JERUSALEM — Israel passed a controversial new “nation-state law” last week that’s sparking both celebration and fierce debate over the very nature of Israel itself.

The law does three big things:

1. It states that “the right to exercise national self-determination” in Israel is “unique to the Jewish people.”
2. It establishes Hebrew as Israel’s official language, and downgrades Arabic — a language widely spoken by Arab Israelis — to a “special status.”
3. It establishes “Jewish settlement as a national value” and mandates that the state “will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development.”

Each of these statements would be contentious on its own, but taken together, they’re a clear, unequivocal statement of how the Jewish state’s current leaders see both the country and the diverse people who call it home.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government backed the legislation and was overjoyed at the law’s passing. Netanyahu lauded the law as “a defining moment in the history of the state” — a phrase that was splashed across the front pages of Israel Hayom, the country’s most-read newspaper, which is often described as Netanyahu’s Fox News for its favorable coverage of his government.

But for Israeli Arabs, who make up one-fifth of Israel’s 9 million citizens, the new law was a slap in the face. When the law passed, Arab parliamentary members ripped up copies of the bill and shouted, “Apartheid,” on the floor of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament).

Ayman Odeh, the leader of a coalition of primarily Arab parties currently in the opposition, said in a statement that Israel had “passed a law of Jewish supremacy and told us that we will always be second-class citizens.”

Palestinians, liberal American Jews, and many Israelis on the left also denounced the law as racist and undemocratic. Yohanan Plesner, the head of the nonpartisan Jerusalem-based Israel Democracy Institute, called the new law “jingoistic and divisive” and an “unnecessary embarrassment to Israel.”

But at the core of the new law is a deep, existential debate that Israelis have grappled with almost since the country’s founding: Can Israel be both a “Jewish state” that protects and celebrates Jewish identity, and a liberal democracy that protects the rights of all minorities, including non-Jews?

The new law is about longstanding disputes over borders and identity

Founded in 1948 in the wake of the Holocaust, Israel has long struggled with its self-identification as both a Western-style democracy that affords equal rights to all citizens regardless of race or religion and a country envisioned as a refuge for Jews.

Waves of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries as well as from Russia and Eastern Europe, South America, and Ethiopia have kept Israel’s Jewish population growing. Under Israel’s law of return, any Jew can easily become an Israeli citizen.

But during Israel’s war for independence, which Palestinians call the nakba, or catastrophe, 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled their homes. Today, their descendants remain refugees, and many still live in urban, slumlike refugee camps across the Middle East. Palestinians who remained in Israel in 1948 were offered citizenship and now make up 21 percent of the population.

In the decades since its founding, Israel has fought several wars with its Arab neighbors, and battled Palestinian uprisings and terror attacks.

Today, Arab Israelis have a different legal status from the 350,000 Palestinians who live under Israeli occupation in East Jerusalem, the 2.5 million who live in the Palestinian Authority-administered West Bank, and the 1.9 million who live in the blockaded Gaza Strip under the rule of Hamas, which the US and several other Western countries have designated a terrorist organization.

Those populations of Palestinians are technically stateless. This means that, for instance, Palestinians in East Jerusalem can’t vote in Israeli national elections or obtain Israeli passports, among other restrictions. For Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, it means that major parts of their lives are controlled by Israel — a country they have no direct voice in.

Arab Israelis, on the other hand, are citizens of Israel and therefore, at least in theory, have access to the same passports, elections, education, health care, infrastructure, and security as Jewish Israelis.

But while they certainly enjoy more rights than Palestinians in East Jerusalem, who in turn have it better than Palestinians in the West Bank, who have it far better than Palestinians in Gaza, Arab Israelis say that since the state’s founding, in practice they have not been afforded the same rights as Jewish Israelis. This is one reason why many Arab Israelis refer to themselves as Palestinians with Israeli citizenship.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, an Israeli human rights organization, has documented entrenched discrimination and socioeconomic differences in “land, urban planning, housing, infrastructure, economic development, and education.” More than half the poor families in Israel are Arab, and Arab municipalities are the poorest in Israel, according to ACRI.

What’s more, ACRI says that Arab Israelis are treated with “hostility and mistrust” and that “large sections of the Israeli public [view] the Arab minority as both a fifth column and a demographic threat.”

For Arab Israelis, then, the new nation-state law is merely the culmination of years of institutional discrimination. Only now the discrimination is officially enshrined in Israel’s basic law — the country’s constitutional equivalent.

Here’s what the new law actually says

It’s worth breaking down the three parts of the law and examining each one individually to get a better sense of what the law actually says, and what it all means:

1) “The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.”

This declaration doesn’t just say that Israel is the historic homeland of Jews, which is a core part of Zionist ideology and the argument for the Jewish state’s existence in what’s now Israel. Instead, this goes further to unequivocally state that Jews — and only Jews — have the exclusive right to “self-determination” within Israel.

In other words, only Jews have the right to determine what kind of state and society they live under. Which means that by default, non-Jews — such as Palestinian citizens of Israel, some of whom are Muslim and some of whom are Christian — don’t have that same right.

Supporters of this declaration say that Jews have the right to a place of their own just like other people have, and that enshrining this principle in the law is necessary to ensure that Israel remains under Jewish control.  

Critics, on the other hand, say this measure is undemocratic and essentially enshrines two separate classes of citizens: Jews, and everyone else. Some even liken it to the strict racial segregation in South Africa under apartheid, in which the indigenous black African population was ruled by a colonial regime based on white supremacy.

2) “Hebrew is the language of the state,” while the Arabic language “has a special status in the state.”

For 70 years, both Hebrew and Arabic were designated as official languages in Israel. This law just changed that.

Arabic is widely spoken by Palestinians in Israel, as well as by some Jewish Israelis with roots in Arab countries. Yet the assumption in Israel has long been that you need to know Hebrew to get a good education and job, and to be able to interact with official government bureaucracies, which largely conduct business only in Hebrew.

Arabic’s “special status” under the new law ensures that some things, like road signs, will remain in both languages.

But Arab Israelis say that stripping Arabic of its official status is meant to erase their identities and histories. They also say it will put them at an economic disadvantage, because Hebrew is often not taught well in schools in Arab Israeli communities.

3) The law mandates that the “state views Jewish settlement as a national value and will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development,” without specifying where.

This clause, interestingly, has angered both the law’s supporters and its opponents. The former say it doesn’t go far enough because it doesn’t specify Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

This is a fundamental issue for many religious and religious nationalist Israelis. They argue that the West Bank is part of Israel, both because Israel captured the land in 1967 and because it’s part of the biblical Holy Land. And since it belongs to Israel, the argument goes, Jewish Israelis are free to build settlements — small enclaves — in the West Bank.

Most of the international community, as well as Palestinians and more than a few Israelis, disagree. They say that the West Bank belongs to a future Palestinian state, and that Israel has been illegally occupying it since it seized the territory in 1967. As such, Jewish settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law.

So by not specifically mentioning the West Bank, this provision in the new law walks a fine line, enshrining “Jewish settlement as a national value” without explicitly saying where those settlements might be.

Even so, opponents of this measure say it’s damaging not just with respect to West Bank settlements but also for Arab Israelis, as the law appears to create a legal right to separate Arabs from living in Jewish communities.

Supporters of the law say this is what a strong Jewish state looks like

The nation-state bill passed on July 19 with a vote of 62 to 55, after years of political debate (the law was first proposed in 2011).

Netanyahu was ecstatic.

“Today we made it law: This is our nation, language, and flag,” he said in a statement. “In recent years there have been some who have attempted to put this in doubt, to undercut the core of our being.”

In an age of hyperpopulism, where identity politics has made a resurgence as the liberal democracies of the post-World War II order face fundamental challenges from within, the nation-state law is a perfect power play for Netanyahu’s kind of nationalism — even if its actual application remains unclear.

But it’s the sentiment, rather than the specifics, that’s attracted much of the public’s attention.

Niran Dishin, a secular 24-year-old electrician and construction worker in southern Israel, told me he supports Netanyahu and the law, though he admitted that he didn’t really know the details of the legislation, as they didn’t directly impact him.

Like most Jewish Israelis, Dishin served in the Israeli Army for his compulsory duty, which he said has shaped his outlook and disenchantment about peace talks with Arabs. He is “proudly” Mizrachi, a term used to describe Jews who came from Arab countries and who have historically been marginalized by the Ashkenazi, or Eastern European, founders of Israel. Today, Mizrachim are a core Netanyahu voting bloc.

Dishin described Israel as both Jewish and democratic — but in his view of democracy, non-Jews, including Arab citizens, need to meet certain conditions to be given the same rights as him.

“This is a place of Jews,” Dishin said, citing the Bible. “I’m not saying that non-Jews can’t live here. But it’s a Jewish country. One who wants to get rights like every Jew has to give something to the country … has to prove himself.”

But critics say the law is openly discriminatory

One working day after the bill passed, members of the Druze community, a small religious and ethnic Arab minority within Israel, submitted a challenge to the law in Israel’s supreme court.

The petition, supported by three Druze lawmakers, argued that the new law discriminated against Druze, many of whom serve in the military, unlike other Arab citizens. (After other lawmakers spoke out, Netanyahu said he would present a plan to affirm the state’s commitment to the Druze.)

And Ihab Elbedour, a 23-year-old Palestinian with Israeli citizenship originally from a Bedouin community in the south, fundamentally disagrees with the aims of the new law.

Elbedour, a law student, said that non-Jewish citizens of Israel have long faced discrimination and this new law would make that inequality even harder to challenge. He speaks Arabic and Hebrew, and he learned the latter for school and work and from mixing with Israelis, who largely don’t speak Arabic.

“For me as an Arab, now I see myself as very limited in many things,” Elbedour said. He worried that this law would be used to kick out Palestinians from mixed Arab and Jewish villages and cities, like Beersheba, where he partially grew up. “This country is becoming more extreme against the Arab citizens and the non-Jews,” he said.

Adalah, a Palestinian-run legal center in Israel, is also planning to challenge the law. It’s using a broader human rights argument based on international laws against apartheid and Israeli legislation against racism and discrimination, said lawyer Sawsan Zaher.

“The danger of this law,” Zaher told me, is that “it could limit our ability to challenge discrimination.” She added that while Palestinian citizens of Israel already face institutional discrimination, this new law makes it much harder to challenge. “It will be justified; it will even be encouraged to discriminate against Arabs,” Zaher said.

The new law reflects a deeper political shift in Israel and abroad

Some supporters of Israel have dismissed criticism of the nation-state law as just another opportunity to bash the country while bigger abuses happen elsewhere. But others see it as an indication that the Jewish state, and the values it claims to represent, are fundamentally shifting.

Netanyahu has aligned himself with illiberal leaders like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, and has even established relations with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman.

And just hours before the nation-state law was passed, Netanyahu met with Hungary’s far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Israel. The two have bonded over their shared loathing of anything connected to the liberal, Jewish, Hungarian-born financier George Soros, as well as their shared anti-refugee views.

But Orbán and his government have also been accused of anti-Semitism over some of the language and images used in their attacks on Soros and Orbán’s praise of Hungarian Nazi collaborators. Netanyahu, though, has publicly painted a different picture of Orbán, calling him a “true friend of Israel” who has pledged to combat anti-Semitism and support Netanyahu’s brand of nationalism.

Internally, Netanyahu’s government has also restricted the space for political criticism, such as promoting laws that make it harder to fund human rights groups and forbidding groups that criticize the military or occupation of Palestinian land from speaking in schools.

In this context, the nation-state law has shone a light on the deep polarization in Israeli politics and society over the future direction of the country.

This divide was perfectly captured in a pair of images.

After the law’s passage, a lawmaker who supported it snapped a congratulatory selfie of himself, Netanyahu, and other colleagues. Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s second-leading newspaper, put it on the front page with the caption, “The selfie of the nation.”

A cartoonist from another paper, however, depicted the selfie instead as a scene from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, with Netanyahu and others drawn as pigs standing above the iconic phrase, “All animals are equal but some are more equal than others.”

The cartoonist was fired by the newspaper shortly afterward for “editorial reasons.”

Miriam Berger is a freelance journalist with a focus on people and politics in the Middle East. She is currently based out of Jerusalem.

TEL AVIV, Israel — Father Tesfayohanns Tesfamariam has always prayed his way through the darkest days. Growing up in Eritrea — a small East African country run by one of the world’s most brutal dictatorships — he prayed to God to find freedom.

When he fled Eritrea, as tens of thousands of others have to escape the slavery-like military conscription there, he prayed for God’s protection. When he was then trapped by human traffickers and tortured by smugglers in Libya and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula — the physical and psychological wounds from which are still raw today — he prayed for the strength to survive.

When the priest made it across the border into Israel in 2010, he prayed that he would finally be safe.  

And Tesfamariam, 44, was relatively safe, for eight years. Many people don’t know it, but Israel — home to the world’s largest Jewish community — also houses an estimated 40,000 African refugees who started arriving in the country en masse in the mid-2000s to escape war, economic hardship, and persecution.

In the southern part of Tel Aviv, Israel’s vibrant commercial capital, African food stands are a common sight. The streets echo with many languages, including Tigrinya, which many people speak in Eritrea, and Arabic, which is spoken in Sudan.

But all of that may soon change because of Israel’s new, and deeply controversial, push to rid the country of its African asylum seekers. Israel says they are economic migrants that the Jewish state can’t and shouldn’t have to care for; critics say Israel’s moves violate international law by denying legitimate asylum claims and deporting people to countries where they’ll be unsafe again.

This month, Israel started issuing deportation orders that present a bleak choice: take $3,500 and leave — or face imprisonment. The issue has divided Israelis as well as the larger Jewish community; some argue that Israel’s identity as a refuge for persecuted Jews should extend to non-Jewish asylum seekers as well.

The problem for Tesfamariam is that a majority of Israelis seem to support the government push to deport the Africans. Sixty-six percent of Jewish Israelis (and half of Israeli Arabs, who make up 20 percent of Israel’s population) favor the deportation plans, according to a late January poll by the Israel Democracy Institute.

It’s part of a worldwide wave of anti-immigrant fervor that is playing out in dozens of countries ranging from smaller places like Hungary to larger powers like the US.

The stakes extend well beyond Tesfamariam and his community of Eritrean refugees. If Israel continues to deport Africans, it will be another sign of how the Jewish state is solidifying a more right-wing nationalist identity and an increasingly closed conception of who belongs and deserves rights.

But if asylum seekers and activist groups in Israel succeed in blocking the effort, it could rejuvenate the more liberal parts of Israel’s civil society that have struggled to build broad enough coalitions for nationwide change. In the meantime, Tesfamariam — and tens of thousands of Africans — are waiting and watching to see which way the country goes.

“They have no idea what is waiting for them on the other side,” he said in a hushed voice.

A country created to take in persecuted Jews is struggling with how to take in persecuted Africans

In Europe last year, about 90 percent of the tens of thousands of Eritreans who applied for asylum were allowed in. In Israel, just 10 Eritreans and one Sudanese person have received asylum since 2009.

That reflects how Israel — a country built to be a refuge for Jews fleeing persecution — is struggling to develop its own policies toward non-Jews seeking asylum amid fears of losing its Jewish majority.

Instead, the country’s law classifies the mainly Eritreans and Sudanese who have crossed over from Egypt in recent years as “infiltrators” — a term first used in the 1950s to refer to Palestinians who would infiltrate from the then-Jordanian-controlled West Bank to attack Israel.

This wave of Africans have been trying to make their way into Israel since about 2006, and by 2012, roughly 60,000 Africans had succeeded. That influx largely ended around 2013, when Israel completed construction of a wall along its southern border with Egypt.

But the wall didn’t fix the question of what to do with the Africans who were already there. So Israel developed different policies along the way, making life harder and harder for those who stayed in an effort to coerce them into leaving, according to Human Rights Watch.

“These [methods] include indefinite detention, obstacles to accessing Israel’s asylum system, the rejection of 99.9 percent of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum claims, ambiguous policies on being allowed to work, and severely restricted access to healthcare,” a 2014 HRW report found.

Over the years, new laws have meant more paperwork and rules that people have to follow to avoid being deported. In 2013, Israel built Holot, an open-air detention center in the south for men; those who didn’t report when summoned could be imprisoned or deported. (In 2015, Israel’s supreme court ruled that African refugees and migrants could only be held there for 12 months.)

Last year, Israel enacted new legislation adding an extra tax on the salaries of asylum seekers, most of whom were already working menial and low-paying jobs. (Asylum seekers aren’t technically supposed to work, but the government allows it in some circumstances.) The law made it more expensive for employers to hire asylum seekers and created a new fund where 20 percent of each person’s monthly salary is set aside — to be accessed only once they’ve left Israel.   

This last part is crucial: The government is using money to pressure people to leave — a process that human rights groups say violates international law because they’re being sent to countries that can’t ensure their safety.

A few years ago, Israel started offering asylum seekers $5,000 and a plane ticket to undisclosed countries in Africa, widely known to be Rwanda and Uganda. The Israeli government denies that it is deporting anyone against their will and insists that Rwanda and Uganda, with which Israel has warming ties, are safe.

But Africans who have taken the money and left Israel, and human rights groups that have monitored what happens next, warn that the reality is quite different. Once in Rwanda or Uganda, the asylum seekers have had their money and paperwork stolen and have often become ensnared in human trafficking.

In one particularly brutal case, at least three Eritreans who left Israel and then tried their luck on the migrant trail to Europe were beheaded by ISIS in Libya in 2015; relatives recognized their faces from pictures and videos ISIS posted online.

About 20,000 Africans have left Israel in recent years, according to the Israeli government.

In February, Israel began issuing deportation orders to some people renewing their visas, giving them 60 days to take the money and leave or be imprisoned. The government says that for now it is only deporting single men who had open asylum applications as of the start of 2018.

But African refugees of all nationalities, including the estimated 6,000 children who have been born in Israel, are scared for their future.

Israel is the latest country to adopt harshly anti-immigrant policies

The debate over what to do about Israel’s asylum seekers has divided the country and Jewish communities in America and raised larger questions about Israel’s identity and Jewish values.

On one side is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — Israel’s veteran kingpin currently battling several corruption cases — who has blamed Africans for crime in Israel and stirred up his voter base by using racially charged language and promising to deport the asylum seekers. He’s backed by members of his far-right ruling coalition, including culture and sports minister Miri Regev, who has likened the Africans to “a cancer.”

This summer, Netanyahu toured the southern part of Tel Aviv, where the government initially sent Africans to live, and promised its Israeli residents that the government would “give back” the area. Some of southern Tel Aviv’s Jewish residents, many of whose families were immigrants to Israel only decades ago, have been organizing against the growing African community in the neighborhood. (Men who have served time in Holot are legally banned from living in Tel Aviv, though many do anyway, as it’s easier to find work there.)

Israeli politicians may not see much to gain in today’s coalitions by speaking out against the deportations. But a determined sector of Israelis in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv is organizing against it by drawing on the Jewish people’s own history of repression and the Holocaust that preceded Israel’s creation.

Rabbis both in Israel and abroad have signed petitions opposing the plan and pledging to hide Africans in their homes to prevent their deportation — citing Anne Frank’s story as precedent. Pilots from Israel’s national airline, El Al, have called for a boycott of flights with deportees (a gesture activists lauded, though they then pointed out that El Al isn’t actually chartering those flights). On February 24, an estimated 20,000 Israelis joined Eritreans for a solidarity march through southern Tel Aviv.

At a protest in Jerusalem in February, one of the organizers, 18-year-old Omer Leven, told me he’d been moved to stand up against the deportations because “we have to do something about it.” As in similar events, Israelis at the rally chanted in defense of human and refugee rights and accused the government of racism.

Some of the slogans, like “human rights for all” or “racist government, don’t deport the refugees” were reminiscent of chants at protests against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories — an issue that’s all but taboo to talk about in mainstream Israel circles today.

Leven, who wants to be a combat soldier during his mandatory military service, said he sees the two issues as very different. “We decided that what we are doing here has nothing to do with politics,” he said. “It’s about basic human rights.”

African refugees are fighting to preserve their new lives in Israel

African refugees in Israel have been living for years with talk of deportations. Humor sometimes helps people cope with those fears: Some Eritreans now joke when making plans with friends that they should hang out “before they deport us.”

Others are buckling under the pressure. Israel has never been an easy place for single Eritrean men, who, after surviving the perilous trek to Israel, have struggled to get by with low-paying work and without social and familial ties.

Fed up and without hope, some have taken the money to leave, and others say they’d rather leave than face jail. Earlier this month, hundreds of African asylum seekers in Holot started a hunger strike after seven men there were transferred to the nearby Saharonim Prison for refusing to be deported.

But now a new generation of Eritrean activists across Israel is working to organize coalitions against the deportations, educate community members about their rights and what awaits them, and make sure people’s paperwork is up to date.

One of those activists is 29-year-old Teklit Michael, who was once one of the fastest runners in Eritrea until he fled to avoid military and religious persecution. Today he’s constantly fielding interview requests amid his full-time job as a coordinator at a center for embattled Eritreans.

“The people deported to Rwanda and Uganda have no protection,” Michael told me. “They could face torture and slavery.”

Tesfamariam, the priest, understands why many in the community are now angry and scared after years trying to rebuild their lives amid all the uncertainty in Israel.

“Nobody hears their cries,” he said.

Tesfamariam works at a nondescript Eritrean church in Tel Aviv without drawing a salary; he moonlights as a plumber to earn enough money to pay his rent. He told me that he’s willing to go to jail rather than leave the country, but he worries about what will happen to others who choose to take the money to leave Israel.

In Libya, his torturers targeted him for being a Christian; he’s worried that the Eritreans in his community, too, will face further danger if they fall back into the hands of human traffickers.

In the meantime, he’s keeping the faith that God will provide. His source of strength is his church, known for its opposition to the Eritrean government. A decade ago, the Eritrean government arrested the head of the Eritrean Orthodox Church, put him under house arrest, and targeted church members who didn’t accept his replacement. Tesfamariam and Michael were among those who never did. Now they can worship freely here, in exile in southern Tel Aviv. It’s all that Tesfamariam has to depend on after everything that’s passed.

“This church serves the people who have become victims,” said Tesfamariam, taking a break from early morning Saturday prayer to speak to me. “We have to stand with our people. We have to stand with the victims.”

Miriam Berger is a freelance journalist with a focus on people and politics in the Middle East. She is currently based in Jerusalem.

PSAGOT, West Bank — When President Donald Trump formally recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital earlier this month, Palestinian leaders called for demonstrations and general strikes. Jamil Jahaleen understood the anger, but he had a family of eight to support. Jahaleen needed the money, so he chose to go to work.

But it’s where he chose to go to work that’s surprising: inside one of the West Bank settlements, which Palestinian leaders generally want to see dismantled as part of any future peace deal with Israel.

Jahaleen, 36, understood his friends’ decision to strike, but he didn’t feel he could do the same. “The situation is hard and I need to eat,” said Jahaleen, who has worked as a handyman at Psagot Winery, a popular West Bank tourist stop about 20 minutes away from Jerusalem, for nearly a decade. “My kids are more important than anything.”

Jahaleen earns 5,000 Israeli shekels per month, or about $1,400 US — substantially more than he’d earn working in a Palestinian-owned business elsewhere in the West Bank, where unemployment is high and salaries are low. At one point, he had to hire a lawyer when Israeli authorities revoked his coveted work permit, he said. But Jahaleen said he is happy with his work, and that his employers just want to live in peace. “Not all settlers are the same,” he added.

Jahaleen’s need to put pocketbook concerns above politics reflects a little-known aspect of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Most of the world considers Israel’s West Bank settlements — which span the gamut from hilltop communities of a few dozen people to quasi-cities with populations of more than 25,000 — to be illegal. Palestinian leaders have long demanded that they (or at least the majority) be torn down as part of an eventual Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.

But for many average Palestinians under occupation, the reality is much more complicated: They may scorn the settlements, but they also depend on them for the money they need to support their families.

Jahaleen is among the 36,000 Palestinian men, women, and sometimes children who work in Israeli settlements in the disputed West Bank — land occupied by Israel’s military but also claimed by Palestinians. Palestinian unemployment and underemployment is high, particularly for young people. Palestinians can be exploited by unscrupulous Israeli employers but can make up to three times more working in factories and construction in Israeli settlements, farms, and industrial zones than in jobs in the Palestinian territories. There, the minimum wage is about 1,700 shekels a month, or about $485 US, according to Yoav Tamir of the labor organization WAC-MAAN.

So while Trump’s Jerusalem announcement sparked protests throughout the Middle East (though not to the extent that was expected), many Palestinians, including those most directly impacted by the US policy shift, reacted with more of a weary, pained sigh than with public outrage. They expected the announcement to have little impact on their daily reality and struggles.

One of those struggles is the basic question of how to put food on the table in a West Bank worn down by unemployment, underemployment, and economic malaise. Some Palestinians like Jahaleen have decided that the best option, for now, is working inside an Israeli settlement.

Settlements are a core part of the bloody and decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Love or hate them, many Jewish settlements, like other institutions tied to Israel’s occupation, are now a deeply entrenched part of life in the West Bank. Israelis began moving to the region after it was conquered, along with East Jerusalem and Gaza, in 1967.

The settlements are considered illegal under international law because they purportedly violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids transferring of populations to occupied territories. Palestinians want the West Bank (along with East Jerusalem and Gaza) to be part of a future independent state. They say the settlements are built on stolen Palestinian lands, which Israel denies.

More broadly, Israel argues that the settlements are legal and that the West Bank — which the government refers to by its biblical name, Judea and Samaria — is Jewish land that can and should be settled for religious, political, and security reasons.

There are now around 500,000 settlers in 130 settlements that range from gated communities and small cities to lone caravans on top of hilltops. Despite the intense international scrutiny, two-thirds of Israelis don’t consider the land occupied today and don’t think of West Bank settlements as anything particularly separate. Many see them as just another, more affordable suburb of Jerusalem where family or friends can live. When settlements do make news in Israel, it’s generally because of a Palestinian attack targeting their residents.

About one-third of Jewish settlers are considered “economic settlers,” meaning they moved there for cheaper, government-subsidized housing and other amenities. Others have chosen to settle the land for more ideologically and religious nationalist reasons. More extreme settlers seek out confrontations and sometimes clash with Palestinians and even Israeli soldiers.

The Obama administration openly criticized the expansion of settlements in its final weeks in office, with Secretary of State John Kerry saying they could kill off any last chance at a two-state solution to the conflict and endanger Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state. The Obama White House also infuriated Jerusalem by abstaining on a controversial United Nations Security Council resolution saying Israel’s settlement policy “constitutes a flagrant violation under international law.”

The Trump White House has taken a very different tack. Last February, the administration issued a statement saying that Israeli settlements were not an impediment to peace — a huge break with decades of US policy. The US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, donated money to pro-settlement causes before taking his administration job, as has Trump son-in-law and White House senior adviser Jared Kushner.

Trump’s policies have emboldened Israel’s extreme right-wing nationalist government and the country’s settler leaders, while simultaneously angering Palestinian leaders, who say the US can no longer serve as a neutral arbiter between the two sides (something average Palestinians have been saying for some time). In mid-December, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas flatly declared that Palestinians “will no longer accept that [the US] has a role in the political process.”

But for both Palestinians and Israelis living in the West Bank itself, regional politics and rhetoric are often colored by the economic ups and downs of everyday life.

Palestinians and Israeli settlers have closer ties than you’d think   

Jewish Israelis living in settlements often point to good relations with Palestinian workers in their communities as a sign that coexistence, or at least economic coexistence, is possible. They say that daily interactions and friendships with Palestinians working in their homes or communities belie a biased Western media portrayal of all settlers as violent and extreme, as well as their own societies’ fears of Palestinians as hell-bent on attacking Israelis.

Yaakov Berg, an Israeli settler who owns the winery where Jahaleen works, says he employs 20 Palestinians at a gas station he owns in a West Bank settlement and will soon be hiring more to build another winery. Berg believes that working side by side allows both settlers and Palestinians to see each other as human beings, not stereotypes.

“We get to know each other,” he told me. “It’s the only solution — people to people.”

Palestinian labor leader Hatem Abu Ziadeh sees the situation differently. He works as a mechanic in a garage in the Mishor Adumim industrial zone, not too far from his hometown of Jericho. Abu Ziadeh, 45, wishes that the Palestinian economy and workers were strong enough that they wouldn’t have to rely on work in Israeli factories and communities built on land he considers Palestinian. Israelis know the Palestinian economy is weak, he said, and so “they exploit the Palestinian worker.”

Many Palestinians like Abu Ziadeh work in one of several Israeli industrial zones in large settlement blocs close to the unofficial border with Israel (areas Israel intends to keep in any final peace agreement). Palestinians need Israeli military–issued permits to work in one of the around 1,000 factories within these zones, which benefit from tax breaks and other government subsidies — Jahaleen requires this type of permit for his work, too. The permits include security background checks and can be suddenly revoked or suspended, such as when Israel imposes a closure on the West Bank during Jewish holidays as a security measure or if a family member is accused of a crime.

Other Palestinians, many of whom don’t have permits, work as laborers, constructing roads and buildings for settlements. Human Rights Watch has accused Israel of creating a “two-tiered system” in which Israeli companies profit from cheap Palestinian labor and land and don’t provide overtime, pension, or work and accident insurance. Israel says it is offering legal and much-needed Palestinian employment.

The Palestinian Authority, the quasi-government led by Abbas that nominally runs the West Bank and Gaza Strip, has technically banned Palestinians from working in settlements — though it has no way to actually prevent them from doing so. Abbas is deeply unpopular, and has been criticized for not pushing hard enough against Israel and for not providing other outlets and opportunities.   

Abu Ziadeh takes these dilemmas as they come. He currently has a good working relationship with his Israeli employer, who runs a garage — but that’s after a decade-long battle to create the first-ever union for Palestinian workers in Israeli settlements. At one point, his employer fired him for his unionizing efforts and falsely accused him of terrorism. He was only exonerated and reinstated after a lengthy court battle.

Still, he says that his way of resisting the occupation is by working to organize Palestinians to fight for, and take back, their rights, one step at a time.

Jahaleen is no fan of the Israeli settlements in theory, but for the moment he knows the wages he earns in the winery support his family. More broadly, many Israeli settlers depend on Palestinians for the relatively cheap labor they provide. It’s a delicate balance that leaves one side with more power than the other — but at least for now, it also seems like one that many on both sides have learned to accept.

“My kids are more important than Abu Mazen,” a nickname for Abbas, “and Trump,” Jahaleen said.

Miriam Berger is a freelance journalist with a focus on people and politics in the Middle East. She is currently based in Jerusalem.