1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS 10 1 2 3 4 5 6x 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 36x 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 36x 1 2 3 4 5 THE FORGOTTEN 6 PALESTINIANS 7 8 A History of the Palestinians in Israel 9 10 1 2 3 Ilan Pappé 4 5 6x 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 5 NEW HAVEN AND LONDON 36x 1 In memory of the thirteen Palestinian citizens who were shot dead by the 2 Israeli police in October 2000 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 Copyright © 2011 Ilan Pappé 6 The right of Ilan Pappé to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by 7 him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 8 All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright 9 Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from 20 the publishers. 1 For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, 2 please contact: U.S. Office: [email protected] yalebooks.com 3 Europe Office: [email protected] www.yalebooks.co.uk 4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 5 Pappé, Ilan. 6 Forgotten Palestinians : a history of the Palestinians in Israel / Ilan Pappé. 7 p. cm. ISBN 978-0-300-13441-4 (cl : alk. paper) 8 1. Palestinian Arabs—Israel—History. 2. Arab-Israeli conflict—History. 9 3. Israel—Ethnic relations. 4. Minorities—Israel. I. Title. DS119.7.P288825 2011 30 956.94’0049274—dc22 1 2010051045 2 Set in Janson Text by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd 3 Printed in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall 4 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 5 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 36x 10987654321 1 2 3 CONTENTS 4 5 6 7 Prologue: Hostile Aliens in Their Own Homeland 1 8 Introduction 9 9 10 1 Out of the Ashes of the Nakbah 15 1 2 The Open Wound: Military Rule and Its Lasting Impact 46 2 3 3 Military Rule by Other Means, 1967–1977 94 4 4 Between the Day of the Land and the First Intifada, 5 1976–1987 135 6x 7 5 After the First Intifada: Between Palestinian Assertiveness 8 and Jewish Uncertainty, 1987–1995 170 9 20 6 The Hopeful Years and Their Demise, 1995–2000 201 1 7 The 2000 Earthquake and Its Impact 229 2 3 Epilogue: The Oppressive State 264 4 Appendix: Note on the Scholarship 276 5 6 Notes 292 7 Bibliography 309 8 9 Index 317 30 1 2 3 4 5 36x 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 36x 1 2 3 4 5 6 And therefore, 7 If you wish, I will say I am the man 8 A Pre-Islamic Poet who spread his wings and flew into the desert 9 And I was a Jew before Jews floated on the Sea of Galilee, 10 And I was a sun-stricken Arab in the morrow’s shift . 1 And I was a rock, an olive tree that remained. 2 All the country became home, but I was a stranger in it. 3 I was a Muslim in Jesus’ land and a Catholic in the desert. 4 Not that any of this altered my way of life; only that I have not 5 forgotten 6x That I was born in the sand, and wandered with the light until 7 I landed 8 At the shadow of a callous knowledge tree. 9 I tasted its fruit. 20 I was eternally excommunicated, unable to return 1 Like the water that flowed and never returned to the river . 2 3 Salman Masalha, ‘Final answer to the question 4 “How do you define yourself?” ’ 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3 4 5 36x 1 Tyre Palestinian population 2 Golan (as % of total) LEBANON Heights 3 75% + 50–75% 4 SYRIA 25–50% Akka 5 5–25% Haifa Sea of Galilee less than 5% 6 Shefa-‘Amr 7 Nazareth Mediterranean 8 WADI ARA Sea 9 Umm al-Fahem Netanya 10 LITTLE TRIANGLE n a d 1 r o Nablus J 2 Tel Aviv/Jaffa WEST 3 BANK 4 Amman Ashdod 5 Jerusalem 6 7 Gaza Hebron Rahat 8 GAZA Dead Sea 9 ISRAEL Beer Sheba 20 1 JORDAN 2 3 4 Negev 5 Desert 6 7 EGYPT 8 9 30 1 Sinai 2 3 4 0 50 kms Gulf of Akaba 5 0 30 miles 36x 1 2 PROLOGUE 3 4 HOSTILE ALIENS IN THEIR 5 6 OWN HOMELAND 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 THE EARLY ZIONIST settlers were compulsory diarists. They left the 6x historians mountains of travelogues, journals and letters, writing from 7 almost the moment they landed in Palestine, at the very beginning of 8 the twentieth century. The land was unfamiliar and their journey from 9 Eastern Europe was quite often harsh and dangerous. But they were 20 well received, first in Jaffa where small boats took them ashore from 1 their ships and where they looked for their first temporary abode 2 or piece of land. The local Palestinians in most cases offered these 3 newcomers some accommodation and advice on how to cultivate the 4 land, something about which the Zionists had little to no knowledge as 5 they had been barred for centuries from being farmers or landowners 6 in their home countries.1 7 The settlers did not reciprocate in kind; at night, when they wrote the 8 early entries in their diaries by candlelight, they referred to the native 9 Palestinians as aliens roaming the land that belonged to the Jewish 30 people. Some came with the notion that the land was empty and assumed 1 that the people they found there were foreign invaders; others, like the 2 founder of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, knew that Palestine 3 was not a land without people but believed that its native inhabitants 4 could be ‘spirited away’ to make room for the Jewish return to, and 5 redemption of, Eretz Israel.2 To quote the late Ibrahim Abu Lughod, 36x 2 | THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS 1 ‘the denial and total disregard of the Palestinians in situ by early Zionist 2 settlers shocked well-meaning but rather ineffectual Jewish European 3 thinkers at the time’.3 4 The perception of the Palestinians as unwanted and unwelcome 5 has remained a potent part of Zionist discourse and attitude in what 6 became Israel in 1948. More than a century later, the descendants of 7 some of these Palestinians are citizens of the Jewish state, but this 8 status does not protect them from being regarded and treated as a 9 dangerous threat in their own homeland. This attitude permeates the 10 Israeli establishment, and is expressed in various different ways. 1 The Israeli College for National Security is the local ‘West Point’ 2 for the most senior officers in the army and the officials in the security 3 services, both for the domestic secret service, the Shabak, and for the 4 famous (or infamous, as the case may be) Mossad. The future heads of 5 the army and these security apparatuses have to graduate from this 6 college, which works very closely with the University of Haifa’s Center 7 for National Security Studies and Geostrategy. Year after year they 8 issue papers warning of the threat of ‘Arab’ takeover of land in the 9 north and south of Israel. Arab here means the Palestinian citizens of 20 Israel. This is the equivalent of the FBI warning the US government 1 that the Native American citizens of the USA are buying flats and 2 houses in increasing numbers. 3 The report of 2007 declared, ‘the state institutions are terribly 4 worried about the increased attempts by Arab (citizens) to buy land in 5 the Negev and in the Galilee’.4 This particular report was the most 6 ironic of them all. It pointed out that the main efforts in the south to 7 buy private land are made by Bedouin, and in the Galilee by Bedouin 8 and Druze. These are the two communities within the Palestinian 9 community in Israel that are supposed to receive a better treatment 30 since their members serve in the Israel army, while the rest of the 1 Palestinian citizens do not, an exemption often brought up as a pretext 2 for the discrimination against them (although one should note that 3 only a very small minority among the Bedouin in the south serve in 4 the army; the majority of recruits come from the north). Seemingly if 5 you are an Arab, even one serving in the Israeli army, when you buy 36x land you still become the enemy from within. PROLOGUE | 3 Even those rare Palestinian citizens who have succeeded by means of 1 appeals to the Israeli Supreme Court in being allowed to purchase land – 2 quite often land or property which was expropriated from them earlier by 3 the state in the 1950s or 1970s – are not immune from a second takeover.