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

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to the existence of the state and those who were not realized that it was

beyond their own power to change the reality. Moreover, he stressed that

the Palestinians’ uncertainty about the future solution for the conﬂict had

caused a kind of paralysis at the level of action. This explanation is echoed

by Elia Zureik, who explains the low-proﬁle Palestinian resistance in

Israel up to 1967 as the result of the government’s policy of alienation and

distancing the Palestinians from any share in power, as well as the role

played by outside Zionist organizations such as the United Jewish Appeal

and the Jewish Agency in providing the ﬁnance for the Judaization of the

land. He also pointed to internal factors, such as the fragmentation of the

society and its ‘distorted class structure’, as preventing active resistance.

Other researchers mention the military might of the state and the fact

that the Palestinians were not called upon from the outside to take up

arms against the Jewish state; neither did the state, as Zureik reminds us,

demand full identiﬁcation or assimilation from the Palestinian minority.

My own conclusion, as I hope comes across clearly from the narra-

tive so far, is that the Palestinians by and large accepted Israel as a fait

accompli and in the early years of the state were not looking for an alter-

native framework, nor did they demand via the UN to be excluded

from Israel. The aims of their struggle were to change the nature of

the regime while not losing their afﬁnity with their Palestinian and

Arab identities.

So the chief policy makers in the early 1960s and the researchers of

the period agreed that the community did not constitute a danger of

any kind to Israel’s security or existence. But the Prime Minister David

Ben-Gurion and his Advisor on Arab Affairs, Yehoshua Palmon, were

adamant in their refusal to abolish it. A few months before Ben-Gurion

lost his premiership in 1963, he succeeded in orchestrating the last

extension of military rule in the Knesset at a vote in February 1963. A

wide alliance from left to right had expected to defeat the vote, but iron-

ically, the Ofﬁce of the Advisor on Arab Affairs recruited the vote of a

Palestinian member, Diab Ubaid from Taybeh, to pass the motion to

extend the military rule (there is no need to elaborate how this

gentleman was viewed by most members of the Palestinian community).

The government also had the support of the Druze Sheikh Ja’ber Madi,

and the Christian Elias Nakhleh. To be fair to all three, they were under

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the heaviest possible pressure from the Advisors of the Prime Minister’s

Ofﬁce.

Ben-Gurion’s successor, Levy Eshkol, was less paranoid about the

Palestinians in Israel and strove to abolish military rule. Since the mili-

tary rule had been imposed by the sheer force of the Emergency

Regulations, there was no need to pass a special law for its abolition. In

1966, Eshkol decided to take the initiative and declared the end of the

military rule. However, the ban on free movement remained until

September 1967 and several areas, such as the vicinity of the nuclear

plant in Dimona and the Arava Valley, which stretched from the

eastern side of the Negev all the way down to the Gulf of Aqaba and

Eilat, alongside Israel’s border with Jordan, were out of bounds for the

Palestinians in Israel. But it was the beginning of a different era in the

life and history of the Palestinian community.

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CHAPTER THREE

MILITARY RULE BY OTHER MEANS,

1967–1977

IN THE MID-1970S the Palestinians in Israel comprised 13 per cent of

the overall population. As a result of the Israeli law that annexed East

Jerusalem, which was occupied in the June 1967 war, they became

15 per cent, that is, about half a million people.

The ﬁrst twenty years of statehood were tough and anxious. At the

time one suspects that many of them did not know that these were not

objective hardships but the result of an intentional and systematic policy

of discrimination. It was not only the visible aspect of military rule that

oppressed the Palestinians during that era, but also the more invisible

economic policies enacted from above. New research by Yair Bäuml,

based on recently declassiﬁed archives, has reafﬁrmed the suspicions of

perceptive observers of the period under review, that the centralized and

nationalized policy intentionally marginalized the Palestinians from the

areas of agricultural production and marketing, and exploited them as

cheap labour in other economic activities. A bisected economy on ethnic

or national grounds was the result, with Jewish citizens forming the

upper class and the Palestinians the lower class.

It was a starting point

from which any community would ﬁnd it difﬁcult to take off economi-

cally and socially. By the end of this decade, the Palestinians were still by

and large directed by governmental policies to work in industries that

were traditional, offered low rates of pay and had no security of job

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tenure. Economists called this ‘low occupational mobility’ and the

Palestinians remained concentrated in the blue-collar market, while the

Jewish middle class grew enormously during this period, taking over

more than three-quarters of the white-collar occupations.

This decade’s images are a mixture of humiliation and pride. They

begin with Jewish society celebrating euphorically the June 1967

victory over Jordan and Egypt, conveying the impression that the

mini-state of Israel was now transformed into a mini-empire: a force to

be reckoned with, not only in the Palestinian world but in the Arab

world at large. Quite a few Palestinians in Israel, secretly or openly,

had believed Nasser’s rhetoric about an imminent victory and his

ability to return the historical clock to the pre-1948 reality. In some

villages women vowed to delay indulgence in haircuts, jewellery or

powder until freedom came. Despite the defeat, Nasser’s reputation

among the Palestinian people remained untarnished, and on his death

in October 1970, hundreds mourned him publicly and vociferously.

But this secular ‘messiah’ of progress failed the masses and faded out

of history in the year that followed the Naksa, the 1967 defeat in the

Arab jargon. With Nasser’s death pan-Arabism lost some of its attrac-

tion, and if there was any comforting image it would come a bit later,

when a group of a few hundred young Palestinians, mainly students

and refugees, waved their Kalashnikovs in a show of self-assertiveness

and deﬁance. Soon this new group extricated the Palestine issue from

the hands of politicians from all over the Arab world, who had osten-

sibly championed the ‘Palestinian cause’ ever since 1946 but done very

little to advance it. As mentioned, Fatah was the largest faction within

the PLO, which until then had been controlled by the Arab League. In

1968, in a quiet coup, Fatah usurped the PLO and replaced the ofﬁ-

cials appointed by the Arab League with its own members and other

Palestinian guerrilla factions’ members. This compensated a little for

the humiliation and collapse of pan-Arabism and of the dream of liber-

ation which had been put forward by the great leader of Egypt.

The images from the end of the decade were a direct result of the

death of the big ideologies in the Middle East, and as a result not only

life but also politics became more local. In the dictionary of Arab

nationalism, the identiﬁcation of the people moved from the Qawmiyya,

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the pan-Arabist sphere of identity, to the Wataniyya, the local identity.

The latter distinction of course was much clearer in the case of the

Iraqis and Syrians, and even easier to grasp for the Palestinians in the

occupied territories and in the refugee camps; it was still blurred for

the Palestinians in Israel. But the images of Tawﬁq Zayyad, the ﬁrst

mayor of Nazareth, winning the municipal elections in 1975 were as

exhilarating for the Palestinians in Israel as Nasser’s triumphs had been

at the beginning of his road to regional glory in the 1950s.

Zayyad threw out the collaborationist elite that had ruled the only

real Palestinian city in Israel and those images are often conjured and

remembered today. The elite comprised a number of families who had

risen to power as a result of collaborations with the Israelis after the

occupation of the city – they were not necessarily the notable families

of the Mandatory Palestine era. Their claim to power was based on

their willingness to cooperate – the most famous among them was Saif

al-Din al-Zu’bi, a member of a clan that had collaborated with the

Jewish forces during the 1948 war.

Tawﬁq Zayyad was born to a

farming family and as a teenager he had to work while he was still at

high school to help the family survive the poverty which affected so

many farmers in the north of the country during the Mandatory

period. His teachers nonetheless remember him as a very industrious

and committed pupil. As a young man he joined the Communist Party

and was elected as a member of the city council of Nazareth in 1954.

It was not only the sight of Zayyad’s triumph in Nazareth that stirred

fond memories; it was also the sound of his voice that people of his and

successive generations remember. He spoke with the enthusiasm of a

proud Palestinian leader, echoing the discourse and narrative of other

Palestinian leaders all over the Arab world. Although a leading member

of the Communist Party, he was in many ways the successor of Yani

Yani who, as mentioned, in 1961 headed a Communist–nationalist coali-

tion which defeated the Mapai candidate in Kafr Yassif. Zayyad reiterated

what many may have wished to suppress in the community, in his party

and in the state: that the Palestinian experience inside and outside the

borders of Israel was closely linked.

No less vivid in the memory of people are the images of what followed:

a ruthless and immediate Israeli reaction in the form of massive land

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conﬁscation, leading in March 1976 to violent confrontations with the

state that left several Palestinian citizens dead after being shot by the

army and the police. This became engraved as the Day of the Land; an

event commemorated annually ever since by the Palestinian community

in Israel and about which more will be said later in this chapter.

LAYING THE LEGAL FOUNDATIONS FOR

SECOND-CLASS CITIZENSHIP

In the years between 1967 and 1976 the Jewish state still considered the

Palestinian citizens to be a potential security risk, but a lesser problem

compared with the new occupied Palestinian populations, which

required more attention, as well as the manpower that had been

employed on military rule inside Israel until 1966. The structure of

military rule was transferred almost as a whole to the West Bank and

the Gaza Strip. Inside Israel it was replaced with a web of new legisla-

tion and rules on the ground which were meant to ensure segregation,

obedience and co-optation, but which also displayed a willingness to

consider some improvements in the general conditions of life.

While life was still lived, at least until 1976, with the same apprehen-

sions and informal limitations as those imposed under military rule,

the political and, especially, the legal elite in Israel did invest some

effort into laying new foundations for the status of the Palestinian citi-

zens. Only recently have legal experts developed a historical appetite,

and thanks to their endeavours we have a better understanding today

of the signiﬁcance of the legislation and court rulings that took place

in the ﬁrst decade after 1967. In general the legislation had the appear-

ance of guarding the rights of the Palestinians in Israel, but it formed

a matrix of power that contained the Palestinians within glass walls,

which they could only hope to break through if they were willing to be

converted to Judaism. This tension was the result of the original

contradictory legislation that at once granted equality before the law

but qualiﬁed it by applying it only to Jews.

Second, this wave of legislation left immense power in the hands

of the various government ministries to act outside the law in cases of

emergency, which we now know in hindsight were hardly ever exercised

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against Jewish citizens but quite often against Palestinian citizens. A very

illuminating example of this is the law and practice against those in the

state who do not serve in the army. Two groups are exempted, although

not legally: the Palestinians and the ultra-orthodox Jews. The former pay

a high price in employment, welfare beneﬁts, national insurance policy

and other aspects of life, whereas the latter, if anything, get preferential

treatment in some of these areas and equal treatment in others. Thus,

initiatives to develop a basic law (a constitutional law which is very hard

to abolish) ensuring human rights and equality were never completed in

the period described in this chapter, while preferential laws for those

serving in the army, code for Jews only, were pushed through.

The ﬁrst step towards articulating afresh the legal status of the

Palestinians in Israel commenced in 1965. This was done within the

framework of the law for the Population Registry. In brief, the law dealt

with the question of who was an Israeli citizen, or rather, it answered the

question of whether there was an Israeli nationality in the negative. As

Nadim Rouhana has put it: ‘there is no Israeli nation’ as such; there are

only Arabs and Jews in the Israeli state.

There was Israeli citizenship but

only Jewish nationality and non-Jewish afﬁliation to religious groups (as

mentioned in Chapter 2, the Druze community formed a separate reli-

gion). The very legal status of people with a national identity and others

who were without nationality laid the foundation not only for discrimi-

natory policies but also for a racist public mood. The differentiation

between nationality, accorded to the majority group, and the sectarian or

religious identity allowed to the others, created a legal discrimination

that no future egalitarian law could alter. Thus, although during this

period (from 1967 to 1977) several laws were passed that spoke the

language of equality, nonetheless these made no difference to the daily

experience of Palestinians in Israel. The main reason was that the basic

laws, those constitutional laws that were there, as powerful as a constitu-

tion in other countries, remained discriminatory and biased. The

amendments introduced to these laws did not change their spirit or

impact. The most important law was the Israel Land Law, which still

afﬁrmed during that period that 90 per cent of Israeli land should belong

to the Jewish people and therefore could not be sold to non-Jews.

The

second was the basic law of elections that prohibited the eligibility of

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any party or list that did not recognize the Jewish character of Israel.

And ﬁnally the basic law of the right of employment still connected the

employability of a person with their respect for the basic values of the

state of Israel, namely its Zionist character.

The fragmentation of the Palestinian community into sects was part

of the overall fragmentation of the Palestinian people, which was both

the aim and product of the Zionist movement and later became the

core of the Israeli strategy towards the Palestinians. In South Africa a

similar concern about the majority of Africans potentially endangering

the white supremacist minority led to a similar policy of fragmentation

of the African community there into tribes, who were offered home-

lands and even states.

Another set of laws dealt with the educational system. Under military

rule the educational system was practically, although never formally,

segregated. The segregation was ostensibly the result of the restrictions

on movement imposed on the Palestinians. After 1966, Palestinian

citizens were allowed to travel into the Jewish areas and they could theo-

retically join Jewish educational institutions. There was no law that

prohibited them from doing so, but the establishment of separate educa-

tional systems for them was a clear enough message. The segregation was

not meant to allow Palestinians to develop cultural autonomy. Quite to

the contrary, it was meant to supervise it closely so that such autonomy

would not develop. It also allowed the government to discriminate in

terms of resources and budgets. The standard of an average school or

class in the Palestinian areas was much worse by any parameter or criteria

compared to that of the average Jewish school.

Interestingly, the segregation stopped at the level of higher educa-

tion. The idea of an Arab university, which has surfaced every now and

then from 1967 to the present day, was categorically rejected by the

government, which feared that such an institution would become a

hotbed of anti-state activity and radicalism. This loophole would both

generate a culture of student activism in the community and turn the

campuses into spaces where Palestinian–Jewish relationships would be

contemplated, conceived and attempted. All in all, in hindsight one can

say that segregation continued to dominate campus life as well, very

much reﬂecting the segregated public life outside of the universities.

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The legislation dealt less with the segregation in the educational

system, which as explained above was taken as a given, and more with

how to ensure total control and supervision within the system, now

that the Emergency Regulations and absolute military rulers were

gone. The law for supervision over schools was passed in 1969. The

short message of a very detailed law was very simple and direct: any

misconduct, in the eyes of Jewish supervisors from the bottom level

upwards, of a Palestinian employee in the educational system would

lead to dismissal or a very severe limitation of rights. During that

decade, 1967–1977, the teachers’ unions and the teachers–ministry

committees that were meant to protect teachers from such abuses did

not include the Palestinian citizens and, therefore, the few cases that

were brought to their attention were decided in favour of the govern-

ment and its representatives in the educational system.

The legal glass ceilings or walls in other spheres of life came in the

form of a very different legislation. In the early 1970s several laws were

passed in Israel deﬁning the privileges granted to those who served in

the Israeli army. The national insurance authority granted them special

welfare beneﬁts, studentships, grants and loans, all of which were

denied to the Palestinian population. Although not all the Jews served

in the army – as mentioned earlier, ultra-orthodox Jews were exempt –

only the Palestinians were discriminated against on the basis of their

exemption from the army.

To complete this part of story one has to stress that it was not only

demographic and Zionist concerns that shaped the legal reality after

1967, it was also the theories of modernization discussed in the

Appendix. Therefore some of the laws were meant to improve the

status of women and weaken the negative aspects of life in the clans and

patriarchal societies, and may thus have created a different image of the

Jewish state in the eyes of the minority. But since these laws were less

signiﬁcant in the eyes of the state, there was no real attempt to impose

them, while in contrast every effort was made to impose discriminatory

laws and regulations. The main problem in this area was that although

the social services were equal by law, they were institutionally corrupt

through their discriminatory practices. This could be clearly seen

where two communities lived in close proximity, such as in Nazareth.

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Throughout the period, the 10,000 or so inhabitants of the Jewish

development town of Upper Nazareth were served by twelve social

workers, while down below in Nazareth, the 100,000 Palestinians were

served by a similar number of social workers. The same disparity in

resources available to each of the two communities could be seen in

every other aspect of social welfare and public services.

Thus the bigamy, clannish hegemony, misogynist attitudes, corporal

punishment of children and the negative aspects of an Arab rural society

all over the region, which existed next to the positive features of egalitar-

ianism, solidarity and the traditional defence mechanisms against the

hardships of life, were not really confronted by the state that claimed to

be the only liberal modern democracy in the Middle East. Some scholars,

such as Alina Korn, stress that the policy also turned a blind eye to the

inevitable criminalization of the Palestinians as a group living on the

geographical and social margins of the society.

The pauperization of

the society and its marginalization contributed to its criminalization

and some of these petty criminals could be seen on the streets on days

of national protest, adding a not always constructive contribution. But

this fusion of criminality and nationalism served well those within the

Israeli Jewish public who wished to demonize the Palestinians and

delegitimize their right of self-determination and equality within the

Jewish state.

THE UNBREAKABLE HOUSE OF GLASS

The new legislation and the continued sense of discrimination were far

more powerful as factors shaping the life of the population than the

hopes raised by the abolition of military rule. The reason was that the

new goodwill on the part of some of the Israeli policy makers was less

signiﬁcant than it may have seemed on the surface, since the reality was

still Jewish. And thus the ofﬁcial abolition of the military rule was

followed by hopeful statements issued by the government to the press

in 1967 and 1968. In fact in 1966 the ofﬁcial government agencies had

already proclaimed proudly: ‘The process of liberalization and conces-

sions [to the Palestinian community] has reached an unprecedented

peak after the 1967 war.’

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