Palestinian society's commitment to civil rights for Jews

Question

In an August 2023 interview with Bassam Jaber, on the Arabic-language channel Hala TV, Bezalel Smotrich said the following (emphasis added):

I want to say first of all, unequivocally: I as Minister of the Treasury of all the citizens of Israel, without differentiating between religion, race or gender, I feel the pain [of intra-Arab violence in the Arab sector], and I am obligated to do everything to fight this [the violence], to prevent it, and to protect the lives, peace, security, and the feeling of security, of all of Israel's citizens, among them Israel's Arab citizens; I am obligated to improve infrastructure and services, and everything the Arab citizens of Israel deserve by right, and not out of charity. I repeat -- by right, and not out of charity.

This echoes Israel's Declaration of Independence, which states unequivocally (emphasis added):

THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.
...
WE APPEAL - in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months - to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.

The video was posted on the official YouTube channel of the Religious Zionism party, headed by Smotrich, suggesting (at the very least) that his constituents would see nothing wrong with this messaging.

While it's possible that Smotrich is misrepresenting his views to fool either his constituents or the Israel public (unlikely, considering how outspoken he is on other points), the flip side of that argument is there's enough political pressure on him to do so from the party or from Israeli society.

Are there any examples of Palestinian leaders or political figures willing to make credible parallel guarantees of full civil rights for Jewish citizens in a future Palestinian state, that demonstrate Palestinian society's commitment to do so?

Answer 1

Rashid Khalidi in The Iron Cage does speak of PLO adopting principles of democratic and secular Palestinian state, where Jews would have equal rights. I quote some of the relevant passages below, but it is necessary to keep in mind some caveats:

• Khalidi's does not provide many quotes or other specific details to support his assertions, and I am having a bit of a hard time confirming them using mainstream media
• There is a caveat of how many Jews could become equal citizens of the democratic and Palestinian state - e.g., some suggested limiting it to those who already resided in the future Palestinian state territory before 1948, which is an insignificant number, compared to more than half a million of Jews currently living in the West Bank and Jerusalem, who are actually concerned by this question. This number is even less meaningful, if we speak of a one-state solution (which one may also want to be secular and democratic.)

The first fresh thinking among Palestinians about the form to be taken by a new polity in Palestine was the proposal put forward at the end of the 1960s, following the June 1967 war, during which Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, as well as the Golan Heights and Sinai Peninsula. This proposal originated with the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). It was discreetly but effectively backed by leaders of the dominant, mainstream Fateh movement, who by now had wrested control of the PLO away from Egypt and the other Arab states that had originally sponsored its formation. This proposal called for a single, secular, democratic state in Palestine, in which citizens of all faiths would be equal. The democratic secular state model eventually became the official position of the PLO, although the nature of this projected state was never fully fleshed out. Fateh leaders like Yasser ‘Arafat and Abu Iyyad were astute in using the DFLP to float the proposal, testing the reactions to it, and then adopting it as their own (this was to happen again when the PLO further modified its objectives and gradually adopted a two-state solution beginning in the mid-1970s).

While addressing Palestinian aspirations for the “restoration” of Arab Palestine, this new approach also postulated the equal citizenship rights of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. In this it marked a significant change from the provisions of the Palestinian National Charter of 1964, and the first acceptance by Palestinians after 1948 that Israelis had full and equal political rights in Palestine alongside Palestinian Arabs.

(These bold claims are followed by a passage describing how backward was Israeli thinking at the time, in comparison to the progressive PLO...)

However, although the secular democratic state idea explicitly took into account Palestinian national aspirations, it did not address either implicitly or explicitly the issue of the collective or national rights of Israeli Jews, rights that official Palestinian political rhetoric still did not recognize. In this rhetoric, Israeli Jews in Palestine were still described as members of a religious, not a national, group, and thus were seen as having full civil, religious, and now political, rights as individuals, but not collective national rights. This idea, although it represented a clear advance on the backward-looking rhetoric of the original language of the Palestinian National Charter, nevertheless represented a continued Palestinian rejection of national rights for Jews in Palestine, and of the state of Israel itself. In consequence, this approach ran counter to the international consensus based on UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of November 29, 1947, which had called for the establishment of both a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine, and which was the international basis for the legitimacy of Israel.

PLO 1968 charter
The above claims by Khalidi are partially based on the Palestinian Liberation Organization Charter (the Charter itself can be found here):

Article 5:
The Palestinians are those Arab nationals who, until 1947, normally resided in Palestine regardless of whether they were evicted from it or have stayed there. Anyone born, after that date, of a Palestinian father - whether inside Palestine or outside it - is also a Palestinian.
Article 6:
The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians.
[...]
Article 20:
The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.

Answer 2

Although many comments on this were deleted, the claim that Smotrich's claim is 'credible' hinges on ignoring much else he said. Or that the 'full' offer extends to Palestinians who can never return let alone be accepted as Israeli citizens. As for the Q, I don't find it terribly relevant since few Jews want to live in a Palestinian state, when they have other choices that aren't likely to be invalidated anytime soon. So the Q is interesting at a rhetorical/hypocrisy level at best.

Off the top of my head, a number of the communist-inspired Palestinian factions perhaps adopted a USSR version of rights. Broad on paper or in theory... (Wiki claims the PFLP was the 'second largest' group besides Fatah at one point.)

Purely at propaganda/rhetoric level, it doesn't take a lot find some statements paralleling Smotrich's, at least in times past. E.g.:

In spring 1969, one of the most prominent leaders of Fatah, Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), emphasized the humanitarian and non-racist nature of the Palestinian revolution “by clarifying our humane attitude toward Jews as people … and persuading them that we are not really as Zionism portrays us—savages who want to massacre them and throw their women and children into the sea.” He called on Arab states to say they were willing to receive all Jews who had migrated to Palestine from Arab countries and to restore their property and their civil rights as Arab citizens in those countries on an equal footing with other Arab citizens. He said Arab states should take advantage of the contradictions within Israeli society, especially between Oriental Jews and Western Jews.

Fatah's adoption of this objective provoked rich debate in Palestinian circles, with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) taking distinctive positions. In the second half of 1968, the PFLP adopted the aim of setting up “a democratic Arab state on the land of Palestine, in which the cultural and religious rights of the non-Arab communities would be preserved, including the Jewish community.” That would come about after the destruction of Israel “as an economic, political and military entity based on aggression” and the liberation of Palestine. In 1970 the front judged that the long and arduous process of liberating Palestine would be achieved by “a broad-based, socialist, progressive national liberation movement, with a base much broader than the masses of the Palestinian Arab people,” and that the state that would be set up after liberation would be “defined geographically, not by the borders of Palestine as drawn by the British Mandate, but by the borders of the socialist, progressive popular struggle movement that achieves liberation.” It said that “within this state a democratic solution to the Jewish question will be possible, and the Jews will become citizens of that state with rights equal to those of other citizens, and with the same obligations.”

The smaller DFLP (mentioned above) had a similarly generous platform, on paper, of:

“[...] setting up a popular democratic Palestinian state in which Arabs and Jews could live without discrimination, a state opposed to all forms of class oppression, with all Arabs and Jews given the right to develop their own national cultures.” The front advocated addressing Israeli public opinion, opening a dialogue with all “progressive” Jews in Israel and the rest of the world, inviting them to “take part in the Palestinian national liberation movement” and to “join Palestinians in a common fight to liberate Palestine and establish a democratic state.” The front did in fact embark on dialogue with Matzpen , a small Israeli leftist organization with Trotskyite leanings, which favored the idea of setting up a binational state in Palestine.

N.B. the same source discusses that the [larger] PLO was (even on paper) much more ambiguous about the nature of the state it sought established.

FWTW, the 1988 PLO/PNC 'Declaration of Independence', while not mentioning Jews specifically, says that

the future Palestinian state should be 'free of ethnic, religius, racial discrimination' and does not elaborate on the question of religious affiliation or the role of Islamic law in a future Palestinian state.

Full text translated to English here on the UN site, with a translation corrigendum as well. OTOH one has to keep in mind that the same document says that '[t]he State of Palestine shall be an Arab State'. But that's in a sense part of the original sin of the "adoption of General Assembly resolution 181 (II) of 1947, which partitioned Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish State", in the view of the PLO (authors of that declaration). The same document finds it necessary to use phrases like 'Palestinian Arab people' (repeatedly) to make the distinction whose independence they are declaring.

TBH, I'm not sure why the first source I found is eliding some earlier Fatah declarations of a similar nature, because these also exist:

One of the strengths of Fatah and PLO was the secular message. Fatah’s ‘Seven Points’, passed by the Central Committee of Fatah in January 1969, points to the role of the struggle in the fight for an independent and democratic state: ‘Fatah, the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, solemnly proclaims that the final objective of its struggle is the restoration of the independent, democratic State of Palestine, all of whose citizens will enjoy equal rights irrespective of their religion’ (Fatah 1969: Article 5). The vision of the future Palestinian state, as stated above in Article 5, was a democratic state embracing the freedom of religion. In an interview in August 1969, Yasir Arafat defines the aim of the struggle in similar terms: ‘. . . an independent, progressive, democratic State in Palestine, which guarantees equal rights to all its citizens, regardless of race or religion’ (Arafat 1969: 136).

But then there's the realpolitik angle that gave the Fatah/PLO the broadest support by not talking about that equality much, let alone [about] secularism...

In 1968, Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad) suggested the formulation of the ultimate goal of the Palestinian struggle being ‘a democratic and secular state’. His idea was rejected by the Fatah mainstream and the PLO, since it implied equality for Jews, a contested issue within the ranks of PLO (Kimmerling and Migdal 2003: 317). By focusing on the struggle for independence and leaving the question of religion aside, the leadership avoided an internal division along the religious/secular, as well as Muslim/Christian, cleavages. Instead, the national narrative allowed for Yasir Arafat and the Palestinian leadership to gain widespread support from large and diverse sections of the Palestinian population, including traditional elites, conservative Islamists and radical left-wingers. Also, the leftist fraction, PFLP and DFLP, for whom the struggle for Palestine was first and foremost a class struggle, accepted Arafat’s version of the national struggle (Lindholm Schulz 1999: 32–3, 121–5; Sayigh 1997).

And then, despite PLO's attempt to be ambiguous about this, Hamas and the Islamic Jihad directly charged it with the fatal sin of aiming for a secular state, e.g. in the 1988 Covenant of Hamas Hamas, article 27.

If you somehow need more similar quotes from other speeches (similar to the 'Declaration of Independence'):

In his speech upon his return to Gaza on 1 July 1994, Arafat stated: ‘We want to build our homeland as free men, a homeland of democracy, freedom and equality’ (Arafat, quoted in Sosebee 1994: 19).

(Same source/book -- Political Leadership, Nascent Statehood and Democracy: A comparative study by Möller & Schierenbeck, 2014)

FWTW, the PLO & Fatah advertised the membership of a few Jews or at least 'person[s] of Jewish origin' to use The Guardian's wording in their ranks. They seem to be too few for any official demographic statistics though.

Even more 'FWTW', the 2017 'revised Hamas manifesto' adds a fig leaf of their own, as it

attempted to distinguish between Jews or Judaism and modern Zionism. Hamas said that its fight was against the “racist, aggressive, colonial and expansionist” Zionist project, Israel, but not against Judaism or Jews. The updated platform also lacked some of the anti-Semitic language of the 1988 charter. [...]

[16:] Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.

[17:] Hamas rejects the persecution of any human being or the undermining of his or her rights on nationalist, religious or sectarian grounds. [...]

Now generally speaking, I'm not sure how much Hamas talks about human rights, as they don't seem to use the term as such (while rejecting 'persecution' of Jews). And the document doesn't mention citizenship either, but does mention democracy

[28:] Hamas believes in, and adheres to, managing its Palestinian relations on the basis of pluralism, democracy, national partnership, acceptance of the other and the adoption of dialogue.

The degree of credibility of these statements is another matter, of course.

Answer 3

I don't agree with the premise of this question. This is just Israeli propaganda.

The point is whilst Israel is a regional power, the Palestinians have nothing. In fact, less than nothing: several reputable human rights organisations, Israeli ones amongst them, have come out and said that there is a de facto regime of Apartheid in Israel-Palestine.

Furthermore Israel has plausibly committed genocide in its retaliation for the Oct 7th raid with a pending arrest warrant by the ICC for Netanyahu and his defence monister, Goav.

This just shreds any talk of how Israel extends rights to Palestine and Palestinians. It's one reason why Palestinians demand self-determination.