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

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82 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

It was, however, more than ambiguity; it was a geopolitical limbo in

which the Palestinians in Israel could be neither people of the villages

nor city dwellers. The members of the community were denied the

beneﬁts of urban life while slowly losing the defence and security

mechanisms usually offered by rural society. Israel’s policy of carrot

and stick inﬂuenced their occupational and economic reality as well.

Collaboration with the government on a local level brought ﬁnancial

rewards for the individual, but also, if one happened to be a head of

council, it brought collective gains for the community.

Individuals and organizations played an important role in delineating

the map of possibilities for the Palestinian community in Israel. During

this period it was the journalists who played that role. Leading the way

was al-Ittihad, the only daily newspaper in Arabic and the organ of the

Communist Party. Every now and then the newspaper challenged the

Emergency Regulations and paid for this with short periods of enforced

closure. Twice, in January 1950 and March 1953, the paper was shut

down for two weeks by a decree of the military governor, for criticizing

the excessive use of the Emergency Regulations. Other means used

against it included the prohibition of its distribution, as was done in

January 1950 when its sale in the Triangle was stopped for ‘security

reasons’.

Together with the activists this and other journals chose topics that

were important to them and the community at large and pushed the

boundaries by individual or collective action. It seems that the dictum

of the journal of the Greek Orthodox community in Jaffa, Al-Rabita:

‘Primum vivere, deinde philosophari’ (‘First live, then philosophize’) was

the golden rule by which most people abided, although the editor of

this paper also published articles calling upon the Palestinians in Israel

to consider armed struggle – particularly when the oppression of the

Israeli authorities seemed unbearable.

NATIONAL ASSERTIVENESS AND RELIGIOUS

COMMITMENT: AL-ARD AND ISLAMISM

But there were those who risked their lives by opting for a more

confrontational way forward, like the al-Ard movement. While al-Ard

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can be, and should be, contextualized as part of the general pan-

Arabism of the Nasserite variant, which was very popular during this

period, it was also the end product of an incremental and somewhat

incidental history of Palestinian responses to particular problems in

Israel. It challenged not only the Jewish state but also the Communist

Party’s careful navigation around the issues of national identity. It

reﬂected more than anything else the weariness with the ambiguity or

the limbo imposed on the Palestinians in the Jewish state.

Al-Ard’s beginnings reﬂected a desire amongst some Palestinians to

take a more assertive position on the increasing number of political

arrests being made in the mid-1950s. It was ﬁrst named ‘The Public

Arab Committee for Protecting Prisoners and the Expellees’, aimed, as

the name suggests, at helping those who had been imprisoned or exiled

from Israel as a result of their political activities. The bulk of the

arrests, especially of young people, occurred each year on the eve of

1 May, the traditional day of demonstrations and protest against the

military rule. Some of the youngsters arrested spent long periods in the

unsavoury Israeli jails, as happened to a large group from the village of

Arabeh who were detained on the eve of 1 May 1957. As noted before,

Tawﬁq Zayyad and Emil Habibi, among others, were frequently

arrested for periods of nine months and more. Both, and in particular

Zayyad, complained that they had been tortured when in the Tiberias

jail in the summer of 1957.

Others were detained under administra-

tive detention without trial for very long periods as happened to Khalil

Khoury, a member of the Nazareth city council in November 1957;

he was never told, even when he was released, what his alleged crime

had been.

The common allegation was membership of an espionage network

working for Arab countries. Announcements regarding the exposure of

such networks included very few details and the archives of the secret

service are not accessible with regard to these charges. The fact that many

of those alleged to have been spying were released without trial may indi-

cate how ﬂimsy these accusations were, as in the case of a very bombastic

declaration in August 1958, when the secret service announced they

had discovered a wide pro-Syrian network in the north of Israel, among

whom were large numbers of Communists.

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Quite often Palestinians who had been accused rightly or wrongly of

espionage were offered the option of exile instead of imprisonment,

especially in cases where the evidence against them was so thin that

even a trial behind closed doors might not have produced the jail

sentence coveted by the secret service. Such was the case of Ghazi

Saadi, who for a while worked closely with the Ofﬁce of the Advisor on

Arab Affairs in the 1950s, but then began to regret this line of action

and became more independent in his thinking and writing. He was a

publisher and a journalist from Acre who was also a member of the

Brit. When he changed course he was accused of spying for Syria but

was offered the choice of exile, which he accepted in 1957.

This committee that would become the al-Ard movement was

another venue for national activity not controlled by either the govern-

ment or the Communist Party. Public ﬁgures such as Yani Kustandi

Yani, the head of the Kafr Yassif council, the lawyer Elias Kussa from

Haifa and Jabur Jabur, the head of the Shefa-‘Amr municipality, were

prominent in the new committee. This body became the ‘Arabic

Front’ and later the ‘Popular Front’, headed by Yani Yani.

The Arab Popular Front is often neglected in the history of the

Palestinians in Israel due to its more famous offshoot al-Ard, but it was

a crucial organization that served as the ﬁrst representative body of

the Palestinians in Israel. One of its major campaigns was aimed at

preserving the Muslim holy places in the hands of the community in

the face of Israel’s decision in 1950 not to allow the Palestinians to

manage the Waqf properties in the state.

The Front organized a congress in June 1961 and wished to convene

it in the al-Jazzar mosque in Acre – a magniﬁcent Ottoman building

from the early nineteenth century, one of the few left after the country

was de-Arabized, not only demographically but also architecturally.

Thousands of people wanted to attend the congress, but the Israeli

authorities ordered the custodians of the mosque to close its gates. The

meeting was moved to a neighbouring coffee house, in which hundreds

of people tried to convene. As Hanna Nakkarah, the Front’s secretary,

wrote about this amazing human gathering, ‘The Congress was

supported by the Arab people of Israel, irrespective of party afﬁliation

or religious identity.’

The congress elected an executive committee

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that then led the struggle to retain some say in running the Muslim

waqfs in Israel.

The same year, 1961, Yani Yani, the head of the Front, was conducting

another struggle in which the Front would serve as a model for future

political activity among the Palestinians in Israel. The arena was the

north-western village of Kafr Yassif, where the government, with the full

force of the military rule behind it, tried to secure permanent control

over the local council for the dominant Zionist party, Mapai.

Yani Yani,

as a representative of both the Communist Party and the Arab Popular

Front, succeeded in defeating the government’s candidate in a historical

triumph, which would be repeated in 1975 when Tawﬁq Zayyad won the

elections in Nazareth (of which more is said later on).

This was all a good training ground for the young people who

founded al-Ard, which sprang out of the wider movement in 1959 as a

result of tactical debate and disagreement. Most of the founders were

law students who saw themselves as Usrat (‘the family of’) al-Ard (‘the

land’). Reading its early publications, one can ﬁnd many demands that

would later be adopted by Israeli Palestinian political parties and

movements, such as a call for the return of the refugees. In those

pamphlets and its journal, edited by Salah Baransi, one can enjoy quite

spicy caricatures of Israeli leaders, such as the depiction of David

Ben-Gurion as the ‘Jerusalem midget’.

Al-Ard was also unhappy with the way in which other organizations

and individuals had resisted the land conﬁscation, and thought that a

ﬁercer strategy was called for. Its early publications and discourse

echoed Nasser’s anti-Western rhetoric, and included vows to join the

struggle against ‘reactionary regimes’ in the Arab world. In a way, they

strove to open a diplomatic outlet for these ideas in what for them was

occupied Palestine, although admittedly they supported the UN parti-

tion Resolution 181 of November 1947 as a basis for a new geopolitical

solution. They were banned from activity, while some were arrested,

and others exiled.

But more than anything else, al-Ard was ﬁrst and foremost a display of

an assertive national position. It was also part of the fascination with pan-

Arabist politics, which had been revived ever since Gamal Abdul Nasser

came to power in Egypt in 1952. There was great excitement on the day

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86 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

of the Egyptian revolution on 23 July that year. When Nasser gave a

speech that was broadcast by Egyptian radio, the streets of the villages

and the alleys of the town would empty; everyone would sit around the

wireless and listen attentively to the ﬁery rhetoric coming from Cairo.

The new Egyptian leader symbolized courage and the promise of a better

future, indeed a turning of the history clock backwards to a time before

occupation and oppression had set in – until he proved to be a disappoint-

ment. Many young Palestinians were named after him, such as Gamal

Zahalka, one of the leaders of the community in the twenty-ﬁrst century,

who was born in 1955. Only one other Egyptian could drag people from

the streets to their transistor radios, and that was Umm Kulthum, the

legendary Egyptian singer whose songs were hours long but ﬁlled the

heart with emotion and offered a brief escape from the daily hardship

and quite probably offered a sense of ‘Arabism’ in the newly Judaized

Palestine. Many years later, the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah,

would cast such a magical spell over the Palestinians in Israel – but this

time it was the television screens that would be watched and the message

would be Islamic as well as pan-Arabist.

When the Communist Party seemed to side with Nasser’s great

rival, Abd al-Karim Qasem from Iraq, in the new revolutionary world

that had emerged in some Arab countries, the popularity of al-Ard

grew accordingly since Nasser was still the most revered leader and

icon in the Palestinian community in Israel. After the movement was

banned, it attempted to continue its work as an economic outﬁt – a

registered ﬁrm that managed publications, educational material and so

on – but this mode of action was also barred by the government. The

movement’s able lawyer, Mansour Kardoush, succeeded in convincing

the Supreme Court that an economic outﬁt could not be outlawed as a

security risk and al-Ard was registered as such in 1962. Of course its

business interest was quite limited and it continued to look for ways of

acting as a political agency. Its attempt to run under the name of the

Socialist List in the 1963 elections failed and it was outlawed once

more and some of its activists ﬁned and arrested. Among them was

Muhammad Mia’ri, who would succeed in running on a similar plat-

form and twice be elected to the Knesset in the 1980s as a member of

the Democratic List for Peace.

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No less daring and challenging to the Jewish state was politics in the

name of Islam; political Islam was still in its infancy before 1967. The

reasons for its emergence are similar across the region: a combination

of socio-economic hardship, a lack of state welfare policies and the

weakening of secular alternatives for action. Each Islamist movement

in the Middle East was unique, with a particular agenda, whether

national or social, that overshadowed the religious one. In the case of

Israel, the national agenda was at least as powerful, if not more so, than

the religious one, particularly later on in the 1980s.

Curiously, one factor in the rise of Islamism was the visit of Pope Pius

VI to Israel in 1964. Young Christians enthusiastically embarked on

preparations for the visit, and opened clubs and activity centres, espe-

cially in the Galilee. Their ardour was catching, and young Muslims

responded with similar zeal, becoming involved in community work.

Their main achievement was in occupying the days of the unemployed

and underemployed in the Palestinian Galilee, Wadi Ara and the

Triangle. The growing of beards, the wearing of traditional garments,

and a more eager participation and interest in Islamic politics in the

Arab world (voicing discontent with the way Nasser treated the Muslim

Brotherhood in Egypt, for instance) were all part of this new phenom-

enon. An unofﬁcial successor to the Grand Mufti during the Mandatory

period, Sheikh Ahmad Abdallah, was the prime mover behind the

scenes. He also collected funds for building more mosques and has had

some able successors who expanded the movement into a signiﬁcant

political force on the map of Palestinians in Israel.

THE VARIETIES OF NATIONALISM

Al-Ard and the early activists in the name of political Islam tested the

tolerance and boundaries of the regime under which they lived. They

threatened to cross the consensual lines of those who represented poli-

tics inside the community and among the Israeli policy makers

engaged with the ‘Arab sector’, as it now became known. The absolute

prohibition imposed on such organizations by the Israeli authorities

strengthened the Communist Party as the only body asserting the

Palestinian national identity under military rule.

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These were the two versions of Palestinian nationalism in the period

leading up to the early 1980s. One implicitly supported nationalism

within an outﬁt that ostensibly broadcast cosmopolitan and Marxist

ideology, but which the regime knew represented national sentiment.

The other was explicitly nationalist and pan-Arabist and was not toler-

ated by the regime. Both were political movements that saw democracy

as a way of life and a desired political future. Espousing democracy in

Israel, however, became a subversive act against the Jewish state. As

mentioned earlier, the government also needed the Communist Party

as a tool for keeping links with the Soviet Union open.

Although the authorities were aware that internationalism was quite

often a cover for a national position, they were crystal clear when it came

to anyone expressing open nationalist positions. These people paid a

very high price. Some were punished via a heavy ﬁnancial ﬁne imposed

on them for their political views, as was the case in 1959 for Salah

Baransi, one of the founders of al-Ard and a key spokesperson for what

As’ad Ghanem, calls ‘the national stream’ (one out of four tendencies he

detects among the ‘Israeli Arabs’, the others being the collaborationists,

the Islamists and the Communists).

Any of Baransi’s writings would

have been enough in the eyes of the Israeli security services to justify his

arrest or expulsion. A typical comment of his was, ‘Zionism is an

ideology based on racism and discrimination. It used the method of

racial discrimination to achieve its objectives and goals.’ Anti-Zionist

Jewish activists said the same at that time, but they were not treated as

Palestinians were when openly pronouncing these views.

There was an uneasiness among Palestinian members of the

Communist Party, named Maki at the time, who wished to play a more

national role – people such as Emil Touma and Emil Habibi, who were

also taken by the powerful inﬂuence Gamal Abdul Nasser had on local

and regional politics. But in around 1957 or 1958, they and others who

were leaders of a sort took a strategic decision not to join in an active

struggle against the Jewish state but rather to concentrate on a partic-

ular political agenda of their own, that of seeking an assertion of a

national identity within the Jewish state. It would take some time

before, in the early 1970s, this would be recognized as a legitimate

mode of struggle by the PLO.

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An illustration of what would emerge in the next decade as the

Israeli Palestinian political discourse was already evident at the 1 May

1958 Nazareth march. Since the establishment of the Communist

Party this had been a purely internationalist show of strength. In 1958,

however, the Palestinian agenda substituted the more familiar Marxist

slogans with calls for the right of return of the 1948 Palestinian

refugees and support for the Palestinian national struggle, to which the

response was, as mentioned earlier, a brutal police suppression of the

march, leaving many wounded and many more arrested.

But it was not only the Israeli authorities who disliked the national

content of the protest, so also did the Jewish leadership of Maki.

As a result the tensions between the Palestinians and the Jewish

activists in the Communist Party became unbridgeable. By 1965 it was

impossible for them to be in one party. The Palestinian members left

Maki, the old Communist Party, and created a new one, Rakah, the

Hebrew acronym for the New Communist List. Even a desperate,

intensive ﬁnal attempt at reconciliation by the Soviet Ambassador,

Comrade Zhubahain, did not help. Gradually Maki disappeared and

Rakah became the Communist Party, with a far more distinct national

character. Joel Beinin in Was the Red Flag Flying There? called it the

triumph of nationalism over internationalism, a process he detected at

the very same period in the Egyptian Communist Party.

But one should be careful in summarizing this period only as an orga-

nizational or institutional history; it was also very much a personal

history. By this I mean that, given the relatively small size of the commu-

nity and its fragmented existence in a state that refused to recognize it as

a collective, individuals could have an impressive impact on the commu-

nity’s ability to survive under a regime that at least until 1956 was keen

to see it disappear.

A SMALL PANTHEON FOR FORGOTTEN HEROES

They may not have been leaders by the conventional deﬁnitions one

ﬁnds in the political sociological literature, but in hindsight their

stances were crucial for the overall existence of the community. Four

stand out: Emil Habibi, Emil Touma, Hanna Naqara and Bulus Farah.

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Habibi was a passionate orator and a charismatic leader, as well as a

proliﬁc writer and journalist. He had a column in al-Ittihad, the

Communist daily, under the pseudonym ‘Juhayna’.

Emil Touma was the editor of al-Ittihad (I had the honour of chairing

an institute named after him many years later). He was the ideologue

propelling the recovery of a Palestinian identity under a Jewish state.

Hanna Naqara, already mentioned, was a human rights lawyer who

questioned the legality of the very early land conﬁscations and paid

dearly for it by having to spend long periods in jail. Bulus Farah, who

quite soon retired to a private life as a businessman, was a respected

ﬁgure in Haifa and attuned to the voices coming from the people them-

selves. He was the secretary-general of the Arab Front and of the

committee for protecting the rights of the expellee and detainees, as

well as being a member of the Communist Party secretariat.

Others like them were involved ﬁrst in the Communist Party and

then in the more national bodies, and contributed signiﬁcantly through

their writings and activities to the preservation of Palestinian nation-

alism within the new reality of the Jewish state. Tawﬁq Tubi was a

prominent and long-serving member of the party in the Knesset while

other members were publicly active outside the Knesset, such as Fuad

Khoury, Munim Jarjura and Saliba Khamis. Touma, Tubi and Khamis

married Jewish women and in their personal lives thus embodied the

alternative model to an ethnic and supremacist Jewish state.

Next to them I have already mentioned those who were more

assertive of nationalism, and probably more aware of the dangers

of Zionism. Salah Baransi, Sabri Jiryis, Habib Qahwaji, Ali Rafa,

Muhammad Mia’ri, Mansour Kardoush and Mahmoud Darwish should

all be remembered as people who struggled in the name of the natural

and national rights of the Palestinians in the Israeli political arena and

paid dearly by being either imprisoned or exiled. In the second rank of

politicians who deserve to be mentioned are people like Uthman Abu

Ras from Taybeh, who was the main activist in the southern Triangle,

and Ramzi Khoury in Acre who, together with Gamal Mousa, the

former a Greek Orthodox, the latter a Muslim, was inﬂuential in

that part of the Palestinian community. The geographical distribution of

Palestinians within Israel allowed ﬁgures in different regions, usually

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of the same generation and of different religious afﬁliations, to cement

the ties between the community and the party in terms of politics, career

and the elusive aspect of identity politics. For example, Yusuf Assad in

Kafr Yassif and Zahi Karakbi, a Greek Catholic in Haifa, were active

among grassroots members as well as among intellectuals and profes-

sionals, in keeping alive a national agenda – albeit one covered with

Marxist discourse and Communist slogans.

THE END OF MILITARY RULE

In 1959 a new governmental committee headed by the Minister of

Justice, Pinchas Rosen, was convened to evaluate the necessity of mili-

tary rule. Unlike a previous committee headed by Yohanan Ratner,

Ben-Gurion’s chief Strategic Advisor in 1955, this one saw no point in

the system’s continuation. As the chair of committee put it: the ‘Arabs’

problem in identifying with the state was no reason for questioning

their loyalty’. Rosen asserted that there was no precedent anywhere in

the world for a group of citizens to be under state military rule for no

apparent reason, that is without committing acts of terrorism or

subversion.

Interestingly, like the early academic researchers of that period, the

committee also wondered why there was no ‘terrorism or subversion’.

The most elaborate explanation for this state of mind was given in

1968 by the American political scientist Ian Lustick, who developed a

special conceptual paradigm to explain how co-optation and coercion

had turned the Palestinians into a ‘docile community’. Lustick attrib-

uted this docility to the efﬁcient and sophisticated system of domina-

tion exercised by the government.

More loyal Zionist historians,

such as Ori Stendel, singled out the lack of leadership and independent

Arab organizations as the main reasons, and some Israelis such as

Micha Nino credited the ‘stable policy’ of the state for the situation.

I hope this chapter in any case has shown that the community was not

docile. Israeli researcher Elie Rekhess claimed that at various times, espe-

cially towards the end of the 1950s, some Palestinians in Israel contem-

plated an Algerian-like struggle, but eventually they decided against it.

Sabri Jiryis asserted that most of the Palestinians in Israel were reconciled

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