Paper short abstract:

Palestinian Israelis are a "trapped minority", living in a Jewish state while being part of the Palestinian people that state is in conflict with. They mostly do not settle down in the "Hebrew" city of Tel Aviv, but they use the city, and the city uses them.

Paper long abstract:

Today, Palestinians don't have a state they can call their own. But those 1.5 million Arabs who are citizens of Israel live in a state, although relating to it in the weak sense, meaning that they belong to it, while the state does not belong to them. Equally, Arabs in Israel do not have their "own" cosmopolitan city, while Jewish-Arab tensions and cultural considerations prevent most Arabs to settle down in the only big urban space - the city of Tel Aviv, which is perceived to be a diverse, albeit Jewish city. There are no Arab schools or Arab theatres. English is spoken more often than Arabic.

However, a few thousand Arabs do migrate to Tel Aviv every year, either to study, to work, or to simply to explore a new kind of individualism far away from the communal constraints from their Arab home towns. Palestinian Israelis do not usually "arrive" in the city, as they usually leave back "home" after marrying. Instead, they "use" the urban space in a very mobile way. They escape cultural and political pressures in search of anonymity and individualism, or simply look for a career in the cities vibrant high-tech sector.

How does the involvement with Tel Aviv influence the ways Palestinian Israelis negotiate their conflicting identities? How can we conceptualize the recurring trans-local flows of a national minority into a city and out of it, if nothing in this process is ever fixed but temporary, if they never "arrive" in the city?