senior Israeli officials threatened to deport citizens to Gaza for expressing sympathy with Palestinians there. In the weeks following October 2023, hundreds were arrested, interrogated, suspended, or expelled from universities and workplaces, often over social media posts criticizing Israel's genocide. Israel has gone as far as revoking citizenship from Palestinians on political grounds. Such repression reflects not loyalty but the costs of resistance.