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

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is also that of multiculturalism and intraculturalism, issues funda-

mentally relevant to societies beyond Israel and Palestine and which

affect the fate of the East–West relationship in the Middle East as a

whole.

This minority is a heterogeneous community in which Christians

live side by side with Muslims, Islamists and secularists who compete

for political domination, and refugees struggle to make their presence

felt in a community the majority of whose members are living in the

same villages their ancestors built hundreds years ago.

It is a group that has been dubbed traitors both by the Palestinian

movement in the 1950s and by current Israeli political forces. Theirs is

an amazing story of almost impossible navigation in a sea of colonialism,

chauvinist nationalism, fanatic religiosity and international indifference.

It is a narrative of a group to which I do not belong, but in whose midst

I lived most of my adult life. As I have outlined in a recent book, Out

of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel,

due to my

scholarly and intellectual critique of Jewish society I was ostracized by

my own community, to the point where I decided to work abroad; I have

been involved in public and political life within the Palestinian commu-

nity since the 1990s. I think it is fair to say that my social connections,

and even more so my ideological associations, are uncommon in the

Jewish community in Israel. Although not unique, I am one of very few

Israeli Jews who feel such a close afﬁnity with the Palestinian minority

in Israel. This has led to me undertaking intensive learning of Arabic,

with constant reading of Arab literature and listening to Arab media, but

more importantly to developing intimate relationships with many

members of the community, and sensing a strong afﬁnity and solidarity

to the point of becoming a pariah in my own Jewish community. I have

never regretted this, even when in October 2009 a small group of young

Islamic activists tried to shout me down at a commemoration ceremony

for the thirteen Palestinian citizens killed in October 2000 in the village

of Arabeh, at which I was the only Jewish speaker tolerated after ﬁerce

opposition from the Islamic movement to any others. I am not saying

this as a complaint, or because I feel I was unjustly treated; these activists

were a small minority within an otherwise very receptive public, and I

can understand why they might view me with suspicion. No, the reason

12 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

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is that when you are part of the privileged oppressive majority, you

do what you do not in anticipation of a standing ovation, nor indeed in

any expectation of gratitude, but rather for your own peace of mind and

moral satisfaction. This is the particular angle from which this book

is written.

Let me add a word on methodology. On the face of it, this is an

old-fashioned narrative history. The appendix to the book covers the

theoretical paradigms offered by others as much as possible; these, in

the main, lack a historical perspective, but are very useful in terms

of analysing the group’s present conditions. In its conclusion the book

attempts to offer its own paradigm, that of the Jewish Mukhabarat

(secret service in Arabic) state (a model explained in the epilogue to the

book) in view of its major ﬁndings from the historical research.

Our narrative moves between two principal perspectives: that of the

Israeli regime, in particular its relevant decision makers, and that of

the Israeli Palestinian community at large, via its political and educated

elite and the writings of or interviews with various members. The

analysis is more nuanced in the case of the Israeli Palestinian commu-

nity for two reasons. First, the state, or rather the decision makers and

those operating the policies on the ground, have been informed by the

same ideological perspective – Zionism – and therefore more often

than not have acted in unison. Second, this book aims to present a

people’s history as far as possible and therefore the magnifying glass is

cast more on the Palestinians than on those who formulated and

executed the policies towards them.

The book has a constant variable and a number of dynamic factors.

The historical periods are the only concrete foundations of the book,

hence the chronological rather than the thematic structure of the

book. Within each period the narrative moves from one perspective to

the other – not, I hope, in a schematic, artiﬁcial way, but rather by the

power of association that sometimes blurs the historical picture, but

which I believe presents a more authentic image of past reality. The

story is not interrupted by theoretical inputs, only by explanations and

elaborations of certain events and personalities. Theory comes back

into the picture when academia begins to play a role in the relationship

between the Israeli Palestinian community and the Jewish state, and

INTRODUCTION | 13

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therefore alternative scholarly understandings of this history appear

twice: in the theoretical appendix and at the various junctures of

history where theories introduced by academics became tools either in

the hands of the government – such as the theories of modernization –

or for those who challenged the governmental policy – such as the

theories of internal colonialism and ethnocracy.

Veteran readers of scholarly works will appreciate the unbearable

gap between the clean and structured representation of reality and its

murky, fractured and chaotic existence as an experience. When the

research is too neat, the smells are gone and the sterile pictures fail to

illuminate, especially in this history of an almost impossible navigation

between conﬂicting demands, the hardship of daily life and the strug-

gles for survival. This book does not seek to idealize the Palestinians

of Israel, or as they are called in the Arab world, the 1948 Arabs; it

wishes to humanize them in places where they are either forgotten,

marginalized or demonized.

This book is also a modest attempt to understand the reality from

the minority’s point of view, seeing them not just as a community of

suffering, but as a natural and organic part of the Palestinian people

and history. You cannot begin to understand what this community has

undergone if you do not begin the story at the latest in 1947, when the

area that became Israel was still Palestine. This is where our story

begins.

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CHAPTER ONE

OUT OF THE ASHES OF

THE NAKBAH

THE LAND THAT WAS PALESTINE, 1947

The ﬁles about Palestinian villages compiled by the intelligence

service of the Haganah, the Jewish underground during the British

Mandate for Palestine, make a fascinating read. The intelligence

ofﬁcers prepared a ﬁle on every Palestinian village, all one thousand of

them. The process of registering these villages began in 1940 and

lasted for seven years. Every such ﬁle contained the most detailed

information possible, from the names of the big families, through to

the occupation of most of the villagers and their political afﬁliations,

from their history to the quality of the land, the public buildings and

even what grew on each of the trees in the orchards that traditionally

encircled the villages.

They are an important source ﬁrst and foremost since they expose

the level and depth of the Zionist preparation for the takeover of

Palestine. The ﬁles included aerial photographs of each village and its

environs and indicated the access and entry points to each village, as

well as assessing its wealth, and the number of weapons its men and

youths held in their homes.

No less important however is the value of these ﬁles as a historical

source for the social and economic conditions in rural Palestine during

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the British Mandate. Since the ﬁles were updated for the last time in

1947, they also provide a dynamic picture of change and transforma-

tion. When the information included in them is matched with other

sources, such as the press from that period, including the ofﬁcial

Palestine Gazette of the British Mandate government, rural Palestine,

very much like urban Palestine, appears to be a society on the move,

showing signs of economic expansion and social stabilization after

years of economic depression and social upheavals.

Almost each village had a school, running water and proper sewage

systems for the ﬁrst time, while the ﬁelds were plentiful and old blood

feuds – as the village ﬁles tell us – had been settled. In the cities

and towns prosperity was also budding. The ﬁrst graduates of the

universities around the Arab world, including the American universi-

ties of Beirut and Cairo, began their professional careers in Palestine,

forming a new middle class, which was so necessary for societies during

the transition into the new capitalist world built by European colo-

nialism and imperialism. Quite a few chose a public career in the

British Mandate government as senior or junior ofﬁcials – the latter

even joining their Jewish colleagues in a strike for a better pay and

conditions as late as 1946. The afﬂuence was visible in the architectural

expansion. New neighbourhoods, streets and modern infrastructure

were also evident everywhere.

The urban as well as the rural landscape was still very Arab and

Palestinian on the eve of the Nakbah – the 1948 catastrophe. Politically,

however, there was a different balance of power. The international

community was about to debate the future identity of the country as if

there were two equal contenders for it. The United Nations accepted

the mandate for deciding Palestine’s future after British rule in the land

ended in 1948. Already in February 1947, the British cabinet announced

it would transfer the issue of Palestine to the UN, which in its turn

appointed a special commission, United Nations Special Committee on

Palestine (UNSCOP), to deliberate upon the fate of the Holy Land.

‘It is not fair,’ complained David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the

Jewish community and later on Israel’s ﬁrst prime minister, in front of

UNSCOP: ‘The Jews are only one-third of the overall population and

only have a very small share of the land.’

Indeed there were 600,000

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16 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

Jews and 1.3 million Palestinians; the Jews owned less than 7 per cent

of the land, while most and, in some areas, all of the cultivated land was

owned by Palestinians.

Ben-Gurion’s complaint bewildered the Palestinians, and still

enrages them today. Precisely because of this demographic and

geographical balance, they deemed that any future plan which did not

allow the vast majority of the people in Palestine to decide its future

was unacceptable and immoral. Moreover, the majority of the Jews

were newcomers and settlers – most of whom had arrived only three

years before this, while the Palestinians were the indigenous and native

population.

But their views were ignored. It did not help that the

Palestinian leadership decided to boycott UNSCOP and that the poli-

tics of Palestine were run mainly by the Arab League, which did not

always have the Palestinian interest in mind.

The UN decided to appease Ben-Gurion: it opened the gates for an

unlimited immigration of Jews and granted 55 per cent of the land to

the Jewish state.

The principled Palestinian and Arab rejection of, and objection

to, the partition plan was well known to the Jewish leadership, even

before it was asked to respond to the UN plan. Therefore, when the

Jewish community sent its agreement for the plan, it already knew that

there was little danger of the plan being implemented due to the Arab

and Palestinian resistance. Nonetheless, Israeli propaganda has ever

since quoted Israel’s acceptance of the plan and the Palestinian rejec-

tion as an indication of its peaceful intentions towards the intransigent

Palestinians. More importantly, this Palestinian rejection was later

used as an explanation by the Israeli government for its decision

to occupy parts of the land accorded to the Palestinians in the UN

partition plan.

The Arab world declared its intention to go to war against the

implementation of this plan, but did not have the means or the will to

stop it. Three months before the Arab armies entered Palestine in May

1948, the military forces of the Jewish community began to ethnically

cleanse the Palestinians from their houses, ﬁelds and land. In the

process the Jewish forces added another 23 per cent to that granted

to them by the UN. By January 1950, Israel as a state covered almost

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OUT OF THE ASHES OF THE NAKBAH |17

80 per cent of Palestine. In it those who were left became the ‘Arabs in

Israel’, slowly building their life out of the ashes of their catastrophe.

THE ZIONIST DREAM AND THE BI-NATIONAL

REALITY, 1949

The photographs from the early days of 1949 tell it all. Palestinians

appear in them looking frightened, confused, disorientated and more

than anything else traumatized. They woke up to a new geopolitical

reality. Palestine as they knew it was gone and replaced by a new state.

The visible changes were too clear for anyone to ignore. Many of

their fellow countrymen, about 750,000 of them, were expelled in 1948

and not allowed to return. They became refugees or citizens of the

Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, or lived under military rule in the

Egyptian Gaza Strip. Out of the one million Palestinians who used to

live within what became the state of Israel (78 per cent of the British

Mandate for Palestine), 160,000 remained in 1949.

Photographs still remain of the small areas in the midst of urban

centres, cordoned off with wires and fences, in which for days and

sometimes weeks those who remained in the destroyed and deserted

towns and cities were forced to dwell. These initial attempts to concen-

trate Palestinians who had lost their homes but remained within the

boundaries of the hometown were supervised by Israeli ofﬁcers, who

called these conﬁnement areas ‘ghettos’. They disappeared by 1950 as

a more humane geopolitical landscape emerged, but in the meantime

they symbolized, more than any other image, the plight in which these

Palestinians found themselves.

No less dramatic was the picture of

those expelled for trying to return back home once the ﬁghting had

subsided.

The new sights were augmented by the noise of the tractors and

bulldozers operating on behalf of the Jewish National Fund ( JNF)

and other Israeli governmental agencies ordered by the government to

Judaize, as quickly as possible, the previously Palestinian rural and

urban areas. The aim was not only to de-Arabize Israel but also to

provide land and housing for the inﬂux of new Jewish immigrants

from Europe and the Arab world. The operation of demolition and

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18 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

destruction was designed and supervised by Yosef Weitz, the director

of the JNF’s Land Department. This body had attempted to purchase

land during the British Mandate, and its basic failure to acquire more

than 7 per cent of the cultivable land is one of the reasons the Jewish

leadership opted to employ force to take over large parts of Palestine

for its future state. On 19 July 1948, Weitz’s boss, the ﬁrst Prime

Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in his diary: ‘abandoned

Arab villages had to be removed’.

Within two years, two million

dunams (1 dunam is 3.8 acres) of Palestinian land would belong to the

Jewish Agency, which meant they were exclusively for the beneﬁt

of Jewish citizens.

How individual Palestinians experienced the trauma depended on

where they lived. Those dwelling in the major cities of Palestine where

they had been the indigenous majority now became a tiny minority

in them, living under a harsh military regime. All around them the

familiar face of an Arab city was transformed dramatically: either

demolished or taken over by Jewish immigrants. Most of the urban

Palestinians were expelled and those remaining were quite often

pushed into small ghettos in the poorer parts of Haifa, Jaffa, Ramleh

and Lydda. If they lived in the rural areas, they belonged to a hundred

and so villages left intact out of more than ﬁve hundred whose inhab-

itants were evicted and in 1949 were wiped out by the Israeli tractors,

turning them into either recreation parks or Jewish settlements.

Particularly devastating was the experience of those Palestinians who

lived on the Mediterranean coast: scores of villages disappeared from

the earth in 1948 and only two remained. And if they were nomads

or semi-nomads, the Bedouin of the south, they found themselves

standing in long queues to be registered as Israeli citizens, signing an

oath of allegiance to a Jewish state.

The scenes in the cities of Haifa and Jaffa in those early days

of statehood convey the enormity of the transformation and traumati-

zation, felt especially by those who had belonged to the urban popula-

tion, some of whom were expelled to nearby villages. When listening

to the memories and reading the memoirs of these Palestinian citizens

of how they fared in the early hours of Jewish statehood one can hear

mostly tales of loss, panic and despair.

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OUT OF THE ASHES OF THE NAKBAH |19

Some of those expelled to the countryside were later allowed to

return, but by no means all. So one trauma was to leave, come back and

see that your house was taken. A different one was to dwell for a year

or so in your own house and then be evicted and forcibly moved to

the countryside (at least as long as the military regime lasted, which

was until 1966). ‘My mother became hysterical, “Don’t you know we

are never going back? Not your book [I was reading a book in the

midst of the chaos], not us, nothing,” ’ recalled Umm Muhammad,

who was a third-grade pupil when they were evicted from the Halisa

neighbourhood in Haifa to a nearby village.

Many, like this mother,

found out when they attempted to return in the 1960s that others had

taken over their houses and their businesses – such as bookshops,

law ﬁrms or grocery shops – in which they lived and worked for gener-

ations. No wonder that many of those who tried to return gave up the

idea and had to reconcile themselves to living in the countryside in

villages that could hardly sustain themselves, now that their ﬁelds had

been conﬁscated by the Israeli authorities.

Worst was watching the loss at close hand in the cities, where proper-

ties and business were either turned into rubble or taken over by

someone else. Some eyewitnesses still prefer not to be named. Hannan,

not her real name, is today a retired citizen of Haifa. Her family lived in

an apartment in a building they owned and her father ran a small factory

for building materials nearby. The remnants of these two buildings can

still be seen. Her family left in January 1948, as did some of the wealthier

people of Haifa who had the means to travel and stay in Beirut or Cairo.

This upper class did not wish to be in the midst of the impending

ﬁghting and hoped to come back later on; they left all they had in their

homes. The vast majority of the people of Haifa of course could not

afford such an exodus and stayed until they were expelled by the Jewish

forces in April 1948. Upon return, Hannan’s family found that both their

home and their factory had been conﬁscated and that Jewish dwellers

had taken over. Like so many others, the family was never compensated

and, according to Hannan’s recollection, they lived in constant fear of a

new eviction and dispossession from their new abode in the city.

There were many others like Hannan who were the original inhabi-

tants of Haifa but could not live in their own homes. They lived next to

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20 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

them, painfully watching them being occupied by invaders. Under strong

international pressure, in particular from the United States, about 25,000

expelled Palestinians returned in the ﬁrst year of statehood under the

framework of family reunions. This took place throughout 1949 when

the international community, and in particular the UN, wanted Israel to

allow the unconditional return of the refuges to their homes (as articu-

lated in UN General Assembly Resolution No. 194, from 11 December

1948). Israel refused adamantly to adhere to this resolution and as a

compromise the government obliged the American administration by

facilitating the return of a small number of refugees who were willing to

swear an oath of allegiance to the Jewish state.

They came back, mainly from Lebanon, and found that in the

short period of their absence their houses had been taken by Jewish

immigrants, and thus notable families who had lived in relative luxury

on Mount Carmel during the Mandatory Palestine years had to be

content with shabby rooms in the dense, poor neighbourhoods of

inner Haifa. The Haifa-born writer and later political leader Emil

Habibi has recorded this particular aspect of the tragedy. When he

came back after the ﬁghting subsided he witnessed his furniture being

thrown out from his ﬂat on Abbas Street on the mountain’s slopes.

He asked the new dwellers why they were throwing out his belongings

and they answered, ‘This house is now our home.’ With great effort he

rented a house on the street. Many among the returnees had similar

stories to tell.

Habibi lost more than his furniture. In an interview with Shimon

Balas, one of the few Iraqi Jewish intellectuals in Israel who remained

loyal to their Arab heritage and culture, he remembered: ‘After 1948

I moved to Nazareth and there I was frightened to learn that my two

daughters were afraid of talking to a boy in the street. We lived in Abbas

Street before 1948, Christian and Muslim boys and girls, and we were

all friendly with each other, going to the same parties, we had a different

life then; we were not afraid of socializing and befriending others.’

For some it was not private property lost and conﬁscated that

marked the new epoch, it was the desecration of everything that was

holy and dear to their hearts, such as the churches and mosques in the

cities and in the countryside. Father Deleque, a Catholic priest in Jaffa

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