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Present Absentees: Dr. Yousef Jabareen MK

Panel: The beginning of the end of national identity

April 30, 2019 at 2:35 pm

Address by Dr. Yousef Jabareen MK at MEMO’s ‘Present Absentees: Palestinian Citizens of Israel & the Nation-State Law’ conference held in London on April 27, 2019.

Yousef Jabareen is a member of parliament in Israel with the Hadash-Ta’al alliance.

A human rights scholar and lawyer, he is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Centre and founding director of the Arab Centre for Law and Policy – Dirasat, based in Nazareth. As an Arab-Palestinian citizen in Israel, his work focuses on discrimination and inequality in education and the workplace, as well as on promoting cultural and housing rights. He is a human rights lecturer and former legal advisor for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.

Jabareen is a recognised and noted authority on minority rights, social change and the Arab-Palestinian community. He has published many research and newspaper articles analysing democracy, equality, minority rights and social change.

Panel: The beginning of the end of national identity

Palestinian citizens of Israel maintain a dual identity, blending Palestinian national identity with Israeli civic duty. This duality is born out in their daily lives and perceptions of self through bilingualism, integration into the Israeli workforce and consumption of Israeli cultural output. Yet this integration into Israeli society often runs contrary to their historical experience of the Nakba, which represents a burden not born by their fellow Jewish-Israeli citizens. The question of how this divergent identity fits into the broader Palestinian, or indeed Israeli, narrative has yet to be answered definitively.