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

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62 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

but were imposed on the whole community. Many people remember

vividly the Israeli ﬂags ﬂying everywhere and young Palestinians

marching to the beat of scouts’ drums celebrating the catastrophe of

1948. Schoolchildren everywhere were asked to write essays, and, if

they were so inclined, poems, celebrating the Jewish state and its

achievements. All over the Arab villages the celebration was both

enforced and highly visible. Members of Jewish kibbutzim in Wadi Ara

recall that their teachers thought that the celebrations in the kibbutzim

were not enthusiastic enough, so they were dispatched to Umm

al-Fahem to watch the parade of Arab scouts saluting the Jewish state.

The poet and Druze writer Salman Natour recalls how he was

forced to celebrate Independence Day in Daliyat al-Karmil. His story

is worth dwelling on as it illustrates the complex reality of living as a

Palestinian in Israel.

Natour still lives today in the Druze village of

Daliyat al-Karmil on the top of Mount Carmel. The Druze are a reli-

gious sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam. In Israel, this is considered to be

a separate religion, and its communal conduct differs somewhat from

similar communities in other Middle Eastern countries (there are

Druze in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, as well as in Israel). During

the 1948 war, the elders of the Druze community, sensing where the

balance of power was moving, signed a pact of allegiance with the

Jewish state. This should have made them ﬁrst-class citizens as far as

full rights and state privileges were concerned. However, they were

conﬁned to special units in the army and were not socio-economically

equal to most Jewish citizens. Nevertheless, most of their leaders

wished to continue the co-optation by and cooperation with Israel.

And yet individual memories from the period of the military rule tran-

scend ethnic or religious afﬁliations. Years later, members of the Druze

community would look back at the ‘blood pact’ which their elders had

signed on their behalf and doubt its wisdom; in particular, young Druze

serving in the army in return for preferential treatment by the Jewish

state soon realized that in practice they were just as likely to be unem-

ployed and marginalized as their Muslim or Christian brothers. The

Druze fulﬁlled their part of the deal, but the preferential treatment

promised did not seem to materialize. The result was their alienation

from the wider Palestinian community with no visible advantages.

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Some among the Druze saw this frustration coming very early on.

Salman Natour, a long-time activist in the Israeli Communist Party, was

one of them. His perspective and his memoirs correspond to those of his

activist friends in the Muslim and Christian communities.

On Israeli Independence Day, the teacher entered Natour’s class-

room and asked which of the pupils would write a poem for the cele-

bratory occasion. This was, Natour recalled, a very happy day for the

children: no lessons, only rehearsals for a dance and song show in

preparation for the principal’s speech commending Israel for being the

only democracy in the Middle East and thanking the government for

its benevolence and kindness.

A third-generation poet, the young Salman conﬁdently raised his

hand and proposed to write the poem. The result, however, was not

celebratory enough, and the teacher wrote something which Salman

was asked to read in his own name as part of a show of deference and

respect to Israeli ofﬁcials. Many years later, that principal was

suspected of collaborating with elements ‘hostile’ to Israel. He urged

Natour to come forward and reveal that it was the teacher who wrote

this patriotic poem, so that his loyalty to the state could be proved.

The poem proved a valuable asset.

THE ILLUSION OF INCLUSION:

MILITARY SERVICE

From very early on the Palestinians in Israel realized that the key to

being a full citizen in Israel was serving in the Israeli army. Serving in

the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was compulsory for men and women

alike, and this was the ticket for full beneﬁts from the state and indeed

for a place in the community of citizens of the nation. The elders of

the Druze community and some heads of clans in the Bedouin commu-

nity argued that serving in the army would separate their members of

the community from the rest of the Palestinians in Israel and, more

importantly, give them preferential treatment, even the status of equal

citizenship – as already noted, they were wrong.

But during the period covered in this chapter their experience was

somewhat different from that of the other members of the minority.

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64 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

Just as for everyone else, for them politicization meant a safe naviga-

tion between the temptations of co-optation and the perils of resist-

ance. Bedouin life and culture had changed very little in the nineteenth

century and the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century. The main event in

their history had been the Egyptian rule of Palestine between 1831 and

1840, which allowed them to frequent Palestine from bases in the Sinai

Peninsula, and they continued to make their presence felt, particularly

after the Ottomans returned to power in 1840. They maintained their

nomadic way of life in the east and north of Palestine during the rest

of the Ottoman rule, but after 1900 the main concentration of

nomadic and semi-nomadic Bedouin was in the south, in al-Naqab or

the Negev.

At the turn of the twentieth century, eighty tribes were registered in

seven different locations, which were marked as bases. This elemen-

tary structure remained intact until 1948. In 1947, there were 80,000

Bedouin in the south of Palestine, but the Israeli expulsion policy did

not spare them and, when the winds of war subsided, only 13,000 were

left. They regrouped into twenty tribes in three locations, spread

throughout the Negev.

The Bedouin in the south, as mentioned, did not join the army

in great numbers. It was mainly from the northern Bedouin communi-

ties that a large number of youngsters joined the army. Scattered from

the western valleys to the eastern border with Syria, these Bedouin are

descendants of tribes who arrived earlier in history from Iraq and Syria.

As a political community they adopted the same strategy as those in

the south, but their way of life was more sedentary than that of the

Palestinians who lived nomadic lives in the south. All in all, those in

the north enjoyed a better standard of living than those in the south, but

not better than the average Palestinian citizen.

It was because of the Bedouin that the Negev remained the only

geographical area in Israel relatively untouched by the fervour for

modernization. Camels and herds of sheep and goats were still an

important part of Bedouin life. However, agriculture and semi-

proletarianization, similar to that which affected the rest of the

Palestinian community in Israel, were beginning to inﬂuence Bedouin

life by the end of the 1950s, leading to the abandonment of their

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nomadic life. The second half of the decade was particularly dry, and

ﬁve successive years of drought drove many of the Bedouin north,

where the government eventually allowed them to settle in a few

villages. Those in the south forsook their pastoral life for unskilled

work in agriculture, construction and maintenance, while others opted

for a career in the army and the police force.

Similar policies of preferential treatment in return for army service

were pursued towards the Circassians, who were a group of a few thou-

sand living mainly in two villages in the Galilee. In the early 1950s, the

government was divided on the question of conscription to the IDF.

The secret service predicted that the Palestinian minority in Israel

would reject conscription, and suggested that all that was needed was

to call up one year’s intake. Should they refuse, the government would

be able to declare that the Palestinian community as a whole refused

to serve in the army. When the experiment took place in 1954, to the

surprise and bewilderment of the secret service, every conscript

responded to the call-up. In addition, the Communist Party supported

potential recruits and the call-up day turned into a festive event. No

one was actually conscripted; the policy makers simply ignored those

people’s readiness to serve.

What is more, the government’s policy on this issue gave it another

tool in its discriminatory policy against the Palestinian minority, which

is still being applied today: only people who have served in the army

are eligible for state beneﬁts such as loans, mortgages and reduced

university fees. There is also a close link between industry and security

in the Jewish state, and many employers insist that potential employees

have done army service, which means that signiﬁcant sections (almost

70 per cent) of industry are closed to Palestinian citizens.

The whole question of tempting Palestinians with military service in

return for a higher level of citizenship thus had a very strong religious

aspect; Christians and Muslims were not even offered such an option.

The Israeli authorities’ intense interest in, and manipulation of, the

religious afﬁliations of the country’s Palestinian citizens continues to

this day. Like the British before them, the Israelis thought it would

prove easier to control different religious communities than face a

national minority. But, contrary to their plans and predictions, religious

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66 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

identity never became an inﬂuential factor in the pro- or anti-Israeli

attitude of the Palestinians.

CHRISTIANITY AND COMMUNISM IN EARLY ISRAEL

There was however a difference between being a Muslim or a

Christian. Being a Christian Palestinian in Israel added another sphere

of identity through which a person had to navigate. But for the vast

majority of the Christians in Israel, a more pronounced Christian iden-

tity coexisted easily with the crystallization of a national identity; in

fact, Christians often played leading roles in the nascent Palestinian

national movement.

The Christian ascendancy within Palestinian

politics in Israel was also facilitated by the total collapse of the Muslim

structure and hierarchy in Palestine in the catastrophe of 1948. The

senior ulamma left the country, and it was many years before political

Islam reappeared as a signiﬁcant force. Meanwhile the Israeli govern-

ment replaced the former Muslim structure with one better suited

to helping it to impose its authority on the Palestinian minority. It

abolished the Mandatory Palestine bodies and replaced them with

Waqf (religious endowment) Boards and Court Councils, which were

directly supervised by the Ministry of Religions. However, these

bodies did not and still do not play a crucial role in the politics of the

people, although they governs the religious courts that have a ﬁnal say

on personal matters such as marriage, divorce and inheritance.

The disappearance of the old Muslim structure of yesteryear not

only left a leadership vacuum but also left many ﬁnancial and real-

estate assets behind. The public endowments, which had been run by

the British Mandate’s Supreme Muslim Council until it was expropri-

ated by the British government during the 1936 Arab revolt, became

‘absentee property’ in 1948, as did private endowments whose super-

visors were ‘absentees’. In 1965, the Knesset instructed the Custodian

of Absentee Property to return the non-absentee endowments to their

lawful benefactors and ordered the transfer of the public endowments

to an Islamic committee – loyal to the government, of course. Not

surprisingly, the former private endowments thrived due to the

stamina of the individuals while the latter public ones stagnated.

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The destruction of the Islamic structures – in particular the vanishing

of the notable families that were the backbone of social and political

life from the seventeenth century until the end of the British Mandate

and the loss of their ﬁnancial infrastructures – opened the way for

Christians to play a more central role in the Palestinian community in

Israel. Christian politicians took on leading positions in the Communist

Party, the only organized group expressing the national aspirations of

the Palestinian minority; they were also strong in the collaborationist

Arab sections of the Zionist parties. The Greek Catholic (Melkite)

Church, under the guidance of the charismatic Mutran (Bishop) Hakim,

was conspicuously active on both sides of the political spectrum. In

retrospect his role is still considered to be suspect by professional as well

as more popular historians. Hakim was favoured by the ruling party

Mapai due to his ﬁery public attacks on Communism in general and on

the Israeli Communist Party in particular. He was enraged when the

Communist Party discovered that he was willing to sell church land near

Tabor Mountain for the building of new Jewish settlements that

disrupted the Palestinian continuity in that area, on the eastern valley of

the country. People today also recall his public call to join the Histadrut,

which many eventually did as it was impossible to build a Palestinian

national trade union.

But there was another side to his activity. He

worked relentlessly to convince the government of Israel, the Vatican

and governments around the Arab world to facilitate the return of his

ﬂock, members of the Greek Catholic Church, to Haifa after the 1948

Nakbah – with some success. And for this activity some Israeli ofﬁcials,

and even historians today, have regarded him with hostility.

Communism was important for the Orthodox Church because it was

Russian; for some members of the Orthodox community it merely

replaced their past loyalty to the Russian Tsar with a new allegiance

to the USSR. This was the largest denomination among nine recog-

nized churches in Israel, the remainder being the Armenian, the Roman

Catholic, the Greek Catholic, the Maronites, the Gregorian-Armenian,

the Syriac Catholic, the Chaldean (uniate) and the Syriac Orthodox

(some individuals also belong to the Anglican Church). But more than

anything else, the Communist Party was a forum where urban Christian

intelligentsia could meet Muslim workers (the lower socio-economic

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68 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

stratum was predominantly Muslim), and together try to shape an

agenda for action and combat their common social and economic hard-

ships. Signiﬁcantly, despite its allegiance to an a-national ideology, the

Communist Party emerged as the only national party; that is, it enabled

people to express their national aspirations without risking arrest, as long

as they did so in the form of a Marxist discourse. Thus, if they chose to

wave a Palestinian ﬂag or any other symbol they risked imprisonment,

but if they chanted a Communist slogan about the right of self-determi-

nation, they would be relatively immune from the authorities’ wrath.

There was still a huge Jewish community in the Soviet Union, and this,

together with the obvious importance of the USSR in world politics,

explained the pragmatic and tolerant attitude of the Israeli government

towards Israel’s Communist Party.

Communism, or whatever was understood as Communism in the

very peculiar circumstances the community lived in, was therefore

the preferred political choice of the Palestinians in Israel. In May 1953,

the ﬁrst elections to the city council of Nazareth took place. The

Communists won 38 per cent of the vote and no coalition of the Zionist

parties was possible without them. In the ﬁrst meeting conducted that

month, the speeches of Tawﬁq Zayyad and Fuad Khoury, the leading

members of the party, were interrupted by the temporary chairman,

who called the police to disperse the meeting after he failed to silence

them himself.

The Israeli government’s attitude towards any form of Palestinian

nationalism, including that expressed via Communism, indicates that

although transfer and expulsion strategies disappeared from the

governmental decision-making desks after 1956, the pattern of discrim-

ination against the Palestinian minority in Israel remained the same.

The co-optation policy, the military regime and the basic predicament

of being a Palestinian citizen within the Jewish state generated several

political responses from within the community, all of which pointed to

a strong wish to remain part of the Palestinian people while at the same

time becoming citizens of Israel with equal rights. Some believed that

Communism would lead to a social revolution, rendering nationalism

secondary and bringing equality to all. Others joined the Communist

Party for less altruistic reasons. They used its internationalist discourse

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to disguise their more authentic national aspirations, the expression of

which would have indubitably led them into trouble with the Israeli

authorities. Afﬁliation to Communism ensured career support via the

party or, even better, a ticket to higher education in the Eastern bloc,

which could then open the door to professions such as law and medi-

cine, which the Palestinians in Israel were in practice, though always

unofﬁcially, barred from pursuing.

Others tied their political future to

Zionist parties, creating their own satellite parties or joining as

members. This may have furthered their own interests, but did very

little, compared with the Communists, to improve the collective lot.

Thus, by 1967, the Communist Party had become the most signiﬁcant

political force within the Palestinian minority. But inside and outside

the party, individuals and small groups adopted other modes of activism

as unionists, individual ﬁghters and cultural producers.

UNION ACTIVISM UNDER THE MILITARY BOOT

There was room for activism because, despite the repression, one basic

right was never taken away: the right to vote and to be elected. The inner

debates on these two rights by the Mapai, the ruling party throughout the

period of military rule, make interesting reading. It is impossible to miss

the irony of the fact that the new instinct for vote gathering was allowed

to overshadow the principal issue of full apartheid. In particular, the

Histadrut, the general trade union, could not resist the power the

Palestinian electorate might supply, and fought, as though they were

genuine humanitarians, for the right of the Palestinians to vote. Even

Ben-Gurion, who wrongly predicted that all the Palestinians would vote

en bloc for the Communist Party, reluctantly recognized that they could

be a useful tool for keeping Mapai in power.

This is probably why the Histadrut executive committee decided to

accept ‘Arab’ members at the beginning of May 1953, after previous

attempts had been rejected. The urge to unionize was acute and appeared

very early on. It was the most natural response to the transformation of

the Palestinian villagers from peasants into a daily skilled and unskilled

workforce in the Jewish Israeli market. The rapidly growing industrial-

ized Israeli economy and the modern-day taxation policy of a capitalist

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70 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS

society triggered a process sociologists call semi-proletarianization

within the Palestinian community in the ﬁrst twenty years of statehood.

While certain aspects of the Israeli economy in those years were still

centralized and monopolized, the market was already affected by the

capitalist forces of supply and demand. The agricultural produce from the

villages had no real market in the Jewish urban centre, ﬁrst because of

preferential policy from above pushing Jewish agricultural products at the

expense of Palestinian ones, and second because the general demand for

agriculture decreased. This forced a considerable number of farmers

in the Palestinian countryside to seek work as day labourers in the

Jewish city, mostly in unskilled jobs. They still cultivated the land for

domestic consumption but could no longer live off the land as they had

in the past.

This predicament was part of a wider economic picture. The capi-

talist system that had begun to thrive at the end of the British Mandate

collapsed and disappeared, while the new one erected by Israel

excluded the Palestinian community left after 1948 from any role in it

or beneﬁts from it. There were vast investments in the Jewish sector,

during the years in which military rule barred the Palestinians from

any share in this development (the only exception was the introduction

by the government of new species and updated technologies that

enriched rural agricultural products, but this was not enough to allow

people to live off the land).

Palestinians were directed into the market of unskilled work by the

government policies of investment and military rule, mostly in construc-

tion, services or Jewish agriculture, where the pay was low, the status

inferior and where there was no guarantee of any tenure in the job.

For construction work the military rulers would allow ad hoc groups

of builders to move into a Jewish project and work there, under

unfavourable conditions, and only for the duration of the projects. All

over the Palestinian areas, villagers who became unskilled workers asked

to be accepted as members of the Histradrut or to be allowed to form

their own union. Palestinians urgently needed some union protection,

not just in the traditional realm of pay, rights and so on, but also because

for most of them employment entailed passing through the military

checkpoints, which were very stingy with permits on such occasions. In

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the villages of Umm al-Fahem and Taybeh, unskilled workers asked to

join the Histadrut or to be allowed to form their own union as early as

March 1950, when the trauma was still fresh and the future not clear

at all, but they were not allowed to do either.

In September 1950,

following the attempts in the villages, the smaller urban communities

also tried to organize unionism under the leadership of the Communist

Party, but their activists, who began distributing pamphlets in the name

of the old British Mandate’s Arab Workers’ Congress, were arrested in

Wadi Nisnas in central Haifa.

Moved by their plight, the Communist member of the Knesset

Tawﬁq Tubi submitted a motion demanding that the government allow

the workers of Umm al-Fahem and Taybeh to establish a workers’

union. The military governor refused to grant such a permit and the

people of these two villages, like so many others in their area, Wadi Ara,

spent hours at dawn hoping to be allowed to pass into the Jewish areas

and look for a job. These same sights would reappear not far away from

there, on the checkpoints between the West Bank and Israel after 1967,

when the Palestinian workers from nearby villages would wait for hours

at the same time each day to be allowed to work inside Israel.

Even if one made it to the city or nearby town, there was the ques-

tion of sleeping over and ﬁnding a temporary abode. In the 1950s there

was plenty of space one could squat in, as the evicted and deserted Arab

houses and buildings stood empty. By the end of the decade most of this

property had been given to Jews to settle in, and any Palestinian work

seeker staying in one was chased out by the police or the army. The

Custodian of Absentee Property pressed those in control of military

rule not to allow such squatting.

The new policy of admitting Palestinians into the Histadrut was

accompanied by an unsuccessful attempt by the leaders of this Jewish

trade union to bar Arab Communists from registering as members. These

small victories kindled the ﬁre of hope among activists that tangible

successes were possible, albeit on a small and limited scale, even though

the superstructure in which they were operating did not allow any funda-

mental revision in the constitutional and political reality around them.

The struggle against the Arab Workers’ Congress was not only about

workers’ rights and privileges but also about collaboration. The presence

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