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

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

142 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

about something more than mere existence. Against this background

one can appreciate how the Jewish state seemed to the more politicized

Palestinians in Israel at the time. The state excluded them as full citi-

zens, occupied their nation state, and refused to recognize its respon-

sibility for the Nakbah and its consequences.

On the other hand, new avenues opened up for those who sought an

individual career. This did not amount to being integrated or included

in the community of equal citizenship, but it posed a question for those

who would portray their situation as straightforward oppression and

occupation. As is later elaborated in the Appendix of this book, when

academic research inside Israel on the community developed in the

1980s and 1990s (very much thanks to the emergence of a community

of Palestinian scholars in Israel and the appearance of progressive crit-

ical Jewish social scientists), this mixed reality of collective repression,

but with individual opportunities, was depicted as an ethnocracy. A

minority in the form of an excluded ethnic group was allowed certain

freedoms and opportunities, as long as they did not undermine the

hegemony and control of the majority ethnic group. The end result of

this formula is a serious and systematic abuse of basic civic and human

rights of the minority group. But away from academia in the world of

political activism, where the mixture of limitations and openings was

on offer not as an abstract idea but as a daily reality, the discourse of

human and civil rights was at times less appealing than the national

dictionary and images; the latter seemed more apt as a compass for

those in the Palestinian community who wished to alleviate the yoke

of decades-long oppression.

But as this book insists, life as lived – rather than academically

deﬁned, analysed and described – did not move that schematically

between inclusion and exclusion. The worst aspect of it, one assumes,

was that every now and then the Israeli Jewish society, mainly through

its intellectuals but at times even through its state agencies, conveyed

a false message of a wish to make Israel a more pluralistic and open

society. While the older generation within the Palestinian community

were experienced enough to view these promises with healthy scepti-

cism, the younger generation – in this decade becoming an over-

whelming part of the community – were at ﬁrst more optimistic about

36x

the options open to them. When these promises turned out to be mere

words and the reality remained more or less the same, the younger

generation would be even more assertive in its conviction that change

would not come from Israel’s goodwill, but only through a struggle

from within.

The ﬁrst disappointment in this regard occurred in the decade

under review here, when even the Ministry of Education in Israel

declared its wish to make Israel into a multicultural society in the

early 1980s.

A NEW MULTICULTURAL SOCIETY?

Life inside Israel was more intricate than it appears in the works of

those who commend Israel for ﬁnally building a democracy in those

years and those condemning it for running an apartheid state. The

social and political intricacy can be partly explained by the complex

relationship between the Palestinians in Israel and other groups in

society. The Palestinians were part of the emerging multicultural reality

in Israel, in which the politics of identity fragmented the political

scene into groups representing particular ethnic, religious and cultural

agendas; some of these group formed political parties on the basis of

their particular identity: a feminist party, a Russian Jewish party, a

Mizrahi party, an ultra-orthodox party, a Mizrahi ultra-orthodox party

and more. Each in its own way felt victimized by the state in the past or

in the present.

Similar predicaments could have served as a basis for a common

political action. On an intellectual and theoretical level, the fragmen-

tation of Israeli society due to the politics of identity did encourage

some new perceptions among Jewish academics, journalists and (more

than anyone else) ﬁlm-makers about Palestinian conditions inside

Israel. After the Lebanon war several very commercially successful

Israeli feature ﬁlms represented this new sensitivity. Three such ﬁlms,

Hamsin, A Very Narrow Bridge and Behind the Bars, dealt in one way

or another with the Palestinian–Jewish relationship in Israel. The

Palestinians in general, and the ones living in Israel in particular,

appeared in those movies as heroes rather than as villains, and even as

THE DAY OF THE LAND TO THE FIRST INTIFADA, 1976–87 | 143

36x

144 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

freedom ﬁghters, whereas their image in previous ﬁlms had been that

of members of a demonized and anonymous enemy. These ﬁlms were

less about the Palestinians than about the moral tribulations of the

ﬁlm-makers or the conscientious Jews in Israel. But they did humanize

for the ﬁrst time the ‘Arab’ on the Israeli silver screen.

This hesitant engagement may explain the lack of political alliances

between the Palestinians in Israel and the other groups. Even the polit-

ical cooperation between the ‘peace camp’ – representing that section in

the Jewish society pressuring for the end of the 1967 occupation in

return for peace – and the Palestinian minority was limited. This was

mainly due to the clariﬁcation of the national position of the Palestinians

in Israel on the one hand, and on the other the new political interpreta-

tion of what passed as ‘left’ and ‘right’ in the Jewish community, which

focused almost exclusively on the debate over the future of the West

Bank and the Gaza Strip while displaying a unity of purpose and posi-

tion towards the Palestinian community inside Israel. In other words,

the Israeli peaceniks were bothered about the occupied territories –

which they wanted to give up – but were less concerned about

the Palestinians in Israel with whom they had to contemplate a joint life.

For an alliance to work either the ‘peace camp’ had to abandon

Zionism or the Palestinian minority had to ignore its national afﬁlia-

tion. In relative terms, there would have to be a pact between critics

of Zionism, whom I termed elsewhere ‘post-Zionists’ – Jews willing

to forsake all or part of the Zionist interpretation of reality – and

Palestinians prepared to put their civic agenda above the national

one. Few in both groups were willing to go that far; the majority of

the Jewish critics of Israel remained within the Zionist mindset and

the new activists asserted that their immediate struggle was national

and not civic. The gap grew in intensity and conviction and dismantled

any potential alliances that might have been contemplated or

attempted.

If it was difﬁcult to create an alliance between the post-Zionists and

the new national forces, one can understand how impossible it was to

build such bridges between the mainstream Israeli political forces and

the Palestinian community at large. During this decade, while individ-

uals continued to cooperate with the state, its organs and representatives

36x

out of necessity, or even at times to collaborate out of personal greed,

there was very little room for collective cooperation with the state based

on conﬁdence or mutual interest.

Even in the more hopeful years leading to the Oslo Accords in 1993,

at which it was alleged that Israel and the PLO ofﬁcially reached a histor-

ical compromise on dividing Palestine into two future states (although we

now know that this failed accord should not have been read in such an

optimistic way), there was no room for improvement in the relationship

of the state with the minority living inside it. While there was a new

willingness to be dovish on the question of the occupation – namely to

consider partial withdrawal and a solution – there was at the same time,

and as a direct result of this ﬂexibility, a strengthening of the hawkish

attitudes towards the Palestinians inside Israel, which could be expressed

in these terms, ‘If we recognize your right to a state in the occupied terri-

tories and you do not like our state in pre-1967 Israel you now have an

option.’ This would become the platform of a very important party of

Russian immigrants and extreme Mizrahi Jews, led by a former bartender

from Moldavia, Avigdor Lieberman.

But at the time we are discussing here, the main process was the

emergence of the national parties inside the Palestinian community,

while the divorce from the Jewish peace camp would come only later,

in 2000. The reason that the clear difference in the agenda between the

Zionist left and the Palestinian community in Israel was not apparent

yet was that they both shared the same hope during the days of the

Oslo Accords, and as long as the PLO still believed in the chance

of peace through that accord, both the Zionist peace camp and the

major parties within the Palestinian community supported the process.

These new national parties associated the question of peace with the

Palestinians with their own future and as such located themselves

outside the ‘legitimate’ boundaries of the Zionist left or ‘peace camp’.

What they did not know at the time was that the PLO also excluded

their fate from a possible peace process in the future. Such stances

opened up the whole question of Israel’s identity, democratic conduct,

and its future between Europe and the Middle East. There was nothing

a Zionist party could offer on the horizon that promised a signiﬁcant

change in the reality of a Palestinian citizen in the 1980s, so aptly

THE DAY OF THE LAND TO THE FIRST INTIFADA, 1976–87 | 145

36x

146 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

described by the writer Anton Shamas after the ﬁrst Lebanon war: ‘I am

a second-rate citizen, nationless in the Jewish state of Israel.’

THE NEW NATIONAL FORCES

In the Palestinian community at that period, the search was more and

more for self-assertion and a national modus operandi that did not rely

on Jewish coaching or cooperation. The Day of the Land was the ﬁrst

national day of protest in this respect. The event itself institutionalized

political activity in the community through the formation of the

‘Committee of Heads of Local Arab Councils’, which now worked

alongside, and at times fused into, the ‘Follow-Up Committee’. This

body was the ﬁnal version of previous committees that had been seeking

since the 1970s to coordinate the political activity of the Palestinians

inside Israel. In 1981, the main politicians and the heads of councils

created the coordination committee, but it did not last for long.

A more successful attempt at coordinating the political activity of the

community came in 1982, in the wake of the Lebanon war in general,

and the massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila

by Maronite militias strongly connected to the Israeli army. The angry

protest all over the Palestinian villages and urban neighbourhoods led to

the founding of the ‘Supreme Follow-Up Committee’ (which we will

refer to hereafter as the Follow-Up Committee). The idea was

conceived by Ibrahim Nimr Husayn, the mayor of Shefa-‘Amr and the

chair of the committee of local councils. He also became the ﬁrst chair

of the new committee. At ﬁrst it included eleven heads of the main

local councils and towns and the members of the Knesset. By 1990

other representatives of various NGOs and citizens living in mixed

Arab–Jewish towns also received representation on the committee,

which became a mini-parliament for the Palestinian community. It

created subcommittees for dealing with various aspects of life in the

community: education, health, sport, social services and agriculture. Its

inaugural meeting was in Shefa-‘Amr where it sat until it moved to

Nazareth where it sits today.

In the main the Follow-Up Committee charted basic guidelines or

general positions on issues that troubled the community at large, such as

36x

relationships with the Jewish state, the PLO or the Arab world. Like the

other NGOs, the Committee had no power of sanction and their decla-

rations were effectively recommendations to the community, sometimes

heeded and sometimes not (for instance the call for a national strike was

not always accepted – but more often than not, it was). The Follow-Up

Committee later became a more signiﬁcant body. Its members did not

seek total obedience to their policy proposals but rather wished to offer

their community a compass with which to navigate in the stormy and

dire straits of life in the Jewish state; or, more precisely, its statements

had recommendations of how best to build a golden mean between the

national demands and the pressures of the state. Very rarely did it call for

direct confrontation as it did in 1988 and in response to the events in

Jerusalem in 2000. A good example of its attempt to be a consultative

body can be seen in the educational work of the Follow-Up Committee,

which in 1984 was taken over by a body under its supervision called the

Follow-Up Committee on Arab Education in Israel. This body responds

to the needs of parents and teachers within a system that is closely super-

vised, monitored and managed by Jewish ofﬁcials in the Ministry of

Education. Navigating between the requirements of the segregated

educational system that demands total obedience to the Jewish state and

the natural impulse to provide national education for the younger gener-

ations requires daily decisions on how to deal with the curriculum

dictated from above, the content of ofﬁcial ceremonies such as the prob-

lematic Day of Independence celebrating Israel’s foundation, while

totally ignoring the catastrophe that befell the Palestinian people in

1948, and similar issues.

In other areas, it was the Committee that suggested how best to react

to events in the ﬁrst and second Intifada and later on to other Israeli oper-

ations in Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, and it suggested what

content to give to days of commemoration, be they for the Nakbah of

1948 or landmarks such as the Day of the Land, in the history of the

Palestinian community inside Israel. In most cases where events organ-

ized by the Committee deteriorated into direct confrontation, the feeling

among the Palestinian Israeli observers (and of this writer as well, but not

however in the Israeli media) was that the trouble began with an over-

reaction on the part of the troops facing the demonstrators.

THE DAY OF THE LAND TO THE FIRST INTIFADA, 1976–87 | 147

36x

148 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

But the major change in the political scene was the appearance of

purely Arab parties. Two political formations stand out in this period as

offering a national outlet separate from both Communism and Zionism.

The ﬁrst was led by Muhammed Mia’ri, a former founder of the al-Ard

movement. He and his former colleagues produced a new parliamentary

party, Hareshima Hamitkademet Le-Shalom, ‘The Progressive List for

Peace’. The members of this new outﬁt had to ﬁght in the Supreme

Court of Justice for the right to participate in the national elections in

Israel. The main opposition came from the Israeli secret service, and it

was a high hurdle to get over.

Only when it was considered in compar-

ison with a fanatical right-wing Jewish party did the court allow it to

take part in the Knesset elections. It was the ﬁrst political party to take

part in the democratic process that declared openly its unambiguous

support for, and identiﬁcation with, the Palestinian national movement.

Initially the party had a few Jewish members in it, but they soon left

and it developed into the ‘Arab Democratic Party’, soon to become the

‘National Democratic Party’, Balad, which is the acronym in Hebrew

of the title but also means the ‘land’ or the ‘village’ in Arabic (it was

later known as Tajamu – ‘the block’). Obviously, for the secret service,

it acted outside the tolerated boundaries of Arab activism in Israel but

the authorities in general tolerated it, although they suspected and

monitored it very closely.

The PLO’s Declaration of Independence (adopted by the Palestinian

National Council in Algiers on 15 November 1988) unilaterally

declared the establishment of the State of Palestine and declared the

chairman of the PLO, Yasser Arafat as the president of the new state.

The principles of the state were the acceptance of the two-state solu-

tion and the need for a peaceful solution with Israel. This declaration,

and of course the Oslo Accords of 1993, strengthened the acceptance,

albeit grudgingly, of such political parties.

The second alternative followed a very different line of thinking

that would become popular in the Islamic movement and with the

Palestinian public at large in the next century: acting as a political

movement and yet refusing to partake in the parliamentary process.

Anti-Zionist activists with some Palestinian friends had already done

this in the previous decade in Matzpen but it remained a very small and

36x

marginal group. In its stead emerged a purely Palestinian national

movement with Jewish solidarity. The new party went by the name of

Abna al-Balad, ‘the sons of the land’ or ‘the sons of the village’ in

Arabic. It had been founded in 1969 but became publicly known after

the 1976 Day of the Land events. It deﬁned itself as ‘a Palestinian

movement operating within the Green Line of Israel’. Among its main

demands were an unconditional right of return for the 1948 refugees,

the end of Israeli occupation all over Mandatory Palestine and the

creation in its stead of an Arab, secular and democratic state.

Adopting such positions required a fair share of personal courage as

arrest and harassment were an inevitable risk one took when joining

the movement (although the worst action against them by the state

took place only in 2004, when its leadership was arrested for alleged

cooperation in terrorism with Fatah activists in Jenin). When Balad

became a parliamentary party in the late 1980s, led by Azmi Bishara,

some members of Abna al-Balad joined it, forsaking the principle of

not participating in the elections, while the others continued to

operate as the original movement, as they still do.

THE IMPACT OF THE 1982 LEBANON WAR:

A CRISIS WELL-NAVIGATED

The forced eviction of the PLO headquarters from Jordan to Lebanon in

1970 strengthened the political and military presence of the Palestinian

guerrilla movement in Lebanon. PLO political, cultural and military

activity was directed from Beirut, while the scattered refugee camps

served as a launching pad for operations inside Israel. One of these

was the attack on a bus at the northern entrance to Tel Aviv in 1978,

which triggered Operation Litani in which Israel occupied the southern

part of Lebanon, up to the river Litani, with the help of Maronite

militias. This happened three years into the Lebanese civil war, which

erupted in 1975, and continued until the late 1980s while involving a long

period of heavy Syrian presence in the country at the behest of the Arab

League.

Israel created what it called a security zone in southern Lebanon

against which Palestinian forces fought together with Muslim militias.

THE DAY OF THE LAND TO THE FIRST INTIFADA, 1976–87 | 149

36x

150 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

Qatyushas (Second World War Russian-made missiles) were ﬁred

into Israel’s northern towns and settlements, and Israel retaliated with

heavy bombardment from the air, the land and the sea. In 1981, the

American envoy Philip Habib secured a ceaseﬁre between the PLO

and Israel. Israel decided to violate this ceaseﬁre after an assassination

attempt on its ambassador in London, Shlomo Argov, on 3 June 1982.

One suspects that the Israeli Minister of Defense, Ariel Sharon, who

had tried ruthlessly to crush the PLO inﬂuence in the Gaza Strip and

the West Bank, was looking for an opportunity to destroy the PLO in

Lebanon. The assassination attempt provided the necessary excuse;

although the assassins, as was well known to Sharon, were Abu Nidal’s

people, who vehemently opposed the PLO and who were supported at

the time by the Iraqi regime. ‘Abu Nidal, Abu Shmidal,’ replied the

Chief of Staff of the IDF, Rafael Eitan, when he was told this was not

a PLO operation. ‘We need to nail the PLO.’

So Israel violated the

ceaseﬁre by bombing nine PLO camps in Lebanon and the organiza-

tion retaliated by heavy bombardment on Israel’s north. This was the

sign for the Israeli forces to roll in and occupy Lebanon as far as Beirut

and the border with Syria.

Prime Minister Menachem Begin – always the constitutional

gentleman – brought the decision to go to war for hindsight approval

by the Knesset. Only Hadash (formerly Rakah, the Communist Party)

voted against it, and even tabled a no-conﬁdence motion against the

government. ‘The country will regret this war for ever,’ declared its

Jewish member, Meir Vilner. The chief editor of Yediot Achronot, Israel’s

foremost daily at the time, demanded in response that Vilner and the

Palestinian members of the Knesset be brought to justice on charges of

treason.

Only when the Sabra and Shatila massacres were carried out

did a mass movement develop in Israel in opposition to the war.

The 1982 Lebanon war produced new dilemmas in the relationship

between the Palestinians and Jews in Israel. As the late poet and

novelist Emil Habibi put it, in the phrase ﬁrst uttered by Mapam MK

Saif al-Din al-Zoubi (long before the 1982 war), ‘My country was at

war with my people.’

The whole war was a bizarre experience for the

Palestinians in Israel, in particular for those living in the north. The

Israeli government euphemistically called the war, ‘Operation Peace

36x

for the Galilee’. In fact, of course, the Galilee was mainly populated by

Palestinians who identiﬁed with the organization branded by Israel

as the enemy of peace in the Galilee: the PLO.

All in all, the war against the PLO, which ended with the removal of

the PLO headquarters to Tunis and the death of many Palestinians and

the destruction of their homes and refugee camps, did not change the

political strategy of the community. Israeli policies were still regarded

as oppressive, but the struggle against them was played out within the

set of rules formulated by the Jewish state. This was not a democratic

game in the eyes of the activists and politicians, but it required more

democratization in the politics of the community itself.

By this time

the nature of the Israeli oppression was understood better by leading

academics in the community. Many of them rejected the state’s depic-

tion of them as immigrants who should accept the code of the host

country, and instead deﬁned the Palestinians in Israel as an indigenous

community to which a foreign state had immigrated, and yet were

excluded from nationhood in their own homeland.

The political struggle was expanded after the Lebanon war. Intellec-

tuals, students, workers and women (highly visible on the ground, though

not in the leadership) were the main agencies moving the struggle ahead.

Political identity and the land question were still the two main issues at

the heart of political life. Something else happened in this respect:

after 1982, the struggle in the occupied territories and inside Israel had

much more in common than in previous years. The difference in the

nature of the Israeli control over the life of Palestinians in the two

localities still determined the particular experience of each community,

as either second-class citizens of the state of Israel or inhabitants of

occupied territories ruled by a military regime. But in both cases there

was a need to use diplomacy in dealing with Israeli and international law,

and other means, alongside the armed struggle still adhered to by the

PLO until 1988.

THE TIME OF THE STUDENTS

This was the decade of the campus as the main locus of political happen-

ings. Members of the various student committees, still not recognized by

THE DAY OF THE LAND TO THE FIRST INTIFADA, 1976–87 | 151

36x