T H E F O R G O T T E N
PA L E S T I N I A N S
A History of the Palestinians in Israel
Ilan Pappé
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW HAVEN AND LONDON
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INTRODUCTION
THIS BOOK IS NOT the first attempt to narrate the story of a group
that numbered a mere 100,000 people when the story began and is
today no more than a million and a half. It is not a very sizeable group
of people, but nonetheless one that deserves our attention. It has been
and still is the subject of much social science research as a case study –
or rather a test case – for a plethora of theories. The excellent work
done so far, therefore, has focused on specific aspects of this group’s
life, whether identified chronologically or thematically. The best way
of covering this impressive scholarly harvest would be a well-edited
book, which I hope will appear before too long. In the meantime, I
have added an appendix to this book, giving a short summary of the
scholarly developments in the research on the Palestinians in Israel, to
complement this narrative.
What most of these works have failed to do – not due to any fault
of their own – is to translate their scholarly interest into a more
general and political focus. For the world at large, and for that part of
it which is energetically engaged in the Palestine issue, the Palestinians
in Israel have been an enigma for a long time. Sammy Smooha and Don
Peretz called the Palestinians in Israel ‘the invisible man’.1 This may be
changing now; as Nadim Rouhana puts it, ‘the Arabs in Israel have
grown to the point where they can no longer be ignored by either
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Israelis or Palestinians’.2
According to Rouhana this ends a period
during which ‘the Arabs in Israel have been an invisible, identity-less and
potentially de-Palestinized group’ and instead turned into a ‘conscious,
active and dynamic segment of the Palestinian people’.3
And yet, it
seems that on the global scene they are still ignored.
An important step in publicizing the particular circumstances of the
community has been achieved by two noteworthy books that have
recently covered the topic: Nadim Rouhana’s Palestinian Citizens in an
Ethnic Jewish State: Identities in Conflict (1997) and As’ad Ghanem’s
The Palestinian-Arab Minority in Israel (2001) are both still very valuable
sources for anyone wishing to understand the development of the political
identity and orientations of this group in a historical perspective.4
Rouhana’s book focused on the development of the Palestinian
identity within the state of Israel, demolishing along the way the
prevalent academic assumption that saw the Arabs in Israel as being
torn between ‘Israelization’ and ‘Palestinization’. His book showed
how the two communities developed in Israel with very little sharing
in terms of collective identity. And thus both Jews and Palestinians
grew up in Israel possessing incomplete national identities – a situation
only reinforced and perpetuated by developments inside and outside
the state of Israel, leading to inevitable clashes unless the ethnic state
of Israel is replaced by a civil, bi-national state.
As’ad Ghanem’s book, published four years later, added a new
dimension for understanding the political streams that developed
within the Palestinian community and drew our attention to the fact
that the world of the Palestinians in Israel should not only be seen in
constant reference to the Jewish state and its policies. There were
issues of religion, modernity and individuality that also divided the
community, and he agreed with Rouhana about the existence of a
certain Palestinian consensus within the state of Israel. Ghanem’s
research in 2001 enabled him to detect the strength of the secular
element in the Palestinian society, during a period of global and local
Israeli Islamophobia; he also noted, with concern, the return of the
clan as a retrograde powerbase for politics. Both books also offer a
prescription for the future: a bi-national state instead of the existing
Jewish state. In this book I do not provide my own idea of a solution;
10 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS
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I am more concerned about the lessons of history than the perils of the
future.
What I would like to add to the existing excellent literature is the
historical perspective (and expand on the historical background provided
in the two books mentioned above). In the ten years that have passed
since these valuable publications have appeared, Zionism and Palestinian
nationalism have matured in a way that allows us to locate more clearly
the Palestinians in Israel as victims of Zionism and an integral part of
the Palestinian movement. As such, this book continues my research on
Palestine and Israel, which I began in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
(2006).5 It is only through a history of the Palestinian minority in Israel
that one can examine the extent to which the long-lived Zionist and
Israeli desire for ethnic supremacy and exclusivity has brought about the
current reality on the ground.
This book wishes to free the Palestinians of Israel from their role
as a case study and tell their history. Only now is this possible, as the
group has a history of more than sixty years of existence as a non-Jewish
minority in a Jewish state. The reason that a coherent historical narrative
of the group has not been attempted before has to do first with this short
history – historians need perspective and the passage of time. But there is
an additional reason: it is a very difficult group to define, lacking as it does
clear ethnic, cultural, national, geographical or even political borders.
The Palestinians in Israel themselves, through their leaders, activists,
politicians, poets, writers, academics and journalists, are still searching for
an adequate definition.
And yet there are good reasons for telling their story. The Palestinians
in Israel form a very important section of the Palestinian people, and
of the Palestinian question. Their past struggles, present-day situation,
and hopes and fears for the future are intimately linked with those of
the wider Palestinian population. They have played a marginal role on
both the Palestinian and Israeli political scenes, yet any resolution of the
present deadlock must take them into account.
There is a second reason for providing a people’s history of this
particular group. Israel claims to be the only democracy in the Middle
East; as its chief minority population, the situation of its Palestinian
citizens forms the litmus test for the validity of this claim. Their story
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is also that of multiculturalism and intraculturalism, issues fundamentally
relevant to societies beyond Israel and Palestine and which
affect the fate of the East–West relationship in the Middle East as a
whole.
This minority is a heterogeneous community in which Christians
live side by side with Muslims, Islamists and secularists who compete
for political domination, and refugees struggle to make their presence
felt in a community the majority of whose members are living in the
same villages their ancestors built hundreds years ago.
It is a group that has been dubbed traitors both by the Palestinian
movement in the 1950s and by current Israeli political forces. Theirs is
an amazing story of almost impossible navigation in a sea of colonialism,
chauvinist nationalism, fanatic religiosity and international indifference.
It is a narrative of a group to which I do not belong, but in whose midst
I lived most of my adult life. As I have outlined in a recent book, Out
of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel,6 due to my
scholarly and intellectual critique of Jewish society I was ostracized by
my own community, to the point where I decided to work abroad; I have
been involved in public and political life within the Palestinian community
since the 1990s. I think it is fair to say that my social connections,
and even more so my ideological associations, are uncommon in the
Jewish community in Israel. Although not unique, I am one of very few
Israeli Jews who feel such a close affinity with the Palestinian minority
in Israel. This has led to me undertaking intensive learning of Arabic,
with constant reading of Arab literature and listening to Arab media, but
more importantly to developing intimate relationships with many
members of the community, and sensing a strong affinity and solidarity
to the point of becoming a pariah in my own Jewish community. I have
never regretted this, even when in October 2009 a small group of young
Islamic activists tried to shout me down at a commemoration ceremony
for the thirteen Palestinian citizens killed in October 2000 in the village
of Arabeh, at which I was the only Jewish speaker tolerated after fierce
opposition from the Islamic movement to any others. I am not saying
this as a complaint, or because I feel I was unjustly treated; these activists
were a small minority within an otherwise very receptive public, and I
can understand why they might view me with suspicion. No, the reason
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is that when you are part of the privileged oppressive majority, you
do what you do not in anticipation of a standing ovation, nor indeed in
any expectation of gratitude, but rather for your own peace of mind and
moral satisfaction. This is the particular angle from which this book
is written.
Let me add a word on methodology. On the face of it, this is an
old-fashioned narrative history. The appendix to the book covers the
theoretical paradigms offered by others as much as possible; these, in
the main, lack a historical perspective, but are very useful in terms
of analysing the group’s present conditions. In its conclusion the book
attempts to offer its own paradigm, that of the Jewish Mukhabarat
(secret service in Arabic) state (a model explained in the epilogue to the
book) in view of its major findings from the historical research.
Our narrative moves between two principal perspectives: that of the
Israeli regime, in particular its relevant decision makers, and that of
the Israeli Palestinian community at large, via its political and educated
elite and the writings of or interviews with various members. The
analysis is more nuanced in the case of the Israeli Palestinian community
for two reasons. First, the state, or rather the decision makers and
those operating the policies on the ground, have been informed by the
same ideological perspective – Zionism – and therefore more often
than not have acted in unison. Second, this book aims to present a
people’s history as far as possible and therefore the magnifying glass is
cast more on the Palestinians than on those who formulated and
executed the policies towards them.
The book has a constant variable and a number of dynamic factors.
The historical periods are the only concrete foundations of the book,
hence the chronological rather than the thematic structure of the
book. Within each period the narrative moves from one perspective to
the other – not, I hope, in a schematic, artificial way, but rather by the
power of association that sometimes blurs the historical picture, but
which I believe presents a more authentic image of past reality. The
story is not interrupted by theoretical inputs, only by explanations and
elaborations of certain events and personalities. Theory comes back
into the picture when academia begins to play a role in the relationship
between the Israeli Palestinian community and the Jewish state, and
INTRODUCTION | 13
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therefore alternative scholarly understandings of this history appear
twice: in the theoretical appendix and at the various junctures of
history where theories introduced by academics became tools either in
the hands of the government – such as the theories of modernization –
or for those who challenged the governmental policy – such as the
theories of internal colonialism and ethnocracy.
Veteran readers of scholarly works will appreciate the unbearable
gap between the clean and structured representation of reality and its
murky, fractured and chaotic existence as an experience. When the
research is too neat, the smells are gone and the sterile pictures fail to
illuminate, especially in this history of an almost impossible navigation
between conflicting demands, the hardship of daily life and the struggles
for survival. This book does not seek to idealize the Palestinians
of Israel, or as they are called in the Arab world, the 1948 Arabs; it
wishes to humanize them in places where they are either forgotten,
marginalized or demonized.
This book is also a modest attempt to understand the reality from
the minority’s point of view, seeing them not just as a community of
suffering, but as a natural and organic part of the Palestinian people
and history. You cannot begin to understand what this community has
undergone if you do not begin the story at the latest in 1947, when the
area that became Israel was still Palestine. This is where our story
begins.
14 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS
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E P I L O G U E
THE OPPRESSIVE STATE
ON 29 MAY 2007, the Israeli Knesset duly revalidated, as it has done
annually in recent times, the Emergency Regulations that had been
imposed in Palestine by the British Mandate in 1945 and readopted by
Israel on its day of foundation in 1948.1 On paper, even today in the
twenty-first century, there are almost two hundred such regulations,
which enable the state to legally declare any part of the country a
closed military area, exercise administrative arrest without trial, expel
and even execute citizens.
From the creation of the state until 1996, there was no need to
extend this validation annually as it was regarded as a permanent situation.
In 1996, in a celebrated display of democratic histrionics, official
Israel announced the annulment of the regulations’ permanent status
and the government decreed a need for an annual approval. The recurrent
approval, needless to say, was taken for granted (partly because,
even without the annual approval of the Emergency Regulations, the
government was still able to impose the same discriminatory regime on
the basis of the general State of Emergency declared in Israel on the
day of its creation and which was still intact in 2007). But for many
observers, the 1996 annulment, or rather charade of annulment, was
the last attempt to democratize the country. After that, and particularly
in the wake of the second Intifada, the legislative effort in Israel
EPILOGUE | 265
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focused on restricting even further the limited rights citizens had
enjoyed under the State of Emergency Rules and Regulations.
As mentioned throughout this book, critical scholars, both Jewish
and Arab, inside Israel have chosen recently to define the state in which
such realities are tolerated as an ethnocracy. I think that this is not a
complete picture and would like to refer to Israel in this epilogue as a
State of Oppression; not for all its citizens, only for its Palestinian
minority. Oppression in the modern era can only be fully achieved with
a developed security apparatus and I argue here that the worst aspect of
the minority’s existence is that its daily and future fate is in the hands of
the Israel secret-service apparatuses. There is no parallel example for
such total securitization in any of the states that make up the democratic
world. The only states which apply similar methods of control are to be
found in the very region where Israel’s founding fathers attempted to
build a European enclave: several states within the Arab world (and
some African states). Of the models typifying the Arab world, one in
particular applies to Israel: the Arab Mukhabarat (secret-service) state.2
As such, the processes taking place in the state of Israel in recent years
do not belong to the twilight zone between democracy and dictatorship,
which was of concern to perceptive thinkers such as Giorgio
Agamben, nor is it enough to define Israel as an ethnocracy. If it were,
the deterioration could then be halted or slowed down by reinforcing
democracy; but, as this book tries to argue, such a fundamental change
would be a total sell-out of the most basic assumptions on which the
Jewish state was built and on which it is currently maintained.
Israel controls the whole area that was formally Mandatory Palestine
and the examination of its oppressive nature relates to its relationship
with about five million Palestinians who live in the Mandatory
Palestine area. In more ways than one, the oppression also affects the
lives of the millions of Palestinians who live in exile or in refugee
camps as a result of the ethnic cleansing Israel carried out in 1948.
The professional literature also offers models of such oppressive
regimes beyond the Arab world, such as the term ‘Masters’ (Herrenvolke)
democracy’, chosen by some scholars to describe the apartheid regime in
South Africa.3 For the lack of a better paradigm I opt here for the
‘Oppressive State’ as the paradigm that can best describe the current
266 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS
reality for the Palestinian minority in Israel. In reality, and in our
analysis, the paradigm is applied to only a part of the population in the
country, while the other part of the population is aware of the oppression
and fully endorses and supports it. Therefore this paradigm of the
Oppressive State is not an attempt to analyse Israel or Zionism in their
totality as a historical, cultural or political phenomenon, only its relationship
with its Palestinian inhabitants. The democratic paradigm
assumes that there is one state, one society and one territory. Such a
paradigm could never apply to apartheid South Africa and does not
apply to the reality in Israel, a country whose founders wanted to build
a central European liberal democracy, but instead created a hybrid
between a settler colonialist state and a secret-service (Mukhabarat)
regime imposed on its Palestinian population.
This is a dynamic model and its version in 2010 is not the same one
employed in the days of military rule. Moreover, throughout the years
of its existence, there have been attempts, wholesale or piecemeal, to
strengthen the democratic variable in the impossible equation of a
democratic Jewish state.4 But it seems that in the last few years an opposite
trend has emerged that indicates that the Jewish state has given up
on the charade of democracy due to navigation fatigue and, as a result,
has escalated its oppression of the minority in an unprecedented manner.
THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF THE
OPPRESSIVE STATE
Zionism was born out of two impulses. The first was a wish to find a
safe haven for Jews after centuries of persecution and maybe an insight
that worse was yet to come. The second was the desire to reinvent
Judaism as a national movement, a drive inspired by the Spring of
Nations, the 1848 wave of national uprisings in Europe. However,
as soon as these two impulses were territorially realized in Palestine,
the national and humanist project became a colonialist one. Inside
Palestine a third impulse was added, the wish to create a pure Jewish
space in whatever part of Palestine was coveted as the future Jewish
state. And when that part was finally delineated in 1947/1948,
consisting of 80 per cent of historical and Mandatory Palestine, it was
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clear that the only way of achieving it was by ethnically cleansing the
one million Palestinians who lived there.5
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine that depopulated half the country’s
people as it destroyed half the country’s villages and towns has never been
acknowledged or condemned worldwide. The Jews became a decisive
majority in the land as a result and claimed their state was a democracy,
with its leaders committed to ensuring that ‘the democracy’ meant the
permanent dispossession of the indigenous population of Palestine.
The global message for the state of Israel was that it could be
included in the democratic world despite its actions in 1948. The result
was that the value of ethnic supremacy was cast as superior to any other
values. Most importantly, it was maintained as such, despite Israel’s
wish to be recognized as the only democracy in the Middle East.
Indeed it was the only democracy in the world where the ethnicity and
religion of the natives defined their citizenship, and where a supremacist
ethnic state posed as a democracy. Moreover, the ethnic cleansing
left 160,000 Palestinians inside the Jewish state, whose territorial
expansionist appetite led to the incorporation of another 2.5 million
Palestinians in 1967 (now there are almost 4 million). Indirectly the
state also controlled the lives of the 5.5 million refugee community
emerging out of the 1948 ethnic cleansing and subsequent waves of
expulsion. While after 1967 Israel chose not to use the same drastic
means for ensuring its ethnic supremacy, its substitute for them was
the creation of an oppressive state.
The presence of Palestinians in what was supposed to be an exclusive
Jewish space determined the nature of the state, which was dictated by
a set of presumptions manifested in daily realities rather than in the
law. However, a certain foundational legislation was deemed necessary,
and was useful, as it attracted very little external attention, despite
Palestinian scholarly attempts to show that even this minimal legislation
was sufficient to brand Israel as a non-democratic state. The end
result of minimal legislation and extensive practices was a total violation
of the right to own property, land, identity or culture, or to receive
full state benefits and rights. Sometimes this was achieved through military
rule, sometimes by direct or indirect occupation, and sometimes
through its semi-apartheid policy.
EPILOGUE | 267
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268 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS
However, the wish to be recognized as a democracy demanded
impressive navigation skills of the political class in order to steer the
state between segregation, oppression and occupation on the one hand,
and the pretence that these did not exist on the other. With American
backing and European support this pretence became strategy, enabled
by the quality of the leaders and a certain regional and global constellation,
as Israel was accepted as a member in the world of Western
democracies and recently as a member of the OECD. This could not
have been achieved without the assistance of Israeli academia, the
Supreme Court and the media, which re-cast the oppressive reality as
democratic.
While liberal Zionists were at the centre of power in Israel, the navigation
produced two golden rules about the Palestinians governed by
Israel. One is that there are two kinds of Palestinians: the ‘occupied’,
with no rights whatsoever, and ‘our Palestinians’, the citizens of the
state who have no collective rights – apart from formal democratic
rights such as voting. Unlike the Jewish majority, they have no right of
land ownership, cannot identify in public with their national movement
and cannot build autonomous educational or cultural systems.
For most of the time this was sufficient for presenting Israel as the
‘only democracy in the Middle East’, but the apparition disappeared
when, after 1975, the Palestinians in Israel increasingly demanded
collective rights. Then, in October 2000, the state reacted brutally and
violently to drive its message home.
THE NAVIGATION FATIGUE OF THE
OPPRESSIVE STATE
This navigation fatigue was fully exposed when the Palestinians citizens
of Israel fundamentally challenged the definition of the state as a democracy.
The serious challenge commenced in 1976 with the campaign
against the vast land expropriation in the north and culminated in the
widespread show of solidarity with the second Intifada, resulting in
six deaths in the first instance and thirteen in the second, not to mention
hundreds of wounded and thousands of arrests, marking the beginning of
the end of the navigation efforts.
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But these two challenges, in 1976 and 2000, were low-intensity
actions compared with the deeper process of change that affected the
Palestinian minority in Israel and which has produced unprecedented
challenges to the state in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
The more active and self-assertive sections of that minority clearly and
unequivocally demanded the construction of a genuine democracy in a
state which they branded as a supremacist ethnocracy. This was a new
chapter in the life of a community that used to respond to governmental
initiatives rather than initiate action itself. Whereas in the past
the state had responded with violence, it now responded via its security
apparatuses by dispensing with the charade of democracy, among
other things through legislation. This could be analysed as democracy
deteriorating into a ‘state of exception’ (to use Agamben’s term,
applied to the West’s reaction to the events of 9/11), but as argued here
in the case of Israel, this same curbing of civil rights had a different
root and purpose.
The recent challenge revolves around one party, Balad, one movement,
the Islamic Movement, and the four vision documents mentioned
in the previous chapter. One could add to it a special antagonism
towards the return of the Nakbah as a major constituent of the collective
identity of the Palestinian citizens. The state’s response came in
2007 as Bishara was expelled from political life via allegations that he
spied for Hezbollah in the Second Lebanon War. At the same time, as
we have seen, the leader of the Islamic movement, Sheikh Raid Salah,
was charged with similar crimes and imprisoned for more than a year
without trial before finally being brought to court, when it transpired
that none of the charges against him could be validated.
The second challenge was the vision documents. On 13 March
2007, the daily Maariv reported on a closed meeting of the Shabak (the
Israeli secret service) at which the head of the organization described
these documents as indicating a ‘dangerous radicalization of the Israeli
Arabs; they tend not to identify with the state and this is caused by the
rise of subversive elements among them’. When asked to respond to
the piece in Maariv, Yuval Diskin, the head of the Shabak, reiterated
his view that the documents were subversive, endangered state security
and could lead to the closure of the NGOs involved.6
EPILOGUE | 269
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270 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS
The vision documents and the reassertion of the right to refer to
the birth of the state in 1948 as a Palestinian catastrophe were fought
with new legislation. And thus Diskin’s remarks were accompanied
by legislative efforts to curb this ‘subversive’ trend. These amendments
to the laws de-legitimized and stripped the citizenship of anyone who
did not declare his or her faith in the Jewishness of the state or who
supported Palestinian organizations such as Hamas.
The new discourse signalled a violent response to any attempt to
express a collective Palestinian identity or challenge the ethnic state,
denoting clear signs of the descending fatigue. At the beginning of the
twenty-first century official Israel was tired of navigating between an
actual policy of ethnic discrimination and the formality of a democratic
state. The regional and global balance of power – as understood in
Israel – made such navigational skills redundant. No one in the USA
or the Arab world seemed to expect Israel to be a democracy.
The fatigue was also the inevitable result of the mediocrity of the
political leadership, whose capacity to navigate seems to be significantly
less than that of the previous generation of leaders. This came
to light in the summer of 2006, when the Prime Minister and several
ministers were busy fighting a legal battle against charges of corruption,
and their skills of navigation were called for. In fact they showed
very little skill and dragged Israel into the Second Lebanon War,
which was universally regarded as the first-ever Israeli military defeat.
The vacuum of military rule was filled by two outfits that had never
had much faith in the need to appear ‘democratic’ for domestic or
foreign consumption, that is, the army and the secret service. These
two organizations were above the law anyway, and their position testified
to the fact that Israel was not a democracy transgressing into a
state of exception, but rather a secret-service – Shabak – state, a local
Arab and Middle Eastern variant of the Oppressive State.
THE PARALLEL MODEL: THE MUKHABARAT STATE
OF THE ARAB WORLD
Politically, the Mukhabarat state exists only within the boundaries of
the Arab world (although there are similar states elsewhere). Such a
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state is characterized as a mass mobilizing state, run by an all-pervasive
bureaucracy and ruled by military and security apparatuses.7 The variants
of this model range from robust to liberal autocracies and the span
is wide enough to include Israel.
What characterizes such states more than anything else is the sustainability
of their security establishment (the Mukhabarat) in the face of
internal challenges and external pressures. This sustainability is ensured
by a strong connection to an outside power; to quote John P. Entelis,
‘the Mukhabarat state cannot long endure if it lacks the financial
resources to pay its soldiers, purchase arms, upgrade equipment, maintain
supplies, and acquire externally-gathered intelligence data’.8
One of the experts on the subject, Nazih Ayubi, described such
states as ‘fierce’, as distinguished from a ‘strong’ (democratic) state.9
The relationship between the state and its citizens is not a legal one,
but purely a function of fierce power relations (remember that this is a
typology of Israel’s relations with the Palestinians, not with its Jewish
society). A fierce state resorts to the use of raw power as its default
function – whereas in democracies which find themselves in crises such
as the 9/11 bombing, the use of such power is a deviation from a set of
non-violent default means of maintaining the state.
Readers versed in the critique of Israel are familiar with its depiction
as ‘an army with a state’. This is actually a common reference to the
Mukhabarat state of Algeria, about which it was written that ‘every
state has an army but in Algeria the army has a state’, describing how
deeply enmeshed the linkage between the state and the security apparatuses
is.10 To be fair, this is not far from the very bold attempt by
several critical Israeli sociologists to define Israel as a militarist
society.11 The role of the army or the security apparatuses in these
studies appears not to be the outcome of anomie, as it would be in the
state of exception, but appears to be a part of the state’s foundation and
raison d’état. Critical sociology points to the oppression as stemming
from a non-democratic founding ideology and a colonialist reality, not
from any internal contradictions in the democratic system that can
produce states of exception. The ideology and the colonialist reality
have produced a state in which the army and the security services reign
not in exceptional situations, but as a rule. The militaristic model
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272 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS
mobilizes Jewish society, but, as a typical Mukhabarat state, oppresses
the Palestinian population.
The authoritarian, rentier militaristic state of the Arab world is a
model that better corresponds, historically and theoretically, with the
state within the state of Israel: the state of the Palestinians within the
Jewish state. However, as argued by others before me, it is a hybrid
with another model, the settler-colonial state, which can be presented
as a mixture between an Arab post-colonial model and a colonialist
model, such as South Africa during the days of apartheid.
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE TRENDS
The deep knowledge of theory and the equally deep involvement
in their community’s fate have led Palestinian scholars in Israel to
intertwine theoretical paradigms with straightforward political polemic.
A favourite source of inspiration that was exhumed from relative
darkness was the work of Carl Schmitt, the German jurist and political
theorist who, in one way or another, blessed dictatorship as a functional
and just political system. Raef Zureik and others have wisely
and sensitively tackled the uneasy dialectical relationship between
romantic nationalist Germany and an analysis of present-day Israel.
One can see why recent policies and discourses adopted in Israel, especially
towards the Palestinian citizens, seem to come directly from
Schmitt’s theorizations.
Issam Abu-Raya, in response to the remarks of Yuval Diskin, head of
Shabak, wrote: ‘Diskin’s statement fits beautifully with [Carl] Schmitt’s
arguments’ about the sovereign having the final say under the law of a
defending democracy.12 This was a line of reasoning that pushed
Schmitt into the Nazi embrace. However, although – if one follows
Diskin’s words on several other occasions – one can see the similarities
with Schmitt, the story of Germany and Schmitt is of a deteriorating
democracy that became a dictatorship and was salvaged once more.
This trajectory is inapplicable in Israel unless one accepts the liberal
Zionist claim that pre-1967 Israel was different. My argument is that
the Israeli paradigm is a colonialist and post-colonialist mixture, a
political outfit of a settler state ruling through a Mukhabarat state.
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Israel’s brand of oppression is the one that typifies both settler states
and Mukhabarat states. Therefore the navigation fatigue, the harsh
response to new challenges and the overall political situation at the
beginning of the twenty-first century are indicators of an escalating
cycle which carries the potential to end the pretence and the false inclusion
of Israel in the frame of analysis of Western democracy. This escalating
cycle is made up of a series of legislative measures, all intended to
continue the oppression of the Palestinian population under the Israeli
state rule.
The first wave was in 1948, leading to the rights to own land, water
and buy and sell land being denied to the Palestinians by law, as was
the right for full citizenship. This was followed by discrimination in
every aspect of life, including welfare, education and protection from
abuse of the law, all practised systematically and efficiently but not
legalized.
The second wave was the legislation through the imposition of the
Emergency Regulations on the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip in
1967 that denied basic human and civil rights to the millions who lived
there. It began with ethnically cleansing 300,000 Palestinians and then
constructing the oppressive regime we are familiar with today. All this
was achieved without undermining Israel’s membership in the exclusive
democratic club.
The third wave is the one that points to navigation fatigue. It
concerns greater Jerusalem, defined as one-third of the West Bank,
where potential Palestinian citizens of Israel have lived since it was
officially annexed to Israel in 1967. A set of municipal regulations and
town-planning ordinances have enabled the ethnic cleansing of the
200,000 Palestinians who live there – an operation that needed time
and had not yet been completed at the time of writing (40 per cent
have already been transferred).13
And there has been a fourth wave of legislation that began in 2001. A
series of parliamentary initiatives led to new discriminatory laws,
among them the ‘nation and admittance to the country’ law which bans
any reunion for whatever reason between Palestinian couples or families
living on different sides of the Green Line. In practice this is a
means of preventing the return to the homeland of any Palestinian who
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274 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS
‘overstayed’ abroad. Other laws institutionalized discrimination in the
welfare and educational realms (for instance the right of the secret
service to determine the employment of school principals and teachers).
And finally there are the laws, already mentioned, that equate objection
to the Jewishness of the state with treason. These laws do not change
the reality, but attest to the state’s ability to forsake the charade and
work more freely against the Palestinians wherever they are.
According to the scenario described and analysed in this epilogue,
the short-term repercussions may be catastrophic; we expect either
escalating state violence against the Palestinians, wherever they are, or
further oppressive legislation. However, in the long run, they may rob
Israel of the moral and political shield with which the West has
provided it. If it continues its oppressive regime, Israel may be South
Africanized or Arabized and thus judged by harsher criteria that the
elite would take more seriously culturally and economically, much
more than the current soft rebukes Israel receives as a democracy.
This may mean that Israel will come to be regarded as a pariah state
and that an end is brought to the dispossession and occupation.
Moreover, de-democratizing Israel could give Palestinian resistance
hope for change and lead it to abandoning its tactics, which are rooted
in despair and anger, born not just as a response to the actual oppression
but also as a reaction against the hypocritical, dishonest brokery
of the West in the conflict from its very first day. If Israel is seen as a
permanent oppressive state, the Palestinians may see a light at the end
of their tunnel of suffering and abuse.
But I would like to leave the readers with some positive images.
There are now five mixed Arab–Jewish schools in Israel, defying the
educational system’s total rejection of these brave attempts to create
alternative enclaves for the future.
There are growing spaces of leisure and pastime, such as the German
colony in Haifa, the promenade in Tel Aviv and the green parks on the
boundary line between East and West Jerusalem, where Palestinians
and Jews share a restaurant, a coffee house or a recreation park. There
is no segregation in public transport, air travel included (although there
is still abuse and maltreatment of Palestinians at the security checkpoints
in the airports), and unlike in the occupied territories, apartheid
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walls are still scarce (although most Jewish villages and suburban areas
are gated communities, in the main to keep the ‘Arabs’ out).
One does not want to idealize the situation. In many other places of
pastime and leisure, Palestinians are not welcome because of who they
are and the daily abuse by whoever represents the government
continues. There are two forces at work in 2010. One is the Arabrabiya,
mentioned before as a distinct Palestinian Israeli dialect of Arabic intertwined
with Hebrew words; it is a functional language spoken between
members of the community. It broadcasts a clear message to the Jewish
majority and the state: we are, so far, the only Palestinian group that
knows you well, accepts your presence in our homeland as an ethnic
group and wishes to share life with you despite everything that your
state and movement has done to us.
The other force is the language of demographic danger. The headline
of the newspaper Yediot Achronot in the early days of July 2010 was ‘We
Are Losing the Negev’. To whom? To the Palestinian citizens of Israel;
not to a foreign army, illegal immigrants or to cynical profiteering from
the outside, but to our own citizens. The media and political language of
middle Israel is that a new Palestinian baby is a grave national danger to
the state’s existence. No affirmative action, no drastic improvement of
standard of living or symbolic inclusion of Palestinians politicians as
ministers in the government (which was done only once and hailed by
the Zionist left as a genuine revolution); none of any of these theoretical
and actual improvements could transform in any meaningful way the
fate of the Palestinians in Israel and that of the Jewish state as a whole.
Time will tell whether the articulate and impressive new member of the
Knesset from Balad, Hanin Zuabi, who, as mentioned, lost some of
her privileges due to her participation in the Turkish flotilla to Gaza in
June 2010 (a loss greeted by some Jewish members of the Knesset
parties with a toast) represents the future because of her excellent
Hebrew and intimate knowledge of what it means to be an Israeli, or
whether she too will be trumped by a state and a public that still believes
in the twenty-first century that it is possible to create an exclusive Jewish
space in the midst of the Arab world.
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