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

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

132 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

military response in all these three villages was the same: shooting with

live ammunition into the crowd, killing six of the demonstrators.

Similar demonstrations took place in Wadi Ara. In one of them,

Ahmad Masarwa, from the village Arara, took part. He reconstructed

the events afterwards, commenting, ‘what was amazing that we organ-

ised without anyone telling us to do so; we collected people and

prepared pamphlets’, all in preparation for a procession of protest in

the village against the land expropriation. Before the procession began

the activists, like Ahmad, went from door to door to convince people

to take part in a national day of strike. This was a brave decision by the

villagers as many of them were employed by Jews and risked losing

their jobs for missing a day in their workplaces. As a reporter from the

Guardian who witnessed the demonstration wrote, the ‘strike was

almost 100 per cent effective in the Arab towns and villages’.

Masarwa recalled that some of the people in the village told him they

joined the strike not because of the land expropriation but because

they could not afford proper schooling and health services due to the

meagre salaries they received. The police brought in buses full of

soldiers who kidnapped the young demonstrators and beat them up in

the buses, arresting some of them while letting others go home.

At the end of the bloody days, six people were buried. Khayr

Muhammad Yasin from Arabeh; Raja Hussein Abu Riya, Khader Abd

Khalila and Khadija Juhayna (sometimes spelled Shwaneh) from Sakhnin,

Muhammad Yusuf Taha from Kafr Kana, and Rafat Zuhairi from Nur

Shams (a refugee camp near Tul Karim), who was shot at Taybeh. The

municipality of Sakhnin commissioned a monument from the Palestinian

artist Abed Abidi to honour the three people from the village killed on

the day. It took a long time before the village, which in the meantime had

become a town, could secure a licence to build the exhibit, which is now

a famous landmark in the Palestinian Galilee.

The poet Mahmoud

Darwish wrote ‘The Poem of the Land’ in memory of those killed:

A small evening

A neglected village

Two sleeping eyes

Thirty years

36x

Five wars

I witness that the time hides for me

An ear of wheat

The singer sings

Of ﬁre and strangers

Evening was evening

The singer was singing

And they question him why do you sing?

He answers to them as they seize him

Because I sing

And they searched him

In his breast only his heart

In his heart only his people

In his voice only his sorrow.

As an act of solidarity other Palestinians, including in the occupied

territories, joined in with the protest. It only lasted one day and yet it

was, as we shall see in the next chapter, a monumental event in the

relationship of the state with its Palestinian citizens.

The daily Israeli press described the events as pure fanaticism without

any justiﬁed cause,

just as they later portrayed the demonstrations in

2000, without any sympathy or understanding of the Palestinians’ moti-

vations or the role of the military and the police in the violence. The

public mood among Jewish society was such that this grave violation

of the Palestinians’ human and civil rights was condoned without any

criticism.

The sight of the state security’s forces killing its own citizens was

one even the more hawkish Israeli politicians did not wish to see.

However, if there was any shock it was short lived. This was just few

months before the great political earthquake in Israeli politics, when

the Labour government was replaced by a right-wing Likud Party,

even more hostile towards the Palestinian citizens. In those last

months of the Labour government the public attention was attracted

to other dramatic events, such as the hijacking of the Air France ﬂight

to Entebbe, Uganda and the Israeli military operation to release the

MILITARY RULE BY OTHER MEANS, 1967–1977 | 133

36x

134 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

hostages. The West Bank was also boiling with the elections that for

the ﬁrst time put an end to the pro-Jordanian leadership, which was

replaced by the PLO representatives.

The workers who went on strike were ﬁred and the Prime Minister,

Yitzhak Rabin, in a meeting with the heads of council declared that all

the plans for expropriation of land would go through. Moreover the

government decided to leak the Koenig document which was hidden

from the public eye as it was deemed then, in 1975, to be too provoca-

tive. Although not all of Koenig’s racist recommendations were

adopted, it was never condemned by the government and it seemed to

reﬂect the attitude of the senior Jewish ofﬁcialdom involved in imple-

menting the daily policy towards the Palestinians in Israel.

36x

CHAPTER FOUR

BETWEEN THE DAY OF THE LAND

AND THE FIRST INTIFADA,

1976–1987

THE DRAMATIC EVENTS of the Day of the Land led to a brief rapproche-

ment, and a halt to massive land conﬁscation – although only for a short

while. The Galilee was not totally Judaized, but Palestinian–Jewish

tension remained high. In November 1978, the Jewish heads of local

councils in the Galilee met with governmental ofﬁcials and ministers

in the newly expanded (on Arab land) town of Carmiel. Carmiel now

stretched over the land expropriated, despite the protest and the sacriﬁces

made by the local community.

The failure to stop the expropriation of land may be explained by the

fact that such a day of protest on this particular question was not

attempted again. The struggle, as far as the Palestinians were concerned,

moved to the courts and even to attempts to involve the international

community in its plight. In any case, the Jewish meeting ended with a

call for the government to continue the ‘Judaization’ of the Galilee due

to the ‘radicalization’ in the attitudes of the Arabs in the north of Israel.

The slogan of the day was ‘there is no shame in Judaizing the Galilee’.

A prime mover behind such initiatives was the new Minister of

Defense, Ariel Sharon, who already in September 1977, despite his

more urgent concerns in deepening the colonization of the West Bank

and the Gaza Strip, stopped any attempts to ease the expropriation

policy or the land regime inside Israel all together. ‘As it is,’ he cried,

136 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

‘alien elements [Arabs] take over the lands of the state. National land

is robbed by others. Soon Jews will have no place to settle in.’

Sharon orchestrated what Ghazi Falah described as the second wave of

Judaization, which included almost doubling the Jewish population in the

Galilee between 1960 and 1985. Sixty new Jewish settlements were added

in three settlement blocks, Segev, Tefen and Talmon, all connected by a

new web of highways, of a quality unknown before in the Galilee, where

the roads to the Arab villages were never upgraded to such a level.

Recollections of the decade that followed the Day of the Land are of

individuals trying to rebuild a normal life after the frightening events,

only to be faced twice, in 1982 and in 1987, with sharp reminders that

normal life was a luxury no Palestinian, wherever he or she lived, could

afford. But even before and in between the war in Lebanon in 1982

and the outbreak of the ﬁrst Intifada in 1987, people could not keep

politics out of their houses and private lives. In the age of television,

and later on even more so with the advent of the Internet, even if one

was not a victim of a particular policy, what happened to the other

members of the Palestinian community or to the Palestinians at large

was very much present and difﬁcult to ignore.

However, this was also a period when individuals in the community

reached senior positions as physicians, sportsmen and businessmen.

The most impressive ﬁeld was that of medicine, where thousands of

doctors were employed in the governmental and private hospitals and

medical services (although it should be noted that only in 2007 was

a Palestinian, Dr Masad Barhoum, appointed to direct a hospital).

During this period the ﬁrst Palestinians joined some of the top Israeli

football teams and one or two made it into the national team (where

the press watched nervously to see whether they would join in singing

the Zionist anthem when required; needless to say most of the players

of the national team did not, and still do not today, know the words off

by heart. But the Palestinian players very honestly said they could not

sing an anthem which craves for the return of the Jews to Zion.) Some

very sanguine academic research was done following this, rather

minimal, involvement of Palestinians in the Israeli football scene, in

the hope that it would be a precursor of a more amiable relationship

between the two communities. This was mainly due to the personality

36x

of Rifat ‘Jimmy’ Turk. A very kind soul born in the harsh neighbour-

hoods of Jaffa, he became the ﬁrst Palestinian footballer to play in

Israel’s national team in 1976. He moved later to work with youth and

the community in Jaffa and symbolized a personal track out of the

otherwise ghettoized existence of Palestinians in Jaffa.

In the business sector, the ﬁrst successes of construction and trade

companies were noted, but again their ability to break into the Jewish

market was limited and some later on were bought by big Israel compa-

nies wishing to monopolize the market of coffee and dairies, which were

traditionally advanced in the Palestinian sector.

But in hindsight these were not the crucial images that impacted on

the life of the community as a whole. The relevant pictures are those

of Palestinian leaders in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip arrested by

a new ﬁerce policy pursued by Ariel Sharon, or blown to pieces by a

Jewish underground; or of Israeli tanks rolling into Lebanon in the

summer of 1982 in a destructive campaign against the PLO and its

leader Yasser Arafat; and ﬁnally of Palestinian children aged thirteen

directing a rocket-propelled grenade against an Israeli tank in the Ayn

Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon, or hurling stones at the armoured

cars in the Balata refugee camp near Nablus in the ﬁrst Intifada against

the Israeli occupation forces.

In between the political drama, in which the Palestinian community

displayed solidarity with other Palestinians throughout the world and

felt a part of a larger community of suffering and victimhood, more

mundane and hopeful images inﬁltrate the collective memory. The

ﬁrst group of young lawyers and doctors began to make a difference to

society; fresh plays and theatre in Arabic for the ﬁrst time were shown

independently and even documentary ﬁlms were contemplated. More

women were educated and worked, more babies were born, and people

lived longer than in previous years.

THE END OF LABOUR AND THE BEGINNING

OF THE LIKUD ERA

For most Israeli Jews 1977 was as disturbing as 1973. The near defeat

on the battleﬁeld was followed by the demise of the Labour movement,

THE DAY OF THE LAND TO THE FIRST INTIFADA, 1976–87 | 137

36x

138 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

which had controlled political life in Israel since the foundation of the

state in 1948. It was replaced by the Likud coalition with a Liberal party

and religious national Jews who represented the new drive in the Jewish

society to settle in the occupied territories – a trend initiated by the

Labour governments.

Menachem Begin, the new Prime Minister until his fall from grace in

1983 due to the drowning of the Israeli army in the Lebanese quagmire,

was remembered among Palestinians in Israel as the man who led the

struggle for the abolition of military rule. But soon this positive image

was replaced with that of a political demagogue who did not hesitate to

arouse the most basic racist and anti-Arab emotions to become Prime

Minister. He was voted in by an Arab Jewish, Mizrahi, electorate, who

were persuaded by an appeal to their anti-Arabism, among other issues.

In their eyes, if I may recap what I have pointed out earlier on, and in the

political manipulation of the political right in Israel, their ticket to full

integration into the Israeli society was their ability to de-Arabize them-

selves: to wipe out their Arab traditions, roots and language so that they

would become as Israeli and Zionist as the Ashkenazi Jews. Displaying a

strong anti-Arab position, including vis-à-vis the Palestinian minority in

Israel, assured success in the struggle for integration and with it, maybe,

personal economic prosperity. Begin unashamedly exploited this impulse

and these apprehensions. His other colleagues, such as Ariel Sharon and

Yitzhak Shamir, were even more vociferous and anti-Arab than he was, at

least in their speeches and discourses.

But at the end of day, both from the vantage point of our time and

when viewed through the eyes of Palestinians in Israel, this fault line

of Israeli politics was quite meaningless in the lives of the Palestinian

community. Likud and Labour may have differed on the fate of the

occupied territories, but there was never any signiﬁcant divergence of

opinion between them as to what the status and the fate of the

Palestinians in Israel should be. For both parties, from a Zionist

perspective, it would have been better if the state had been emptied of

its indigenous and local population, but this was an impossible dream.

Instead they had to tolerate a Palestinian minority, provided it did not

aspire to become a national group that could challenge, or even

change, the Jewish nature of Israel.

36x

Thus if you ask the Bedouin of the Negev about that decade they

will recall that the last months of Labour in power were the worst. Driven

by extra zeal, and without particular prodding from above, the ofﬁcials in

the Negev harassed this part of the community in the months leading to

the election of the Likud. Ninety dunams of the land of the al-Sana tribe

were run over by tractors to make them unusable while forty-ﬁve fami-

lies from another tribe were moved from an area coveted by the Israel

Land Administration to Wadi Ara in the north. They were ﬁrst settled

in area 109, as it was called, which was under the rule of Emergency

Regulation No. 109 – which meant that for a while they lived in a closed

military zone, unable to enter or leave it without army permission.

As Ghazi Falah noted, the Bedouin discovered during that period

that their problem was ‘not so much of being Bedouin, but rather those

of being Arabs in a Zionist state’; at the time Falah was a young Bedouin

geographer trying unsuccessfully to offer a geographical perspective

that was not loyal to the Zionist state or its assumptions. Geography, as

Edward Said noted, is very closely associated with nationalism and

patriotism; it was by far the most difﬁcult position to hold within the

Israeli academia and indeed Falah teaches it today in the USA.

It seems that in the ﬁnal days of Labour, its representatives on the

ground were even less tolerant than during the decade as a whole. When

the anti-Zionist movement Matzpen wished to screen a ﬁlm about the

1956 massacre in Kafr Qassem, the ﬁlm was conﬁscated. Even in 1977 it

was not possible, either in the Arab or Jewish public space, to discuss

openly what had happened in 1956. A similar attempt to silence discus-

sion in cultural media about unpleasant chapters in the past occurred

in the same month, when Israeli television wished to screen the ﬁlm

Hirbet Hizah, S. Yizhar’s famous story exposing the violent side of Israeli

conduct during the 1948 war. The month also saw the continued policy

of house and administrative arrests for those who persisted in their crit-

icism of the government, such as Ghazi al-Sadi, a publisher from Acre,

interned for allegedly spying for the Syrians; he was offered release in

return for exile and giving up his Israeli citizenship. Some even paid with

their lives, as happened in Majd al-Kurum, a village on the road between

Acre and Safad, where the authorities demolished a house and, in the

process, when faced with demonstrators and protestors, killed one

THE DAY OF THE LAND TO THE FIRST INTIFADA, 1976–87 | 139

36x

140 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

villager and wounded and arrested scores of others. This demolished

house is still visible today from the main highway as a commemorative

landmark of past tragedies and evils.

Begin lost his seat to the more extreme right-wing leader Yitzhak

Shamir, whose reign of power was short-lived and who therefore left

no enduring impact on any aspect of life in Israel. From 1984, it was

back to Labour, although this time within a unity government. As

could have been anticipated, on the issue of Palestinians in Israel there

was no dividing line between the two major political blocs of Labour

and Likud.

THE AXIS OF EXCLUSION AND INCLUSION:

LIFE IN THE FOURTH DECADE

The two dramatic events of this decade, the 1982 Lebanon war and the

ﬁrst Intifada, were not powerful enough to determine the troubling ques-

tions of identity, navigation, citizenship and survival, which remained

insoluble and as problematic as they ever had been.

The limited possibilities open to Palestinian citizens were the

result of the previous governmental policies. Since the policies in

the new decade did not fundamentally challenge these early ones, the

political options and strategies for the individual and the Palestinian

community as a whole were pretty much the same as before. The most

signiﬁcant fact in this respect was the economic gap between the

Jewish and Palestinian communities in the late 1970s. It was so wide

that one can now say with conﬁdence, and in hindsight, that it defeated

the chances for real reconciliation, even without the particular pres-

sures on the relationship brought by the 1982 Lebanon war and the

ﬁrst Intifada.

For political and academic observers at the time, the main change

between Labour and Likud was the espousal of an extreme capitalist

economic policy by the latter (advised directly by none other than Milton

Friedman), and this was the main reason for the economic polarization

in the Jewish state. This analysis was favoured by the Communist

Party, which asserted that a more egalitarian economic and social

policy would have produced a Jewish state in which the minority could

36x

live on equal terms with the majority (next to a Palestinian state in the

West Bank and the Gaza Strip).

While important sections in the Zionist left, for instance a new

group of leading professors and intellectuals in the Labour Party,

Kevuzat 77, the 1977 group, began to adopt this analysis and prog-

nosis, young intellectuals in the Palestinian community, many of them

originally members of the Communist Party, saw the problem as orig-

inating elsewhere. They still believed that the source of the problem

was the ethnic ideology of the Zionist movement and its adoption as a

hegemonic strategy by the Jewish state. Therefore the solution in their

eyes was to substitute the regime in Israel for any political outﬁt that

would be liberated from this hegemonic ideology, regardless of its

economic nature. So while the Communist Party opened a huge Soviet

book festival in 1977, other activists were pushing forward either more

purely national agendas or Islamic ones.

Whatever was the cause, one point is very clear from a historical

perspective: in terms of expectations and realities, the socio-economic

conditions seemed to have a decisive impact on the vast majority of the

Palestinian community, as now a second generation of children born

into post-Mandatory Palestine was growing up. The economic reality

affected the social one in particular for this new generation. Israel in the

late 1970s was a state where Palestinians, unlike Jewish citizens, had very

limited options for social mobilization. For example, ofﬁcial Israeli

statistics showed that only 1 per cent of Palestinians were enrolled in the

ofﬁcial education system beyond the age of sixteen, and only 4 per cent

were enrolled between the ages of thirteen and ﬁfteen.

The low

percentage of Palestinians accepted into Israeli universities did not meet

their drive for higher education; hence many young people found their

own way to Europe, and those connected to the Communist Party to

Eastern Europe, in pursuit of academic careers.

Given the economic deprivation and these social limitations, the

prevailing experience of many in the Palestinian community at that

time was of a growing sense of alienation from the state, even thirty

years after its foundation and a decade after the abolition of the mili-

tary rule. The problem was not only the policies of the Jewish state,

but also the expectation, at least among the educated elite, that life was

THE DAY OF THE LAND TO THE FIRST INTIFADA, 1976–87 | 141

36x