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

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

182 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

Around the fortieth anniversary celebration of Israel’s independence,

the main activists in this community coordinated what hitherto had

been the local committees of each deported village into a national

committee of internally displaced persons based in Nazareth, initially in

Safafra, the western neighbourhood which hosted most of the refugees

from the nearby village of Saffuriyya, destroyed by the Israelis in 1948

and on whose ruins, under the watchful eyes of its former inhabitants,

Jewish settlers built the settlement Zipori.

The committee developed a new national ritual that would become

a focus for a novel kind of activism in the community. This consisted

of annual pilgrimages to one of the destroyed villages, where a cere-

mony of commemoration took place, with eyewitnesses telling the

story of the village and in particular the days of its destruction; this was

followed by the cleaning of the area and the leaving of some sort of a

commemorative mark. The villages chosen for this ritual, which still

continues, are those with relatively easy access – others are impossible

to reach because there are Jewish settlements there, or because a forest

has been planted over the village by the Jewish National Fund. Once

the pilgrimages began, JNF ofﬁcials encircled the remains of the

villages with barbed wire to make them inaccessible.

Other activities included the creation of a museum of a sort

commemorating the Nakbah in Nazareth, the convening of meetings

and conferences on the 1948 Palestinian refugees’ right of return and

attempts to recruit, with little success, local politicians to their cause.

Their activity was reciprocated by one small Jewish NGO, Zochrot,

‘remembering’ in the female form in Hebrew, which took upon itself

the mission of informing the Israeli public about the 1948 events with

the help of the work of the Israeli new historians and the Palestinian

historiography that challenged the accepted Zionist version of the war

and, in particular, debunked the myth of a voluntary Palestinian ﬂight

in 1948.

The second unique feature of this period was individual and inde-

pendent political careers. There were some independent voices in those

days which sought their own course of navigation through the murky

waters of local Israeli politics. An outstanding ﬁgure in this respect was

Ibrahim Nimr Husayn, the long-reigning mayor of Shefa-‘Amr and the

36x

head of the Follow-Up Committee. He was chosen for the latter posi-

tion precisely because he had no clear party afﬁliation and seemed to be

respected by all concerned (the Committee preferred to have a non-

partisan head and, later on, Husayn’s neighbour from Kafr Madna,

Muhammad Zeydan (Abu Faysal), would be twice elected to this posi-

tion because of his lack of afﬁliation with any recognized party).

Inevitably, Husayn’s decision to avoid any direct confrontation with the

Israeli Ministry of Interior, which was the bread and butter of any Arab

council that wished to survive, led some to accuse him of unnecessary

collaboration with the state. Young members of the public in his home-

town disliked his approach; one of them threw a Molotov cocktail at the

municipality building, burnt the Israeli ﬂag there and wrote grafﬁti

against the mayor, who responded by organizing a rally of support.

HARSH ISRAELI REACTIONS: BACK TO THE SHABAK

That there was another option, and an impulse not to be content with

being second-class citizens, was shown by the positions adopted by the

Islamic movement and its powerful appearance on the scene, and the

consolidation of the national secular position by the new national forces

and even inside Hadash. The emergence of a more assertive Islamic and

national Palestinian voice within Israel led the Israeli political elite to

put strategizing about the issue back into the hands of the security

octopus. Instead of employing human rights lawyers, political scientists

or social welfare specialists, the government gave the secret service the

‘Arab ﬁle’. As before, the drive to continue the undemocratic and racist

policies led to a deterioration in the personal security of Israelis as a

result of the ongoing Palestinian national struggle, which in the period

under discussion focused on the settler communities in the West Bank

and the Gaza Strip. The bloody retaliation by the settlers and the army

heightened tension between Arabs and Jews inside Israel.

One result was the growing popularity of Meir Kahana and Kach,

whose imagery and language was adopted by the mainstream press

when referring to any Palestinian in Israel who did not succumb to

Zionism or the state as an ‘enemy’. This was not a phenomenon

conﬁned to the extreme margins. The support (which, one should

AFTER THE FIRST INTIFADA | 183

36x

184 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

reiterate, was democratically expressed) given by Palestinians inside

Israel to the uprising unleashed verbal attacks on them from the

centre, the left and the right. The basic message was in some way a

return to the 1950s images and perceptions of them as a dangerous

ﬁfth column in the midst of Jewish society.

There was, as mentioned in the previous chapter, a new presence of

Palestinians in the very towns and settlements that were meant to keep

them in their own habitual enclaves. Although these individuals were

the last to express support for the uprising publicly or openly, the two

disconnected phenomena were fused into one.

This could be detected around the government’s discussion table.

After years of neglecting the issue and not discussing the situation of

the Palestinians in Israel in any serious manner, the government

convened a special meeting in May 1989. It was probably the ﬁrst

cabinet meeting devoted to the subject since a special meeting

convened in the aftermath of the Day of the Land in 1976. Then

Yitzhak Rabin had appointed the ex-general Matti Peled to look into

the Arab educational system and try to improve Arabs’ sense of

belonging. Not much happened in this respect apart from some multi-

cultural masterplans devised by the Ministry of Education that

included sections on educational workshops focused around ‘coexis-

tence’. With the appointment of Shulamit Aloni as Minister of

Education to the 1992 Rabin government, more content and purpose

was cast into these ofﬁcial schema and, at least theoretically, there was

a space for a less segregated educational reality, but this hope did not

last for long. It evaporated with the rest of the promising indicators of

a possible better future with Rabin’s assassination in November 1995.

This may be a good point to discuss Rabin’s legacy in Israel in

general, and in the life of the Palestinian community in particular. This

writer does not share the assessment of many of his colleagues of

Rabin’s drive for peace during the days of the Oslo Accords, nor the

assertion, put most eloquently by my friend Avi Shlaim, that Rabin’s

assassination was the main reason for the collapse of the Oslo

Accords.

The Oslo process was the brainchild of Rabin’s arch-rival in

Israeli politics, Shimon Peres, and was never fully endorsed by the late

Prime Minister. Like all the Israeli negotiators before and after him, he

36x

saw peace negotiations as offering the Palestinians terms of surrender,

rather than a genuine attempt to reconcile and live jointly in the

disputed land.

However, I do believe that he was unique in his approach to the

issue of the Palestinians in Israel, not during his ﬁrst term in ofﬁce

(1974–1977) but during his second term (1992–1995). I was already

participating in Israeli politics in those days, as part of the Palestinian

political scene, and he was one of the few who treated fellow

Palestinian politicians as human beings and legitimate members of the

political scene. Rabin approached the Palestinian parties immediately

after the election in the summer of 1992 and offered them, for the ﬁrst

time in the history of the state, a partnership in government. As

discussed, it was very limited; he did not dare to offer them a place in

the formal coalition, but in return for their support in the parliament,

they were given senior positions in the Knesset and his government

pursued some policies of positive discrimination in state employment

(granting an assured place and quota for Palestinians among senior

ofﬁcials), increased educational budgets and some improvements in

the social welfare system. This also included a dialogue, interrupted by

the Likud government which came into power in 1996, about allowing

more say to the Palestinians regarding the content of their educational

system. Some of these achievements were taken away by future

governments; others were kept and helped to mitigate the overall and

continued oppressive reality.

The 1989 cabinet meeting on the ‘Arabs’ in Israel was similarly futile.

The leading voice in that meeting was that of the Communications

Minister, Yitzhak Modai, and the discussion evolved around the radical-

ization in the attitudes of Palestinians in Israel. ‘The intifada has spilled

over into Israel,’ declared Modai and ‘there are villages which the police

are afraid of entering’.

Local politicians spoke in a similar vein when asked about the

Palestinians in Israel. In an interview the Mayor of Carmiel lumped

together what he saw as increased support by the Palestinians in Israel

for the Intifada with the continuous move of Palestinians into his town,

commenting, ‘Carmiel was built in order to Judaize the Galilee, it is

too early for joint life. They should stay in their village.’

This kind of

AFTER THE FIRST INTIFADA | 185

36x

186 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

ofﬁcial apartheid discourse and attitude was tolerable worldwide at a

time when apartheid in South Africa was about to crumble.

The irony was that at that time governmental policies openly

favoured the Jewish citizens in the Galilee and the Negev. The Israel

Land Administration, now operating in a more regulated and organ-

ized manner (a process begun in 1977), introduced the ﬁve-year

masterplans for spatial expansion in the early 1980s. Whereas in the

case of the Jewish population these plans were meant to allow expan-

sion, in the case of the Palestinian minority they were aimed at limiting

expansion rather than aiding it. Cheaper services were provided to the

Palestinian population in the name of efﬁciency, while the main

impulse for this was in fact ideological. As noted by many researchers,

this discrimination still continues today.

These problems were reinforced by the lack of any public land

accorded to the Palestinians for developing industry, public housing or

commercial centres. A mere 0.15 per cent of the state land during that

period was given to Palestinians in Israel for non-agricultural use, of

which the vast majority was used for building shanty towns for the

Bedouins in the Negev and better housing for the Druze (5 per cent of

the 0.15 per cent).

The Israeli press followed these statements by national and local

politicians with distorted reports on the youth and educational initiative

taken by Palestinians to improve the poor services provided by the

state. Any attempts to ﬁnd something for teenagers to do during the

long summer vacation were reported in the press as ‘Intifada youth

camps’.

Such attitudes were translated into other forms of harassment

and intimidation. A typical case was when a coffee-house owner in

Haifa demanded that seven young Palestinian customers should not

speak in Arabic. Worse, Palestinians overheard speaking Arabic in

shopping malls were attacked in Ramleh, Tiberias and Migdal Haemek,

and one villager from al-Makr was murdered by a Jew. Palestinian

fans of a local Nazareth football team were attacked viciously by the

Jewish fans.

From ofﬁcial circles, then, down to the hooligans in the streets there

were days when anyone speaking Arabic was immediately suspected and

feared. No wonder, in the 1990s as well as in the 1950s, the principal

36x

governmental agency entrusted with formulating and executing the

policy towards the minority was the Shabak.

One of the major decision makers in this organization, Nachman

Tal, summarized the outﬁt’s aim as keeping the temperature at a

reasonable level. As he explained:

Even if the Arabs in Israel attained full equality, they will never be

fully satisﬁed and would not change their national and ideological

preferences. A national minority will always ﬁnd it difﬁcult to live

in the state of the majority, therefore there is no solution to the

problem. One has to keep the temperature low.

He used this reference to temperature as he was impressed by some-

thing a veteran French colonialist from the days of the struggle for

Algeria told him: that the French mistake was noting too late that the

temperature had risen; as if ‘detecting’ in time the Algerian resistance

to the French occupation would have left the country in French hands.

However, in the same piece in the newspaper a veteran of the Shabak

noted that ‘keeping the temperature low’ was a euphemism for pursuing

a very aggressive and hostile policy towards the Palestinian citizens and

he doubted the wisdom of such an attitude. Tal claimed that it was a

carrot-and-stick policy, but the problem was that the carrot, constant

improvement of the citizens’ standard of living, was the politicians’ job

and in most cases they were unwilling or unable to fulﬁl it.

This analysis and prognosis is quite bewildering as we know now in

hindsight that the secret service predicted that the Palestinians in Israel

would join the uprising. These Shabak experts should have (but could not

have, due to their prejudices) listened to the leaders of the Palestinian

community who repeatedly declared and explained that not only they, but

also the PLO, did not expect the Palestinians in Israel to take part in the

uprising. Nadim Rouhana asserted at the time that the Israeli ‘experts’ on

the Arabs mistook very emotional identiﬁcation with the uprising with a

wish to take an active part in it.

Even groups of the Palestinian commu-

nity branded by the Israeli establishment as ‘Israelized’ – and therefore

ones which sent their sons to serve in the army – such as the Druze and

the Bedouins shared this emotional identiﬁcation. The result was a new

AFTER THE FIRST INTIFADA | 187

36x

188 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

discourse in the main Arabic newspaper in Israel, the ofﬁcial organ of the

Israeli Communist Party, al-Ittihad. The national PLO discourse, when

employed by Palestinian media in Israel in the past, would have led to the

closure of newspapers and the arrest of journalists. Now it poured out like

a tidal wave – everyone was using it. The Green Line in this respect disap-

peared – the prisoners of the uprising in the occupied territories were

regarded by the Palestinians in Israel as if they were their own prisoners in

Israeli jails. This is why for Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line

the uprising had no political boundaries; it was a revolt which encom-

passed every Palestinian living in the historical homeland.

CULTURAL BOOM

This discourse was already there, as we mentioned in the poetry of the

1950s, in the novels of the 1960s and in the plays of the early 1980s.

The trend had been reinforced by the uprising. Now it also penetrated

the more folkloristic genre of local poetry – it appeared in the tradi-

tional praise local poets and storytellers recited at weddings, some-

times in an improvised duo between two poets, ‘competing’ on who

could best extol the virtues of the bride and groom. Popular songs as

well began to incorporate more political and ideological elements.

This was a very proliﬁc period for the written word within the

Palestinian community of Israel. There was a booming new literary

energy across different gender, religious and sectarian backgrounds,

including authors such as Munim Haddad, Naji al-Dahir, Dib Akkawi,

Naila Azzam-Labes, Shakib Jahshan, Ussaman Halabi, Admon Shehadeh

and Aﬁf Shalhut. As a result their works have touched on almost every

aspect of life. In response to Edward Said’s famous article after the

Lebanon war, ‘Permission to Narrate’, in which he urged Palestinians to

retrieve and protect their narrative in the face of Israeli propaganda over

the years, one of the local poet laureates, Samih al-Qasim published a new

collection under the title Do Not Ask Permission from Anyone and Munim

Haddad in Taybeh opened in 1988 a centre for Arab heritage with the

publication of a book The Arab Heritage: Erasure and Awakening.

But if previous decades were those of poetry and then theatre, this

one was the epoch of the documentary, and, to a lesser extent, the

36x

feature ﬁlm. It began with ﬁlms made by Michel Khalifeh from

Nazareth, who produced both documentary and feature ﬁlms dealing

with the Palestinian experience inside and outside Israel. Pages from

Ripe Memories told the story of two women, one of them the famous

Palestinian novelist Sahar Khalifeh and the other a villager from Yafat

al-Naserh. In 1987 he ﬁlmed A Wedding in the Galilee, the second-ever

Palestinian feature ﬁlm and the ﬁrst shot inside Palestine.

Khalifeh belonged to a group of Palestinians from Israel, mainly from

Nazareth, who studied and worked abroad and then came back and

produced ﬁlms on the Palestinian reality in Israel. Others included

Rashid Masharawi, Eliah Suleiman and Hani Abu-Assad. The boom in

cinematic production was important because, apart from individual

Palestinians in exile, the communities of refugees and those under occu-

pation were too preoccupied with the existential struggle to bother with

this crucial medium. The PLO while in Beirut had put some effort and

money into making documentaries about the Palestinian condition, but

since it moved to Tunis, and then during the Oslo days, partly to

Ramallah, its cultural production had subsided. Whether it was

Masharawi in his ﬁlm The Shelter or Khalifeh in his various ﬁlms, their

depiction of life reﬂected the Palestinian existence inside and outside the

homeland. The ﬁlms moved between the personal and the national

experience as sharing the same features of safety, danger and aspirations.

While such contributions to the cinema were crucial, the input as far

as other aspects of general Palestinian culture were concerned was also

much less marginal than it used to be. An Islamic or rather a neo-

Islamic take on culture developed in Israel as it did in the rest of the

Muslim world. When the Salman Rushdie affair exploded all over the

Muslim world, it had a faint echo in the Palestinian community as no

one thought of publishing the book in Arabic. It appeared in Hebrew

despite a single protest letter send by Adil Zaydan, the secretary of the

religious scholars in Israel. But in Israel at least in those days you could

ridicule any religion in a novel, including Judaism. Later on, the

Islamic movement, unlike the established Islamic bodies, would have

an impact on culture in certain spaces where it was politically powerful.

This was manifested in events where women were separated from men

during musical performances but, all in all, Islam in the public sphere

AFTER THE FIRST INTIFADA | 189

36x

190 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

was more political and social than cultural: by this I mean that the

theatre, ﬁlms and shows by Palestinians in Israel were not censored,

and not even self-censored, on matters of Puritanism and modesty,

only by the Israeli authorities if the works of culture were regarded as

subversive or against the state.

Palestinians were reading Hebrew novels more than ever before,

although they would be translated into Arabic only in the late 1990s

and the beginning of the next century. Few of the Palestinian writers

wrote in Hebrew themselves, but one, Anton Shammas, produced

what many local critics regard as one of the best novels in this

language, Arabesques (in the twenty-ﬁrst century his successor in a way

is Said Qashua who has already produced three novels; they are more

lightweight but have been written by someone also deeply in love with

the Hebrew language). Shammas’ novel was the tale of one Palestinian

village destroyed by Israel in 1948; a tale beginning in a Syrian village

in the nineteenth century and ending in the United States in the 1980s.

This work landed its writer in the spotlight and later on involved him

in a famous public debate with one of Israel’s leading novelists, A.B.

Yehoshua, who famously invited Shammas to leave the country if he

was unhappy with the Zionist regime and the success of the Jews in

dispossessing the Palestinians.

Alienation, namely the depiction of

the Palestinians in Israel as aliens in their home country was not just a

governmental policy, but also a private crusade by a liberal author.

As before there was no real and signiﬁcant dialogue between authors,

poets and journalists. The cultural life reﬂected the segregated socio-

political reality which had been built and sustained by successive

governments. This is also why the number of mixed marriages, in this

period a more common phenomenon, remained too marginal and

negligible to warrant any serious mentioning in a book like this. To be

fair, one should say that traditional Palestinians did not welcome such

marriages or connections any more than most Jews did. Yet a woman or

man could easily convert to Islam for the sake of marriage, but was less

welcome to convert to Judaism. Films and novels had many such

romances as their main plots, however in real life there were far fewer.

One could possibly agree with the Haifa-based sociologist, Yuval Yonay,

that the number of interracial marriages was ‘too small to be studied

36x

since separation between Jews and Arabs is so ingrained in Israeli

society, it is surprising that anyone manages to escape these central

controls’. And indeed those who do, risk the wrath of the Jewish society

at large.

In response to the involvement of two young Jewish women from

Petach Tivka, a large city near Tel Aviv, in an alleged attack by

Palestinian youth on a Jewish citizen in Tel Aviv, the municipality of

Petach Tivka announced it was establishing a team of youth counsel-

lors and psychologists whose job it was to identify young Jewish

women who were dating Arab men and ‘rescue’ them. But this brand

of policy was usually not triggered by the alleged involvement of young

women with criminal activity by Arab youth. In Pisgat Zeev in

Jerusalem the residents formed a vigilante-style patrol to stop young

Jewish women meeting with Palestinians. And in 2007, the munici-

pality of Kiryat Gat launched a programme in schools to warn Jewish

girls of the dangers of dating local Bedouin men. The girls were shown

a video titled ‘Sleeping with the enemy’, which described mixed

couples as an ‘unnatural phenomenon’.

Even at that period cultural production was deemed dangerous in a

state where its value was judged by the secret service and not according

to artistic critics. Thus when the painter Jawad Ibrahim from Umm

al-Fahem opened an exhibition displaying images from the Intifada

and life under occupation, he was arrested and spent a long time in the

notorious Keziot jail, where people were held for terrorist offences.

A PHONEY CRISIS: THE FIRST IRAQI WAR

At the time the ﬁrst Gulf War seemed to present a moment of serious

crisis in the relationship between the Jewish state and its Palestinian

minority. But its short duration did not signiﬁcantly transform the atti-

tude of the state to its Palestinian citizens. What it did do, however, was

to expose, and very forcefully so, the fragility of the fabric of coexistence

in Israel.

At the beginning of the crisis, when Saddam Hussein invaded

Kuwait in August 1990, no particular tension was felt in the relation-

ship between the two communities; despite the animosity of most of

AFTER THE FIRST INTIFADA | 191

36x