This chapter discusses the evolution of Palestinian identity in Israel after 1987, a period marked by sharp political transformations. The first Palestinian Intifada in 1987 swept through the West Bank and Gaza Strip in a popular uprising against twenty years of Israeli military occupation. The Intifada, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Gulf War in 1991 led to the Madrid peace talks in 1992, followed by secret talks in Oslo. This peace process proceeded until its collapse in 2000, with the outbreak of the second Intifada. The first Intifada and its associated developments moved Palestinians in Israel to reconsider their political stance and identity in light of a peace process that excluded them from the solution to the Palestinian problem. The outbreak of the second Intifada in 2000 marked a transformation in Palestinian political participation in Israel, evidenced in the local demonstrations held in solidarity with Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.

These events had a marked influence on Palestinian identity in Israel. The publication of four ‘vision documents’ in the years following the second Intifada highlights this political activity, aiming to define the relationship between the Palestinians and Israel, as well as to form a political discourse that begins to address key questions in the Zionist–Palestinian conflict. The four ‘vision documents’ were proposed by Palestinian academics and politicians (both individually and institutionally) inside Israel. The four documents address different aspects of Palestinian life in Israel (legal rights, education and so forth) but above all they mark the emergence of a collective Palestinian discourse inside Israel.

In a study of Palestinian political identification in Israel after the outbreak of the first Intifada, Nadim Rouhana concluded that it did not affect the aforementioned tripartite consensus, and that the solidarity of Palestinian citizens in Israel with the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories during the uprising remained symbolic, consisting only of verbal or artistic expressions of ‘sentimental identification’ (Rouhana 1990: 61). The conclusion that Rouhana presents may be correct with regard to Palestinian political activity, but his dismissal of the verbal and artistic sentimental identification fails to acknowledge the valuable political and national identification components that Palestinians in Israel carry, as I will show in this chapter.

Transformations in identity are not always reflected in political activity. Rouhana's reference to the sentimental identification emphasises, in fact, the ‘doubly contradictory’ identity of Palestinians in Israel.