Pappe Ilan. The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel

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102 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

Later the ofﬁcial declaration talked about the newly won freedom of

movement for the Palestinian citizens as an indication that ‘almost all

the restrictions that made life difﬁcult and unnecessarily burdened the

Arab population have now been removed’.

In fact, quite a few restric-

tions on movement had been imposed on the Palestinians in East

Jerusalem, who were regarded ofﬁcially as part of the ‘Arabs in Israel’

after 1968. But, more importantly, the civil administration, which was

the informal branch of the military rule in the towns and cities,

remained intact. This was a branch made up of members of both the

Israeli police and secret service which possessed extended authority –

almost unlimited – when it came to the Palestinian citizens of Israel.

The police had a special section called the ‘Board of Special

Operations’ (Ha-Lishka le-Tafkidim Meyhuadim or LATAM). Its terms

of reference were to expose, report and prevent subversive, terrorist

and espionage activity among the Palestinian citizens of Israel. This

portfolio tells it all in a nutshell; even after the abolition of the military

rule, the Palestinians in Israel were still considered to be the hostile

aliens of the early twentieth century.

This was reinforced by the national symbols of the state, which were

exclusively Jewish and whose content owed much to the wars with

Arabs and the Arab world. The ﬂag, the national anthem and the state

insignias were all not only Jewish but also anti-Arab in one way or

another. The anthem craved for the return of all Jews to Israel while

the ﬂag resembled the Jewish Talith and the Jewish prayer mantle, and

the parliament was represented by the Menorah, a seven-branched

candelabrum used in the ancient Tabernacle in the Desert and in the

Temple in Jerusalem. These insignias were not only meaningless to the

Palestinians but actually hostile to their situation, representing as they

did the Jewish right to the Palestinian homeland.

There was here an inherent paradox. On the one hand, from the

moment military rule was lifted, Palestinians came into daily contact

with Jewish society, from the lowest social strata upwards; the vast

majority were employed by Jewish individuals or companies. On the

other hand, there was no sign of any social or cultural interaction, while

political cooperation happened only on the margins of the main stage.

Thus cohabitation and coexistence were only temporary experiences

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for both communities rather than the result of a policy from above to

produce a joint community or citizenship; if anything the government

was quick to undermine any initiative for the creation of joint spaces,

such as joint kindergartens and schools.

In December 1969, Arab and Jewish authors tried to create a joint

union that did not last for long: A.B. Yehoshua, Dalia Rabikowitz,

Yitzhak Orpaz, Mahmoud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim and Salim Jubran

were among the founders of this hopeful outﬁt. The Palestinian

authors demanded the abolition of the censorship of their work and

an end to exile for some of the political activists and, in particular, to

the administrative arrests (arrests without trial for unidentiﬁed terms),

which by then had been imposed on hundreds of people in the West

Bank and in the Gaza Strip (with a few cases also in Israel itself). It was

difﬁcult to secure their Jewish counterparts’ support for this and the

venture disappeared into thin air.

A far more effective meeting was that organized by a new outﬁt:

Siah, the Hebrew acronym for the New Israeli Left, which fought

directly against the continued harassment of Palestinian writers, poets

and journalists. In March 1970, the ﬁrst meeting took place in reaction

to the renewal of the Lydda-based author Fouzi el-Asmar’s administra-

tive arrest. By then he had already been interned in jail for a year and

a half without access to lawyers and without having been brought in

front of a judge.

There were some attempts from above, though very short-lived and

not genuine enough, to create some common cultural space. The

Israeli television network opened an Arab section after the inaugura-

tion of Israeli television in 1968. While it would soon be seen as a

collaborationist arm of the government by many in the community, in

the early days it had the opportunity and the means to produce a

different visual (if nothing more) reality, which it deserted later on.

Particularly impressive was the children’s programme Sami and Susu, a

bilingual Arab–Jewish comic dialogue that had fans in both communi-

ties and addressed an audience on the verge of forming negative

images of each other. (Research by the psychologist Daniel Bar-Tal

proved that in Israel Jewish and Arab children subscribed to the demo-

nized images of each other’s community very early on in the segregated

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104 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

and indoctrinated educational system – even at the stage when toddlers

supposedly live in a secure world of their own.)

Participation in the common republican good, whether in culture or

politics, was conditional, requiring acceptance of Zionism as the hege-

monic ideology in the state of Israel. Hence in May 1969 a committee

from the newly formed Labour Party (formerly Mapai) recommended

that ‘Arabs’ could be party members as long as they accepted ‘the

guiding social and ideological principles of the party’.

Palestinians lived in total segregation apart from a small urban

minority who lived in proximity to Jewish neighbours. They had their

own towns as well, Shefa-‘Amr and Nazareth, which added to their

sense of seclusion. As mentioned earlier, the educational system (apart

from the universities where in that decade the presence of Palestinian

students was low – around six hundred in 1971) was totally segregated.

The educational and cultural policy during the military rule was

dictated by a wish to turn the Palestinian community in Israel into ‘loyal’

citizens. The secret service warned the government that without close

supervision of schools and cultural activity, a nationalist Palestinian iden-

tity would develop. So Jewish ofﬁcials were put in charge of curricula and

censored cultural events as much as they could. The ability to appoint and

ﬁre principals and teachers added to the tight supervision of education

and culture. The standard guidelines for the Jewish educational system

included instruction to encourage students’ love of their homeland and

the strengthening of the national identity. Needless to say, these aims

were not mentioned in the guidelines distributed among the Palestinian

schools.

The only ‘mixed’ school was a high school in Haifa, but even there

the Palestinian pupils attended separate classes! By the end of the

century several new mixed schools had appeared, though without

either reﬂecting, or bringing about, a fundamental change in the

segregated reality around them. In my class, graduating in 1972, there

were two Palestinian students; the only ones in one of the biggest high

schools in Haifa.

The strong limitations on expressing one’s national identity and the

imposition of severe control over education forces one to question the

assertion of the mainstream sociologists in Israel who claim that with

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the abolition of military rule in 1967 Israel transformed itself into a

liberal democracy. This is not reﬂected either in the recollections of

the Palestinians themselves from that period or in the legislative

programme. On the contrary, instead of referring to what unfolded as

liberalization of the public space for the Palestinian minority, one can

talk about a developing normalization in the relationship with

both the state and the Jewish majority. This daily relationship was in

itself a novelty compared to the reality under military rule, and may be

considered an improvement, but it did not hide the inbuilt imbalance

of the status of both communities, nor could it be taken as proof of the

end of the de jure and de facto discrimination of the state against its

Palestinian citizens.

Reading memoirs and talking to people about that period, it transpires

that the most oppressive aspect of it all was not the laws, the seclusion,

the segregation, the unemployment or the poverty. The impression one

receives is that they were bad, but manageable. What was as intolerable

as it was impossible to defeat was the attitude of those who represented

power in the Jewish state: the ofﬁcials in the Ministry of the Interior,

the tax collector, the policeman, the judge or anyone who was supposed

to provide service in the name of the state. The general experience

was of abusive practices and humiliation that remained fresh long after

the worst memories of military rule faded away, mainly because they

are still there in the twenty-ﬁrst century. Adnan Abed Elrazik, one of

the ﬁrst Palestinian lecturers in Israel (in the Department of Education

in the Hebrew University), and Riyad Amin, who was one of the ﬁrst

Palestinian science PhD candidates (also at the Hebrew University; he

later became a lecturer in Birzeit University), put together an evaluation

of the situation in 1978. Looking back at the period after the abolition of

the military rule, they found that discrimination had remained a salient

feature in the life of the Palestinian citizens. They point to three areas –

land expropriation, lack of employability and abuse in education – as the

worst aspects of living as an Arab in the Jewish state during the period

from 1967 to 1978.

Those responsible for direct and indirect contact with the

Palestinian citizens in the name of the state were still in the habit of

providing beneﬁts only in return for collaboration of a sort. If you

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106 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

wished to open a restaurant, to become an employee of the govern-

ment, to expand your business or to embark on an academic career (a

novel idea after 1967), some favour was to be expected in return. It

could be active service for the Shabak, the Israeli secret service – just

an occasional report, or grassing to the authorities, or an overt display

of loyalty to the state. The relevant documentation that would prove

or disprove how systematic or intentional this policy was after 1967 is

not open as yet and one wonders whether it ever will be; in 2010 the

Israeli government altered its policy of archival declassiﬁcation,

extending both the period and the terms for making new documents

accessible to the historians. However, ﬁrst-hand accounts suggest that

attempts to get Palestinians to inform were common during that

period, and that they still happen today.

Most of the Palestinians I know have succeeded in resisting both the

temptation and the intimidation, but not everyone did. One of those

who persevered under pressure is Hatim Kanaaneh, who returned from

the USA to practise medicine in the Galilee during the late 1970s. He

recalls how, quite soon after his arrival, the authorities tried to recruit

him as an informer. As a returnee student he was entitled, as I was after

ﬁnishing my studies abroad, for a loan to help set up life in Israel. But

in his case, the Ofﬁce of the Advisor on Arab Affairs sent an ofﬁcial to

tell him that the loan depended on his willingness to serve as an

informer. ‘I’ll scratch your back and you’ll scratch mine,’ Yorum Katz,

the chief recruiter in the north in those days, told him. ‘My itch is

gone,’ answered Hatim and ended the conversation. Katz possessed a

lot of power in securing permits for businesses, trade and so on, and

Hatim later discovered that Katz had banned his brother from trading

with Gaza.

In 1959 John Grifﬁn, a noted white journalist, wrote a famous book,

Black Like Me, about his experiences of living as a member of the black

population in the American South. Three decades later Yoram Binur

wrote an ‘Arab like Me’ book which reafﬁrms much of what is described

above. Binur lived as a ‘Palestinian’ construction worker in Tel Aviv for six

months and, although his account of the late 1980s is mainly about

Palestinian workers who came from the West Bank, he also gives a vivid

description of what it felt like to be an ‘Arab’ in Israel or the occupied

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territories, and in Tel Aviv, the only Western city that has no Arab popu-

lation in it.

In this context it is worth mentioning the work by Rebecca

Kook, the only one on the subject I know of, which methodically compares

the experience of African Americans with that of the Palestinians in Israel,

examining and evaluating latent as well as more obvious forms of racism

and discrimination. She concludes that the main difference lies not in the

practices and the daily reality of the community, but in Israel’s willingness

to institutionalize the discrimination through legislation, whereas in the

USA, since the abolition of slavery and the segregation policies of the

southern states, the races have been equal before the law.

The ability to engage for a while with wider Israeli society increased

the hopes of many among the minority for a better future in the years

ahead; these hopes were manifested in an increase in votes for Zionist

parties and a more open relationship with the main trade union, the

Histadrut, among other things. In fact, the high level of participation in

the various election campaigns was another indication of the aspirations

which people harboured during that period. When their hopes never

materialized, the frustration and depression would be immense. But this

was not yet known in the ﬁrst decade without military rule.

THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC REALITIES OF LIFE

Some of the realities in the ﬁrst decade after 1967 did not attract much

attention at the time, but nevertheless harboured destructive potential

for the future. One such slice of life was the economic imbalance

between the two societies. Jewish society began to thrive after the ﬁrst

two decades of statehood, during which the economy had been

minimal and the state as a whole had been poor and struggling. Then

a new era of prosperity commenced. Reparations from Germany,

American Jewish money (particularly signiﬁcant during that period),

various aid packages from successive American administrations, and

foreign investments all beneﬁted Jews, mostly those of European

origin, but hardly affected the standard of living of the Palestinian

citizens of Israel. The annual income of a Jew was twice that of a

Palestinian as a result of the different pace of their economic develop-

ment throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

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108 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

The socio-economic reality at this time should be seen in a wider

context. Twenty years of land expropriation had turned the Palestinian

community, which had been principally rural and agricultural, into

salaried workers, or rather semi-workers in the Jewish areas, who

were underpaid and had very little hope for social and economic

mobility. The Palestinians were clearly at the very bottom of the socio-

economic structure with very little hope of leaving this unenviable

position.

This, coupled with the different standards in education (the average

Jewish child ﬁnished ten years of schooling, and the average Palestinian

only six), meant that the disparity remained steady and was no less

oppressive than direct military rule. A very detailed retrospective report

on the employment situation found that between 1967 and 2000 the

basic predicaments of employability among Palestinians in Israel have

not altered much. Educated Palestinians more often than not were

working in job for which they were overqualiﬁed. It stated: ‘many

Arabs suffer from discrimination in employment as many work places

refuse to employ them’.

And thus although equivalent proportions of

Palestinian and Jewish men were employed through the decade covered

here, later on we learn that many Palestinian men became unemployed

earlier on in their life due to the nature of their unskilled work (only

40 per cent of them remained in the labour market above the age of

50, while 70 per cent of Jews were still employed in the same age

group).

This polarization only increased over the next decades and contributed

its share to the frustration and sense of oppression. Even those achieving

a full cycle of higher education, including university, had very little

hope of ﬁnding jobs that ﬁtted their qualiﬁcations or expectations in a

Jewish-dominated market; there is not sufﬁcient data for the 1970s, but

from the 1980s onwards, half of the university graduates did not work in

jobs that ﬁtted their qualiﬁcations.

The economic situation was inﬂuenced by the prevention of govern-

mental ﬁnancial ﬂows that would have encouraged economic activity.

New Israeli legislation had encouraged such activity ever since the

early 1960s but in practice these laws were not applied to Palestinian

entrepreneurs and the Palestinian areas were not included in the

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state’s infrastructural development planning. The result was that they

lacked the developmental infrastructure necessary for beginning new

economic projects, hence local entrepreneurs were not interested.

the same time the general infrastructure for habitation: water, sewerage,

roads, electricity and hygiene deteriorated.

Until the late 1980s the Israeli government gave precedence to what

it called national interest over economic considerations. The national

goals were encouraging Jewish immigration, the distribution of the

Jewish population all over the country, a welfare system for all and

high employment. This was achieved through a policy of centraliza-

tion, including heavy regulation of the ﬁnancial and banking system.

Even the rise of ‘free market’ parties took time to transform this facet

of the economy.

In practice the centralized economy produced a complex bureaucracy

that demanded permits for every aspect of life and allowed no free

competition except on the periphery. Most of the economic power was

in the hands of big governmental cartels and monopolies, many of which

were run by government, the Jewish Agency and the Histadrut.

It was

difﬁcult to see how one could change the situation as the government

had total control of development and strategy in the realm of economy,

with the result that even when, in the next decade, liberalization was

introduced to the local economy, the Palestinians could not exploit the

free market reality to transform their conditions. Like democracy, the

free market and privatization were conditional according to one’s ethnic

identity.

This was a typical colonialist dilemma for the Israeli policy makers;

they insisted, as did those academics writing loyally in the name of the

state and Zionism during that period, that the Palestinian society was

modernized under Israel’s rule. There is little doubt that they, or the

natural progress of things in the Middle East, did contribute to the

disappearance of some of the more negative aspects of the local indige-

nous society: there was less illiteracy, more opportunities for women,

better health conditions, a higher level of education and so on. Again I

would refer to the very honest summary of these advantages in As’ad

Ghanem’s work.

However, this was very limited progress in compar-

ison with the Jewish society – a disparity which mainstream Israeli

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110 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

sociologists pinned on the nature of the Arab minority and which crit-

ical sociologists later on would blame on Israel’s discriminatory policies.

Like colonialist powers before them, the Israeli politicians and ofﬁcials

expected that this limited modernization would satisfy the Palestinian

minority, but it did not. The undeniable improvement in the commu-

nity’s standard of living was judged by the Palestinians not according to

past realities, but according to how they fared in comparison to the

Jewish members of the society, and that exercise ended in great dismay

and outrage.

Not all of the complex realities of the Palestinian society can or

should be attributed to Israeli policy. This was a society in a Middle

East that was transforming slowly and dialectically from the old world

of Ottoman rule and traditional values into an age of nationalism and

global capitalism. And, as elsewhere in the Middle East, old social

patterns still affected life, even in places where brutal modern policies

from above were trying to eradicate them, as was case in Ataturk’s

Turkey and in the Shah’s Iran. Inside Israel, the clan, the hammula, was

still the main centre of life in the rural areas, which meant both a

source of solidarity and stability in the face of dire economic and social

conditions, but also unchallenged patriarchy and only superﬁcial ideo-

logical afﬁliations either to Communism, nationalism or collaboration

with Zionism. The politics of the hammula and its main interests

served as the principal political platform; any ideology that could serve

this platform was welcomed. The younger generation, and wider

sections of the small urban centres of Palestinians in Israel, had begun

to drift away from this social reality but still found it difﬁcult to assert

life outside the extended family circle. This was particularly hard to

achieve in the rural areas, where Israeli policies strengthened the

power of clans, and very few alternative modern systems were open to

individuals who were looking for new defence mechanisms that would

replace the familiar traditional ones.

A leading Israeli anthropologist at the time, Henry Rosenfeld, noted

a new phenomenon emerging which was unique and had no comparable

existence anywhere else in the region and this was the making of a young

‘rural middle class’ – almost an oxymoron.

The rural villages stopped

being agricultural – they were now the residence of workers, employed

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and underemployed, mostly commuting to the Jewish areas. And in

the village a middle class emerged. It was a process that took twenty

years to mature. Alongside the workers there were the contractors, the

lorry drivers, the restaurant owners, the lawyers and doctors and other

professionals.

Members of this middle class could not, even they wished, perceive

Israeliness as an alternative to either traditional spheres of identity or

the national one. Whatever we will call the process they underwent

in the third decade of statehood, be it ‘modernization’, education or

migration to the cities, the transformation of their lives deepened the

rift between the Palestinian individual and the Jewish state. As Nadim

Rouhana puts it, they developed a ﬂawed national identity and one

which was affected by the realities in Israel on the one hand, and the

strengthening of the Palestinian national movement on the other; but

whatever it was, it had very little in common with the Israeli Jewish

identity.

This was not the prediction of the academics in Israel who began to

be interested in the Palestinian community as a subject matter. For

them the Palestinians in Israel were a successful case study of ‘modern-

ization’ under the guidance and impact of the modernizing state. These

scholars equated modernization with greater integration in the Jewish

state, an observation that was valid in certain aspects of life, but one

which was wrong when it also included an assumption of identiﬁcation

with the state. Even if there were some indicators that Palestinians were

succumbing to being a tamed national group within an exclusive Jewish

state, given time, something more powerful seemed to be at work that

tipped the balance against it: the uniﬁcation with the Palestinians in the

West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

THE IMPACT OF THE UNIFICATION WITH THE

REST OF PALESTINE

As for everyone else living in Israel, the consequences of the June 1967

war, rather than the short-lived war itself, were formative events in the

history of the community. For the Palestinians in Israel, the occupa-

tion of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip meant ﬁrst and foremost a

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