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

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refugees to return to their homes. Needless to say, the future of the

Palestinians in Israel was not part of the programme.

This diktat was accepted by the majority of Jewish members of the

Knesset, and even the right-wing opposition accepted the basic outlines

of the programme with few reservations. From Peace Now on the left –

once a natural ally of the Palestinians in Israel – to Gush Emunim on the

right, there was a wide consensus on the nature of the conﬂict’s solution.

Unfortunately, it was a position that only deepened the already wide

gap between Palestinians and Jews in Israel.

It became painfully clear to the Palestinians in Israel that the old

dichotomy between Labour and Likud no longer reﬂected the Israeli

internal debate on the critical issues concerning the minority. Indeed,

Labour (the hegemonic representation of Zionism since 1882 until its

fall from power in the 1977 elections) and Likud (the heir of the

Zionist faction, Herut, an alternative, more ethnocentric and segrega-

tive variant of Zionism known as Revisionism that rose to challenge

Labour’s Zionism as of 1922) had effectively coalesced into one major

ideological stream.

For despite the bitter antagonism that has sepa-

rated them historically, and despite Labour’s loss at the polls in 1977,

it was Labour’s vision that prevailed over the Revisionist commitment

to total sovereignty over the whole of historical Palestine. It was

Labour’s vision, in which Likud essentially acquiesced, that became the

principal prism through which the political centre and professional

elites in Israel viewed the Israel–Palestine reality.

To be fair one should add that the above analysis was clear in the mind

of academics and professionals who closely followed political develop-

ments in Israel. The Palestinian citizens themselves were still more

apprehensive of a Likud government in 1996 than a Labour one. And

thus for instance in the village of Tira in the Triangle a black ﬂag was

waved after Netanyahu’s victory and, as retaliation, an unknown person

planted a bomb in the town hall.

But after the 1999 election of Ehud

Barak and Labour, this sense of a united Zionist front was also shared by

the vast majority of the Palestinian citizens in Israel.

But Israel was not a totally homogenous society in 2000, at least less

so than it would be nine years later. Despite the convergence of the two

mega-parties into one stream, there were still two main variants to the

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hegemonic ideology: post-Zionism and neo-Zionism. The ﬁrst, articu-

lated more clearly in 2000 than it had been in the late 1980s when it

ﬁrst came to prominence, strongly criticized Zionist policy and conduct

before and after 1948, accepted many of the claims made by the

Palestinians concerning 1948 itself, and envisioned a non-Jewish state

in Israel as the best solution for the country’s internal and external

predicaments. As such, it presented a point of view acceptable to large

numbers of Palestinian citizens in Israel. But due to the events

described in the next chapter, the movement itself almost disappeared

and therefore the potential political alliance that it could have produced

did not materialize. Thus post-Zionism did not become a political chal-

lenge. The post-Zionist success was in legitimizing abroad, more than

in Israel, hitherto taboo topics of great relevance to the internal debate

in Israel: the nature of Zionism, Israel’s moral conduct in 1948, the

refugee problem and so on. The impact was felt mainly abroad since

academia and the educational system in Israel succeeded in eliminating

the post-Zionist challenge in the next decade.

The main political challenge to traditional Zionism came from the

right, from a fundamentalist Zionism termed by some as ‘neo-Zionism’.

From the perspective of the Palestinians in Israel, neo-Zionism was a

violent and extreme interpretation of Zionism. It existed as a marginal

variant of Zionism both in the Labour and the revisionist camps and

was nourished in the teaching centres controlled by the religious

Zionist Hapoel Hamizrachi (which became the National Religious

Party, Mafdal). It burst forth as an ofﬁcial alternative after the 1967 war,

pushed forward by expansionists among the Labour movement, leaders

of the newly established Likud, and leading rabbis. In the 1980s, neo-

Zionism widened its constituency by forming alliances with the settlers

in the occupied territories and the deprived and marginalized sectors of

Jewish society. Whether North African Jews, or immigrants from the

ex-Soviet Union who had not made it in Israeli society, the neo-Zionist

outﬁt sold them anti-Arab racism as the best and lowest common

denominator for political action. When rabbis threw in a theological

ﬂavour for such ideas they became even more powerful and threatening

to the Palestinian minority in Israel. It began with a whisper, but by the

beginning of the next century it was common to read, especially in the

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local regional newspapers, the chief Sephardi rabbi of Safad, or Lid,

warning against too many Arabs roaming their cities or ‘kidnapping’

innocent Jewish girls. When these people had access to a local radio

station, in what became a kind of Israeli bible-belt broadcasting, their

poisonous and racist tongues would know no boundaries. This kind of

rhetoric was accompanied by the establishment of special organizations

to protect Jewish lives in these areas, mostly underdeveloped towns

on the margins of the state, and ‘salvage’ the few hundred Jewish

women who – God forbid – fell in love with Palestinians from nearby

villages.

This was part of a wider problem. The Jews who came from Arab

countries have traditionally been an electorate of the right in Israel,

in terms not so much of the debate about the future of the occupied

territories as of their attitude towards the Palestinians inside Israel.

However, the sociological research is not deﬁnitive nor is this group

homogenous. They were nonetheless an important part of the alliance

that maintained the neo-Zionist point of view: an uneasy pact between

expansionist nationalists, ultra-orthodox rabbis and ethnic spiritual

leaders of the Mizrahi Jews, all presenting themselves as champions of

underprivileged Mizrahim. One important party, Shas, through its

spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, resorted more and more to racist

remarks about Arabs as part of its attempt to widen the ranks (often

including references to the right to conduct genocide on them: ‘We

should destroy and eliminate the Arabs,’ he said).

Shas being a very

cynical political movement, however, when holding the Ministry of

Interior it did not refrain from promising beneﬁts to the Palestinian

community should their representatives in the Knesset support the

religious legislation Shas wanted to push forward. Parties like Shas,

and its predecessor in the Ministry of Interior, the national religious

party Mafdal, were also able to persuade and sometimes bribe a few

Hammulas in the rural areas to vote for them en masse.

These political and ideological developments inspired considerable

apprehension among the Palestinians in Israel. The move to the right

had commenced with the election of Netanyahu in 1996, but the whole

political leadership now lost any interest in advancing the Oslo Accords

and missed opportunities to mend fences and maybe leave some hope

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for the future – opportunities which had been spotted very clearly by

the Palestinians in Israel. One such was Yasser Arafat’s visit to the

Holocaust museum in Lohamei Hagetaot (a kibbutz in the north of

Israel) after he was disinvited by the Holocaust museum in Washington.

The visit was condemned from left to right and the process of recon-

ciling the traumas of both sides was cut dead when it was just beginning

to bud. Azmi Bishara, who wrote several articles against Holocaust

denial in the Arab world and among the Palestinians, commented

despairingly, ‘Finally a Palestinian leader acknowledges your suffering

and you reject him.’

In September 1997, Prime Minister Ehud Barak asked for forgive-

ness from the Mizrahi Jews for years of discrimination, a gesture

ridiculed at every level by the Palestinians in Israel, who had organized

a national strike on the same day to protest against their discrimina-

tion. Al-Ittihad called upon Barak to ask for forgiveness from the

Palestinians in Israel, a request that, needless to say, went unheeded.

On the other hand, at an ofﬁcial ceremony in October 1997 commem-

orating the Kafr Qassem massacre, the President, Moshe Kazav, asked

for forgiveness in the name of the state. For many Palestinians this

seemed too late, and was christened by the press as the butcher’s

apology (Kazav means ‘butcher’ in Hebrew).

Many felt that it was too late for Israeli gestures. When the Israeli

Association for Civil Rights demanded that a Palestinian Israeli be a

member of the Israel Land Administration, Amir Makhoul, a leading

ﬁgure in the developing civil society (and the brother of Issam

Makhoul, a long-serving Hadash member of the Knesset) wrote that

this was a patronizing act that was not genuine or practical, since the

Palestinian representative would be a lonely voice in a body which

would continue to adopt plans for further expropriation of Palestinian

land and space.

The relationship between the Jews and the Palestinians in Israel

would worsen in the next century, but it was already bad enough.

When an Israeli helicopter in southern Lebanon crashed in an air acci-

dent and more than seventy soldiers died in February 1997, Azmi

Bishara explained to Haaretz, Palestinians in Israel ‘are barred from

joining in the mourning as this was not an innocent accident; it

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226 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

occurred during an occupation of an Arab country, an occupation with

which they could not identify’.

In Israel’s only Arab–Jewish commu-

nity, Wahat al-Salam or Neve Shalom (‘Peace Oasis’), one parent who

lost his son in the accident sought to call a sports facility after him,

creating the worst crisis in the relationship between the two ethnic

groups, from which they still have not recovered today. As Bishara

mentioned, for the Palestinians, even within the context of a mixed

community, there was no problem in respecting the private grief of a

member of the community, but commemoration in a public space in

their eyes endorsed the legitimacy of the occupation of Lebanon

during which the accident occurred.

Despite this difﬁcult atmosphere, however, individuals, parties and

NGOs continued trying to communicate with government in the

closing years of the twentieth century. In one area, that of schools, an

uneasy dialogue continued throughout the 1990s with some relative

success in getting bigger budgets, more schools and more freedom in

determining the curriculum.

The movement to the centre of politics of ideas and platforms which

had previously been conﬁned to Kahana and Kach explains why his son

and successor, Binyamin Zeev Kahana, was such a failure. He did send

threatening pamphlets everywhere suggesting that Umm al-Fahem, the

major Palestinian town in Wadi Ara, should be bombed and that sort of

thing, but he was also prosecuted by the State Attorney (although the

Supreme Court let him go unpunished). He was killed in an attack on

his car in the occupied West Bank. His successors continued to try to

provoke in a similar way, but they have become less signiﬁcant in the

overall deteriorating picture.

With the demise of Oslo, even before the outbreak of the second

Intifada, the gap between neo-Zionism and mainstream Zionism

regarding possible solutions about the occupied territories narrowed

to insigniﬁcant proportions (although it would be revived for a short

while over the decision of Ariel Sharon’s government to evict the

Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005). But the vision of the

future was not just a matter of deﬁning borders or containing

Palestinian national aspirations. It was also a matter of identity and the

essence of the society. This vision was formed by an alliance of settlers,

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ultra-orthodox and secular Russian immigrants, who had their own

party, Israel Beitenu (‘Israel is our Home’). The leader of the latter was

Avigdor Lieberman who would become a senior minister, and, as we

shall see in the next chapter, would contribute more than anyone else

to the dissemination of a racist anti-Arab discourse and legislation.

The alliance also had scholarly support in the form of a think-tank,

modelled on similar neoconservative outﬁts in the USA. They all

offered a simplistic image of the reality whereby the fault line of exclu-

sion and inclusion in the common good was clearer than ever before:

the Palestinians in Israel were not included.

Against this background, at the very end of the twentieth century, a

sort of Palestinian elite emerged that would succeed in mobilizing its

community in the next critical juncture – that of the second Intifada of

October. Who was this elite made of? This was a much more educated,

some would say more modern, group of leaders and activists. They

understood better than their predecessors the nature and loopholes of

the Israeli political, legal and social systems. But this was also a very

frustrated professional elite. The dramatic increase in the number of

high schools and high-school graduates over the previous ﬁfty years

meant that a large number of them had gone to university, although

many fewer Palestinians applied and were accepted compared to

Jewish applicants. Some suspected this gap was ideologically motivated

and engineered by means of psychometric exams; the little known and

still inaccessible information concerns quota policies in the profes-

sional courses such as medicine and law.

The second source of frustration was the lack of job opportunities

for those who graduated successfully from the universities. Their best

chance was usually a teaching position in a school. Seventy per cent of

the teachers in Arab schools in the 1990s held university degrees that

had very little to do with the careers they have chosen.

Employment in areas which were security-related, even loosely so,

such as the national telephone or electricity companies, offered hardly

any positions to Palestinian citizens. This included El-Al, the national

air carrier, the water authority and governmental ministries in general.

An intriguing exception was the tax collection agencies; there seemed

to be fewer objections to installing Palestinians in the most unpopular

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228 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

governmental agency. Knowledge and education also made people

more informed about the level of discrimination. The ofﬁcial publica-

tions, which proudly proclaimed that resources were more equally

distributed between Palestinians and Jews, were now closely read and

examined against a reality of disparity that hardly changed.

The effect of these socio-economic realities was heightened by consis-

tent references to the Palestinians in Israel as a demographic danger.

Such references became very common in the closing years of the

twentieth century. They were made by leading academics, senior minis-

ters including the various prime ministers, the daily newspapers and

anchormen and women in the media. As a headline in the daily news-

paper Yediot Achronot cried, ‘The demography of the Arabs in Israel is the

next ticking bomb threatening the state of Israel.’

These references

were far more important signiﬁers of the regime’s attitude than the nice

poster the government prepared for the Israel jubilee celebrations,

showing the children who made up the new Israeli society: a Russian Jew,

an Ethiopian Jew, a religious Jew, a secular Sabra (a native-born Israeli

Jew) and an Arab. This was the second version prepared for the Day of

Independence; the ﬁrst one did not include the Arab boy.

The twentieth century closed with a bitter but poignant letter by the

Palestinian author Anton Shammas from his voluntary exile in the USA

to his many Hebrew readers in the fashionable weekly, Hair of Tel Aviv:

‘The Zionist adventure has been an utter failure. True, the desert

bloomed, but in its stead intoxicated wilderness covered the land.’

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CHAPTER SEVEN

THE 2000 EARTHQUAKE AND

ITS IMPACT

IT IS NOT DIFFICULT to choose the image to represent the last decade

of our story. All the possibilities come from three days in October 2000. It

could be the picture of police snipers shooting at a gathering of youths and

throwing stones and blazing bottles at them. It could also be Muhammad

Asil, aged eighteen and a member of one of the very few Arab–Jewish

youth peace movements, Seeds for Peace, who was shot at close range by

a police ofﬁcer when sitting under a tree as he watched the demonstration

and clashes in his town of Sakhnin. It could be the image of eighteen-year-

old Wesam Yazbak, the nephew of the leading Palestinian historian in

Israel and later president of the Israeli Oriental Society Mahmoud Yazbak,

who was shot in the back while trying to calm down his comrades in the

narrow alleys in Nazareth. It could be the two young women being beaten

in front of the camera by the special police units for just walking along the

main road between Yafat al-Nasrah and Nazareth.

The images presented to the Jewish public were different, of course.

The keynote of their newspapers and radio and TV contributors was

‘back to 1948’, showing isolated Jewish settlements in the Galilee

stormed by masses of people, cut off by stoning on the roads leading

to their homes and a sense of insecurity unknown before. It was the age

of the second Intifada, which had subsided by 2010 in the West Bank

and inside Israel, but which still smoulders on in the Gaza Strip.

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THE OCTOBER 2000 ‘EVENTS’

The second Intifada raged from October 2000. It spilled over into Israel

itself, where the old frustrations of the Palestinian minority burst out

in solidarity with the Palestinians killed in Jerusalem in the confronta-

tions that followed the visit of the then opposition leader, Ariel Sharon,

to Haram al-Sharif, the holiest Islamic site in Palestine and the third

sacred site after Mecca and Medina. Unarmed Palestinians went out

to protest against the Sharon visit as well as against the failure of the

Oslo Accords and promises. Palestinians on both sides of the Green

Line rejected Israeli and American accusations that the extremism of

the Palestinian leadership was responsible for this failure. Despite his

declining popularity, large sections of the community resented the

demonization of Yasser Arafat as a warmonger for refusing to accept

the Israeli diktat for peace in the Camp David Summit in the summer

of 2000.

But more than anything else, Sharon’s visit triggered a response

from people whose hopes had been falsely raised for a moment only to

be hurled to the ﬂoor as unattainable and illusionary. Thirty-three

years of occupation seemed to be far from reaching an end, notwith-

standing the charade of peace and negotiations. And when women,

men and youngsters went into the streets to demonstrate, they were

met by the fully equipped Israeli border police.

The Follow-Up Committee and leading politicians among the

Palestinians in Israel proposed days of solidarity in the old way of calling

a national strike and a huge public gathering. In response, a huge

demonstration was staged in Umm al-Fahem in Wadi Ara in a show of

solidarity with the Palestinians in the occupied territories. More sponta-

neous demonstrations took place in villages located near some of Israel’s

main highways and newly built outposts, recently erected as part of

the Judaization of the Galilee. On these spots, sensitive locations for

both communities, the demonstrators blocked the roads and in some

cases began marching into these settlements, many of them gated

communities where people had been oblivious until that moment to

how Palestinian was the environment in which they had settled, on land

conﬁscated from the locals.

It is worth mentioning that the Judaization of the Galilee, which was

the main trigger for the Day of the Land events in 1976, was an

ongoing process. And therefore even when the agenda of a particular

juncture such as the one in October 2000 was outrage against the Israeli

occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the two agendas, the

land conﬁscation and the occupation, fused into one. This connection

was recognized by the Orr Commission, the ofﬁcial inquiry committee

appointed by the government to investigate the causes for, and the

events of, October 2000, of which more is said later. The report

summarized what various Palestinian NGOs and human rights activists

had been saying for years, in Hebrew, and what had been written in the

numerous memoranda submitted since 1976 to government agencies,

which it seems no one had read or paid any attention to.

The Orr Commission singled out the Israeli policy of land conﬁsca-

tion as one of the main causes for the frustration among the Palestinians

in Israel. The problem was the absence of any master planning that

would have approved expansion and building of new houses and ﬂats.

The ofﬁcial excuse for not allowing any new building, or extensions to

existing buildings, between 1976 and 2000, was the absence of these

master plans. But of course they were not created because ideologically

the Jewish state did not want to allow its Palestinian community to

improve its living conditions, or at least did not care about the predica-

ment of insufﬁcient living space.

The committee, in a very subdued tone compared to the one used by

the investigative NGOs, including the Israeli Association for Civil

Rights, stated ‘that the natural rights and needs of the Arab population

were not met or cared for’.

What they did not mention was a far worse

aspect of the land policy of Israel. These natural needs led to illegal

building on a large scale, which was met by an aggressive policy of

house and ﬂat demolitions. As mentioned earlier, in Jaffa and Ramleh

alone during that period, thousands of ﬂats and houses were demol-

ished and a similar policy was implemented wherever Palestinians lived

in the Jewish state. In October 2000, it was the sight of a demolished

ﬂat or house and not a knowledge of the discriminatory policy that

impelled demonstrators to risk a direct confrontation with the might of

the Israeli forces.

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