National Minority, Regional Majority : Palestinian Arabs Versus Jews in Israel 9780815651031, 9780815632306

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National Minority, Regional Majority

Syracuse Studies on Peace and Conflict Resolution Louis Kriesberg, Series Editor

ot h e r t i t l e s i n s y r ac use st u di e s on pe ace a n d con f l ic t r e solu t ion

The Broken Olive Branch: Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict, and the Quest for Peace in Cyprus, 2 vols. h a r r y a na sta siou

Conflict and Cooperation: Christian-Muslim Relations in Contemporary Egypt pet er e. m a k a r i

41 Shots . . . and Counting: What Amadou Diallo’s Story Teaches Us about Policing, Race, and Justice bet h roy

Global Liberalism, Local Populism: Peace and Conflict in Israel/Palestine and Northern Ireland g u y b e n -p o r a t

Human Rights in the West Bank and Gaza: Legacy and Politics il a n peleg

Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation Across Cultures j o h n pau l l e d e r a c h

Re-Centering Culture and Knowledge in Conflict Resolution Practice m a r y a d a m s t r u j i l l o, s. y. b o w l a n d, l i n d a j a m e s m y e r s , p h i l l i p m . r i c h a r d s , and b e t h r o y, eds.

Taming Ethnic Hatred: Ethnic Cooperation and Transnational Networks in Eastern Europe pa t r i c e c . m c m a h o n

Thinking Peaceful Change: Baltic Security Policies and Security Community Building f r a n k möl l er

Transnational Social Movement and Global Politics: Solidarity Beyond the State j a c k i e s m i t h , c h a r l e s c h a t f i e l d, a n d r o n pa g n u c c o, eds.

National Minority, Regional Majority Palestinian Arabs Versus Jews in Israel

Yitzhak Reiter

Syracuse University Press

Copyright © 2009 by Syracuse University Press Syracuse, New York 13244-5160 All Rights Reserved First Edition 2009 09 10 11 12 13 14

6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.™ For a listing of books published and distributed by Syracuse University Press, visit our Web site at SyracuseUniversityPress.syr.edu ISBN-13: 978-0-8156-3230-6

ISBN-10: 0-8156-3230-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reiter, Yitzhak. National minority, regional majority : Palestinian Arabs versus Jews in Israel / Yitzhak Reiter. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (Syracuse studies on peace and confl ict resolution.) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8156-3230-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Palestinian Arabs—Israel. relations.

2. Israel—Ethnic relations.

I. Title.

DS113.7.R43 2009 305.892'74—dc22 2009013005

Manufactured in the United States of America

3. Jewish-Arab

Contents l i s t of m a p s a n d t a bl e ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s i n t r oduc t ion

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1. The Confl ict Sources 2. The Earthquake

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34

3. Arabs under Likud: The 1977 Political Reshuffle 4. Palestine First: West Bank and Gaza Projection

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69 90

5. Turning the Scales Between Likud and Labor

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106

6. The First Intifada and the Madrid Conference

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127

7. Peace and Affi rmative Action

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150

8. The Emergence of a National Minority 9. Black October

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199

10. The Jewish Counterattack 11. Future Vision

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Conclusion

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not e s

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bi bl io g r a p h y i n de x

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361

268 289

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343

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229

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175

Maps and Table Maps 1. Residential Areas of Arabs in Israel | xxxii 2. Training Zone 9 | 55 3. Training Zone 107 (al-Ruha) | 185 Table 1. The blocking block agreement and its implementation

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y i t z h a k r e i t e r is associate professor of political science at Ashkelon Academic College and senior lecturer in confl ict research, management, and resolution at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the editor of three books and author of eight others, including Jerusalem and Its Role in Islamic Solidarity; War, Peace, and International Relations in Contemporary Islam; Muslim Scholars on Peace Treaty with Israel; Islamic Endowments in Jerusalem under British Mandate and Islamic Institutions in Jerusalem.

Acknowledgments

t h i s b o ok wa s w r i t t e n in three different locations. I began the study in 2001 with a grant from the Truman Institute of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a strong endorsement from its head at the time, Professor Amnon Cohen. I am most grateful to the Truman Institute and its academic and executive staff for their ongoing interest in and support of this project. During the initial phase of the research, Orna Cohen assisted me with locating material in the press and general literature. Then in 2003, I divided my sabbatical between Washington, D.C., and Sydney, Australia. As a scholar in residence at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C., I was able to extend my research with the assistance of Edan Raviv. I would like to thank the Institute and its staff for the generous hospitality that I received and for assigning Edan to assist me with the research. At the University of Sydney, I was a visiting professor affi liated with the Department of Hebrew, Biblical, and Jewish Studies headed by Professor Suzanne Rutland, whom I wish to thank for her patience in reading my initial draft, raising questions, and making important comments. Shifra Symonds helped me with translating the draft into English during the fi nal stage of the study, fi rst in Sydney and then in Jerusalem in 2004. I am indebted to the three above-mentioned assistants all of whom dedicated themselves to the project and undertook their work very seriously. There are two other institutions that supported me throughout the period of the study that I wish to thank: the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies and Ashkelon Academic College. I wish to thank Professor Yaakov Bar-Siman-Tov for reading the introduction and making substantial suggestions regarding the theoretical framework that I fi nally chose. I am also indebted to the reviewers of the book, ix

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Acknowledgments

Professor Louis Kriesberg and Professor Saliba Sarsar. They made substantive comments that improved the quality of the book and I am indebted to their invaluable assistance. I also wish to extend my thanks to Dr. Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin, who assisted me in the fi nal stage by commenting and in proofreading. Finally, I wish to thank Glenn Wright, former acquisitions editor at Syracuse University Press, for his patience and encouragement and Kay Steinmetz, Mona Hamlin, and Annelise Finegan of Syracuse University Press.

Introduction

i n j u ly a n d aug u s t 2 0 0 6, a thirty-four-day-long war erupted between Israel and Hizballah troops in Lebanon. The circumstances leading to the war—a Hizballah cross-border raid resulting in three Israeli soldiers killed and two abducted—seemed to most Israeli Jews as legitimizing and justifying a large-scale war to remove Hizballah’s threat to northern Israel. Israel retaliated fi rst with a large-scale air strike in Lebanon against Hizballah targets, which also damaged the Lebanese infrastructure, and later with a ground operation. Hizballah reacted by launching four thousand rockets and missiles from Lebanon to the northern part of Israel. Almost half of the Israeli civilians who were killed as a result of the rocket strikes were Arab citizens (eighteen out of thirty-nine).1 Israel’s Jewish majority expected that the Arab minority in Israel, a population of 1.1 million people comprising 15 percent of the Israeli society, would express anger against Hizballah and understand Israel’s position, which was that Israel could not be passive following the provocation (which was not the fi rst incident). Instead, Jews were astonished that the Arab population expressed sympathy with Hizballah and called for an immediate cessation of the Israeli military operation. They also complained that they were discriminated against in shelter facilities and other defense measures. Four weeks after the war, three Arab Knesset members of the Balad party and two Arab former MKs visited Syria, challenging Israeli law and provoking the Israeli Jewish public. A survey in 2006 found that 48.3 percent of the Arab population believed that Hizballah’s rocket fi ring into Israel was justified.2 Why is it that Arab citizens sympathize with their state’s enemy in a situation of war, even if they pay a price as innocent victims who lose their lives from the “enemy’s” strikes? Is it because of their pan-Arab identity? xi

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Is it their Palestinian identity and their interest in fi nding a solution to the Palestinian problem? Or does this position emerge from sixty years of experience as citizens of an underprivileged group in Israel? Whatever the answers to these questions, what prevents Israel’s government and the Jewish majority from fully integrating the Arab minority and from granting them equal rights? Is it the “Jewish” structure of the state of Israel that marginalizes the non-Jews? Is it the political positions of Arab leaders who express solidarity with Israel’s enemies? Is it that Jews fear that the significant Arab minority in the country constitutes a fi fth column, especially given the regional security challenges? The events of July–August 2006 are only one round, but a significant one, in the cycle in which the Israeli-Palestinian and the broader Israel-Arab confl ict influences the internal split between Jews and Arabs within Israel itself. This book underlines the interlocking dimension of the confl icts that Israel is involved in, and argues that this interconnection is a major source in understanding the exceptional confl ict between the Jewish majority and the Arab minority in Israel. The Israeli internal ethnonational confl ict presents a complicated phenomenon that requires understanding the relationship between external confl icts and the internal processes within Israel.3 This is the main argument of this book, presenting a different perspective from other scholarly interpretations of the Jewish-Arab confl ict inside Israel as being mainly influenced by government discriminatory policies or as a “structural” problem of a state that identifies itself as both Jewish and democratic (but is a nondemocratic ethnocracy, as Yiftachel argues).4 Another key theme is the question of what causes a minority to challenge the majority and to adopt confronting strategies against it, and what are the motivations of a majority group to adopt, despite this challenge, either an inclusive strategy or coercion. Most of the studies on Jewish-Arab relations in Israel have dealt with the Arab minority only. They have analyzed identity formation and political processes that this minority is undergoing and its reaction to external events and government policy.5 Some researchers point to the Palestinization process that the Arab minority is undergoing as the main factor alienating Arabs from the state.6 Others have focused on the fact that the Middle East is characterized more than other parts of the world by special factors relating

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to confl icts: the influence of religion and the relative weakness of the state and its institutions.7 In recent years, studies of confl icts in the Middle East revealed the complexity and multidimensional aspects of inter-state confl icts using the conceptual framework of interlocking conflicts.8 Drawing on this theoretical framework, I argue that this particular confl ict needs to be understood as part of the interlocking confl ict phenomenon. Thus, this book will present a different analysis from earlier studies, which refer to the Jewish-Arab divide in Israel as an interethnic confl ict that can be compared with other ethnic majority-minority confl icts. Louis Kriesberg introduced the interlocking confl ict concept in the context of the Middle East.9 He defi ned interlocking confl icts as confl icts connected over time and through shared issues and parties. The confl ict may be regarded as one in a linked series of events of developments between adversaries with generations of enmity. They also may overlap and embed in each other.10 Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov recently built on Kriesberg’s theory: “Simultaneous existence of various confl icts influences both the development of each individual confl ict as well as the dynamics of the interactions among the various confl icts. A confl ict is not only bilateral, but each confl ict has more than two sides because each side has its own relationships with other parties. Each confl ict generally includes within itself a number of subjects or issues that other parties are interested in.”11 Using this theoretical approach, I will argue that the Jewish-Arab internal confl ict in Israel is an interlocking confl ict that has to be analyzed as part of other confl icts, particularly the Israeli-Palestinian confl ict but also as part of the broader Arab-Israel confl ict and the global confl ict between the great powers, in which the Middle East constitutes an important arena. Since Israel occupied the Palestinian populated territories during the 1967 war, the Palestinian question and the broader Arab-Israel confl ict in the Middle East cast their shadow on Jewish-Arab relations inside Israel. Hence, one cannot understand Jewish-Arab relations in Israel without examining the influence of the Palestinian-Israeli confl ict on both parties to the internal confl ict. For both Arabs and Jews, intergroup relations have a history of over a century of the Jewish-Arab encounter in Palestine. The events during the British Mandate, the 1948 war (war of liberation

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and independence for Israelis and the Nakba, catastrophe, for Palestinian Arabs), and its aftermath (for Palestinians, dispersion of most Palestinians as refugees, loss of homeland, and loss of lands; for Israelis, existential war, Arab terror, and fear of a second Holocaust) are within the living memory of the two adversaries. The use of terms for describing the national minority group in Israel is also contentious. The Arab citizens of Israel were, until 1948, the dominant group. Unlike the uprooted Palestinians of this land, they remained in the territory that in 1948 became Israel. They identify themselves as national Palestinians entitled to Israeli citizenship. They are Palestinian Israelis, or Palestinian citizens of Israel—a defi nition that their elites have adopted in the last two decades in preference to the term Israeli Arabs. They see their Israeli citizenship or their “Israeliness” as merely an instrumental and technical matter. Both Israeli Jews and Arabs also use the term Israeli Arabs (Arabic: ‘Arab Israe’il; Hebrew: ‘Arviyey Isra’el). The term was invented following the granting of Israeli citizenship to the Arabs who continued residing in newborn Israel after the 1948 war. It continued to be used after 1967 to distinguish this group from the Palestinians of occupied West Bank and Gaza. Some Palestinian radicals adopted the PLO terms for this particular group: “The Arabs of 1948” (Arabic: ‘Arab Thamani wa-Arba‘in), namely those who reside “in the territory which was occupied in 1948,” or “the Arabs of the Inside” (Arabic: ‘Arab al-Dakhil) meaning the Arabs who reside inside Palestine, as distinct from the Palestinian diaspora. In this study, I have chosen to use two terms, Israeli Arabs and the Arab minority, because these are the prevalent terms used in Israeli discourse and in the literature and also in order that the lay reader will not confuse this group with the Palestinians of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip. The change of identity of Israeli Arabs into Palestinians developed gradually following Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian populated territories in 1967. Since then, Israeli policies in regard to the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians are seen by them as a duplication of the state’s policy toward them in terms of land expropriation, settlement, and coercion against the political elite. Israeli Arabs see Israel’s struggle and policy versus the Palestinians, or even its peace strategy, as undermining their major interest, whereas on the

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xv

other hand, Israeli Jews and government—who see themselves sixty years after the establishment of Israel as still fighting for its very existence—cannot detach the presence of a large internal Palestinian-Arab minority in Israel from the state’s external security threats. Both sides to the internal confl ict are influenced and to a major extent also driven by the manifestations of the broader confl ict. The Arab-Jewish split in Israel is not just another ethnic minority-majority relations/confl ict, but an ethnonational confl ict. Both sides to the confl ict not only belong to two different ethnic groups, who possess mutually incompatible goals,12 but they also represent two adversary nations with different identities. For reasons to be discussed later in this book, I am terming the minority-majority encounters in Israel a conflict and not relations. Jewish-Arab relations in Israel are mostly in confl ict and dispute. However, there are also what could be described as “pockets” of coexistence, where members of the two groups encounter each other as individuals. This occurs in the workplace, particularly in hospitals and in the civil service, and in special institutes such as Givat Haviva, which brings together Arab and Jewish youth for joint activities and in civil society organizations. The parameters of the interlocking confl ict vary. In addition to the two major parties to the confl ict—the Jewish majority and the Arab minority— the Israeli government is an important institutional actor. True, it represents the interests of the majority, but since it has responsibility for running a state and for safeguarding security and stability, its policy can deviate (usually, be more moderate) from the position of the general Jewish public. The Arab leadership is also an important player in shaping the parameters of the confl ict. In addition, Palestinian organizations in general are also actors influencing the behavior of parties to Israel’s internal confl ict. Another important factor is that the actors simultaneously play a role in more than one confl ict. In addition to the internal confl ict, the Israeli government is involved in the confl ict with the Palestinians as well as in other regional confl icts with Arab states. The Arab minority, for its part, is also involved in the Palestinian issue in more than one way, including voting in the parliament and moral and symbolic support for the Palestinians. Since 1967, their leaders have developed amicable relations with the PLO and other Palestinian leaders, and recently also with the rulers of the Arab

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Introduction

neighboring countries: Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. The actors also operate in more than one issue area. In the internal confl ict, the main players deal consistently with issues of democratization, civil rights, the peace process or alternatively the strategy of struggle and relations with Israel’s Arab neighbors. The confl ict, thus, is complex and multidimensional. For the sake of this study, I use two major factors that I argue fundamentally influence the level and the direction of the confl ict: developments in the Israeli-Palestinian confl ict and changes of government policy. I give these two factors equal weight in generating the mode of the confl ict, but as I will explain, the fi rst one is more influential due to the fact that the second factor—government policy—is influenced by the basic sources and developments in the realm of the fi rst one—the broader Palestinian-Israeli confl ict. I will also examine other parameters of the multidimensional ethnonational confl ict inside Israel that shape its mode, such as competition of leadership, economic development, modernization, globalization, and ideological changes. In addition, the influence of the broader circles of confl ict in the Middle East in which the Arab states and the superpowers are involved will be analyzed whenever there is an impact on the internal Jewish-Arab confl ict in Israel. Influence of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict There is no doubt that the starting point of the confl ict between Jews and Arabs within Israel is not 1948, when Israel was established, but in the pre1948 dispute over Palestine, beginning with the gradual Jewish immigration to Palestine in the last third of the nineteenth century and intensifying following the British conquest of Palestine and the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The thirty years of Arab-Jewish confl ict under British rule demarcated a struggle between two national movements: Palestinian-Arab nationalism and Zionism. This period, which culminated with the 1948 war, experienced successive violent clashes between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. The new reality, which took shape in the Middle East after 1918 with the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, is perceived in the Arab and Islamic world as a total distortion of the natural historical development, which was meant to create a large Arab state that would encompass all the

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regions of Palestine. From the end of the nineteenth century, however, the Zionist movement sponsored Jewish immigration, purchase of land, and development of production. During the three decades of the British mandate in Palestine, the Zionist movement expanded its stronghold in Palestine and established institutions for a state in the making. During the Second World War and the Holocaust and shortly after, the Zionist movement further strengthened the Jewish demographic reality and political apparatus. The Arabs under the leadership of Hajj Amin al-Husayni did everything in their power to stop Jewish immigration to the Holy Land, to prohibit the sale of land to the Jews, to prevent the establishment of the Jewish state, and to torpedo the 1947 UN partition resolution, yet without success.13 During the British mandate period, the relations between Jews and Arabs were shaped into a paradigm of violent struggle, resulting in a bloody war in 1948. The struggle preceding the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 left a grave imprint on the collective memory of the members of the two nations in Israel. Both Jews and Arabs retain traumatic memories from the period prior to the state’s establishment, each according to their own perception and historical experiences. Those narratives are reflections of how each side perceives the other.14 The confl icting narratives of the past are interwoven into the present confl ict, and they shape the national goals of each of the parties to the confl ict. The Jewish-Israeli collective memory equates the Arab citizens of the state with the Arab population that engaged in war with them. A relatively small country, Israel’s elongated borders touch four Arab states, and the state itself is planted in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world. Furthermore, fear of the domestic demographic balance, which favors Arabs in terms of population growth, leaves the Jewish community with the sense of being under siege despite Israel’s military, economic, and technological supremacy. Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (including East Jerusalem and the holy shrines) in 1967 is a fundamental event, and its historical importance cannot be underestimated as it confi rmed the Israeli-Palestinian collision and brought the confl ict to the doorsteps of Jews and Arabs in Israel. It restructured the 1948 political map by entailing the establishment of a Palestinian territorial entity that might progress toward a Palestinian state. It established Jordan as an East Bank

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state (with a reduced but still large Palestinian population in the kingdom) and Israel with new borders, as an occupier of the Palestinian territories with a presence in (and annexation of) East Jerusalem. The Israeli-Palestinian confl ict has developed since then, with the peace process and violent events also interlocking; the fi rst Palestinian uprising— the Intifada—the Oslo Accords of 1993 and their failure, and the al-Aqsa Intifada since late September 2000. In the period since 1967, the Arabs in Israel shaped their Palestinian identity and closed their political ranks with the PLO and the Palestinians in the territories and the Islamic Movement within Israel identifies also with Hamas. The Jewish public in Israel reacted to this development. In general, the Jewish populace correlated the Arabs in Israel with the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in relation to both their violent methods against the Israeli government and citizens, and their political ends. As a result, the Arab population inside Israel was viewed with renewed suspicion and deemed untrustworthy. The Israeli-Arab confl ict, and its more limited dimension of the IsraeliPalestinian struggle, is an ongoing process of active and continuous strife. Since its establishment, Israel has been involved in wars against one or more Arab state every few years. Between the wars, Israel experienced armed actions by Palestinian organizations and consequently retaliated against these organizations and states perceived as hosts. The reality of the violent struggle in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip since 1967 has impacted on Israeli society—Arabs and Jews alike. Since the 1970s, when Israeli Jews began settling in these territories, the struggle on both sides of the “Green Line” (pre-June 1967 borders) intersected with the Palestinization process of the Israeli Arabs and can be seen as the two sides of the same coin. Thus, in Israel the gap between foreign relations (the issue of the Palestinian territories as a subject of foreign policy) and domestic relationships (minority-majority relationships) is almost nonexistent. Daily occurrences in the Palestinian territories reflect the relationship between Jews and Arabs in the state of Israel and heighten the internal confl ict. The decision by the Israeli government to occupy the West Bank and Gaza territories and to encourage Jewish settlement in them added two significant sources of tension to the relationship between the majority and minority: the demographic challenge and political tension. The legal and administrative

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annexation of East Jerusalem to Israel, Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories, and violent struggle between Palestinians and Israelis created the perception among Arab citizens that the state is an enemy. The radicalization of a significant segment of the Jewish population has added another dimension that has impacted on the daily relationship between Arabs and Jews in Israel. Moreover, the physical abolition of the Green Line between 1967 and 2005 created a new demographic reality that threatened the Jewish majority in the historical Palestine/Eretz Israel and exacerbated the siege mentality among Jews. It would not be an exaggeration to state that for almost sixty years until the Arab League Peace Initiative of March 2002 (reconfi rmed in the Riad summit of March 2007), the Arab world rejected the legitimacy of the state of Israel and viewed its birth as a sin. Israel is viewed as a product of western imperialism and is assumed to be a base for European influence in the past— and American power in the present—to secure control over oil resources and to protect the Arab world from its own splintered, and often extremist, politics. The Arab minority is not only an indigenous minority but also a majority that became a minority under special circumstances; the presentday majority is a “fresh” migrant group. An Arab intellectual summed this up succinctly: “Israel came to us; it is not we who came to it.”15 The fact that some Israeli Arabs expressed glee during the 1991 Gulf War when Iraqi missiles landed in Israel16 magnifies the tension between Jews and Arabs in Israel, one that originated in the underlying confl ict. However, not only the Jews are being affected by the siege mentality. The neighboring Arab states are afraid, according to their interpretation of the past, of Israel’s expansionist intentions and of its continuous domination of the third holiest place of Islam, al-Aqsa.17 The Arab citizens of the State of Israel on their part interpret the state’s policy in the Palestinian territories as an attempt to eliminate the Palestinian political entity and to cause the Palestinian population to emigrate from the territories. Some of them genuinely fear a forceful transfer, namely that the government will remove the population of Arab citizens from the state through a policy of ethnic cleansing. Here we have a complicated situation in minority-majority relations in which each side feels threatened by the other, and these emotions dynamically influence the behavior of one group toward the other. Hence, the

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developments in the Israeli-Palestinian-Arab confl ict since 1967 are a major parameter influencing the Jewish-Arab confl ict within Israel. Influence of Government Policy The second major factor influencing the escalating/de-escalating trends of the confl ict is government policy. Most studies of Jewish-Arab relations in Israel explain the political behavior of Arabs as a response to government policies.18 This study undertakes an analysis of the government policies since the late 1960s, when martial rule ended, to the present. The policies varied from control and coercion during the period of military restrictions to co-optation, incremental reduction of disparities, affi rmative action during the Rabin government of 1992 to 1996, and return to earlier policies. However, the basic principles of the different governments’ policies emerge from the creation of Israel as a Jewish (and democratic) state. The Zionist movement’s aspiration to establish a state, which would realize the right of self-determination of the Jewish people and serve as a shelter for persecuted Jewish communities following the European Holocaust, stood at the core of the definition of Israel as a Jewish state. From a Jewish state, Israel soon became the state of the Jewish people.19 The motives behind the establishment of the state, its national goals, character, and manner of existence are all tied into the roots of the Arab-Israeli confl ict. The events that preceded the establishment of the state contributed to the fact that Israel would not be a “normal” country according to the traditional format of a western liberal democracy; rather, its administration would follow a special model of democracy, with the intent of securing its identity as a Jewish state and preserving the hegemony of the Jewish majority both in terms of demographics and cultural identity. The discriminatory attitude toward Arabs, embedded in the Jewish nature of the state, harms its democratic fabric. The wider the disparities, the less democratic Israel tends to be and vice versa. Looking at what has developed in contemporary Israel, it is no wonder that Arab and post-Zionist academics do not perceive Israel as a democracy. They mockingly say, “Yes, Israel is a democracy—for Jews.” As an example, a notable Arab intellectual in Israel (who left the country in the early 1990s), Anton Shammas, protested in a public debate with the writer Avraham B. Yehoshua that the

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state of Israel is not a state of its citizens because it does not entitle him to equal citizenship and does not include him in its Israeliness.20 Yehoshua countered that Israel is no different from other nation-states that give their minorities only personal civil rights. As another example, advocate Usama Halabi argues that a state that is identified as Jewish is inherently incapable of implementing equality and that the Arab citizens suffer in this state from an institutionalized inferiority that is embedded in state laws, and therefore Israel cannot be considered a democratic state.21 Post-Zionist Jewish researchers conclude that Israel is not a democracy in the Western sense of the word. They also argue that within the relationship between the two founding principles of the state—its Jewishness and its democratic fabric—is an inherent contradiction.22 Most prominent among them is Oren Yiftachel, who claims that Israel is a nondemocratic autocracy (to be discussed in chapter 1).23 The impact of the Jewish nature of the state on its policies versus the Arab minority is further discussed in the next chapter. Yet a brief introduction to the subject is essential for the sake of the study’s conceptual framework. Let me begin by noting that the Israeli reality was created against a background of immediate challenges that were experienced by the founders of the state in 1948. These security and demographic challenges propelled the Jewish activity, during the 1948 war and its aftermath, toward the securing of defendable borders with a minimum Arab population. The existence of the Arab minority in the state was perceived as tolerable as long as it was not a significant demographic threat, and as long as these minority members did not assist the state’s enemies and did not threaten its security or the continuation of the political status quo of Israel as a Jewish democratic state. Israel’s Declaration of Independence in May 1948 included an appeal to the Arab public and a call to participate in the building of the state “on the basis of appropriate representation,” which expresses the democratic foundation of the regime. This appeal was in essence a rhetorical one with no practical consequences. The Zionist establishment aspired to relate to the Arabs as individuals who belong to different minority groups (Christians, Druze, Bedouins, felahim, and urban communities). In return for their loyalty, they would enjoy personal civil rights. The Arabs did not benefit from equal rights; they were exempt from the duty of serving in the army and they

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did not enjoy appropriate representation in public institutions. However, the state did not impose cultural assimilation on them. It preserved the official legal status that the Arab language enjoyed during the British mandate period. The state established a separate national educational system for the Arabs to be conducted in the Arabic language; it enabled Arab newspapers to be published, recognized the holidays of non-Jewish religions, and enabled Arabs to operate their particular (religious) court systems in matters of personal status. In this regard, the Israeli case is not a typical one. In other ethnonational confl icts where the state does not recognize national rights of the minority, usually it also denies the cultural identity of the minorities and seeks to assimilate them. The need of the Zionist movement, which was predominately a national secular movement, to preserve the unity of the Jewish people led to compromises. The determination of national affi liation was done on the basis of Jewish halacha (religious law), and a formal constitution, which could have anchored the fundamental rights of minorities, was not endorsed. The Arab population, which remained in the State of Israel, went, in the course of the 1948 war, from being a majority to a minority in its own homeland—now the state of the Jews. In 1949, when the armistice was signed, the Arab minority constituted approximately 19 percent of the population. This decreased to 11 percent in the early 1950s as a result of mass Jewish immigration in the country. The Arab minority was economically and politically weak, devastated, socially split, and lacking leadership. Israel granted them citizenship under the assumption that they were entitled to personal civil rights only. This is the Nakba of 1948, the “catastrophe” of the Palestinians and the upended reality of the Arabs in Israel who view themselves as part of the Palestinian people. Moreover, as a result of the ongoing state of war with its Arab neighbors, in the fi rst two decades after the establishment of Israel, Arabs were subjected to military administration and to restrictions on their movements (and consequently employment restrictions) and exclusion from political power. The state did not enable the minority to construct its own institutions of national leadership, and those institutions that existed prior to 1948, such as the Supreme Muslim Council or the institution of mufti (issuing Islamic legal opinions), were abolished. The Israeli Arab citizenship was of limited

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application; the state did not truly accommodate them or integrate them in a way that would give them a sense of belonging to the state’s institutions. The only meaning of their citizenship was the political right to vote and be elected to the Knesset, municipalities, and other national institutions. However, the major goals of the state excluded the Arab citizens, and the state did not search for a mechanism of creating an inclusive citizenship. The establishment of the state also separated Israeli Arabs from the surrounding Arab world. While the Arab citizens were suspected by Arab states of collaborating with the “Zionist enemy,” the Israeli Arabs preserved and even nurtured their Arab cultural and national identity. Jewish society after the establishment of the state was recruited entirely to the Zionist cause. The challenges of the state of Israel were to safeguard its security in a hostile geopolitical environment and a critical international community. The state fi rst and foremost turned to increasing the immigration and absorption of Jews, building and developing the major infrastructure of the country, creating a strong military, establishing a strong and stable economy, securing housing and employment for the new immigrants, and developing an economic infrastructure for the Jewish agricultural sector in the kibbutzim and moshavim (agricultural settlements). The army and the Hebrew educational system became the melting pot of Israeli society, while the Jewish and Hebrew language and symbols dominated the public sphere. The military government imposed on Arab citizens between 1948 and 1966 and housing segregation between Jews and Arabs meant that very few Jews encountered or developed a deep familiarity with Arabs. Even in large mixed cities, where 10 percent of the Arab population lived, Arabs resided in separate neighborhoods and were a weak minority in every aspect. Arab citizens were not present in the consciousness of the state or the average Jewish citizen. Thus, the “constructive” principles of the Israeli political system as a Jewish state created Jewish hegemony in the following areas: land and settlement, demography (the law of return), security and army service, and symbols and the public culture. These principle “systemic” policies will be discussed in detail in the next chapter, where I argue that not all of these policies are vital for Israel to remain “Jewish,” and that not all of them are certainly nondemocratic.

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The boundaries established by the above-mentioned history of majorityminority relations leave only a narrow opportunity for change. The Jewish majority’s perception of the state as Jewish, Zionist, and an ethnic democracy is rigid.24 The fundamental characteristics of the majority-minority distinction thus determine the inferior civil status of the Arabs and hinder them from achieving a meaningful and substantive equality as distinct from civilian equality on the instrumental technical sphere. Government policies regarding the rights of the Arab minority since the official abolition of martial law on Arabs in 1966 reflect a largely continuous moderate trend of improving the economic and social rights of the Arab population both as individuals and as a group. In some cases, the changes in policy reflect a deterioration of their situation, particularly with issues pertaining to land. The above-mentioned basic principles of a Jewish state in relation to the status of its Arab minority are the departure point in evaluating the changes and developments in government policy and its influence on the political behavior of the Arab minority. Finally, one needs to address the controversial question as to whether the Israeli ethnonational confl ict is comparable to other confl icts or unique. Arab and post-Zionist scholars tend to view the Jewish-Arab confl ict inside Israel as comparable with other ethnonationalist confl icts that have interlocking qualities such as in Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, and Rwanda, while Israeli Zionist scholars would argue for its uniqueness. Dr. Muhammad Amara of Bar-Ilan University is the only Israeli Arab scholar who views the Israeli case as unique. He maintains that “Israel is not the only country in the world that has such a confl ict, but the security issue adds a unique aspect, differentiating Israel from others.”25 Put differently, of all the confl icts in the world, Israel is the only case in which the (Jewish) majority experiences an ongoing state of active war (including guerilla/terror actions) with the Palestinians in the territories as well as with its Arab neighbors, in which the Palestinian Arab minority within Israel itself actively expresses its solidarity with enemies of the state. These enemies include Palestinian armed organizations, Saddam Hussein (in 1990), and Hizballah in 2006. Another special feature of the Israeli case is the historical sense of right of ownership. In this region, a people lost their homeland following two major revolts against the Roman Empire and returned two thousand years

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later, claiming their historical right to the land based on biblical and historical texts at the expense of those who had lived on this land for hundreds of years. The majority group is the immigrants, but their self-image and selfoutlook are that they are the original inhabitants of the land. Consequently, the way the minority and the majority group view the past, their attitudes in the present and their political vision for the future are completely opposed to each other; their narratives do not meet but clash. The historical precedent and traumatic experiences of both Jews and Arabs adds a dimension to the relations between them and makes the possibility of healthy cooperation between the parties questionable at best. Another unique aspect of this confl ict is that the minority in Israel is part of the Arab nation—the majority in the region surrounding the state. Although there are other ethnic democracies such as Sri Lanka and Estonia, Israel is the only state that is officially and constitutionally defi ned as the exclusive nation state of the (Jewish) majority as “a Jewish and democratic state.” All of these aspects of the Israeli minority-majority confl ict mean that the broader Israeli-Arab confl ict influences the confl ict at least as much as does government policy (shaped by the majority) toward the minority. Broader Circles of Middle East Interlocking Conflicts The intra-Arab confl ict and the involvement of the superpowers in the Middle East have also had an indirect impact on the confl ict under review in this study due to their influence on Israel and the Palestinian-Israeli confl ict. From the superpowers’ perspective, the Middle East is an important arena for competition due to both its strategic location between Europe and the Far East and its major role in oil production. Israel, as a U.S. ally, has developed the strong technological and military capacity, including nuclear capacity, of a regional power. Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Jordan, Eygpt, and until 1978 Iran are counted as close allies to the United States, but their relations with Israel vary from one country to another and over time. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union supported anti-Western regimes in Egypt and Syria and was involved in other Arab states. For the Arab League, twenty-two Arab states in the broader Middle East (including North Africa), the Palestinian issue was always a focal point of Arab solidarity and internal

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consolidation versus Israel—an alignment that was used during the Cold War by the United States and the USSR to deepen their involvement in the Middle East affairs. The involvement of the superpowers in the Middle East did not disappear with the end of the Cold War, and they are not the only countries that have been involved in the region. From the early 1990s, the European Union, as a growing international power, has become more involved in the major trouble spots of the Middle East such as Palestine and Iraq. Its policy has deviated from the U.S. strategy from time to time. The changes of coalitions of the Western powers and among Arab states could be seen during the 1990–91 Gulf War, the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the second Israeli war in Lebanon in 2006. Until 1979, the Arab world as a whole saw Israel as an enemy or an adversary. The peace treaty signed in 1979 between Israel and Egypt began a process of change. In 2002, the Arab League recognized for the fi rst time Israel’s right to exist in secure borders and expressed its willingness to establish normal relations with Israel, if the latter would accept a number of conditions. The Arab peace initiative was led by Saudi Arabia who sees itself leading a Sunnite Arab moderate camp (in cooperation with the West) versus the increasing power of Iranian Shi‘ite Islam, which is extending into Lebanon, Iraq, and to some extent Palestine with Hamas. Saudi Arabia also seeks to strengthen itself against al-Qa‘ida extremist Islamic militancy and its terrorist actions. Since developments in the broad theater of the globe influence the legitimacy and the strategic status of Israel in its confl ict with the Palestinians, they also have an effect on the internal Jewish-Arab confl ict. As an example, if Israel is perceived as less powerful in the regional scene, then the Arab minority is more likely to challenge the state system and policies. On the other hand, if Israeli Jews feel a growing threat from the neighboring Arab states, they are less likely to make concessions to the Arab minority. The interlocking confl icts in the Middle East interrelate to each other. The Israeli government is a major player that acts simultaneously in two wider confl icts (Israel-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab), and its decisions are affected by the superpowers’ foreign policies and by their adversaries’ actions. Since the external confl icts Israel is involved in are the more salient, one could expect that in order to prevent a battle on two fronts, one external

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and one internal, the government would make concessions in the internal confl ict. However, since Israeli Jews (and government) view the confl icts on both sides of the 1967 border as an extension of the 1948 war, this is not how they respond. They believe that if the outer confl ict escalates, then the internal one will also be exacerbated. The Israeli Arabs see themselves as Palestinians; they see the struggle of the Palestinians to establish an independent state as representing their own interests. What they view as negative Israeli policy regarding the Palestinian issue they also see as directed against them as part of the Palestinian people. This is manifested by their involvement in mass-scale violent protest during the two Palestinian intifadas. Therefore, the analysis of the confl ict under review would consider the links of the different confl icts and their influences on the strategies of the major actors. Conflict Trend The influence of the two above-mentioned major factors (developments in the Palestinian-Israeli confl ict and government policy) on the confl ict can be detected by surveying the attitudes and the political behavior of the two adversary parties: Arabs and Jews. The political behavior of each group contributes to the change of the confl ict’s intensity, as Christopher Mitchell maintained: “It is commonplace that confl icts change over time. The most obvious aspect is change in the behavior of the parties as they alter strategies and react to each other’s actions, making minor escalatory or de-escalatory moves, or initiating major changes such as adopting coercion instead of conciliation.”26 The political behavior of the Jewish and Arab groups would indicate the mode of the confl ict in each of the nine subperiods under review in this book between 1967 and 2008. The confl ict is manifested in more than one way, including mass-scale violent escalation/de-escalation; sporadic violence; intensifying political organization, that is, institutional actions against the other, such as legal restrictions or establishing independent minority institutions; radicalizing or moderating voting patterns; verbal hostility or moderate discourse; positive or negative political positions versus the other; identity manifestations; and patterns of nonviolent protest or

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appeasement—all of which could be summarized as escalation/de-escalation or intensification/de-intensification of the confl ict in each of the particular government tenures. Review of the Jewish attitude and political behavior versus the Arab minority creates a methodological problem. Generally speaking, the Jewish majority is not active in addressing Arab minority behavior. The Jewish public (rightly) views the government as representing its interests regarding its internal confl ict with the other ethnic and national group in the country. It is very rare to have specific Jews’ actions to follow regarding the Arab minority, such as retaliation during the October 2000 riots. The main tool indicating the Jewish attitude is, therefore, public opinion surveys. Government policy is not only an independent factor that influences the confl ict but is also one of the indicators of the confl ict itself, reflecting the Jewish public’s strategies and political behavior. The situation is different among the Arab minority. Here, the difference between the leadership and the public could be found in public opinion surveys that show that the leadership is more radical than the general population. In addition, between the two main actors there are internal ideological and party differences that I will explore, because the political competition between parties influences the strategies adopted by them versus the other in any given time. I will draw more on the differences between Likud and Labor governments than on the nuances between the Arab leading parties because since the 1970s the Arab Council of Heads of Municipalities and the Supreme Follow-up Committee make their decisions based on a consensus vote. This remark leads me to point to the dialectical dynamics of the confl ict’s development. Put differently, how does the political behavior of one group influence the political behavior of the other party and vice versa? In the analytical chapters as well as in the concluding chapter an attempt is made to unfold the confl ict dynamics of reaction and counterreaction. Building on a chronological structure, I will analyze the influence of the two above-mentioned factors as well as the other interlocking components of the confl ict on the political behavior of Arabs and Jews as adversary groups, looking at the confl ict’s escalation/intensification or de-escalation/de-intensification. Due to the rapid changes occurring in the two major interlocking confl icts of which Israel in involved with Palestinians in the West Bank and

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Gaza and inside Israel and the importance of the government’s policy to the understanding of the confl ict’s dynamics, I have chosen to divide the nine analytical chapters of the book according to the tenure of governments in Israel, which is mostly four-year periods. The fi rst chapter is devoted to a detailed discussion of three key issues: fi rst, the clashing historical narratives of Jews and Arabs in Israel; second, debate over the possible contradiction between the Jewish nature of the state and its democratic fabric; and third, the impact of the “Jewishness” of the state on the status of the Arab minority. Chapter 2 reveals the historical background from the Six Day War (June 1967) to the fi rst major riot of the Arab minority in March 1976, reassessing the riot’s causes. It also elaborates on the government policy before 1967, during the martial regime in Arab populated areas and after. Chapters 3 through 11 analyze the confl ict during nine consecutive government coalitions beginning with Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1977 up to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert who was in power when this study was concluded in 2008. Each chapter discusses six factors in each time period: (1) Israeli internal political setting and election results, (2) the Palestinian dimension, (3) general Middle East and superpower involvement, (4) government policy regarding the Arab minority, (5) Arab political behavior versus the state and the Jewish majority, (6) Jewish public opinion and political behavior versus the Arab minority. Each chapter summarizes the influence of the main factors on the mode of the confl ict in the governmental tenure under review with a concluding evaluation. The concluding chapter integrates the conclusions, referring to the study’s questions and to the theoretical model of interlocking conflict. It looks at conflict trends, whether in linear or changing directions, the conflict “rules of the game” and whether the parties have behaved consistently, and finally, the “red lines” of each of the conflicting groups: for Jews, challenging the Jewish nature of the state, and for Arabs, suggesting transferring them out of Israel. This study is based on a broad range of sources, including archival documents, unpublished documents from my private collection, the media, official publications, monitoring reports of advocacy organizations, secondary literature, and my personal experience of long academic and civil service engagement in this field.

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In addition to the above, the press is the major source of information. As someone who is very familiar with the nature of government documentation (from 1978 to 1987 I served as Israel’s prime minister’s deputy advisor on Arab affairs), I can testify that regarding most of the period under review, certain newspapers, such as Haaretz, al-Ittihad, al-Sinara, Kul al-‘Arab, and others, serve the historian well. They give a good factual coverage of the events and the developments of the subject under discussion. The credibility of the reports in Haaretz seems to me to be particularly high and almost unbiased. I have, therefore, used this paper throughout the period under review, particularly in chapters 6 through 11. Other newspapers are used selectively. Monitoring reports of associations such as Sikkuy, Mosawa Center ‘Adalah, and Mada al-Carmel from recent years provide valuable information on the government’s policies and strategies of the Arab minority. The next chapter provides the historical background and focuses on five key issues that serve as a departure point to the subsequent periodic, analytical chapters: the contentious histories of Jews and Arabs prior to and after 1948; the official defi nition of the state as Jewish and democratic and the implications; government policies of land use and ownership and demography; and the process of “Judaizing” the public space.

National Minority, Regional Majority

1. Residential Areas of Arabs in Israel. Map designed by Michal Kidron, Department of Geography, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

1

The Conflict Sources

ac c or di ng t o Christopher Mitchell, sources of dispute lie in the psychological processes determining the emotions, attitudes, and perceptions of the parties to the confl ict. These, in turn, affect the selection of behavior toward the adversary.1 These psychological processes include the historical memory of the adversary groups as well as their experiences from the emergence of the dispute between them. This chapter explores the sources of the JewishArab confl ict in Israel that generate the psychological processes that Mitchell refers to. It deals with the origins of the confl ict and the way that they affect the current relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel. It begins with the current clash over the historical narrative centered on the right to the land of Palestine and on the 1948 war and its aftermath. Then I discuss Israel’s unique political system, or “structure” in relation to minority-majority relations—the defi nition of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and the tensions between these two principles—including its ramifications for the status of Israeli Arabs. Finally, I deal with the basic state policies toward the Arab minority in four areas: land, demography, security, and the state’s public culture. One cannot understand the Arab-Jewish confl ict inside Israel without taking into consideration these policies, which one side of the confl ict (Jews) views as essential while the other side (Arabs) regards as hostile to their basic needs. Conflicting Narratives One spring day in 1978, bulldozers deployed under the auspices of the Israeli authorities entered the old Muslim cemetery of Safuriya, on the outskirts of Nazareth, and plowed through the entire estate. Originally a large Arab 1

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National Minority, Regional Majority

village, emptied of all its inhabitants in the 1948 war, its new Israeli occupants leveled Safuriya to the ground following the war. Giora Zayd, a member of the Haganah’s division of Arabists, narrated that on the eve of the war, he met with approximately forty family heads from the village and offered them a nonengagement agreement. However, the offer was rejected. On 16 June 1948, as Israel Defense Forces (IDF) headed toward Nazareth, the residents of the village ran away, abandoning their homes and land. The fate of those villagers was similar to that of most other Arabs residing in those lands that became part of Israel following the 1948 war: displacement and nationalization of their land and its reassignment for various development purposes, followed by the eradication of their villages from the Israeli landscape and consciousness. A segment of the population of Safuriya opted to stay within the newly established Jewish state (others fled to Lebanon and Syria). However, they were not allowed to return to their homes and were not permitted to resettle on their land or to farm it. Some of them settled in the nearby village of Rayne, and others found their way to one of the hills just east of Nazareth, overlooking Safuriya, where they built their houses in what would become Hayy al-Safafra (the Safuriyens’ neighborhood). The view from their neglected neighborhood included the erased Safuriya, which, for the elder populace, was the place they remembered from their childhood and youth. Safuriya was located in the Zippori region, an ancient Hebraic-Jewish settlement that was famous for producing esteemed Talmudic scholars in the second and third centuries of the Common Era. The state preferred to use names from the ancient past—the Hebrew, Biblical, and rabbinic history of the place—that linked the “new” Jews and the “new Jewish” identity to their heritage. The “return of Zion” is justified and strengthened in Israel through the public culture whereas the “Goyim”—the Arabs—who are present and who were born in this place are obliterated from the formal landscape and denied acknowledgment. As a village that had proved uncooperative with the Jewish Yishuv (prestate community) on the eve of the 1948 war, Safuriya’s residents were fated to become refugees, with the town itself deteriorating into ruins. Its land subsequently came under the authority of Israel, which established the Jewish village of Moshav Zippori on it, and allocated the lands for various purposes.

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Its former inhabitants, who approached the new Israeli administration with the request to lease their original agricultural ventures, were denied and instead offered land previously the location of other Arab villages that were similarly destroyed. With this policy, the state aimed to prevent the Arabs from gaining possession of lands owned originally by them or their family members, who had become “absentees” and refugees outside Israel. The situation of Safuriya is just one of many such incidents. It is an example and a symbol of the nationalist confl ict and the dispute over historical rights in Israel, which makes the Jewish-Arab confl ict in Israel meaningless without a study of the broad historical context. The current narratives that Jews and Arabs tell themselves about the history of the place and its population are totally one-sided. Arab accounts begin the history of the place with the Muslim conquest of the seventh century and particularly with Saladin’s liberation of this village from the Crusaders. They mention the Roman name of the place, but nothing of the ancient history of the site and of its Jewish affi liation.2 On the other hand, the Israeli official publication related to the place—a guide published by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority—devotes four pages to the ancient Jewish and Christian history of the place and only one paragraph to its Arab connection, which says, “In the eighteenth century the Arab village Safuriya was one of the fortresses of the Bedouin ruler of the Galilee Dahir al-‘Umar who fortified and restored the citadel. During the Arab revolt (1936–1939) and in the War of Israeli Independence (1948) the village and its citadel housed the Arab gangs who operated against the Jewish Yishuv.”3 The Parks Authority’s Web site adds, “The Arab village of Saffurieh, a name that harks back to the Greek Sepphoris, is nearby.”4 The destruction of Arab villages following 1948 was not complete. In many instances mosques, churches, and cemeteries were left unscathed. They serve as evidence for and reminders of the historical existence of the villages, and also as a focus point for the hopes of the expelled occupants, who at times saw the remains as a cornerstone for the revival of their heritage, in anticipation of the reestablishment of their villages, once their land is returned. Their historical narrative is a mirror of the above-mentioned Israeli narrative, a point I will further discuss. According to them, they were barred from their homes by force in order to allow the state of Israel to build a Jewish state in place of, and at the expense of, the Arabs. During the 1970s,

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National Minority, Regional Majority

various Arab constituents began to unearth remnants of their villages, primarily cemeteries and mosques, in the hope of realizing their dreams to return to their places of birth (a movement that resurfaced during the 1990s with the Islamist movements). Some Jewish municipalities and state agencies reacted from time to time by uprooting cemeteries or by destroying remaining structures. Such was the case in Safuriya. One morning, bulldozers emerged and razed the cemetery of Safuriya to the ground. By midday, a group of Safuriyen (internal) refugees had gathered and decided to found an association with the purpose of preserving the village and its heritage. Following the signing of the Declaration of Principles between Israel and the PLO (the Oslo accords) in 1993, the National Committee of Displaced People in Israel was established with the aim of returning the refugees to their old villages and reestablishing their ownership over the lands of which they were deprived in the past. The number of internal refugees in present-day Israel is approximately 150,000, 15 percent of the total Arab population inside Israel. The Safuriya Association members joined the National Committee and sent their representatives to its meetings. One of the society’s founders, Amin Taha, stated in 1997, “I do not deny our goal which is to repossess our land.”5 The revivalist activities of the displaced and the founding of the village committee is not an esoteric matter. It has entered the political agenda of many Arabs in Israel in the second half of the 1990s. For example, Hanna Suwayd, head at the time of ‘Aylabun Municipal Council, director of the Arab Center for Alternative Planning, and elected to the Knesset in 2006, proposed in an opinion piece that the inhabitants of the Safafra neighborhood of Nazareth should be repatriated in the original Safuriya in order to ease the housing shortage in Nazareth and elsewhere, and that the lands of Arab villages evacuated and destroyed during the course of the 1948 war and its aftermath should be returned to the internal refugees. Another example was in the election campaign of MK Muhammad Barake (Hadash) in 2006, when he chose to be fi lmed with ruins of the Safuriya village, his family’s village until 1948, in the background.6 It is important to note that Israel’s Jewish population views such proposals, in the context of the wider ArabPalestinian effort to return 2.5 million refugees to the state of Israel, as an existential threat, that is, the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state.

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The case of Safuriya/Zippori addresses the origins of the interethnic confl ict inside Israel. The chronicles of the “’48 Arabs”—also known as “Israeli Arabs” in the Arab world—fi nd their roots in the Arab-Israeli confl ict prior to, and during, 1948 and persist in the current Israeli-Palestinian crisis. The actions of the Israeli government, such as the destruction of the Safuriya cemetery in 1978, vividly remind the Arab citizens of the Nakba, or catastrophic defeat of 1948. Conversely, the Arabs’ demand for the resettlement of destroyed villages is a reminder to the Jews that the struggle for an independent Jewish state is yet to be fi nalized. Jewish-Arab relations in Israel are thus embedded in the historical confl ict and rooted in a larger and older confl ict—the Arab-Israeli confl ict or the Israeli-Palestinian one—and as such it is an interlocking confl ict. Both sides add historical depth and a long-running cultural dimension to the short history since 1948, presented in their primordial identity construction. The ancestral right to the land, the history of religious sanctity—the Jewish Temple Mount/the Muslim al-Aqsa Mosque and the Jewish Cave of the Patriarchs/the Muslim al-Haram al-Ibrahimi, in Hebron—have current political implications and are recruited to empower the national stand vis-à-vis the other and as a mechanism for internal cohesiveness in the two groups. The Jewish Zionist narrative7 underlines the children of Israel’s primordial right to the land through the biblical promise from God to Abraham; the exile of the Jews from their land and their sufferings as a minority in the Diaspora; the Holocaust, which became the moral justification for the establishment of a state for the Jews; the (false) claim that the land was vacant and undeveloped; the legitimate acquisition of land in Palestine by Jews and the backing of these activities by international actors, which culminated in the Balfour Declaration (1917) and the San Remo agreement of the League of Nations (1920), and was followed by the UN partition resolution (1947) of Palestine between two independent states, one Arab and one Jewish. The Jewish narrative argues that the state of Israel was inherited from its ancestors, and the Bible accordingly serves as the primary historical evidence of their ancient presence in Palestine. They argue that Jews were the majority in the land until the fi fth century CE. While in exile, the Jews preserved their religious and ethnic identity, which included their aspiration to return to Zion. Anti-Semitism in Europe, accentuated through the Holocaust, added

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National Minority, Regional Majority

more weight to the ideological justification for national sovereignty, with the ultimate goal of protecting persecuted Jews all over the world. Arab resistance to Zionism during the mandate period, including the Tarpat riots (1929 massacre), the Arab Revolt of 1936–1939, the Arab rejection of the 1947 partition plan,8 and the wars initiated by Arab armies in attempts to destroy the Jewish state—up to the Six-Day War (June 1967) and the Yom Kippur War (1973)—serve as proof, in the eyes of the Jewish public, of the Arab desire to rid the Middle East of the Jews, to “push them into the sea.” In particular, the denial of the 1947 partition plan and the ensuing war launched by Israel’s neighbors—including the Palestinians— has led to the Jewish Israeli viewpoint that the 1948 war was a war of liberation (Milhemet Hashihrur). Thus, from the Jewish point of view, the terms of the ceasefi re agreement signed between Israel and its neighboring states in Rhodes in 1949, the de-Arabization and de-Palestinization of Israel through the Judaization of public space, and the rejection of refugees’ right of return is a valid response to Arab violence. From the Arab perspective,9 however, the land of Palestine is an inheritance from their ancestors. It is the territory of ancient Arab tribes and peoples who, according to the current, popular Arab narrative, preceded the presence of the Hebrews. It is a territory that the colonial powers, Britain and France, determined should come under British sovereignty. The 1916 Sikes-Picot agreement was viewed by Arabs as a betrayal of the British promise to the Sharif of Mecca. This agreement split the Arab territories of the Ottoman state between the two colonial powers (initially also with tsarist Russia), and extracted Eretz Israel/Palestine/Filastin from the area that had been promised to the Arab authority in the course of correspondence between Al-Husayn Ibn ‘Ali and McMahon, the British resident in Egypt. It is not only that the British did not fulfi ll their part of the agreement that led to the outbreak of the “Great Arab Revolt” of 1916, but they also created a contradictory reality in Palestine. The British fostered the establishment of a Jewish national entity in place of an Arab state, enabling Jewish immigration at the expense of the Arabs, who until then had constituted the majority in the land for hundreds of years. According to the Arab narrative, the Jews arrived in Palestine under British imperialist auspices and gained a hold over it; they then occupied it by force, driving away its original

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inhabitants and establishing a state at the expense of the Palestinian people, uprooting the indigenous inhabitants from their land. Two examples illustrate why Israeli Jews see the Arab narrative as delegitimizing their collective existence in Palestine. Muhammad Dahla, an Arab advocate, said in an interview in 2003, “In 1947 the Jews had neither a legal, historical, nor religious right; the sole right of the Jewish nation was that of distress. This right of distress, however, should not justify 78 percent [the space that Israel holds of Palestine]. It can’t justify the fact that the guests became the masters; in the end, those that ought to take precedent are the natives rather than the immigrants.”10 In 2006, member of the Knesset Azmi Bishara said, “The establishment of Israel was the most significant armed robbery in the world in the second half of the twentieth century, when a homeland was stolen with the power of weapons . . . this is how we perceive the history of Zionism, and we shall not grant it retroactive legitimacy.”11 Thus, for the present Israeli Arabs, the 1948 Nakba is not merely history but a living memory and a demand to open the so-called 1948 fi les, that is, to restitute the refugees, to rebuild their demolished villages, and to compensate them with reparations. In the post-1948 context, Israeli Arabs often claim that Israel was the party that rejected or neglected calls by neighboring countries—all Arab—for peace, and that Israel in its actions against the Palestinian struggle “behaves as a terrorist state.” The debate over history between Jews and Arabs in Israel is reflected in educational curricula. In 2005, the Ministry of Education introduced a new program according to which all Israeli high school students should learn the defi nitions of 100 terms relevant to Zionism, cultural heritage, and democracy.12 Once the program was released, it was strongly criticized by academics and educators.13 Wadi‘ ‘Awawda, an Arab journalist, wrote in an opinion article that the Ministry of Education program is “enforcing Zionism on Arab high school students.” Minister of Education Limor Livnat, who initiated the program, did not hide her intentions. In a letter she sent to Adv. Ghadir Niqola of Adalah (Center for Arab Rights) dated 29 March 2005, she explained, “Only if one knows one’s past, one’s heritage and one’s culture one can understand the strong attachment between one’s people and the land, and their right to build itself and its institutions in this land . . . the minorities who learn their own particular heritage also learn of

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National Minority, Regional Majority

the strong connection between the Jewish people and its land, while being equal citizens in the state of Israel.”14 In fact, the program compelled Arab students to study Zionism without an equivalent section on Arab nationalism. It portrayed only the Jewish narrative of the 1948 war and its aftermath. The period before 1948 was termed “Arab terror.” It also claimed that Jews, even in Diaspora, longed to return, and they migrated to Palestine due to its holiness in Judaism.15 The new program outraged Arab academics. Shortly after the 100 terms program was launched, two alternative programs were compiled by Arab academics with the aim of introducing them in Arab high schools. The fi rst was written by Amal Jamal (an Israeli Arab Druze who currently chairs the department of political science at Tel Aviv University), at that time at the Gilo Center for Educating Democracy at the Hebrew University, and the second by As‘ad Ghanem, head of the Ibn Khaldun Center in Shifa‘amru (an Arab who chairs the department of political philosophy and government at Haifa University).16 Jamal’s work is based on the academic literature in political science. Instead of terms about Zionism, his last chapter defi nes terms in “the history and the reality of Arab society in Israel,” which include terms on the Palestinians’ “Right of Return” and the Arab minority as an “indigenous minority.” Regarding the 1948 war and its aftermath, the Ministry of Education narrative is as follows: The War of Independence is also named the War of Foundation (kommemiut) or the War of Liberation, which began on 30 November 1947, the day after the UN Partition Resolution regarding the partition of Palestine into two states was passed. During the fi rst stage of the war, the confrontation erupted between the Arabs of the Land of Israel and the Jewish Yishuv. On 14 May 1948, when the British Mandate was terminated and the declaration of the establishment of Israel was announced, the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon invaded the country. It was a critical existential war for Israel and resulted in a large number of victims. It ended with signing of armistice agreements with four states: Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, defi ning the borders of the state.

The official Israeli narrative ignores the issue of refugees and puts the full responsibility of the war on Arab shoulders.

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In contrast, the Arab narrative published by the Ibn Khaldun Center blames Israel for crimes: 1948 is the year when the Palestinian people was expelled from its home and land and lost its homeland in favor of the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel. The Nakba (catastrophe) events include the occupation of most Palestine lands by the Zionist movement and the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians who became refugees. In addition, the events included dozens of massacres and looting of the Palestinians, the demolition of about 500 villages, the destruction of Palestinian urban cities turning them into Jewish cities, the expulsion of most of the Bedouin tribes who lived in the Negev, an attempt to destroy the Palestinian identity by erasing Arab geographical names and changing them into Hebrew names, and the destruction of the natural character of the Arab country in an attempt to give it an alternative, European character.17

Amal Jamal’s program reveals the Palestinian narrative of why the Arabs rejected the UN partition resolution. First, the resolution neglected the demographic reality in Palestine: Arabs constituted 76 percent of the total population but were entitled to only 45 percent of the land, whereas Jews constituted 33 percent of the population and owned only 7 percent of the land, but were entitled to 55 percent of the land (the terms of the UN resolution were based on a prediction for further Jewish immigration). Second, Arabs “fear[ed] that once the Jews will get a sovereign land they will use it as a springboard for future occupation of land, as was proved later in the 1948 and the 1967 wars.”18 In his defi nition for “Nakba,” Jamal narrates the Palestinian version of what created the Palestinian refugee phenomenon: Israeli expulsion or abandonment by their own decision. He quotes Palestinian researcher Salman Abu Sita, who claims that from 531 origin villages of the refugees, the inhabitants of 122 were expelled by the Jewish forces, 270 others left because of a direct Jewish military attack against them, 38 others abandoned the village because fear from an attack, 49 because a nearby town was captured, 12 because of psychological war, and only 6 abandoned their villages of their own will (for another 34 there is no information about the reason for its abandonment).19 The terms in the democracy sections also reflected debated narratives.20 The Ministry of Education term “Minorities” (term 24 of the Hebrew

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version) says that minorities are a universal phenomenon. The special character of the Arab minority in Israel as an indigenous minority is not mentioned. It maintains, “Already in the [Israel’s] Declaration of Independence complete social and political equal rights were promised to all its citizens, regardless of religion, race, gender, and freedom of religion, conviction, language and education and culture. The minorities in Israel are, for example, Arabs (Muslims and Christians), Druze and Circassians.” The term “Equality” emphasized equality as equal opportunities and on an individual basis, and only gave examples of Israeli laws safeguarding health, education, and welfare services. In regard to the Law of Return, it said that it applies to Jews only, but non-Jews can be naturalized by the Law of Citizenship—a wording used to cover the legal inequality. Jamal’s Arab alternative program describes the Arabs in Israel as a national minority “that still suffers from discrimination, and struggles to achieve equality with the Jewish majority.” Among the goals of the struggle are the return of expropriated land to its Arab owners, the right of internal refugees to return to their abandoned villages, recognition of the “non-recognized villages” (“illegal housing” in the official terminology), return of absentee properties to the Arab population, and civil and political equality and partnership in decision making.21 Jamal describes the Arab Palestinians in Israel as a people or a nation without an independent state, whose loyalty to the state is suspected. The state was established “on their homeland and on the ruins of their national project, and they do not share the rule of their state.” He outlines various types of minority struggles in the world: civic struggle for complete equality as achieved by the Scots in Britain, civil struggle for a special status in the state with the right to keep their particular identity and special relations with their kin-nation societies, or military struggle and confrontation against the state for independence. He concludes, “In most cases, the minority chooses the strategy on the background of how it became a minority and on the state system and its policies regarding the minority.”22 By imposing the 100 terms program on Arab schools, the Ministry of Education opened a “can of worms” with Arab educational elites. The Arab reaction can be traced from the way that the initiators of the alternative programs presented their goals. As‘ad Ghanem, for example, said his alternative program aimed to address

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the success with which the ruling Israeli establishment has employed the Arab school as a means of taming, “Israelizing,” disciplining and controlling Palestinian citizens, and of imparting ideas aimed at programming the agenda of the Palestinian society according to criteria viewed appropriate by the Israeli authorities. Hence, these authorities have striven to create an Arab Palestinian who differs from the Palestinian in the Occupied Territories, in refuge or in the Diaspora . . . A Practical work program should be derived from such a plan in order to counter programs aimed at the colonialist eradication of identity, and to place the historical narrative in the hands of our children and nourish them from the springs of Arab culture.

Ghanem’s program was widely distributed in the Arab sector. His center distributed over 65,000 copies of the booklet with the support of the Welfare Association, an Arab organization funded by a Jordanian Palestinian (‘Abd al-Majid Shouman, the founder of the Arab Bank), which grants fi nancial support to Arab nationalist organizations in Palestine. According to Ghanem, “Over twenty-five Arab academics participated on a voluntary basis in the project’s formulation. They also continue to contribute to the project’s implementation by participating in regional workshops for parents and teachers, held with the goal of introducing the project and its mechanisms of implementation.”23 Although the Ministry of Education prohibited Arab schools from using the alternative plans, the Arab narrative (which fundamentally challenges the legitimacy of the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state) penetrated these schools via informal channels such as the parents’ committees. “Jewish” and “Democratic” Israel: Conjunction or Schism? In its declaration of independence, the founders of the state of Israel determined Israel to be a Jewish state, but they did not consider the legal and practical consequences of this defi nition.24 Israel also declared itself a democracy, and most Israelis view their political system as a democracy following the western model. However, a defi nition of Israel as “democratic” in conjunction with “Jewish” was enacted only in the basic laws of 1992. No one denies the tension between these two elements of the state’s system. Whereas “Jewish” entails privileges for Jews or favoring Jews in some

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particular rights, “democratic” means equal rights for all citizens. The following question emerges: is there an inherent contradiction between the two principles or can Israel balance between the two so that the state will remain both Jewish and democratic? Non-Zionists and post-Zionists (and antidemocratic Zionists) tend to see the contradiction, whereas democratic Zionists believe that there is a compromise position. Jewish Zionist researchers do not see the contradiction between the two foundational principles of Israel as irresolvable but rather as two values that exist in a tension that can be reconciled. In comparing Israel to European nation-states, the dominant group in the country has the right to keep its hegemony in the public culture, national symbols, and constructing its (sectarian) immigration policies.25 In reference to the 1966 UN International Convention of Civil and Political Rights of Minority Peoples and the 1995 European Convention of Protecting National Minorities, Alexander Yakobson of Hebrew University and Justice Yitzhak Zamir even argue that Israel’s Arab minority enjoy the same rights, and possibly even greater rights, than ethnic minorities in Western European countries.26 The main issue in this context is the question of the attitude of the state, which is a Jewish nation-state, to the Arab minority.27 More specifically, to what extent can discrimination against the minority be justified in universal moral terms? The discussion in this context is not only in the legal sphere but on the practical level as well: how the official ideology of the state and the laws, which anchor its Jewishness, translate in practice and affect the daily life of Arab citizens. Arab academic and political elites attacked the state’s defi nition of Israel as a Jewish state. In a document that was prepared by some forty Arab academics and published by the Arab National Committee of Heads of Municipalities in December 2006 titled “The Future Vision,” they suggest reconstructing Israel as a “consensus democracy” of two national communities (this will be discussed in more detail in chapter 11). The proposals in this document were strongly condemned by the Jewish establishment, however. For example, the senior fellows and board of the Israel Democracy Institute, a generally liberal, independent research group that has worked on projects with some of the same Arab intellectuals, wrote a response expressing its “severe anguish” over the document’s contents.

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For a better understanding of the ethnonational confl ict in Israel, however, one must examine the question of whether those aspects of legislative and governmental actions that favor the Jews are the appropriate way to express the Jewish defi nition of the state.28 In other words, what are the vital elements necessary to implement the national self-determination of the Jews and to realize the essence and the justification of Israel’s existence from the perspective of the Jewish citizen? The lack of a deliberate and meticulous legal defi nition of the Jewish character of the state, and the lack of constitutional safeguards for minority rights, has led to ambiguity and opportunity for interpretation, particularly in terms of administrative and legal procedures and legislative processes by the state (governmental actions and policy practices) that discriminate against Arab citizens across a wide spectrum of issues. It has left room for unreasonable and unjustified privileges for Jewish citizens that prevent Arab citizens from achieving full civil equality. A precise expression of this situation can be found in the words of the general secretary of the Labor party (later a minister of the interior and minister of science and culture), MK Offi r Pines, in a lecture delivered in 2002 at the Civil Accord Forum: In my eyes the State is less democratic than I would like it to be, and I am saying this as a Jew, a Zionist and an Israeli. If a government in Israel could regard the Drukman law29 as a reasonable law, we have a serious problem. The Israeli reality is one in which institutional discrimination exists against Israeli Arabs. This discrimination exists in the establishment, among ministers of the cabinet, members of Knesset, general directors of ministry, among secretarial clerks, among drivers and even cleaners in the government ministry. When a decision involving allocation of money needs to be taken, the outcome inevitably favors the Jewish constituency. When two candidates apply for a position, one Jewish and one Arab, it is most likely that the Jewish one will be chosen.30

In other words, in matters related to the rights of the Arab minority in Israel, there is a gap between a vision of liberal democracy and the reality of partial democracy. Democracy should serve all the citizens and should secure the personal integrity and freedom of all citizens, and the actual status of the Arab citizens reflects a defect in the democratic fabric of the state.31

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Beyond the issue of concrete equality stands the question of belonging, which is linked to the emotional identity and affi liation of citizens with a state. Even if the Arab citizens benefit from civil equality in the practical sense, as long as Israel is identified as a Jewish nation-state, Arabs will never genuinely feel “they belong.” The lack of belonging or, more precisely, blocking the opportunity among a group of citizens to belong, humiliates the minority.32 The question is: In order to be a liberal democracy, does Israel need to cease being a Jewish state? Professor Oren Yiftachel, a geographer from BenGurion University asserts that in order for Israel to be a democracy it should implement some principles that are perceived widely as democratic: equal and inclusive citizenship, popular sovereignty and universal suffrage, protection of basic civil rights and minorities, periodic universal and free elections, and clear borders of the state. He found in Israel the following deficiencies: civil inequality, undefi ned state boundaries, lack of minority consent, and ethnic exclusion. He concludes that the state system is predicated on a constitutional arrangement that contradicts the conditions of equal citizenship and, therefore, democracy. He counts Israel among the nondemocratic ethnocracies. However, Yiftachel himself admits that the above principles reflect an ideal model that is never fully achieved.33 My contention is that one should question the “equality” of democracy in Israel (as in any given democracy) and not whether Israel is a democracy.34 This conclusion is based on two arguments. First, Israel has many features of Western democracies such as a system of the supremacy of law, checks and balances between the three major authorities, the safeguarding of general liberties as well as many civil rights, political pluralism and rotation of governments via elections (with a comparatively high turnout of voters), a high rate of civil society activity (NGOs), and involvement of the public in policy making. Second, it can be argued that the deficiencies in the Israeli democracy are largely (but not solely) due to the special historical context of the revival of Jewish nationalism, the establishment of the state as a Jewish state that is an alien entity in the Arab-Muslim region and its intense and ongoing security concerns. However, there is room for Israel to strengthen its democratic fabric, particularly in regard to the principle of civil equality.

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Professor Ruth Gavison, a leading legal expert from Hebrew University and advocate of civil rights who is counted among the long-standing supporters of the defi nition of Israel as a Jewish democratic state, believes that in order to preserve the democratic fabric of the state, some arrangements that safeguard equality need to be implemented, at least a minimum of civil rights and the elimination of systematic discrimination against minorities. Having said this, Gavison does not view inequality in “belonging” as harmful to the democratic fabric of the state, although it may be a severe defect in its political morality, a point that could weaken the social cohesiveness and stability of the state and increase pressure on central democratic features of the state.35 Even today, six decades following the establishment of the state, different opinions exist regarding the ramifications of defi ning Israel as a Jewish state.36 A pioneering attempt to list the minimum traits of the “Jewish” character of the state was made by Chief Justice Aharon Barak. Barak listed five parameters: “The minimalist interpretation of the term ‘Jewish State’ centers on the right of every Jew to immigrate to Israel in which Jews would constitute the majority; Hebrew is the State’s central official language; the State’s main holidays and symbols reflect the national revival of the Jewish people; and the Jewish heritage is a leading component of its religious and cultural heritage.”37 These five parameters could be classified into two main spheres: immigration laws favoring Jews and Jewish hegemony in the public sphere. These fields of majority hegemony are universal norms according to Barak. Yet, whereas these principles are accepted by minorities in other democratic states, the Arab minority in Israel has a difficulty in accepting them due to their above-mentioned historical narrative. In their eyes, they are the real owners of the land and the indigenous people of Palestine, and they should dominate over the Jewish migrant settlers. They believe that they should impose their Arab-Islamic cultural hegemony on the Jews or at least share the power in the country on an equal basis. Barak’s view of a minimum program for the “Jewishness” of the state expresses his own personal opinion only and it is not a result of a public debate, nor is his text known to more than a handful of experts. It should be noted that Barak in his minimum program of “Jewishness” ignored two essential areas of majority hegemony that are vital for Israel to prevail its

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Jewish nature: land control and security.38 Perhaps he avoided these issues because he was confident that Israel after six decades of existence has already established its dominance in these realms by employing a series of laws to ensure it (and implemented by the Supreme Court). Barak’s confidence was so strong that he ruled in the case of an Arab family (Qa‘dan), which was prevented from settling on JNF lands, that the government should not allow such discrimination.39 Such a verdict could occur in the 2000s when Israel controlled over 93 percent of the country’s land. It could not have taken place in the early 1950s when the state was searching for every plot to settle the new Jewish immigrants. Let us examine the two realms mentioned by Aharon Barak as vital for Israel to be Jewish and democratic (demography and public culture) and the two policy areas that he avoided (land and security). These four issues present the Israeli dilemma between the “Jewish” and “democratic” principles. A series of decisions taken by the Jewish leaders of the state in its formative period, in these four areas, determined the institutionalized inferiority of the Arabs in the state of Israel from the outset. However, as I will show, some legislative measures and practices that are not vital for Israel to preserve its Jewish nature could strengthen its democratic fabric. Land Policy Making policy decisions regarding the territory and jurisdiction of municipalities as well as planning and housing touches a central nerve in the relationship between the two ethnonational groups in Israel: The national confl ict is fi rst and foremost a territorial one, since a nation that seeks self-determination is bound to execute sovereignty over national land. The struggle between two national movements, the Arab-Palestinian movement and the Zionist movement, over lands in Palestine during the mandate period shaped cultural patterns, which have continued after 1948. The Nakba of 1948 and the defeat of the Arabs is linked to the territorial question and therefore any government action relating to land strikes a raw nerve in the collective memory of the Israeli Arabs, whose founding ethos is the 1948 catastrophe. The demographic reality that was created after the establishment of the state, namely the departure of Arabs and the arrival of Jews, necessitated the

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reallocation of land resources; land owned by people who left the country was dedicated to development projects in order to absorb Jewish immigrants and construct new settlements.40 The Arab population that remained in the state of Israel was in need of land resources in order to sustain itself, particularly for housing and economic development. Thus, the tension created between the state authority and the Arab population over land and planning issues stemmed partially from real needs of the Arab sector and partially from the opposing national ethos of the two national groups. Nearly every demand by Arab citizens regarding land and planning was perceived by the Jewish establishment as expressing a nationalist claim, and every governmental action related to rights and law enforcement over land was perceived by the Arab public as a continuation of the 1948 struggle and as a step toward the Jewish intention to deprive the Arabs of their lands. In addition to enacting laws aimed at safeguarding the Jewish objective of the state (to be discussed later), the state took over “abandoned” lands belonging to Palestinians who were not present in the country in 1949 and therefore were defi ned as “absentees,” as discussed above in Safuriya. In the process of nationalizing the land, Israel enacted a sophisticated series of laws related to land and real estate based on Ottoman and British mandate laws. The territory of British Mandate Palestine was about 26.6 million dunams (a dunam is 1,000 square meters; four dunams are equivalent to one acre), of which only one-third were cultivable and about 40 percent was the Negev Desert, which was mostly state land. Prior to the 1948 war, Palestinian Arabs privately owned between 4.2 and 5.8 million dunams in the territory that became Israel after the war and Jews owned about 2 million dunams.41 Today, Israeli Arabs privately own about 0.7 million dunam (3.5 percent of the total land of Israel),42 while one-fi fth of state-owned lands (about 4 million out of 20.6 million dunams) are lands previously owned by 1948 refugees or Arab citizens. At least half of this land (2.5 million dunams) was owned by absentees who became refugees. This included estates belonging to the Muslim endowment—waqf—while the remainder was land that was expropriated from the Arab population for the purpose of developing new Jewish towns such as upper Nazareth, Ma‘alot, Carmiel, and Tzefat (Safed) in the Galilee. Another large part of the “national lands”—about half (some say 70 percent) 43 of the state’s territory (10.5 million dunams,

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mostly in the Negev)—were considered by the British Mandate government as “public land,” and Israel opted to register them as state lands. This included some 650,000 dunams possessed by the Bedouins in the northern part of the Negev.44 In the Negev, which is about half of the territory of Israel, only 14 percent of the land was registered as Arab privately owned land, 1 percent was Jewish-owned land, and 84 percent was before 1948 “public land.” In addition to lands expropriated from refugees/absentees, Israel systematically destroyed a significant number of pre-1948 Arab villages (416, according to one Arab version)45 with the exception of a few mosques and churches. Henry Rozenfeld wrote that the land expropriation policy was an expression of self-glorification by the state and glorification of the national spirit (expressed by giving preference to the development and expansion of the nation’s assets), and at the same time it was aimed to “de-territorialize the Arabs.”46 Benziman and Mansour wrote that the most important goal of this policy was to limit the Arab national claim and fortify the monopoly of the Jewish claim.47 An emergency report submitted to Prime Minister Ehud Barak by an inter-university research team following the October 2000 riots (see chapter 9) defi ned the Arabs’ problem regarding the land issue as “growing needs coupled with diminishing space.” Of the approximately 900,000 Palestinians who in 1947 lived in the territory that became Israel, 83 percent fled from the country during the war and became refugees. The 17 percent who remained in Israel own today between 12 percent and 17 percent of the land (0.7 out of between 4.2 and 5.8 million dunams) that Palestinians owned prior to 1948. Given the higher percentage (some 36 percent) of urban population among the Palestinians prior to 1948, it is obvious that the rural population remaining in Israel lost part of its land, but not most of it. However, in considering the value of the land and the ability to use it, one should also pay attention to the question of planning jurisdiction. Arab towns and villages have jurisdiction over 2.5 percent of the country’s land (out of the 3.5 percent that they own) and they are still in need of land for economic development and future housing projects.48 The emergency report stated that the land and planning regimes in Israel discriminate against Arabs both legally and politically in the following matters: minimum allocation of land for Arab use, prevention of new Arab settlements, unequal policies regarding access to

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lands and demolition of houses built without permit, the division of municipal jurisdiction in such a manner that leaves a large amount of land under Jewish sovereignty, exclusion of Arabs from decision making in administrative issues, and particularly underrepresentation in planning and land institutions. The Jewish population has grown and some 700 new Jewish settlements have been established since 1948, whereas the Arab sector remains static with the same number (about 120) of towns and villages, with the exception of the Bedouin settlements. This is in spite of the fact that the Arab population is growing quickly and has increased sixfold since the establishment of the state, whereas its land reserves have diminished, particularly due to vast land expropriation and the annexation of Arab-owned land by Jewish regional councils and the restriction of municipal jurisdiction of Arab towns and villages. Another problematic aspect is the special status of the JNF (Keren Kayemet LeIsrael) and the Jewish Agency, which are exclusively Jewish institutions, in the official state decision-making process regarding land policy. JNF funds are raised by Jews in the Diaspora and hence JNF policy is that these funds should be spent on Jewish citizens only. After the establishment of the state, Israel held about 3.5 million dunams (3,500 km 2) of land that had belonged to Palestinian refugees, which Israel referred to as “absentees’ properties.” Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion believed that this land reserve—equivalent to one-sixth of Israel’s total area—was vital to ensure the existence of the state, but he feared that appropriation of the land would be interpreted as a provocation and a challenge to UN Resolution 194, which recommended repatriation of the refugees. The state was also in desperate need of funds in order to purchase arms and food and to absorb the waves of Jewish refugees from Arab lands and Holocaust survivors from Europe. Ben-Gurion decided to sell these abandoned lands to the JNF—an organization that by its charter is allowed to transfer lands to Jews only—to prevent international pressure forcing the state to restore it to the Palestinian refugees. In January 1949, 1,000 km 2 of the best marketplaces in the country, which were located on this land (from a total of about 3,500 km 2), were sold to the JNF for the low price of 11 million Israeli pounds.49 Another 1,000 km 2 of seized land was sold to the JNF in October 1950, but only a quarter of this was fi nally turned over. The JNF had run out of money, and the level of international pressure was less than had been expected. A

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far greater change occurred in 1960, when administration of the land held by the JNF, apart from forested areas, was transferred to the Israel Land Administration (ILA), a newly formed government agency responsible for managing 93 percent of the land of Israel.50 The state granted the JNF the right to nominate ten of the twenty-two directors of the ILA. Arab citizens were until recently prevented from acquiring rights in the most attractive lands in Israel for housing and for agricultural cultivation, having available to them only those lands that were not owned by the JNF or administered by the ILA. Arab citizens also do not benefit from funds raised by these national institutions. The Jewish Agency, which deals with Jewish settlement and construction of Jewish settlement, is not responsible for developing Arab localities and in fact operates to their detriment by restricting their territory. However, in recent years, American Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee are allocating money for projects in the Israeli Arab sector via Arab NGOs. Other aspects of Israel’s land policy have created daily tensions between the state and its Arab citizens. In existing settlements, these include dozens of Arab housing clusters known as nonrecognized villages, the lack of land reserves for developing Arab towns and villages due to the fact that Arabowned lands are included in the jurisdiction of Jewish regional municipalities, the government’s rigid policy regarding the demolition of houses built without a permit, and the disregard for the lack of zones for future housing in Arab towns and villages. Most of the Muslim Waqf property was nationalized, and small parts of it have been released to a state-governed board of trustees.51 The Beduins’ lands in the Negev have likewise been subject to dispute. The state has moved the Beduins to a limited number of towns that have gradually become very poor. Demographic Policy During Israel’s War of Independence, an effort was made to take over as much territory as necessary to defend and protect the state and to leave as small an Arab minority as possible inside Israel. Israel sees the endorsement of Jewish immigration and the preservation of a Jewish demographic majority as vital to implementing and safeguarding

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the right to self-determination of the Jews. The demographic consideration, although not expressly enunciated, influenced some of the political decisions, resulting in laws of immigration and citizenship aimed at granting Jews privileges and preventing the repatriation of Palestinian Arabs who fled from the territory.52 Israeli Arabs attempted in vain to protest discriminatory legislation in the immigration laws that granted automatic citizenship (naturalization) only to Jews. The Law of Return, enacted in 1950, stated the right of every Jew to immigrate to Israel (make aliyah) and to receive citizenship. This right was granted to the Jew’s spouse, his children, nephews and nieces, and their spouses. Non-Jews, among them Arabs born within the geographical boundaries of Israel prior to its establishment, can immigrate to Israel only in accordance with the Law of Entrance to Israel (1952). In other words, they are obliged to receive the approval of the Ministry of the Interior, just as every tourist or foreigner must apply in order to enter Israel. The Citizenship Law of 1950 states three criteria to be eligible for citizenship: immigration, residence, and birth. The fi rst applied only to Jews, while the second and third applied only to those that met other criteria of the law. Initially, all Jews were entitled to citizenship by making aliyah, even if they were born in Israel prior to the ratification of the citizenship law. According to a 1980 amendment of the law, those entitled to citizenship on the grounds of birth are not permitted to it on the grounds of aliyah. The implication of the two laws is that all Jews who immigrated to Israel are entitled to citizenship rights, whereas Arabs are entitled to citizenship only on the grounds of residence, birth, or naturalization—not through immigration, or aliyah. Arab researchers such as Adv. Ussama Halabi view the Law of Return as unreasonable structural discrimination against the Arabs. Some Israeli Arabs could live with the Law of Return had it been the only privilege of Jews in Israel that discriminates against them.53 Others see this law as the core of their inferiority. As former MK Azmi Bishara put it, “I disagree that Jews are entitled to privileges, such as the Law of Return; enough is enough . . . This state has to be a state of all its citizens like Belgium and Canada.”54 Jewish researchers such as Assa Kasher and Haim Gans defend the Law of Return and justify it as a response to the victimization of and

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discrimination against Jews by other countries and the need of a nation to safeguard its majority in order to implement self-determination.55 Recently, Israel amended the Law of Citizenship in a way that prevents Israeli Arabs from naturalizing Palestinian or other Arab family members. The law and the debate are discussed later in chapter 10. Israeli demographic policy also favors Jews in fi nancial support. Every new Jewish immigrant or returning resident is accorded fi nancial benefits (called an “absorption basket”) not granted to Arabs, even if they entered Israel and immediately received citizenship. Moreover, according to the Decree of Purchase Tax (exemption) of 1975—enacted under the authority of the 1952—Law of Entrance returnees (mostly Jewish) who spend over two years abroad are entitled to an exemption from paying purchase taxes.56 Another legal reinforcement of the Jewish demography majority appears in the distribution of child allowances (to be discussed in chapters 6 and 9). Creating Jewish Symbolic and Cultural Space The maps, which accompanied the 1947 Partition Plan accepted by UN Resolution 181, designated for the Jewish state those areas where Jews constituted the majority. However, in this area approximately 45 percent of the population were Arabs, who lived mainly in cities such as Haifa and Jaffa and in Arab villages. The cease-fi re lines that were agreed upon by Israel and its neighbors in 1949 included a sizeable amount of territory that was conquered by Israeli forces during the war, predominantly in three areas: the eastern Galilee in the north, the little triangle (Wadi ‘Ara) in the center of the state, and the Negev in the south. The residents of Wadi ‘Ara, previously occupied by the Jordanian-Arab legion and transferred with its 30,000 inhabitants to Israel in keeping with the 1949 Rhodes agreement, remained in their villages, in an area that was homogeneously occupied by Muslim Arabs. The area from then on was called the Little Triangle or simply the Triangle (to distinguish it from the West Bank triangle of Nablus-TulkarmJenin). Lands previously owned by Palestinians, who fled from the territory that soon became Israel (refugees or absentees), were nationalized by the state. Those residents were predominantly in the vicinity of Lajoun and Megiddo and west of the ‘Ara Valley. Prior to 1948, the Negev was inhabited

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by roughly 11,000 Bedouins living in tents and shacks, primarily concentrated in the northern part of the Negev in a region labeled Sayyig, between Beer Sheva, Dimona, Arad, and Kibbutz Shuval. The western part of the Negev was resettled by Jews. In towns such as Jaffa, Haifa, Lod, Ramla, and Acre, an Arab minority remained after 1948, living in separate neighborhoods usually in the older parts of the cities. In the Galilee and Jerusalem corridor, most of the Arab villages that were evacuated during the war were demolished. Some 15,000 villagers who were evacuated from their homes in the Galilee and chose to remain within the state of Israel were transferred to live in other towns and villages. While some adapted to the new location, most regarded themselves as “internal refugees.” The Israeli government next pursued a policy of Judaization in all those areas that were evacuated or abandoned. This meant eradicating Arab villages, creating new Jewish settlements, and renaming Arabic places, settlements, streets, rivers, and mountains with Hebrew names.57 In most cases, the National Committee for Naming, situated in the prime minister’s office, gave ancient biblical Hebrew titles to these places. Thus, for example, Safuriya’s ancient Hebrew name Zippori was restored. In other cases, original Arabic names were Judaized, and a Hebrew suffi x was added. The kibbutz that was established on the pre-1948 Arab village of Jibta was renamed Gvat. Nahalal was established on the lands of the village Mahlul. Nearby Kibbutz Sarid was erected on the ruins of the village formerly recognized as Haneifa, and Kfar Yehoshua on the remains of Tel-Shaman.58 In towns where Arab citizens were a minority—accordingly labeled “mixed towns”—selected segments of the original Arabic names of streets were preserved, mostly in the dominantly Arab neighborhoods. For example the Hasan Shukri Street, where several government institutions were located, has preserved its original name honoring the pre-1948 mayor of Haifa. Perhaps this occurred since Hasan Shukri enjoyed good relations with the Jewish inhabitants of Haifa, and perhaps because his son Suhayl remained a resident of Haifa and cooperated with the Jewish establishment. Conversely, al-Jabal Street, a central avenue in Haifa, was renamed “UN Avenue.” Following the UN resolution of 1975 that called Zionism a racist movement, the Haifa municipal authority decided to rename the street “Zionism Avenue.” In 2001, the Hadash wing of the Haifa municipality

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organized a demonstration in one of the Arab neighborhoods of Haifa, Wadi Nisnas, in which the protesters demanded that the original Arabic names of streets be restored. Amir Makhul, a member of the Popular Committee of the Haifa Arabs, stated, “We shall remind the public that Y. L. Peretz [a nineteenth-century Jewish writer] Street was once named Mukhalis Street, and that Ya’ir Stern [the commander of the Lehi Jewish underground during the British Mandate] Street was once named al-Jahiz [a medieval Arab writer] Street, and Ma‘ale Ha-Shihrur [liberation hillside] Street was Al-Burj [tower] Street.” Only five of the streets of Jaffa bear Arab names although 50 percent of its inhabitants are Arabs. However, change began in 2007 when the Naming Committee of Tel-Aviv Yaffo municipality decided to name a number of streets after Arab personalities such as the famous Arab writer Emile Habibi. The committee, however, refused to name streets after Saladin and some Palestinian figures involved in nationalist activities that were seen as problematic for the Jewish state.59 Other changes after the formation of the Jewish state were more considerate of Arab citizens and their basic needs. Some important fundamentals of Arab culture were preserved both on the national level and the local level. Israel did not attempt to assimilate Arabs within the Jewish-Hebrew culture, most importantly in the realm of public education. Although education is sponsored by the state, Arabs enroll in separate schools where Arab teachers teach in Arabic. Between the two options of integrating Arabs into the general educational system on the one hand and autonomous Arabic education on the other, the Israeli government decided to take the middle ground: educating Arabs in separate schools that used the Arabic language and included their religions in its curriculum, but that are maintained as an integral part of the national educational system and are not permitted autonomy. This policy recognizes Arab citizens, as a cultural minority, as entitled to an education in their own language while still enabling the state to regulate the formal education in the Arab sector. The decision not to integrate Arabs into the Hebrew educational system did not emerge from the rational decision about whether autonomy should be granted but rather from the fear that such integration could impair the ethnic uniqueness of Jewish society. It was assumed by the government soon after the state was

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established in 1948 that mixing the two communities into the same educational institutions would ultimately fail.60 In order for the Arab educational system not to edify separatism, the school curriculum imposes equivalent hours for both Jewish and Arab history. Arab schools, however, in contrast to their Jewish counterparts, do not provide political education and do not teach Arab national heritage (the antithesis to the Zionist narrative) in the official curriculum. The Arabic language—an official vernacular during the British Mandate—continues to enjoy its formal legal status. However, this status is ineffectually enforced. Furthermore, the teaching of Arabic in Jewish schools is minimal. Arab settlements and urban neighborhoods have kept their cultural character, and during the 1980s the Arab-Muslim features of those areas populated by Muslims even increased as a result of the growing influence of the Islamic movement (as seen in the increased number of new mosques and minarets). In the realm of religious law, Israel established special personal status tribunals for the various religious sects, and Israeli law intervened only in a select number of universal social areas, such as the minimum age for marriage (seventeen), the prevention of polygamy, and the prevention of forced divorce on women (although even these interventions are only partially implemented).61 In 2001, state-run family courts were given a parallel authority in personal matters, responding to demands of Arab feminists and various political groups. The religious holidays of Christians, Muslims, and Druze have been legally recognized, as have the various weekly days of rest. The national commemoration days, however, reflect only the Jewish-Zionist ethos, and there is not one national Arab day of remembrance or national Arab public holiday. Israel’s official memorial activities give expression to the Jewish heritage only, such as the official day of memorial for the fallen IDF soldiers (halalim), the day of memorial for the Holocaust and heroism, the establishment of cultural tributary institutions that endorse Jewish national heritage—such as Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi—and organizations for the encouragement of the Yiddish and Ladino languages. From 1977 on, the Arabs adopted 30 March as their national day of protest, and since the mid-1990s, they developed special commemoration days for the Nakba that they celebrate on 15 May (the end of British Mandate in 1948, Israel’s Declaration of Independence and the

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official beginning of the 1948 war) as an antithesis to the Israeli celebration of Independence Day (celebrated according to the Hebrew calendar on the fi fth day of the month Iyar). The state does not prevent these popular commemorations. The national goals of the state are thus reflected very accurately in its values and symbolic representations. The state’s principle values, as well as its culture, which dominates the public space, strongly express the national interests and cultural aspirations of the Jewish majority. The public atmosphere, national educational norms and reforms, and official ceremonies that have developed over the years are all built around the Jewish historical memory and accentuate a Zionist outlook that includes Diaspora heritage, the Holocaust, and the revivalist movement. The establishment of the state of Israel as a state that actualized the right to self-determination of the Jewish people automatically led to the choice of official symbols of the state as those that express the Jewish identity. The national anthem is Jewish and its text does not attempt to include non-Jewish citizens. The national flag and other state symbols—from coins and bills to official governmental publications—again are derived from the Jewish tradition with which Arab citizens cannot identify. The Hebrew calendar, and its use alongside the Gregorian calendar, is established by law. The treatment of the Arabic language is different.62 The Israeli Declaration of Independence recognized the Arab minority as a group entitled to proper representation and participation in the state’s political processes. The Arabic language, recognized under British Mandate law, has maintained its official status. The national currency contains Arabic text, and official government documents, such as minutes of Knesset meetings (Devrei HaKnesset), are translated into Arabic. The language is also used in the state’s judiciary processes, both through the translation of the laws and as part of the courts’ rulings and daily affairs. Arabic is used on road signs and in the Arab educational system.63 In 2007, the Knesset legislated for the establishment of a state-funded Academy for Arabic Language equal to that of the Academy for Hebrew. However, because of the hegemony of Hebrew, most Arabs are bilingual, and they insert Hebrew words in their daily speech.

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Security and National Duties (Army and Civil Service) In 1960, during a meeting between David Ben-Gurion and his newly nominated advisor on Arab affairs, Uri Lubrani, the Israeli prime minister instructed Lubrani not to invest any effort in making Israeli Arabs love their state, as such efforts seemed futile in his eyes. On the other hand, he indicated that it must be ensured that they observe the law, and that the government treated them with justice and equality. Ben-Gurion stressed the security threat posed by Israeli Arabs and provided Lubrani with a long list of positions from which Arabs were barred (such as work on telephone switchboards or senior positions at the Haifa port authority). Ben-Gurion described the Arabs’ attitude toward the state in the following way: If a fida’i [a Palestinian who sacrifices himself] entered Tayba, the Prime Minister does not expect that the Mukhtar of Tayba would turn him in. He does, however, expect him to order the fida’i to leave the village, because he disturbs some sort of a process, which everyone is content with. I would like to create a situation of mutual dependency; where the Arab resident of Tayba knows that he is dependant on the State, and where the State knows that it is dependant on the Arabs. For example, if we construct a water facility near Kibbutz Ramat Hakovesh, this facility will provide water for both Tayba and Ramat Hakovesh. And whoever destroys it, will cause a water shortage for both settlements.64

From the fi rst day of Israel’s inception, Israeli Arabs were perceived as threatening Israel’s national security due to the fact that they represent an ethnonational community that is part of the Arab (Palestinian) people who are in confl ict with Israel. The Arabs are a relatively significant minority, residing in segregated areas and owning lands and assets in specified territorial blocks that are near the state’s borders, areas that were mostly included in the Arab part of the UN partition plan. These facts made the Israeli Arabs a suspect group, perceived as implicitly disloyal to the state with no chance of making themselves loyal. The country’s leaders expected that in critical times (such as an existential war), Israeli Arabs would identify and collaborate with the enemies of the state.

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Ben-Gurion’s conviction, mentioned above, did not change and is shared by most Jewish Israelis.65 What is the basis for the perception of the Arabs as an internal security threat, despite the fact that only very few were involved in hostile actions against the state? Perhaps it emerges from the perpetual sense of threat that the state of Israel is under when facing the hostile Arab region and unsympathetic international institutions. Perhaps it was influenced by the traumas present in the Jewish collective recollection since the Holocaust and the 1948 war. And perhaps it is a combination of all of these. One should emphasize that from the Jewish perspective, in light of the exceptional circumstances of Israel’s development, national security is not only the conventional defi nition of a state’s stability versus external and internal elements but in addition its stability as a Jewish state, that is, its political stability. In other words, the fact that a large minority that is a part of the surrounding dominant Arab group does not recognize the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state and, in the last decade, has even acted to change the Jewish essence of the state, is perceived by the Jewish public as a national security threat. As an example, in a book titled Introduction to National Security, published recently by the Ministry of Defense Press, it was stated that the object of Israel’s national security is the Jewish nation. Accordingly, the national security problem was defi ned as internal threats to the defi nition of the state as Jewish. A review of this book criticized this defi nition, saying that it implies that whoever supports the ideology of Israel as a state of all its citizens is an enemy of the state.66 A recent debate exemplifies how the border between security and political ideology is blurred. In 2007, Israeli Arab NGOs and leadership drafted and published four documents in which they called for a constitutional change eliminating the word “Jewish” from the defi nition of the state. The head of the General Security Service (GSS, or in Hebrew, Shabak), Yuval Diskin, argued at a brainstorming session with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that “the radicalization of the Israeli Arabs is a strategic danger to the State’s existence.”67 Later on the GSS responded to a letter sent by the editor of an Arab newspaper to the prime minister’s office, saying their mission meant they would “prevent subversive activity of those who opt to harm the nature of the state as a Jewish and democratic state, even if in their activity they are

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making use of democratic means, and this [authority is vested by the GSS] by force of the principle of ‘defending democracy.’”68 When the Civil Rights Association questioned this response in a letter to the General Attorney Menachem Mazuz, Diskin claimed Mazuz’s support in another letter in which Diskin explained in detail the GSS law, which stated among other missions its duty “to safeguard and promote national interests that are vital for the national security of the State, as determined by the government and law.” Diskin went further by maintaining that “subversion,” as the GSS interprets it, might also be “striving to change the basic values of the state by eliminating its Democratic fabric or its Jewish nature, as subversion against the democratic regime and its institutions” (emphasis added). Consequently, he added that the GSS might act against or eavesdrop on those who are suspected as taking part in activity that has subversive aspects in order to ensure that it does not hide or serve as a basis of illegal activity.69 This position of the GSS and the state’s attorney was strongly criticized.70 Policy decisions regarding the status of Arab citizens were primarily influenced by the reality of the ethnonational confl ict in Palestine coupled with the hypothesis that the 1948 war would not be the fi nal struggle for national survival. Despite signing the 1949 armistice agreement with Israel, some of the Arab states continued the rhetoric of war, which aimed at changing the results of the Israeli War of Independence. The factors combined to create a policy-making context described by Uzi Benziman (a Jew) and Atallah Mansour (an Arab), in their Hebrew book Subtenants, analyzing the Israeli government’s policy toward Israeli Arabs: In May 1948, the Jewish leadership in Palestine was still under the terrible shadow of the Holocaust, which included the collaboration of Arab leaders with the Nazi regime, and the sense of threat of a general Arab attack against the new state. The threat to the very existence of the state and to the lives of its Jewish inhabitants was real and powerful, and the Jewish public and leadership’s attitude to the Arab minority was a direct product of these fears. Moreover, one should remember that in the course of the War of Independence, facts were created (occupation on the one hand, and the fleeing of most of the Arab population and its deprivation on the other) that decisively influenced Ben-Gurion’s attitude (and the state’s leadership as a whole) as to the status of the Arab minority that remained

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within state borders, or was annexed to it as a result of the 1949 armistice agreement with Jordan. In the eyes of the Jewish population and leadership, following the establishment of the state, the Arabs were a security risk. This perception stemmed from the fact that the Jews projected the regional Arab threat onto the minority that remained within the state’s jurisdiction. In reality, however, the Arab community was a vulnerable, defeated, and timid group.71

This security prism influenced many of the policy decisions taken by the state’s leaders at the time. The most significant political decision taken by Israel’s leaders was the imposition of a military government and the enforcement of martial law— lasting eighteen years—in those areas inhabited by Arabs: in the Galilee, the Triangle, and the Negev. The decision in 1966 to abolish the restrictions of the military government, though taken after years of public debate, was supposed to reveal a new approach toward Arab citizens. A year after this decision was made, the Six Day War erupted, resulting in a decisive victory by Israel over its Arab neighbors, and its occupation of additional territories— among them the West Bank and Gaza Strip—inhabited by Palestinians. This outcome should have changed the establishment’s attitude toward Israeli Arabs, since it demonstrated that there was no existential threat posed to the state of Israel by its Arab neighbors anymore. Unfortunately, this assumption did not materialize. As a result of the security paradigm, Arabs were exempted from military service.72 This decision by the state’s leaders was formed within the fi rst years of the state’s existence. There were volunteers from the Druze, Bedouin, and Circassian communities who have served in the army from the 1950s, and so some believed that the recruitment of Arabs to the IDF was possible. The fear of Arab disloyalty to the state, however, and in particular the fear that Arabs could become a fi fth column in times of war made their recruitment to the army impractical. In 1954, the minister of defense examined Arab citizens’ reaction to the possibility of enlisting them in the army. He was surprised by the overwhelming and massive acceptance of Arabs who crowded recruitment offices to register. Although public discourse in the Arab sector displayed opinions on either side, Israeli Arabs passed the test of

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loyalty. Ultimately, however, the minister decided not to recruit them, and the enlistment project was terminated.73 The all-inclusive army exemption given by the defense minister to Arab citizens indicated that the authority had determined the Arab population to be disloyal to the state. This decision defi ned the boundaries of the Israeli national collective and the boundaries of Israeli citizenship. The Arabs were not included in the collective goals of Israeli society in general, and a common citizenship was not created.74 The test for participating in the defense of the state was a test of national affi liation criteria—Jewish affi liation—rather than a citizenship test. The government preferred to recruit selected minority groups whose loyalty to the state was not in doubt: Druze and Circassian men have been called to service since 1957, although exemption on a moral basis was possible. Some Bedouins were also called up to the army as volunteers and accepted into the army’s ranks. Muslim, non-Bedouin, and Christian volunteers were accepted as individuals in low numbers, and during the 1980s the IDF recruited select groups for the mandatory military service. The recruitment policy, which distinguishes among groups according to religious or communal affi liation, contributed to the political separation of the Druze from the Arab community and to the integration of Bedouins into a pro-Israeli political orientation. Conclusion The roots of the Israeli-Arab confl ict—and the special circumstances of the establishment of the state of Israel as a democratic and Jewish state— vastly influenced the attitudes of Jews and Arabs regarding one another and determined the state’s administration, moral fiber, national goals, cultural symbols, and citizens’ individual and collective rights and obligations. The minority-majority confl ict is, thus, an extension of broader regional confl icts: Israeli-Palestinian, Israeli-Arab, and, more recently, an Israeli-Muslim confl ict, particularly with the combination of Iran-Hizballah-Hamas and the appeal to anti-Israel and anti-Jewish feelings across the Muslim world at an international level. The state was established by the majority after three decades of struggle that culminated in a war (1948) against the minority group. By awarding

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legitimacy to the preference of one ethnonationality over the other (in immigration and citizenship laws), the government created a sentiment among the Jewish public that justified those preferential realities in other areas as well. At the same time, the Arabs felt that they were second-rate citizens. These post-1948 policies established the Arabs’ status as a minority that is unable to achieve true equality; namely collective equality as a national minority, even through democratic means.75 Of the above four areas—demography or immigration laws, public culture, land control, and security— not all legislative measures and practices were vital for Israel to maintain its Jewish nature and many of them cannot be justified on moral grounds. Regarding land, for example, drastic discrimination in the allocation of land rights and limiting the access of one group of citizens to land undermines the democratic fabric of the state and its stability. Issues of land zoning and jurisdiction, land development rights, and fair compensation for expropriated land has nothing to do with the Jewish character of the state. The Jewish political leadership was able to institutionalize discriminating policies toward its Arab citizens in various day-to-day measures—a notion that was supported by Jewish public opinion—by defi ning the state as Jewish, along with the lack of a state constitution protecting the rights of minorities.76 In surveys conducted since the 1980s, it was found that the majority of the Jewish public views this discrimination as legitimate. For example, in one public opinion survey of 2001, 57 percent of the Jews supported the statement that the government should give priority to its Jewish citizens when allocating resources.77 In another survey conducted in February 2002, 60 percent supported this statement.78 The very defi nition of a Jewish state, which has been actualized by government actions that give preference to the Jewish ethnonational group, implies that the Arab minority will always have an inferior civil status according to the desire of most of the Jewish citizens. The question to be asked is whether restricting the state’s expression of Jewishness to the most vital fields only, as defi ned by Aharon Barak, would allow the Arab minority to lead reasonable individual and collective lives in Israel. What modifications could be made that would reduce the Arab sense of inequality and reduce their feeling of nonbelonging to the state? Could Arab citizens, or at least a significant majority of them view Israel as a state with which they identify

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and feel they belong to and be loyal to? I will try to respond to these questions in the concluding chapter. The following chapters deal with the developments that occurred after 1948 in these four basic areas as well as in the confl ict with the Palestinians and the political behavior of each of the parties to the confl ict resulting from those developments. Chapter 2 describes the situation in Israel during the 1960s and the 1970s. It reveals the policies of the Labor party governments until the political turmoil of 1977, which brought the Likud party to power.

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The Earthquake

t h e a r a b r io t s of 30 March 1976 known as Land Day were an earthquake in the relationship between the state and its Arab citizens. Mass civil disobedience by the Arab population against the government, which culminated with the deaths of six Arabs by security forces shooting and the injury of many Arabs and Jews, shocked the Jewish public and all echelons of the ruling establishment. No one predicted that Arab citizens would opt for a violent, physical confrontation with the state’s security forces. The riots, which erupted one year before the end of three decades of the Mapai/Labor party’s rule and the rise to power of the right-wing Likud party in May 1977, cast their shadow on Jewish-Arab relations for the period to come. This chapter looks at the events of Land Day and government policies in the decade prior to 1976, a period that began with two watershed events: the official end of the military regime in December 1966 and the June 1967 war, the Six Day War. Although the military regime officially ended on 1 December 1966, it ceased in practical terms only in 1968, after the 1967 war, when Israel was engaged with a new security challenge in the West Bank and Gaza. Some of the army’s security powers were transferred to the police and to the GSS. The mentality that the Arabs were a security threat remained long after this change.1 Since the period between 1948 and 1977 has been analyzed in detail in previous studies, 2 I will summarize the main points and add my own insights, based on policy documents that have not been released to the public so far and my interpretation of the confl ict as an interlocking confl ict. The outcome of the 1967 war significantly influenced Jewish-Arab relations by weaving the Palestinian issue into the internal confl ict. 34

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The Interlocking Dimension of the Conflict 1967–1976 The Land Day riots in 1976 symbolized the fi nal release of the Israeli Arab population from the military administration’s shackles, which had been removed officially a decade earlier. This decade was characterized by two critical wars with Israel’s Arab neighbors. During Israel’s second decade of existence, the state still faced an ongoing military challenge, which many Israeli Jews felt were existential. During this period, Israel began to establish itself as a regional military power, investing much in the development and expansion of its military and the inauguration of a nuclear reactor in Dimona. The major regional security challenge during the period from 1964 to 1967 was the struggle between Israel and its Arab neighbors over water resources, which was one of the factors that led to the Six Day War of June 1967.3 Before they were fully accustomed to the freedom of movement that came with the end of military administration, Arab citizens had to contend with the Six Day War and its consequences. Throughout the war, they remained a peaceful and passive community. The fifth column theory believed by many in the Israeli establishment claimed that in the case of war, Israeli Arabs would side with the enemy and sabotage the state’s defense, but this proved false. There is no doubt that sentimentally, the Arab citizens identified with the Palestinians and the Arab states. However, would they opt to take active hostile actions against the state? It was unrealistic to believe that after two decades of strict security control, they would have the capacity. Israel’s decisive victory and the fall of the symbol of national pan-Arabism—the popular president of Egypt, Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser—put a halt to the belief of Arab citizens that Israel’s existence was temporary and that it was a weak entity in the regional geostrategic arena (the surrounding Arab world). Genuine mourning in the Arab sector in Israel marked Nasser’s death in September 1970, which reflected its national affi liation with the Arab world.4 The majority of Israeli Arabs, however, acknowledged Israel’s might as a stable and strong factor in the Middle East, resolving that they had to adapt to their status as a national minority in a Jewish state. Despite this acceptance, the civil subversion of the Arab minority in Israel was unbearable, and some Arabs opted for political mobilization. The impact of

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National Minority, Regional Majority

the regional dimension (the Arab and the Palestinian confl ict with Israel) after the Six Day War on the Arab minority influenced Arab public opinion. In a survey among post-independence fi rst and second generations of Israeli Arabs conducted in 1969, 66 percent of the parents (post-1948 generation) compared to 40 percent of the youth (second generation) responded negatively to the question “Should the Arabs launch another war against Israel?”5 The fi ndings show that the second generation was more radical than the fi rst generation. The second significant consequence of the Six Day War, which had a major impact on Jewish-Arab relations, was the restoration of contact between Israeli Arab citizens and the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The collapse of the physical barrier of the “Green Line” (the pre1967 border) resulted in a gradual return of Israeli Arabs to their national (Arab-Palestinian) and religious (Islamic) roots, a process of growing Palestinization of their identity.6 In the early 1970s, the fi rst buds of the Palestinization process—the emergence of new Arab political organizations—were observed, both at the local and national levels. The radical movement Abna’ al-Balad emerged during these years, as did the National Committee of Arab Heads of Municipalities and several other organizations. The fi rst half of the 1970s witnessed a growing resistance of Arabs to the political status quo. From 1967, the Palestinian component in Israeli Arabs’ identities became more pervasive. Between June 1967 and June 1969, the two years following the Six Day War, some eighty Israeli Arabs were involved in hostile actions against state security. Israeli researchers argue that between the 1967 and 1973 wars, some 220 Israeli Arabs joined the PLO and were engaged in guerilla operations or other activities on its behalf.7 However, a senior representative of this group—Sabri Jiryis—maintains that only 50 Israeli Arabs joined the PLO. According to him, they were not perceived by the PLO as representing 1948 Arab refugees, and the PLO decided in advance not to include Israeli Arabs.8 In any event, Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line developed relations and contacts in a number of activities: in employment opportunities, in business and family encounters, and in more elite contact including religious leaders, intellectuals, journalists, and political activists.9 After the Six Day War, it was discovered that the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza experienced greater disadvantage than the Israeli Arabs

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in the areas of education and health services, municipal governance, and local infrastructure, agriculture, and socioeconomic status. In other arenas, the conditions of the Israeli Arabs were inferior compared to their counterparts in the territories. For example, among West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, there were more university graduates than among Arabs in Israel. In the political arena, Israeli Arabs had no influence on Israel’s political system whereas in the West Bank and Gaza there was intense political activity occurring before (partially underground) and after 1967.10 As noted, during the 1970s, dozens of Israeli Arabs with a high political awareness left Israel and joined the PLO. Among them were celebrities such as poet Mahmoud Darwish and lawyer Sabri Jiryis, who were employed in the PLO’s research center in Beirut or in its press and culture unit. Following their admission, the PLO produced an important resolution in the Palestinian National Council (PNC), which for the fi rst time incorporated Israeli Arabs into their political program. Until then, they were suspected of collaborating with the Zionists.11 In the fi rst half of the 1970s, Israeli Arabs still felt inferior and humiliated by the PLO, who had initiated the national struggle. After Land Day, however, this sense of inferiority vanished. The change in attitude deepened the bond between the two Palestinian communities, as displayed in cultural activities such as a writers association and joint cultural events. This kind of activity gradually socialized a common identity. The political campaign of both communities at the time aimed at fi nding a solution for the Palestinian problem by establishing an independent state alongside Israel, and not in its place. Israeli Arabs preceded the PLO in suggesting the two-state solution, as laid out by the Communist party Rakah, “two states for two peoples.”12 In the 1970s, Israel was far from accepting such a program. The failure to achieve a peaceful agreement between Israel and its neighbors who participated in the 1967 war led to a series of hostile actions, particularly between Egypt and Israel, who controlled the entire Sinai Peninsula. This War of Attrition (1969–1971), in addition to isolating Israel in the international community, nourished the paranoia of the Jewish public: “The Arab world wants to destroy Israel and throw the Jews into the sea” and “the entire world is against us.” Periodically, events occur that contribute to this state of paranoia, such as the Holocaust.13 This paranoia combined with

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the Arab minority’s identification with nations that were hostile to Israel contributed to the Jewish public’s continued opinion that Israeli Arabs were a security threat and was one of the main obstacles preventing their integration into the Jewish state.14 The international dimension, which was the outer circle of the confl ict, had an indirect impact on the Israeli-Palestinian theater. Until 1975, the United States was deeply involved in the Vietnam War while the USSR was engaged in reviving the declining Soviet economy. During the period of détente from 1970 to 1975, the 1973 war between Israel and Egypt and Syria erupted, followed by the Middle East oil crisis, which extended over a decade and brought Israel closer to the United States. The United States did not solely concentrate on its relations with Israel, however: Egypt accepted a U.S. cease-fi re proposal during the October 1973 war (called in Hebrew the Yom Kippur War, in Arabic, Ramadan War) and the postwar separation agreement between Israel and Egypt was formulated with U.S. mediation. The war and its aftermath paved the way for the Egypt-Israel peace negotiations, but its influence was seen only after 1977. In the years following the 1973 war, Israel felt devastated while Israeli Arabs’ self-confidence increased. The 1973 war undermined Israel’s image as invincible. Among Israeli Arabs as well as the rest of the Arab world, one outcome of the war was a revival of Arab dignity, which was wounded during the wars of 1948, 1956, and 1967. Tawfiq Zayyad—a Communist and Arab nationalist political leader and poet—published a poem praising the Egyptian army’s crossing of the Suez Canal and the return of the Egyptian and Syrian armies to Sinai and the Golan Heights after smashing Israel’s fortified Barlev line along the Suez Canal. In a collection of poems named “The Great Crossing” (al-‘Ubur al-Kabir) published by Zayyad during the war (23 October 1973), he stated, “The crossing was sanctified.”15 The poem reflected the general attitude among the Arab public of the time. Here again, the internal confl ict was influenced by the way that Arabs—the minority in Israel—saw themselves as part of a regional majority. It seems that the 1973 war revived the Arab minority’s hopes for reforming their group status. The more Israel’s outer and inner (the political shock among the Jewish public following the war) invulnerability appeared to be challenged, the more the capacity of the Arab minority to negotiate the

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improvement of its status and rights appeared to increase. The prime minister’s advisor on Arab affairs, Shmuel Toledano, who was a former Mossad officer, thought that the Arab population stood strong as a result of the war, and they believed they were observing the disintegration of the state.16 Perhaps this postwar attitude led to the Arab leadership’s decision to strongly resist Israel’s policy of land expropriation in 1976. The mid-1970s were a turning point for Arab-Israeli representation. New leadership emerged with personalities like Tawfiq Zayyad and institutions such as the National Committee for the Arab Heads of Municipalities. In the municipal elections in Nazareth of December 1975, the senior political leader and mayor of Nazareth, Sayf al-Din al-Zu‘bi, a member of the satellite list of the Mapai (Labor) party and considered a collaborator with the Zionists, was replaced by a second-generation Arab, Tawfiq Zayyad. Zayyad was supported by a group of nonfactional Arab academics, and their party won a landslide victory (eleven out of seventeen seats in the city council).17 He was the fi rst Arab leader since the 1950s who had charisma and enjoyed popularity among Arab citizens, even those who did not vote for his party. The Communist party (Rakah, later renamed by the acronym Hadash) was the leading political party of Arab citizens, and most of the prominent politicians were members of it. Among them were the articulate and distinguished parliamentary speaker Tawfiq Tubi, ideologist Emil Touma, and novelist Emile Habibi. Following the 1967 war, Israel was expected to cede the occupied Palestinian-populated territories for peace. Once it became clear that Israel was reluctant to return to the pre-1967 borders, the Arab citizens of the state felt more alienated from it. The polarization grew when Israeli Arabs observed the messianic process that parts of Jewish society underwent after the 1967 war, specifically the growing desire to retain permanently the West Bank and East Jerusalem (and later, the Gaza Strip as well), and to implement Israeli sovereignty in these territories. The imposition of Israeli law and administration on East Jerusalem, coupled with expropriation of public (and sometimes also private) lands with no registered owners in the territories and the establishment of Israeli settlements there, resulted in clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security forces across the Green Line. In the latter half of the 1970s, the tension in the West Bank intensified. The minister of defense, Shimon Peres, decided to hold municipal elections

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National Minority, Regional Majority

in the West Bank. This was announced in December 1975 to be carried out in April 1976. After the results of the elections came in however, there were riots in West Bank towns and cities,18 which coincided with the Land Day riots in the Israeli Arab sector. The riots escalated after April and May due to a series of government measures and the impact of the Gush Emunim (Jewish settlement) movement. Government Policy until Land Day of 1976: Reward and Punishment Ian Lustick rightly described government policy after 1948 in terms of control and co-optation.19 Policies enacted during the period of military control between 1948 and 1967 tended to continue even after the abolition of the military regime. Since security and political control resulted in political gains for the ruling party, Mapai opted to resume measures of control. The following section uses key government and Labor party documents to shed light on the policies regarding the state’s Arab minority. The main policies that appear in government documents refer to political control and co-optation on the one hand, and to issues of demography and land ownership on the other hand. During the 1960s, the ruling party (Mapai) was split, and Levi Eshkol, who was elected as prime minister in 1963, faced other powerful factions in his party, particularly Golda Meir’s group.20 The Arab community was a focus of the internal political struggle among the opposing camps in Mapai. Abba Hushi, the mayor of Haifa, influenced Mapai’s decision making regarding Israeli Arabs. During his term, 1965–1970, a political struggle took place between Hushi, his son-in-law, Amnon Linn, and Shmuel Toledano (the prime minister’s advisor on Arab affairs). Hushi was a powerful Mapai politician who had enjoyed a good relationship with the Arabs even before the state of Israel was founded when he was the leader of the Brit Poaley Eretz Israel movement. He and Linn believed that moderate Arabs could ideologically justify declaring loyalty to the state, even though they were minorities, and that such sentiments among Arabs would facilitate their control by Mapai and by the state.21 Therefore, they were searching for clan leaders who were ready to deny their national identity for personal or

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sectional benefits. Sayf al-Din al-Zu‘bi was one such leader during the 1960s and 1970s. Heading one of the largest clans (hamula) in the northern region of Israel, he collaborated with the Jewish establishment after 1948 as a facilitator between the ruling government and Arab citizens in solving existential problems of displacement, property rights, and employment. Zu‘bi’s engagement as a facilitator won him many supporters among the Arab population. Abba Hushi was Zu‘bi’s patron, whereas the prime minister’s advisor of the time, Yehoshua Palmon, supported Saleh Khunefes, representing the Druze, for the position of the head of Mapai’s minority representatives to the Knesset. Zu‘bi and Khunefes competed through separate satellite parties, which were backed by different Jewish patrons and factions of Mapai for election to the Knesset during the 1950s. In the mid-1960s, Hushi created a supreme forum for dealing with the Arab population, headed by himself (and by Yigal Alon following his death), and with the participation of his son-in-law Linn, Linn’s adversary Toledano, and Ya‘akov Cohen, the director of the Histadrut’s Arab Department. The forum did not record minutes of its meetings at Hushi’s insistence, although the decisions undertaken by its members were executed by government agencies. One of the major decisions made by the forum following the abolition of the military government was to establish a municipal system in the Arab sector that would provide Arabs with a framework of local self-administration. Toledano opposed Linn’s concept of developing Arabs’ identification, which he considered artificial, with Israel as a Zionist state.22 Although an ex-Mossad officer without a base in the party, Toledano fostered more liberal measures toward Arabs, including their integration into the state. He held the conviction that such measures would bring Arab radicals closer to the government. Toledano’s policy toward Arabs was perceived as liberal. Political co-optation of the minority was as liberal a concept as could be held in those days by the establishment’s higher echelons. His concept of liberal and soft co-optation (as opposed to the strong control concept of Hushi and Linn) led him to endorse the founding of Arab local municipalities. Municipal councils in the Arab sector began to be established by the Ministry of the Interior in the years 1969–1970. When Golda Meir was elected prime minister in 1969, Toledano sided with her in the power struggle with the Haifa branch of Mapai, led by Hushi. The Arab municipalities that Toledano

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built were intended to counter Hushi and Linn’s faction among Arab supporters of Mapai. In March 1973, Toledano dispatched a secret document to Meir expressing his evaluation of the situation now that Israel was twenty-five years old. Toledano foresaw severe problems with the growing alienation and radicalization of the Arab minority. One month later, Toledano submitted another report to the political committee of the Labor party containing his recommendations for a policy of “reward and punishment” toward Arab individuals and local or political collectives. He expressed three limitations of implementing such a policy: the democratic nature of the state that could not implement an efficient use of this policy without being exposed to judicial or public criticism; the inability to secure complete coordination of all government ministries and institutions; and the difficulty in defi ning who is “negative” (to be punished), particularly regarding bodies such as local councils. He explained this difficulty as follows: “Until now we regarded as ‘negative’ every council affi liated with Rakah, even if the majority of its members including its chair were affi liated with ‘positive’ parties. In this way of implementation, we harm villages where most of their voters cast the ballots in favor of ‘positive’ parties.”23 Toledano recommended that the Central Committee for Security (a government committee with the participation of senior officers of the IDF, the General Security Service and the Police, headed by him) would examine and define each person or village and label them “positive” or “negative.” He also suggested that every government ministry would be subject to the policies laid down by the Central Committee for Security or by the interministerial committee for Israeli Arabs.24 Thus, a committee of civil servants, in which the security agencies played a major role, formulated the administrative actions of the government regarding its Arab citizens, both as individuals and as a group. Another policy paper written by Toledano and submitted to Prime Minister Meir, titled The Minorities in Israel, exemplifies the diverging concepts of the policy makers. Toledano informed his superior that the government had held only two general discussions dedicated to Israeli Arabs since the creation of the state and in fact had not fi nalized any policy regarding the Arab minority. In the political chapter of this document, Toledano stated, “Until now we succeeded in preventing the inauguration of an Arab party.

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The Zionist parties, however, do not absorb Arabs as members of their parties, and Israeli Arabs themselves do not view the Zionist parties as a proper framework for their political activity. Arab departmental bodies should be organized within the existing [Zionist] parties. At present, any Arab academic who has self-respect has no choice but to join Rakah.”25 Toledano highlighted several problems involving Arab citizens that remained unsolved. These included humiliating social attitudes held by Jews toward Arabs and Druze, the failure to absorb Arab academics into professional employment, the lack of employment resources in Arab villages and towns, and other demographic and land problems, such as high birth rates among Muslims, a growing Arab majority in the Galilee, and the dispersion of the Bedouin population over a large territory in the Negev. Toledano asked why these problems remained unsolved and explained that while he was responsible for government policy, he had no authority over the individual ministries. For example, Toledano mentioned the inability to move forward with a land settlement policy in the Negev, accusing each ministry of having its own goals, which confl icted with the others. He proposed that the government nominate a minister of Arab affairs, indicating that the Israeli Arabs themselves were the ones demanding the nomination. Not surprisingly, Toledano’s adversaries accused him of attempting to tailor the ministerial suit for himself. The stick-and-carrot policy granted political power to the office of the prime minister’s advisor of Arab affairs. Reading a letter sent in December 1974 by one of Toledano’s assistants to his patron, one could conclude that personal interests were interwoven in essential national interests.26 The advisor and his assistants were particularly interested in the carrots, namely, that government agencies would accept their recommendations as to who should be given benefits and resources, in order that they could cultivate Arab leaders and, by so doing, increase their own political power. A certain person from the so-and-so clan is “positive,” they would tell other government officials, in order to convince them to allocate benefits to these individuals, which in the end would benefit the advisor. The above-mentioned assistant, who was director of the largest district of the prime minister’s advisor on Arab affairs in the northern part of Israel, complained in his 1974 letter that the stick-and-carrot policy was being

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used less frequently and was less effective.27 In an attempt to convince the decision makers, he asserted an “orientalist” argument: “The influence of this measure [reward and punishment] is highly appreciated by minorities who perceive the regime that uses these methods as acting out of legitimate power, and they express high esteem for a stable administration compared to an authority that does not use such a mechanism, which is perceived as very weak and diluted.”28 He argued that they had to make full use of this strategy in order to extend the outreach of our friends, and limit the advancement of our opponents. The more we succeed in isolating one group from another, and the more the Arab public realizes that it is beneficial to work with “friendlies,” and not to be counted with the negative elements, the more we will be able to control this population in the long term. The major obstacle of implementing the stick-and-carrot policy is that we are a democratic state, and all that this entails. In spite of this fact, there are many other areas in which we could implement this policy without a clash with the law, and public opinion.29

He continued by indicating that this policy was very successful among the Druze and Circasian communities, and recommended that other sectors of society be divided in this fashion, such as the Bedouins, Christians, and even Muslims. The author suggested operating the policy on the individual service level and extending its implementation to the Histadrut (General organization of the workers’ and professional unions) as well as other public groups and NGOs.30 To what extent did Toledano influence the Labor party’s policy? An internal party document issued in 1979 strongly opposed establishing an Arab national party, as well as the increase of Rakah political power.31 The document proposed the creation of Arab leadership on a local and district levels in religious, communal, or professional frameworks and the gradual endorsement of middle-aged and young-generation leadership who would not be expected to publicly identify with Zionist goals. Presumably, this policy document reflected an attempt to join the two leading approaches of the Labor factions mentioned above (those of Toledano and Linn). Therefore, it stated the need to pursue a carrot-and-stick policy toward the Arabs, to be

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carried out by all government ministries, as well as some more liberal steps. However, as will be discussed below there, was a gap between the declared policy of the committee and its implementation. In retrospect, one should emphasize that Mapai leaders deluded themselves into thinking that co-optation on the one hand and a policy of punishment on the other hand would halt Arab empowerment as a national minority group. The Koenig Memorandum Other public officials had competing views. One was Israel Koenig, the northern district administrator for the Ministry of the Interior, who was affi liated with the National Religious Party (NRP), HaMafdal, which was part of the Labor coalition from the 1950s until 1977. Koenig attempted to stop the process of establishing new Arab municipalities—a policy endorsed by Toledano. When he failed, he tried to prevent free elections for the councils. Koenig wanted to prevent the emergence of political power in the Arab population, minimize the consolidation of power by Toledano and his party, and fi nally strengthen himself and his party’s political power. Again, personal interests merged with party interests, supported by the ideological concept of national security.32 Toledano endorsed the policy of empowering the local governments of Arab communities by nominating municipal councils in dozens of Arab towns and villages, to the chagrin of Koenig. Moreover, from 1972 to 1974, the National Committee for Arab Heads of Municipalities was established. Although allowing this group to form violated the government policy of resisting the national organization of Israeli Arabs, Toledano supported the organization: he saw it as a counterbalancing force to Rakah and the Arab nationalist camp. His expectations, that the inauguration of this committee would reroute Arab activity from the nationalist to the municipal domain, were not met, however.33 Moreover, Toledano believed that the new Arab organization would be depended on government funding and consequently subordinated to the state apparatus. This view proved to be invalid. Toledano’s ideological opponent, Israel Koenig, endorsed the policy of expropriating Arab-owned land to change the settlement and demography

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in Northern Israel in favor of Jews. The Galilee Development Plan was cultivated to achieve this goal. Toledano anticipated that the plan would outrage the Arab minority and he negotiated with Arab municipal heads the terms of the plan. Fearing that the negotiation would hamper the plan’s realization, set to begin on 1 March 1976, Koenig sent a confidential memorandum to prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. The “Koenig Memorandum,” which was leaked to the press six months later, accused Toledano and the Labor party’s “liberal policies” of undermining Israel’s security. Although the memorandum was sent to Rabin in 1976 by Koenig, I discovered that the document was initiated in early 1974 and was originally written by three Jewish mayors in addition to Koenig. According to one of the drafters, Tzvi Alderotti, the four were motivated by the fear that Israeli Jews might lose Galilee to the Arabs if a drastic policy was not adopted.34 Koenig argued in his memorandum that the Arabic-speaking officials who handled Israeli Arab affairs (Toledano and other Labor politicians and bureaucrats) targeted violent elements from among the Arab population and turned them into leaders. He added that those functionaries’ thinking was “Arab,” and that they lacked critical and analytical skills to foresee the process of radicalization because they identified overwhelmingly with their Arab subjects. Koenig wrote that the demographic balance in Galilee was changing in favor of the Arabs. He stressed, “Their growth in Galilee is a threat to our sovereignty in this district and opens possibilities for neighboring Arab armies to penetrate Israel. The concern is the solidarity of the nationalistic elements among Israeli Arabs with the Arab states, and their willingness to assist such forces.” Koenig expressed his anxiety that the Arabs would demand a referendum in the northern district and that they would present their demands to international forums. He reported that after the December 1975 Nazareth municipal elections, most of the city’s population joined ranks with the Rakah party and hurried to pay their municipal tax debts. He presented Rakah as an enemy. “It should be mentioned that the term Israel does not appear in the Rakah party’s letterhead and this is no coincidence,” he wrote. Koenig also asserted that there was a new campaign of land purchase by Arabs in the north in general, particularly in Upper Nazareth, in Acre, and in the Asdrolean (Izra‘el) valley. His recommendations were as follows:

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to increase Jewish settlement in Arab-concentrated districts—especially in Nazareth and along the borders—and to enforce construction and planning laws strictly in order to limit Arab settlements, to operate a policy of stick-and-carrot with regard to leaders and villages who express hostility to the state, to establish a new sister party to Labor that would campaign for equality and peace, and to give the General Security Service a covert and controlling presence in this party. Referring to the Arab leadership, he said that Israeli Jews were naïve and unfamiliar with Arab dealings. They did not take into consideration the “Levantine and shallow culture in which imagination overarches rationality.” He called for the reshuffle of all governmental experts on Arab affairs, the reestablishment of a new Arab leadership and party, and a witch hunt against Rakah leaders, or, as he expressed it, nomination of “a special team and General Security Service unit that will investigate the manners of the Rakah leaders and other negative personalities, and expose the fi ndings to the public, and to take personal actions against every ‘negative’ figure at all levels and in all institutions.”35 Koenig’s memorandum shows that his evaluation of Israel’s power and of the regional challenges from Arab neighboring states was completely different from Toledano’s. Koenig was afraid of Israeli Arab citizens’ collaboration with hostile Arab elements in the Middle East. In contrast, Toledano, a former Mossad officer, did not see the Arab minority as an existential threat to the state. In the economic realm, Koenig stated that the Arabs’ welfare had improved. He believed they had significant fi nancial resources that were not reported to the tax authorities and that their comprehensive economic condition was quite good since they did not serve in the army: during those three years, they were able to earn additional income. He accused them of accumulating black money that could fi nd its way to hostile organizations (“the payment of debts to the Nazareth municipality has already been mentioned,” he reminded). He also warned that Arabs might take over some economic sectors and have the ability to paralyze them, which would cause severe damage to the national economy. Koenig suggested the following ways to overcome these threats: in every factory in a critical area that is funded by the state, the number of Arab workers should not exceed 20 percent; limit child

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allowances to Arabs by transferring the responsibility for these allowances to Jewish agencies and Zionist organizations; and important institutions should prefer the employment of Jews over Arabs. Koenig feared the emergence of a new generation of educated Arab leaders who would be nationalists, which led him to recommend that “their travel abroad be facilitated for educational and employment purposes, and that it is made almost impossible for such travelers to return—such a policy could endorse their emigration.” In implementing such a law, Koenig determined that public interest should outweigh individual rights and that the promotion of national security should be a national priority. As he wrote: “One should recall the lessons from other nation-states’ experiences, which also have national minorities, that an over-liberalist and unregulated approach does not lead to the ultimate goal planned by its architects, but on the contrary. This rule is applicable particularly to a portion of the Arab minority in Israel.”36 In the Bureau of the Advisor on Arab Affairs, Toledano prepared a response titled “The Policy of a Soft Hand toward Israeli Arabs Will Not Calm Them Down, and the Policy of the Iron Fist Will Not Oppress Them.” This was structured as an article to be published in the media. It did not challenge Koenig’s moral and nondemocratic ideological values but rather his factual claims. The document drafter, not surprisingly, defended the government’s experts on Arab affairs (“Arabists”), arguing that these experts deliberately predicted a growth of the Arab nationalistic trend. He quoted from Toledano’s notes written in July 1971 and March 1973 to support these arguments. Defending the reputation of advisors on Arab affairs was important in order to prove that five years earlier he had warned about the same phenomenon Koenig pointed out in his memorandum. Interestingly, the drafter did not challenge Koenig’s demographic assertions and recommendations. He only challenged his data, writing that Koenig confused fertility with natural birth rates so that his figures were exaggerated. The compiler also claimed that Koenig’s description of the processes’ consequences was exaggerated. He asserted, “We do not expect any possibility that because of the demographic structure in the area, a reversal will occur to hamper Jewish sovereignty in the Galilee.” The solution to the demographic challenge, according to the response, was “to immediately be proactive in terms of birth control.”

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The response document defended the Arabists, who, according to Koenig, were Levantines who had adopted the culture of their subjects. In other words, the author defended the officers and not the stereotypes suggested by Koenig against the Arabs: “40 percent of all officers working in Arab affairs are from European extraction, some of them university graduates, mainly in the field of Oriental studies.” Referring to the personal attacks against the leaders of Rakah, the drafter did not challenge Koenig on moral grounds but rather claimed that “pursuing so many people was impractical.” As a district governor, Koenig enjoyed wide authority, enabling him to enact part of the policy that he recommended. For example, in 1979 Koenig restricted the transfer of funds to the Nazareth municipality, which was under the control of the Rakah party. In justification, he sent the attorney general a poster designed by that municipality, interpreting this poster as “expressing hostility towards state authorities” and demanding the government take legal measures against municipal authorities.37 The 1976 Land Day riots broke out before the Koenig memorandum was made public. They erupted in reaction to a land expropriation project and resulted with six Arab rioters shot to death by security forces. They were a watershed in Jewish-Arab relations in Israel and were followed by an attempt by the government to appease the Arab community in Israel. Two weeks after the publication of the Koenig memorandum in the press on 22 September 1976, some 300 Arab municipal council members convened in Nazareth to discuss their reaction to the memorandum. They criticized Prime Minister Rabin, who had not taken action against the author of the memorandum, and they demanded that Koenig be dismissed. They decided to hold a general strike in Arab municipalities for two hours on 28 September.38 However, the government did not fi re Koenig; rather he continued in service until 1986. There is no doubt that the Koenig report embodies ideas the ruling establishment inherited from the martial regime of the 1950s and the 1960s.39 However, although the Toledano office’s response to the Koenig memorandum did not challenge its moral concepts, Toledano’s approach toward the Arab minority was completely different to Koenig’s memorandum. By initiating Arab municipal councils and two five-year development

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plans of the Arab sector, Toledano showed far more willingness to allow Arab self-determination. Ahmad Sa‘di’s claim that the Koenig memorandum represents both Toledano’s and the government policy is wrong.40 Sa‘di uses testimony of Toledano before the leaders of the Labor party in 1968 to analyze policies of the 1970s—a decade after the abolishment of the military government over the Arabs. Moreover, that 1968 testimony of Toledano ended with a series of questions, which show that Toledano already questioned the existing policies. Government policy blueprints drafted between 1967 and 1976 regarding the Arab minority expressed the fears of the Israeli Jewish establishment. Advisors to the prime minister were concerned with the growing nationalistic trend in Arab society. They feared that instability would emerge if the minority established a strong national party and if a large segment of the Arab population was unemployed. They were afraid that the state would lose Jewish dominance in Galilee in favor of the Arabs and lose control over a large area in the Negev. The Koenig memorandum expressed much deeper concerns. Koenig perhaps expressed common, primeval Israeli Jewish fears driven by the siege mentality of a nation that sees itself surrounded by hostile neighbors and afraid that the Arab minority would be a fi fth column in time of war. Although the 1973 war disproved this concern, the rejoining of Israeli Arabs with their Palestinian kin created a different evaluation. Selective Social and Economic Integration The most significant change following the end of the military government was the opening of the general labor market for Arab employees. The process of abolishing the military government was also accompanied by the admission of Arabs into the Histadrut, improvement of health and other governmental services within Arab villages and towns, compensation and rehabilitation of internal refugees, establishing and developing Bedouin settlements, modest investments in education, the development of a fiveyear plan to develop Arab village infrastructure, admission of Arab students into universities, and institutionalization of the Muslim Waqf and shari‘a court system.41

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Demography and Land Policies (before the Galilee Judaization Plan) In order to safeguard the Jewish nature of the state of Israel, it was necessary to increase its Jewish population in light of the high growth of the Arab population, which, by 1965, reached a global record (4.5 percent annually).42 The demographic factor was a major concern for the government. Levi Eshkol, as prime minister, established the Center of Demography. The role of this center was to recommend policies to increase the birth rate among Jews and provide health services for the Arab population, in order to instill western norms of family planning in the hope of regulating the increase in the natural birth rate (see chapter 10).43 During the 1970s, the Israeli government strengthened the legal and administrative measures aimed at the demographic challenge by endorsing Jewish population growth and immigration to the state. In 1970, a bill was ratified that gave preference in the payment of child allowances by the National Welfare Institute (Bituah Leumi) to families of which at least one member served in the military, in other words, largely to Jewish families.44 This benefit was only provided to families of three children and above. During the discussion of the bill in the Knesset, the government explicitly admitted that the law distinguished between two groups of citizens: Jews and Arabs. During the debate, some Knesset members warned that such a law would damage the democratic fabric of the state. One alternate proposal was to authorize the Jewish Agency to pursue the fi nancial support of families with many children in order to escape the need for state discrimination against one group of citizens. However, this proposal failed to attract a majority vote. In the 1980s, it was revealed that as a result of coalition agreements, Jews who did not serve in the army (mainly ultraorthodox Jews) also received the higher allowances (in the form of yeshiva student scholarships and other funds provided by the Ministry of Religious Affairs). This loophole was amended, after it was exposed in the press and the case was fi led in the Supreme Court.45 In conclusion, the application of two political paradigms, a liberal approach and political co-optation, led to a comprehensive government policy that operated on two fronts: the fi rst still regarded Arabs as a security risk

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to the state and consequently sought to isolate the Arab sector at the margins of Israeli society, preventing any unified and organized leadership while repressing economic development and geopolitical expansion. The second attempted to use their labor potential and recruit them into the labor force. The policy that followed the military government did not create any substantial changes in the lives of the Israeli Arab minority. It was the same game with a different name, namely, the policy of control and co-optation based on the carrot-and-stick strategy. In addition to the fact that the same civil servants who controlled the Arab minority during the military regime remained in their positions, the 1967 war and its consequences could also explain why the concept of control prevailed after 1967. The Palestinian issue and the process of Palestinization that Israeli Arabs underwent concerned the Jewish establishment, who therefore opted for keeping control measures to cope with the situation. Thus, the perception of the Arabs as a hostile minority persisted together with some minor attempts to be more liberal. An important question to be discussed is whether the policy blueprints discussed in the two memos quoted above materialized. Ian Lustick concluded in 1980 that “the regime has experienced a real decrease in its ability to manipulate the Arab population,”46 although he also thought that “for the next ten to fi fteen years . . . it is unlikely that either the resources or the political ingenuity of the regime [will] be seriously strained by the task of controlling the Arab population.”47 History shows that once military rule ended in 1966, government agencies lost their mechanism of implementing control and co-optation. The carrot-and-stick strategy was not as efficient as during the system of military government. Its effectiveness gradually was reduced, replaced, in effect, by neglect. In contrast to the military administration that gave orders and was regarded as a supreme governing institution, the governmental ministries each had independent methods of administration and approach in their handling of Arab affairs. The prime minister’s advisor on Arab affairs had only advisory powers, not operative ability or budgetary capacity. The internal rivalry within the Mapai/Labor party and between Toledano and other senior officers such as Koenig or other cabinet members made the ability to implement an effective policy almost impossible. Some of the elite officers viewed the advisor on Arab affairs as a political agent striving for

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self-aggrandizement. Therefore, they regarded him as an adversary, and they did not cooperate with him. As a result, there was a huge gap between policy proposals and their implementation. In fact, the policy of control and co-optation was ineffective and existed “on paper” only by 1976, a decade after the abolition of military rule. The document written in 1974 by the assistant to the advisor on Arab affairs testified that the stick-and-carrot strategy was rarely implemented. The ineffectiveness was manifested clearly when the government was unable to deter Arab mayors from conducting a general strike on 30 March 1976. Moderate Arab leaders, who in the past had collaborated with the government, after Land Day shifted their affi liation to the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (DFPE) or Hadash (the Communist party). The lack of influence was later seen in the results of Arab vote for the Knesset in May 1977; for the fi rst time since the inception of Israel, the majority of the Arab voters cast their ballots for the Communist party. In practice, the lack of centralized control gradually—but consistently—normalized the services provided for Arab citizens and significantly weakened the government’s ability to control them. Arab Political Behavior: The Land Day Riots and Their Ramifications As discussed, 30 March 1976 was a watershed in the history of Arabs in Israel. The “Galilee Judaization Plan,” which, following criticism, was changed to the “Galilee Development Plan,” aimed to expropriate privately owned land for the expansion of the Jewish towns of Karmiel and Upper Nazareth, and respond to the concern that the Galilee region bordering Lebanon and Syria would be dominated by the Arab population. Of about 20,000 dunams to be expropriated, Arab citizens owned some 6,000 dunams. Louis Kriesberg argues that “matters that are regarded as of vital interest by one or more of the adversaries have great potential for escalation. The party defending what it believes to be essential to its existence will use whatever means it has that it believes will be effective against the threat to its existence.”48 Land and national identity are interwoven, and the struggle to defend the land carries both a personal and a collective dimension, namely, the defending of a national territory that strengthens the national

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identity of those who participate in this struggle. There was no doubt that the Arabs viewed the land issue as a vital existential issue that justified an uprising. The question here is whether the government land expropriation plan was the underlying cause of the Land Day riots or just the trigger. I will argue that what motivated the Arab leadership to call for a general strike by the entire Arab population on 30 March 1976 was not only the specific land expropriation but the Arabs’ view of this action as a continuous policy of land expropriation. This time they believed that they were empowered enough to mobilize and prevent the plan’s implementation. They were also offended by the Jewish public and official discourses of “Judaization of the Galilee,” which they interpreted as delegitimizing their existence; if they failed to act, as they had under the military rule, perhaps the policy of land expropriation and discrimination would continue. Moreover, it is clear that the Israel-Palestinian confl ict after the 1967 occupation also added to their anger, as I will elaborate below. The general strike by the entire Arab population on 30 March 1976 turned into a violent mass protest that was dispersed by the security forces, resulting in numerous injuries as well as the death of six Arab citizens. The 1976 protest became a foundational event for the Arab minority (as well as the entire Palestinian people) to be commemorated every year by protests and demonstrations, signifying their struggle to improve their status as a national minority and as part of the Palestinian people. Land Day became a day of commemoration, a day of protest, and a day of celebration all in one, and is marked annually by Palestinian communities in Israel as well as in the Palestinian diaspora. Since August 1975, when state institutions decided to expropriate Arabowned land, a debate developed between Toledano, who opposed expropriation, and General Meir Zore‘a (nicknamed Zaro), the general director of the Israel Land Authority who proposed the plan. The General Security Service supported Zore‘a’s plan. In a meeting of the Supreme Committee for Land Expropriation of the Israel Land Authority, Toledano attempted to block the proposal, arguing that, due to its political ramifications, this delicate matter should be decided by the cabinet and not by a committee of civil servants. When it was discussed in the cabinet, two ministers—Natan Peled and Victor Shem-Tov from the Mapam party—supported Toledano’s

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view and Toledano was able to recruit the support of the two ministers of the Independent Liberal party, Moshe Kol and Gideon Hausner. Toledano convinced them to propose that significant reparations should be paid to the landowners. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin rejected this change and decided to support Zaro’s proposal. The fi nance minister submitted the expropriation plan to the government, and it was enumerated without any discussion. The reparations to be paid to the Arabs as compensation for their land was to be “to the extent that is possible,” namely, practically zero. The government’s plan for land expropriation was not the only negligent strategy they pursued at this time. A few weeks prior to Land Day, another initiative was taken. In mid-February 1976 the council heads of three villages in the Bet Netofa valley (al-Batuf in Arabic), Dir Hanna, ‘Arabe, and Sakhnin, received a letter from a police officer of the nearby Segev station stating, “Know that the entrance to [training] Zone 9 is forbidden and whoever enters this area will be prosecuted. Any trespasser will be prosecuted as having entered an army facility. You must inform the village inhabitants of

2. Training Zone 9. Data provided by Dr. Amiram Oren; map designed by Ohad Reiter.

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this announcement.” The letter was on a small piece of paper, without an identifying signature and without preliminary negotiations or even an explanation. But the statement forbade the villagers from entering and cultivating their 13,500 dunams of land, called al-Mal in Arabic. The use by the IDF of training zone 9 (a large block of land originally encompassing some 42,000 dunams), which had been closed off by the British Mandate government during World War II, had always been problematic: it was close to several Arab villages, and land owners continued to cultivate most of this zone in order to protect their land rights. The government had attempted a number of times to overturn the relatively comfortable arrangement established by the British, of nonintensive use of the land and consideration of the landowners, and seal off the area, preventing its use by the owners. Such attempts occurred in 1956 and again 1967, but the army ended up rescinding its intention and reaching another agreement with the heads of the local councils that would enable the villagers to continue to cultivate their lands, some of which had olive and almond trees planted on them. This time, however, the action was interpreted differently. The Arab landowners were afraid the government’s intention was to expropriate their land and they linked this to the wider land expropriation plan, which was public by this time. This link was made since the area had not been used as a training zone since 1967. In light of the expansion of military zones after Israel occupied territories after the Six Day War, the IDF preferred to make use of those territories: Sinai, Golan Heights, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip. Mahmud Sa‘id Na‘amne, the head of the local council of Arabe, explained the reaction in the “Black Book” (Al-Kitab al-Aswad), published by the National Committee for the Protection of Arab Lands after Land Day: We interpreted the closure order as a preparation for the expropriation of our lands going by what we have become accustomed to in expropriation operations. The order enraged the inhabitants and particularly the farmers who feared their families would lose their livelihood. By the following day, a large convention gathered in Sakhnin to rally against the closure orders, and protest actions were taken in order to attract local and international support. These actions forced the Ministry of Defense to call a meeting

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of the inhabitants’ representatives. Eventually, they found it appropriate to renounce the closure order, and they decided to divide the area into two zones without expropriating the land, and this is of importance. However, we have heard in the media recently that the government has plans to construct Jewish settlements in training zone 9 and this has again raised fears among the villagers.49

When the ruling authorities realized that the closing order of zone 9 could lead to riots, they opted for negotiation with representatives of the three villages, which resulted in a new agreement being signed two weeks after the original order was given. This enabled the farmers to enter their land either with a two-year permit or a special permit that accommodated the needs of the IDF’s training schedule. Apparently the government was prepared to sacrifice access to this training zone in order not to harm the expropriation plan. The Arab community interpreted this agreement differently. They viewed the Defense Ministry’s compromise as an outcome of the protest and the unity that they had demonstrated. Consequently, they expected (wrongly, as will be explained later) that the protest planned for 30 March would achieve similar results. As noted, a general strike was announced for 30 March 1976. On the evening of 29 March, army trucks transporting soldiers from training zone 9 encountered barriers of rocks and burning tires laid out by Arab protestors on the road between the villages Dir Hanna and Sakhnin. The soldiers, who were noncommissioned and simply traveling back from the training zone, were unprepared and trapped while protesters stoned them and threw cans of boiling oil. The soldiers opened fi re, killing one Arab villager as well as injuring few others. This was the beginning of a series of clashes that erupted over the next few days. The entire area was put under curfew, and the police and border police were quickly summoned to establish order in these three villages. Arab inhabitants violated the curfew, prompting security forces to use their guns to enforce it, and protesters attacked the police cars. Dozens of people were injured, among them soldiers and policemen as well as the six Arabs who were killed.50 In his testimony in the “Black Book,” Jamal Tarabey, the head of the Sakhnin Local Council, explained how he had advocated a peaceful

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demonstration: “On the 29th of March, the eve of the Land Day (Arabic: Yawm al-Ard), I stood in front of a large group of protesters from our village Sakhnin and asked them to express their anger by striking peacefully as we would normally mark and mourn the loss of a person dear to us.” A few hours after the outbreak, Tarabey was still attempting to calm the atmosphere, as the authorities expected him to. However, the situation soon deteriorated: When I was called to the police station in the evening, it was after the situation in the neighboring village Dir Hanna had already deteriorated. Thousands of bullets hit the fences and the balconies of the houses in the village and the illuminations from the bullets were observed from Sakhnin houses, and suddenly in our village there were many injured people. . . . They convened in the main road of the village while bullets continued to target them and blood dripped and covered our precious homeland. From my window I watched the crazy actions of the “security” forces that provoked the actions of the citizens. Thousands of shots, fi fty wounded, seventy arrested, and three dead [at this stage]. The commander of the northern district, General Raphael Eitan, said to me, “Your resistance to the security forces should cease immediately or else I will come down hard on the village . . . ” I asked for a delay . . . as the picture became clear so the sky darkened and the mourning and the anger rose when the names of the killed were announced: Raja Husayn Abu Raya, Khadr Khalayla, and Hadija Shawahna . . . 51

The situation calmed down only in the late evening after the Arab leaders of the villages promised the military commander and the police officers that they would reinstate order. The trigger for the unprecedented protests in March 1976 clearly illustrates the link between civil rights and the nationalist struggle. Emile Touma, one of Rakah’s ideologists, accurately expressed it in a lecture he delivered a few months after Land Day: National rights are fi rst and foremost recognizing that Israeli Arabs are an Arab minority, not minorities . . . if you approach the issue with these definitions, using a nationalist approach, you realize that they need to develop socially, economically, and culturally. We view national rights also as the

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elimination of discrimination and national oppression that we witness in the example of land expropriation . . . in differences of budget allocation to municipalities . . . in education . . . in the constitution . . . for instance, the law of citizenship discriminates; this is how we defi ne the national rights of the Arab population in Israel.

The Israeli Arabs’ Land Day was also related to the Israeli-Palestinian confl ict in a way that underlines the interlocking dimension of the confl ict and its role in times of escalation. The fact that the government initiated the land expropriation plan at the same time that West Bank Palestinians were clashing with the occupying authorities, resisting the takeover of their lands and Jewish settlement activity, created the link between an internal civil protest of Arabs in Israel—struggle for civil status and rights—and their identity as part of the Palestinian people who were struggling for the right to self-determination over their land. Immediately after the government announced its intention to expropriate a lot of land in order to “Judaize” Galilee, Arab leaders linked this expropriation to the government’s policy in the Palestinian territories. Thus, for example, in a national protest that took place on 19 October 1975 against the expropriation plan, the organizers announced that they expected a just peace, which could only be realized by complete implementation of the UN Security Council’s Resolution 242 and Israel’s withdrawal from the territories occupied in June 1967.52 In another gathering of Arab political activists that took place two months after Land Day, the statement released maintained, among other things, “The aggression displayed against the Israeli Arabs on Land Day cannot be separated from the continuous aggression shown towards the Arabs of the territories administered since 1967. It is but a new chapter in the policy of the denial of the Palestinian people’s rights, reflected in the taking over of lands by force, administrative detentions, torture of prisoners, and exploding houses. This is the policy used against Arabs since the establishment of the state, a policy that has turned them into hostages stripped of their rights.”53 The Palestinians in the territories and the PLO also played a role in forming the link between the two issues. The PLO took advantage of the Israeli Arabs’ mobilization and declared a simultaneous general strike in

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the territories. In fact, in most of the West Bank cities, a trade strike took place on 30 March 1976.54 Soon after Land Day, the Palestinian National Council stated, “We saw the occupied part of Palestine since 1948 joining the occupied part of Palestine in 1967.”55 In addition, it was obvious that Israeli Arabs were imitating the actions of Palestinian demonstrators against West Bank settlement activity: blocking roads with rocks, burning tires, throwing stones and burning oil cans at security forces, and burning cars—all new forms of protest for Israeli Arabs. As Shaykh Zaki Diab, the head of the Tamra Council, stated in an interview, “The TV shows Arabs [in the West Bank] throwing stones at soldiers, and they learn from this how to behave.”56 The land expropriation program initiated by the government, which led to Land Day, is more evidence that the military government paradigm still existed. The government had not contemplated that its actions could lead to a protest of such magnitude. They failed to predict the consequences of their actions. Similarly, the organizers of the general strike, the Arab leadership, did not expect the protest to spill over into a violent confrontation with Israeli security forces. They hoped for a powerful, legitimate protest but were unprepared for its tragic results. Land Day shocked both the Jewish and Arab communities. The Arab population was traumatized by the fact that their protest was met with military and police blocking, which caused the loss of lives and a huge number of casualties. The scale of the rebellion demonstrated by the Arab citizens, who until then had been a compliant and passive minority, surprised the Jewish population. This “earthquake” led the Jewish establishment to reevaluate the situation and to initiate policies to integrate the Arab minority in order to prevent its alienation from the state. The Arabs viewed the government’s steps—despite the fact that these steps were not effective ones—as a lesson that mass protests produce desired results. Elie Rekhess holds the view that the resistance demonstrated by the Palestinians in the territories against the Jewish settlement activities and against the Israeli government’s actions was interpreted by Israeli Arabs as success of Palestinian protesters against hesitant security forces who did not know how to cope with their protest. A new leadership, consisting mostly of academics and professionals, led the Israeli Arab struggle and were to become the backbone of the resistance by the minority.

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The ramifications of Land Day were expressed in two domains of Arab political behavior. The fi rst was a shift of Arab leaders who formerly identified with Zionist parties but, following the events of March 1976, joined the Communist Front (DFPE). The second was Arab voting patterns. In 1965, the last year of military rule, 76 percent of the Arabs voted for Zionist parties or their Arab satellite lists, and 24 percent voted for the Communist party. In 1969, Arab support for Zionist parties diminished to 70 percent, in 1973 to 62 percent, and in 1977 to 49 percent (47 percent if mixed cities are included).57 In summary, during the 1976 Land Day events the Arab population in Israel mobilized toward a rebellious protest that marked a peak of escalation in the Jewish-Arab confl ict in Israel. Policy Drafting Following Land Day and Arab Reaction As stated, Land Day shook the Jewish establishment. The government realized that the Arabs were capable of organizing for political mobilization, and took a number of measures in order to appease them while still endorsing Jewish territorial hegemony by initiating a new program of Jewish settlement— “observation points” (mitzpim)—to be discussed in the following chapters. During the cabinet’s discussion dealing with a comprehensive policy regarding Arab citizens in the aftermath of Land Day, one of the ministers, Moshe Kol, of the Independent Liberals party, recommended a liberal policy toward the Arabs. In an article published three years later, he made public his recommendations: During the Rabin government I continued to demand the conducting of in-depth discussions and I even submitted a memorandum including fourteen action points to assist in the integration of young, educated Arabs within the social and economic life of the state. Furthermore I suggested that the Histadruth, as a strong economic and public agency, could serve as an example in this regard. I argued that the Arab department of the Histadruth executive committee is shortsighted in its approach to the Arab sector. The cabinet decided to pass on my proposals to the advisor on Arab affairs, Shmuel Toledano, and to be discussed by a special cabinet. My feeling was that the prime minister did not believe a change in the relationship

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with the Arab minority is possible as long as there is no peace [emphasis added]. The special cabinet discussed the issue of the Negev Bedouins but did not manage to discuss the fundamental questions because, in the meantime, a political reshuffle had taken place.

Kol thought that unless it was handled properly, the problem of the Arab minority would be “a time bomb undermining the foundations of our state.” He criticized an article by Professor Amnon Rubinstein that agreed with Yitzhak Rabin’s position, that there was not much to be done regarding the Israeli Arab problem until peace and a solution for the Palestinian problem was achieved.58 The Palestinian-Israeli confl ict was regarded as a major obstacle to change in government policy toward the Arab minority. The action taken by the Rabin government after Land Day was mainly a declaration of intentions: “to invigorate the execution of the Israeli government’s policy regarding the integration of Israeli Arab citizens into the state, on the basis of complete and equal citizenship, while respecting their particular cultural and religious affi liation.”59 In order to reach this goal, three bodies were to be established: a special ministerial committee headed by the prime minister, a Jewish-Arab public council, and a committee of general directors of the ministries headed by the advisor on Arab affairs. This was named the interministerial committee, and consisted of ten ministerial officials and the three security agencies—the army, the General Security Service, and the police. The decision concluded that Moshe Kol’s and Shmuel Toledano’s proposals (the more liberal approach) would be submitted for review by the special cabinet committee, but this was never convened. The government proposed an additional thirteen actions regarding the integration of Israeli Arabs, but none of these were actually implemented. The most significant operational decision of the government was to place 120 Arab university graduates in the civil service. Such a decision demanded special preparation and, apart from a few exceptions, Rabin’s government did not have the chance to implement its decision prior to the elections of 1977. For example, Rasmi Bayadsi, a former education inspector, was named the PM’s deputy advisor on Arab affairs. Another university graduate, Ahmad Natur (later the president of the Supreme Shari‘a Court), was nominated in the same office to handle Arab student matters. He was expected to calm

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down Arab students’ protest activities by appeasing them with scholarships funded by the Muslim waqf reparations.60 Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin resigned his office in late 1976, and the government entered an election campaign without ever having convened the committees that it had formed. Although the general director’s committee did not convene before the campaign, its chair managed to nominate a subcommittee of lower-level officials. This subcommittee met with the aim of redefi ning the relationship between the state and its Arab citizens.61 Meir Jarrah, the director of the Arab department in the Prime Minister’s Information Agency and Labor party activist, argued in the committee’s fi rst (and only) session, “Arab circles opt for a bi-national state.” Therefore, he proposed describing the relationship (between the Arabs and the state) with an emphasis on the Jewish uniqueness of the state. The subcommittee’s fi nal defi nition reflected this proposal: “The purpose—Israel is a Jewish state that fosters equal rights and duties for all its citizens regardless of religion, race, or national affi liation. Israeli Arabs are an integral part of the state of Israel, and as all citizens, are bound to express loyalty [to the state], and identify actively and completely [with the state], while preserving their unique Arab, cultural, and religious heritage.”62 All of the committee members agreed upon the need to endorse a sense of belonging to and sharing in the state alongside the development of a particular Israeli Arab identity associated with the state: There is a need to create this association among the [Arab] passive majority, and for this purpose, to encourage the establishment of ideological clubs based on intellectuals with good reputations among the Arab population, in order to create wide public appeal, and to endorse leaders on all levels who identify with the above mentioned purpose and who are capable of facing the hostile elements, to encourage the participation of Arabs in the decision making process; to open the parties to their admission, and to revise educational curricula; to develop communal services, among them a civic service that would gradually lead to their incorporation into the IDF, the fi rst step being to create a compulsory national service.63

The last recommendation was debated by the committee’s members, who suggested different versions and reservations about the resolution.64

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The government’s decision to defi ne Israeli Arabs as a cultural and religious minority was criticized harshly by Arab leaders, who demanded they be recognized as a national minority.65 A committee of moderate leaders such as Hanna Muways, Tariq ‘Abd al-Hayy, Jamal Tarabey, and Ahmad Masalha of the National Committee of Arab Heads of Municipalities reacted to the decision in a letter to Prime Minister Rabin, in which they asserted that Israel should be perceived as a binational state. When the letter provoked an outrage in the Jewish establishment, the committee members reneged on their wording and explained it as a “media misunderstanding,” saying that all they meant was to protest that their national identity was not acknowledged in the government’s decision, which relegated them to a cultural and religious minority only.66 One assumes that had this situation occurred today, the committee members would not have apologized. Already in 1976, however, moderate Arab leaders insisted on viewing the Arab minority as a national minority and the state as a binational state. This indicates that intensification of the minority’s demands began a decade after two landmarks: the abolition of the military regime in 1966 and the 1967 war. Conclusion The central question to be asked while analyzing the Jewish-Arab confl ict in the period between 1967 and 1976 is what caused the escalation of tension in Jewish-Arab relations, turning it into the direct confl ict that occurred over the course of Land Day. Most previous studies explain that Land Day was perceived among the Jewish public in Israel as a protest in the realm of civil rights. This chapter suggests a different explanation. The mass violent protests by Israeli Arabs and their iron-fist oppression by the state apparatus stems from a combination of factors and processes. First, from the prism of the “system” or constructionist approach, one should view the struggle over land, demographic hegemony, and settlements as reflecting the structure of the confl ict between Israel as a Jewish state and the Arab citizens as a national minority. The basic structures causing pre- and post-1948 strife between the Jewish entity and Arabs in the broader context and with the Palestinians in the immediate context still existed thirty years after 1948, and are even more relevant today.

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The clash between two nationalist aspirations within Israel is built into the state’s structure at all levels: the ideological, the political, and the practical-operational levels. The strategies of the Jewish majority and the Arab minority are shaped along the lines of the broader confl ict. The Jewish establishment in the 1970s sought to minimize Arab demographic dominance in Galilee and to extend Jewish control and management over Arab territory. The expropriation of Arab-owned land for Jewish settlements was viewed by the Arab minority both as an extension of the intranational confl ict and as a struggle over collective civil rights. It was also perceived as a battle over existential resources—the land. Their protest actions aimed at alarming the majority, and therefore they were conceived as a radical rebellious form. Second, the processes of change influenced both Jewish and the Arab groups. By 1976, Israeli Arabs numbered half a million people, a minority of some 15 percent of the population with a very high birth rate. The system of control and co-optation of this minority, though still following the official policy of reward and punishment, was significantly less effective after the removal of the military administration in 1966. A decade after the elimination of military rule, which gave Arabs access to the general labor market, their economic situation had also improved. The trend for mobilization strengthened following an impressive increase in the number of university graduates, resulting in a group of young leaders who were well-versed in the political situation. All of these factors empowered Israeli Arabs and boosted their confidence in political mobilization.67 An additional factor was a change in Israeli society toward the strengthening of democratic practices that took place following the abolition of military administration. It weakened the effectiveness of the state’s control over the Arabs and ultimately led to more liberal practices in the civil service toward Arabs. Third, psychological factors affected the behavior of the two groups. The demographic dimension generated fear among both of them. The Jewish establishment opted to block Arab dominance in some areas in the northern part of Israel and to foster Jewish birth rates while the Arabs were anxious that land expropriation would become an ongoing process that would deprive them of existential resources. Fourth, the interlocking dimension of the confl ict was manifested in the influence of developments in the West Bank in the Israeli-Palestinian

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confl ict, the external factor. This was a consequence of the 1967 war, and it created a significant change in Israeli society. From being an isolated minority group, Israeli Arabs became part of the Palestinian “inside”—those Palestinians who live in the western part of Palestine. The renewed strife between Israel and West Bank and Gaza Palestinians placed the two ethnonational communities in Israel as something resembling national rivals, and when violent events took place in this broader context they viewed each other as enemies. The 1973 war indicated the connection between the outer and inner circles of the confl icts Israel was involved in. Undoubtedly Israel was seen by the Arabs, both inside and outside Israel, as more vulnerable after than before the war. Palestinians in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 were emboldened, as were the Arab citizens of Israel. The Jewish society and its state institutions felt more insecure, and this resulted in the government’s attempts to strengthen Jewish hold on land in the northern Arab-dominated areas in Israel. The solidarity between the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians and Israeli Arabs in their protest against Israel’s policy toward these two groups’ political demands resulted in the radical position of the Arabs’ leadership and in the violent form of the Land Day demonstrations. The analysis of political events presented in this chapter points to a link between the civil equality issue and the national Palestinian protest that took place in the West Bank and Gaza at the same time. Thus, the external confl ict served as a catalyst for the strong protests on Land Day. In the Land Day protests, Israeli Arabs imitated the protest patterns of West Bank Palestinians who were also resisting Israeli settlement activity. The PLO adopted Land Day. It encouraged a trade strike on this day and later marked 30 March on the national Palestinian calendar. One should also note that leaflets produced before Land Day and published by the Land Defense Committee included a deliberate demand to resolve the Palestinian question.68 Fifth, a national minority is more likely to rebel when other options for mobilizing and modifying its inferior treatment are blocked. The government’s insistence on proceeding with a massive land appropriation plan for Jewish settlements at the expense of Arabs signified to the Israeli Arabs a threat for which they were prepared to sacrifice in order to stop. The fact that the Ministry of Defense conceded their position on closing of training zone 9 prior to Land Day was an encouraging sign for Arab leaders when

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considering the advantages of a protest strategy. Thus, one of the results of Land Day was a kind of political earthquake that forced the Jewish establishment to reevaluate its policy. As a consequence, there have hardly been any incidents of land expropriation in the Arab sector since 1976. Kriesberg notes that group information about deprivations increases the group’s sense of grievance.69 The Land Day events also show that if a group has accurate information on its relative deprivation, it tends to political mobilization. It is not sufficient that a minority member feels like a secondclass citizen and at a disadvantage in basic rights. In order to be willing to struggle and sacrifice, individuals must be equipped with accurate data on the extent of discrimination in terms of their rights. In the fi rst half of the 1970s, a special committee headed by Sami Jiraysi produced reports on the Arabs’ living conditions in terms of economy, housing, and property ownership and use. The studies were published in the media and armed Arab citizens with statistical proof of their disadvantaged position. The report regarding the shortage of land in the Arab sector, which was published in February 1976 shortly before Land Day, indicated the decline in the productivity of Arab agriculture and the lack of land for housing and development due to the increase of land reserved by the government in the Arab sector and its population growth. The report’s compilers compared a Jewish and an Arab village, Kibbutz Yif‘at and the Arab village of Mashhad, and they found that the amount of agricultural land per capita in Yif‘at, which had a smaller population, was five times than that of Mashhad (16 dunams per capita in Yif‘at compared to 3.3 in Mashhad).70 Finally, an important precondition for a civil rebellion by a minority is that the group develops an authentic and legitimate leadership, organizational and institutional systems, and a cohesive group identity. In the mid-1970s, a decade after military rule was abolished, Israeli Arabs already possessed a popular national leadership—the National Committee of Arab Heads of Municipalities—a network of local political organizations such as academic committees and the National Committee for the Protection of Arab Land, and political movements such as Abna’ al-Balad. Israeli Arabs’ identity as a particular group of the Palestinian people was gradually developed after 1967. Such an identity could not have developed without the emergence of a large middle class and a growing number of university graduates, which

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happened during the 1970s.71 Other demographic aspects also played a critical role. During times of struggle against the land expropriation in the Galilee, Israeli Arabs emerged as a significant demographic mass—a group of half a million people. In the western and lower Galilee, they were a clear majority, and their self-empowerment was characterized by Tawfiq Zayyad (the mayor of Nazareth): “half a million people means one million hands that are able to combat occupation.” By “occupation,” he referred to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, another manifestation of the interrelation between the internal minority-majority confl ict and the external one, the Israeli-Palestinian confl ict. Summing up, the Jewish-Arab confl ict in Israel escalated during the period from 1967 to 1976, reaching a peak in the March 1976 Land Day riots. Government policy regarding the Arab minority—land expropriation, political control, and economic deprivation—was a major factor influencing the confl ict during this period. The developments in the Palestinian-Israeli confl ict were also a factor in influencing the minority-majority relations in the decade under review in this chapter, but on a lower scale since the struggle by the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza territories was in its initial stages. The salience of the Palestinian issue in influencing Israeli politics in general and Israeli Arab political behavior in particular increased with the rise of the Likud party to power in 1977. The next chapter deals with the JewishArab confl ict in Israel during the fi rst Likud government from 1977 to 1981, headed by Menachem Begin.

3

Arabs under Likud The 1977 Political Reshuffle

t h e r i s e of l i k u d to power after the May 1977 elections marked a major sociopolitical change in Israeli society. Early in the 1960s, the Mapai (Labor) party suffered from an internal crisis (with the resignation of BenGurion and formation of his Raphi party), while the right-wing Herut party joined ranks with the Independent Liberals to form Likud. This new party attracted the support of many oriental Jews who felt discriminated against by Mapai. The oriental Jews experienced persecution in the Arab world, forcing many to flee their homes, but because they originated from Arab countries and a culture that is perceived in westernized Israeli society to be inferior, they felt some hostility in their new home, too.1 In addition, the rejuvenation of messianic sentiments among religious and nationalist segments of Jewish society in Israel following the 1967 war strengthened the Israeli right. The events of the Yom Kippur war in 1973 also fostered a sense of disdain toward the Mapai party, which was seen as having misjudged the likelihood of the Arab states launching an attack on Israel, leading to Israel being caught off guard. The Labor party cabinet was accused of poor performance before, during, and after the war. The Dash party emerged from the protest movement against Mapai’s performance in the 1973 war and its corruption. Dash was headed by General Yigal Yadin, a former IDF chief of staff and archaeologist who was a member of the Agranat Commission of Inquiry into the 1973 war. Members of the economic and academic elite, who constructed a political platform calling for a territorial compromise over the West Bank and Gaza, formed this new, centrist party. 69

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At the same time, a political restructuring also took place among the Arab population. The Communist party—Rakah—was still the only party that represented the Arabs’ nationalistic aspirations. Prior to the 1977 elections, Rakah established the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (DFPE, known as Hadash, its Hebrew acronym) in cooperation with the Jewish Black Panthers movement and other political groups in both the Jewish and the Arab sectors. Carried by the waves of the Land Day protests and the euphoria of winning the 1975 Nazareth municipal elections, the Front won a landslide victory—53 percent 2 of the Arab vote in the Knesset elections of 1977 (5 out of 120 seats in the Knesset) —and succeeded in significantly siphoning away potential Arab voters from Ma‘arach, the alignment of Labor and Mapam (the pro-Mapai Arab candidates gained 21 percent of the votes compared to 36 percent in the previous elections of 1973). Ezer Weitzman, a former Air Force commander who was regarded as Begin’s political heir, chaired the Likud election campaign. Likud won onethird of Israeli votes (43 seats) and the Ma‘arach only a quarter (32 seats). Likud, headed by Menachem Begin, formed a government coalition with the new Dash party, which had won 15 seats in the Knesset, the nationalreligious party Hamafdat (NRP, 12 seats), and another two small parties: Shlomzion led by Ariel Sharon, who immediately after the elections merged with Likud with its two seats, and the Independent Liberals party (one seat). Together the coalition had 73 Knesset seats. The historical shift of power (mahapach in Hebrew) was an internal political earthquake among Jewish Israelis, a shift in the ruling elites to include for the fi rst time oriental Jews, taking them from the periphery to the center of power. The shift turned out to be a long-term phenomenon as Likud became a strong political force. The significance of the 1977 elections is that the long-ruling Labor party lost the majority support of Israeli Jews. From that time on, Labor was dependent on Arab votes in order to return to power. This new situation increased the political force of the Arab minority. However, in spite of their increasing power, the Arabs were not on par with religious and other Jewish sectarian groups, who also could play a decisive role in Israeli politics. The Arabs lacked the bargaining power held by these sectarian groups, though,

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as they were simply unable to vote for Likud due to Likud’s hard-line policies regarding the Palestinian issue. In the 1970s, the political fissures among Jewish Israelis widened. The Gush Emunim (Block of Loyalty) movement founded by Moshe Levinger and Chanan Porath of the NRP formed a strong settlement movement in the West Bank and Gaza territories. This activity had not been prevented by the former Labor government but was outright endorsed by the Likud government. Arab citizens viewed Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories as detrimental to their own interests and their vision of a viable Palestinian state existing alongside Israel. On the other side of the Jewish political map, the Peace Now movement was established, advocating the end of occupation of the Palestinian territories. The mainstream Labor party did not support Peace Now policies, and Arab citizens could barely detect any difference between the Likud and Labor parties.3 Consequently the Arab minority isolated itself from the Zionist parties and from state institutions and gradually formed separate political institutions. Beginning in the early 1980s, the Arabs abandoned the satellite lists of Mapai, their rate of participation in Knesset elections decreased, and Arab parties were formed to appeal to the Arab electorate. In May 1980, Ezer Weitzman resigned from his government office and called for new elections. His inability to maintain the coalition and the deteriorating economic situation forced Begin to call for early elections, which took place in 1981. The Palestinian Dimension Prior to the 1977 elections in Israel, a change occurred in U.S. policy in the Middle East. In 1975, the American research institute the Brookings Institution compiled a report that recommended a peace plan according to which Israel should withdraw to its pre-1967 borders and an independent Palestinian state should be established, or, alternatively, the Palestinian territories would be annexed as part of a federation with Jordan.4 When Jimmy Carter was elected U.S. president in November 1976, there was no special crisis in the Middle East, but the U.S. administration feared a second round of Arab oil boycotts and thus was seeking to promote peace between Israel and its

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neighbors. Carter planned to exert pressure on Begin to encourage him to convene a peace conference with the USSR and the Palestinians, whose participation was not desired by Israel. Both Israel and Egypt had an interest to undermine the U.S. move to convene an international convention for peace in the Middle East, so Menachem Begin and Muhammad Anwar al-Sadat initiated secret talks that concluded with a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel in March 1979.5 Sadat did not aim to preempt the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. On the contrary, he believed that the removal of the psychological barrier between Israel and its Arab neighbors would lead to a just solution for the Palestinians as well. However, Begin’s hard-line position resulted in an unofficial agreement between the two negotiating parties that the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians would have the right for autonomy in these territories, and the two parties formed a specific negotiating team for this matter. This move was interpreted as Egypt’s avoidance of a solution to the Palestinian problem and Israel’s means of blocking any possibility of a future Palestinian state.6 Hence, Israeli Arabs did not welcome Israel’s peace agreement with Egypt. In July 1980, Anwar al-Sadat suspended the Egyptian-Israeli talks regarding autonomy for the Palestinians in reaction to the Knesset’s changes to the Basic Law: Jerusalem was declared the capital of Israel, which meant that no sovereign power in Jerusalem would be transferred to non-Israeli rule, and that a change of the law needed the consent of 61 out of 120 members of the parliament.7 Likud policy after 1977 regarding the Palestinian issue led to deterioration in relations between Israel and the Palestinians in the West Bank. Soon after the 1976 West Bank municipal elections, supporters of the PLO organized a political body called the National Coordination Committee, which became an official leadership platform identified with the PLO and its political goals. The most militant mayors on this committee were Bassam Shak‘a from Nablus, Muhammad Milhem from Halhul, Fahd al-Qawasme from Hebron, Karim Khallaf from Ramalla, Ibrahim Tawil from Tul Karm, and Wahid Hamdalla from ‘Anabta. The committee encouraged media coverage of the Israeli policies of demolishing Palestinian houses in the West Bank that had been built without a permit and arresting political activists and deporting them, which were represented as a racial policy. The new

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Palestinian national leadership used these actions to justify armed struggle and the goal of eliminating the state of Israel.8 Following these activities, the Israeli government dispersed the committee, dismissed the mayors of al-Bira, Ramalla, and Nablus, and endorsed the formation of “village associations” headed by a pro-Hashemite politician, Mustafa Dudin, as an alternative, moderate leadership that was engaged in municipal affairs only.9 Another development in the Israeli-Palestinian sphere was armed actions, which the PLO led from its headquarters in Lebanon. In March 1978, Fatah took hostage a bus on the Haifa-Tel Aviv road. The action resulted in the death of 35 Israelis, and Begin ordered the IDF to invade Lebanon for the Litani river operation against armed Palestinian organizations. The one-week operation resulted in the death of 300 Palestinian men and 18 IDF soldiers. In addition to these clashes, the rapid influx of Jewish settlers in the West Bank after 1977, encouraged by the Likud government with fi nancial incentives, created severe tensions between the population in the territories and the Israeli administration. Thirteen illegal settlements were established between September 1978 and October 1979 in the West Bank by Gush Emunim and were removed by the army. However, over the course of time, they were rebuilt and received government approval. Begin’s cabinet also decided to settle the Hadassa House (a former Jewish-owned building) in the middle of Hebron following a terrorist action by an armed Palestinian organization against a Jewish yeshiva (religious school) in Hebron. In January 1979, more West Bank land was expropriated from Palestinian owners, and in June a new settlement, Elon Moreh, was formed near Nablus, the biblical city of Shechem. A numbers of unsuccessful efforts had been made to establish this settlement under the previous Labor government, with Begin being a supporter from the beginning. Visiting Elon Moreh in 1979, Begin announced, “In the near future there will be many Elon Moreh.” When the Supreme Court ruled that Elon Moreh was illegal, Begin respected the ruling. However, the government permitted the settlers to build on a nearby site (Kabir Mountain). During the four years from 1977 to 1981, Begin’s government built 144 new settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Between November 1979 and April 1980, Gush Emunim activists conducted violent campaigns against Palestinians in Jalazun, Ramalla, al-Bira, and Halhul. They caused damage to houses and invoked outrage all over

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the West Bank. The violence reached its peak in May–June of 1980.10 In November 1979, security forces arrested the elected mayor of Nablus, Bassam Shak‘a, for expressing support for a terrorist action that caused the death of six Israelis in Tel Aviv. The government attempted to deport Shak‘a but was unable to do so due to international pressure. However, in May 1980, the government deported the mayors of Hebron and Halhul and the Muslim judge of Hebron to Lebanon for their indirect responsibility for the death of six Jews in Hebron. In June 1980, the mayors of Nablus and Ramalla survived an assassination attempt when bombs were planted under their cars by the Jewish Underground, a Jewish terrorist group in the Palestinian territories that was later exposed. Mayor Shak‘a was injured in this attack, leaving him with an amputated leg. All the above contributed significantly to the escalation of the internal Arab-Jewish confl ict. In the outer circle of the conflict, the Middle East was still a domain of competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in the late 1970s. The Iranian revolution of 1979 affected USSR-neighboring Afghanistan and prompted a preemptive Soviet invasion to save the crumbling Communist regime there. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan ended the détente because the Americans supported the Muslim Afghan rebels. The election of Ronald Reagan as the president of the United States and his iron-fist policy regarding the USSR affected the Israeli Arab arena because Menachem Begin’s hard-line policy versus the Palestinians was not opposed by the new American administration, which later on contributed to Israel’s decision to launch war against the armed Palestinian organizations in Lebanon (June 1982). Government Policy Begin’s government never intended to implement the 1976 post-Land Day resolutions of the Rabin cabinet. Moshe Sharon, a professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies at Hebrew University, was nominated as Begin’s advisor on Arab affairs. He replaced Toledano, who had abandoned Labor and was elected to the Knesset as a member of the newly established Dash party. Sharon compiled a policy blueprint of some 200 pages. However, due to power struggles between him and the general director of the prime

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minister’s office, Eliyahu Ben Elisar, the policy draft was never brought for discussion before the cabinet.11 Sharon’s program centered on the idea of national civil service for the Israeli Arabs. This plan was analyzed by a subcommittee of the Knesset’s Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee, headed by Professor Amnon Rubinstein of the Dash party, who recommended the establishment of a voluntary national civil service for Israeli Arabs. Two Arab public figures testified at the subcommittee’s meeting that such service should be obligatory and not voluntary, adding that national civil service would lead to complete equality. Arab journalists, however, rejected the idea of any kind of national civil service for Arabs.12 The new advisor on Arab affairs’ policy was a continuation of the former Mapai policies, with an emphasis on preventing escalation of confl ict or nationalism: enforcing law in the Arab sector, implementing a policy of reward and punishment, demographic measures, and nonrecognition of Arab national bodies. The proposed policy also recommended integrating Arabs into the civil service and the economy.13 Here again, one should distinguish between a declared policy and actions taken. The differences between the policy recommendations during Labor’s tenure compared to the Begin government were not significant. In any event, the recommendations were only that—recommendations—steps were not taken to ensure their implementation. Many plans were not even brought to discussion to get government approval and therefore were not carried out. As with its predecessors, the Begin cabinet had no apparatus and no budget or will to invest in this area (with one exception in the demographic realm). The national goals that the Labor government attempted to achieve prior to Land Day by land expropriation, namely carving up the territorial space of the Arabs in Galilee and fostering Jewish settlements there, were pursued using a different approach by the successor Begin government. They sought to establish small settlements on higher controlling areas that would serve as a core for future development and monitor the area to prevent Arabs from taking over what were termed “state lands.” Starting in 1976, planners in the Jewish Agency began to create a series of master plans for the establishment of these settlements, which were labeled “observation points,” (mitzpim), due to their small size and high locations.

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The observation points were funded jointly by the World Jewish Agency, which allocated some $25 million (later raising this to $80 million) for preparing the infrastructure, providing job opportunities, and assisting investors during the fi rst provisional housing period, and the government, which allocated $100 million for housing loans and mortgages.14 Former MK Amnon Linn attributed the initiative to Ariel Sharon during his time as the minister of agriculture in the Begin cabinet, and he called the purpose of the observation points “to fi ll vacuums in large territories in the Galilee in order to prevent unplanned and illegal settlement attempts by Arabs.” Sharon sought to establish a similar matrix of settlements in the West Bank. Linn believed that the observation points were a success because they prevented the Arabs from achieving territorial autonomy.15 Geographer Arnon Soffer of Haifa University, however, believed that the observation points were counterproductive. They motivated Arabs to cement their possession of the territory by planting trees and building houses illegally.16 Another geographer, Professor Oren Yiftachel of Ben-Gurion University, stresses that 92 percent of the Jewish settlers in these observation points were motivated by economic considerations rather than the ideologies held by the Jewish Agency and the government.17 The Jewish settlement policy in Galilee was led by senior government officers and politicians. In order to promote their programs, they fi rst conducted a scare campaign in the Hebrew press under the slogan “Arabs control state land.” They argued that Arab-built illegal housing aimed to take over state land. In fact, government committees such as the Markovich committee—discussed below—found that most of the illegal building by Arabs was done on Arab-owned, private agricultural land, and it occurred because of the lack of designated housing zones in Arab towns and villages.18 One of the senior officers behind the scare campaign was the government’s Galilee action coordinator who also represented the Jewish Agency at the time; the above-mentioned slogan appeared also on an official document of the Jewish Agency.19 The campaign in the media appealed to the Jewish public and created a wave of reaction. For example, Jewish heads of local municipalities who convened in Karmiel urged the government not to shy away from speaking outright of Judaizing Galilee. This announcement was followed by a

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statement from a senior Hadash leader—Saliba Khamis—who referred to Judaizing Galilee as “Arab-phobia”; namely, an unhealthy fear Jews possessed of Arabs.20 Indeed, planning documents for the observation points included the deliberate expression “Judaizing the Galilee.” In those plans, the Arab population was represented as a “problem” and the settlement project was termed “a struggle over the land.” The planning documents were phrased in military terminology and the planning measures suggested were semi-military: deployment of formations, occupation of lands, taking over territory. They emphasized strengthening of the Jewish majority while ignoring the needs of the Arab population.21 After a master plan for the new Jewish “observation” settlements was formulated, the next stage was to create municipal jurisdiction for them. In 1980, the government established the new regional council Misgav, an initiative that created new tensions between Jews and Arabs in the Galilee. Misgav was an umbrella municipality for the new Jewish settlements (observations) between the Netofa valley and the Acre-Safed road that encompassed most of the lands outside Arab boundaries.22 Although, since Land Day, the government had ceased expropriating Arab lands, the newly established regional council’s jurisdiction restricted the jurisdictional territory of the Arab villages, thus limiting their future development. Misgav encompassed the twenty-eight newly built Jewish settlements and included 183,000 dunams with a population of only 4,000 Jews, whereas the eleven nearby Arab towns and villages had a jurisdiction of 70,000 dunams for 180,000 people. Most of the land in that area, including Arab-owned land, that had not been part of any Arab municipal jurisdiction was annexed to the new Jewish-dominated regional council’s jurisdiction. The Arab mayors demanded that land owned by Arabs, which was previously submitted to planning committees with a request that it be allocated as a reserve for developing their village or town, would remain as it was or be annexed to their own municipal jurisdiction. So, although the methods were different, the Likud government resumed the policy of restricting the land area of Arab settlements. Unlike the Labor party government, however, law enforcement by government agencies was stricter in the Likud era. Civil servants, including those that were nominated by the Mapai/Labor party, who represented the Israel Land Authority or planning and construction committees found a

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responsive audience in Likud ministers when they suggested the intensification of law enforcement. Previously, enforcing the law was more problematic due to the advocacy and lobbying of Arab leaders, who were “vote merchants” for the Labor party during election campaigns. After the Land Day crisis, which among other things indicated a housing predicament in the Arab sector, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin decided to form a committee to study the phenomenon of illegal housing. The committee, which was headed by Haim Koversky, the general director of the Interior Ministry, was requested to “submit proposals for a constructive solution to the problem of illegal building in order to ensure the adherence to the law in Arab localities.”23 The committee found that in 1976 there were valid master plans for only eight out of eighty-six Arab villages and towns in the northern district. Some forty-five Arab villages were in a process of preparing master plans (twelve were being processed at the local committee level, sixteen were lodged with district committees, and seventeen had progressed even further through the bureaucracy), while the remainder of the Arab villages had no master plans at all. The fi rst Likud government renominated a committee to handle the same subject but with a different intention: “to prevent illegal overtaking of State lands.” The second committee was headed by Ya‘akov Markovitz, Koversky’s deputy. The recommendations that were published on 28 September 1979 included measures to crack down, namely to allocate more resources for increased inspections, to carry out the demolition of those houses ordered by the court, and to hold local municipalities responsible for illegal public land possession. The committee also called “to take assertive action against violators of the planning and housing law, who assist in taking over state land” and to “defi ne cooperation guidelines between the district police officers, the Israel Land Authority, the IDF and the Ministry of the Interior regarding the quick execution of house demolition orders.”24 Unlike Mapai/Labor, the Likud did not expect political support from the Arab constituency, and consequently its policies did not include bettering economic conditions for Arabs, but only restrictive measures. A good example is its policy toward the Bedouins. In 1978, a new agency was created within the National Parks Authority that was vested with the authority to control open spaces and was more intensively active in the Negev.

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The unofficial name of this agency was the “Green Patrol,” but the Negev Bedouins called it the “Black Patrol” due to its involvement in controlling the Bedouins’ lives: demolishing houses and expropriating livestock in order to force them to settle in permanent urban residences.25 The daily engagement of law enforcement authorities with the Bedouin groups aimed at preventing their permanent possession of “state” land, including illegal building and grazing. This intensified the hostility between the Bedouins and the state. In 1979, one of these engagements resulted in a Bedouin protest, which could be regarded as a benchmark change in the political orientation of the Bedouin population. One morning an Israel Land Authority bulldozer, arrived at the Bedouin town of Laqia to destroy a cactus hedge (which acted as a natural barrier) possessed by the Abu Qaren family from the al-Sani‘ tribe. This piece of land had been expropriated by the state in order to prepare housing plots for settling the Bedouin society. The al-Sani‘ tribesmen grouped to prevent the bulldozer from operating and attacked the workmen and the policemen protecting them. This event soon escalated into an inflamed clash and resulted in a large Bedouin demonstration against the government.26 Intensified law enforcement occurred in the Galilee as well. In 1977, the demolition of a house built without a permit in the village of Majd alKurum led to mass disturbances by Arab inhabitants in that village and villages nearby. The reason for demolishing the house was its proximity to the main road, the Acre-Safed Road. According to the housing and planning laws, building too close to a road is prohibited, and in the case of Majd al-Kurum the proscribed distance was 75 meters on either side of the road. The demonstration that took place in the village ended with the death of one inhabitant and police injury of many others. Following this event, the head of the Majd al-Kurum municipality, Muhammad Manna‘, abandoned the Labor party, joined Hadash, and was reelected in the 1986 municipal elections as a Hadash representative. The protest and its repression created a more assertive struggle by the Arabs against government’s policy.27 An alternative solution would have been to reassess the rules about the roadside buffer. That the minimum distance requirement was arbitrary was indicated when a few years later, a new and legal house was built on the same spot where the demolished house had been located in 1977.28

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In sum, during Begin’s administration, rights for Arab citizens remained low on its priorities, while it increased enforcement of laws regarding land and housing in Arab communities. The government implemented a settlement policy that was manifested in the mitzpim. Government policy thus alienated the Arab community from the state and its Jewish majority. Arab Political Behavior and Public Opinion Labor was the main party to be disadvantaged by the radicalization of the Arab minority. Its Arab activists were distressed as shown by the resignation of MK Sayf al-Din al-Zu‘bi from the party. Zu‘bi took the opportunity when Labor party chairman Shimon Peres visited him in February 1979 at his house in Nazareth to announce his resignation from the Knesset in protest of “the radicalization in the Arab public, and the faulty handling of this by the Jewish side.” He thought the government should implement policies that would back moderate elements and punish the extremists. He expressed his anger toward democracy, saying, “The Arabs interpreted the freedom of expression and organization wrongly [as a sign of weakness] and they will gradually make rabbits out of you. Remember the lesson of 1948 . . . today, in order to succeed in the Arab sector, a lawyer has to be radical, a physician has to take a nationalist, separatist position, and the tradesman has to be a communist, and the student has to turn to the left.”29 As I described in the previous chapter, these words were echoed by government (Jewish) “Arabists” who served as advisors on Arab affairs and were influenced by the nondemocratic outlook of Arab collaborators such as Zu‘bi. Until 1972, the Israeli Arab political spectrum was very narrow. In election campaigns to the Knesset, Arab citizens could choose between the Communist party, which to a large extent represented their particular interests and aspirations, and the Zionist parties (Jewish dominated parties such as Labor/Mapai, Mapam, and so forth), that, although they did not offer them complete participation, enabled them to enjoy some privileges from being affi liated with the party in power. The government did everything in its power to prevent the establishment of a national Arab political movement. The previous attempt to found such a movement began in 1958 and ended in 1965 with the outlawing of al-Ard before it could become a party.30 After

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a period of recovery after the Six Day War, Arab academics began organizing as political bodies. Among them were former activists of the nationalist alArd movement. The fi rst association of Arab university graduates was formed in Nazareth in 1971 by Arab academics who held nationalistic views.31 The Nazareth group later established the Nazareth progressive movement, which was the springboard for the Progressive List for Peace (PLP) formed in 1982 (see chapter 4). Hadash’s victory among Arabs during the 1977 Knesset elections increased its power and image, and strengthened the self-confidence of its leaders. Consequently, the establishment regarded this party as a major threat. Hadash operated on two fronts. It acted as a counterbalance for the policies of the government by representing and defending the Arab minority’s rights. In addition, it acted as a moderating force against the extreme Arab nationalists. Abna’ al-Balad was another new political movement that emerged in the 1970s and challenged Hadash. This movement, which started organizing in 1972 in a few Arab villages, was, to some extent, the heir of the al-Ard movement. Abna’ in Arabic means “sons” and balad means “a place to live” or “territory” and is used both in the narrower and wider sense of the word. Therefore, Abna’ al-Balad could be both the village sons seeking to change the political reality—from the bottom up starting with the village—and the sons of the country, the indigenous people who demand their primary right over the land and perceive themselves as representing the national interests of the Arabs. The movement’s activists delegitimized the state of Israel. Some of them identified with the PLO campaign and others with the Palestinian organizations belonging to the Rejection Front within the PLO. Hadash viewed these groups as a threat and presented them as irresponsible elements whose extremism could turn the Jews against Arabs and destroy the minimal achievements of the Arab populace. A more serious concern of Hadash was the loss of the electoral support of Arab nationalists, who had voted for their party in previous elections when there was no nationalist alternative. This fear became a reality in the 1980s with the establishment of Abna’ al-Balad and other nationalist parties. During the 1970s and the 1980s, there was much friction between the two movements. For example, at a convention organized by the Committee

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of the Defense of Arab Lands in Nazareth in March 1979, MK Tawfiq Zayyad (a member of Hadash), in response to the demolition of a house that was constructed illegally in Majd al-Kurum, claimed that “as long as there are stones in the Galilee, we shall use them to stone those who try to destroy our homes.” At the same convention, Zayyad opposed a proposal made by extremists to declare a general strike on the third annual Land Day commemoration, asserting that this is a day of memorial and not demonstrations. A group from the Abna’ al-Balad who participated in this gathering shouted, “We will redeem you with blood and spirit, oh Galilee,” and the Hadash leaders responded by shouting, “Jewish-Arab friendship.” This response was intended to appeal to Jewish left-wing activists from the Mapam and Shelli parties who were present. In order to challenge extremist groups, Zayyad had to maneuver between radical and moderate lines.32 On 29 March 1979, one day prior to the Land Day commemoration, Hadash members in Umm al-Fahm published a leaflet in which they condemned the burning of a public bus in the village, the raising of a Palestinian flag over a school, and the extreme graffiti banners on its walls. They hinted that those who conducted these operations were Abna’ al-Balad members who conspired to torpedo the peaceful commemoration planned by Hadash. The leaflet also stated, “Some irresponsible and suspicious elements are trying to distort our justified struggle . . . without considering the complex political dynamics. The government is attempting to disperse our local municipalities, and these kinds of actions assist them in doing so.”33 From the other side of the Arab political map, Abna’ al-Balad attacked Hadash for its decision not to support a general strike planned for the second annual commemoration of Land Day, maintaining that “as long as the communist party receives its legal standing from the authorities it restricts itself to the boundaries defi ned by those authorities.” Its leaders added that as a party that opposes nationalist movements, Hadash is not a pure Palestinian organization.34 As a Jewish-Arab party raising the slogan of a joint Jewish-Arab struggle, Hadash found itself defending its platform to Arab nationalists. However, its leaders started to search for policies to attract the nationalists’ support. The newly formed Arab nationalist groups challenged the Hadash hegemony in the Arab sector. These groups attempted in 1980 to form a new umbrella organization under a political front named the Supreme

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Coordination Committee on an ideological platform that was named after the place at which it was agreed upon—the “Umm al-Fahm Convention.” The group’s platform stated, among other things, “The Palestinian problem is the core of the struggle between the Arab Nationalist Liberation Movement and the Zionists, the Reactionists and the Imperialists; the starting point for the fundamental solution to the Palestinian question rests in the Right of Return as part of the self-determination of the Palestinian Arab people and in the establishment of an independent state on Palestinian land . . . The enemy camp is embodied in Zionism, in Imperialism, and in the Arab reactionism.”35 With such a platform, it is not surprising that the government outlawed the organization. In the late 1970s, a fourth political ideology (in addition to the proZionist, Hadash, and Abna’ al-Balad groups) grew in the Arab sector: the Islamic movement. Islamic political thought was derived from both religious and cultural sources, and was also influenced by the spread of fundamentalism in the 1970s, not only in Islam but also in Judaism and Christianity. Palestinian Muslim fundamentalism also became a political movement with a nationalist affi liation and, as such, recruited supporters from the Hadash’s constituency. The Islamic movement made its fi rst appearance in Israel in an educational vacuum in the realm of teaching Islam in Arab schools, and in the context of the convergence of the Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line after 1967. It was further expanded after Palestinian Muslims were allowed to embark on the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1978, combined with disillusionment with solutions offered by the conventional ideologies for the socioeconomic predicament of some members of Arab society.36 The movement’s founders were young Israeli Arab Islamic college graduates of Nablus, Hebron, Tulkarm, and East Jerusalem. Shaykh ‘Abdalla Nimr Darwish ‘Isa from the village of Kafar Qasem, who was the fi rst to head the movement, was born in Israel in 1948 and studied in the Islamic institute in Nablus for four years. The movement’s veterans included Shaykh Khalid Muhana, Shaykh Ra’id Sallah, and Shaykh Hashim ‘Abd al-Rahman, all of whom were born in Israel in 1958 and studied between 1976 and 1979 in the Islamic college in Hebron.37 The Iranian revolution of 1978 and the newly presented option of undertaking the pilgrimage to Mecca also gave the Islamic political stream a boost.

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In 1980, the fi rst activists of this movement formed an underground subversive group named Usrat al-Jihad (the Jihad Clan, later known as the Young Muslims and the Islamic Movement), which supported the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. This group succeeded in carrying out acts of sabotage inside Israel, and after public exposure by the security agencies, they were imprisoned and released after a short period as part of a prisoner exchange with the Ahmad Jibril organization.38 The Jihad Clan was outlawed by the government, but its activists who were released from prison soon established the Islamic Movement as an extra-parliamentary movement. The political pluralism that developed in the Arab public during the late 1970s and 1980s stemmed from the socioeconomic changes of the time: the increase of the middle class on the one hand, economic distress in parts of the Arab community on the other, and the birth of a new generation of university graduates. The combination of economic empowerment and educated mobilization endorsed the founding of these new political bodies and contributed to the self-empowerment of the Arab community. The trend for change is manifested in higher education rates in the Arab sector. As an example, the rate of illiteracy among the Arab population decreased from 50 percent in 1961 to 13 percent in 1990. The rate of graduation from high school increased from 7.6 percent in 1961 to 40.6 percent in 1990. In 1966, there were only 270 Arab university students, whereas in 1987, there were some 4,000 students and 10,000 Arab university graduates.39 The competition between Arab nationalist groups led to an escalation of activity in opposition to the state. The main issue debated by the competing Arab movements was not the civil rights of the Arab minority but the Palestinian issue. The most radical political initiative was the idea to inaugurate the Congress of Arab Masses, which was launched against the background of the shock that Israeli Arabs felt following the assault on three Palestinian West Bank mayors in June 1980.40 Soon after the attempt to assassinate the Palestinian mayors by a Jewish underground movement, the Arabic-language Hadash newspaper al-Ittihad published a declaration signed by 180 prominent Israeli Arab figures and titled “The Sixth of June Convention” to commemorate the thirteenth anniversary of the Six Day War in 1980. This initiative aimed at protesting against continued Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and was linked to the status of

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Arab citizens inside Israel. The declaration was a reaction to what Arabs regarded as “crazy” government policy in the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967. It emphasized the Palestinian identity of Israeli Arabs “as a living, conscience, and active part of the Palestinian people.” The publication claimed that the continuous deterioration of the situation of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza directly influenced the lives and the future of the Arab citizens in Israel, who are also victims of national oppression and racial coercion. The campaign strongly criticized Israel’s attitude toward West Bank and Gaza Palestinians and called for the establishment of a Palestinian state to be headed by the PLO. The petition was distributed through Hadash party members and the alIttihad newspaper, among other methods, and it became clear that the call was widely supported by the Arab population. This success boosted the initiators—among them, one of Hadash’s ideologists, Emile Touma—and led them to organize a big convention of Israeli Arabs aimed at founding a representative political body of 500 elected delegates, each representing 1,000 Arab citizens. The congress, thus, aimed to serve as a national minority parliament and to form an elected leadership and institutions. The government regarded it as a political undermining of the state that could lead to irredentist demands and outlawed it in accordance with the emergency laws.41 The organization of radical nationalist movements was related to the deepening of Israeli Arabs’ Palestinian identity following the reestablishing of ties with the Palestinians in the territories and the struggle that took place during this period between Israel and the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.42 In a survey conducted by Sammy Smooha of Haifa University in 1980, he found that 57.5 percent of the Arab interviewees identified themselves in categories in which “Palestinian” was one of the terms used. The numbers who identified themselves this way increased gradually, and in 1985 it stood at 73.6 percent.43 Smooha also surveyed Arabs about whether Israel had a right to exist: 51.1 percent of Israeli Arabs accepted, 28.4 percent had reservations, and 20.5 percent did not accept Israel’s right to exist.44 The change in Israeli Arabs’ political position influenced by their growing Palestinian identity explains their resentment of the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement. A segment of the Arab public viewed this agreement as impacting negatively on the Palestinian domain, which was their priority.

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They viewed the accord as American-Egyptian legitimizing of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and a denial of the Palestinian people’s right to establish their own state.45 An indication of this resentment was that the five Hadash members in the Knesset voted against the peace agreement with Egypt. Hadash also boycotted the Egyptian ambassador in Israel for some years following the agreement. Between 1979 and 1980, there were a significant number of demonstrations in the Arab sector, most of them protesting the government’s land and settlement policy, particularly the demolition of houses. Arab students in the universities also carried out violent protests.46 In sum, the Arab political behavior demonstrates an escalation of the confl ict during the fi rst Likud government. Jewish Public Opinion and Political Behavior The Jewish public generally did not take a civil stance in the relations between the majority and the Arab minority. This task was left to state institutions. Apparently, Jews assumed that the state apparatus represented Jewish interests in this matter. Government land and settlement policies reflected the Jews’ general perception of the Arab minority as a security threat. Jewish Messianism, expressed in the settlement activity in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, was encouraged during Begin’s tenure. This, along with the Jewish public’s shift to the right, in particular the shift of those social segments (the orientals) who voted Begin into power, was viewed by Arab citizens as a threatening development. However, the Jewish public inside Israel did not take action against Israeli Arabs, and their political behavior in this regard was low. A survey conducted in 1980 by Mina Tzemach showed a relatively high rate of Jewish approval for the government’s discriminatory policies. Regarding higher education, 47.3 percent of the Jews supported giving preference to Jews; 40.7 percent supported giving preference in employment, 44.5 percent for public service, 48.5 percent for housing opportunities for large families, 49.7 percent for welfare allowances, and 65.8 percent for senior positions of the bureaucracy. The interviewees justified their prejudice by citing security. However, 60 percent of them supported the idea that Arabs should have to commit to national duty; in other words, they did not fear Arabs serving in

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the IDF.47 Smooha inquired in his survey to what extent Jews would agree to structural changes that would enable the integration of Arab citizens into the state. Changing state symbols to include Arab legacy elements was opposed by 97.3 percent, and 70.5 percent agreed that the state ought to use all means necessary to preserve its Jewish/Zionist nature.48 Conclusion The rise of Likud to power had two significant consequences on the political agenda of the Arab minority. For Palestinians, the West Bank witnessed violent clashes and the peace treaty Israel signed with Egypt curtailed the prospect of forming a Palestinian state. For minority status, Likud policies increased the state’s control and use of law enforcement in issues related to land and building without a permit. The state’s Arab citizens perceived the government’s policies in the territories as a reproduction of its hostility in the domestic realm. Enhancement of the Palestinian component of Israeli Arabs’ identity strengthened during Begin’s tenure. Thus, the major parameter of the interlocking aspect of the confl ict— the Palestinian issue—strongly affected and intensified the confl ict in the period under review in this chapter. Likud did not believe in appeasing measures such as those Labor tried to introduce following the Land Day protest of 1976. Begin’s government, however, opted to Judaize the Galilee without new expropriation of land (the observation settlements and the Misgav municipal jurisdiction to control this land), combined with hardening the enforcement of laws of land and building control. Begin personally was regarded as a genuine and fair leader, and he did not use hostile discourse against Arab citizens. The political behavior of the Arabs responded also to the internal challenges. In addition to a few low-scale demonstrations in the Galilee against demolitions of what was termed “illegal building,” the new Likud tenure witnessed the fi rst outbreak among the Bedouins, who until then were regarded as a peaceful, moderate, and compliant community. The impact of government policy on the intensification of the confl ict was, therefore, of a medium extent.

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As Mitchell noted, the parties to a confl ict learn over time and change their attitudes and perceptions as well as modifying their goals and behavior as a result of those altered perceptions. The learning process may involve the adoption of alternative patterns of behavior if old patterns prove unsuccessful.49 After the 1976 Land Day protests, the Jewish public radicalized its positions against Israeli Arabs and justified discriminatory policies against them on the basis of security. Yet, learning from the Land Day experience, the public did not take any initiative or operative role versus the Arab minority. The Arab public intensified its political behavior, but they learned a lesson from the Land Day protests, which were aggressively oppressed by the security forces. From 1977 on, they opted for strategy that would gain political dividends in the long run. As Arabs experienced increased demographic, educational, economic, and political empowerment, they searched for new vehicles for political mobilization to cope with the above-mentioned challenges. Hadash, the leading political power among the Arab community during the late 1970s, failed to satisfy their needs. It suffered from an inherent tension between its pro-nationalistic ideology and its commitment to respect the law and the state. Consequently, nationalist political elements, which had been dormant since the outlawing of the al-Ard movement in 1965, reemerged, and political competition that had existed between new and old groups of the Arab community forced Hadash’s Arab proponents to radicalize their positions in order to preserve their political support in the Arab population. During the tenure of the fi rst Likud government, Arab political movements mobilized themselves toward organizational empowerment. They used subversive organization in an attempt to create independent political institutions. The most pervasive action was the attempt to form a separate Arab electoral body. The trigger in the campaign to construct the Congress of Arab Masses erupted on the Palestinian plane, the Sixth of June Convention, and the way Arab leaders explained the connection between the broader Palestinian issue and their internal status as a national minority. An Arab nationalist organization was seen by the government as an existential threat and therefore was curtailed by an exceptional step in a democracy: it was outlawed in accordance with emergency law. Government coercive measures, such as the outlawing of three new Arab political organizations,

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ruled out any attempt of a rebellious action as occurred on Land Day in March 1976. In conclusion, although during the tenure of the fi rst Likud government there were no notable violent riots or mass-scale protests, the intensity of the level of confl ict decreased only slightly due to the impact of the external Palestinian dimension on the internal confl ict as well as government policy regarding land, building, and settlement. The next chapter will elaborate on the escalation of tensions in the West Bank and Gaza and its projection on the internal ethnonational confl ict in Israel during the second Likud government from 1981 to 1984.

4

Palestine First West Bank and Gaza Projection

du r i ng t h e s e c on d Likud government in Israel from 1981 to 1984, the Cold War still cast its shadow on Middle East affairs and the Soviet war continued in Afghanistan. Backed by the Reagan administration’s policy of supporting Israel both economically and militarily, Israel hardened its policy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip against local Palestinian nationalist leaders. At the regional level of the confl ict, Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982.1 The Palestinian refugees living in (mostly south) Lebanon had fled there in 1948 from the northern part of what became Israel, and many of them had fi rst- and second-degree relatives among the Arab population in Israel. The war, which culminated with the ousting of PLO organizations from Lebanon, radicalized Israeli Arabs’ attitude against state policy in the broader context of the Israel-Arab confl ict. At the same time, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip intensified their struggle against the Israeli occupation and the measures taken by the Likud government to reinforce the settlement movement in these territories. This chapter centers on the effects of the regional confl ict on the Palestinian issue as it developed in the West Bank and Gaza territories and the 1982 war in Lebanon, on the political behavior of the Israeli Arab minority, and on the majority-minority confl ict. The Political Setting The Rise of Likud to power in 1977 placed the future of the Palestinianpopulated territories—the West Bank and Gaza Strip—as a paramount issue on Israel’s political agenda. Likud and other right-wing factions convinced 90

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themselves that Israel could resume occupation of these territories by granting Palestinians a self-rule that excluded the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. The peace accord between Israel and its strongest Arab neighbor—Egypt—which ended in a deadlock over the Palestinian issue, contributed to this illusion.2 The Labor party, on the other side of the political map, was also deluded by the “Jordanian Option,” that is, to return control of most of the West Bank to Jordan and avoid a Palestinian state.3 Labor, however, seemed more reluctant to end the occupation of the Palestinian territories, although there was also a growing trend within its camp toward the Peace Now (Shalom Achshav) movement. The intensive Jewish settlement activity, which took place in the West Bank during Menachem Begin’s tenure, widened the political gap between the right and the left in the Israeli Jewish society. The activity of Gush Emunim to the right of the political map and Peace Now to the left represented two opposing ideological positions. On the national security level, Israel faced two challenges. One was the threat by the Palestinian armed organizations that operated from Lebanon, initiating attacks against Israel from across its northern border with Lebanon. The second challenge was the Iraqi nuclear enterprise. Three weeks prior to the June 1981 general elections, Israel bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor Ozirak. The success of this operation strengthened Likud’s position at the ballot box. The 1981 election resulted in a power balance between Likud and Labor, forty-eight to forty-seven seats. Likud gained only 10,400 votes more than the Labor party (equivalent of half a seat in the Knesset); the Dash party disintegrated and most of its voters returned to Labor. However, Likud easily formed a majority coalition with the Jewish religious parties (thirteen seats) and the Hatchiya right-wing party (three seats). Thus, Menachem Begin appointed the government for the second time, and now Ariel Sharon was appointed defense minister. Given the increased engagement of arabs with politics since 1976, one would have expected Hadash to gain most of the Arab votes in the 1981 elections. But the opposite happened. Support for Hadash significantly diminished (from 53 percent of the Arab electorate to only 38 percent), and this party returned to the insignificant role it held before Land Day and

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the 1977 elections.4 The votes that the Communist party lost were gained by Labor and other Zionist parties. Experts had different interpretations of these results. Jacob M. Landau asserts that the weakening of Hadash, coupled with an increased support of the Labor party, indicated a “votes for services” trend and could indicate the moderating of Israeli Arabs and their integration into the state.5 According to Landau, the results of 1981 did not necessarily reflect consideration of nationalist factors, in contrast to the 1977 elections, although a new factor was the challenge posed to Hadash by the Abna’ al-Balad movement and other nationalists. They accused Hadash of clinging to the Soviet Union’s policy and of lacking a nationalist approach. Indeed, another negative for Hadash was the decrease in popularity of the USSR among Arab communities due to the Soviet war in Afghanistan.6 Ori Stendel, however, believes that Hadash was weakened because it radicalized its position in 1980 by organizing the Congress of Arab Masses on the one hand and on the other hand because it was not extreme enough; the party lost votes to more extreme nationalist groups such as the Progressive Movement for Peace.7 Elie Rekhess also believes that the failure of the Congress of Arab Masses devastated Hadash in the 1981 elections.8 Had these interpretations been correct, one would expect Arabs to vote for Likud (if they were searching for services) or abstain from polling (if they were seeking a more radical position) and not vote for Labor. It is more likely that what motivated the shift of votes from Hadash to Labor was the desire of the Arab population to replace the Likud government, which undermined the Arabs’ prospect of ending Israel’s occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Beginning in 1981, Arab citizens’ interest in promoting peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors forced them to side with the Labor party in general election campaigns to the Knesset, in spite of the fact that Labor represented a Zionist ideology, because Labor was seen as more likely to accomplish peace between Israel and the Palestinians and see the establishment of a Palestinian state. The Likud government’s coercive actions against the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank and Gaza Strip after 1977 and its policy of reinforcing Jewish settlement in these territories strongly influenced the Arab minority. Arab support of Labor indicated the high importance of the Palestinian issue for Israeli Arabs, and here again we see how the interlocking dimension of the confl ict affected political behavior.

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The second Likud government under Menachem Begin initiated two severe steps on the broader Arab-Israel plane. In December 1981, Begin proposed (to the U.S. administration’s chagrin) the “Golan Heights Law” annexing formerly Syrian territory and assigning Israeli citizenship to the 13,000 Syrian citizens of Druze extraction who had remained in the area following the 1967 war. In June 3, 1982, a Palestinian terrorist group headed by Abu Nidal severely injured Israel’s ambassador in London. Israel reacted by launching a military operation that developed into a war in Lebanon with the aim of removing the Palestinian armed organizations and the PLO from Lebanon. The Israeli government took the opportunity to promote another concealed geopolitical aim: to assist the Maronite Christians in taking over the government in Lebanon by positioning the Maronite Bashir Jumayyel as the president of Lebanon. Following the war, in August 1982, 8,900 PLO gunmen including Yasser Arafat left Lebanon for a new basis in Tunis. Ariel Sharon, the minister of defense, was accused of deploying the IDF to achieve his hidden agenda. Aiding the Christian faction involved deploying Israeli troops in Beirut, far beyond the 40 km margin around the Israeli border that had been approved by the cabinet. He was also accused of not preventing the Christian militias from massacring Palestinian Muslims in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps of Beirut. The operation resulted in Israel’s military being enmired in south Lebanon for the next eighteen years. A commission of inquiry (the Kahan Commission) found Sharon responsible for neglecting the possibility that the Christian militias could take revenge of the residents of Sabra and Shatilla and recommended that he should leave his position as minister of defense and not be appointed to this office in the future.9 One year after the war ended, Menachem Begin resigned from the position of prime minister as a result of his distress regarding the war and Yitzhak Shamir replaced him in October 1983. Several other circumstances contributed to the political crisis at this juncture: a suffering economy, manifested by high inflation and collapse of the stock market; further internal factional violence, indicated by the murder of Emille Greentzweig, a left-wing demonstrator, by a right-wing person and by increase in terrorist actions inside Israel and the Palestinian territories; and the deadlock in the Palestinian

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situation. All contributed to instability of the state, and the Knesset elections were held in 1984, one year earlier than planned. The Palestinian Dimension On 25 March 1982, violent riots erupted in the West Bank in response to the Israeli civil administration’s decision to dismiss the mayors of Nablus (Bassam Shak‘a) and Ramalla (Karim Khallaf) and to dissolve the councils of these municipalities. These riots, the most serious since 1967, resulted in the deaths of six Palestinians and one Israeli solider and a large number of injuries.10 These events inflamed Israel’s Arab citizens. Arab leaders called a general strike on 30 March, the fifth Land Day commemoration, manifesting the strong influence of the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the internal one. Another turbulent event took place in the Palestinian-Israel domain one month later. On a vacation from basic training—on the eve of the Jewish Passover festival—Alan Goodman, an American Jew who had joined the IDF, entered the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount and fi red at Muslims on al-Haram al-Sharif.11 Palestinian leaders in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip responded with a week-long general strike during which many violent clashes with the Palestinian populace took place. An Israeli Arab delegation—headed by the chair of the National Committee of Arab Municipalities Ibrahim Nimr Husayn, and joined by Tawfiq Zayyad and twelve other mayors—visited al-Haram al-Sharif to express their solidarity and condemnation of the “occupiers’ crimes.”12 Two months later, in June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon in order to “dismantle the terrorist infrastructure.” The war against the PLO in Lebanon stood in stark contrast to Israeli Arabs’ aspirations for a peaceful solution, which would include the establishment of a Palestinian state in the territories. Moreover, the Christian militias’ massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatilla in western Beirut, discussed above, deeply affected the Israeli Arabs, eventually leading to riots in September 1982. The tensions between Israelis and Palestinians resulted in death and destruction on both sides. In 1983, 538 Israelis were killed in Palestinian terrorist actions compared to only 18 in 1982. The situation further deteriorated in 1984.13

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Government Policy In challenging the Labor party, Muhammad Watad, an Arab Knesset member from Mapam, argued that the Likud policy toward the Arab minority was no worse than the Labor policy. Watad asserted that Menachem Begin, as well as his successor Yitzhak Shamir, used the same coercive measures Labor had done and in some areas improved the situation for Israeli Arabs. He claimed that through a direct dialogue with the prime minister and cabinet, he and his Arab colleagues had succeeded in making some progress. This included readjusting the jurisdiction of Arab localities neighboring the Misgav regional council established in 1980 (see chapter 3), providing electric power to the last twenty Arab villages that lacked this service, and achieving an agreement with the Ministry of Defense that enabled land owners to cultivate the land that was located in an army training zone within Wadi ‘Ara.14 Watad coined the term “fighting dialogue” to describe the assertive opposition from within the Zionist party in order to advance the interests of the Arab minority. Chapter 3 showed that Watad’s claims that the fi rst Likud government would work with Arabs were exaggerated, and a policy analysis of the second Likud government (1981–1984) concludes that the same was true for this period. In 1980, Likud had gotten around outright land expropriation tension by creating new Jewish settlements called observation points and turning surrounding areas, outside formal Arab jurisdictions, into a new municipal council called Misgav. The Misgav Affair led to increased tensions during Likud’s second term. As was the case in many other land settlement affairs before and after 1980, it reawakened the historical tensions over land, the very essence of the broader Israeli-Palestinian confl ict. In the spring of 1983, the leaders of the Arab municipal councils warned that they would demonstrate and fight to reclaim their land from the Misgav jurisdiction. Israel Koenig, the north district commissioner of the Ministry of the Interior, had to have discussions with each of the eleven heads of Arab municipalities near Misgav regarding their jurisdiction. Following these negotiations, he removed some 40,000 (out of 220,000) dunams of Arab-owned land from the Misgav jurisdiction and transferred them to the eleven neighboring Arab municipalities.15 This decision was seen as a victory for the Israeli Arabs’ political struggle.

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The government’s policy regarding collective representation for the Arab minority also exacerbated the confl ict. We have seen that in late 1980 the government outlawed an attempt to organize a national elected body for Arabs, the Congress of the Arab Masses. In late 1982, shortly after Israel invaded Lebanon, an initiative was introduced in the Arab sector aiming at uniting existing political forces within a body named the “Supreme Follow-up Committee for Arab Citizens” (hereafter called the Follow-up Committee). This committee was to consist of the Committee of Heads of the Arab Municipalities, all Arab members of Knesset, the Arab members of the Central Committee of the Histadrut (a union organization), and representatives of other specific Arab sectors (such as the nonrecognized villages). The fact that Knesset members and Arab political activists from the Labor party joined the Follow-up Committee vested this body with additional power and created the impression that the Labor party had ceased to boycott the Hadash party that influenced its activity.16 The fi rst decision of the Follow-up Committee was to organize a protest against the Sabra and Shatilla massacre in Lebanon.17 The committee elected Hanna Muways, the head of the council of Rama, as chairman. The committee deliberately chose him for his moderate personality, despite the fact that he was identified with the Hadash party. His nomination did not reduce the fear felt by the Likud government for this new body, however. The prime minister’s advisor on Arab affairs at the time, Binyamin Gur Ariyeh, published an article in the Arabic government-owned newspaper al-Anba’ in which he presented the Follow-up Committee as an extreme body due to Hadash’s dominance within it. He called upon Arabs to be more active through existing general frameworks, such as the National Center for Local Government, instead of mobilizing separate bodies.18 The Israeli establishment attempted to sabotage the committee by endorsing an alternative forum of Arab moderate personalities who headed local councils. As a result, some municipalities—those who were headed by moderate leaders—received larger budgets from the Ministry of the Interior. In January 1982, Gur Ariyeh invited twenty-five moderate mayors to a meeting with Matityahu Shmuelevitz, the general director of the prime minister’s office, to discuss their concerns regarding the Arab population. This meeting alarmed the Communist party, and its newspaper al-Ittihad published

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an editorial alleging that the meeting was to circumvent the Arab political bodies.19 However, the government’s action did not harm the Follow-up Committee or the Arab National Council of Heads of Municipalities. The Arab leaders who participated in these meetings benefited from playing a double card: getting privileges from the government agencies while asserting their affi liation with Arab national organizations.20 As noted, safeguarding the primary interests of the Jewish community (in the areas of lands, settlement, and Arab political power) was the policy of the second Likud government vis-à-vis the Arab population. However, the Likud government treated fairly some problems of Arab citizens and sometimes even tried to appease the Arabs. One example is a special prize awarded by the prime minister for new compositions in Arabic literature.21 The government also refrained from taking radical steps that would stir up the emotions of Arab citizens. For example, the Likud government rejected the proposal of obligatory national service for Arabs suggested by extreme right-wing MK Geula Cohen (HaTchiyya), according to which civil rights would be conditional on serving in a special national service.22 Even though there were some positive developments under Likud, MK Muhammad Watad’s claim that they were more liberal than Labor is incorrect. Despite the valid criticisms against the Labor party, the Arabs could always negotiate their interests more successfully during Labor tenure due to the party’s interest in attracting their votes during elections. One example of Likud’s lack of support was narrated by Watad himself: In 1983 Likud members introduced the Bill of Families Blessed with Many Children, which discriminated against Arabs in social security allowances given to families of three children and above. The bill was proposed despite such an arrangement being illegal according to the general attorney, who said he would be unable to defend such a case considering that Arabs make up 48 percent of the families with three children and above. The bill also stated that (Jewish) yeshiva students (who did not serve in the army) would receive supplementary allowances from the Ministry of Religious Affairs. MKs Muhammad Watad (Mapam) and Hamad Khalayla (Labor) responded by fi ling a case with the Supreme Court against the Ministry of Finance and the Finance Committee of the Knesset. They wanted to prevent the bill from being passed, but the Supreme Court rejected their case.23

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In the meantime, the tenure of the president of the state was over and the Knesset had to elect a new president, contested by both Likud and Labor candidates. Due to the balance of power between the two political camps, every single vote was important to win the position. Watad and Khalayla negotiated with their Ma‘arach (a joined Labor and Mapam) party, trading their support for Chaim Herzog, the party’s candidate, for the promise of a Labor vote against the Bill of Fortuned Children Families when it was debated in the Knesset. Labor leaders accepted the condition, and the Likud withdrew the bill due to the lack of support.24 It may be that the contention of some Arab leaders that Likud’s policy regarding the Arab minority was more liberal than the Labor’s policy was motivated by political manipulation: to pressure Labor leaders to provide more benefits to the Arab population. Arab Political Behavior During these years, Arab political behavior veered from protest actions against the government’s policies on the one hand and efforts to establish institutions and strengthen the national minority on the other hand. Arab political bodies organized numerous protest activities against the authorities on the issue of the Misgav land jurisdiction and on the difficult socioeconomic conditions of Arabs living in the Jewish-dominated (mixed) cities.25 However, Arab protests regarding Palestinian issues were stronger and more radical than their actions relating to land, settlement, and housing in Israel. A clear example of this assertion was the sixth commemoration of the Land Day. Five days prior to the commemoration, the Arab population was apathetic about the celebration. However, as discussed above, on 25 March, Israel dismissed the mayors of Nablus and Ramalla. On 27 March, Hadash held an emergency convention of the Committee for Defense of Arab Lands under its guidance. The convention decided to call a general strike on 30 March, after five years of Land Day commemorations in which no general strikes were held in the Arab sector. Hadash responded to the challenge presented by nationalist elements and it gained ascendancy due to this actions.26 The PLO, for its part, used the media to urge Israeli Arabs to join the struggle on Land Day. Consequently, the general strike of

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30 March 1982 witnessed a large number of violent clashes with the police in the Israeli Arab sector.27 The National Committee of Arab Heads of Municipalities also organized an emergency meeting that resulted in the head of the National Committee, Ibrahim Nimr Husayn, sending a telegraph to the prime minister and minister of defense. The telegraph condemned the government’s actions in the Palestinian territories that had led to casualties resulting from IDF fi re and demanded the detention of those soldiers responsible. He also demanded that the closure on the Golan Heights be lifted, the detained Druze protestors be released, and the restoration of order and normalcy of life in the Palestinian-populated territories.28 Alan Goodman’s shooting at the al-Aqsa/Temple Mount compound, mentioned above, is another example of how the Palestinian issue entered the political agenda of Israeli Arabs and centered their protest activity during the 1980s. A delegation of Arab leaders visited Temple Mount in order to express their solidarity with the Palestinians, and they referred to the incident as one of the “crimes of the occupier.”29 During their meeting with the head of the Supreme Muslim Council, Sheikh Sa‘d al-Din al-‘Alami, the delegation proclaimed, “We belong to one nation, the Palestinian-Arab nation, and this place is holy to us as well.” Tawfiq Zayyad added, “This action was not carried out by one person. Rather, it is part of a series of crimes executed daily against the Arab-Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza. A situation where Arab blood is spilled freely has been created . . . We are half a million Israeli Arabs who stand unified with you in your just cause.”30 Zayyad’s assertion was a genuine reflection of how Israeli Arabs perceived the political situation, namely, the interrelation between the Palestinian cause and the status of the Arab minority inside Israel. Several months later, the Sabra and Shatilla massacre, for which the Israeli government was held responsible, took place in Lebanon, leading to a massive outcry in Israel among Jews and Arabs alike. A demonstration was organized in Tel Aviv in which some 400,000 people, Arabs alongside Jewish members of the leftist-peace camps, participated. In the Arab sector in Israel, spontaneous responses took place, including roadblocks, stoning of vehicles and policemen, and the display of PLO symbols such as flags and portraits of Yasser Arafat. The Arab leadership announced a general

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strike on 22 September 1982. On the eve of the strike, MK Tawfiq Zayyad delivered a passionate speech in Nazareth warning that any Arab not willing to protest would be challenging the will of the people and desecrating the blood of the victims.31 The strike on the 22 September became particularly violent. All the schools, with the exception of the Bedouin institutions, participated in the strike, and economic activity in the Arab sector stopped completely.32 On this day and the three succeeding days, the northern district alone witnessed 146 violations of the law: 47 stonings, 18 fi res, 19 barricades of roads and junctions, 17 cases of burning tires and similar vandalism, 39 unlicensed rallies, 25 unlicensed demonstrations, and 2 unlicensed conventions. During these events, 56 civilians and 43 policemen were injured.33 The events were more severe than March 1976, which inaugurated Land Day. For example, in Baqa al-Gharbiya, Arab youngsters constructed a barricade/checkpoint on the regional road. After questioning passengers and asking them to present their identity cards, they assaulted those who were Jewish. In other Arab villages, police stations were attacked and police cars were stoned, and a Jewishowned supermarket in Nazareth was stoned as well.34 In order to understand this outrage, one must remember that many Israeli Arabs had relatives in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. The reporter Qasem Zayd wrote in the ‘Al Hamishmar newspaper: The outbreak of the Arab citizens’ outrage on the day of mourning for the horrendous massacre in the Sabra and Shatilla camps is a natural and understandable reaction. It seems that there is no other way to respond to such barbaric actions, which are a black stain that will never be removed . . . The massacred victims are of the same flesh and blood as the Arabs of the Galilee and the Triangle . . . The pogrom was intended to eliminate an entire people. Therefore, the resentful public could not suppress its anger and adhere to the call of the president of the state and Arab leaders to keep the peace and quiet. MK Tawfiq Zayyad of Hadash said about this occasion that Holocaust victims conducted the Nazi massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatilla and that this event was a continuation of Israeli massacres of Palestinians since 1948, which have never ceased. He added, “The Palestinian problem is our problem. Our brothers have been sacrificed as victims, and we also sacrificed our land and homeland.” 35

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Alongside protest activities, the Arab minority strove in 1980 to build their political capacity vis-à-vis the state institution. The forming of the Supreme Follow-up Committee of Arab Citizens in 1982 and its institutionalization in 1984 is a benchmark in the Arab community’s process of crystallization as a Palestinian national minority, a minority in need of a popular institution of collective political leadership. The organizational development was followed by the shaping of a political platform. In 1984 a convention of the National Committee of Arab Heads of Municipalities resulted in the formation of a political platform, similar to the PLO’s political program, which centered on the establishment of the Palestinian state.36 Developing civil society capacities was another realm of the Arab minority’s activity. The high inflation experienced by Israel’s economy during the 1980s provided the Arabs with extraordinary buying power and assisted in strengthening the Arab middle class. One way this development was articulated was through the establishment of two weekly newspapers, al-Sinara and Kul al-Arab, whose founders were academics, owners of advertising agencies who foresaw the growing potential of the advertising market in the Arab sector.37 The existence of free and independent commercial-based newspapers in the Arab sector (al-Anba’ newspaper was sponsored by the government, and al-Ittihad and al-Mirsad were funded by political parties) boosted the identity construction of Israeli Arabs as a national minority and increased the awareness of their rights and their struggle for civil rights. Another development that contributed to the self-empowerment of the Israeli Arab community was the inauguration of Arab associations and the assistance these associations received from Jewish foundations as well as Palestinian sources. In 1980, the registration of new associations as nonprofit organizations was made easier when the Knesset replaced the Law of Ottoman Associations with the Law of Associations (Amutot). Within a few years, some 180 associations were established in the Arab sector with the purpose of endorsing cultural and political activity. Most of their funds were pledged by the Welfare Association, located in Geneva, headed by Professor Hisham Sharabi, a Palestinian PNC member from the United States, and funded by Mu‘asasat al-Ta‘awun, the Arab bank owned by ‘Abd al-Majid Shouman (a Jordanian Palestinian). Khalil Nakhle, the executive director of the association and a past resident of Rama in the Galilee, published his political

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strategy that assisting associations should work toward self-empowerment of the Israeli Arabs and toward an autonomous educational and cultural system for the Israeli Arabs independent of the state’s system.38 These civil organizations (the third sector) produced a cadre of professionals who were experts in fund-raising techniques, public relations, and administration who later would construct and lead a political strategy for a national minority. Arab internal politics also played a role in the process of radicalization. Hadash, the strongest party in the Arab sector, was being challenged during this period by more radical elements such as the Islamic Movement and Abna’ al-Balad. In the 1982 municipal elections in Nazareth, another force emerged that challenged the Hadash hegemony in the Arab sector: a group of nationalist intellectuals known by the name of Progressive Movement Nazareth. They succeeded in securing four out of seventeen seats in the municipal elections, which were a springboard to the 1984 national elections.39 The fact that Hadash was weakened in the general elections in 1981 caused this party to radicalize its activities in order to regain its popularity in the Arab sector. Arab Knesset members and mayors affi liated with the Zionist parties were in a dilemma. If they acted against political radicalization toward nationalism, they would be labeled as traitors. However, if they joined the radical camp, they endangered their position within their parties. Two examples shed light on their delicate situation: In March 1982, they called for the Arab population to refrain from holding a general strike on Land Day when the major issue protested was the Palestinian issue and not the collective rights of the Israeli Arab minority. MK Muhammad Watad called upon his colleagues to “separate our particular [Israeli Arabs] strategy and the strategy of West Bank and Gaza Arabs,” but his call was in vain—the Arab leadership opted for a strike. Choosing the other route, MK Hamad Khalayla of the Labor party joined the speakers at the convention during the general strike that was held in his town, Sakhnin.40 Khalayla decided to join the Follow-up Committee, and he boycotted the Knesset session celebrating 100 years of Jewish resettlement in Palestine. He also voted against the Golan Heights law, which required a majority vote in the Knesset to approve Israel’s withdrawal from the Golan Heights (in the course of a peace accord between

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Israel and Syria). His independent behavior cost him his seat in the Knesset. In the next election, the Labor party replaced him with another Arab candidate, ‘Abd al-Wahab Darawsha. Party leaders believed that Darawsha’s record as a civil servant (an inspector in the ministry of education) would guarantee that he would be more of a “yes man” then Khalayla. However this assumption soon turned out to be wrong, as Darawsha displayed even more independence than Khalayla.41 The gradual radicalization of the political positions of Israeli Arabs was seen in a survey conducted by Sammy Smooha in 1980: 11 percent of the Arab population denied Israel’s right to exist and 30.3 percent had reservations regarding its existence.42 This trend increased, with only 51.4 percent supporting unconditionally Israel’s right to exist in 1985 compared to 58.8 percent in 1980. In the 1980 survey, two-thirds of the Arab interviewees said that they could not trust most Jews.43 In sum, Arab political behavior during the second Likud tenure (1981– 1984) manifested itself in violent protests, more hostile forms of political discourse, and the creation of new national Arab organizations—all of them representing an increasing level of confl ict with and opposition to the Jewish state. These developments were clearly affected by the events across the Green Line, as well as in Lebanon. The Jewish Public’s Position Since the protests of Land Day, the Jewish public has viewed the Arab population as a threat to the internal stability of the state. The increase in the number of violent events along with the growing solidarity of Israeli Arabs with the population of the Palestinian territories and the PLO has gradually deepened the sense of alienation that Jews feel toward Arab citizens: they did not identify Israeli Arabs with the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians. The Jewish public perceived the government as an extended arm of its will regarding the treatment of Arabs in Israel and, apart from a few extremists such as the Jewish Underground, there were no special or spontaneous actions taken by Jews against Arabs in this period. In 1980, 40.9 percent of the Jews surveyed regarded Arabs as a security threat to the state, 65.9 percent believed that they were not trustworthy, and 42.7 percent thought that the

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state should intensify its control over Arabs through an iron-fist approach.44 However, Jewish political behavior as a separate domain from the government policy did not contribute significantly to escalation of tensions. Conclusion The paramount issue that occupied the second Likud government was the Palestinian issue on two fronts: in the West Bank and in Lebanon. A series of Israeli actions in this domain—beginning with the dismissal of radical West Bank Palestinian mayors, and followed by the war in Lebanon, the Sabra and Shatilla massacre, and the shooting incident on al-Haram al-Sharif compound—all strongly outraged Israeli Arabs. The result was a series of wide-scale clashes between Arab protestors and security forces. Reactive protests illustrated the increasing significance of the Palestinian issue for the political agenda of Israeli Arabs and once again proved the centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian confl ict to the Israeli Arabs. Even moderate Arab MKs associated with Labor invested much of their time in issues related to the Palestinian realm. Government policy during this period regarding the Arab minority was relatively moderate and even took few appeasing steps, such as minimizing the scale of taking over Arab-owned land into the jurisdiction of the Misgav regional council, respecting the Arab culture via a special PM’s prize for Arab writers, and opposing radical bills by the right-wing opposition. The Likud government’s policy in the domestic and civil arena regarding the Arabs in Israel was not perceived by the Arabs as being more hostile than the policy of the previous government headed by Mapai. Perhaps these moderate policy decisions prevented a stronger escalation of the internal confl ict. In other words, government policy contributed toward de-escalation, but since the broader confl ict generated strong resistance to the Israeli behavior in the Palestinian and Arab arenas, mass violence of Israeli Arabs was unavoidable. In addition to violent protests, Arabs were engaged during the period under review in political mobilization through the development of a national organization. They formed a national leadership institution: the Supreme Follow-up Committee. The Arab political arena was split between four streams that competed for the political support of the public, leading to a

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process of escalating protest against the system. The radicalization of the Arabs was also indicated in the voting patterns of 1984 (see next chapter). Jews, as demonstrated in public opinion polls, reacted to the Arabs’ radicalization and to Palestinian armed actions by becoming more polarized, but without responding in an aggressive fashion or instituting violent actions against the Arabs in Israel. The two major factors of the internal Jewish-Arab confl ict affected each other toward a greater intensification of the social and political positions. After two Likud governments and an escalation in the tensions between Jews and Arabs in Israel, a Labor-Likud coalition was in power between 1984 and 1988 with two prime ministers: the fi rst two years, Shimon Peres, followed by Yitzhak Shamir. Chapter 5 analyzes the differences between the two subperiods of this government—a relatively peaceful period in the confl ict under review—that was changed overnight when the intifada broke out in late 1987.

5

Turning the Scales Between Likud and Labor

t h e i n f l u e nc e of the continuous occupation of the West Bank and Gaza split Israeli society between the right-wing camp led by the Likud party, which adopted a hawkish policy versus the Palestinians, and the leftwing camp led by the Labor party, which opted for a more dovish approach. The two major camps at this juncture in the history of Israel enjoyed fairly equal electoral support, and the Arab minority had no choice but to side with Labor, even though the party was Zionist and far from expressing the ideological outlook of most Arab citizens. This chapter discusses the developments in the Jewish-Arab confl ict inside Israel during the Israeli “unity government” between 1984 and 1988 with a special analysis of the difference between the two major parties in relation to the Arab minority. The Political Setting The policy of Israel and its Arab adversaries versus each other was always affected by the global theater of confl ict between the two great superpowers, and particularly by the U.S. support of Israel and its foreign affairs policies from 1967 on and the USSR support of Arab strategies. A new era began in 1985 when Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union. At fi rst he was engaged in improving the USSR economy, and his attempts to reduce tensions with the United States were not reciprocated. The fi rst meeting between Gorbachev and U.S. president Ronald Reagan took place in mid-April 1986, and in 1987 Gorbachev announced fi rst glasnost (maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government 106

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institutions) and then perestroika (restructuring the economy). A year later the Soviets began withdrawing from Afghanistan. The year 1984 was a time of political instability in Israel. Having invaded Lebanon in 1982, the IDF became trapped there, suffering casualties on an almost-daily basis. This fact together with the overall debate over the Lebanon War, the fi rst Arab-Israeli war when there had not been a national consensus, strengthened the internal split between the right and left in Israel.1 The economic situation also deteriorated and there was an extremely high rate of inflation. The war in Lebanon resulted in the ousting of armed Palestinian organizations from Lebanon and the resumption of the search for a diplomatic solution to the Palestinian issue, which became the main challenge facing Israel during the second half of the 1980s. During this period, secret negotiations took place between Jordan and the PLO, with minor U.S. involvement, regarding the possibility of convening an international conference for peace in the Middle East.2 The failure of these discussions, together with Israel’s unsuccessful attempt to cultivate a supplementary leadership in the Palestinian territories, created a feeling of hopelessness and deep despair among the Palestinians in the territories and eventually led to the outbreak of the Palestinian popular uprising called the intifada in December 1987. This also affected the Arab citizens of Israel.3 Given that the balance of power between Likud and Labor was fairly equal, the two parties realized that the Arab vote was decisive regarding which party would form the government. Therefore, in the mid-1980s the Likud, as Labor had previously done, began to court certain sections of the Arab population, particularly the Druze, the Bedouins, and some Muslim clans. The Likud party even established a special department whose role was to attract Arab political support during elections. The fact that the two largest parties were attempting to court Arab voters strengthened the Arab minority’s political status and concerned Likud. On the eve of the 1984 election, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir announced that it was unacceptable for a government to be formed based on “non-Jewish votes.”4 When polling was over, Likud MK Ariel Sharon delegitimized the election results, arguing that the additional votes received by the Labor party were Arab votes. He objected to the possibility of forming a unity government—a government

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based on a combination of the Labor and Likud parties—arguing that those who would determine the cabinet would be the Israeli Arabs and this could not be allowed.5 Despite Sharon’s opposition to the unity government, this did not prevent him from later serving as a minister in that government. Prior to the 1984 elections, the Labor party concluded that in order to attract Arab votes, they must integrate Arab candidates into the main party list and not just to form special Arab satellite lists, as in the past. This change demanded a new approach with the need to fi nd candidates for the Knesset who would appeal to the Arab population, instead of Hamula (clan) seniors, whose popularity was in decline. As a result of this change, a new Arab Knesset member was elected from the Labor party’s list, MK ‘Abd alWahab Darawsha, while in the Mapam party, which joined the Labor coalition, Muhammad Watad was reelected. Both Arab MKs were in their forties, part of the second generation following the Nakba, had completed university studies and were charismatic personalities. The Labor party granted Darawsha all-encompassing political freedom, more far-reaching than had been stipulated in the party platform. Darawsha presented himself in the Arab community as an activist working for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state headed by the PLO, a stance that contradicted the 1984 Labor party’s platform.6 The 1984 polls ended with the Likud and Labor parties receiving almost the same number of seats in the Knesset (with Labor party slightly ahead with 44 seats compared to 41 seats for Likud) and neither was able to form a majority coalition with the remaining small parties. There was no choice but to establish a national unity government. The prime minister’s position would rotate, with Labor leader Shimon Peres fi lling the role for the fi rst two years (until September 1986) and Likud leader, Yitzhak Shamir, the subsequent two years (1986 to 1988). Mapam, which had allied with Labor, refused to be part of the same government as Likud and withdrew from the alliance, joining instead the Meretz party, which was inaugurated by Yossi Sarrid and Shulamit Aloni. The 1984 elections marked a change in the political orientation of the Israeli Arabs. The Arab satellite parties affi liated with Labor ever since 1949 disappeared from the political system, enabling the development of an Arab national party (including the Jewish movement Alternativa—an extreme

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left party formed by Uri Avnery and Matityahu Peled) with an anti-Zionist platform, namely, the Progressive Lists for Peace.7 The PLP succeeded in challenging Hadash with a more radical and national campaign and competed with Hadash over the Arab nationalist constituency. The competition between the PLP and Hadash led to Hadash’s radicalization and verbal attacks by Hadash leaders against the minister of defense, Yitzhak Rabin, during the intifada.8 The PLP also attacked Hadash as an agent of Israelization that aimed to turn the Arab masses into Israelis. It presented itself as an alternative political party opposing Israelization, using slogans such as “Palestinization of the Arabs in Israel.” As a result, Hadash gained less support from the Arab constituency. It received 33 percent of the Arab votes, which was a decline of 5 percent of the total vote from the 1981 election. It did, however, succeed in keeping its four seats in the Knesset.9 The PLP won 18 percent of the vote, equivalent to two seats in the Knesset. They were fi lled by advocate Muhammad Mi‘ari, former activist in the al-Ard movement, and Matityahu Peled, a Jewish academic and former army general from the Alternativa movement.10 One should also look at the shift of votes from the Labor satellite lists to PLP. Although Labor received 25.8 percent of the votes of Arab citizens (compared to 29 percent in previous elections)11 it lost the 18 percent of Arab votes which had previously gone to its satellite list. During the 1984 election campaign, some Jewish Knesset members appealed to the Central Election Committee demanding that the PLP be disqualified because its platform did not include the recognition of the state of Israel. This appeal was successful. Following its disqualification by the committee, the PLP appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the committee had not proved that this party was opposed to the existence of the state.12 Jewish political reaction occurred immediately after the elections: the Knesset enacted an amendment to the Basic Law that stated that a party that does not recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people could not participate in the elections. This law specifically aimed to disqualify the PLP from running in subsequent elections. Following its formation, the national unity government succeeded in curtailing the high inflation and withdrawing the IDF from the central part of Lebanon to a narrow security belt in south Lebanon (June 1985).

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The government also accomplished a relief mission (Operation Solomon) to fly Ethiopian Jews to Israel. In July 1986, Israel resumed relations with Morocco marked by a visit of PM Shimon Peres to Casablanca. Although a few left-wing Israelis met with senior PLO leaders unofficially, the unity government fought against the PLO. In October 1985, the IDF air force struck the PLO headquarters in Tunisia as a reaction to terrorist actions that PLO armed men took against Israelis. The Palestinian Dimension After the PLO was defeated and expelled from its haven in Lebanon, Israeli Arabs quickly understood that the Palestinian strategy had changed from armed struggle to political negotiations. They were, therefore, disappointed by Israel’s failure to see the possibilities for peace. Interestingly, an active attempt to advance peace was initiated by Arab Knesset members of the Labor and Mapam parties. In November 1984, shortly after the general elections, ‘Abd al-Wahab Darawsha from the Labor party decided to participate in the Palestinian National Council convened in Amman. He believed that by doing so he could advance the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. However, the general secretary of the Labor party, Uzi Baram, contacted him when he was already in Cyprus preparing for fl ight to Amman, and dissuaded him from carrying out his plan.13 Darawsha and Muhammad Watad were engaged during those years in lobbying for the Palestinian institutions and leaders in the West Bank and Gaza. For example, they advocated reopening West Bank universities after they were shut down by a military decree following several campus riots. They also met with the mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, and lobbied to resolve the problems faced by Palestinian inhabitants of Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. From 1986 onward, their involvement in issues relating to Palestinian prisoners in Israel increased.14 In April 1987, Minister of Foreign Affairs Shimon Peres reached (without consulting PM Shamir) a secret draft agreement with King Hussein on peace between Israel and Jordan according to which an international peace conference would be convened to direct Israel and Jordan to a negotiation

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leading to Jordan’s resuming control over most of the West Bank (the London Accords).15 Yitzhak Shamir rejected the agreement and prevented its discussion in the cabinet. He opted to hold political discussions with West Bank Palestinian figures in order to bypass the PLO and their requirement to establish an independent Palestinian state. The Palestinian issue was viewed as in a deadlock, and a crisis was only a matter of time. In December 1987, the Palestinian uprising known as the intifada broke out in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The uprising took the form of a popular struggle, both violent and nonviolent, including what Palestinians termed resistance or armed struggle and Israeli Jews view as terror.16 The major cause of the uprising was the deadlock in negotiating the Palestinian demands to Israel’s end of occupation in the West Bank and Gaza and the establishment of a Palestinian independent state. The Palestinians in the Israeli-controlled territories suffered from the occupation on all planes: economic distress, personal humiliation at checkpoints, and other problems. They despaired of the Arab states, the PLO, and the international community being able to assist them with their goal. The young generation of Palestinians was ready for mobilization, and an increase of Islamic awareness on the one hand and a decrease of Israeli military deterrent on the other hand boosted the uprising.17 The intifada broke out in the Gaza Strip and West Bank spontaneously and surprised both the PLO and Israel. The civil subversion had one goal: to bring the Palestinians to the table for negotiations in order to end Israel’s occupation. The uprising experienced large-scale violence during the fi rst three years and reached its peak in 1990. It formally ended with the signing of the Oslo Accords, the Israel-PLO peace agreement of 1993. The uprising included all Palestinian towns, villages, and refugee camps. The IDF had to handle about 1,500 violent events monthly including attacks against Israeli security forces, civilians, and Palestinians who collaborated with Israel; there were general strikes, tax rebellion, and resignation of Palestinian civil servants employed by the Israeli administration in the West Bank and Gaza. The uprising led to a large number of Israeli casualties, about 150 every month. The PLO and the newly born Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, joined together to lead the uprising through a Central National Command. The

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rioters used mostly “cold” weapons such as stones, knifes, molotov cocktails, and slingshots but also some shootings and other “hot” actions. The Palestinians intended to expel the IDF from their populated areas and replace the Israeli administration with self-rule.18 Israel was unprepared to deal with a popular uprising. Minister of Defense Yitzhak Rabin initiated an iron-fist policy to suppress the riots, and security forces were sent in with live ammunition and rubber-coated bullets. The IDF used armed vehicles, special forces in disguise, and punished the general Palestinian population by closing down universities and schools, demolishing the houses of families of those involved in violent actions, and jailing or deporting political activists. In April 1988, the IDF attacked and killed Yasser Arafat’s deputy, Khalil al-Wazir (nicknamed Abu Jihad), at his private house in Tunisia. Abu Jihad was involved in intifada operations from his remote headquarters. The government backed up Rabin’s policy, but the counterrioting measures were disproportionate. TV channels screened pictures of Israeli armed forces fighting against women and children and beating detainees with clubs, resulting in world public opinion being strongly opposed to Israel. The intifada polarized the internal split between the right- and leftwing camps in Jewish society and between the IDF and Jewish settlers in the Palestinian-populated territories. It put an end to the “Jordanian option,” and on 31 July 1988 King Hussein announced Jordan’s disengagement from the West Bank. This strengthened the PLO as the diplomatic player representing the Palestinians and resulted in the PNC’s declaration on 15 November 1988 of the independence of the Palestinian state. It also resulted in a significant economic cost to both the Palestinians and Israel.19 The secret peace talks of 1993 between Israel and the PLO could take place since each of the sides of the confl ict did not accomplish a victory on the battlefield. The Oslo negotiations were also possible due to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the large-scale Jewish immigration to Israel from former Soviet Union republics. In sum, the Palestinian issue was a relatively dormant factor during the fi rst three years of the unity government, but in the last year the intifada broke out and contributed strongly to an escalation in the Israeli internal confl ict between Jews and Arabs.

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Government Policy Compared to the seven years of Likud reign (1977–1984), which were characterized by a policy of control without any significant measures to appeal to the Arab population, the four years of the joint Labor-Likud coalition were characterized by an attempt to solve some of the problems that faced Arab citizens. The change was due to the new political situation of electoral balance between the two major parties, which forced both parties to court the Arab vote. The two parties were preparing themselves for the next election campaign by introducing some measures to appease the Arab population in order to gain their political support. Two ministers shared the responsibility of Arab affairs: Ezer Weitzman served for the fi rst two years (July 1984–October 1986), followed by Moshe Arens (October 1986–November 1988). Shimon Peres, who held the position of prime minister in the fi rst phase of the unity government, nominated Avraham Tamir, a member of Weitzman’s Yahad party (which joined Labor), to the position of director of the prime minister’s office, and he assisted Weitzman in his initiatives pertaining to the Arab community. In January 1985, Tamir formed a committee of general directors of ministries on Israeli Arab affairs, which he headed. It managed to create greater administrative efficiency, more than any committee in this area in the past. Weitzman abolished the position of advisor of Arab affairs, which to the Arab citizens symbolized their inferiority and highlighted the fact that they were subjected to state control. Weitzman also achieved another political goal with this initiative: he fi red the Likud government’s advisor, Binyamin Gur Ariyeh, and replaced him with Joseph Ginat in the position of senior assistant to the prime minister, who now was in charge of handling Arab affairs. Ginat brought to the position a domestic agenda focused on equality and his academic concept that Israeli Arabs are not strongly influenced by their Palestinian nationality, but rather have developed their own political identity.20 He concluded that the state should endorse this desire for equality and, by so doing, reduce the friction between Arab citizens and the state authorities. The major goal of his policy was not to resolve the confl ict but to placate it. A policy paper prepared by Ginat (together with Avraham Tamir and the author of this book) urged that the state should demand civil

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loyalty from Arab citizens but should not expect them to identify with the Zionist goals of the state. At the center of the document were two proposals: to create a voluntary national service for Arabs—a substitution for mandatory military service—and to entitle Arab volunteers to the army to benefits similar to those received by Jews. The document also proposed that the gaps in the realm of economic development be bridged and that the municipal services in the Arab villages and towns be improved in order to turn them into desirable living places. The paper recommended that each ministry, in its own area of expertise, would take care of developing the infrastructure and services for the Arab communities according to the standards of the Jewish community. In the political-security arena, this document did not innovate; instead it reflected a continuation of the previous governments’ strategy of preventing the establishment of national Arab political entities and the achievement of autonomous rights.21 As was the fate of many policy documents, the proposals in this one never materialized. The document was submitted to the General Director’s Committee and to the Security Cabinet, but no decisions resulted from the preliminary discussions. The committee formed by Tamir declined because the general directors merely sent their junior assistants— who did not have the authority to make independent decisions. The importance of the Arab vote to the two leading parties of the government explains why decisions could not be taken by this administration. Ministries of each party neutralized one another’s initiatives as both sides aimed to prevent their adversary from being credited with improvements by the Arab electorate. Due to this competition, the minister in charge of Arab affairs could only attempt to solve specific problems within the jurisdiction of his party ministers, and he failed to introduce any comprehensive and meaningful reforms. Weitzman’s injection into the public discourse of the idea of a more liberal attitude toward the Arabs encouraged some Arab interest groups to apply for his assistance in solving their particular problems. The government’s handling of Arab affairs was consequently not a product of a programmed policy accepted by the cabinet but rather a matter of ad hoc treatment. Three main issues surrounded the unity government’s treatment of the Arab sector during its four years in power. First, a proposal was made to

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repatriate the internal refugees of Ikrit and Bir‘em to their original villages. The residents of Ikrit and Bir‘em had been uprooted from their homes in 1948, “until the security situation allows their return.” In 1951, the High Court ruled that the villagers were allowed to return “as long as no emergency decree” against it has been issued. The government hastened to issue such a decree against the Ikrit evacuees, and two months later, the IDF blew up the houses in that village. Only the churches of the two villages were left standing. Two years later, the land of the two villages—16,000 dunams in Ikrit and 12,000 dunams in Bir‘em—was expropriated for Jewish settlements. Now, representatives of the displaced Arabs demanded that the government fulfi ll its promises to repatriate them to the towns and villages that had been demolished. When Menachem Begin was in the opposition party (particularly during the 1950s and 1960s), he claimed that the Mapai party was causing an injustice to the Ikrit and Bir‘em populations, and he sought their repatriation. When he was prime minister, however, Begin was unable to get his own government to approve this policy. One of the reasons was an objection by the General Security Service, who opposed this initiative on the grounds that the repatriation would create a precedent for some four hundred other Arab villages. Now, in 1984, Weitzman requested Ginat to fi nd a solution to the problem. Ginat met with the two communities separately and negotiated a solution, a recommendation to reestablish the two villages a few kilometers from their original locations.22 Ginat did not propose to return them precisely to their original locations because of opposition from the Israel Land Authority and the nearby Jewish settlements that had received the villages’ lands for their own use. After studying the case, Ginat concluded that Ikrit and Bir‘em constituted a special situation and that the return of the displaced villagers would not set a precedent for the dozens of other displaced Arab communities who also demanded repatriation to their original, demolished villages. First, unlike other Arab villages abandoned or evacuated in 1948, the inhabitants of Ikrit and Bir‘em were asked by the Jewish forces to leave for two weeks for security reasons and were promised that at the end of this period they would be allowed to return; second, the Supreme Court ruled in 1951 that the Israeli authorities’ designation of the villages as military zones was illegal.

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This should have allowed the former residents to return to these villages. However, the IDF prevented them from doing so by destroying the houses. The fear that this repatriation would open the floodgates in the context of the Palestinians refugees’ claim of the right of return had served as a deterrent in the past, hampering the resolution of the dilemma of Ikrit and Bir‘em. Ginat identified these two villages as exceptions and an injustice that should be rectified. Perhaps further motivation for a solution was that the displaced in this case were Maronites and Catholics, two groups that Israel had special interest in appeasing, considering their global outreach. However, despite all of Ginat’s efforts, his proposals were not implemented and the Arabs of Ikrit and Bir‘em were not returned to their villages at this stage. The second significant problem of the Arab community that was dealt with during Weitzman’s tenure as the minister responsible for Arab affairs was the dismantling of the army training zone 9 in the Galilee (see map on page 55). During the 1980s, the army decreased its use of this zone and withdrew from parts of it—those areas that were state-owned—for Jewish settlement in the framework of the “observation” settlements program. The Jewish settlements Ma‘ale-Tzviya, Yuvalim, Eshhar, and a number of others were established in the training zone while neighboring Arab villages were still prohibited from using their land for agriculture. The training zone was also a source of tension between the army (and state institutions) and Arab citizens because of the damage caused to the soil and property as a result of live ammunition training. After being approached by the Arab villagers, Weitzman succeeded in convincing the minister of defense, Yitzhak Rabin, to end the closure of this zone and to return the land to the original Arab owners, who could cultivate their lands again. This was the fi rst time since 1948 that the state returned significant plots of land to its original Arab owners. Here again, gaining Arab citizens’ votes was the major consideration for the Weitzman-Rabin initiative.23 The third Weitzman policy initiative occurred in 1985, following a court rule to demolish a house built without permit in Majd al-Kurum village. The demolition of houses built without permits (illegal buildings in the governmental terminology) was another major problem facing the Arab sector. There were insufficient authorized housing zones in the Arab sector and the building of illegal Arab houses was subject to a large number of

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court rulings, which ended in the demolition of these houses, as discussed in chapter 3.24 When Majd al-Kurum house owner approached Weitzman in an attempt to avoid demolition, the minister decided to found an interministerial committee to investigate illegal building in the Arab sector. The second Markovitz committee functioned with a different agenda and different guidelines: to solve the problem of illegal building in a positive way. The committee found that more than ten thousand houses were built in the Arab sector without legal permits and concluded that the lack of housing zones and updated master plans was the main reason for this phenomenon. It recommended that retrospective approval be granted to most of these residences with the exception of a few dozen houses that blocked national plans for constructing highways or energy infrastructure. The committee also found that “most of the recommendations of the two previous committees were not implemented, and thus the illegal housing phenomenon had worsened, and that no resources, money or manpower had been allocated for the supervision of house constructions, or preparing master plans for the Arab villages.”25 How did it come to be that two different ministerial committees, both headed by Markovitz and making their report within five years of each other, would come to completely opposite conclusions? The answer lies in the different political power held by Arab citizens in the two periods, and in the different policy orientation of the Likud and Labor parties. Moshe Arens of the Likud party was appointed as minister in charge of Arab affairs during the second half of the national unity government; he replaced Weitzman in October 1986. He nominated Amos Gilbo‘a, a former IDF intelligence major general and military correspondent for Ma‘ariv, to the position of advisor on Arab affairs to replace Ginat. Gilbo‘a, who entered his tenure with no political background, worked out a new policy paper that appealed to the interests of both major coalition parties. He commissioned a study by a well-known Haifa University professor, the geographer Arnon Soffer, to serve as the scientific foundation for his policy blueprint. Soffer is known for rigid opinions regarding the Arab issue, influenced by his understanding of demography and settlement (to be further discussed in chapter 10). He was concerned about Arab demographic growth and the expansion of Arab settlements in the Galilee, Triangle, and Negev regions,

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which he thought could bring about the loss of state sovereignty over these regions. His political-academic convictions were reflected in the study that he submitted to Gilbo‘a in March 1987.26 The study recommended expanding Jewish settlement in Arab areas and preventing Arabs from gaining control over industrial and business zones and national highways. He also recommended that the Arabs should be kept concentrated in their villages by providing public housing projects in order to prevent their immigration to Jewish towns, and, by so doing, decreasing the friction between Jews and Arabs in Jewish areas. In the document submitted to Arens, Gilbo‘a stressed the importance of shaping a policy that was agreed to by all the parties that make up the coalition. He emphasized the strong influence of the Palestinian issue in the West Bank and Gaza territories as a factor that prevented a radical change in the government’s policy regarding Arabs. He did recommend, however, that funds be allocated to raise the living standards of Arabs to that of Jews, and estimated this could be done for 253 million NIS (even though disparities in infrastructure alone were estimated to be 18 billion NIS).27 Another suggestion was to try to foster among Arab citizens a sense of belonging to the state by encouraging “positive” elements—factions favorable to the Israeli state—and by implementing a divide and conquer policy, a policy supported by his superior. An exception to the conservative suggestions in his blueprint was a recommendation to raise the status of the Arabic language. This recommendation aimed at creating a new discourse for the partnership between Jews and Arabs and at including Arabs in the state’s official ceremonies. In August 1987, the government decided to stop the development of the Lavi jet due to its high cost. In response, Moshe Arens, who headed the lobby for continuing its development resigned his ministerial office. As a result, Gilbo‘a’s program was not presented to the cabinet. His proposal was later submitted to the government, but no decisions were made or resolutions carried out. Gilbo‘a later criticized this response, saying that none of the governments were interested in a serious discussion of the situation of the Israeli Arab, preferring to defer the problem indefi nitely.28 Arens believed that the public mood in the Arab sector did not facilitate the implementation of previous government’s promises of equality to the

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Israeli Arabs, and he predicted the continuation of discriminatory policies. He proposed to gradually integrate the Arabs into the military service, and vigorously encouraged the Bedouins to serve in the army as compulsory conscripts, rather than on a permanent (paid) basis, as some of them tended to do. His efforts resulted in the founding of a special Bedouin unit in the army. Arens’ efforts resembled the traditional Likud tendency to attract sectarian groups among the Arab population. One important achievement of his tenure was the allocation of equal budgets for services and infrastructure in the Druze villages, thus putting them on par with Jewish settlements.29 Yet the money was not actually disbursed during his government’s term. Arens’ approach to the displaced persons from Ikrit and Bir‘em was liberal, resembling Menachem Begin’s position. He revived this initiative in order to send a message to the Arab Christians that the Likud had a more liberal policy toward them than Weitzman’s Labor party (who had recommended return to a place nearby, not the original locations). Arens submitted an omnibus bill proposing that the two villages be reestablished on their original plots with zoning for the reconstruction laid out in the bill, that those who were repatriated would be integrated in the regional defense system, and that the army would be opened for voluntary service.30 Arens’ significant contribution to government policy regarding the Arab community during his time in office was the encouragement of voluntary service in the IDF, which he believed was the ultimate expression of loyalty to the state.31 The government rejected Arens’ bill as well. During the 1990s, two other government initiatives to solve the problem of the displaced villages failed and the matter was closed in 2001 with Ariel Sharon’s cabinet’s decision to prevent the return of Ikrit’s and Bir‘em’s original inhabitants due to the fear that the case would regarded as a public and legal precedent for the Palestinian refugees’ claim of return. The Supreme Court backed this decision in a 2004 ruling.32 In conclusion, the unity-government policy sought to appeal to the Arab population, particularly during its fi rst two years. The policy was expected to contribute to a de-escalation of the internal confl ict. However, the Palestinian intifada that erupted in 1987 impacted on the Israeli Arabs more strongly.

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Arab Political Behavior In the second half of the 1980s, Arab political echelons were engaged in the institutionalization of their organizations, in founding additional national parties and political movements, and in expanding the activity of the Supreme Follow-up Committee and the role of civil society organizations. During the two years of Ezer Weitzman’s tenure as minister of Arab affairs, there were no significant protest demonstrations held by Arabs due to the new mood of appeasement created by Weitzman’s personal attitude and rhetoric. Weitzman’s positions regarding the Palestinian issue, that is, his support for Israel’s withdrawal from territories and for initiating talks with the PLO, also gained him esteem among the Arab population. When one of the two major factors influencing the confl ict in a relationship de-escalates and there is no significant intensification in the second factor, then a process of de-escalation of the confl ict takes place. This is exactly what happened between late 1984 and 1987. However, the relatively de-escalated tensions in the relationship between the Arab minority and the state were changed dramatically with the outbreak of the intifada in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The intifada deepened the links and solidarity between the Arabs in Israel and their Palestinian brothers and sisters in the territories. Israeli Arabs seemed to be proud that the Palestinian struggle achieved success. Jawdat Kabaha from Barta‘a told the Israeli writer David Grossman that before the intifada, he hesitated to express his Palestinian identity in public, whereas subsequently he openly declared pride in his Palestinian identity, an identity that according to him does not contradict his Israeli citizenship.33 The intifada also increased the abhorrence felt by the Israeli Arabs for the actions taken by the state against the Palestinians. As a young man from Barta‘a Nasuh Kabaha told Grossman, “The intifada has exposed the true face of the Jews with the behavior of the soldiers who invade Palestinian houses (in the West Bank and Gaza Strip), break things, and curse the Arabs.” He added that he himself does not participate in the struggle but he supports his brothers.34 Elie Rekhess summed up the position of the Israeli Arab population and the intifada as follows:

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Israeli Arabs, similar to other components of the Arab and Palestinian people, expressed much respect and admiration for the “stone-bearing youngster” and dispelled the myth of the “undefeated Israeli army.” Many of them were moved by the intensity of resistance that left the security forces without any effective way of dealing with the mass-scale demonstrations, the rock barricades, the burning tires, and the Molotov cocktails. The wide TV coverage enabled Israeli Arabs to follow the events closely. The international sympathy given to the Palestinian Herculean actions and their ability to stand up to the military forces vested Israeli Arabs with a sense of pride and participation in the achievements of their counterparts in the West Bank and Gaza. On the other hand, the iron fist repression of the riots, the huge number of casualties, the aggressive behavior of the IDF soldiers, the scenes of humiliation suffered by the residents of the territories, the arrests and the deportations, and the continuous suffering of the civil population, all gave birth to the sense of partnership and sharing of pain and sorrow . . . and fi nally, the nationalist awakening of the occupied territories’ residents was projected also within Israel. The Arab population of Israel was exposed daily to Palestinian symbols of uprising: Palestinian flags and the supportive banners of the Palestinian organizations, the traditional Kafiyah, and the raised fi ngers in the “victory” sign. The crystallization of the Intifada around the PLO leadership, the expression of loyalty to Yasser Arafat, the repeated demand for national rights—in particularly the right for self-determination and an independent Palestinian state—all influenced the majority of Israeli Arabs and urged them to identify with the goals of the struggle. As a result, the Palestinian national component of their identity gradually solidified.35

At the start of the uprising, on 9 December 1987, Hadash attempted to organize a protest. However, other Arab factions did not accept its extreme proposals. On 21 December 1987, a general strike was announced by the Supreme Follow-up Committee, who declared a minute of silence to commemorate the memory of the Palestinians killed during those days. The day of the strike was named “Peace Day,” but it turned into a massive, violent protest. As an example, in Jaffa a public bus was stoned in the main street and in Lod, young Arab protestors disrupted the movement of public transport and stoned the municipal police station. Serious clashes between Arab

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protestors and security forces occurred also at Tayba and on the Wadi ‘Ara road, where the traffic was blocked and Jewish cars were attacked with stones and Molotov cocktails.36 Israeli Arabs expressed their sympathy with the Palestinian uprising in many ways, sometimes by symbolic means but also by political demonstrations. In some cases, the protests became violent and expressed hostility toward state policies. However, Israeli Arabs as a community did not join the uprising and did not instigate riots within the state of Israel, as was the case in the occupied territories (to be discussed in detail in the next chapter). The outbreak of the intifada was a convenient excuse for Darawsha’s withdrawal from the Labor party and the formation of a new Arab independent party, the Arab Democratic Party (ADP). Prior to the November 1988 elections, the Supreme Follow-up Committee again announced a general strike to be held on the fi fteenth of that month, the same day in which the PNC convention in Algiers announced the establishment of the Palestinian state. Some senior officials in the Israeli prime minister’s office considered outlawing the Supreme Follow-up Committee in response, a suggestion that was not implemented.37 How did the intifada influence Arab public opinion? In a survey of political positions conducted in 1988 by Sammy Smooha among Arabs, it was found that only half of the interviewees accepted Israel’s right to exist, and those who identified themselves as Palestinians increased to 66.7 percent of the interviewees compared to 54 percent in a previous survey conducted in 1980. Nadim Rouhana found in his survey that 68 percent of the Arab citizens identified themselves as Palestinians.38 A decisive majority of 70.7 of the Arab citizens in the Smooha poll said that it was impossible for them to trust most Jews.39 Thus, the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza in late 1987 strongly influenced the political resistance of the Arab minority inside Israel, resulting in a trend of escalation of the confl ict. Jewish Political Behavior In the 1984 elections, Rabbi Meir Kahane was elected to the Knesset. He was an extremist American vigilante who had settled in Israel and took a

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racist approach to the Arabs, even publicly calling them “dogs.” The fact that Kahane and his movement had some support in the Jewish sector raised anger and fears among the Arab population. This feeling of anger remained even when Kahane was prevented from taking his Knesset seat because of his extreme racist views. Jewish hostility toward Arabs increased further after the Jibril deal (May 1985) to exchange 1,150 Palestinian prisoners, who were being held for security violations and terrorist activity, for three Israeli prisoners of war in August 1985. Opposing the Jibril Deal, Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir in his capacity as a member of the Knesset submitted a nongovernment bill requesting the release of the Jewish Underground prisoners who had conducted terrorist actions against Palestinians in the West Bank. Although the bill was opposed by the government and fi nally failed in the Knesset, the Jewish terrorists’ terms of imprisonment were shortened by the president and the Committee for Early Release of Prisoners.40 A public opinion survey conducted following the Jibril deal found that Kahane could have gained eleven seats in the Knesset had a general election taken place at that point.41 Among the Jewish public, 47 percent viewed Hadash as more dangerous than Kahane’s Kach party, while 22 percent perceived Kach as being of greater concern. Jews were ready to legitimize Kach and disqualify the Arab parties.42 Only half of the Jewish population accepted without reservations the Arabs’ rights to live in the state of Israel. About 60 percent of them believed that Arabs were not trustworthy and 40 percent thought that Arabs posed a risk to national security and an iron-fist policy should be implemented against them.43 The Jewish public opinion was strongly influenced by the confl ict between Israel and the Palestinians: it seems that Jews did not distinguish between the attitudes of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians on the one hand and Israeli Arab citizens on the other hand in times of violent confl ict. The more moderate policy of Labor versus the Palestinians and particularly the release of Palestinian prisoners (terrorists in Jews’ eyes) radicalized the Jews’ position versus the Palestinians in general including increasing opposition to Israeli Arabs. These public opinion polls also showed a significant difference between the government and the public regarding policies related to the Arab minority: the Jewish public was more radical than its political leaders. The opposite

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phenomenon was found among the Arab minority, whose leaders tended to present more radical positions versus the state and the Jewish majority than the Arab public. Conclusion The period of national unity was characterized by an increase in the political power of the Arab minority, which resulted in Arab voters being courted by the two major parties. This development was indicated by the attempt of cabinet members to treat various problems of the Arab population more liberally. On the domestic front, the ministers in charge of the Arab sector showed openness and created a moderate atmosphere, which contributed to fewer protests occurring during this period. However, evaluation of the Arab-Jewish confl ict during the tenure of the national unity government needs to be divided according to the prime minister in power: Shimon Peres of Labor until October 1986, and Yitzhak Shamir of Likud until 1988. The two leaders and their parties had a different agenda on both the Palestinian issue and the internal Arab minority issue. The fi rst two years witnessed relative calm on the Palestinian plane, when secret talks took place between the PLO and Jordan and then between Shimon Peres and King Hussein until deadlocking when Yitzhak Shamir declined the London accords. The government policy led by Minister Ezer Weitzman in the fi rst half of the unity government was marked by steps to appease the Arab population and by an inclusive and welcoming official discourse. The government policy had a psychological effect on the Arab minority. At one point, it was felt that the cycle of struggle was producing results and that the state had opted to reverse its ongoing policy in the spheres of land, housing, and refugees by returning a large lot of land to Arab use (training zone 9), by legalizing thousands of Arab houses built without a permit, and by proposing the return of internal refugees (Arabs displaced from Ikrit and Bir‘em to their villages). The policy changes aimed to court Arab voters were not fundamental changes but only slight relief from coercive measures (housing regulations as an example). Minor as they were, these policy changes combined with a changing discourse during Ezer Weitzman’s tenure contributed to de-escalation between 1984 and 1986.

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However, this trend halted overnight when the intifada broke out in December 1987. The reshuffle of Ezer Weitzman as minister in charge of Arab affairs and the policy adopted by Labor minister of defense—Yitzhak Rabin took aggressive measures to suppress the intifada—the escalation of tensions returned. Israeli Arabs decided to express their solidarity with the intifada and with its violent manifestations but mostly made an effort not to take an operative part in the violence themselves, with the exception of mass rallies and strikes during special events. The change of the Arabs’ political activity toward mobilization and violent activity occurred as a result of a change in the Palestinian dimension of the confl ict, which coincided with the government’s rotation to Shamir as Likud prime minister and Arens as minister in charge of Arab affairs. The intifada resulted in increased violent actions and mass scale protest by Arab citizens, which overshadowed the government’s attempted appeasement toward the Arabs. This chapter and the following suggests a reevaluation of the role of the fi rst intifada on the relationship between Jews and Arabs in Israel. I argue in the next chapter that the intifada had a strong, negative impact on both Jews and Arabs. It injected the Palestinian component much more strongly into the internal confl ict. The Jewish public polarized its attitude, becoming more strongly opposed to the Arab minority and viewing them as an enemy. One result was growing Jewish sympathy to the racist Meir Kahane. The behavioral element was manifested by a reactive mode by both sides with cyclic responses. The Kahane phenomenon offended the Arabs who reacted with political mobilization and support for the radical PLP party. When Jews witnessed the Arab radicalization, they reacted, further polarizing their position. The Jewish public observed the solidarity that Arabs showed with the Palestinians in the territories and they increasingly feared Arabs. This strengthened their long-standing stereotypical view of them as a security threat, to be treated accordingly with tough measures, a view expressed clearly in public opinion polls. As a result, there was increased support for Kahane, and Jewish members of the Knesset acted to block the PLP as well as Kahane. One should also mention the relationship between government policies in the two planes, the internal and external confl ict with the Palestinians. Israeli governments seems to shape policy without regard for the

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connections between the two domains, while the Arab minority sees a close linkage between policies regarding the Palestinian territories and the Arab minority inside Israel. The next chapter deals with the period of the fi rst Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The Yitzhak Shamir cabinet of 1988–1992 began as a Likud-Labor government and ended without Labor. The Madrid Peace Conference had important consequences for Israeli Arabs as I will discuss in chapter 6.

6

The First Intifada and the Madrid Conference

a s t h e t i t l e of this chapter indicates, the Palestinian dimension was still the pivotal issue driving Israeli internal politics during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The fi rst Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip broke out in late 1987 and lasted for the entire tenure of the second unity government led by Yitzhak Shamir. Related effects for the Israeli Arab minority came from initiatives to fi nd a solution to the confl ict between Israel, the PLO, and Israel’s Arab neighbors, manifested by the convening of the Madrid Peace Conference of October 1991. This development could only take place in light of the change in the global theater involving the disintegration of the USSR and its ramifications in the Middle East. Oil in the Middle East was always a major consideration for U.S. foreign policy, which explains their strategic support of Saudi Arabia and the Arab emirates. When Iraq led by Saddam Hussein invaded its oil-rich neighbor to the south, Kuwait, in 1990, George H. W. Bush gave the order to take military action (Operation Desert Shield, later known as the fi rst Gulf War) with the aim of removing Iraqi forces from Kuwait and ensuring that Iraq did not invade Saudi Arabia. In this crisis, for the fi rst time since the Cold War, Arab states joined the United States—the strongest supporter of Israel—against another Arab state. In retaliation, Iraq responded by launching Scud missiles into Israel, expecting that Israel would retaliate and the U.S.–Arab states coalition would disintegrate. However, Israel was pressured by the U.S. administration to avoid any military response. President Bush achieved his stated objective by forcing an Iraqi withdrawal, thereby liberating Kuwait. He then ordered a cessation of combat operations, allowing Saddam Hussein 127

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to stay in power rather than occupying Iraq. For the fi rst time in the history of the Middle East, Israel and moderate Arab states were on the same side, sharing a common interest to maintain the regional status quo. Perhaps this joint interest contributed to the Arab League resolution of a peace initiative with Israel in March 2002. The Palestinians, however, viewed Saddam Hussein’s policy positively and they expressed solidarity with Iraq against the United States and the coalition of Arab states. As the Iraqi Scud missiles targeted Israel, some of them were reported to be celebrating (“dancing on their houses’ roofs”).1 When Iraq was defeated and withdrew from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait cut their fi nancial support to the PLO and Palestinians in general, and deported some 300,000 Palestinian workers, who were welcomed in Jordan. Feeling committed to support the Arab states and given the weakness of the PLO in the Arab arena after the defeat of Iraq, the United States decided to convene the Madrid Peace Conference. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir opposed the Madrid conference, but President Bush pressured Israel into participating by making fi nancial support promised for the absorption of former Soviet Jews into Israel conditional on Israel’s support of the international peace conference. The Palestinians also participated, represented by a joint JordanianPalestinian delegation. The Madrid conference took place in October 1991, when the intifada was gradually dissipating, and although it did not make any real progress, the positive atmosphere it created contributed to the direct Israeli-PLO talks that resulted in the Oslo Accords of 1993 during PM Yitzhak Rabin’s tenure. These developments could only have been achieved under a new global order. As the USSR was unraveling, President Bush and Soviet President Gorbachev declared in a summit in July 1991 a U.S.-Soviet strategic partnership marking the official end of the Cold War. This chapter elaborates on the effects of three issues on the Jewish-Arab confl ict in Israel: the fi rst intifada, the ramifications of the Madrid Conference, and a change of government policy that aimed to narrow the gap in the budgets of the Jewish and Arab sectors. The intifada links the inner and the outer circles of the interlocking confl icts in which Israel is involved. The Madrid conference also involves this connection, but it puts these two confl icts in the context of the (new) global strategic order, as well as in the

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regional dimension of the confl ict—the Arab states in the Middle East and the effect of the Palestinian question on their internal stability. The gradual change in government policy regarding the Arab minority has no relation to the outer confl icts. It resulted, rather, from the internal political competition between the two major Jewish parties: Likud and Labor. The Political Setting In their analysis of the 1988 election campaign, Asher Arian and Michal Shamir rightly argued that the regional Israeli Arab confl ict still overshadowed every issue in Israeli society at large.2 The 1988 election was seen as a referendum on the future of the Palestinian territories. The Labor party advocated exchanging territories for peace and hinted at “the Jordanian option,” that is, returning most of the West Bank to Jordanian sovereignty in return for peace with Israel. This was despite King Hussein’s July 1988 declaration of disengagement from the West Bank. The Likud party spoke of peace while strengthening its hold over of the Palestinian-populated territories. A new extreme-right-wing party, Moledet, called for the transfer of Palestinian as well as Israeli Arabs out of Eretz Israel/Palestine, an idea which had been introduced into public discourse by Rabbi Meir Kahane. An important development occurred also in the Arab political arena. As noted in chapter 5, the Palestinian uprising of December 1987 provided MK ‘Abd al-Wahab Darawsha of the Labor party, who had not been satisfied with his party’s Palestinian policy for some time, with the justification to defect from the Labor party and initiate an independent Arab nationalist party. Darawsha believed that peace between Israel and the Palestinians and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state were realistic goals that could be achieved immediately. Minister of Defense Yitzhak Rabin’s announcement at the beginning of the intifada that the IDF’s policy would be to “break the bones of the Palestinian rioters” was Darawsha’s excuse for leaving the Labor party. He declared his departure from Labor during a mass demonstration that took place in Nazareth and was lifted up triumphantly by the crowd of protesters.3 The 1988 Knesset elections were held one year after the start of the intifada, with its ongoing violence between the Palestinians and the IDF

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impacting Israeli Arabs. The Arabs were again an important factor in these elections, but this did not assist the Labor party for two reasons: fi rst, Jews were shifting to the political right due to the Palestinian uprising; and second, a new national Arab party—the Arab Democratic Party (ADP)— courted Arab voters who had previously supported Labor.4 Running for seats as Labor party candidates were one Arab and one Druze candidate in secure positions on their electoral list. One Arab Christian woman ran but lost, and Mapam listed an Arab from Acre in the secure third place on its list. The election results were as follows: Likud received 31.1 percent of the votes, equivalent to forty seats, 1 percent and one seat more than the Labor party, which lost five seats in these polls compared to previous elections. Likud together with right-wing and Jewish religious parties had a majority of sixty-five seats in the Knesset. However, Yitzhak Shamir decided to maintain a coalition with Labor instead of with the religious parties, who demanded a high level of fi nancial subsidies to their affi liated institutions. Following the elections, the three Arab-based parties (Hadash, PLP, and ADP) were ready to sign an agreement with Labor to form a political block in the Knesset on the condition that Labor present a peace plan and a program for bridging the disparities between Jews and Arabs in the state. The Labor party, however, decided at the last minute to join a Likud-led coalition headed by Yitzhak Shamir (without rotation of the prime minister position) instead of creating a narrow coalition with the support of the Arab MKs. The Arab population was once again left outside the executive political circle. In the new government formed by Shamir, Labor leaders were nominated to two of the three major ministerial positions: Shimon Peres was named minister of fi nance and Yitzhak Rabin defense minister. In the end, the Jewish religious parties also joined the coalition. The results of the elections in the Arab population marked a significant change compared to the polls of 1984. This political shift occurred at the expense of the Zionist parties, with the overall Arab votes for these parties decreasing from 48.7 percent in 1984 to 41.7 percent.5 In the 1988 elections, Labor lost 24,000 Arab votes, about 10 percent of the Arab electorate, to the newly established Darawsha party—ADP. Darawsha received 27,012 votes altogether, 11 percent of the total Arab vote, which was equivalent to

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more than one seat in the Knesset.6 Hadash gained an insignificant additional 4,000 votes (1.5 percent), attaining a total of 84,032 votes, equivalent to four seats, and also an increase in their support compared to the elections of 1984 (37 percent of the Arab vote).7 The PLP lost 9,500 votes (4 percent), receiving 33,695 votes. Their one seat was fi lled by the Arab nationalist Adv. Muhammad Mi‘ari. The decrease of the PLP’s power could be explained by the Arabs’ disappointment at the way the party was run and their internal disputes.8 The second national unity (Likud-Labor) government, headed by Yitzhak Shamir, was engaged mainly with the Palestinian intifada in the West Bank and Gaza and the Palestinian issue in general. By late 1988, it was clear to both sides that the violence of the intifada had reached a stalemate, and in December 1988, Arafat announced for the fi rst time the PLO’s acceptance of the two-states solution. This was a watershed announcement that began a dialogue between the United States and the PLO. The disintegration of the Soviet Union worked for Israel in two major domains: fi rst, Arab states who were hostile to Israel (Syria and Iraq) and the PLO lost a strategic supporter; second, a massive Jewish immigration from Russia to Israel boosted Jewish demography inside Israel. The so-called unity government was divided between Likud, which tried to block peace talks with the Palestinians, and Labor, which worked to facilitate such discussions. In May 1989, Shamir decided to initiate peace talks with West Bank and Gaza Palestinians to bypass the PLO by endorsing a local moderate Palestinian leadership and to hold elections there. Labor, headed by Shimon Peres, viewed these talks as a policy of stagnation in achieving peace and searched for alternatives. After eighteen months of this disagreement over approach, Peres unsuccessfully attempted to form a coalition with the Jewish religious parties (known as “the stinking exercise”). As a result, Labor was ousted from government and a new right-wing coalition, headed again by Shamir, was formed. However, the three extreme-right-wing parties (Tzomet, Moledet, HaTchiyah) withdrew from this coalition a few months before the general elections of 1992 when Israel held (under American pressure) direct peace talks with a Jordanian-Palestinian delegation following the Madrid peace conference. The political blackmail by small parties, which peaked during

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this period, resulted in the introduction in January 1992 of a new election system according to which the prime minister would be elected separately from the Knesset parties in a second ballot. Knesset members took advantage of the political split to enact two important laws in 1992: the Law of Human Dignity and Liberty and the Law of Freedom of Occupation, which strengthened Israel’s democratic fabric by allowing the Supreme Court of Justice to annul Knesset legislation that was interpreted by the court as contradicting the basic law. The Palestinian Dimension: Israeli Arabs and the Madrid Conference During the fi rst half of the 1990s, there were great expectations in the Arab sector for the development of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. Arab leaders gradually started making contact with PLO officials. During this period, while Yasser Arafat was in Tunis, he received dozens of Israeli Arab leaders, among them heads of municipalities and other politicians.9 From the mid-1980s, Dr. Ahmad Tibi, a gynecologist from Tayba (and since 1999 a member of the Knesset), initiated encounters with PLO members, earned the trust of Ezer Weitzman and other Israeli politicians, and began conducting secret missions between Tunis and Jerusalem (his name was mentioned in efforts to locate Israeli POWs and MIAs in Lebanon).10 His efforts assisted in readying both sides for the peace process, and the meetings soon took on the form of political negotiations. They also led to PLO leaders coming to perceive Israeli Arabs as an effective lobbying power in the Knesset and with the Israeli Jewish public.11 On the other side, Israeli society was significantly affected by the Palestinian uprising and by Jewish extremists’ actions against Palestinians. In July 1989, a Palestinian terrorist traveling in a crowded public bus en route from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem (line 405) seized the steering wheel from the driver and drove the bus over a steep precipice, resulting in the death of fourteen Israelis. The event angered the Jewish public. A Jewish terrorist, Ami Popper, shot to death seven innocent Palestinian workers at Rishon Letzion in May 1990, which outraged Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. Another provocation occurred in October 1990, during the Gulf crisis. Members of the (Jewish) Temple

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Mount Faithful movement attempted to lay the foundation stone for what they termed the “third Jewish temple” near one of the Temple Mount/alAqsa gates. This succeeded in provoking a massive, violent reaction. Muslim protestors in the courtyard of al-Haram al-Sharif threw stones at the Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall, requiring a police operation in the Temple Mount compound. A severe violent confrontation erupted when the police entered the Haram, which led to the death of seventeen Palestinian Muslims. The Palestinians termed this event the “al-Aqsa massacre,”12 and the Israeli Arab political leadership reacted by announcing a general strike, by paying condolence visits to the injured and families of those killed, and by expressing their solidarity with the Muslim Waqf administration of the Haram.13 Such tensions were to prove an ongoing obstacle to the peace process, but in the early 1990s there was hope among Israeli Arabs for a negotiated peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. The peace conference in Madrid heightened the sense of optimism, pride, and satisfaction among Israeli Arabs. Their feeling that the intifada had succeeded in its aim of forcing the Israeli government to begin negotiations led to a sense of solidarity between the Palestinian communities on both sides of the Green Line.14 Israeli Arabs regarded the Palestinian delegation, and not the Israeli one, as representing their interests, even though the Israeli delegation included an Arab (Druze) representative, As‘ad As‘ad. For example, at a conference of the Hadash party convened on 15 November 1991 to celebrate the third anniversary of the PLO’s announcement to establish an independent Palestinian state, MK Tawfiq Zayyad said, “Shamir did not represented us at the Madrid conference.” The guest of honor at this conference was the head of the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid conference, Haidar ‘Abd al-Shafi, who subsequently stated that he felt that he represented in Madrid the entire Palestinian people, including the Palestinian Arabs of Israel. The peace conference in Madrid raised the expectations of the Arabs in Israel that issues relating to them, which emerged from the history of the Israeli-Palestinian confl ict, would also be discussed (Rekhess coined the phrase “reopening of the 1948 fi les”), including the return of internal refugees to the fi fty-four villages demolished in 1948 and the release of land expropriated by the government to its original Arab owners.15 Arab

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columnist Marzuk Halabi said that Arabs supported the Palestinian position in Madrid and hoped that the fi nal settlement would not neglect the Israeli Arabs.16 MK Muhammad Mi‘ari, an Israeli Arab who voluntarily joined the Palestinian delegation in Madrid, declared that “even though the status of the Israeli Arabs is not on the agenda of the conference, it is impossible for them to be absent from an international conference that deals with the Palestinian question.”17 During the convention, a rumor spread that a group of Israeli Arab politicians had prepared, in cooperation with the Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and the Palestinian diaspora, a special fi le (the 1948 Arabs fi le) in which suggestions were made regarding the fate of Israeli Arabs and their intention to raise their issue in the bilateral negotiations.18 The Palestinian delegation’s spokesman, Radwan Abu ‘Ayyash, confi rmed this rumor. He added that the Israeli Arabs were represented at the Madrid conference by Mi‘ari.19 Mi‘ari himself said that Israeli Arabs constituted one-fi fth of the Palestinian people, and the Palestinian delegation should raise the issue of discrimination against Arabs in Israel just as the Israeli delegation could raise the issue of the treatment of Jews in Syria.20 During the Madrid conference, the public debate on the issue of minority status in the Arab sector intensified as a result of expectations that any peace agreement would change their status. Israeli Arabs were disappointed when the PLO refrained from raising their demands at the Madrid Conference and reluctantly concluded that they would have to speak for their own interests.21 In the eyes of the PLO, they had only one important political role, that is, to exercise their right to vote in Knesset elections in order to gain a block of fourteen to sixteen seats that could influence political decisions in favor of establishing a Palestinian state.22 Indeed, the Oslo Agreements signed in 1993 were approved in the Knesset as a result of the support of Arab representatives who voted with the coalition headed by Yitzhak Rabin. However, the Madrid Conference highlighted for Israeli Arab political leaders the fact that the PLO, in its desire for an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza, viewed the demands of the Arab minority within Israel as a hindrance. Consequently, the Israeli Arab leadership realized that they would have to fight for their interests separately from the Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza.

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In sum, the Madrid peace conference raised hopes among Israeli Arabs for a solution of the Palestinian problem. After three years of intensified violence in the Israeli-Palestinian domain and then a short de-escalation, these hopes had a moderating effect on both Israeli Jews and Arabs’ political behavior. Government Policy: Gradual Change During this government’s tenure, there was a gradual improvement in policy vis-à-vis Arab citizens, reflecting the two major parties’ acknowledgment of Arab electoral power. During the 1980s and more so in the 1990s, there was a growing awareness among the Jewish establishment that continued discrimination against Arabs was intolerable and would lead to further civil disobedience. This was also the policy recommended by the General Security Service (GSS). Nachman Tal, at the time the deputy head of the GSS and today a researcher at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, said in an interview that the GSS called on the government to integrate the Israeli Arabs and to work to bridge economic disparities between Jews and Arabs, mainly in order to safeguard the peace and ensure their loyalty. His opinion was that “for a national minority it is almost impossible to live in a majority state (of others), therefore there is no ultimate solution to the problem. One should simply try to control it and reduce the temperature of the confl ict.” However, the GSS recommendations, like others, remained on paper: the prime minister and other cabinet ministers did little to implement them.23 Despite this failure of implementation, the realization regarding discriminatory practices permeated the Jewish echelons in both major parties. With this new attitude, incremental steps were introduced to bridge the gap between the Arab and Jewish sectors, eliminating discriminatory practices against Arabs and addressing civil rights problems. For example, during the 1980s and 1990s, more zoning master plans were prepared for the Arab villages and towns. The town of Umm al-Fahm had no comprehensive master plan (a different urban planning document from specific housing zone plans) until the beginning of the 1990s. In 1991, after twenty years of debate in many planning committees, the master plan was fi nally approved.24 In the

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same year, the government issued new ordinances for planning and housing that aimed at speeding up the construction of housing projects. The trigger for these changes was the absorption of the massive immigration from the former Soviet Union. Some Arab towns and villages succeeded in using these new guidelines to improve their own housing projects. For example, in Baqa al-Gharbiyya, three specific plans were approved that legitimized over 600 houses that previously had no building permits. The head of the council, Samir Darwish, stated that these ordinances enabled the bypassing of traditional bureaucracies that “made construction endeavors in a village without an approved master plan almost impossible.”25 Another tactic employed by the government to appeal to the Arab community was changing the status of Arab villages from local councils to mayorships, thereby giving densely populated rural villages the status of towns. This step, taken under the authority of the Ministry of Interior Affairs, allowed the minister, Ariye Der‘i of the ultraorthodox Jewish Sephardic Shas party, to advance the political interests of his party and gain some Arab support in the subsequent elections. For example, in March 1992, three months prior to the elections, Der‘i announced that the Bedouin town of Rahat had been granted the status of a city, that its jurisdiction had been expanded, and that the ministry intended to approve long-term loans and grants for the city, to be invested in enlarging the city hall and the construction of an appropriate sewage system.26 Der‘i’s effort generated 436 votes from Rahat in support of the Shas party. Another area where a gradual though quiet change took place was the educational system. Over many years, there were significant discrepancies in budget allocation between Jewish and Arab school systems as was highlighted in the State Controller Report of 1992. The minister of education, Zevulun Hamer, initiated a five-year plan to bridge these gaps in educational facilities even though he was aware that his plan would not fully close the gap between the Jewish and the Arab schools.27 The new plan was not implemented until the late 1990s. Gradual progress also took place in the allocation of budgets to Arab municipalities following protests of the heads of Arab localities. A report prepared by the Center for Local Government revealed that government subsidies to Arab municipalities in 1991 were half the average sum allocated

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to Jewish districts (790 NIS per capita versus 1,320 NIS). The gap in government funding was even greater in the Ministry of Welfare budget where the disparity was 1:3 NIS; Arab municipalities received 30 NIS per capita as opposed to 90 NIS per capita in the Jewish municipalities. The crisis stemmed from the tendency of the local municipalities to create budget deficits in order to compensate for the deficiency in budget allocation from the Ministry of the Interior and force the Ministry of the Interior to cover the deficit in order to prevent the collapse of municipal services. This trend led to the deterioration of local services. Another reason for the lower distribution of funds to Arab localities was the method of budget allocation, which was assigned in proportion to the revenues raised by the municipalities themselves. The resources available to the Arab municipalities for raising revenue were much fewer than those available to the Jewish ones as a result of disparities in business infrastructure and economic development. Most Arab towns and villages had little more to rely on for raising revenue than property taxes. Furthermore, the rate of tax collection in the Arab localities was lower due to higher levels of poverty among the Arab population. Thus, locally raised revenue in the Arab municipalities consisted of only 25 percent of their budget, compared to 60 percent in the Jewish ones.28 Following a strike by Arab municipalities, the government committed to ensure the budgets allocated to the Arab municipalities would be equal to those of the Jewish ones within four years. This decision meant an increase of the budgets to Arab municipalities by 240 percent (202 million NIS annually, compared to 60 million NIS allocated in 1991).29 One of the Arab mayors, Rafiq Hajj Yihya of Tayba, called the new policy a historical benchmark and said, “This is the fi rst time since the inception of the state that the government has treated the problems of the Arab sector seriously, in an attempt to fi nally create equality between the Arab and the Jewish sector.”30 The bureaucratic breakthrough to equalize the budget distribution was enabled by a decision to disregard the self-revenue criteria as the basis for proportional subsidies.31 This important change in policy began under Likud, headed by Yitzhak Shamir, the most politically conservative of Israeli prime ministers. It resulted from the political protest of the Arab heads of municipalities and the fact that the Arab population’s political weight had become a decisive factor in election results.

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While modest gains were made in the realm of municipal budgets, in other areas regression occurred, inflaming tensions between the Arabs and the state. The most sensitive of these areas was not surprisingly linked to land and settlement issues that intensified with the mass immigration of Soviet Jews in the 1990s. The defi nition of Israel as a Jewish state, which gives priority to Jewish immigration, accentuates the inferior status of its Arab citizens. In order to absorb half a million immigrants from the former Soviet republic within the space of the two or three years after 1990, the state needed land resources and funds. In some cases, these came at the expense of the Arab population, the result of national development that benefited only the Jewish segment of society. The case of Ramia is a good example of the tensions created by Jewish Soviet immigration. In order to construct a new neighborhood in the northern city of Karmiel to house Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet republics, the government attempted to evacuate a cluster of seventeen houses built without a permit by local Bedouins in a place called Ramia. An explosion of public outrage at this plan threatened the political future of the mayor of Karmiel. His candidacy for the position of Head of the Center for Local Government would be voted on by a body of which one-third of the delegates were Arabs. A new agreement was reached whereby the Ramia Bedouin residents were incorporated into the new neighborhood of Karmiel.32 In general, however, the Arab population did not protest against the government’s efforts to absorb new immigrants from the USSR. There were only a few articles in Arab newspapers that explored the negative implications for Arabs in Israel. One such article was written by Muhammad ‘Ali Taha, the secretary of the Arab Writers’ Association, and appeared in the Communist party newspaper al-Ittihad. Taha desperately called for Gorbatchev to put an end to Jewish emigration to Israel.33 Another article called for the implementation of the right of return of Palestinian refugees who, according to the writer, had a prevailing right over the Jews who claimed a right that was 2,000 years old, unlike the Palestinian refugees who fled their homes in 1948.34 However, these two articles were the exception. This is not to say that Arabs welcomed Jewish immigration from the Soviet Union. Apparently they accepted it as an unwanted inevitability that they were powerless to prevent.

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Ministers of Arab affairs were motivated by, among other things, the political interests of their party. For example, David Magen (Likud), when serving in the positions of minister of economy and planning and minister of Arab affairs, submitted a bill proposing the allocation of credit of 200 billion NIS for a two-year development plan for the Arab sector in addition to 500 million NIS for a five-year plan for land settlements for the Bedouins and nonrecognized villages, but he failed to receive the support of the government and the bill did not pass.35 Ehud Olmert, who replaced Magen as the minister of Arab affairs, submitted a policy document in collaboration with the police minister, the minister of justice, and the General Security Service. The policy document suggested a combination of integrating of the Arabs into the state, as well as tighter supervision and law enforcement.36 In a confidential letter, Olmert recommended that government agencies should not cultivate contact with Arab bodies that claimed to represent Arab society on a national basis, namely the Supreme Follow-up Committee. Rather, the cabinet ministers should deal with elected municipal councils only. (It is interesting to note that, when Olmert became prime minister in 2005, he cooperated with the head of the Follow-up Committee). Olmert also recommended that larger budgets be granted in order to improve the level of services, on the condition that the minister of Arab affairs carried out the distribution of funds. He also advocated that the attorney general should punish those who participate in public disturbances, including making arrests more flexible. All in all, the policy draft paper was another manifestation of the old model of co-optation and control. But once again, these policy recommendations remained on paper and were never implemented. In summation, the second government of unity made some progress in dealing with the problems of Israeli Arabs, mainly in narrowing budget discrepancies between Arab and Jewish municipalities and in building schools in the Arab sectors. However, much that was promised was never implemented, adding to the distrust between the two communities. Thus, the gradual change in government policy aiming at reducing disparities between Arabs and Jews had a minor de-escalative impact on the minoritymajority confl ict.

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Arab Political Behavior The village of Barta‘a is populated by one clan, the Kabaha family. It was split in half in 1949 by the cease-fi re agreement between Jordan and Israel; the eastern part, Barta‘a al-Sharqiyya, constituted part of the West Bank and the western part was in the state of Israel. These circumstances make it a good case study for researching the consequences of the intifada on the Arabs in Israel. Muhammad Amara and Sufyan Kabaha (a resident of Barta‘a) in their book Split Identity conclude The Palestinian Intifada, which broke out in December 1987, opened new channels of contact between the two parties of the Barta‘a village. At the beginning, the western [Israeli] Bart‘a inhabitants . . . observed the Intifada from a distance and initially did not even show any sympathy for their relatives in the eastern [Palestinian] part. However, over the course of time, they also began to support the Intifada. . . . The residents of the western part . . . began to warn their relatives in the eastern part when they spotted the army on its way to the village; they hid them during searches; and they gave shelter and fi rst aid to those injured in confrontations with the army. In this way, the Intifada increased the daily contact between the two parties, even though both sides knew the limits of this collaboration and restricted themselves. For example, when some people of eastern Barta‘a attempted to convince their relatives on the Israeli side of the village to take an active part in the Intifada . . . , western Barta‘a residents complained to senior Intifada activists arguing that they did not want trouble with the Israeli law, and their arguments were heeded. The Intifada leaders of eastern Barta‘a announced through the mosque loudspeakers a statement saying that the situation in western Barta‘a is different and that they were satisfied with the moral support from their relatives on that side.37

In their study, Amara and Kabaha conclude that the intifada actually “strengthened the Green Line”—the physical, psychological and political border—meaning that the Israeli Arabs did not join the intifada. However, the authors unconsciously provide facts and instances that demonstrate that the Green Line was in fact disappearing on an emotional level. For example, they write, “The Intifada activists of the eastern part, and particularly those

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who were wanted [by the Israelis] among them, became a national symbol. They came to signify much of social and national value. Some of the western Barta‘a residents assisted them, sometimes by providing shelter or organizing a banquet in their honor—an act which was considered to bestowed honor upon their hosts as well. At times, people were proud of the fact that a wanted person was a guest in their home. When one of the intifada activists crossed western Barta‘a roads, the residents used to come and shake his hands as a mark of respect and pride for both sides.”38 In another study, Amara argued that the Israeli Arab/Palestinian confl ict was one of three factors influencing the Israeli Arabs’ identity, the other two factors being Israel as a Jewish state and the discrimination against Arabs.39 He claimed that “paradoxically, the Intifada reinforced both concepts: the Palestinian identity and the Israeli one.”40 Looking at official figures for Arab involvement in violent actions shows that the intifada influenced the emotional and ideological Palestinian identity of the Arabs in Israel to the point that they adopted new and more violent methods of protest, which they learned from their Palestinian brethren. Israeli Arabs expressed their solidarity and sympathy with Palestinians in many ways. Their leadership announced general strikes and organized protests, which led to civil disturbances, including raising the Palestinian flag, which was illegal, damaging property, and rioting. Some Arabs also participated in terrorist activities.41 During 1988 and 1989, the number of terrorist actions by Israeli Arabs increased ninefold compared to the previous year (fi fteen or twenty cases versus two in 1987). Most of them were sporadic incidents and were not carried out by an organized group. As for other forms of political violence, in 1987 there were 69 incidents of violent sabotage by Israeli Arabs increasing to 210 in 1988. During the fi rst year of the intifada, in 1988, there were also 133 incidents of stone throwing by Israeli Arabs and some 370 cases of expression of Palestinian nationalism such as display of the flag.42 During the four years of the intifada, the Arab leadership in Israel organized a relatively larger number of strikes than in previous years. Between 1988 and 1990, they organized approximately ten general strikes, compared to only two in the previous ten years from 1977 to 1986.43 During the Land Day commemoration of March 1990, following the murder of seven

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Israeli Arab workers by an Israeli citizen (Ami Popper) on 21 March 1990, a general strike resulted in violent riots.44 In October 1990, following the clash between Muslims and the police forces on the Temple Mount/Haram discussed above, which resulted in the death of seventeen Palestinians and many casualties, the Israeli Arab’s Supreme Follow-up Committee declared a general strike and a day of mourning. The protest rallies, which took place in Arab towns and villages in the Galilee and the Triangle, deteriorated into riots and clashes with security forces. How do the above manifestations of violence match Amara and Kabaha’s assertion that the intifada “didn’t cross the Green Line”? I believe that the answer is that most of the violent actions taken by Israeli Arab citizens were carried out by individuals. The Arab leadership in Israel, at all levels (national, regional, and local) opposed any breach of the law or use of violence. West Bank and Gaza Palestinians also did not attempt to recruit Israeli Arabs to participate actively in their violent uprising.45 The main collective identification with the Palestinian struggle was expressed by Israeli Arabs through peaceful actions such as providing material or monetary support, which was needed due to the increase of casualties, economic disadvantages, and the many closures enforced on the territories.46 At the beginning of the intifada, the Israeli government was concerned that the uprising would spill over to the state of Israel with the endorsement of the Follow-up Committee. Al-Ittihad, the Hadash newspaper, was closed down in March 1988 by a government decree in order to prevent the Follow-up Committee from disseminating guidelines for action prior to the upcoming Land Day.47 Amos Gilbo‘a, Minister Roni Milo’s advisor on Arab affairs, predicted that the Israeli Arabs intended to organize anti-Israeli disturbances on the Land Day commemoration of 1988. When that Land Day passed peacefully, Gilbo‘a and Milo said that the Arab leadership “displayed maturity,” mostly because of the warnings they received and the security measures taken.48 In May 1988, the commander of police of the northern district called upon the Arab mayors in the Nazareth area and warned them from continuing the violence in their localities. Alexander Bligh, the prime minister’s advisor on Arab affairs, wrote in December 1988 that Minister Moshe Arens, who was in charge of Arab Affairs when the intifada broke out, considered outlawing the Supreme Follow-up Committee, whose influence

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over the Israeli Arab population could pose an imminent national security risk and maybe even cause a replication of the intifada inside the state’s jurisdiction.49 Bligh complained that no Israeli Arab leader had called publicly for the cessation of violent actions.50 However, no action was taken against the Supreme Follow-up Committee. Sawt al-Haqq wal-Hurriyya, the Islamic movement newspaper, was closed down in June 1990 for three months. In 2002, the minister of the interior claimed that the newspaper “justifies the use of violence and terror actions against Israelis.”51 The fact that the intifada as a popular uprising “did not cross the Green Line” was due to a conscious decision by the Palestinian leadership on both sides. As Nadim Rouhana put it, “Profound sentimental identification and limited behavioral support—is inextricably linked to their dual political status as Palestinian nationals and Israeli citizens.”52 The Israeli Arab leadership was content with the symbolic expression of solidarity, and the leadership of the Palestinian territories did not attempt to export the struggle to the Israeli Arabs. Arab citizens also considered the cost and benefit of being involved in violent actions. They felt they had something to lose were the intifada to cross the Green Line.53 During the intifada, some Palestinian figures started to view the Israeli Arab community as the strategic depth of the West Bank and Gaza population. Umm Jihad (Intisar al-Wazir, the widow of former Fatah leader and Yasser Arafat’s deputy Abu Jihad, who was killed by Israeli forces in a commando action in Tunis) announced in July 1990 that the PLO had adopted a new strategy in which Israeli Arabs, as an integral part of the Palestinian people, would have a specific role in the overall Palestinian struggle.54 This strategy commissioned Israeli Arabs with changing the demographic balance inside Israel and with influencing Israel’s policies using their electoral power.55 The rapprochement between Israeli Arabs and the PLO was also fostered by the decisions of the nineteenth session of the PNC, convened in Algiers in November 1988. During this session, the PNC stated that Israeli Arabs are an integral part of the Palestinian people and that the PLO is the sole legitimate Palestinian representative, including the Palestinians in Israel.56 The Israeli Arab leadership welcomed this resolution, particularly because they were addressed as an integral part of the official ranks of the Palestinian movement.57

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The intifada had a number of political repercussions for Israeli Arabs. One was the establishment of the Arab Democratic Party (ADP) and another, the “divorce” in the PLP party between the Jewish Alternativa movement and the Arabs, making the PLP an exclusively Arab national party. Thereafter, the PLP criticized Hadash for maintaining a Jewish-Arab partnership. Another important development was the strengthening of the Islamic movement in the shadow of the intifada (which assisted in the proliferation of its radical ideology). Nadim Rouhana argues that the intifada also influenced the strategy of Israeli Arabs: “The uprising consolidated all three elements of the political consensus of the Arabs in Israel. And while their support of the Palestinian national goals of liberation and independence in the occupied territories grew stronger, at the same time they began looking inward, seeing the issue of equality within the Israeli system as a strategic goal of greater urgency and higher priority. In line with this strategic goal, the Arabs of Israel made concerted efforts to confi ne their political activity within the limits allowed by Israeli law.”58 Rouhana is right if one follows the Israeli Arabs’ intellectual discourse regarding their status, particularly their demand for political autonomy. A good example is the development of the idea of self-rule for the Arab population. The fi rst to raise this idea was Sa‘id Zeedani, a philosophy professor, who on 26 January 1990 wrote an article for the newspaper al-‘Arabi calling for territorial autonomy for the Arabs of the Galilee, the Negev, and the Triangle. His program suggested establishing an Arab university, Arabic as the official language of the autonomous regions, and Arab autonomy with sovereign authority in the fields of housing, development, health, environment, internal policing, and the determination of educational goals.59 Soon after, Azmi Bishara presented a program of cultural autonomy for Arabs in Israel in addition to changing Israel from a Jewish state to a state of its citizens.60 The fact that the demand for autonomy emerged during the intifada indicates that the Palestinian issue was one of the Israeli Arabs’ political priorities. The more Israel alienated the Palestinians, the more Israeli Arabs feel alienated as a minority group because they realize that they cannot influence the state’s policy. They react by distancing themselves from the state. Another expression of the Arabs’ growing alienation was seen during the fi rst Gulf crisis in 1990–1991 when Iraq launched Scud missiles against Tel

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Aviv and other places in Israel. During these attacks, many of Israel’s Arab citizens expressed their solidarity with Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi people.61 The intifada was also an opportunity to internationalize the political strategies practiced by the Arab leadership. In May 1991, when the national committee of Arab municipal councils decided to declare a strike protesting unfulfi lled government promises to cover their deficits, they also decided to appeal to foreign embassies in Israel, the UN, and other international organizations expressing their grievances about Israeli policy toward the Arab population. This protest bore fruit, as the government began negotiations with the municipal representatives to fi nd a solution. The Arab appeal to international organizations clearly concerned the government. From May to July 1992, Bligh, the prime minister’s advisor on Arab affairs, produced reports entitled “Israeli Arabs and the International Community.” He asserted that the Arab leadership had succeeded in the foreign affairs realm when the UN Committee for Palestine ended its session in January 1992 with a declaration that dealt with Israeli Arab problems.62 An earlier international success was achieved in 1991 when the U.S. Justice Department included a report on Israeli Arabs in its Human Rights Report (the Shifter Report) for the fi rst time. In September 1992, William Harop, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, declared that the Israeli Arabs were discriminated against, and that he was looking forward to this issue appearing on the bilateral agenda between Israel and the United States. Israeli Arabs also broke through barriers regarding foreign relations with the PLO. Politicians such as Mohammad Mi‘ari, ‘Abd al-Wahab Darawsha, Ahmad Tibi, and, later, Azmi Bishara, established strong relations with the PLO and Arab countries, not as Israel’s delegates but as advocates against Israeli policy. Despite the nationalist approach of the Israeli Arabs, one can still trace pragmatic elements, even during the intifada. For example, the majority of the Arab members of the Histadrut (the unions’ syndicate) voted for the Labor party in its 1989 election. The Arab parties received only 33 percent of the vote in these elections. The Histadrut elections are distinct from the general elections of the Knesset, as the Histadrut is a more concerned with professional and social issues.63 Another example is the government crisis of March 1990, when the six Arab members of Knesset recommended to the president that he charge Shimon Peres, the chairman of the Labor party,

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with the task of forming a coalition. The Arab parties signed an agreement of political support with the Labor party, and the ADP expressed its willingness to join the coalition. Professor Benyamin Neuberger interpreted this as a trend among Arab parties to become more moderate.64 I believe that we should view these actions as realpolitik, in other words as an instrumental expression and not as an indication of a moderate attitude toward the state or toward the Jewish majority: in a survey of political positions conducted by Sammy Smooha in 1998, half of the Arab interviewees expressed reservations about Israel’s right to exist and two-thirds included the term “Palestinian” as a component of their identity. The same percentage believed that most Jews were untrustworthy.65 In sum, the political behavior of the Arab minority during the fi rst intifada indicates an escalation and radicalization of their attitude toward the political status quo. However, they acted cautiously so that they could express their solidarity with the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and with the PLO but at the same time avoid a mass subversion of the law. Had the government not tried to address discrepancies between the Jewish and Arab sectors, perhaps there would have been a more radical escalation of tension. Jewish Political Behavior The intifada had a strong negative impact on Jewish-Arab relations in Israel as noted in chapter 5. Despite the fact that the Arabs did not join the uprising in the occupied territories, it widened the gap between Jews and Arabs. In reaction to the intifada, Israeli public and leaders blurred the distinction between Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line. The Jewish public was exposed, through the media, to negative aspects of Israeli Arab identification, to rhetoric and solidarity with the Palestinian intifada and sometimes violent actions. The average Jew did not distinguish between Palestinian Arabs in the territories (“the bad Arabs”) and Israeli Arabs (“the good Arabs”). The identification of Arabs with the uprising in the territories and the many deaths that resulted led many Jews to view Israeli Arabs as one and the same with the Palestinians: that is, the enemy. The Jewish response did not take long to materialize. Jews threatened Arabs, the police took

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aggressive measures against them, and Arabs were excluded from the public sphere. For example, after Hamas kidnapped a border policeman in Lod in December 1992, spontaneous local Jewish demonstrations called for “death to the Arabs”—failing to differentiate between Palestinian terrorists and local Arab citizens of Lod.66 After the election campaign of 1988, Jewish right-wing political figures fostered the political delegitimization of the Arabs, whom they feared would support the Israeli left, adversaries of Likud and other right-wing parties. Ariel Sharon contributed to the rhetoric of delegitimization during this campaign. Others suggested exiling Arabs from Israel or, alternatively, denying them political rights including the right to vote unless they performed national service.67 Rafael Eitan, a former IDF chief of staff who established the right-wing Tzomet party, admitted that his proposal to integrate the Arabs into the national service was aimed at diminishing support for Hadash.68 The Labor party, which understood that without the Arab electorate it would be impossible for them to win elections, had a different response. In 1991, the party formed an Arab district and a Druze district in which the two constituencies would elect their candidates independently, guaranteeing them seats in Labor’s list.69 The Israeli left-wing camp found itself drawing closer to the Israeli Arabs’ position, particularly regarding the Palestinian question, which was expressed by, among other things, meetings between Jewish Labor politicians and PLO leaders.70 When asked whether they would accept the Arab minority’s right to exist in the state of Israel, 41.8 percent of Jews said yes, 38.7 percent had some reservations, and 19.4 percent rejected their rights.71 As far as civic rights, 34.5 percent of the Jewish public favored increased surveillance of Israeli Arabs, 33.1 percent supported continuing the present policy, 15.3 percent would allow for equality and integration, 11.4 percent would allow Arabs to organize independently and share the state’s national institutions, and 5.7 percent would grant them separate legal status and autonomy similar to the West Bank and Gaza.72 Of those Jews surveyed, 58.8 percent viewed Arabs as a danger to national security, 60 percent agreed that it is impossible to trust most Arabs, and 46.9 percent favored, without reservations, the use of an iron-fist policy against the Arab minority.73 The public opinion polls

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indicated an escalation of hostility among Israeli Jews, which could have been caused by the violence of the intifada. Conclusion The fi rst intifada influenced the course of Jewish-Arab relations in Israel to a greater degree than has been previously estimated by researchers. It deepened the rift between Jews and Arabs and sharpened the alienation between the Arabs and the state; its consequences are still felt today. The Palestinian issue cast its shadow on the internal Israeli (intra-Jewish) debate on the future of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and was the major cause of internal political crises. The conservative Shamir’s tenure at the height of the Palestinian intifada significantly affected the Arab minority in Israel as well as the Jewish attitude toward Arab citizens. The intensity of the confl ict was still high due to the Arabs’ solidarity with the Palestinian uprising and Israel’s policy versus the Palestinians. The political behavior of the Arab minority and Jewish public opinion during the period under review shows an intensification of the confl ict. Among Arabs, there were mass-scale protests and sporadic violent clashes, votes for the new Arab nationalist parties PLP and ADP, developing connections between Israeli Arab leaders and the PLO, support for Saddam Hussein’s Scud missile attacks against Israel during the Gulf War, and solicitation of international involvement in Israel’s internal confl ict with its Arab minority. The Palestinization of Israeli Arabs had also a negative effect on the Jewish public. The belief increased in Jewish society that Arab citizens who identified with the Palestinians were just like their brothers on the other side of the Green Line and were hostile to the Jewish state. Thus, the Jews developed a strategy of defense and counterattack. Whenever Arab votes could affect the electoral success of Labor and Likud, as was the case since 1984, the government made modest policy steps to address problems such as inequitable development budgets, educational services, and zoning. This strategy continued in the Shamir government between 1988 and 1992. The government’s modest efforts in this direction dampened the escalation of the Jewish-Arab confl ict during the period

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under review. However, tensions between the Arab minority and the state were high due to the broader Israeli-Palestinian confl ict during the intifada. After twenty-five years of escalation of the majority-minority confl ict inside Israel, for the fi rst time a serious process of de-escalation occurred during the Rabin-Peres government of 1992 to 1996. The following chapter describes how changes in the two major parameters of the confl ict led to a new—although short-lived—de-escalation. Chapter 7 reveals that the process of de-escalation is also dependent on the external factor—the Palestinian dimension—which manifests the interlocking dimension of the Israeli Arab confl ict under review in this book.

7

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t h e y i t z h a k r a bi n – s h i mon p e r e s government between 1992 and 1996 (hereafter the Rabin government) signed peace accords between Israel and the PLO and between Israel and Jordan, and tried to initiate a new policy toward its Arab citizens, thus marking significant changes in the two major factors of the Jewish-Arab confl ict in Israel: the Palestinian issue and government policy versus the Arab minority. To what extent did these changes influence the confl ict behavior? Did they contribute to deescalation? In order to answer this, two more questions can be asked. First, what was the impact of achieving a peace agreement between Israel and the PLO on the Arab minority in particular and on the internal confl ict in general? Second, were the Rabin government’s policy changes toward Arab citizens a real reform or only minor and instrumental steps, and how did these changes impact political behavior of the Arabs? In addressing these questions, this chapter looks in more depth at the discrimination experienced by the Arab population and the state apparatus’s attempts to redress this discrimination. The Political Setting The Israeli-Palestinian confl ict was a major issue in the 1992 election. The Likud strategy was to prevent the creation of an independent Palestinian state. Yitzhak Shamir acknowledged that he had participated in the 1991 Madrid peace conference only under American pressure and consequently sought to stall the process. However, a significant segment of the Jewish population (from the left wing of the political map) and Israeli Arabs believed that the region was entering a new era, and their expectations for peace increased. 150

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As noted in previous chapters, since 1981 Arab voters had found themselves allied with the Labor party, and this was also true for the 1992 elections and their aftermath. The Arab-based parties Hadash and the ADP, exceptionally, declared their willingness to join a government coalition headed by Labor.1 They believed that these elections would be critical for the peace process. PLO leader Yasser Arafat—who was regarded by Israel at that time as an enemy—called upon Israeli Arabs to participate in the elections, hoping that they would gain fourteen to sixteen seats to the Knesset, and that they would endorse a vote for a peace treaty based on the PLO’s program.2 Arabs did not gain this many representatives in the Knesset, but their vote for the Oslo Accords was to prove crucial. The Labor party, for its part, understood that without the votes of the Arab electorate they could not win the election, and thus expressed greater sympathy for Arabs’ civil rights. Part of this sympathy was to officially recognize the existence of discriminatory policies and the need to remove the disparities.3 From 1990 on, the intifada shifted from a popular uprising into terror actions within Israel itself, including knife stabbings and the fi rst suicide bombings, which created insecurity among Israelis. A Palestinian terrorist attack at Bat-Yam occurred one month before municipal elections. In the attack, Helena Rapp, a high school student, was killed, which led to a popular Jewish call against Arabs in Bat-Yam. Both Labor and Likud used this incident against one another in their campaigns.4 Another political problem was created by the economic situation. The Jewish immigration from former USSR together with labor union strikes created economic distress and a high rate of unemployment (12 percent). Labor appealed to the Russian-speaking newcomers who were angry at the government’s failure to absorb them. The Shamir government was also accused of allocating significant funds to religious institutions and to settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, and with issues of corruption involving senior politicians. The slogan “corrupt, you are repulsive” was used by Labor and the left-wing parties. After the two major parties elected their candidates in the internal primaries, Labor focused its propaganda on the personality of Rabin versus Shamir. Yitzhak Rabin had a public image of “Mr. Security.” His record as IDF’s chief of staff during Israel’s victory in the Six Day War of June 1967

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and as the defense minister who had led the harsh military policy to contain the Palestinian intifada contributed to this image. His “sabra” behavior— straightforward speaking—and his deliberate avoidance of “politically correct” language gave him an image of a person one could trust, and therefore he was an ideal candidate for Labor in that critical time. Labor’s challenge in the 1992 election was to attract Jewish voters who did not accept the deterministic approach of Likud regarding the Palestinians and wanted a moderate prime minister whom they could trust not to make concessions on the state’s national security interests. In contrast to Rabin, Yitzhak Shamir was perceived as hesitant in decision making and as willing to block a chance for peace with the Palestinians. After polling, the left (peace) camp won 56 out of 120 parliament seats (Labor won 44, Meretz 12) while the right-wing parties won only 43 seats (Likud 32, Tzomet and Moledet together 11). In order to form a coalition, Rabin needed to court at least one of the three religious parties, who had gained 18 seats altogether, or the two Arab parties (5 seats). Finally Rabin succeeded in forming a 62-member coalition with Labor, Meretz, and Shas and the external support of five Arab Knesset members from Hadash and the ADP. The Palestinian Dimension: The Oslo Accords Following the success of the U.S.-led coalition with Arab states in the fi rst Gulf War of 1991, a new world order in which the United States was the foremost superpower began. The rise to power of the Rabin-led Labor government in Israel in 1992 and the inauguration of Democrat Bill Clinton in 1993 as the president of the United States gave hope for a peace initiative in the Middle East. Backed by the U.S. administration, Israel and Syria held peace talks in 1992–1993, but these did not materialize in an agreement. An especially tense situation between the Arab citizenss and the state was created when the government decided in December 1992 to deport 415 Hamas activists from the Palestinian territories to Lebanon. Arab MKs Tawfiq Zayyad and Hashem Mahamid paid a visit of solidarity to Gaza, and Mahamid said, on this occasion “The Intifada should continue with stones and all other means.” Right-wing Jewish MKs demanded that Mahamid’s

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immunity should be removed and he should be taken to court for supporting an armed struggle. The Knesset decided to restrict Mahamid’s movements and prevent him from entering the Palestinian territories for three months. Mahamid, reacted by accusing the Jewish MKs of racism and said, “I hold the Israeli right wing by its balls.”5 Even a moderate Arab Labor leader, MK Nawaf Masalha, complained in August 1993 that the Rabin government introduced hostile measures against the Palestinians “that the Likud did not dare to take”: deporting 415 Hamas leaders to Lebanon, closing the Palestinian territories, killing thirty-eight Palestinian children who were caught in the cross fi re over the course of six months, and depriving hundreds of Lebanese of their houses during the IDF’s Operation Accountability in Lebanon. In late June 1993, Hizballa launched rockets against an Israeli village, and in the following month, attacks by both Hizballa and a Palestinian armed organization killed five IDF soldiers inside the Israeli-controlled security zone in south Lebanon. Israel retaliated with Operation Accountability, week-long artillery attacks and air force strikes inside Lebanon. It ended in a cease-fi re agreement between Israel and Hizballa. Masalha considered leaving the government when the massive bombing started, and he stayed only after Rabin promised him that the operation was about to end.6 The PLO-Israel secret talks began as a private initiative, and developed into a formal peace accord in September 1993. After the signing in Oslo of the “Declaration of Principles” for peace between Israel and the PLO, the Arab citizens of Israel were satisfied. The improvement in the government’s policy toward them was hardly felt, however, because the change of policy was gradual. However, the change in atmosphere following the Oslo Accords was felt immediately. When the euphoria died down, due to the difficulties of implementing the peace agreement and terrorist actions conducted by Hamas in 1994, both ethnonational groups within Israel were disappointed and frustrated, and the two groups questioned the intentions of the other. This disappointment turned to despair when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in November 1995. If one expected that the Oslo accords would drastically de-escalate the internal confl ict between Jews and Arabs in Israel, one would soon be disappointed. The influence of the peace accords contributed to de-escalation, but

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not dramatically. There were two opposite effects for Israeli Arabs. On the one hand, the Rabin government increased their legitimacy in their quest for civil equality, however gradual. On the other hand, Israeli Arabs were politically marginalized. The establishment of two states dictated by the Oslo accords would destine them to remain a minority in Israel, a state that the PLO recognized as a Jewish state.7 In addition, the peace accords failed to deal with Israeli Arab concerns: the “1948 fi les,” that is, expropriated lands (mainly absentee properties), the demands of internal refugees to return to their original (abandoned and demolished) villages, and their political status in the state. Moreover, the Jewish public internalized the need for territorial compromises and therefore sought compensation through the strengthening of the Jewish identity of the state, an identity that by definition undermines the status of the Arab population. Hence, the new political and ideological situation following the peace accords created two contradictory trends among Arabs: integration and opportunism among moderates (including Hadash) and alienation and escalation by nationalist groups for their national demands, as I will discuss below. During the peace process itself, tensions occurred between Israel and the Palestinian Authority over the implementation of the Oslo accords. Each side undertook unilateral actions in order to create a preferential status quo on the ground before the fi nal status issues were fi nalized at the negotiation table. The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995 (by Yigal Amir, an Israeli Jew close to the settler circles) shocked the country and deepened the rift between the left and the right. Jews who voted for Labor and other left-wing parties felt closer to Arab citizens, and in fact they were for a while politically dependent on the Arab vote. They felt that the chance for peace had been hijacked by Rabin’s assassination. The alienation of Arabs in Israel increased due to the campaign by Israeli right factions, both moderate and more extreme, to de-legitimize the Oslo Accords. These efforts were accompanied by the de-legitimization of the Arab citizens and their right to influence critical political decisions regarding the state’s borders and future. The right-wing factions claimed that because the 61 Knesset votes in favor of the Oslo Accords included 5 Arab votes, the decision on Israel’s future had not gained a true majority. This kind of response indicates how the peace treaty

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achieved by Rabin did not in fact contribute significantly to the de-escalation of the Jewish-Arab confl ict. Government Policy The “Blocking Block” Agreement When Yitzhak Rabin formed his new government, he refused to include the two Arab parties in the coalition, even though he had only a narrow majority and they had indicated their willingness to participate. ‘Abd alWahab Darawsha, the ADP chairman, even threatened to initiate a vote of no confidence if he would not be nominated as a minister in the government. Darawsha, angered at the fact that the Arab parties were not invited to join the coalition, accused the Labor party of a “racist approach.”8 However, the public atmosphere was charged with anti-Arab fervor fermented by rightwing politicians who opposed the inclusion of Arabs in decisions pertaining to the fi nal borders of the state. Rabin was afraid that having Arab members in his coalition would weaken the legitimacy of his government among many Jewish citizens and so hinder achieving peace with the Palestinians. Finally, an agreement between the Labor government and Arab parties left these two parties as part of a political block only. Rabin’s main aim was to insure that, in the case of a no-confidence vote, which could topple his government, the Arab parties would support the Labor party. But the two Arab parties were not incorporated into the government. In Hebrew, the agreement was known as the “blocking block” (gush hosem) settlement, as its aim was to prevent the overthrow the government. The agreement between Labor and Hadash regarding the “blocking block” was signed in July 1992. As with other policy documents regarding Arabs, only part of it was implemented. It stated that the government “will encourage the full integration of the Arab and Druze citizens in Israel in all matters, whilst respecting their cultural and religious uniqueness, and will work to guarantee equality between all the citizens of the state.” 9 This formula, which avoided recognizing Arabs as a national minority, had appeared in the government’s resolution of 1976 just after Land Day took place (during the fi rst Rabin government). In 1976, the Arab leadership had

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rejected it. However, in the July 1992 document, the Labor party added promises to bridge the gap between the Jews and Arabs in civil services and infrastructure.10 In another agreement between the Labor party and ADP, Labor committed to forming a special cabinet, headed by the prime minister, with the mission of preparing within six months a five-year plan for budgets that would equalize services to the Arab localities.11 Hadash and ADP promised in return to vote for the government in the eventuality of a no-confidence motion. In addition to what was formulated in the signed documents, Labor’s Arab partners presented new demands during subsequent times of political crisis. For example, in late 1995 the MKs of Hadash and ADP threatened to vote against the government. Subsequently, the general secretary of the Labor party met with the Arab MKs and promised them that “the government will, in its next session, recognize five Arab unrecognized villages.”12 This matter had not been explicitly mentioned in the agreement, which only mentioned a review of the issue of illegal housing. One of the political mechanisms intended to ensure the implementation of the agreements was a joint parliamentary committee headed by MK Haim Oron of Meretz, which aimed at accelerating the treatment of issues relating to the Arab sector.13 In November 1993, Rabin ordered, after a meeting with this committee, that Arab academics should be immediately absorbed in the government’s ministries and that child allowances paid to Arab families should be raised to an equal level to that of Jewish families over the course of three years.14 The Challenge of Implementation Cabinet ministers took various steps to solidify the “blocking block” agreement and improve matters relating to the Arab sector. A committee headed by the general director of the prime minister’s office, Shimon Sheves, coordinated implementation. Soon after the formation of the new government, the ministers undertook a series of actions, substantial as well as symbolic, to implement the agreements. One of the symbolic (and insignificant) steps was the abolition of the position of prime minister’s advisor on Arab affairs. Since 1948, this position had signified the state’s control over the Arabs.

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However, it soon became clear that the position had not been abolished altogether but simply renamed “Head of Minorities Division.”15 Due to its policy of affi rmative action toward Arab citizens, the Rabin government was perceived as a model for accommodating the needs of the Israeli Arabs, transforming relations between Arabs and the state.16 Some Arab leaders even viewed the Rabin period as a “golden age.” For example, the head of the Arab Follow-up Committee, Shawqi Khatib, stated in a lecture in October 2002, In the last ten years, I had the honor of drafting and signing four agreements with different governments—the government of Shamir in 1991, Rabin’s of 1994, Netanyahu’s of 1997, and Barak’s of 1999. The preamble of every agreement stated that the government recognizes the injustice and disparities between the Arabs and Jews. However, none of these agreements were implemented . . . except for the short period when Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister, when for the fi rst time the government introduced new budgets dedicated to the Arab sector. Moreover and most importantly was the fact that the late Rabin was the fi rst and only prime minister who was not shy to admit that he was reliant on Arab votes. The Arabs were not part of the executive authority, but they were part of the “blocking block” in the Knesset. For the fi rst time, the Arabs felt that their political weight in the state was valued and important to the government. Also for the fi rst time, the Arab public had a sense of belonging.17

Khatib is not alone in his assessment of this period; some Arab municipalities organize annual commemoration ceremonies for Rabin after his assassination. They remember him as embracing something that does not exist anymore. Salem Jubran, the editor of al-Ahali newspaper, said that Rabin’s period as prime minister was the best era in the history of the Arabs in Israel.18 Even ‘Abd al-Wahab Darawsha, who left the Labor party because of Rabin’s statement during the fi rst intifada that “we have to break their bones,” said that Rabin was the fi rst leader who acknowledged the injustices of the past and acted to rectify them.19 Analyzing the government measures that were enacted, however, I would question whether the Rabin government indeed represented a true transformation in policy and implementation of promises made to the Arab

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leadership. Let us look at the main themes of government policy during Rabin’s term. Local Municipalities’ Budgets In describing the increase of government subsidies for Arab municipalities, Shimon Sheves, general director of the prime minister’s office, called it a radical change. In 1993, the subsidies from different government ministries for the Arab sector were increased by 236 million NIS compared to the previous year. The funding of development projects in the same year was increased by 180 million NIS, a twofold increase from 1992.20 Judging by the increasing number of protests, the increased funding alone was inadequate to solve all the perceived problems, however. In 1994, 1995, and 1996, ongoing fi nancial crises in Arab municipalities resulted in protests in front of the prime minister’s office in which the heads of the local councils erected a tent and held a prolonged strike (thirty-seven days in 1995).21 Husayn Sulayman, the spokesperson of the National Committee of Arab Heads of Local Authorities and a member of the Labor party, spoke about the gap between policy and implementation: Compared to the Likud governments, which in some areas such as housing, transportation, trade and industry, did not invest one cent in the Arab sector, this cabinet for the fi rst time has channeled funds into these items. In some fields, such as education, the budget for the Arab sector was doubled. The debts and deficits of the Arab municipalities stem from the ongoing neglect by previous governments and from the money that the Arab municipalities themselves spent by taking on overdrafts from the bank outside the approved budget . . . Since the representatives of the Arab population had an agreement with the Labor party, aimed at achieving complete equality . . . we expected the Labor party, once it came to power, to solve all the problems overnight, and this did not happen. Therefore, we continue to fight, when we felt that our share in government fi nancial assistance did not match our relative representation in the population we protested.22

The Rabin government made significant progress in allocating budgets in order to narrow the discrepancies in the different sectors. However, it did

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not approach the problems of Israeli Arabs with a comprehensive, needsbased plan, according to which achieving equality would occur within a definite time frame. The Educational System Long-term discrimination suffered by Arabs in the educational system led the Rabin government to commit not only to try to remove the disparities but to opt for affi rmative action for the Arab sector. A few months after he was appointed minister of education, Amnon Rubinstein decided to cut government funding for 15,000 school hours in the Jewish religious educational system and to transfer these funds to the Arab education system in order to “eliminate long-term discrimination in which surplus resources were allocated to the Jewish religious system at the expense of others.”23 In the following school year (1993–94), Rubinstein added subsidies for the fourth and fi fth grades in Arab schools.24 The Arab sector expressed its satisfaction with the subsidization of the construction of new schools and classrooms, as well as more fi nance for class hours and teaching positions.25 Rubinstein set another important precedent through the recognition, for the fi rst time, of two Arab colleges. One was the Islamic college in Baqa al-Gharbiyya, a college established by a Sufi movement endowment (Khilwatiyya-Qawasma), to serve as a teacher training school.26 The other was the I‘bilin school in the Galilee, administered by Elias Shakour, an academic college (Mar Elias College) to be recognized by the Council of Higher Education.27 Granting official recognition to Arab colleges was of important symbolic value well beyond the specific benefit. This decision signified to the Arab sector the establishment’s willingness to integrate them even in matters from which they were previously excluded—such as establishing an Islamic college. Rubinstein’s policies created high hopes, while the reality of his achievements might be considered modest incremental change rather than real reform. Infrastructure and Land Issues Inferior infrastructure is one of the most severe problems experienced by Arab villages and towns. As with education, this inquity was a result of years

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of government neglect. In a survey conducted by As‘ad Ghanem on infrastructure and services in Arab municipalities, it was found that the budget was the primary reason for the lack of infrastructure and adequate services. Of the Arab municipalities surveyed, 95.7 percent had electricity, 96.7 percent had running water, 84.6 percent had concrete roads, but only 26.7 percent had sewage systems. Telephones were provided in 91.2 percent of the Arab towns and villages. Only 15.2 percent had public parks, 58.7 percent had football fields, and 34.8 percent had basketball courts. A swimming pool was available in 6.5 percent of the localities, and 21.7 percent had a sports complex. Only 16 percent of the localities had kindergarten programs.28 During the Rabin administration, the Housing Ministry significantly increased budgets for projects in the Arab sector, from 10 million NIS in 1993, to 63 million NIS in 1993, and to more than 100 million NIS in 1994.29 Over half of the amount was intended to improve road access in the Arab sector. Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer also directed the Israeli Land Authority to prepare land for public institutions and kindergartens in Arab villages, and he demanded the preparation of a multiyear plan for repairing main roads and sewage systems in Arab localities in the Galilee.30 However, the budget allocated for infrastructure was still far from corresponding to the needs of the population, as Ben Eliezer described it: When we came to power almost two years ago we found among the Arabs [between them and the Jews] disparities that were forty-five years old. As long as we continue to be in power, it becomes clear to me that the Arab citizen in the state of Israel is a third-rate citizen . . . during all the years we didn’t know how to cope with the Arab problem, more accurately we did not want to face it, we avoided it, we bypassed it . . . we spoke with the Arabs through intermediates, we treated them with a carrot-and-stick policy. . . . Since this government came to power, for the fi rst time in the history of the State, the Ministry of Housing included the entire Arab sector in its national working program. With the stretching out of a previously stingy hand, their appetite was developed and rightly so. Only now we are discovering how many things the Arab population was missing.31

Ben Eliezer’s awareness was not enough to eliminate the disparities, or perhaps there was just too much catching up to do. In 2002, a special state

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controller’s report criticized the huge disparities that remained: 70 percent of Arab municipalities lacked a complete sewage system, 85 percent had neighborhoods without paved roads, and only 67 percent of Arab schools had a standard infrastructure (compared to 89 percent in the Jewish sector).32 The only public construction by the government in Arab localities was in the realm of medical facilities: forty-eight health clinics were constructed in Arab villages in that period. Construction policies undertaken by other government ministries during Rabin’s term were more modest than in the fields of municipal budgeting, education, and infrastructure. The Ministry of Tourism granted Nazareth the status of a development area, qualifying it for subsidized hotel construction. In addition, a new development program called Nazareth 2000 began to take shape.33 The Law of Electric Power, initiated by the Ministry of Energy, made electricity available to thousands of formerly illegal houses, following the Markovitz committee’s decision mentioned in chapter 6.34 Minister of the Environment Yossi Sarid allocated environmental protection units to the Arab localities and funded the 50 percent required to be invested by the municipalities themselves. Prior to 1994 there had not been one single environmental unit in the Arab sector.35 The promises made by the Labor party to expand the jurisdiction of Arab localities were only partially fulfi lled. Minister of the Interior Uzi Baram authorized the addition of land to the jurisdictions of a few Arab settlements following an inquiry commission that recommended adding 1,600 dunams to the municipality of Nazareth, which previously was under the authority of the (Jewish-dominated) Upper Nazareth municipality and the regional council of Emek Izra‘el. Some land plots were also added to the jurisdiction of the nearby villages of Mashhad and Yafi‘a.36 In 1995, the Ministry of the Interior prepared master plans for thirty-four Arab municipalities. The new programs addressed the needs of the Arab settlements and population in these localities.37 In the same year, nine new Arab industrial areas and seven new villages were listed by the Ministry of Industry for allocation of land for development purposes. In the field of agriculture, however, there was no change in policy at all. Arabs were consuming only 2.4 percent of the irrigated water authorized for agricultural use, and their revenues per dunam of cultivated land were 30

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percent lower than the Jewish sector average.38 A new agricultural development program in the Negev entirely neglected the 100,000 Arab Bedouin citizens who resided in this district.39 Groundbreaking improvements, however, were achieved in six areas below. Child Allowances The most important initiative on both substantial and symbolic levels toward achieving equality was the equalizing of child allowances paid by the National Welfare Institution between discharged soldiers (mainly Jews) and those who had never served in the army (mainly Arabs). Beginning in 1970, the government paid higher sums to families with three children and above to families in which one member was a discharged soldier (yotze tzava) or policeman. The policy was aimed at encouraging Jewish births. However, the policy was discriminatory because ultraorthodox Jewish families who were exempt from army service received the same allowance as families of discharged soldiers by registering youngsters in the army for one day. Due to pressure from the Arab MKs of the blocking block, a law was passed in 1994 that equalized the child allowances over three years. This resulted in a substantial decrease in the poverty rates of Arab children from 42.9 percent in 1994 to 32.6 percent in 1996.40 Unrecognized Villages Another major breakthrough during Rabin’s tenure was over unrecognized villages, the official term used to describe a cluster of houses or hamlets (some of which had been built before 1948) in the Galilee, the Triangle, and the Negev. These houses had never received a building permit, and the government planned to demolish them and remove their residents to existing villages. These hamlets were declared illegal, any new construction was prohibited, and they were not connected to electricity, water supply, or other infrastructural benefits as well as educational and medical facilities. Almost 100,000 people resided in the unrecognized villages (70,000 in the Negev and 30,000 in the north) in some 12,000 houses built without permits.41

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The previous policy toward unrecognized villages had two goals. The fi rst was economic, to avoid investing in undesirable or small regions. The second was territorial, to evacuate Arab land and make it available for future Jewish settlements and development programs. During the 1980s, the problem became acute: the government had gone forward with demolitions of illegal houses, leaving hamlet residents homeless. They organized into a pressure group at a convention in Ein-Hod (an Arab unrecognized village on the Carmel mountains, where a Jewish village bearing almost the same name was formed on the original Arab village’s lands) in December 1988, the Association of Forty (marking forty years since 1948 and some forty unrecognized villages in the Galilee). The new association prepared a master plan for fi fty-two hamlets to be developed into thirty-eight recognized villages. In May 1992, Rabin’s Minister of the Interior Uzi Baram declared that he would adopt the principles established by the Association of Forty. Following this announcement, in December 1994, the government recognized the fi rst four villages. In the following year, four more villages received recognition.42 The authorization of these eight villages was a breakthrough in the government’s policy of nonrecognition, and it opened the door to recognizing all unrecognized hamlets in the north. Simultaneously, the government began to study the demands of the Negev Bedouins to construct new rural settlements and approve some of their unrecognized villages. The “Confrontation Zone” Since 1980, the government had given priority in funding to Jewish localities along Israel’s borders, particularly in the north. These towns and villages were known as the “Frontline Zone,” threatened by Hizballah rockets, and as a result were entitled to additional government funding and tax reductions. Until the Rabin tenure in 1992, no Arab village was included in this zone, although a number of Arab villages were close to the border. During the Rabin government, four Arab villages were for the fi rst time included in the Frontline Zone, but this action was taken because the municipal councils fi led a case in the Supreme Court of Justice. As a result, world Jewry funds were also allocated to the four Arab villages.43 Following this decision,

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fi fteen Arab and Druze villages and towns were included on the lists of other national priority programs, but implementation was delayed.44 Civil Service and Diplomatic Corps Another symbolic act during this government’s tenure was the appointment of Arabs to senior civil service positions and particularly to the diplomatic corps. Shimon Peres, the minister of foreign affairs, and his deputy Yossi Beilin opened up the foreign ministry’s diplomatic cadets’ courses to Arabs and Druze, and some of them continued on to get positions in the Foreign Service. Eventually the fi rst Arab ambassador was nominated: Israel’s ambassador to Finland, ‘Ali Yihya, a former teacher of Arabic for Jewish adults. Yitzhak Rabin was personally involved in introducing affi rmative action into the civil service in nominations for senior positions. The government nominated two Arab members of the Knesset to the position of deputy ministers—Nawaf Masalha (Labor) as deputy minister of health and Walid Sadeq (Meretz) as deputy minister of agriculture. In July 1993, the government passed Resolution 1994, which determined that a quota of 130 positions be fi lled by Arab university graduates who had applied for them.45 The government nominated a committee headed by the author of this book, and with Arab and Jewish experts, to recommend the procedures for affi rmative action. Here again, expectations were greater than the actual achievements. Nevertheless, the government’s action was an important starting point for creating awareness within the bureaucracy.46 Ikrit and Bir‘em Another issue addressed during Rabin’s reign was the 1995 recommendation of a special cabinet headed by Minister of Justice David Libai to allow some 600 displaced families of Ikrit and Bir‘em to reconstruct their homes in the same place as the original villages (see chapter 5). This recommendation did not satisfy the displaced families due to the restrictions on the area in which the new villages could be constructed and the limit on the number of descendants eligible to receive plot of lands. In addition, they were denied permission to reclaim the farming areas they owned before the evacuation of

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the villages.47 The government nominated a special general directors’ committee to hear their complaints, but this committee did not accomplish a great deal before the government was dismissed following the elections of 1996. When the new government failed to implement the recommendations of the committee, the displaced persons appealed to the Supreme Court and, as noted before, lost their case.48 Summary of Policy Was there a true transformation in the Rabin government’s policy regarding the Arab minority? In contrast to present-day nostalgia for Rabin, Arab public figures at the time asserted that they did not witness the significant changes they expected. They criticized the government on both the domestic and international levels. Let us look fi rst at the evaluation of Israeli experts. Sara Ozacky-Lazar and As‘ad Ghanem wrote that the Arabs perceived equality not only as equality of budgets but as a partnership, as integration and equal status in decision making, which they did not fully receive under Rabin. Enumerating the above policy measures, Ozacky-Lazar and Ghanem concluded that “the changes were incremental and do not show a significant turnaround.”49 Analysts were also acutely critical of the government’s policy regarding the peace process. Shuli Dichter, the co-director of Sikkuy, thought the most important accomplishment of the Rabin government was the legitimization of the civil partnership of Israeli Arabs in historical decisions (their Knesset vote for the Oslo accords).50 Elie Rekhess, however, concludes that Rabin did not regard equality and integration of the Arabs as a priority.51 In evaluating the blocking block agreements, Majid al-Haj asserted that those agreements did not reflect a breakthrough regarding the collective rights of Arab citizens. They maintained Arabs as a cultural and religious minority, and rejected their demands to be recognized as a national Palestinian minority and other matters relating to their civil rights.52 Another expert, Aziz Haidar, says the Rabin government period did not offer the Arab leadership any real involvement. The government still followed a paternalistic approach to the Arab leaders, politicians, and representative bodies. Haidar termed the affi rmative action policy “sophisticated and intentioned co-optation.” He also stated that barely anything was invested

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Table 1. The blocking block agreement and its implementation Item in agreement

Implementation

Bridging discrepancies in education

Affirmation action in construction new classrooms and additional study hours in the elementary schools No progress No progress No progress No progress 48 new mother-and-child clinics constructed

Bridging gaps in industry Bridging gaps in agriculture Bridging gaps in housing Bridging gaps in funds for youth Bridging gaps in health services Equalizing the budgets and number of employees in the Arab and Druze municipalities

Significant progress in narrowing the gaps

Completing master plans for the Arab and Druze villages and towns

Some progress was made but the actual finalization of the plans occurred only after this government’s term

Amending the law that determines the Islamic endowment assets as absentee properties and transferring its administration to the Muslim community

Not implemented

Forming local committees for planning and housing in every Arab municipality of 5,000+ people

Not executed as detailed; one committee was formed to encompass a number of Arab villages in Wadi ‘Ara

Constructing sewage systems in Arab villages

Significant progress

Establishing an institute for higher education in which Arabic will be the language of instruction

Two Arab colleges were recognized, but no new institution was established

Approving a five-year plan and budget to decrease the disparities and to equalize services and funds to Arab municipalities

Not implemented

Reassessing the problem of houses built without permits

Demolition of illegal houses almost entirely ceased

Reassessing the jurisdiction zones of Arab municipalities

The jurisdictions of a few villages nearby Nazareth and the town of Rahat were expanded.

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Table 1 (continued) Item in agreement

Implementation

Reassessing the government’s program to unify (decrease the number of) Arab municipalities

The unification was not carried out, not as a result of reassessment but because of the successful drawing out of court procedures by the municipalities

Subsidizing a “build your own home” program in Arab villages and towns

Not implemented

Renovating Arab neighborhoods

A decision was made, but not implemented

Other issues outside the agreement in which progress was made

For the fi rst time: (1) Arab villages were recognized as confrontation-zone settlements and as part of national priority programs; (2) Environmental units were established in Arab municipalities; (3) An Arab was nominated to the position of ambassador, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs absorbed Arabs and Druze as diplomatic cadets

in economic development. Haidar does not consider the policy changes to be fundamental. He adds that the Rabin government did not address some of the major problems of the Arab sector such as providing services for the Bedouins and the unrecognized villages and the improvement of educational achievement. Moreover, in his opinion, some actions taken by the government harmed the Arab population, such as the nomination of Jews to head some new Arab municipalities, the jurisdiction of the Misgav regional council, the expropriation of lands for the cross-Israeli expressway, a new law regarding discharged soldiers that discriminated against the Arabs, and the settlement of Palestinian collaborators from West Bank and Gaza in Arab villages. Haidar adds that, on a personal level, the Arabs felt a sense of openness and bettered conditions due to the expectations of peace, and the economic improvements that came from special budgets and reduced

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unemployment and increased salaries when Palestinian workers from the territories were restricted in their movements. However, Arabs were excluded from gaining any political influence even though they were a vital electorate. Haidar attributes this to the jealous guarding of the Jewish state paradigm, which still viewed Arabs as a security risk.53 A close look at what the Rabin government accomplished compared to what was neglected justifies in my view criticism of the experts’ conclusions. The above survey of the government policy shows that the main arena in which Rabin’s government bridged the gap between Jews and Arabs was in government budgets. This endeavor, however, was not a product of a comprehensive plan. Rather, it was a result of individual initiatives by each ministry in its own jurisdiction. The atmosphere of hope for peace on the one hand, and the awareness of the Arab’s political power on the other, motivated them to improve the Israeli Arabs’ situation. It is true that the progress made still fell far short of addressing the Arab populations’ expectations following the signing of the Oslo peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians in 1993. Table 1 summarizes the shortfall between the blocking block agreement and its actual implementation. Out of eighteen items agreed upon between the Labor party and Hadash and ADP parties, significant progress was made only in five, with two items partially implemented. In most of the issues from the agreement, there was no change at all. However, improvements of the Arabs’ civil rights were made in three areas not covered by the agreement. The above description of the achievements of the Rabin government generally supports the assertions made by Ozacki-Lazar and Ghanem. However, the progress made in issues of symbolic significance does not warrant the low evaluation given by Haidar. In my opinion, the most important policy change was the principal of affi rmative action to be legitimized and internalized by the Jewish public. Arab Political Behavior The 1992 elections resulted in an increase in support for moderate Arabs factions. Hadash received three seats in the Knesset and ADP two. The radical PLP party, however, did not achieve the minimum voting threshold for a seat (obtaining only 24,000 votes).54 In the 1992 elections, Arab voters

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increased their support for the Labor party and other Zionist parties by 52 percent, a level unequaled since the political upheaval of the 1970s. The Labor party received 20.4 percent of the Arab votes compared to 16.5 percent in the previous elections. Yet Arab voter turnout in the 1992 election decreased from 73 percent in 1988 to 70 percent despite Yasser Arafat’s call to Arab citizens to vote and thereby influence Israeli politics.55 The decrease in the Arab participation could be explained by their lack of confidence in the ability of their votes to influence policy, by their adherence to the call made by nationalist elements such as Abna’ al-Balad to boycott the elections, or by both.56 The increased support for the Zionist parties among Arab voters was interpreted as opportunistic.57 However, I tend to agree with the view expressed by As‘ad Ghanem, in his overview published on the eve of the elections, that emphasized the Palestinian dimension. In order to establish an effective coalition and move the peace process forward, the Likud party had to be removed from the head of the ruling coalition.58 One must remember that the election took place after four and a half years of intifada, eighteen months after the Gulf crisis, and nine months after the Madrid Conference. Israeli Arabs were eager for a political peace process on the Palestinian-Israeli level and voting for Labor was their option for endorsing such a process—an assessment that turned out to be correct. The Rabin government tenure was a period of ideological incubation and crystallization of the Israeli Arabs’ resistance to the Jewish nature of the state and for demands to reopen the 1948 fi les, namely to repatriate internal refugees to their original villages and the general claim of return of the Palestinian refugees. The positive changes during Rabin’s term in the two major factors propelling Jewish-Arab relations in Israel—peace with the PLO and more liberal policy regarding minorities—resulted in a lower number of protests from 1992 to 1996. The major protest-generating event during this period was the murder of twenty-nine Palestinian Muslim worshippers at the Ibrahimi Mosque of Hebron in February 1994 by Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish resident of Kiryat Arba.59 The Arab leadership avoided the traditional general strike to commemorate Land Day “due to the developments in the peace process and the measures taken to improve equality for the Arab population.”60 In December 1995, the MKs of Hadash and ADP proposed a no-confidence

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vote in the Knesset in response to a government bill intending to limit PLO activity in Jerusalem. They claimed that this bill would hamper the peace process and would contradict the Oslo agreement. The no-confidence proposal was submitted only after they made sure that it would fail. Tracing the political debate between Arab factions in this period is important for understanding the roots of ongoing radicalization and what could be done to reverse this trend. In 1995, before PM Rabin was assassinated, the Arab political map consisted of three ideological streams: radical nationalists such as Azmi Bishara (who later established Balad), moderate nationalists who voted for Hadash and ADP, and pragmatists who supported Labor or other Zionist parties. Bishara attacked Hadash and ADP for what he termed a “post-ideological strategy” supporting “Israelization” because they aspired to join a coalition with the Labor party.61 Hadash’s response is a view that is no longer heard; an editorial written by an al-Ittihad editor, ‘Ali ‘Ashur, stated, “What is wrong with the Israelization of the Arabs? On the contrary, there is nothing to be shy about. We wish that all Arabs can become Israeli citizens, equal to Jewish citizens.” He stated that the right of the Jewish people for self-determination had already been granted by the UN 1947 Partition Plan. The Arabs’ struggle, headed by the Communist party, was always for the implementation of the second part of this resolution, the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the granting of equal status to the Palestinian minority in Israel. Ashur added, “After we accomplished many achievements in those two arenas, must we now risk them by being perceived as undermining the State, something which could be used as a justification to discriminate against us?”62 The moderate camp was more willing to celebrate Israeli Independence Day as well as serve in the IDF. Zionist parties in the municipal elections and in the Histadrut elections of 1993 saw increased support from this faction.63 Another debate centered on the nature of the state as “Jewish and democratic.” In November 1994, As‘ad Ghanem maintained during a conference at Tel Aviv University that the defi nition of the state as Jewish should be changed. His assertions received wide coverage in the Arab press.64 Ghanem and other Arab academic nationalists (such as Azmi Bishara) developed an academic justification for resistance to the Jewish nature of the state, for demands to reopen the 1948 fi les and repatriate internal refugees to their

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original villages, and for the right of return of Palestinian refugees. One explanation for the radicalization of Arab nationalists was that they felt that the minority interests were marginalized by the PLO in the Oslo peace process and that they would have to struggle themselves for their demands regarding “historical injustices”; the PLO would have been satisfied with the establishment of an independent state with pre-1967 borders.65 Reacting to Ghanem’s resistance to the Jewish nature of the state, journalist Salem Jubran (a former member of Hadash and since the 1990s a Meretz member) published an opinion piece saying this strategy did not serve the true interest of the Arabs: “The demand to change the Jewish character of the state triggers the resistance of the majority of the Jews in Israel. The Jews ask: are the Arab countries not Arab countries? Would the Palestinian state be a state of all of its citizens? Life forces us to reconcile between our national affi liation and our citizenship. Therefore, we have to fi nd an approach which will maintain our loyalty to our people while still enabling us to be real citizens in the state.”66 Jubran was attacked by Arab nationalists for “groveling in vain” at the feet of the Israeli establishment.67 Arab political behavior during the period 1992–1995 shows that progress in the peace process and in promoting greater equality for the Arab minority results in de-escalation. If we look at the political situation today, since the collapse of the Oslo peace process and reverse of policy in the realm of civil rights, we see the converse: the nationalist moderate camp (Hadash) has become more radical while support for the pragmatist moderate camp has decreased. Muhammad Amara, in his study of Arab political violence, wrote that during Rabin’s administration, Arabs identified with the state more than they had in the past. He stressed the anger displayed by Arabs in reaction to Rabin’s assassination in 1995.68 A year after Rabin was assassinated, the Supreme Follow-up Committee organized a mass convention in Nazareth. Although the topic of the conference was “equality,” many of the speakers addressed topics that reflected a demand for a change in the Jewish hegemony in the state. The demands raised in the convention included recognizing the Arab minority as a national minority, state recognition of Arab representative political bodies, and abolition of conscription for the Druze community.69

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Jewish Political Behavior The Jewish public was split during Rabin’s term. On the one hand, there was no Jewish objection to the liberal policy of the Labor-led government toward Arabs civil rights. However, on the other hand, senior Likud members attacked the legitimacy of the government and its foreign policy because it was dependent on Arab votes and not on what they called “a Jewish majority.” From 1990 to 1992, Likud and other right-wing parties sought to undermine the Labor party. They viewed the mere fact of negotiation with Arab parties as illegitimate, and they accused the Labor party of negotiating with the “PLO’s agents,” meaning collaborating with the enemy.70 They also tried to delegitimize Israeli Arab participation in decisions critical to the future of the state, including its fi nal borders with the Palestinian entity and with Syria.71 MK Ariel Sharon suggested in May 1993 that Arab citizens should not have the right to participate in any referendum over the future of Judea and Samaria (West Bank). Sharon said, “The real [and] primary, decisive loyalty of most Israeli Arabs, including . . . their representatives in the Knesset, is naturally not to Israel but to the Arab Palestinian interest.” He dismissed the idea that by excluding the Arab minority from the democratic process he was undermining the moral and democratic foundation of the state. As he put it, “Our grandparents and parents did not come to here to establish a democracy . . . It is good that a genuine democracy was created [but our ancestors] came here to establish a Jewish state. Remember this!” 72 This fear of including the Israeli Arabs in the political process because they could undermine the Jewish nature of the state continued to determine policy, even on the left of the political spectrum, and explains why the Labor party did not want to include the Arab parties in a coalition. In fact, Yitzhak Rabin and the Labor party surrendered to the campaign of delegitimization conducted by the right wing, which opposed the inclusion of Arabs in key political decisions. Following the Knesset approval of the Oslo accords with the support of Arab members of Knesset, Rabin was concerned about his image of being dependant on Arab votes, and he had to walk a tightrope with his policies. Therefore, the change in the status of Arab citizens during the Rabin tenure was limited. It is true that the government’s treatment of them changed; however, the Arabs were still excluded

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from political power. The blocking block agreement prevented the inclusion of the Arab parties in the government coalition and denied them any influence over decision making in domestic as well as foreign affairs policies. In the fi nal year of Rabin’s tenure, between April 1994 and August 1995, Israel was affected by extreme terrorist actions conducted by Hamas, which turned Jewish public opinion against the Palestinians in general and to some extent also against the Israeli Arabs who sympathized with the Palestinian struggle. One particular incident—a suicide bombing in January 1995 at the Beit-Lid junction in which eighteen soldiers perished—had a devastating impact on Jewish society. Conclusion Generally speaking, the Oslo Accords signed between Israel and the PLO significantly de-escalated the internal confl ict in spite of the fact that they did not resolve Israeli Arabs’ systemic problems as a national minority. The de-escalation strengthened when the government’s foreign policy was accompanied with a series of internal operative steps to narrow disparities, even though these did not introduce dramatic reforms. The significant change in the two basic factors influencing the Jewish-Arab confl ict in Israel resulted in a clear distinction between Arab nationalists and moderates. The influence of the interlocking nature of the internal and external confl icts was manifested not only in the Arab political behavior but also in government policy. Arab electoral support was always an incentive for the Labor party to promote the rights of the Arab minority. However, the Labor government could not introduce significant changes for Arabs because it feared losing Jewish voters who saw Arabs as a security threat. It was only the new atmosphere of peace created after the Oslo Accords that allowed government policy of affi rmative action in budgets and in employment opportunities for Arab citizens. In spite of the changes in the government’s policy toward the Arab population, the Palestinian issue still dictated the political agenda of the Arabs in Israel. The Arab MKs could not support a no-confidence vote against the government for fear of dismissing the coalition that was promoting the peace process, which they were hoping would succeed.

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The Rabin tenure witnessed a significant increase of the number and quality of new Arab NGOs. The new civil society organizations in which many young academics were employed gradually developed the self-perception of the Arab population in Israel as a national minority. This process is elaborated on in the next chapter, which deals with the tenure of Binyamin Netanyahu as prime minister between 1996 and 1999. The situation deteriorated significantly under his leadership, both in terms of the Israeli-Palestinian confl ict (because of his failure to implement the Oslo Accords) and in terms of the internal situation (where the Rabin government’s policies were reversed).

8

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“ i l l i fa t m a m a t ” —what has passed didn’t die (a reversal of a common Arabic saying, “what has passed is dead”); “the ‘internal refugees’ should be repatriated and their original villages demolished in 1948 should be rehabilitated,” said Hana Suwayd, at the time the head of the ‘Ilabun Local Council (and today a member of the Knesset of the Hadash party), at a round table symposium of academics and practitioners in July 2002 at the Neve Illan resort near Jerusalem. Basel Ghattas reinforced these feelings, stating, “We would like to be masters of our homes; we are a majority in the Galilee but we were torn from the area and from the history, and I want to feel at home in the Galilee. The law of return, therefore, affects my daily life.”1 Suwayd and Ghattas, representing the Arab academic and political elite and civil society organizations, surprised many of the Jewish participants around the table. The two speakers presented a new sentiment that challenged the post-1948 political reality. This chapter broadly describes the process, which took place in the 1990s, of the crystallization of the Arab community as a national minority that worked for self-empowerment and its own political and civil institutions. The Political Setting During the seven months between Rabin’s assassination and the general elections, when Shimon Peres served as prime minister, terrorist actions continued inside Israel and along the borders with Lebanon. An attempt by the Peres government to retaliate against Hizballah in Lebanon ended in 175

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a military operation that affected the Arab electorate. During Operation Grapes of Wrath, an Israeli artillery bombardment mistakenly struck a public school in Kafar Qana, in southern Lebanon, and led to ninety-one civilian deaths. Disaffected with the government’s actions, Arab politicians had been campaigning against Shimon Peres, arguing that Arab citizens should boycott the elections. During the last few days before the elections, however, determining that such a boycott would ensure a Likud victory with all of its ramifications for the peace process, Arab leaders reversed their approach. Changes to the Israeli election system took effect in 1996. Now the prime minister would be elected according to a winner-take-all vote in a separate ballot from the Knesset elections, which were based on proportional representation (this system lasted until the 2001 elections). Voters had a choice between Shimon Peres as Labor’s leader and Binyamin Netanyahu of Likud. The new election system made Arab citizens vital partners with the Labor party and the entire left block and increased the political power held by the Arab parties. In its election campaign, Likud implied that Labor favored the Arab electorate and their interests over those of the Jewish constituency. Two Likud effective campaign slogans were “Netanyahu is good for Jews” and “Bibi or Ahmad Tibi,” meaning that a vote cast against Netanyahu would bring to power Ahmad Tibi, an Israeli Arab politician who was also Yasser Arafat’s advisor. Apparently these messages influenced the Jewish public and caused a slight shift to the right of the Jewish electorate.2 Binyamin Netanyahu was elected as prime minister, defeating Shimon Peres by only 1 percent of the total vote (50.5 percent compared to 49.5 percent). Most Arab voters (94.7 percent) supported Shimon Peres. Even though the Labor party won more seats in the Knesset than the Likud (34 versus 32), the system of electing the prime minister separately from the vote for the parties gave preference to Netanyahu to form the new government because of an increase in the number of sectarian parties who supported Likud.3 Peres’ defeat indicated an increase in the number of Jewish citizens who questioned the Oslo process and the intentions of the Palestinians. Apparently, the terrorist actions conducted by Hamas—radical Islamists who do not recognize the state of Isreal—prior to the elections affected the outcome and thus achieved their aim of derailing the peace process.4

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Hadash and ADP almost doubled their power in the 1996 elections by obtaining 9 seats (5 for Hadash and 4 for ADP). The PLP again did not cross the threshold, wasting about 14,000 votes, as did a new party named Arab Unity, which received only 2,000 votes.5 The new election system enabled the Arab citizens to express their Palestinian agenda by voting for Shimon Peres for PM while at the same time expressing their agenda as a national minority by a massive vote for Hadash and ADP. The Netanyahu government based on right-wing and Jewish religious parties was characterized by instability, and this resulted in elections being held one year earlier than usual (1999). Netanyahu’s tenure witnessed internal crises and scandals, but the scale of Palestinian terror actions was low during his three years in power. The new government had to cope with the Palestinian problem and accept Israel’s commitment to the Oslo agreements. The economy during this period showed signs of recession as a result of regional instability, and the IDF was still involved in south Lebanon through its agent, the South Lebanese Army. Casualties on Israel’s northern border continued on a daily or weekly basis. The Palestinian Dimension During the second half of the 1990s, a wave of militant Islamic terror actions began against American and European targets. In June 1996, a truck carrying a bomb targeted an apartment complex in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, housing military personnel from the United States, Britain, and France. Nineteen U.S. servicemen were killed and hundreds of people were injured. Two years later, al-Qa‘ida became visible as a terrorist threat against the United States with bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Worldwide Islamic terrorism against U.S. and European targets worked to the benefit of Israel, who is regarded by the West as a Western model democracy in the Middle East in a combat with militant Islamic groups such as Hamas and Hizballah. Netanyahu came to power with a political platform aimed at undermining the Oslo accords and the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. However, due to external pressures (particularly exerted by the United States), his cabinet was forced to sign a document with the

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Palestinian Authority to honor the commitments laid down in Oslo, to withdraw from most of the city of Hebron and transfer its sovereignty to the Palestinian Authority. According to the Why Memorandum of October 1998, Israel would relinquish 13 percent of the West Bank, of which 10 percent would be turned over to Palestinian control and the rest would be turned into nature reserves. In return, Arafat agreed to undertake measures to prevent acts of terrorism against Israel, to apprehend individuals suspected of perpetrating acts of violence and terror, and to punish all persons involved in acts of violence and terror. In addition, it was agreed that the Palestinians would collect illegal weapons and that the Palestinian police would be reduced from 36,000 to 30,000 men. Arafat also agreed to reaffi rm the letter he sent to President Clinton in January 1988 concerning the nullification of those Palestinian National Charter provisions that called for the destruction of Israel. It was agreed that permanent status negotiations would resume on an accelerated basis so that the sides could reach an agreement by 4 May 1999 (the target date for a fi nal status agreement set in the Oslo Accords). However, the optimism created at Wye was short lived, since both parties accused each other of failing to meet their commitments. From Israeli Arabs’ point of view, Netanyahu’s government created a negative climate for the Oslo process. Therefore, Netanyahu’s policy escalated their resistance toward the government and the state apparatus.6 One event in particular exemplifies how Netanyahu’s political agenda in the Palestinian arena affected the Arab community in Israel. In September 1996, Netanyahu ordered the opening of an exit to a tunnel that had been excavated from the Jewish-dominated Wailing Wall northbound along the Temple Mount/al-Aqsa western wall. The unilateral action, disrupting the status quo around the holy places of Jerusalem, angered Muslim authorities and ultimately resulted in mass violence in the West Bank and Gaza territories.7 The riots of September 1996 took the form of a quasi-intifada: for the fi rst time, Palestinian police were involved in live gunfights with Israeli citizens and security forces, whereas in the past they had cooperated in security measures and to prevent violent uprisings. Sixteen Israelis (including IDF soldiers) were killed during these violent clashes as well as fi fty-seven Palestinians, and hundreds were wounded.

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Terrorism erupted after a one-year cessation, with radical Hamas suicide bombers claiming the lives of more than twenty Israeli civilians and wounding hundreds in bombings in March, July, and September of 1997. Netanyahu accused PA president Yasser Arafat of lax security and retaliated with draconian sanctions against Palestinians working in Israel, including the withholding of millions of dollars in tax revenue, a blatant violation of the Oslo accords. With the Israeli government contending that peace was impossible in the face of Palestinian terrorism and Palestinians maintaining that terrorism was the by-product of stalled peace talks, there was little hope of moving forward. Adding to the tensions, two Mossad agents from Israel’s secret service botched an assassination attempt on Hamas leader Khaled Mash‘al in Jordan on 25 September 1997, an act that simultaneously exhibited Israel’s own violent tactics and alienated Israel’s friendly Arab neighbor. In exchange for the captured Mossad agents, Netanyahu freed a number of Palestinian prisoners, including Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, Hamas’s spiritual leader. From late 1997 until October 2000, Israel experienced a lull in attacks against Israel’s civilian population by Palestinian groups. Government Policy The Netanyahu government’s operation in the Arab sector was characterized by reversal of the previous government’s policy of narrowing disparities, with the exception of government funds for education and municipal budgets. These funds are transparent and independently indicated in the government annual budget.8 The reality in other government ministries was dire. In 1997, when Moshe Katzav was deputy prime minister and the minister in charge of Arab affairs, a report was prepared in the bureau of the Advisor on Arab Affairs that summarized the progress of the Netanyahu government during that year in issues relating to the Arab sector. A few minutes before the beginning of a press conference to release this report, a senior official ordered page 11 ripped out. The page listed the development budgets of various ministries and showed that the government had decreased the funding to the Arab sector.9 For example, there was a 51.7 percent decrease in the Ministry of Trade and Industry’s funds for Arab localities, and there was a 67 percent decrease in the

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Ministry of Agriculture’s funds. These changes were masked by the overall budget, which showed increases from 1996 to 1997 due to allocations in education and local government to the Arab municipalities.10 The Bedouins and the Druze, who were regarded by Likud as potential voters for this party, received priority in development funding. In 1998, the government approved a five-year plan to allocate 1.7 billion NIS to the Druze sector based on a survey of infrastructure and services conducted that year. This was the fi rst and only time such a survey was conducted in order to establish an equal budgeting policy. Also in 1998, the government allocated 614 million NIS over five years for development projects of Bedouin settlements in the Galilee.11 In land and settlement policy, the Netanyahu government escalated the enforcement of the housing and building laws, particularly in the unrecognized villages of the Negev and the Galilee. Here, the Netanyahu government froze the implementation of the former government’s legitimization of eight unrecognized villages.12 In 1996, 57 percent of the so-called illegal houses were owned by Arabs. However, 90 percent of those demolished were in that sector and only 10 percent of the illegal houses that were demolished were in the Jewish sector.13 Two particular events outraged the Arab population in 1998 and resulted in a dramatic escalation of the tension between the state and the Israeli Arabs. In April 1998, the Ministry of the Interior demolished three houses built without a permit on farmland by Arabs in a place called Umm al-Sahali near Shifa‘amru (in Hebrew, Shfar‘am). In May 1998, the IDF’s chief of staff, Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, expropriated 500 dunams in Wadi-‘Ara, named the al-Ruha land, to be part of an army training zone. This will be discussed below.14 An interesting and exceptional action was taken during Netanyahu’s tenure by Minister Katzav (who was appointed in 2000 as president of Israel). On his own initiative, Katzav participated in the annual ceremony conducted in Kafar Qasem to commemorate the Kafar Qasem massacre. The traumatic event occurred on 29 October 1956: Arab citizens on their way home from work had not heard about the curfew imposed due to Israel’s military operation in Sinai, and forty-seven of them were shot to death for violating the curfew. It was the fi rst time that a government official participated in this commemoration. Katzav sympathized with the families who lost their loved ones, who, he said, “deserve our forgiveness.”15

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In sum, the Netanyahu government abolished most of the budgetary improvements introduced by the former government with the exception of the budgets for municipalities and educational institutions. Moreover, Netanyahu’s land and building policy defi nitely contributed to the deterioration of relations between the Arab minority and the state. Arab Political Behavior During the Netanyahu tenure, an escalation of nationalist strategy took place among Arabs as well as in the public discourse of Arab politicians against the state authority and policy. In August 1996, the Arab leadership presented to Netanyahu “The Demands of the Arab Citizens in Israel for Equal Rights,” a document drawn up by the Supreme Follow-up Committee and the National Committee of Arab Heads of Municipal Authorities, listing both their civil and nationalist demands.16 Discussing the connection between Israeli Arabs’ internal and regional political goals, MK Muhamad Barake of Hadash explained in early 1999 the connection between the Israeli Arabs’ program for equality and the Palestinian desire for liberation and statehood: We are an inseparable part of the Arab and Palestinian people and we have to express this in actions. That is, to participate in the struggle of our people and to assist them by putting all our political weight behind the election campaign . . . we have to support our people by forming Israeli bridgeheads to recruit them for supporting liberation and the independence of our people . . . understanding our rights from a civil point of view only devastates the Palestinians. We have to take into consideration the national interests of our people . . . we distinguish between national rights and civil rights. We are not like the Russian [Jewish immigrants from the former USSR] who demand budgets only. We are a Palestinian national minority in a state that is hostile to our people [the Palestinians] and hostile to us as its citizens. Is it not absurd to shuffle the cards [to give up national interests] for the sake of sewage programs and funds for municipalities?17

A public opinion survey conducted in late 1997 by Elie Rekhes and Efraim Ya’ar from Tel Aviv University failed to address the impact of the Palestinian

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issue on the Arab minority’s political behavior, centering only on the civil status of Arabs in Israel. The survey found that 41 percent of the Arabs regarded equality as the most important issue whereas 32 percent regarded improvement of services as the most important issue; 14 percent saw the struggle to return expropriated lands as the main issue of concern, 8 percent the shaping of national identity, while 6 percent prioritized the struggle to establish a Palestinian state. The survey indicated a high level of discontent in the Arab minority regarding their status. In polling about the nature of the state and the Arab minority’s status in it, the survey found that Arabs citizens demand a radical change: changing Israel from a Jewish state to a state of its citizens was suggested by 66 percent of the interviewees, whereas only 20 percent supported “a Jewish state which is also a state of its citizens” and 10 percent suggested autonomy for the Israeli Arabs.18 Only one-fi fth supported a relatively moderate position that was identical to the left-wing Meretz party platform. A survey conducted in 1998 by Gad Barzilai from Tel Aviv University found that the Palestinian identity is a major component of the identity of Israeli Arabs, which defi nes a new type of communal identity. His survey polled the citizens’ norms and trends in abiding to the law and found that 81 percent of the Arabs expressed a sense of group discrimination and 44.8 percent thought that safeguarding political interests to prevent land expropriation was more important than abiding by state law, including the rulings of the Supreme Court. They justified violating the law and organizing illegal demonstrations against the state. Only 52.2 percent of the Arabs polled maintained that state laws should be respected. In cases where religious law contradicted state law, 40.8 percent of interviewees declared they would opt for the religious law, 8.8 percent refused to respond, and 50.4 percent responded that they would obey the state law. Barzilai concluded in 1998 that there was a real probability of a mass popular resistance in the Arab minority if the state did not put an end to the discriminatory policies.19 In retrospect, one could conclude that Barzilai predicted the outbreak of the October 2000 riots (which will be discussed in the next chapter). The growing competition between Arab political parties radicalized the expressions of the leaders of these parties against the government’s policies and against the state. A series of statements by Arab leaders and members

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of Knesset indicated that a leader, in order to gain popularity, had to raise the nationalistic banner to the top of his agenda.20 Nawaf Masalha, a Labor MK, suggested a different model of leadership: a struggle for equality and for a solution to the Palestinian problem without opposing what the Jewish majority viewed as its vital national needs. He strongly criticized his Arab MK colleagues’ expressions against the state and added, “I cannot identify with an element that is a state’s enemy, even if he is not my enemy.”21 However, Masalha was on the margin and represented a minority viewpoint in his community. Protest Activity Events in the broader Palestinian arena resulted in an intensification of Arab political protest. Following the Israeli operation in the Western Wall tunnel in September 1996 discussed above, the Supreme Follow-up Committee convened and announced a general strike in the Arab sector to express their solidarity with the Palestinian rioters, and it called for protest rallies and mass demonstrations. Following this call, violent disturbances erupted in Nazareth, Jaffa, Lod, and Ramla, resulting in many casualties. The government’s unilateral opening of the tunnel was the trigger for the northern Islamic movement to organize its fi rst festive convention (mahrajan) under the slogan “al-Aqsa is in danger.”22 Two other major protests occurred during the Netanyahu regime. In April 1998, Israeli authorities demolished three houses that had been erected on agricultural land on the hill of Umm al-Sahali near Shifa‘amru. The owners of the houses, who until then had lived in tents, rebuilt the demolished houses with the assistance of Arab organizations. Rallies displaying PLO flags and led by Arab politicians marched to Umm al-Sahali in support of the residents. Two days following the demolition, police forces arrived to stop the rebuilding and were confronted by Arabs who arrived from Shifa‘amru to assist the residents of Umm al-Sahali. They attacked the policemen with stones and sticks. The confrontation soon spread to road junctions between Nazareth and Shifa‘amru, and the Supreme Follow-up Committee proclaimed a one-day general strike and organized a demonstration. Due to popular pressure and eventually the intervention of President

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Ezer Weitzman, the police refrained from executing the orders to demolish the rebuilt houses.23 The al-Ruha Affair The al-Ruha affair was an extraordinary case in land expropriation battles. It began with administrative action by the army and the state to add a plot of 500 dunam (zone 107, which included Arab-owned lands) to two existing army training zones (105 and 109) west of Umm al-Fahm. The desire for additional zones for live ammunition training had existed in the upper echelons of the IDF since 1985, when they had to give up training zone 9. In order not to lose zones 105 and 109—both also located on Arab-owned land—the IDF decided to intensify live ammunition training in these two zones. However, to do such training required more space for maneuvers. Lipkin-Shahak, the IDF’s chief of staff, decided to connect the two separate zones by expropriating the plot of land that separates them. The decision was greeted with outrage by the Arab population, resulting in violent clashes between the inhabitants and security forces. The affair was fi nally resolved with an unprecedented agreement between a local Arab committee and the state. The authorities not only renounced their claim to the land for the training zone but they gave up additional lands by adding large blocks to the Arab municipalities’ jurisdictions. The agreement was reached even though one of the prominent figures of the Arab committee was the head of the radical northern Islamic movement, Sheikh Ra’id Salah. Following Lipkin-Shahak’s public decree regarding the al-Ruha lands, Wadi ‘Ara residents campaigned for four months. In the entire Arab sector, solidarity demonstrations were organized. The hub of the protest activity was a special protest tent erected in the center of the disputed lands in which a sit-down strike was held as well as prayers and political discussions. On 27 September 1998, 8,000 policemen were dispatched to al-Ruha by the order of Minister of Internal Security Avigdor Kahalani to dismantle the tents and remove the protesters from the area. A large number of residents and hundreds of high school students crowded the police checkpoints on the route to al-Ruha and threw stones at the policemen. The clashes soon spread to the Wadi ‘Ara highway, blocking traffic. The police reported thirty-nine

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3. Training Zone 107 (al-Ruha). Data provided by Dr. Amiram Oren; map designed by Ohad Reiter.

casualties among its forces, and Arabs reported hundreds of casualties (police figures claimed only eighty). The rioters used stones as well as Molotov cocktails and the policemen sprayed crowds with rubber-coated bullets. Shaykh Ra’id Salah was among the injured and his deputy, Sulayman Aghbariya, was among the detainees. Following the dismantling of the tents, a three-day riot erupted in which hundreds of high school students stoned vehicles and blocked the nearby highway and stoned policemen. MK Azmi Bishara named these events “the al-Ruha intifada.” Bishara testified before the Or Commission that inquired into the October 2000 riots, which was reported in his party’s newspaper Fasl al-Maqal: He evaluated and related positively to a new phenomenon of assertiveness in the resistance of the Arab inhabitants, a phenomenon of self-confidence in defending their lands. This was something new, according to which

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there is no compromise, and that there is a will that what Arabs accepted in the 1950s—that the training zones will infringe on their homes— would not happen again. They achieved results. I wish, and this is my message now, that they could accomplish these results without it [rioting]. This would have been possible had there been the same openness which was created only later.

In Bishara’s words, “None of the protests were organized; everything was spontaneous. . . . This is the reaction to fi fty years of [state] terror, when the bulldozer is the only solution to the problems of illegal building in the Arab sector, instead of proposing a constructive solution.”24 At the end of 1998, the parties to the land-use dispute reached a temporary agreement according to which land owners would be entitled to access their lands during the period of negotiation.25 A fi nal agreement was not reached until December 2000.26 Instead of expanding the training zones, the government conceded, withdrew from the original zone, and committed itself to expanding the jurisdiction of nearby Arab villages.27 The al-Ruha and al-Sahali affairs were perceived by the Arab population as effective (although violent) tactics to achieve political goals, and they were added to the symbols of struggle relating to issues of land and housing. Establishing Claims as an Indigenous National Minority The government’s policy from the inception of Israel was to treat its Arab citizens as a religious, ethnic, or cultural minority entitled to individual rights but not collective rights. During the Netanyahu years, Israeli Arabs challenged this policy more effectively than ever before. They demanded to be recognized as a national minority entitled to collective political rights and as an indigenous minority, with the right to run autonomous institutions, and to be compensated for the injustices of the past. Already in the 1996 election campaign, the strategy of changing Israel’s regime from a Jewish and democratic state into “a state of all its citizens” was in the platforms of all three Arab parties, and it was injected into Knesset discourse by Arab MKs, including those of the Labor and Meretz parties.28 The idea of transferring power to establish so-called cultural autonomy for

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Israeli Arabs was also raised during these years as a means to achieve collective equality for the Arabs. These demands accelerated during the Netanyahu government. The political activities together reflected a comprehensive strategy or at least a series of targeted strategies resulting from study on behalf of the Arab political leadership, and its academic elite and civil society association. During the Netanyahu government’s tenure, advocacy organizations such as Adalah, Mossawa, Ittijah, and the Balad party, which led this ideology, were established, and the subsequent sections of this chapter describe the development of the ideology and the resulting political activity. The new political demands challenged Israeli Jews who sought to safeguard Israel as a Jewish hegemonic state in its public culture and demography. The new Arab concept, therefore, contributed significantly to confl ict and confrontation between the two groups. Attempts to Form an Arab Executive Body In 1999, the Mossawa Center prepared for the National Committee of Arab Heads of Local Authorities a strategic plan to develop its capacity. The program suggested the establishment of eight professional committees, the development of professional and strategic programs, the construction of a special building to coordinate and administer activities, and the formation of an administrative apparatus and a center for strategic planning and information. The methods to be used included mass recruitment, strengthening of the national struggle, developing an educational and cultural program, alternative planning, legal advocacy to safeguard the interests of the Arab population, professional preparation for meetings of the National Committee and the cabinet, surveys of needs of the Arab sector, and analyzing the state’s budgets. Although the program was approved by the National Committee,29 it has not been implemented yet, perhaps because of the lack of resources. However, many of the proposed measures have been implemented by other Arab civil society organizations.30 Rejecting the Jewish and Zionist Nature of the State Arab academics hoped to influence public discourse by rejecting the Jewish and Zionist nature of the state. For example, the head of the Balad party,

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MK Azmi Bishara, stated in a Knesset debate, “Judaism is a religion and not a nation, and the Jewish public in the world has no national status whatsoever and it doesn’t have a right to self-determination. Historically the idea of the state of the Jews is illegitimate. And if you ask me, I am not ready to give the state of Israel historical legitimization. There is no link between the rights over the land [of Palestine] of Palestinians who were deported from their land 50 years ago and the rights of an imaginary group that was exiled from the land 2,000 years ago.”31 Similar statements were made in discussions between 1999 and 2001 at the Israel Democracy Institute. The institute organized meetings between Jewish and Arab academics and public figures with the aim of publishing a joint document (a kind of public charter) that included principles for the relations between the state and the Arab minority. The group failed to agree on the fi nal text, largely because most of the Arab participants refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, whereas most of the Jewish participants insisted that the Arabs grant this recognition.32 In one discussion, ‘Adel Manna‘ (one of the project’s co-organizers) said, “What does it mean to identify with something that is your opposite, something that seeks to eliminate you, a Jewish Zionist state that doesn’t give you security, equality, or identity . . . as long as the state is like this and these are its ends, how can you ask me to identify with it?”33 I said that I am ready to accept the most limited defi nition of the meaning of a Jewish state. Give me equality . . . and if you will prove to me, not in words, but in action that you can preserve a very limited Jewish nature of the state, and still grant me civil equality and complete participation, I am ready to live in a state that calls itself a Jewish state, providing this defi nition of the Jewish state does not contradict with equality and democracy . . . I’m ready to go with you and even to live with a Jewish flag, with a menorah symbol and many other symbols. I am even ready to come to an agreement over the issue of the right of return and the solution to the refugee problem, etc., as long as these are more or less the only areas of discrimination against Arab citizens. If this is not enough for you, then we have a problem here, we have war.34

Another interesting articulation of the state’s defi nition was made by Khaled Abu ‘Asaba: “You ask me to justify your right to national sovereignty

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by justifying the denial of my sovereignty. My right to sovereignty is being rejected. . . . That is . . . from a normative point of view, you ask me here to recognize your right to national sovereignty and in so doing to prevent me from justifying my national sovereignty . . . you cannot come and ask me to justify Zionism.”35 There were some prominent Arab intellectuals who disagreed with the opposition to the Jewish nature of the state of Israel. For example, the editor of al-Ahali newspaper, Salem Jubran, said at a symposium that “raising the banner of changing the character of the state is a fatal error. It revives the Jews and isolates the Arabs.”36 Jubran voices a moderate minority opinion among Arab intellectuals who think that the Arab leadership should struggle for civil equality and that it would achieve much more if it would refrain from offending the Jewish community by raising extreme national demands. Commemorating the Nakba The Netanyahu government decision to celebrate the fi ftieth anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel resulted in Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat’s decision to commemorate fi fty years since the Nakba. Arafat formed a supreme committee for the commemoration of the Nakba that had 400 members, including Israeli Arab representation.37 The Supreme Follow-up Committee also formed a committee called “the Supreme Committee for the Nakba and the Sumud [steadfastness].”38 Since then, Arab commemoration ceremonies of the Nakba take place on 5 Iyar, according to the Hebrew calendar, the date that Israel celebrates its independence. The PLO commemorates it on 15 May, the day according to the Gregorian calendar when Israel was established in 1948 and when the 1948 war officially began.39 On Nakba Day, Arab political bodies organized mass visits to abandoned and demolished villages. In one mass rally in May 2001, 3,000 people carried banners enumerating the 416 villages that were abandoned in 1948 and subsequently disappeared. This is another example how the two confl icts—the Israeli-Palestinian and the internal Jewish-Arab—interlock and influence each other. In a comparative analysis of Nakba activities between the Palestinians in the territories

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and the Israeli Arabs, Hillel Frisch found that compared to the Palestinians in the territories, for whom the Nakba symbolizes the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Arabs in Israel add an additional significance: the return of Palestinian refugees to Israel and a change in the nature of Israel.40 The meaning of the Nakba was explained by MK Azmi Bishara in a letter that he sent to all Knesset Members in June 2001: “I am not an Israeli patriot. I am a Palestinian, part of a people whose tragedy has not ended since 1948. Do not ask me, for example, to celebrate Israel’s victory in wars or to celebrate the day of independence. This Israeli victory is my catastrophe.”41 Another explanation of the meaning of the Nakba was via a comparison between it and the Jewish Holocaust. Advocate Muhammad Dahla from the Adalah organization explained attitudes to Ari Shavit of Haaretz, who reported, “Although the Nakba was not exactly like the Holocaust, he is not ready to accept the Jewish monopoly on the term Holocaust.” Dahla said, “It is true that here there were no concentration camps. However, on the other hand, the Nakba as opposed to the Holocaust is still ongoing. Whereas the Holocaust was one of people, the Nakba is a Holocaust of people and land. It is our destruction and the ruin of our homeland.”42 Needless to say, many Israeli Jews take such statements as evidence that Israeli Arabs are an existential threat to the state. Restoration of the Pre-1948 Landscape Beginning in the 1980s, Arab politicians complained that cultural rights— landscape and names of places, of villages of streets, and of Islamic holy sites—were being ignored.43 They began arguing that the Arab character of urban neighborhoods in Haifa and Jaffa should not be changed and demanded the reinstitution of the original Arab street names as well as the restoration of abandoned and Islamic cemeteries and mosques. The redevelopment of two disadvantaged Arab neighborhoods, Wadi Nisnas in Haifa and ‘Ajami in Jaffa, was perceived as sacrificing the pre-1948 symbolic landscape of the Arabs for the maximization of real estate profits. The Arab population of these neighborhoods had to move away because of the increase in property prices following the development. This was also what happened

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in the older section of Acre, where the government encouraged its Arab residents to move to a neighboring village named Maker. More complicated was the situation regarding mosques and Muslim cemeteries. The Ministry of Religious Affairs did try to preserve abandoned and old Muslim monuments, but its actions were sporadic and inconsistent.44 The Islamic movement actively campaigned to fi ll this vacuum. The desecration of the tomb of Izz al-Din al-Qassam (a figure from British Mandate times considered a hero by Palestinians and a terrorist in Jewish and British eyes) near Haifa by some Jewish provocateurs catalyzed efforts to restore Islamic cemeteries, mosques, and saint tombs. The Islamic movement took the initiative, appealing to Arab nationalism in its religious activity. Groups began systematically to map and document the remains of mosques and cemeteries, and then campaigned to restore and preserve every Muslim place holy that had existed prior to 1948, leading to tensions with Jewish residents and state authorities. Legal Advocacy The Supreme Court generally serves to enhance the democratic character of Israel and to prevent the erosion of Israel’s democracy. From the second half of the 1990s, it became an important theater for Arab advocacy groups. Legal advocacy became one of the important strategies of civil society groups, with the Adalah Association—the Legal Center for the Rights of the Arab Minority in Israel—the main organization. Prior to Adalah’s formation, the Israeli Association for Civil Rights used to challenge the establishment and tested the government’s policy in the courts. Equal funding and proper representation in public agencies were two of Adalah’s issues of advocacy. In December 1996, Adalah applied to Eliyahu Swisa, the minister of religious affairs, and MK Avraham Ravitz, chairman of the fi nance committee of the Knesset, claiming that the ministry’s budget draft for 1997 discriminated against the non-Jewish sectors. Only 1.43 percent of the total budget was allocated for religious services of the Muslim, Christian, and Druze communities. Adalah advocated that this tiny allocation of resources was illegal because it contradicted the principle of equality and violated the freedom of religion and worshippers.45 After being ignored

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for some time, they fi led a complaint to the Supreme Court.46 At the fi rst hearing, the Court ruled that the Arab population in Israel is discriminated against in terms of religious resources. However, it did not commit the ministry to changing its policy.47 Another complaint was submitted the following year when it was clear that the ministry had not complied with the Court’s ruling on the principle of equality. This time, the justices’ ruling forced the Ministry of Religious Affairs to allocate equal resources to non-Jewish cemeteries, setting a precedent for other issues.48 Following this case and a number of other cases of budgetary discrimination, the Supreme Court established a legal principle that where a plaintiff can prove that the Arabs are discriminated against in a specific budget item, the state should allocate a share proportional to the number of Arabs in the country. If the discriminative process is an ongoing one, the state should repair it by an affi rmative action. It should be noted that the state budget does not generally indicate how much is allocated to particular subgroups, and therefore in many cases it is impossible to prove discrimination.49 The Israeli Association for Civil Rights also took part in legal advocacy to improve Arab citizens’ rights. Following a case fi led by the association to the Supreme Court, the Court ruled that the government should nominate Arabs as members of the Israel Land Authority. The Court’s ruling set a precedent that the government has a duty to represent all groups in public agencies.50 Regarding the status of the Arabic language, Adalah was mainly motivated by symbolic rights of the minority than by practical ends. One of the greatest achievements, fi led jointly by Adalah and the Arab Association for Human Rights (AHR), was a ruling by the Supreme Court that forced the Department of Public Works and the Ministry of Transportation to add Arabic texts to all road signs in Israel according to a mandatory timetable.51 A fundamental Supreme Court ruling, known as the Katzir case or the Qa‘adan affair, responded to a case fi led by the Association of Human Rights concerning the right of an Arab to purchase land and build his property in a Jewish settlement funded by the Jewish Agency. Adel Qa‘adan applied for land in the village of Katzir in Wadi ‘Ara, a town that was founded by the Jewish Agency to change the Arab demographic and territorial presence in the Triangle. Aharon Barak, the president of the Supreme Court, ruled that the government cannot allocate state lands to the Jewish Agency, knowing that the

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Jewish Agency’s charter only authorizes Jews to settle on its lands and that in such cases a non-Jew is also entitled to purchase land.52 This ruling sent a clear message to the government and the Jewish public regarding discriminatory policies, even in such sensitive issues such as land and settlement.53 On the issue of unrecognized villages, Adalah promoted government recognition of these villages by forcing the state to provide basic services to their populations. For example, in June 1997, Adalah fi led a case with the Supreme Court against the Ministry of the Interior for hundreds of residents of Husayniyya who demanded that the ministry use Husayniyya, the name of the unrecognized village, as their official address and not a nearby recognized village. Following this litigation, Husayniyya was recognized by the government.54 Adalah also worked to protect the political rights of the Arab minority and to provide legal advocacy to Arab citizens who were offended by Jewish incitement and racial attacks aimed against them. The organization represented MK Azmi Bishara before the Knesset’s Central Election Committee and the Supreme Court to prevent Bishara’s disqualification from the 1999 and 2003 elections. Assertive Lobbying for Equal Funding and Media Coverage Arab Israeli leadership has also lobbied successfully. This involved negotiation with the state’s agencies while simultaneously applying pressure through the media and legal procedures. The primary Arab association that uses this strategy is Mossawa, the Arab Center for Equal Rights. Since 1999, this center has provided a detailed analysis of the state’s budget in which they reveal the funds dedicated to the Arab sector and highlight the items in which Arabs are discriminated against in government budgeting processes. This analytical work is effective leverage for widespread public demands by the Arab population, and it serves the legal advocates who exert pressure on the government to reform its policies and practices.55 In 2002 Mossawa, exposed the government’s fraudulent announcement that it had implemented a four-year plan named the Four Billion Program. This caused diplomatic embarrassment for Israel, particularly in the EU and the United States. Following Mossawa’s exposé, the U.S. administration’s

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report on human rights included a chapter on Israeli budget discrimination and the government’s misleading the public, both local and international.56 Appealing to the International Community Another method used as a tool of empowerment by a national minority in its struggle for collective rights is to appeal to external actors. During the 1980s, the fi rst foundations were laid by Arab organizations to seek assistance from the international community in the interests of the Israeli Arab minority. As a result, the EU and other western countries began funding Arab advocacy groups and Jewish-Arab groups that work for coexistence or intervention programs. The strategy of appealing to the international community was explained in an interview given by MK Jamal Zahalqa of the Balad party to Haaretz newspaper: “Today, even politics are globalized; Israel takes into account what is written in the Economist.”57 By the end of the 1990s, Arab advocacy organizations were encouraged by the growing interference of the international community in ethnic confl icts in the world in the post–Cold War era. The new situation encouraged Israeli Arab advocacy organizations to present the Arab population’s plight to international organizations and the general community. In 1991, the Galilee Association for Research and Health Studies and the Follow-up Committee for Health Issues applied to the International Environment and Water Tribunal in Amsterdam, demanding that it force the Israeli government to supply water to the two unrecognized Bedouin villages of Kamane and Husayniyya, near Karmiel. They attached a legal opinion from an expert from the Israeli Technion (university) who stated that the drinking water that the residents transported in certain tanks caused liver disease in the children of these villages. Israel lost its case in the Amsterdam tribunal, which ruled that the government must provide the unrecognized villages with drinking water.58 Several years later, these villages also received governmental recognition. During this same period, the Arab Association for Human Rights in Nazareth appealed to the U.S. Congress demanding that Congress reject fi nancial assistance (totaling $10 billion) dedicated to the absorption of Jewish immigrants in Israel or, alternatively, to make its approval conditional on the allocation of 18 percent of

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the funds to the Arab sector, relative to its proportion of the population.59 With this action, the association challenged the state’s goal of assisting Jewish immigration and absorption in Israel, which provides benefits to one ethnonational group while withholding them from another. The most salient expression of recruiting the international community against the Jewish establishment’s policy—Israel’s policy—took place at the UN conference against racism, racial discrimination, and hatred that took place in Durban, South Africa, in August and September of 2001. Israeli Arab organizations stated that “Israel is a racist state with racist laws compared to unofficial racism (in practice only) of other states.” They rejected the assertions of Jewish-Arab associations, who argued that, although there is discriminatory practice in Israel, there is no institutionalized racism.60 The Arab groups claimed that Israel was a racist apartheid state that commits genocide. As such, they rejected Israel’s legitimacy and sought to cultivate international recognition of a different political structure for Israel. Shuli Dichter, codirector of Sikkuy—a Jewish-Arab NGO—and a veteran advocate for equal rights for Arabs, claimed that internationalizing the struggle by Arab organizations in Israel goes hand in hand with delegitimizing the Jewish state.61 There are further examples of their activities. Human Rights Watch, the largest American human rights organization, published a 187-page report on the discriminatory policies against the Arab educational system in Israel.62 Arab organizations provided information that challenges the official Israeli data submitted to the UN committees that supervise international covenants.63 Jewish Political Behavior Since the 1980s, the Jewish leadership has been concerned with Arab efforts to challenge the Jewish nature of the state. In 1984, the Knesset passed legislation disqualifying political parties if they do not recognize Israel as a Jewish state. This new law shook the political realm and antagonized the Arab public.64 The Arab leaders’ demand to change the nature of the state has also engendered suspicion and resentment among the Jewish public, apparently more than any other demand. The demands to open the 1948 fi les and

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ideas of alienation are interpreted by large segments of the Jewish public as a threat to force minority aspirations on the majority and as an attempt to reject the right (of Jews) to self-determination.65 One outcome of this has been an increasing number of Jews who support the idea of transferring Arabs out of the state.66 During this period, the Supreme Court continued to play an important role of preventing the expansion of discrimination against Arab citizens. In 1998, the higher court disqualified a Jewish right-wing political block of three municipal parties in Upper Nazareth from running in the elections based on statements by its leaders against Arabs that the court found to be “racist expressions that one cannot even imagine being worse.”67 Conclusion During the Netanyahu period, there was significant erosion for Arab citizens in two vital areas: retreat from the peace process and the Oslo agreement, and a reversal in the policy of affi rmative action in the allocation of funds to Arab localities. Although during Netanyahu’s tenure Palestinian terror actions were of a lower scale than in the previous one from the Israeli Arabs’ point of view, it was clear that Netanyahu undermined the Oslo process and that he signed the Why River accord on Hebron only under strong U.S. pressure. Thus, the Palestinian issue was a medium-level influence on the confl ict. Netanyahu’s election campaign marketed him as “good for Jews,” which apparently meant to the detriment of Arabs. The government policies during the years under review retreated from Rabin’s affi rmative action. There was also more enforcement of the laws on illegal building. A few land and building cases even developed into violent clashes between Arabs and the police. The policies and actions of the government also influenced the confl ict at a medium level. During this period, the Arab minority mobilized on two levels. On the political level, the Arab population responded to the call of its leadership to escalate protest measures and respond with violence to actions of the police and security forces. Such was the case following the opening of the northern exit to the Western Wall tunnel in Jerusalem, to the demolition of houses

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in Umm al-Sahali and to the annexation of land for new training zone in al-Ruha. Overall, the Arab public came to view violent protest as legitimate. At the same time, Arab political and academic elites in civil society organizations developed a strategy centered on an ideology that views the Arabs as entitled to special rights as an indigenous and homeland minority, which resists the Jewish nature of the state and aspires to replace it with a binational state. The new strategies of identity as a national and indigenous minority, violent protests, and challenging the Jewish nature of the state during Netanyahu’s tenure reflects escalation of the confl ict. Jewish politicians also radicalized their measures and positions versus Arabs as expressed by the initiative to disqualify Arab parties. Rebecca Kook believes that the ideological changes stemmed from the Arabs’ desperation after the failure to achieve equality by government action. In her article on the 1996 elections, Kook wrote that Arabs believed that equality could be implemented only through a redefi nition of citizenship that recognized them as a national minority.68 Why is it, then, that although during Rabin’s government the Arabs’ situation significantly improved, they were already beginning to construct this new strategy? My contention is that this hopelessness is a combination of resentment toward foreign and domestic policy in Israel. In other words, there is a correlation between the government’s policy vis-à-vis the Palestinian issue and the civil status of Arab citizens. The deterioration of the peace process, which did not occur until the Netanyahu period, only exacerbated the need among Israeli Arabs to strengthen the construction of their status as an indigenous, national minority group. Since Israel and the PLO signed the Oslo accords, it had become clear that the Israeli Arabs had to fight for their own status before a fi nal agreement between Israel and the PA would end the confl ict and the opportunity to raise claims for improving Arab status. Although significant progress had been made during the Rabin government regarding the two major issues for Arabs in Israel—peace and equality—they positioned themselves to make demands for the future. As discussed above, violent clashes between the police and Arab protesters erupted during Netanyahu’s tenure. These incidents increased both in

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number and intensity during the subsequent Ehud Barak government, and they were the precursor for the October 2000 riots. The following chapter deals in detail with the riots and with other issues related to Barak’s tenure as prime minister between 1999 and 2001.

9

Black October

a t m i dda y on 1 October 2000, a protest rally, led by Sheikh ‘Abd alRahman Abu al-Hija from the Islamic movement, took place in the village of Furaydis. The rally participants marched toward the northern entrance of the village situated on the old Haifa/Tel Aviv Road. Some 150 to 200 protestors went down to the main road, marching toward the southern entrance of Furaydis shouting, “Death to the Jews.” They struck the roofs of passing cars, which were forced to slow down. At one point, they completely blocked traffic. They arrived at a restaurant named Miro, owned by an inhabitant of Furaydis. The restaurant owner—an Arab—used to raise an Israeli flag in front of the restaurant to attract customers. When the protesters arrived, some Jewish customers were dining inside. A group of protesters burst into the restaurant and tore down the flag, destroying everything in their path while shouting “Death to the Jews” and attempting to attack the Jewish diners. The owner and his family formed a barrier between the customers and the rioters, holding knifes and wooden sticks to prevent the rioters from reaching the customers, and eventually assisted them to leave the restaurant. Fighting then erupted between the protesters and the police who were summoned to deal with the riot. The protesters wounded a number of policemen and threw stones at the police cars. Police forces in turn opened fi re on the rioters, injuring six of them.1 This was only one of many clashes that erupted during the fi rst ten days of what was later called Black October by the editor of the Arabic Kul al-‘Arab newspaper, Zuhayr Endreus.2 The provocative visit of Likud party leader Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (al-Aqsa according to Muslim terminology) on 28 September 2000 led to a violent demonstration by Muslims and clashes between security forces and the protestors, resulting in the deaths of seven 199

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Palestinians. The event incited the second popular uprising of the Palestinians in the territories, the al-Aqsa intifada. Israeli Arab groups became involved with violent protests, and it seems that they encouraged the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians in their violent opposition to the Israeli occupation. Consequently, on 1 October 2000, severe riots erupted in the Arab sector that lasted for ten days, the fi rst three days being the most violent. In dispersing the riots, the police shot to death thirteen Arabs, which had serious repercussions on the Jewish-Arab confl ict and led to the formation of a state commission of inquiry. The Or Commission of Inquiry’s report, which was submitted three years later, revealed a parallel event in which Jews attacked Arabs eight days after the march past the Miro restaurant. At the close of Yom Kippur, a large group of Jewish residents of the Hatikva neighborhood in Tel Aviv crowded Etzel Street, calling out, “Death to the Arabs.” The rioters attacked the Avazi restaurant, smashed windows, overturned tables, and uprooted plants. The restaurant and its surroundings were covered in glass shards. Arab workers who were in the restaurant at the time were rescued unharmed by the police. Outside the mob burned tires, overturned cars, and burned three apartments in which Arabs resided. In spite of the violence, the police treated the Jewish protesters differently than the Arab protestors. In a video clip documenting the event, the policemen were seen standing in the midst of the crowd in a relaxed manner. The fi re brigade flooded the street with water and the crowd looked as if they were having fun. They sang songs in front of the TV cameras, songs in which the repeated motif was “death to the Arabs.” Later, the commander of the Iftach police station, Menashe Arbiv, explained to the Or commission the reason for the different behavior of the police in protests of Jews and Arabs: “The policemen are not afraid to approach the Jewish population because they feel safe. They do not feel the same danger as in Jaffa [mostly populated by Arabs]. In the Hatikva neighborhood, stones and Molotov cocktails were not thrown at the policemen and they were not the protesters’ targets. In Jaffa, however, the police force, as well as Jewish property, is the target.”3 The police also arrested and detained protesters in Tel Aviv when the atmosphere became charged and the crowds started to riot. At one point, stones were hurled at the police; one brick hit the roof of a police car and

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another one hit a police officer. In order to clear the road for the police cars transporting the detained protesters, a police officer used a fi re extinguisher to spray the crowds. Once the cars had passed, the mob broke up. The above-mentioned cases were two of dozens of events documented by the Or commission. Swarming a restaurant in order to hunt Jews or Arabs while shouting “death to the Jews” or “death to the Arabs” was only one illustration of the volatile relationship between Jews and Arabs in Israel at that time. Hatred and rage results in these rampages against the opposing group and in the double standards seen in police treatment of the two sets of protesters. Since the October 2000 riots, an even larger rift has developed between the two communities, while social interactions between the two groups have been reduced to almost zero. In February 2001, Arab workers at the Avazi restaurant chain complained that they were prohibited from speaking Arabic at work. The restaurant owners were afraid that it might alienate customers.4 This chapter analyzes the events of Black October and the ramifications of the al-Aqsa intifada on the Jewish-Arab confl ict in Israel. It considers the political background to the events, starting with the 1999 elections that brought Ehud Barak to power, with Barak’s treatment of Arab citizens and his cabinet’s policy toward them, the process of Islamization that proceeded October 2000, and the conclusions of the Or Commission of Inquiry’s report. The Political Setting: The 1999 Elections and Coalition Formation The Palestinian issue and the Israeli presence in south Lebanon were the two focal points in the 1999 election campaign, as they had been in the 1996 elections. The Israeli voters again had the choice of two different approaches. Netanyahu and the Likud party suggested a hard-line policy in security and foreign affairs (the continuation of settlement in the Palestinian-populated territories and continued IDF presence in south Lebanon). Ehud Barak and the Labor party (One Israel, or Israel Ahat, a combination of Labor, Gesher, and Meimad) campaigned on the platform of continuing the Oslo process and withdrawing from Lebanon. Voters again made two choices on their ballots: one for the prime minister and one for the Knesset.

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For the Arab sector, the main difference in this campaign was that an Arab—Azmi Bishara, the head of the Balad party—stood as a candidate for prime minister. His decision to run was motivated by a number of factors. First, he wished to influence the Jewish discourse and to get the Jews used to the presence of Arab citizens in the sphere of political power, or as Jamal Zahalqa, the second candidate on the Balad list, put it, “Bishara signified a vision according to which one day maybe an Arab could be the prime minister of Israel.”5 The second aim was to force a runoff election if no candidate gained 40 percent in the fi rst round, which would increase the political standing of Arab voters. The third was to gain media exposure for Balad doctrines in particular and the messages of the Arab sector in general. However, Bishara withdrew his candidacy two days before the election after Chairman Arafat, head of the Palestinian Authority, approached him and expressed his concerns about the political consequences of his candidacy.6 Had Bishara stayed in the race, his appeal to Arab voters increased Binyamin Netanyahu of the Likud party’s chances of winning the elections over Ehud Barak from the Labor party. The Palestinian Authority wanted Labor to win the elections in expectation of continuing the Oslo process, which had been neglected during Netanyahu’s tenure. The Arab population shared the general Palestinian interest in returning the Labor party to power. Indeed, 97 percent of the Arab voters (95 percent without the mixed cities) voted in favor of Ehud Barak in the elections for prime minister.7 From the Jewish sector, Barak attracted 51 percent, while the Arab votes added a further 6 percent of the total Israeli electorate, significantly strengthening his electoral position. The Arab voting pattern underlines the interlocking dimension of the confl ict and the connection between the internal and external national confl icts of Israel. Arab participation in the 1999 elections was 3 percent lower than in the 1996 elections (75 percent compared to 78 percent). The Zionist parties gained 30 percent of the Arab votes compared to 33 percent in the previous poll. The decrease of participation among Arabs, together with the decline in support for the Zionist parties, signified a gradual increase in the selfisolation of the Arab sector. Two factors contributed to diminished support for Labor: fi rst, the Labor party did not appeal to Arab voters this time as it was not the party in power and therefore could not offer personal benefits

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to the Arabs, and second, the two-tiered voting system enabled Arabs to support Arab parties for the Knesset while simultaneously voting for Ehud Barak for prime minister.8 Hadash decreased from 37 percent of the Arab electorate in 1996 to 22 percent (three seats) due to its competition with Balad and perhaps also due to a confl ict in Nazareth where the Hadashaffi liated mayor resisted the Islamists’ demands to build the Shihab al-Din mosque near the Church of Annunciation.9 Bishara and Tibi joined ranks in these elections in order to pass the minimum threshold for holding a seat in the Knesset. They received 17 percent of the Arab votes and both of their candidates were elected to the Knesset.10 The Ra‘am party (a joint party of ADP and the southern faction of the Islamic movement), helped by Hashem Mahamid who had abandoned Hadash and joined Ra‘am, gained 31 percent (five seats)—mainly due to its organizational capacity. The three Arab parties altogether gained ten seats in the new parliament (out of 120). Barak formed his government coalition with the new Center (Merkaz) party in addition to two Jewish religious parties (NRP and Shas) and Meretz. The major challenge for Ehud Barak and his cabinet was in foreign affairs, particularly the regional circle: achieving peace with Syria, achieving a permanent accord with the Palestinians, and withdrawing the IDF from south Lebanon. The continued presence of Israeli forces in south Lebanon resulted in daily military clashes between IDF and Hizballah forces in the second half of 1990. For most Israelis, the almost daily cost of lives of Israeli soldiers was of great concern, and in his preelections platform, Barak promised Israel’s withdrawal from south Lebanon within one year. He followed through on this promise, but in a hasty manner that was interpreted by Arabs in Israel and abroad as a sign of Israel’s weakness. MK Azmi Bishara said that the resistance strategy of a small organization such as Hizballah could defeat a strong country like Israel11 (this perception was repeated in the 2006 war in Lebanon). This explanation implied that persistent armed struggle against Israel would be a fruitful endeavor. Israeli officials viewed Bishara’s assertion as an endorsement of terror actions against Israel, and in 2001 he was charged in court for his speeches at Kardakha (in Syria) and Umm al-Fahm. However, in 2003 the Nazareth magistrate court ruled in his favor. Despite the sweeping support given to him by the Arab sector in the elections for prime minister, Barak decided not to integrate their representatives

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into his cabinet; in fact, he did not meet with representatives of the Arab population in the Knesset until after he had fi nished forming his coalition. Barak overlooked Ra‘am’s demand to join his coalition, and the meeting that fi nally took place was described as an update meeting only. Like Rabin in 1996, he knew that the Arab members of Knesset would avoid voting against his government in order to make sure the Likud party was not returned to power.12 Two of the three Arab parties, Ra‘am and Hadash, demanded from Barak policy actions such as amending the constitution to ensure equal rights for the Arab minority, recognizing them as a national minority, and defi ning Israel as a state of its citizens.13 Barak ignored these demands. The Palestinian Dimension: The Camp David II Summit Under U.S. president Bill Clinton, the United States tried to avoid involvement in foreign confl icts, and there was a resurgence of liberal movements as well as a nearly uninterrupted period of rapid economic growth following the recession of the late 1980s. When Barak succeeded Netanyahu in July 1999, Clinton, who was known for his support of Israel, attempted to assist Ehud Barak in negotiating peace both with Syria and the Palestinians. Ehud Barak disappointed Palestinians and Israeli Arabs when, at the beginning of his term, he opted to negotiate for peace with Syria and abandoned the Palestinian cause. Barak agreed to withdraw from the Golan Hights, but he rejected President Bashar Assad’s demand to delineate the border between Israel and Syria close to the Sea of Galilee—a stance that brought the talks to an end. On the Palestinian issue, Barak’s approach was to avoid implementing the provisional settlements of the Oslo accords, namely transferring additional territories to the Palestinian Authority, and move directly to discussions on the fi nal settlement. At the same time, Barak did not attempt to control the growth of Jewish settlements, which expanded more rapidly under his leadership than under Netanyahu, adding to Palestinian distrust of his intentions. When the negotiations with Syria failed, Barak returned to the Palestinian arena. He exerted pressure on Clinton and the chair of the Palestinian Authority to convene a summit meeting that would discuss all issues of

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disagreement between Israel and the PA in order to reach a permanent settlement that would resolve the Palestinian-Israeli confl ict. The parties arrived at Camp David in July 2000 insufficiently prepared, and the talks ended in failure. What infuriated the Palestinian and the Israeli Arab communities further was Barak’s success in convincing a large part of the Israeli public that he had done all he could to achieve peace and that he proposed a most generous, far-reaching compromise to the PNA’s chairman; it was Arafat who torpedoed the negotiations by rejecting Barak’s generous offer. Without dwelling on the different narratives of the second Camp David summit talks,14 of concern to us is that Barak’s political representation of the talks created a shift in the Jewish public from the left to the right of the political spectrum. A last-moment effort, with negotiations conducted at Taba prior to early elections in the Knesset, to reach an understanding between the Israeli and Palestinian negotiation teams did not bring about substantial results. The decision by the Palestinian leadership to take advantage of Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount/al-Aqsa and initiate the al-Aqsa intifada resulted in a complete loss of trust by Israeli Jews for the Palestinians and to the decline of the Israeli left-wing camp. The October 2000 riots in the Arab sector, which were interpreted by the Jews as a sign that the Israeli Arabs were joining the violent intifada completely, destroyed the little trust that remained between the Jewish and Arab communities in Israel. The collapse of the peace process was the major cause of the dramatic escalation in violence that occurred during October 2000. Government Policy After the failure of negotiations with Syria, Ehud Barak devoted most of his energy to achieving a permanent agreement with the Palestinian authority and the PLO. He completely neglected the internal issue of the Arabs in Israel and ignored their leadership. To his senior advisors in the government’s security department who constantly requested a special brainstorming meeting on the policy regarding Israeli Arabs, he said, “Wait until peace arrives.” Barak testified before the Or commission that he refused such a meeting because he believed that he already had sufficient understanding due to his previous experience in the civil service (including the army). The

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Or commission concluded that Barak’s attitude reflected an unacceptable display of superiority.15 The main change in Barak’s government policy, compared to that of Netanyahu, was the inclusion of Arab leaders in government committees that dealt with Arab affairs. Minister Matan Vilnai, who was in charge of Arab affairs, nominated Muhammad Zaydan, the head of the Follow-up Committee, to attend the meetings of the cabinet of Arab affairs, and his deputy Shawqi Khatib was included in the general directors committee for the Arab population. Minister Vilnai worked to reach a settlement between the Ministry of Defense and the popular committee of the Wadi ‘Ara inhabitants in response to the al-Ruha land debate that had led to violent protests during Netanyahu’s tenure. Perhaps the establishment’s leniency in this agreement was a response to the October 2000 violence and from the pressure on politicians as a result of the special investigation committee that examined the government’s policy. There were three other important areas of the Barak government’s activity in the Arab sector: the budget, representation in the public service, and land and housing. Budgetary Policies From the very beginning of Ehud Barak’s tenure, the heads of Arab municipalities found themselves yet again in a political struggle against a government that was not willing to fulfi ll promises made by the previous government.16 Following a strike that lasted forty-five days, organized by the heads of Arab municipalities who met in a special protest tent erected in front of the government premises in Jerusalem, they met Minister Vilnai.17 The meeting, which took place in December 1999 with the general directors of a few ministries, resulted in an agreement to implement affi rmative action in budget allocation for the Arab municipalities. This agreement is a historic document of dialogue between the government and representatives of the Arab population. It stated that within three months the government would submit a four-year plan for the development of Arab localities, and that government budgets for the Arab sector would be increased by 100 million NIS annually, beginning in the year 2000. In addition, the government promised to

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prepare a plan to rehabilitate the budget of every local Arab council whereby 70 percent of the deficit would be covered by the government, to form special joint teams from the government and local Arab councils to identify special budgetary items in the Arab sector, to ensure the full use of the funds by removing bureaucratic obstacles, to speed up the preparation of housing master plans for Arab settlements, and to expand their municipal zones. The four-year plan, termed “The Four Billion Plan” (one billion NIS annually for four years), approved in 2001, intended to double the budgets dedicated to Arab towns and villages by pooling all of state development sums, currently about half a billion NIS annually, by demanding each ministry add 25 percent to that basic budget and add a special budget of 25 percent. The plan dictated building new internal roads and public housing projects, which were lacking in the Arab sector. The Mossawa Center calculated that the new plan raised the government budget allocated to Arab localities from 4 percent of the total budget to 8 percent and thus termed it “the 8 percent plan” (as a point of comparison, Israeli Arabs make up 15 percent of the population) instead of the Four Billion Plan.18 The fi rst draft of the plan, published in June 2000, held the traditional structure of Arab society responsible for the difficult economic situation of the Arab localities, and stated, “The major goal of the plan was to change their way of life to that of a modern Western society.”19 The implication was that as well as raising their standard of living, Arabs would increase their participation in the labor force and reduce fertility rates. However, in a retrospective evaluation, the plan looks hastily constructed and based on incorrect and outdated assumptions. There was no input from the Arab public.20 A critical analysis of the plan noted that the amount of funding decided on by the government fell far below the actual amount needed to accomplish the development needs in the Arab sector.21 In addition to the defects of the Four Billion Plan, Ariel Sharon’s government delayed its implementation until 2002, and even then it was not fully funded.22 Barak’s government also did not implement the Peres government’s promise in 1996 to allocate 50 million NIS to eight newly recognized villages. A plan prepared by the Netanyahu cabinet to develop Bedouin villages, at the cost of 660 million NIS, was also not implemented.23 Instead, in the year 2000, the Ministry of Agriculture decided to pay drought subsidies

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to compensate the Bedouin farmers for the fi rst time since the establishment of the state.24 In education, Barak’s government did continue the previous government’s five-year plan.25 In February 2000, the Law of National Education was amended to include among the educational purposes the study of the language, culture, history, heritage, and traditions of the Arab population. The addition of these subjects to the curriculum, however, was a long and gradual process.26 Representation in the Civil Service During Barak’s tenure, some progress was made in legislation that promoted a proper representation of Arabs in the civil service. Arabs in Israel comprise about 15 percent of the population but are underrepresented in the civil service and government enterprises. Since the beginning of affi rmative action, which was announced by the Rabin government in October 1993, until 2000, 1,759 Arab employees joined the civil service (an increase of 6.5 percent).27 However, in January 2001 Arabs were still underrepresented, only constituting 5.5 percent of the bureaucracy.28 In 2002 the figure was 5.7 percent or 3,128 out of 54,337 employees.29 Thus there has been consistent but slow progress. Most of the Arab employees in the civil service were employed in service positions and there were no Arabs in senior executive positions. Some ministries hired many more Arabs than others: 60 percent of the Arab employees worked in the Ministry of Health, mostly in lowranking jobs, 13 percent were employed by the Ministry of Religious Affairs as mosque clerics, 8 percent in the Ministry of Finance as income tax inspectors and officers, 5 percent as social workers in the Ministry of Labor and Welfare, and 4 percent in the Ministry of Education.30 Underrepresentation of Arabs takes place also in government enterprises. Among 668 directors in these enterprises in the year 2000, there were only 22 Arab directors (3.29 percent),31 and from among 63,489 workers only 500 (less than 1 percent) were Arabs. In the electricity authority, for example, there were only 50 Druze and 5 Arab workers among 14,063 employees.32 In the year 2000, a law was passed following the election of MKs Azmi Bishara (Balad) and Salih Tarif (Labor), which stated that on

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every government enterprise board of directors, there should be proportionate representation of the Arab population, and that government ministers should, as much as possible, nominate directors from the minority groups to achieve this.33 Again, the implementation of the law was sluggish. The government initiated a training course for directors of government enterprises in which twenty Arabs participated.34 Yet, in public bodies such as the broadcasting authority, the Israel Land Authority, in local and district planning and housing committees, and in the supreme national planning council, Arabs have continued to be underrepresented.35 Other areas where Arabs are underrepresented are the judiciary,36 the written and electronic media, and public committees such as the one that decides the winners of the Israel Prize. In March 2000 a Druze, Salih Tarif from the Labor party, was appointed to the position of minister without portfolio and to head the special cabinet for Arab affairs. However, he soon resigned after being charged with bribery. The position of minister was offered to Nawaf Masalha, an Arab MK who had served as the deputy minister of foreign affairs. He rejected the nomination on the basis of his disagreement with the government’s policy regarding the Palestinian issue. Land and Housing Policy The decision to demolish a house built without a permit is arrived at by a municipal council or a planning authority. The police are expected to assign forces to secure the house in order to implement the demolition order, which is given by a court or the chair of a district planning committee. Government policies relating to land and housing were not a result of planning by the cabinet but rather a continuation of the previous governments’ policies, which the Barak administration simply followed. However, an administration that sought to improve its relations with the Arab minority could develop a monitoring and coordinating mechanism for contested demolotion orders, as was done during the Rabin government. During the Barak term, however, the government was not sensitive to this need. In June 1999, the municipality of Lod demolished a house built by Arabs in the Harakevet neighborhood. The event was followed by angry demonstrations, with the Arab protestors

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being dispersed by the police with rubber-coated bullets. MK Azmi Bishara was among the injured. In September 2000, the Ministry of the Interior demolished a house belonging to the Qubsi family in the village of Nahef. Again, the demolition resulted in violent clashes. During the Barak period, there was no significant progress in preparing housing master plans for Arab villages. According to data collected by the Sikkuy association in the year 2002, only 12 out of 82 Arab municipalities had an updated master plan. In the Jewish sector in the same year, 100 municipalities out of 148 had an approved master plan.37 A survey conducted by the Institute of Peace Studies in Givat Haviva in 2001 highlighted the contribution of Barak’s policies to the outbreak of violence. In this survey, 65 percent of the Arab citizens said that they believed Barak caused their situation to deteriorate, compared to 76 percent who expressed the same opinion of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in 1999, and 3.1 percent of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Sikkuy stressed that Barak’s government did not make any progress regarding the Arab sector.38 Hence, government policy during Barak’s term influenced negatively the confl ict and contributed to the high level of violence of the October 2000 riots. Arab Political Behavior Deterioration before October 2000 Government policies on land issues were always a source of tension between the Arab minority and the state apparatus. Demolitions of houses built without permits in Lod and Nahef and the decision to construct a military base on a former Sakhnin development zone during Barak’s term resulted in violent and outraged protests.39 The Sakhnin affair exemplifies how government action can lead to deterioration and violent clashes. The situation unfolded in a way parallel to the 1976 Land Day and the 1998 al-Ruha clashes. In all three cases, the trigger for violent protest was an arbitrary state decision that ignored the Arab land owners and the inhabitants of the relevant area. In 1999, the government decided to construct a military base (storage of armaments for emergency attacks) on land that had been Arab-owned (absentees’ property) and that

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the Arab town of Sakhnin planned to use as its development zone (based on the national master plan). Moreover, the new military facility included a training track for tanks in close proximity to an Arab school of 600 students. The Arab residents were angered not only by the possible ecological disturbance but also that the land was taken out of their municipal jurisdiction without even informing them of the new plan.40 As a result, during the annual Land Day commemoration in Sakhnin in March 2000, around a hundred Arab youths marched toward the new military base, uprooted its fences, penetrated the military facility and planted a PLO flag inside it. Violent clashes erupted between these protestors and the security forces who were called to the scene, leading to a large number of casualties, including the injury of the head of the Follow-up Committee, Muhammad Zaydan.41 The death of Shaykha Abu-Salih, a seventy-one-yearold woman, resulted in a series of demonstrations of Arab students at their universities. The protestors claimed that the police had used gas grenades to disperse the demonstration and this had caused Shaykha’s death (the police, based on a report from the Rambam hospital in Haifa, claimed that Shaykha died of a heart attack unconnected to gas inhalation). The situation was fueled further by the university’s administration. The Arab Student Council at Haifa University, chaired by Khulud Badawi (Hadash), submitted an official application to university authorities requesting permission to organize the demonstration, but the university delayed its response for seventy-two hours on the basis of a rarely used article in its constitution. The Arab Student Council decided not to wait but organize the protest immediately, risking confrontation. Right-wing Jewish student organizations responded with counterdemonstrations, and soon the Haifa University campus turned into a battlefield, both verbal and physical. During the subsequent days, additional demonstrations were organized at other universities over the issue of the right of Arab students to demonstrate. Arab members of Knesset appeared on the scene, and there was wide media coverage. The student leaders gave interviews to the press, provocatively expressing their identity as Palestinians who identified with the Palestinian struggle.42 Khulud Badawi, who also served as the head of the national Arab Students’ Association, explained in an interview, “It is everything together. . . . The Arab student experiences big disappointment from the Barak government. He

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[the Arab student] sees the peace process come to a dead end, he notices the discrimination against the Israeli Arabs, and he sees how he is discriminated against in the university in which he is enrolled.” Badawi added that there are deep psychological and political reasons for the alienation of Arab students: problems of acclimatizing to a university in which the Hebrew language dominates, being underprivileged in scholarships and dormitory accommodation, and the refusal of universities to recognize the Arab Student Councils. For example, at Haifa University (where Arabs were over 20 percent of the students) every pamphlet of the Arab Student Council had to be translated into Hebrew; the university did not allow distribution of Arabic pamphlets, arguing that this would offend the sentiments of Jewish students.43 The competition between Arab political parties prior to the elections and particularly between Hadash and Balad also contributed to the stormy atmosphere on the campuses in April 2000. Mu’ayad Mi‘ari, the chair of the Arab Students’ Council of Tel Aviv University, which was the only council chaired by a Balad member while other councils were dominated by Hadash, said in an interview that Hadash was shaking in its boots after the results of the 1999 Knesset elections. The loss of two Hadash Knesset seats was due to the loss of voters under the age of forty, since most of the younger voters supported Balad. Mi‘ari thought Hadash leaders MKs Muhammad Barake and ‘Issam Makhul attempted to follow the nationalistic approach started by MK Azmi Bishara of Balad. MK ‘Issam Makhul from Hadash participated in the student demonstrations in the universities. His colleague Muhamad Barake said about them, “‘Issam and I defi nitely represent something, we are defi nitely signaling something to our students. However, we are talking about a series of events [that led to the outraged protest]: recent events, pictures from Umm al-Fahm [police clashes with protesters], unemployment, the peace process that has come to a standstill, and the disappointment from Barak.”44 One month after the student demonstrations, the National Committee of Heads of Local Authorities, the Follow-up Committee, and some Arab parties and political organizations called on the Arab population to boycott a reception on 7 May 2000 organized by the Ministry of the Interior in Shifa‘amru to celebrate Israel’s day of independence. Prime Minister Ehud Barak as well as Arab leaders were invited. The host of this event was the

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Shifa‘amru mayor, Badi Yasin, who was perceived as being close to the government. Arab leaders explained the boycott as a response to Barak’s neglect of the Arab minority. They called for a demonstration protesting the government’s policy and police behavior. The two events, the celebration and the demonstration, soon turned into a feud between the participants, with Arab protestors raising PLO flags in front of the celebration, which was sporting numerous Israeli flags.45 The event indicated that the Arab polity is not homogeneous, and that the nationalist faction is not the only player. October 2000 The outbreak of violence in the Arab sector was the climax of a series of events with some experts predicting the possibility of such an outbreak.46 Political processes, namely the collapse of the peace process and the deterioration of the status of the Arab minority, exacerbated the accumulation of grievances and rage. In addition, the Arab sector had “rehearsed” a series of similar reactions in the two years preceding, all of which ended in large-scale violence by the Arab protestors, a police force too willing to use live bullets, and a sense of bravery among the Arab population. The provocative visit of Likud party leader Ariel Sharon to what Jews see as their Temple Mount and Muslim Arabs as their Al-Haram al-Sharif or the al-Aqsa compound on 28 September 2000 resulted in the death of seven Palestinian rioters in that compound on 30 September. This provided the trigger for the violent outbreak. On 1 October 2000, riots erupted in the Arab sector that lasted for ten days, the fi rst three days being the most violent, including the loss of life. The magnitude of these riots, which took place in Arab-populated areas, was of a complete rebellion against the state. The protestors attacked the security forces and Jewish civilians driving on the roads; they threw Molotov cocktails and stones as well as destroying every facility or symbol of authority: road signs, other signs in Hebrew, traffic lights, and businesses. In response, the police treated the protestors as though they were West Bank and Gaza Palestinians who had attacked the security forces, using rubber-coated bullets, live ammunition, and gas grenades. Thirteen Arab civilians were killed by police fi re and one Jew was killed after his car was stoned

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while he was driving on the highway. When the fi rst reports of Arab protestors’ deaths were broadcasted over the radio, more waves of Arab protestors and rioters crowded the streets and exacerbated the violence. The October riots blurred, and to some extent erased, the distinction between Arab citizens of the state and their legitimate struggle for civil rights and West Bank and Gaza Palestinians who were carrying out an armed struggle against Israel.47 Although the riots where seen as a spontaneous reaction, there were signs that the Palestinian leadership had planned to involve the Israeli Arabs in their violent uprising. On 30 September 2000 Yasser Arafat’s office disseminated among Israeli Arab leaders a written call to join the Palestinian struggle, since the “Internal 1948 Arabs” share with the Palestinians a common fate and goal: the same national dream.48 Official Israeli interpretation of the events blamed the Arab leadership for the violence. Avi Dichter, head of the General Security Agency, laid the responsibility for the outbreak of the intifada squarely at the feet of the Israeli Arabs. In a meeting of the Knesset Committee for Security and Foreign Affairs, Dichter said that Israeli Arab leaders stirred up things after the Muslims were killed on the Temple Mount and this brought about the protests. He accused the Balad movement of leading the nationalist campaign.49 Palestinians were also critical of the Arab reaction. Abu Mazen, then a Palestinian cabinet member, discussed the Israeli Arabs’ role in the intifada: With all respect for their readiness to sacrifice lives, Israeli Arabs’ participation was a great mistake. We opposed their participation, both in the fi rst intifada and the current one. We told them: you have a different mission; you have to build and defeat governments within Israel. Keep this role of yours; if you want to assist us, help us with food and participate in demonstrations with Israeli peace movements. What happened is that soon after the outbreak of the intifada, a wave of events erupted in which Israeli Arabs participated. Thirteen people were killed, eighty were injured, and the Israelis said to them: for fi fty years you live with us and this is how you behave? How could we even think to repatriate the refugees? When I spoke to them for the fi rst time, they were angry. I told them, you have made a crucial mistake, you acted out of sentiment, not reason, you could help us in alternative ways. Do not forget that you are Israeli citizens; this is beneficial both for you and for us. You must work for us by voting a

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vote of no confidence in the Israeli parliament, as was the case when they defeated Yitzhak Shamir when the Labor party recruited fi fty-six votes, among them the votes of five or six Israeli Arabs. If the Israeli Arabs would participate efficiently in the elections, as they do in the local elections, they could obtain between fi fteen to eighteen seats in the Knesset and thus gain the power to block the government. When Rabin suggested expropriating lands in Jerusalem, the Arab members of the Knesset threatened a vote of no confidence and he had to withdraw the suggestion. You, the Israeli Arab citizen, could do much for us by acting rationally, without running after illusions and dreams. I’m telling you, the behavior of Israeli Arabs severely damaged the possibilities of achieving a resolution to the refugee problem.50

The outcome of the October 2000 riots justifies the naming of that month “Black October.” From the Arab citizens’ point of view, the Jewish state considered them not citizens, who have the right to protest, but as an enemy to be shot at by snipers using live ammunition. From the Jewish citizens’ and the state security authority’s perspective, the Arab citizens revolted against the state and acted as an internal enemy. The little trust that existed between the two communities vanished, and militancy, inflamed discourse, and mutual fear emerged. Jews and Arabs frequented each other’s neighborhoods less and shopped at each other’s shops less. Israeli fi rms restricted and diminished the services that they provide to Arab localities. Part of this phenomenon is embedded in the fear held by service people that they risk their lives by entering Arab towns or villages. One of the results of the riots was a sense among at least some Israeli Arabs that their fate is connected to the Palestinian issue. A demonstration of this feeling was the memorial stone erected by the father of one of the protesters who was shot to death in October 2000. It was painted with map of Palestine and inscribed with the same slogans used by West Bank and Gaza martyrs of the al-Aqsa intifada.51 Following the October protests, the families of the thirteen slain Arabs (in their terminology, murdered) organized an action group that together with other Arab political organizations initiated a boycott of the elections for the prime minister in February 2001. Arab voter turnout dropped from 75 percent to 19 percent. At fi rst, the Israeli government nominated an

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investigation committee that held no legal authority, and only after strong political pressure exerted by the Arab population did Ehud Barak nominate a national inquiry commission headed by Supreme Court Judge Theodore Or, and district court judge Hashem Khatib (an Arab) and professor of Middle East history Shimon Shamir (formerly Israel’s ambassador to Egypt and Jordon). The commission was directed to inquire not only into the deaths of thirteen Arabs but also to study the long-term reasons behind the outbreak of the riots. The commission’s letter of appointment gave equal weight to the interests of minorities and state authorities. From the outset, the Arab population did not trust the committee. However, the Arab leadership cooperated and submitted its version of events. The Adalah association recruited some 200 Arab advocates who volunteered to collect testimonies and to build up the case of the Arab minority, as well as representing the families of the dead and the Arab leaders who received letters from the commission warning of potential allegations against them. The commission’s report was published during Ariel Sharon’s second term, three years after the riots took place. Since the report analyzes events that took place in 2000, however, this chapter is the appropriate place to evaluate the commission’s conclusions. The Or commission devoted its fi rst chapter to the question of why the riots broke out and why they were so violent. Six out of nine experts testified to the commission that the main reasons for the outbreak of violence were the Jewish character of the state and government’s policies.52 This was also the leading interpretation in most op-ed articles.53 This explanation was given even though the immediate trigger to the violent actions was of a national-religious motivation, namely, what was perceived as an offense to the Islamic sanctuary of al-Aqsa, and the solidarity of Israeli Arabs with the struggle of the Palestinians, a few of whom were killed in the al-Aqsa/Temple mount clashes on the eve of October 2000. This interpretation, focusing only on the civil dimension of the confl ict, is one-dimensional and inadequate, the Or commission concluded. I assert as well that in addition to ongoing discrimination against Arab citizens, the process of Palestinization among Israeli Arabs (particularly after the outbreak of the fi rst intifada) created an additional parameter to the ethnonational confl ict in Israel that contributed to the atmosphere necessary for violence.

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In analyzing the reasons for the outbreak, the Or commission differentiated between long-term causes, which were that the state of Israel is a Jewish Zionist state and that the Arab citizens identify with the Palestinian narrative and the Palestinian people, and more immediate causes such as government policy and incitement by Arab public personalities. The commission’s report begins with the historical background of the Arabs in Israel, who are not a normal ethnic minority but a majority population that became a minority after their decisive defeat in the 1948 war. According to the report, the preferences given by the state to Jews supplied the minorities with the sense that the Israeli democracy is not a democracy of the same level for the Arab citizens. The report describes the tensions that stem from the ongoing strife between Israel and the Palestinians and the Arab world, with the minority belonging to a people who are perceived by Jews as the enemy, which creates a sense of potential threat among the Jews. Referring to the government’s policies, the report indicates that the state recognized the separate existence of the Arab sector as a community that should not be assimilated into the majority but not one with particular legal rights. This attitude toward Arab citizens caused the Arab population to accuse the state of viewing them as a demographic group and not as a national minority. These feelings of marginalization were further reinforced by the obvious rights granted to the Jewish majority. The Arabs’ demand to be recognized as a national minority was rejected from the very beginning by the authorities, and this added to the friction between the Arab sector and the government.54 As to whether the government had any responsibility for the outbreak of the riots, the commission stated that various authorities had prior knowledge that discrimination was a significant factor in the radicalization of the Arabs.55 Public opinion surveys proved a direct link between the government’s policies and the political position of the Arab public, and they undermined the notion that radicalization was inevitable and deterministic.56 The commission members gave much weight to the government’s land policies, particularly the cases of Ikrit and Bir‘em (two 1948 depopulated villages discussed in chapters 5 and 8). The series of events in both cases began with good will on the part of the Jewish establishment but ended in the disappointment of the displaced people and caused many in the Arab sector to

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despair of Israel’s national system. The lack of success in resolving disputes contributed to the Arabs’ feeling of despair and loss of faith in institutional channels of action. The report said that if, in cases such as these, the Arabs did not achieve anything by using legitimate methods, it was understandable they should search for alternative methods.57 However, the report did not recommend that the government address the issue of internal refugees. In addition, it concluded that the government has yet to defi ne an appropriate attitude toward the minority.58 The report compilers also dealt with the political developments experienced in the Arab sector, in particular the contribution of two movements: the Balad party, which pioneered the idea that Israel should become a state of its citizens, and the Islamic movement, which incited against the state regarding Islamic holy places. The commission pointed out that the demand to change the nature of the state raised suspicion and dissatisfaction in the Jewish public more than any other demand.59 The commission saw the rhetoric and actions of Arab leaders as containing a normative responsibility in addition to the actions of the government. The commission found very little evidence of defi nite incitement to violent actions in the leaflets distributed by the Arab leadership calling on the Arab population to protest. However, the tempestuous rhetoric of the announcements and their calls for a determined struggle, while not criminal, did have a foreseeable outcome. The leaders’ rhetoric directed the patterns of hostile protests, resulting in the leaders’ eventual loss of control over these protests. The Arab leadership did not learn its lesson and did not prevent further deterioration of these actions into violence. Rather, the leaders defended throwing stones and blocking roads as natural and legitimate actions. Their statements cloaked the disturbances with an aura of bravery. The clashes thus intensified, and, as the commission put it, “the writing was on the wall” as to which direction the next protests would go.60 The commission wrote that the Arab leadership’s message inflamed the atmosphere in the Arab community, creating hostility to the state and legitimizing the use of violence in order to achieve political ends. The report also points an accusing fi nger at Jewish society in general, bringing attention to the voices among the Jewish population that called for the Judaization of Arab-populated zones and referred to the “demographic

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threat” in these zones. Such opinions created insecurity among the Arab population.61 The commission also took note of the destructive social attitude of Jews toward Arabs. Palestinization of Arabs’ identity also contributed to the radicalization of the Arab sector, and a Palestinian identity anchored in the Israeli context developed. The commission summed up the background factors that contributed to the outbreak of the riots as a combination of processes: 1. educational, economic, and demographic empowerment of the Arab sector; 2. continuing discrimination and tensions surrounding the land issue, including building on these lands; 3. the ramifications of the political process with the Palestinians, the crystallization of the Palestinian identity in the territories, the intifada and the influence of radical Islamic trends; 4. the increase of Jewish elements holding negative attitudes toward the Arab minority; 5. the increased centrality of issues of ethnic minorities within Israeli and international liberal discourse; 6. the reversal, in the second half of the 1990s, of the trend to improve conditions in the Arab sector that was implemented during Rabin’s term; 7. the crisis of trust of Prime Minister Barak that emerged in the Arab sector.62 The report maintained that the plurality of Arab parties and the process of political splitting increased competition between Arab members of Knesset, and thus contributed to the radicalization of their statements and actions.63 The Or Commission recommended assigning policy regarding the Arab minority directly to the prime minister, implementing equal allocation of resources, giving voice to the collective identity of the Arabs in the public culture, and practicing just land allocation. The commission also recommended a reform of the police force, including taking action against a number of its officers who were found responsible for the death of Arab citizens. However, in January 2008, the state attorney Menachem Mazuz decided not to charge any of the policemen involved in dispersing the rioters by shooting at them because of “insufficient evidence.”64 Mazuz said that in addition to evidentiary problems that stem from the long period of time that has passed since the incident, “We had to take into consideration the fact that the incident involved on-the-spot judgment in an emergency situation, under circumstances that don’t justify the casting of criminal blame.” The Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority

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Rights said it would turn to the United Nations to seek justice.65 They have published their version of the events in a document titled “The Accused.”66 As for the commissions’ recommendations regarding government policy, I fi nd a gap between the analysis of the factors that led to the riots and the recommendations for an operative governmental policy in the following issues. First, the commission pointed to the lack of collective rights of the Arabs in Israel as a source of tension between the majority and the minority on one hand, but it also justified the legal basis of the denial of these rights by quoting the rulings of Supreme Court judges Yitzhak Zamir and Michael Cheshin, who ruled that equality should be applied in personal rights but not collectively.67 Second, the commission criticized harshly continuing discrimination against the Arab sector in the form of lack of funds and stated that the government ought to reallocate existing resources. The commission justifies a policy of affi rmative action for the disadvantaged minority while supplying the legal justification for inequality that stems from considerations of security and political stability.68 Third, the Or Commission emphasized in its recommendations that the ruling authority should fi nd ways of enabling the Arab citizens to express, in the public sphere, their cultural identity in a respected manner.69 However, the commission did not identify how to implement this recommendation, in spite of the fact that this subject lies at the core of the debated issues. Fourth, although the commission’s report determined land and housing issues to be the major source of tension between the Arab minority and the state, it did not explicitly recommend a change of policy regarding house demolitions. Finally, regarding the issue of recognizing political organizations that represent the Arab minority, the commission also came to no defi nite conclusion. When describing the background to the riots, the commission noted, “The state authorities who feared the opening of an additional political front, and the possible ramifications of a national separatist Arab organization, tended not to recognize the Follow-up Committee and other organizations (although for practical reasons, they cooperated with them more than once), and this policy opened an additional axis of polarization.”70 However, the

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commission did not recommend recognizing these bodies, and it also did not suggest a mechanism for incorporating the Arab leadership into discussions regarding civil rights. In sum, unlike the current Israeli discourse, which views the Or report as a repair guide for policy, the above five points reveal that the Or Commission legitimized the status quo. It did not break new ground in its recommendations, and when it did make an unconventional recommendation, such as giving expression to Arab identity in the Israeli public culture, it did not detail the practical suggestions for the implementation of this recommendation. Escalation The October 2000 riots were the second earthquake in the relationship between Arab citizens and the Jewish state after Land Day in 1976. Following these events, the mistrust between Jews and Arabs deepened; Jews and Arabs avoided shopping in each other’s neighborhoods and Jewish-Arab dialogue and joint activities almost ceased.71 The Arab public also radicalized its position, as seen in its protest actions and its opposition to the political status quo. Two political consequences demonstrated the radicalization of Arab political activity. First, the Supreme Follow-up Committee appealed to Arab citizens to boycott products manufactured in the Jewish settlements of the West Bank and Gaza. The committee publicized the names of eighty-five Israeli companies whose factories were located in the territories and stated that every cent given to the settlements was a cent invested against achieving real and just peace, and against the national interests of the Palestinian people.72 This decision had only a symbolic importance but no operative impact. Second, the director of the Ittijah association, Amir Makhul, appealed to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan that the commission of inquiry into violence in the Palestinian territories be authorized to investigate the way the Israeli police treat Arab citizens. According to him, “The Palestinians in Israel are in need of international protection from the Israeli government and public escalations.”73 Fundraising and humanitarian assistance to the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians was also used to support the al-Aqsa intifada. It has been estimated that the Arabs in Israel donated 50 million NIS annually to the Palestinians in the territories during the fi rst three years of the second intifada.74

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There was also a political rapprochement between the Arabs in Israel and the Palestinian National Authority, which was facilitated by a special office of the PNA. Fawzin Amal, an Israeli Arab and former resident of Acre who was affi liated with Fatah and was released from Israeli jail under the “Jibril deal,” was nominated by Yasser Arafat to be in charge of contact with the “1948 Arabs.” His office in Ramalla corresponded intensively with Israeli Arab local councils. In his letters, he presented Arab settlements as “strongholds of the Palestinian nationalities that support the just Palestinian national struggle.”75 Another aspect of the Arab political behavior during the Barak tenure was the submission of bills relating to Arab national issues, such as national commemoration of the 1956 Kafar Qasem massacre.76 In July 2000, MK Ahmad Tibi (Ta‘al) submitted a bill stating, “This law aims at bringing equal active civil partnership in the society in all areas of life, and to a proper representation in its institutions, on the grounds of complete and equal participation.”77 This attempt was followed by another bill titled “Basic Law: The Arab Minority as a National Minority” submitted by MK Azmi Bishara in May 2001.78 The bill stated that the Arabs, as a national minority, are entitled to collective rights and complete civil equality; to appropriate representation in all the state’s institutions; to endorse and develop its culture, heritage, and customs freely; and to establish and form representative institutions in every area that distinguishes them as a minority. The bill also stated that Arabic should be the second official language of Israel and that all governmental publications should be published in Arabic, that the state should recognize the special link of the Arab minority with the Palestinian people and the rest of the Arab world, and should take appropriate measures to enable them to express their Arab identity and develop their culture, language, heritage, and history. Also, the bill would enable Arabs to enjoy complete involvement in the economic progress and development of the state. In the bill’s explanatory note, Bishara argued that Arabs are a native and indigenous population, not a minority of immigrants who arrived in the state in order to assimilate or to create a different nation. This history necessitates recognizing them as a collective and recognizing the balance between the status of the individual entitled to equal rights

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and group affi liation to a national minority whose normative formation preceded the establishment of the state. The government’s response to the bill was not surprising. It stated that Israel is a Jewish state and would preserve the supremacy of the Jews with Jewish national institutions and preference to the Hebrew language. The Minister of Justice, Meir Shitrit, said in the Knesset that Bishara’s bill raises difficulties in many respects: “The difficulty in [legally] operating particular institutions emerging from the state as a Jewish state, such as the Academy for Hebrew Language, and continuing the special status of the Jewish Agency. In addition, the right of equality does not justify the establishing of national institutions of the Arab minority as the bill suggests.”79 Bishara submitted other bills that aimed at abolishing the consequences stemming from the defi nition of Israel as a Jewish state. In a bill to amend the Law of Citizenship, Bishara suggested eliminating the hegemony of the Hebrew language in Israel and equalizing the status of Hebrew and Arabic and, in fact, facilitating naturalization of the Palestinians.80 In addition, Bishara submitted a bill aimed at detaching the JNF, the World Zionist Organization, and the Jewish Agency from the state. In the explanatory note, he stated that these institutions are devoted to the service of the Jewish people, whereas they benefit in Israel from a seminational status in which the state uses them as its arm. By so doing it enables discrimination against non-Jewish citizens, namely the Arab minority. Not surprisingly, all such bills proposed by Arab Knesset members were defeated. Yet the Arab MKs accomplished their purpose of influencing the discourse both in the Knesset and among the Arab society. The political discourse of Arab politicians also escalated. For example, MK Muhammad Barake called at a Hamas convention on the Israeli Arabs not to be content with expressing solidarity with the Palestinians in the territories but to actively endorse their struggle against occupation.81 Referring to Palestinian armed attacks (terror attacks in Israeli eyes) against the IDF, MK Ahmad Tibi asserted, “This is a legitimate operation of resistance by the Palestinian people who are under occupation. If the Israelis reach Nablus, the Palestinians will reach Tel Aviv. We do not have to feel guilty or apologize for this action.” This statement was broadcast on the satellite TV channel of Abu

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Dhabi. Asked by Ma‘ariv to clarify, Tibi said, “We are opposed to putting bombs in train stations or the terrorist attack at the Dolphinarium [disco] that targeted women and children. However, to struggle against military targets of the occupation is legitimate.”82 Another radicalization of Arab political behavior following the October 2000 riots was a growing tendency to boycott elections. This movement was led by the families of the thirteen Arabs who were killed and a group of Arab academics. As‘ad Ghanem, a leading academic in the Arab community, proposed that Arabs refrain from voting in the elections of February 2001, which saw Ehud Barak (Labor) and Ariel Sharon (Likud) vying for the position of prime minister. In an opinion article, Ghanem wrote that the Arabs should opt for an important alternative, namely to hold their own elections for a national political body for Israeli Arabs. By doing so, Ghanem maintained, the Arabs would turn the Israeli system into a binational and democratic system instead of an ethnocratic system that prioritized Jewish interests.83 A few months later, Ghanem reiterated this idea in a lecture at Tel Aviv University, saying Arabs should boycott the elections and conduct their struggle in extra-parliamentary channels using consistent public protest, a strategy which he called “public Jihad.”84 In the 2001 elections for prime minister, the calls for a boycott were successful: Arab voter turnout was 19 percent compared to 75 percent in the general elections of 1999. During the years 2001 and 2002, the involvement of Arab citizens in terrorist actions, some of which had a severe impact, increased significantly, although there was a gradual decrease after 2003. In 1999, only two Arab citizens were involved in such actions. According to data from the Israeli GSS, in 2001, twenty-five terror groups were uncovered involving fi fty-six people (compared to nine groups in 2000), and in 2002, thirty-five terror groups were exposed involving seventy-eight people. In 2003, the number of terror groups and involved people among Israeli Arabs dropped to twentyfive and forty-three respectively.85 In the fi rst three years of the al-Aqsa intifada, 2001–2003, twenty-seven terrorist actions were conducted by Israeli Arab citizens in which 135 Israelis were killed and 786 were injured, casualties that included Arab citizens as well as Jews. In September 2001, the fi rst Israeli Arab suicide bomber, Sakhar Khubayshi, an Islamic activist from Abu Snan in the Galilee and a father of seven, was sent by Hamas to blow himself

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up at a railway station in Nahariya. Three other people were killed and fortysix were injured. In the village of Jaljulia, an explosives laboratory in which Israeli Arabs prepared bombs was uncovered. Some Israeli Arabs were also involved in directing suicide bombings and in a few cases committed such actions themselves. Although a few dozen Israeli Arabs do not represent the entire Arab community, the increase in the number of terrorists from among this population indicates the existence of a supportive environment for such actions. Israeli Arab leaders refrained from condemning the attacks of suicide bombers. As the Or Commission noted, the educational activity of the northern faction of the Islamic movement contributed to the creation of culture of violence. Their messages included deliberate incitement against Israel with provocative and unfounded claims that Israel intended to demolish the alAqsa Mosque and to build the third Temple in its place. At the beginning of 2001, two leaders of the Islamic movement were investigated by the police on suspicion of such incitement. Sheikh ‘Abd al-Rahman Abu al-Hija quoted a poem condemning the Jews for murdering the al-Aqsa worshippers and added, “The worshippers of the Golden Calf murdered them.” Another Islamist leader, Sheikh Kamal Khatib, compared Prime Minister Barak to an Ethiopian military commander from the sixth century BC who tried to take over the Ka‘ba in Mecca and was killed by Allah in response. Khatib was suspected of incitement to assassinate the prime minister.86 Jewish Political Behavior In October 2000, the Jewish public was shocked by the intensity of the violence done by Arab citizens. At the start of the riots, some Jewish groups conducted spontaneous and violent counteractions against Arab citizens for the fi rst time since 1948, which indicates that the confl ict had reached the highest intensity in the history of the state. However, the chief reaction of the Jewish public occurred in the political arena, which will be elaborated upon in the next chapter. Political personalities from the extreme right expressed radical positions against Arabs. For example, MK Avigdor Lieberman (Israel Beitenu) published a proposal to separate Arabs and Jews; MK Limor Livnat (Likud), who became the minister of education in Sharon’s government,

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endorsed allocation of budgets to Arab schools in direct proportion to their loyalty to the state. MK Ephie Eitam from NRP called Arabs a “cancer in the state’s body” and MK Ephraim Sneh (Labor), who was a minister in Barak’s government, proposed transferring the Arab triangle to the Palestinian state once it was established.87 In other words, tensions strongly escalated after the riots, with Jews demanding Arabs’ exclusion from society. The effect of the hostile Jewish political behavior after 2000 was described by MK Tawfiq al-Khatib (Ra‘am): In my fi rst tenure I felt like a member of Knesset; today [since 1999] I feel like an outsider. This Knesset has alienated Israeli Arabs more so than any other Knesset. It is not a matter of money and budgets; it is a matter of attitude. If the Arab public sensed that even if there is no equality, at least they are on the path leading to equality, the confl ict would not have emerged and the question of identity would have not been raised. I separate the whole issue of identity from what is occurring in the territories with the Palestinians. The problem is that in the last two years [2000–2002], as far as the attitude of the government is concerned, we have regressed to the 1950s. We are not citizens, but Arabs. The Labor party is not doing enough; it is not defending and supporting the Arabs but is rather a partner in trampling Israeli Arabs. For me it is a total disappointment. I want there to be a Jewish state here as long as I, as an Arab citizen, am entitled within this state to full rights and duties as well. I do not want to feel like an enemy of the state. One should understand that in the Middle East, Jews and Arabs operate according to sentiments and not according to reason. Thus, what influences people’s opinions is what happened last week, and therefore even if such opinions are expressed, I believe that if the Arab citizens felt that they were in general progressing towards equal rights and equal treatment by the state, then all the recent events would lose their destructive impact.88

Al-Khatib’s asserts that the alienation of Arab citizens that stems from their inferior citizenship also contributes to their despair and makes nationalism attractive. His moderate approach underlines the importance of government policy in counteracting the escalative effect of the national parameter—the impact of the Palestinian issue—in order to keep the confl ict in a low mode.

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Conclusion Why did the October 2000 rebellion erupt at this point, when the prime minister, a Labor party member, had withdrawn the IDF forces from Lebanon and had opted to promote the peace process with the Palestinians? The developments in the two variables analyzed in this study show that the Palestinian issue was the more influential factor in generating the riots. Yet Barak’s government’s policy and particularly Barak’s personal approach toward Arab leaders contributed much to the escalation. To this list, one should add ongoing policies started in Netanyahu’s tenure, since these also outraged the Arab population. The government’s actions clashed with Arab citizens’ vision—as well as the complicated reality—of the internal civil sphere and the regional arena (the Palestinian issue). This strengthened Arabs’ withdrawal from the state and exacerbated their growing rejection of the Jewish, Zionist nature of the state. The Barak government’s policy was not particularly hostile to Arabs with one exception: the policy of house demolition, which had operated as a routine policy since the 1970s. However, Barak failed to integrate the Arabs into the government’s coalition, and he neglected their representatives in the Knesset. Added to the political bitterness of the Arab citizens, a result of their disadvantaged civil status, was the collapse of the peace process with the Palestinians and the religious-cultural dimension of the al-Aqsa events (with the eventual security forces’ shootings of demonstrators perceived by the Muslims as draconian). These factors combined and culminated in the October riots. During this period, Arab citizens increased their solidarity with the violent Palestinian al-Aqsa intifada, and the number of those involved in violent actions also increased. In actual fact, during as well as after the October 2000 riots, both Jews and Arabs viewed the rival group as an enemy. However, Abu Mazen’s criticism of Israeli Arabs’ involvement in the intifada riots reflected the different interests of the Palestinian communities on the two sides of the Green Line: PLO leaders (mostly Fatah) viewed Israeli Arabs as a lobby inside Israel for establishing an independent Palestinian state with preJune 1967 borders, whereas Israeli Arab elites expected the PLO to demand in addition the return of expropriated land to its original Arab owners and

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the return of a significant number of refugees (particularly the internal refugees) to their now-demolished villages. During Barak’s government, the two major factors impacting on the internal confl ict equally contributed to the escalation of relations between Jews and Arabs. For the fi rst time in the history of Israel, the interlocking dimension of the two confl icts—the internal ethnonational and the external with the Palestinians—strongly affected also the Jewish public and pushed Jews to take actions against the Arab minority on both the popular and leadership levels. The Arab minority—which at this period had a strong political elite consisting of party leadership, academics, and civil society activists— changed its strategy after Black October and chose to boycott the elections for prime minister in February 2001. They opted for seclusion and withdrawal while at the same time building separate communal institutions in order to prepare themselves for future confrontations in which they would demand structural and constitutional changes to the state of Israel. The October riots by the Arab minority presented the highest escalative mode of the Jewish-Arab confl ict in Israel since 1948. This, in turn, produced a very negative reaction from the Jewish citizens of the state and politicians as discussed in the next chapter. Whereas this chapter surveyed the Arab strategies, the next chapter deals with the Jewish strategies responding to the events of October 2000. It discusses developments during the two tenures of Ariel Sharon as prime minister between 2001 and 2005.

10 The Jewish Counterattack s t r a t e g i e s de v e l op e d by parties to a confl ict generally respond to the other party’s behavior. When one party uses strategies that the other party regards as unacceptable, it often provokes severe counterreactions.1 This study posits a kind of dialectical development between two sides in Israel: the government, particularly its policies concerning domestic and foreign affairs, and the political behavior of the Arab minority. The analysis of the political behavior of Arabs and Jews in the previous chapters presented how Jewish governmental strategies that outraged the Arab minority resulted in counterstrategies to challenge the state’s system. The strategies of the Jewish majority in general (not the government) were not presented because the public was not directly involved in taking actions versus the minority group. Concerns about Arab Israelis were expressed mostly in public opinion polls rather than in specific actions. This situation changed dramatically following the October 2000 riots and the eruption of the al-Aqsa intifada. In October 2000 for the fi rst time since Israel’s inception, Jewish groups retaliated with violence against Arab citizens. In addition, the Jewish public attempted to radicalize policies toward the Arab minority and to influence the government to introduce tougher measures on issues essential to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, even if it was at the expense of the democratic fabric of the state. This chapter centers on counterresponses of the Jewish public and government to the Arab strategy of violent protest, hostile public discourse, and challenges to the Jewish nature of the state. It deals with the five years of Ariel Sharon’s tenure as prime minister (2001–2005). 229

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The Political Setting Ehud Barak’s decision to participate in the Camp David II summit of July 2000 resulted in the withdrawal of the religious and right-wing parties from his coalition. The political situation was even more destabilized following the collapse of the permanent settlement talks between Israel and the Palestinians in July 2000 and the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada. As a result, Prime Minister Barak announced his resignation but immediately announced his candidacy in the upcoming election. He ran against Ariel Sharon, the Likud leader. Barak believed, apparently, that the Israeli (Jewish) public would support his efforts for peace and particularly the fact that he, according to his (false) narrative, had succeeded in exposing Arafat as the major stumbling block to peace while he himself had made every effort to achieve it, even by breaking taboos such as redividing Jerusalem. Barak’s confidence proved mistaken, and this was not because of Arab voters (most of whom boycotted the elections). In the February 2001 elections, Barak experienced a crushing defeat, mainly due to the Jewish vote. Ariel Sharon enjoyed a landslide victory over Barak—62.4 percent versus 37.6 percent—and he formed a wide coalition of Likud, Labor, and five other parties representing the extreme right and the Jewish religious parties. Labor participated in Sharon’s coalition for the fi rst two years (2001, 2002) of the new government. The major challenges of Sharon’s fi rst government were the Palestinian armed struggle, terror actions inside Israel, and economic distress that resulted from the Palestinian suicide bombers. The six-week-long military operation Defense Shield of April 2002 against the Palestinian armed organizations succeeded in reducing intifada terror actions. However, it inflamed antigovernment emotions among Arab citizens. Following the successful military actions, the coalition split over issues relating to the economy and the national budget. The Labor party defected from the government, and Sharon decided to call early elections in January 2003. Sharon and his Likud party won this election as well with 38 seats in the Knesset and formed a coalition with the new centrist, antireligious party Shinuy (headed by Yosef Lapid), which gained 15 seats. The fortunes of the Labor party (headed by Amram Mitzna‘) declined even further in this

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election, with its number of Knesset seats reduced from 26 to 19. The Labor and left-wing parties lost support as a result of the militancy of the Jewish public who wished to retaliate against Palestinian terrorism and suicide bombings. Sharon’s postelection cabinet excluded Labor but included the extreme right parties, HaIhud HaLeumi and Israel Beitenu (which then left the government in 2004, while Labor rejoined it on the basis of Sharon’s disengagement from Gaza plan). Israel’s political parties experienced another seismic shift in late November 2005. The Labor party elected left-leaning Amir Peretz as their new leader, a defeat for longtime leader Shimon Peres. Peretz announced that he would break the coalition formed with Likud. The Likud party had largely opposed the Gaza disengagement program Sharon has initiated in April 2004. As a result, in November 2005 Prime Minister Sharon left the Likud party—a party he helped to found—and formed the new, more centrist Kadima (“Forward”) party. The Palestinian Issue and the War Against Terror Global terrorism was increasing during this period. The global struggle against radical Islamists led to empathy in the international community of Israel’s history facing Arab-Islamic violence. On 11 September 2001, nineteen terrorists affi liated with al-Qa‘ida hijacked four commercial passenger jets, crashing two of them into the World Trade Center in New York City and another one into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. The fourth aircraft crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. Over 3,000 people died and many more were injured, and the U.S. economy was affected negatively. In response, the United States and Britain launched a bombing campaign and then ground forces on the Taliban government and al-Qa‘ida terrorist camps in Afghanistan with the aim of capturing al-Qa‘ida’s leader Osama bin Laden, destroying his organization, and removing the Taliban regime that had provided support and safe harbor to al-Qa‘ida. The war successfully removed the Taliban from power but has been less successful in achieving the goal of restricting al-Qa‘ida’s activities. In March 2003, the United States and Britain launched war against Iraq, presenting the war as a “preemptive” military action against world terrorism and advocating regime change, alleging

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(falsely) that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction and supporting terrorist organizations. Militant Islamic terror groups targeted European and Arab states during 2004–2005 and contributed to a change among Arab states as well as among West European countries of their position in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as I will discuss later. High-profile global terror actions were resumed on 11 March 2004, when 202 people were killed and 1,400 injured in bombings at Madrid’s railway station. In the same year, Chechen terrorists blew up two planes, killing all ninety passengers, and killed nine people at a Moscow subway stop. In early September 2004 dozens of Chechenian guerrillas seized a school in the Russian town of Beslan, near Chechnya, and held about 1,100 young schoolchildren, teachers, and parents hostage. At least 335 hostages were killed, including 156 children, and more than 550 were wounded. Saudi Arabia has also suffered a variety of terrorist attacks since May 2003, all of them attributed to al-Qa‘ida. The attacks have caused the deaths of about a hundred foreign workers, but for the first time, some attacks were also aimed at Saudi government targets. Finally, London was attacked in July 2005 by Islamic bombers on the London underground, killing 52 and wounding about 700. The fact that Arab Muslim states such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan also suffered from militant Islamic terror actions by al-Qa‘ida encouraged Saudi Arabia and the twenty-two members of the Arab League to resolve in March 2002 the Arab Peace Initiative, which recognizes Israel within the 1949 armistice (or pre-June 1967) borders. However, the war in Iraq placed the United States at the same status of Israel—an occupier of Arab-Islamic territory—in the eyes of many Arabs and Muslims. The long-term ramifications are still to be seen, but in 2007, more than four years after the invasion and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime, it seems that the war has failed in its objectives and has had a devastating effect on the United States. While the war in Iraq led to the dismemberment of a strategic threat to Israel from the east, since 2005 it has had to cope with a new one. In August 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president of Iran, and in October he announced that “Israel must be wiped off the map.” In the eyes of Israelis, his threats were taken seriously when Iran’s nuclear project was revealed, in addition to Iran’s existing long-range missiles, which can reach the entire territory of Israel.

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During Ariel Sharon’s tenure, the IDF escalated its fight against the Palestinian intifada. Many military actions took the form of wartime actions, with the army increasing deadly attacks against terror activists. These attacks also claimed the lives of nearby civilians. Among other actions, the Israeli air force used a one-ton bomb to bomb a house that harbored a senior terrorist and his family. The aggressive actions taken by the IDF were perceived by the Arab public as overreactions and were often called massacres, a term often used by Palestinians in connection with the 1948 Nakba, thereby reflecting the traumas of the past. Thus, Israel’s confl ict with West Bank and Gaza Palestinians continued to radicalize the discourse of Arab leaders who identified with the intifada, as described in the previous chapter. In an attempt to restart the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Israel and the United States resolved to circumvent Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, whom Ariel Sharon called “irrelevant” and an obstacle to peace. Under U.S. pressure, Arafat reluctantly appointed a prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), in April 2003, who was to replace him in negotiations. On 1 May 2003, the “quartet” (the United States, UN, EU, and Russia) unfurled the “road map” for peace, which envisioned the creation of a Palestinian state by 2005. Although Sharon publicly acknowledged the need for a Palestinian state and Abbas committed himself to ending Palestinian violence, the road map quickly disintegrated when neither side honored their obligations: Abbas, with little real political power, did not disable terrorist organizations and Sharon did not dismantle settlements, much less prevent new ones from being established. The resumption of Palestinian suicide bombings inside Israel led Israel to increase its “targeted killings” of those who Israel defi ned as being terrorists, including senior Hamas political and spiritual leaders. Unable to maneuver between Arafat and Israel, Mahmoud Abbas resigned five months after his appointment, and he was replaced by Ahmad Qurei (Abu ‘Ala’) in September 2003. In the summer of 2004, terror actions against Israelis were reduced because the Hamas movement decided on a unilateral hudna (cease-fi re, later termed tahdi’a) as long as Israel did not target its senior activists. Ariel Sharon, who anticipated a new U.S. peace initiative that might end the occupation in the West Bank, decided in 2004 to introduce a new policy regarding the Palestinian issue. He claimed that since Yasser Arafat endorsed terror

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actions against Israel and expressed extreme positions, Israel had no partner for peace talks and it should take unilateral steps to disengage from the Palestinians. Sharon initiated a unilateral plan to do this. The plan had two phases: fi rst, Israel and several large Israeli settlement blocks in the West Bank would be separated from the rest of the West Bank (including four evacuated Jewish settlements) with a barrier named the “security fence”; and second, Israel would disengage completely from the Gaza Strip. Sharon pursued his plan only after he received a letter from President George W. Bush on 14 April 2004 assuring Israel in regard to U.S. policy on two major issues concerning this fi nal status solution to the Palestinian issue: Israeli settlement blocks in the West Bank that are close to the pre-1967 border and the right of return of Palestinian refugees. President Bush stated, It seems clear that an agreed, just, fair, and realistic framework for a solution to the Palestinian refugee issue as part of any fi nal status agreement will need to be found through the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the settling of Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel . . . In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of fi nal status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion. It is realistic to expect that any fi nal status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities.2

In spite of formulating this policy, in May 2004 Israel launched its largest military operation in Gaza in a decade, and in October 2004, in retaliation for Palestinian rocket attacks, carried out its deadliest incursion in Gaza. One month later, in November 2004, Yasser Arafat died, and he was replaced by Mahmoud Abbas, fi rst as acting PLO chairman and then in January 2005 he was elected president of the PA. The Labor party supported Sharon’s disengagement program and joined the government coalition. The disengagement with Gaza, which involved the forcible evacuation of around 8,000 Jewish settlers was completed peacefully in August 2005, four months before Sharon experienced a devastating series of strokes that left him in a coma. Sharon had refused to coordinate

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the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip with Abbas, which would assist Hamas in winning elections to the PA Legislative Council in January 2006. Government Policy Coping with the “Demographic Bomb” In late 2002, Shoshana Arabelli Almozlino, a former minister of health, said, “What did we establish the state for, if at the end of a day it will be a democratic state but not Jewish? . . . The Jewish people have to survive and to do everything towards this. If we will not know how to preserve the Jewish people, we will remain without a nation.”3 Almozlino was responding to those who criticized the reactivation of the Public Advisory Council of Demography of which she was a member. Reinstituting the Council of Demography was only one of a series of actions that were taken by the Jewish establishment following the October 2000 riots and the outbreak of the alAsqa intifada in an endeavor to counteract what was perceived to be an Arab attempt to undermine the Jewish basis of the state of Israel. The high growth rate of the Arab population (which reached a peak in 1964 of 4.5 percent; during 2003, it was 3.3 percent compared to 2.2 percent among Jews) and the fact that Arab citizens constituted an absolute majority in some strategic areas in the Galilee, the Triangle, and the Negev generated concern in the ruling Jewish establishment that Jewish immigration to Israel would not suffice to preserve the Jewish majority. The Center for Demography and the Public Advisory Council of Demography—two government agencies consisting of experts from the fields of health, welfare, and social affairs—were formed in 1963. During its operational period until the fi rst half of the 1990s, the recommendations of this council included, among other things, developing measures to increase the birth rate and decrease abortions among Jews, while developing health and educational services in order to expand the knowledge of family planning in the Arab community. These operations were intensified after 1967. The council included two gynecologists and a representative of the women’s organization Na‘amat.4 Since the early 1990s, against the background of negotiations for a permanent solution between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the

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demographic debate in Israel intensified. Even left-wing politicians were searching for a way, in the fi nal settlement, to include settled areas in the West Bank (Ariel, Ma‘ale Adumim, and Gush Etzion) within Israel in order to limit the evacuation of Jewish settlements. The Palestinian leadership was determined not to concede any land beyond the June 1967 boundaries unless Israel offered territory in its place, which led some prominent Israeli politicians and academics to propose the Israeli Wadi ‘Ara area (the Triangle) as an exchange for the West Bank settlements. The demographic considerations of this proposal are clear: the annexation would reduce the Arab population in Israel by one-fi fth of its current total (some 200,000 Arabs inhabit Wadi ‘Ara). The proposal to make this territory part of the Palestinian state was raised by the general secretary of the Labor party, Ra‘anan Cohen, and later by MKs Yossi Beilin, Efraim Sneh, Ehud Barak (no longer prime minister) 5 —all considered left-wing politicians—and Avigdor Lieberman of the right-wing party Israel Beitenu.6 The idea of territory exchange based on population concentrations soon captured the Jewish public’s imagination. A public opinion survey published in March 2002 found that most of the Jews in Israel (52 percent) supported the transferring of the Triangle to the Palestinian Authority in exchange for other territory.7 Another survey found that 63 percent of Jews agreed with the sentence “Arabs are a security and demographic threat to the state,” and 40 percent agreed that the state should encourage Arabs to emigrate.8 Similar results were found in a survey by the Israel Democracy Institute: 62 percent of Jews supported the proposal that the government encourage Arab emigration.9 In a public opinion survey of March 2005, 42 percent of Jews interviewed agreed that Israel should encourage Arab emigration, 17 percent “tended to agree,” and 40 percent rejected the proposal.10 This position among Jews was probably strengthened by the Arabs’ solidarity with the Palestinian intifada and Arab MKs’ remarks calling for a change in the Jewish nature of the state and identifying with Palestinian violence. The attitude among Israeli Jews was exemplified by an article written by Avraham Tal, a columnist in Haaretz: “If the Arab citizens keep electing politicians like Dahamshe, Bishara, and Tibi as their representatives, and will not dissociate from them and from the abominations that come out of their mouths from election to election, the chances of coexistence will diminish

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and eventually disappear. The Arab citizens should not be surprised at an increase in the rate of Jews in Israel who support separation plans—us here and them there—which will include also the inhabitants of Umm al-Fahm, Baqa al-Gharbiyya, Tira, Tayba, etc.”11 The discourse on Israel’s demography was reinforced after publicity highlighting the statistical analysis of some academics, particularly Professor Arnon Soffer, a geographer from Haifa University, whose predictions are, in my view, exaggerated. Soffer includes in his estimates of the Israeli Arab population the Palestinian inhabitants of East Jerusalem, who according to Israeli law are not citizens of the state but inhabitants in a territory declared to be under Israeli jurisdiction. This is an incorrect premise that is also used by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, which is guided by political considerations: wanting to assert that East Jerusalem is part of Israel’s sovereign land. Soffer claimed that Israeli Arabs in 2004 were a population of 1.5 million, comprising 20 percent of Israel’s population. The Bureau of Statistics’ figures were 1,340,200 (19.5 percent), including the Arabs of East Jerusalem.12 To these numbers, Soffer added his estimate of “illegal” Arab residents. But both Soffer and the Bureau of Statistics provide misleading figures. Soffer’s estimate of “illegal population” is baseless, and the inclusion of East Jerusalem Arabs, who have no Israeli citizenship and see themselves as West Bank Palestinians, is totally wrong. The figures provided by Professor Aziz Haidar are based on what, in my view, is a correct processing of the Bureau of Statistics’ data. Haidar found that Israeli Arabs were in 2001 only 15.2 percent of Israel’s population.13 One of the major bodies for the discussion of demography as an important component of national security was the Herzlia Convention, which was strongly influenced by the ideas of Professor Uzi Arad, an advisor of Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu. At the March 2001 convention, a team of experts headed by Arad predicted that two-thirds of the population in the land of Palestine in 2020 would be Arabs and that this change would also have an economic impact, namely a deprived socioeconomic population. The conference’s recommendations were to encourage families of three to four children and to abolish remittances to large families; to spread Jewish population to the Galilee, Izra‘el valley, and the Negev in order to prevent a continuous Arab territory that would split Israel; to include

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Jewish-populated areas in the West Bank near the Green Line within the state of Israel; and to remove parts of the Triangle, East Jerusalem, and some Bedouin-populated areas in the northern Negev to Palestinian sovereignty. The conference recommended that the government grant Arab citizens a choice between participating in the elections for the Israeli Knesset or in the Palestinian state, changing their status to permanent resident (not citizen) in Israel, and including Jewish citizens who reside abroad among those eligible to vote for the Knesset.14 Two years later, at the Herzlia Conference of 2003, Binyamin Netanyahu said that Israel has no demographic problem regarding the Palestinians, who in the future will enjoy full self-determination, but rather with the Israeli Arabs. Netanyahu warned that if the percentage of Israeli Arabs reaches 35 to 40 percent of the population, Israel would become a binational state. As minister of fi nance under Ariel Sharon between 2003 and 2006, Netanyahu reduced child allowances. When criticized by ultraorthodox Jews for his policy, he replied proudly, “My policy succeeded in reducing birth rates among the Arabs.”15 The demographic threat—particularly the fear that the political agenda and fundamental decisions determining the state’s borders will be determined by a majority that combines the Israeli left and the Arab population— encouraged right-wing politicians to delegitimize the right of the Arabs to participate in decisive matters relating to the state. Moshe Arens, a senior Likud leader, proposed a bill in 2002 that aimed, to some extent, to decrease the political power of Arabs by granting Israeli expatriates (mostly Jews) the right to vote and including them as citizens who are “present” in Israel.16 A similar bill was proposed in 2005 by MK Eliezer Cohen (HaIhud HaLeumi). His aim was to strengthen the right-wing parties and weaken the influence of Arab voters. The Knesset, however, rejected these bills.17 Government policy did not lag behind public discourse. In early September 2002, Minister of Labor and Welfare Shlomo Benizri reconvened the Public Advisory Council for Demography some five years after it had been abolished. The Ministry of Welfare and Labor Web site included a statement that the Center for Demography operates to safeguard an appropriate level of Jewish population growth. Minister Benizri, who also re-established the Center for Demography, addressed the opening session of the re-convened

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council about the beauty of the Jewish family that is “blessed” with many children, saying, “We are the majority in this land and we have the right to preserve our character and the character of the Jewish state and also to preserve the Jewish people.” The resumption of the council’s work in September 2002, according to Benizri, was necessary in light of the Central Bureau of Statistics’ indication of a decrease of the Jewish population.18 Adv. Suhad Bishara from the Adalah association demanded that government offices refrain from funding the activities of the council and that total separation be kept between the council and state agencies. She wrote, “The Council’s operation . . . sends a message to the public that the natural Arab growth in the state is a threat to the state and to the entire community. This message deepens the perception of the Arabs as a threat; it strengthens the tendency of delegitimization and dehumanization and stresses the inferiority of the Arabs in Israel. . . . Every administrative authority has to work according to the principle of equality in favor of all citizens of the state regardless of race, gender, origin, and nationality. The council, in its hidden and revealed goals, sends a message to the citizens that they are not equal, which will give roots and legitimacy to racism against part of the population in Israel.”19 But all the protest actions did not achieve a change in government policy: the majority of Israeli Jews viewed the demographic challenge as a threat and agreed with the former minister of health Shoshana Arbeli Almozlino that preserving a Jewish demographic majority was more important than the democratic fabric of the state. The second kind of government action on the demographic challenge was fi nancial support to families in order to encourage higher birth rates among Jews. In 1999, child allocations totaled 6.7 billion NIS, or 1.6 percent of the GNP.20 However, in 2001, an ad hoc political alignment between Arab parties and Jewish orthodox parties resulted in the enactment of the “Families Blessed with Children Law” initiated by MK Haim Alpert (Agudat Yisrael).21 The new law allocated an increased child allowance to families with five or more children, most of whom were Arab and ultraorthodox Jewish families—two communities whose members do not serve in the army. The number of Arab families who benefited from the law was double their relative proportion in the population (30 percent of all families with five children and above). However, in 2003 the ultraorthodox parties were excluded

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from the government coalition and this enabled the Sharon government to gradually decrease the child allowances for families with numerous children.22 Shawqi Khatib, the chair of the Follow-up Committee, argued that the proposal to cut this budget item was, in addition to a severe economic impact, an expression of the general atmosphere of hostility toward Arabs in the state. He stated, “We hear the discourse of transfer, we witness the political transfer taken against Arab representatives in the Knesset and now we also see an ‘economic transfer’ against Arab children. They want to punish the Arab public and they punish our children. This is very sad.”23 A third government action aimed at achieving a demographic goal, although it was presented as dealing with a security problem, was the enactment of an amendment to the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (Temporary Provision), 5763-2003 (July 2003), a one-year amendment to Israel’s Citizenship Law preventing the naturalization of spouses of the members of the PA or citizens of Iran, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, or any place where activity endangers the security of Israel or its citizens.24 The provisional law was extended and the Knesset was preparing a permanent law. Critics argue that the law is racist because it targets Arabs, since Israeli Arabs are far more likely to have Palestinian spouses than other Israelis. In 2003, 2004, and 2007, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) called upon Israel to abolish the law, stating that the law contravenes the UN convention of 1966 (which Israel joined in 1979) regarding the elimination of racial discrimination.25 A Haaretz editorial categorized the law as “Racist Legislation.”26 The columnist, Uzi Benziman, claimed that the law was not aimed at dealing with security problems but rather satisfied the nationalistic urges of right-wing Knesset members. He added, “It violates the basic right of a person to get married without paying the price of being uprooted. It expresses a tendency to deport as many Palestinians as possible from the state . . . The government is formed by right-wing parties whose position towards Arabs borders on racism, but they represent the Jewish public in the country. Only a minority in the establishment and the ruling elite have developed values of tolerance and acceptance towards the Arabs (the Sikkuy reports testify to this).”27 When the bill was debated in the Knesset, the security discourse was used to camouflage the demographic purpose of this law. Knesset members

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who supported the bill quoted General Security Service data that claimed that 11 percent of the Arab citizens who participated in terrorist actions in 2002 were members of mixed families where one of the parents was a Palestinian from the territories. MK Yuval Shteinitz, the chair of the Knesset committee for defense and foreign affairs, presented the real reason behind the law, saying, “The state has the right to defend itself demographically. We experience here a Palestinian effort to move population into the state of Israel in order to change the demographic balance. The fact is that in the entire Arab world, usually the woman moves to live with her husband and here it is the opposite.”28 The Jewish-Zionist response to the allegations of UN CERD and the Israeli Arab organizations was that every country has the right to regulate and control the flow of foreigners. Ruth Gavizon from Hebrew University and the Israel Democracy Institute, formerly the president of the Civil Rights Association in Israel, published an article that supported the new amendment to the citizenship law. She argued that this law could be justified not only for security reasons but also as part of the effort to preserve Israel as a state in which the Jewish people can realize their right for self-determination. On this basis, she claimed, the state has the right to control its immigration policies.29 Her position expresses widespread sentiments in the Jewish public, including the left wing, which is concerned about losing influence as a result of high birth rates and immigration of Arabs into the state.30 In sum, the combination of two processes pushed the Israeli government to take steps to ensure the Jewish demographic majority in Israel. These were the growing resistance of Arab citizens to the Jewish ethos of the state and their identification with the Palestinian uprising, and the (ungrounded) fear that the Arabs in Israel are “a demographic bomb.” In 2006, it became clear that Arab fertility rates had decreased from 4.7 percent in 2000 to 3.7 in 2006 and that the alarmist predictions of Arnon Soffer and the Central Bureau of Statistics had no basis in reality.31 Dealing with Arab MKs’ Extreme Positions Remarks made by Arab members of Knesset who expressed solidarity with violent actions generated an iron-fist policy of law enforcement by the

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Israeli authorities. The government’s belief, that Arab leaders had crossed the line with their speeches, caused the general attorney to order the police to investigate almost all Arab members of Knesset and in one case—MK Azmi Bishara—even to charge him with crimes. As an example, in September 2000, MK Muhammad Barake of Hadash was investigated following statements he made after the demolition of houses built by Arabs without a permit near Nahef and after demonstrations of Arab farmers near Tamra in June 1999. The investigation ended with charges fi led that he had insulted a civil servant and assaulted a policeman.32 During the al-Aqsa intifada, the Knesset enacted a number of laws, some initiated by the government and some by right-wing members of Knesset who consolidated support from cabinet members at the Knesset plenum. These new laws aimed to restrict the scope of influence of Arab members of Knesset. One could view them as reaction to the provocative activity of the Arab leaders. MK Azmi Bishara’s trips to Syria, his meetings with President Bashar al-Assad and his public speeches there, and his involvement in illegal trips by other Israeli Arabs to Syria were the main reason for legislating an amendment to the law that extended the validity of Emergency Regulations (Travel Abroad) (No. 7), which was intended to prevent travel to Arab countries that do not have diplomatic relations with Israel. Another law named the “Law of Election to the Knesset and to the Prime Minister’s Office (amendment no. 46, 2002)” stated that in the oath of allegiance, every Knesset member must declare his commitment to uphold article 7A of the Basic Law, namely, that Israel is a Jewish and democratic state. The new amendment determined that an individual Knesset member, and not only a list of candidates, could be disqualified from participating in the elections if he or she acts in opposition to these principles. MK Israel Katz, who initiated this amendment, explained, A continuous series of remarks by the Arab members of the Knesset in this house, not all of them but too many of them, and the unrestrained support of all the murderous terrorist actions, are the trigger for this law. Whoever is not ready to respect our rules and the fact that the state of Israel is a Jewish and a democratic state that resists terror and racism, let him leave, the gate is open. Whoever supports terror and wants to be a parliament member, let

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him go to Gaza, to Ramalla, to Damascus, to Beirut. Whoever stays here has to respect the rules . . . we must rid the Knesset of Arab extremists and enable more moderate representatives who accept the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state to be elected in their place.33

Another law, the “Law of Immunity of Members of Knesset, Their Rights and Duties (amendment no. 29) 2002” removed immunity from Knesset members who denied the right of existence or the Jewish nature or the democratic fabric of the state, or incited racism, or supported armed struggle or terrorist actions against the state of Israel in the country or abroad. The law was commonly known as the “Bishara Law,” as it aimed to prevent Arab Knesset members from expressing solidarity with the armed struggle and terrorist attacks of the Palestinians and Hizballah during the al-Aqsa intifada, as MK Azmi Bishara had done.34 Minister of Communication Reuven Rivlin said that the value of this law is declaratory and it was intended to express the repulsion at the pronouncements of Arab leaders against the state.35 When the bill was discussed in the Knesset, MK Ze’ev Boim addressed MK Bishara: “We created this uproar intentionally . . . you didn’t notice that you stretched and stretched the rope and now this rope has torn.”36 This law was applied in April 2002, when MK Ahmad Tibi, a former advisor of Yasser Arafat, entered the Muqata‘a compound (PA headquarters) in Ramalla, ignoring the orders of the soldiers at the IDF checkpoint, in order to meet Arafat during the Israeli Operation Defense Shield in the West Bank. In response, the committee for Knesset affairs decided to remove his immunity as a member of the Knesset and to restrict his entry into the PA territories until the end of the Knesset session in October 2003.37 Legislative action was also taken to prevent expressions of solidarity with Palestinian violent actions and terror. “Penal Law (amendment no. 66) 2002,” which was commonly known as “the law of incitement,” was introduced by the government and was widely supported in the Knesset, including Labor party members. The law stated, “Whoever publicly calls for violent action, or supports, identifies with, or encourages violent action that has a likely certainty, according to its substance or the circumstance under which it was publicized, that it will generate violence will be punished with five years

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of imprisonment.” The probability test for charging someone with incitement for violent actions, which in the past was “beyond a reasonable doubt” (as in the case of Kol Ha‘am) 38 was changed in the new law to a reasonable possibility. The defi nition of a violent action also was more general in the new law: “a violation that hits the person’s body or that presents his body with the risk of being harmed.”39 Arab citizens regarded the new amendment as an attack on the Arab sector since it restricted their freedom to express support for the Palestinian intifada and its struggle for freedom from the Israeli occupation and for self-determination.40 The minister of justice, Meir Shitrit, said that the new law did not violate freedom of expression but rather clarifies the boundaries for incitement. The general attorney, Elyakim Rubinstein, said that the lack of such an amendment had resulted in the closing of dozens of cases of people who were alleged to have incited others to violence. For example, no charges were fi led against MK Talab al-Sani‘ from the Ra‘am party following his response to a Palestinian gunfi re attack on pedestrians near the entrance to the Ministry of Defense and the IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv (he said “this action is a legitimate action of struggle by the Palestinian people under occupation, the action was aimed against military targets and not against women and children”). The shooter was not affi liated with a particular terrorist organization, and therefore supporting his actions could not be regarded as a violation of the existing “decree against terror.”41 Because of the legislation and disciplinary actions, the Mossawa Center claimed that Arab members of the Knesset were victims of a systematic Israeli policy of physical attacks by security forces, restrictions on freedom of movement, and legal and legislative procedures aimed at restricting their political activity. The police denied these claims and argued that the Arab members of Knesset had been involved in severe disturbances and in obstructing policemen in the course of their duties.42 The fi rst case to be fi led under the new incitement law was against a newspaper editor and writer. Tawfiq Ahmad Jabarin was the editor of the Islamic movement organ Sawt al-Haqq wal-Hurriya who published on 7 June 2002 an article by ‘Abd al-Rahman Bukeirat that interpreted a verse from the Quran about martyrdom. The verse says, “Reckon not those who are slain in the way of Allah, to be dead; Nay! They are alive and are being

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sustained by their Lord” (Quran, 3:169). An Islamic movement activist added, “Let us ask Allah to elevate us to the status of martyrs (shuhada).” Jabarin claimed that the text has a purely spiritual meaning and has nothing to do with politics.43 The Islamic movement termed the case “the trial against the Quran.” Journalists and poets were also investigated about allegations of incitement. The poet Shafiq Habib of Dir Hana was investigated by the police, who alleged that he published a book of poems without censors’ approval. The police claimed that some poems in the book were bound “to incite, inflame against, and harm the ruling authority.”44 The police also investigated the poet and columnist Abd al-Hakim Masalha and the writer Muhammad ‘Ali Taha. The General Security Service investigators warned Taha and ordered him to be cautious in his writing because, according to them, “the readers, and particularly the younger ones, might understand his wording as incitement.” Of all the new legislation, the most punishing was the amendment to the Basic Law, the Knesset, that authorized the Central Election Committee to disqualify candidates or parties who did not recognize Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, who support terror, or who acted deliberately or explicitly in support of the armed struggle of an enemy state or terrorist organization against the state of Israel. A decision of the committee to disqualify a candidate (but not a list) was dependent on approval by the Supreme Court. The amendment was intended, by its right-wing initiators, to exclude Arab nationalist MKs from the Knesset and to leave only those Arab MKs who were members of Zionist parties.45 The law was exercised on the eve of the 2003 Knesset elections, when the head of the General Security Service submitted an opinion to the Central Election Committee that the rights of the Balad party to stand for elections should be withdrawn. Consequently the committee decided to disqualify Azmi Bishara, Ahmad Tibi, and the Balad party (as well as Baruch Marzel, a Jewish former Kach movement member who was listed as a candidate of the Herut party).46 However, this decision regarding all the disqualifications was overruled by the Supreme Court. Interestingly, an editorial in Haaretz supported the disqualification of MKs Bishara and Tibi: “it is to be hoped that the public will understand the circumstances, which meant there was no

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other recourse for democracy but to protect itself.”47 This position taken by Haaretz, which is known for its left-wing, liberal position, indicates how far sentiments in the Jewish public had shifted. A special report published by the Mada al-Carmel Center, which is associated with the Balad party, argued that these laws redraw the democratic boundaries to bolster the Zionist consensus and thus reshape parliamentary discourse. The report also stated that the laws restricted the freedom of representation and right to be elected. They maintained that “Palestinian citizens,” by which they mean Israeli Arabs, are required to support the Zionist consensus, which denies their Palestinian identity and does not accept the citizens as they are.48 Government Funds to Arab Localities Shortly after being elected in 2001, Ariel Sharon informed the Arab heads of municipal councils that he was interested in improving relations with them. He decided to personally head the special cabinet committee dealing with Arab citizens, although this committee rarely convened. He also promoted the Four Billion Plan that had been prepared at the end of Ehud Barak’s tenure.49 However, the implementation of the plan by the administration fell short of the original budget.50 The budget for Arab localities from 2001 to 2004 increased from 500 million NIS only to, on average, 684 million NIS annually instead of one billion NIS,51 and in 2005 it decreased to 412 million NIS—a decrease of 17.6 percent in relation to the year 2000 and 40 percent compared to 2004. Budget cuts followed the intifada, which significantly damaged Israel’s economy from 2001. According to Ministry of Finance data, the average government per capita expenses in funding of Arab municipal councils in the year 2001 was 4,650 NIS, whereas in the Jewish localities it was 4,247 NIS—a 9 percent difference.52 However, there has been a gradual narrowing of the discrepancies between the Jewish and Arab sectors in government funding due to Supreme Court rulings. For example, Justice Dalia Dorner ruled in June 2004 that every governmental development program should include the Arab sector on an equal footing.53 The Supreme Court ruled in February 2006 that it is unlawful that only four out of 495 settlements

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included in the National Preference Areas, which are entitled to fi nancial preference and tax exemptions, were Arab towns and villages.54 Representation in the Civil Service The Sharon government nominated Arabs to the civil service on a sporadic basis only. One significant senior nomination was the appointment of Magali Wahba, a Druze member of the Likud party to the position of general director of the Ministry for Regional Cooperation. Wahba, who in 2003 was elected to the Knesset, was the fi rst non-Jew to be nominated as a general director of a ministry. During 2002, an Arab was nominated to the position of deputy general director of the Ministry of Science, Culture, and Sport,55 and for the fi rst time an Arab was nominated, by the Labor minister of the interior, to the position of general director of a ministry (of Interior). Another Arab—MK Ghaleb Majadla—was elected to represent Labor as chair of the Knesset Committee of Interior Affairs. In 2006, he was appointed by Labor to join Ehud Olmert’s cabinet as a minister. Lands and Settlement Ariel Sharon was famous for endorsing Jewish settlement, and he boosted this activity, including in Arab-dominated areas. In late 2001, there were sixty-eight new Jewish settlements in various stages of development.56 In October 2002, Sharon’s cabinet decided to construct fourteen new Jewish settlements in the Negev as part of a plan to promote a Zionist majority in the Galilee and the Negev. The innovation of this plan was the use of the term “Zionist majority” instead of “Jewish majority,” which had been used in the past. One of these settlements, Gvaot Bar, was deliberately designated by the government and the Jewish agency “to form a settlement continuity to balance the expanding Bedouin settlement.”57 Sharon’s government expanded the number of large-scale private farms populated by a single Jewish family (havot bodedim) while acting to reduce the area possessed by the Bedouins and their “unrecognized hamlets.” In 2003, the government supported fi fty-four Jewish-owned farms in the Negev as well as thirty-one in the north. Some of these were not registered legally,

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but the authorities did not pronounce them illegal or issue orders for them to be demolished as they did with the Bedouin clusters. The prime minister’s advisor on settlements, Uzi Keren, wrote in a report that private Jewish-controlled farms are “another way of building Eretz Israel.” He maintained that they aimed at “preserving the state’s land and providing solutions for demographic issues.”58 Every Jewish family who settled in the new Jewish farms or settlements received state funding of at least 230,000 NIS (150,000 NIS from the Ministry of Housing and 80,000 NIS from the Jewish Agency).59 Regarding the confl ict over land possessed by Bedouins and resettlement of the Bedouin residents of unrecognized hamlets and towns, the Sharon government approved a five-year plan to develop the Bedouin sector between 2003 and 2007 and allocated some 1.17 billion NIS for this purpose. However, a significant amount of this funding was designated for intensifying law enforcement related to the Bedouin settlements (control of housing and grazing).60 The confl icting positions of the Bedouins and the government regarding house building have perhaps prompted a more flexible approach to planning from the government. Bedouins in the Negev build 1,500 new illegal structures annually, but only around 300 are demolished each year. Perhaps an understanding of the detrimental impact of this policy led the government in 2005 to establish a new Bedouin municipality—Abu Basma—to encompass seven formerly unrecognized villages in which 23,000 Bedouins reside on a plot of some 60,000 dunams. In this municipality, 20,000 dunams was for condensed clusters of housing and 40,000 dunams was for Bedouins who are dispersed. The government also assigned to Abu Basma for infrastructure development 400 million NIS for three years, 2006–2008, and to other Bedouin villages 300 million NIS, in addition to the previous amount of 1.17 billion NIS. Thus, it seems that the government is gradually recognizing the reality of how the Bedouins live. Government officials, while combating Bedouin unrecognized settlements, completely failed to recognize the negative impact of state policy, which has alienated an Arab group that was previously more favorably disposed to the Jewish state. The government’s perception that the Bedouins’ occupation of land was trespassing culminated with Sharon’s government, which took extreme action. The Israel Land Authority (ILA) sprayed poison on Bedouin crops

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over 12,000 dunums, claiming that these were state-owned lands that had been cultivated illegally. The Supreme Follow-up Committee termed this action the behavior of “a racist, apartheid regime.” A case was fi led with the Supreme Court of Justice, which ruled that the ILA action was unlawful.61 Failure to Implement the Or Commission Report In late August 2003, when the Or Commission was about to submit its report, Prime Minister Sharon introduced a new policy due to his concern that the fi ndings of the commission would be critical.62 The special cabinet for Arab affairs resolved, “The Israeli government attributes much importance to improving the relationship between the different sectors that make up the population in Israel, and therefore it seeks to improve the situation of the Arab citizens of Israel and to respond to the problems of this sector in a way that will facilitate their equality and will integrate them into the society and into the state of Israel.”63 Following this resolution, Prime Minister Sharon announced, “The program’s success depends on the complete cooperation of the Arab sector and its leadership in a way that will create an ideological platform for real coexistence.” In other words, Sharon conditioned the implementation of the basic rights of citizens on moderate political behavior by the Arab leadership. In a lecture at the Truman Institution, Reuven Gal, the deputy head of the National Security Council who drafted the government’s resolution, said that the strategic approach of the government was “to ensure a friendly minority.” According to him, the government resolution touched upon all the recommendations of the Or Commission, introducing a long-term strategy that would improve higher education, land and housing, employment, and municipal administrations. Assessing whether the resolution is a change in direction for the government, Gal said, “As long as the intifada is rife there will be no change. The main change should be a change in the general public atmosphere.” In other words, the government sees only small incremental changes to be possible in this atmosphere.64 Indeed, the government resolution was declarative, and, like many before it, very little was implemented.65

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After the Or Commission’s report was submitted to the government in September 2003, a number of ministers rejected its recommendations and even criticized the very establishment of a commission of inquiry.66 They also argued that the state should not take any action against the policemen involved in shooting at Arab citizens during the October riots. The Likud Political Bureau, headed by MK Uzi Landau, the former minister of interior security, which is in charge of the police, rejected the recommendations of the commission. Landau said after the meeting, “Israel’s police force deserves praise. Its policemen acted bravely and under impossible conditions when they faced thousands of rioters who challenged the state in circumstances of war by assisting the enemy—the Palestinian authority and the terrorist organization.”67 Finally, under pressure from Prime Minister Sharon, a special cabinet was formed to study the report and recommend to the government what action to take. The committee was headed by Minister of Justice Yosef Lapid, a centrist who headed the Shinuy party, but its members were known as advocates of an iron-fist policy toward the Arabs, which affected the committee’s resolutions.68 The recommendations of the Lapid Committee, which was approved by the government in June 2004, fell far short of what had been recommended by the Or Commission. The operative resolution included the following measures: prepare zoning master plans for Arab localities, fund classroom construction, develop an educational program, develop employment zones, implement affi rmative action to absorb Arabs into the civil service, form a Jewish-Arab council for ongoing dialogue, establish a government authority to improve the minority sectors, encourage civic service among Arabs, initiate “the other’s week” in the school curriculum and a “day of tolerance,” and integrate Arabs in joint industrial zones. Lapid admitted in 2005 that the recommendations had not been implemented since “all the ministers of the committee he headed except himself opposed the Or report recommendations.”69 The Lapid report and its nonimplementation were criticized by Justice Or in September 2004: “Here is another example of the huge gap between plans, announcements, and even government resolutions and their implementation and execution.”70 Thus, it is no wonder that 93.5 percent of Arab interviewees said in a 2004 poll that government policy toward them is unjust.71

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In sum, government policy under Ariel Sharon was no different from that of many previous governments. Discriminatory practices against the Arab minority were ongoing, even though modest measures were introduced to allocate more funds to Arab localities. The most outrageous issue in the eyes of the Arab population was the way Sharon’s government responded to the Or Commission recommendations. There was no particular government action that boosted confl ict escalation, but the insensitive and inadequate handling of the Or report contributed to a greater alienation of the Arab minority. Arab Political Behavior As stated in chapter 9, the second intifada was one of the periods of greatest tension in the history of relations between Arabs and Jews in Israel. There was a growing involvement of Arab citizens in terror actions, as well as an increase in Arab politicians’ attacks against state policies. The Arab public boycotted the elections for the prime minister in 2001, with voter turnout in the general elections diminishing from 74 percent in 1999 to 60 percent in 2003 (compared to 68 percent among Jews). Charging Israel with discriminatory policies in international forums was a growing phenomenon during the period under review. Debate over Participation in the General Elections Prior to the 2003 elections, the Balad party and the Islamic movement called for a boycott of the polls, while Hadash campaigned for participation in order to prevent Ariel Sharon from being elected.72 Those who supported the boycott argued that the Arab members of Knesset were a façade used by Israel to propagate the myth of democracy, and that they can only voice their protests not influence state policies.73 In 2006, the call to boycott the elections was renewed, and some Arab activists suggested establishing a separate Arab parliament.74 Demonstrations During Ariel Sharon’s tenure as prime minister, the government’s actions in the Palestinian territories more than its policy in civil matters was again the

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catalyst for mass protests by Israeli Arabs. In March 2002, a general strike in the Arab sector was held to express solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinians in the territories. Hadash’s decision to join the strike indicated that the atmosphere in the Arab community was heated. However, three years later, in March 2005 the Follow-up Committee decided that the Land Day protest would be commemorated without a general strike.75 In April 2004, when the Israeli army was engaged in a war against Palestinian militias in the West Bank (Operation Defense Shield) following a Palestinian suicide bombing in Netanya that cost the lives of thirty Jews, Arab students in the David Yellin College, Hebrew University, Haifa University and Beit Berl College, held a moment of silence in memory of the Palestinian martyrs of that battle.76 Another special protest took place in January 2006, when a convention of 500 Arabs with representatives of the three Arab parties and other Arab nationalistic bodies was organized in Nazareth in support of Syria and the Syrian people. They signed a petition to the UN secretarygeneral asking that aggression not be used against Syria, in spite of an investigation into the assassination of Lebanon’s PM, Rafiq al-Hariri, that suspected Syria was behind the assassination.77 MK Azmi Bishara and four of his Balad party peers violated the law that prohibits traveling to Arab countries who do not have diplomatic relations with Israel, and in September 2006, one month after Israel’s second war in Lebanon, they provoked the Jewish public by traveling again to Syria and meeting with President Bashar al-Assad. Another example of how the Palestinian issue was affecting Israeli Arabs is the educational content of a summer camp organized by Abna’ al-Balad in July 2003. “The Camp of Return” trained and educated some 300 children about Palestinian martyrs and taught them songs praising suicide bombings. The children were separated into groups that were named after refugee camps. The camp organizer, Muhammad Kana‘ne, told a Haaretz correspondent that the camp educates children “about what happened in 1948, about our rights and our right for self-determination that was taken from us. We also educate the children how to participate in the Palestinian struggle. We are part of the just Palestinian struggle.” The booklet distributed to the children included a biography of Hamas bomb engineer Yahiya ‘Ayyash. Kana‘ne stated that ‘Ayyash and his comrades are heroes in the eyes of the Arab world. Following the story about this summer camp on a Channel 10

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television program, the police closed the camp down and arrested several of its counselors.78 Appealing to International Forums Arab organizations’ efforts in the international arena to criticize Israel’s policies increased during this period. Two reports were submitted by the Arab Association for Human Rights and by Adalah to a forum affi liated with the UN human rights committee. A report submitted in 2002 demonstrated that Israel had intensified its political restrictions on Arabs (to be elaborated in the following section) and withdrawn the immunity of Arab members of Knesset; Arab representatives were risked physical attacks and legal pressure aimed at restricting their ability to act freely. The report claimed that Arabs are increasingly delegitimized and are perceived as an internal enemy.79 Another report from 2003 informed the UN Commission on Human Rights of the amendment to Israel’s Law of Citizenship (discussed in chapter 9) and the UN commission included concerns about this legislation in its 2003 report.80 Antagonistic Discourse Before the 2003 elections, the Central Election Committee decided to disqualify the Balad party and MKs Azmi Bishara and Ahmad Tibi from running. Statements made by Arab academics on the day the Supreme Court discussed the appeal of the Arab MKs reflected the tension and the continually radicalizing position of the Arab sector. As‘ad Ghanem said that Arabs are entitled to ownership over their homeland. They pay the price of recognizing Israel in return for the ability to debate the nature of the regime. He argued that Israel’s regime is a tyranny of the majority, not democracy, and added that “ethnization” is implemented in daily practice, giving Minister Lieberman’s decision to spray the Bedouin fields with poison as an example. Ghanem anticipated that if the Supreme Court did not overrule the Central Election Committee’s disqualification decisions, the state would lose even more credibility with Arabs.81 Nadim Rouhana of Tel Aviv University said in the same session,

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This is not a defensive democracy but a defensive Jewish regime. The Jews rule the country forcefully and by the barrel of a gun. Arabs do not have the right to participate in determining the common good. The Arabs recognize the legitimacy of the state and its institutions, but they do not recognize “the state of the Jewish people.” The Supreme Court is wrong when it interprets the Arabs’ nonrecognition of the Jewish nature of the state as nonrecognition of the legitimacy of the state. Every self-respecting Arab is considered a threat to the Jewish state. If the Arab parties were to be disqualified, the Arabs will challenge the legitimacy of the institutions. Challenging the hegemony is done only when all demands for incremental changes are obstructed. Arabs will not use collective violence, but only civil disobedience, and fi nally, they will appeal to international institutions.82

The Balad party published a pamphlet titled “Before We Deteriorate to Apartheid,” which presented Israel as a state that sweeps its Arab citizens under the carpet and was experiencing racial hysteria that encouraged it to implement severe sanctions against the Arabs. In reaction, Uzi Benziman argued in his column, “The Jewish majority cannot ignore the dangerous slide toward violent undermining that is expanding in the Arab population. The Israeli Arab leadership must use different language and actions to prevent this phenomenon.”83 These expressions highlight the intensity and escalative mode of the confl ict during the Sharon tenure. Public Opinion Polls The escalation of disapproval with Israel’s policies was also apparent in public opinion surveys. A survey conducted by Mada al-Carmel found that 90 percent of Israeli Arabs thought the defi nition of Israel as a Jewish state would not safeguard their full equality in the state, and 81 percent claimed there was a contradiction between the two defi nitions of the state as Jewish and democratic. Only 35 percent of the Arabs said that they were ready to accept the defi nition of Israel as Jewish if they would enjoy complete equal rights. For the majority of other respondents, this aspect of the defi nition was alienating: 55 percent said that they did not feel that Israel was their state, and 81 percent maintained that Israel is not democratic and that it is democratic for Jews only. Even larger majorities responded to more specific policies: 90

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percent believed that the Law of Return (that only applies to Jews) was racist, and 90 percent supported a solution of Israel as a state of all its citizens; 44 percent supported a binational state.84 Another survey found that the majority of the Arab population—77 percent—agreed that Israel will remain “a Jewish and democratic state” until it gives Arabs full equal rights. The Yafa Center, which conducted the survey, did not ask for a defi nition of “equal rights,” and so does not show whether interviewees interpret equal rights in a way that contradicts what the majority of the Jews view as essential for a state to be “Jewish.” The failure to defi ne equal rights and the Jewish nature of the state causes problem with the interpretation of Sammy Smooha’s Index of ArabJewish Relations project. In 2004 Smooha conducted a survey of political positions of a sample of Jews and Arabs. Smooha rejected the thesis of radicalization suggested by Elie Rekhess, according to which Arabs and Jews are undergoing a historical process of mutual alienation, detachment, and potential confrontation. He proposed instead a politicization thesis according to which there are negative and positive forces acting upon the Arabs and Jews in Israel that balance and prevent open confl icts between them; the outcome is not necessarily crisis and violence. The politicization process is nourished by two basic processes that Arabs are experiencing: Israelization and democratization.85 Smooha’s index is a Herculean endeavor collating the results of thirty years of public opinion surveys. Although I agree with Smooha’s assertion of the existence of positive and negative forces influencing the relations between the two national groups, I do not agree with his interpretation of the 2004 index project poll results. Smooha’s major fi ndings were that 70 percent of the Arabs acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, but only 13.8 agree that it would be a Zionist state and 90 percent support a binational state instead of a Jewish state. Here, I agree with Rekhess that these fi ndings are not compatible. Rekhess argues that the separation between the Jewish and Zionist elements of the state is artificial. He hypothesizes that these apparently contradictory answers are given because Arabs consider the existence of Israel a fait accompli. There is a gap between pragmatic considerations and ideological dimensions, between preferences and historical reality.86

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In my opinion, there are two problems with Smooha’s conclusion. First, his survey questionnaire did not include items to delineate between “a Jewish state” and “a Zionist state.” Second, Smooha’s defi nition of what differentiates a Zionist state from a Jewish is problematic. He delineates four dimensions: (1) the state borders (a Zionist state in his mind means expansion of Israel beyond the pre-1967 borders whereas a Jewish state accepts the 1967 borders with minor changes); (2) the Law of Return (a Zionist state is a state of the entire Jewish people while a Jewish state can introduce criteria for immigration); (3) settlement policy (a Zionist state endorses Jewish settlement in all parts of the country and thus marginalization of the Arabs and a Jewish state doesn’t encourage settlement expansion); (4) participation in national decisions (a Zionist state denies the right that Arab votes would count in national decisions such as fi nal borders of the state whereas a Jewish state legitimizes Arab participation in fateful decisions).87 All four parameters that Smooha uses as the difference between a Jewish and a Zionist state are current traits of Israel and strongly supported by most Jews (dimensions 1 and 4 represent particularly the right-wing factions). In other words, when Arabs resist the existence of Israel as a Zionist state they reject the state as has existed since 1948, and as most Jews strongly favor. No wonder than that Smooha’s survey show that most Arabs support the change of Israel into a binational state or, put simply, the end of Israel as a Jewish state. Moreover, some characteristics do not fit into a single category. The Law of Return, which aims to preserve the Jewish majority in the state, is the essence of the meaning of a Jewish state, and not only of what Smooha defi nes as a Zionist state. The same applies to the issue of settlement policy. On the other hand, there are many Zionists who do not insist on excluding Arabs from existential decisions or on expanding Israel’s borders beyond the 1948 borders. Smooha challenges the criticisms of his conclusions by asking, “How can one explain the fi nding that most of the Arabs agree that: ‘The [Palestinian] refugees should receive suitable compensation and be permitted to return only to the Palestinian state?’”88 The explanation is that this is the position of the Fatah leadership of the PA, based on realpolitik considerations. In my opinion, evaluating Jewish-Arab relations on the basis of detecting the groups’ political positions is insufficient from a methodological point of view. In order to assess the level of mutual acceptance or rejection, one

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should consider their political behavior, as this book presents, not their political affl iations. Moreover, Jewish-Arab relations are not necessarily consistent or linear. The confl ict is a dynamic one and changes between radicalization and politicization according to the main two generators (Israel’s confl ict on the Palestinian plane and government policy toward the Arab minority) influencing the political behavior of both Arabs and Jews. Jewish Political Behavior: A Zionist Counterattack The October 2000 riots and the second Palestinian uprising—the al-Aqsa intifada—were perceived by the Jewish public as additional evidence of the Israeli Arabs’ affi liation with the Palestinian terrorist actions against the Israeli population. During 2000–2003, the increased involvement of Arab citizens in terror incidents had a significant influence on the attitude of the Jewish group. For example, Ashraf Qaysi from Baqa al-Gharbiyya (age twenty-eight) was sentenced to five life sentences in prison for assisting a jihad terrorist who in February 2005 blew up the Stage Club in Tel Aviv, resulting in the deaths of five civilians and fi fty civilians injured. Following the release of data on the number of Israeli Arabs involved in terror activity, the columnist Uzi Benziman wrote, “Arab leaders are making their lives easy by claiming that the rate of those involved in terrorist actions is low. They are not aware of the objective significance of what we see: a young militant generation of a discriminated national minority, which does not accept the Zionist defi nition of Israel, and the subjective manner in which it is perceived by the Jewish majority and its leadership—a threat to the state’s existence as the national home of the Jewish people. They were apprehensive about confronting the Islamic movement, which is the major hotbed for the incubation of terrorist cells. By so doing, the Israeli Arab leadership clears the way for Sharon to act as he sees fit.”89 Ariel Sharon also accused the Israeli Arabs of cooperating with the terrorism of the Palestinians in the territories. The Or Commission reviewed statements by Arab members of the Knesset and of the Follow-up Committee and concluded that they contributed to a general atmosphere of incitement and escalation of hostility. The many statements of empathy for the intifada made by Arab Knesset members Azmi Bishara, Muhamad Barake,

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‘Abd al Malik Dahamsha, Ahmad Tibi, and Talab al-Sani‘ were perceived by many in the Jewish public as an indication of “identification with the enemy at time of war.” The fact that Arab members of Knesset advocated the elimination of the state’s Jewish identity, including instituting Nakba ceremonies on Israel’s day of independence, together with the increase of Arab participation in terrorist actions and the talk of a demographic threat all strengthened the sense of danger felt by the Jewish public. In addition to the external pressure, the rivalry among political forces within the Arab sector and among its leaders contributed to the augmented identification of Israeli Arabs with the Palestinian struggle. Amnon Rubinstein, a leading politician from the centrist Shinuy party, a former cabinet minister, and a prominent professor of law (and the president of the Interdisciplinary Center—a private university in Herzlia), wrote an opinion piece that explains clearly the motivation of Israeli Jews for viewing the Arab minority as a security threat and restricting their mobilization. Rubinstein wrote, “Jews are accused of being paranoid. Perhaps it is true, but their past justifies their paranoia. Some say that Israelis are even more paranoid. Possibly. But their present justifies their fears. The present, and not Auschwitz, or more precisely, the present in addition to Auschwitz highlights their fears. The threats expressed by Arabs and Muslims to eliminate [Israel] prove that this paranoia is not unfounded.”90 Rubinstein reveals the Israeli Jewish psyche in a nutshell. The Jewish reaction to the political behavior of Arabs since October 2000 took place on three levels: on the official level, the government reacted with a strict demographic policy and with administrative as well as legislative actions aimed at blocking identification with violent actions against Israelis. On the political level, Jewish members of the Knesset initiated a number of laws aimed at strengthening the Jewish nature of the state and restricting the freedom of political action of Arab members of the Knesset. Jewish political figures who held hard-line and racist positions reacted with hostility against the Arab population and its leaders. Moreover, journalists, even those who were not from the right-wing camp, published opinion pieces strongly criticizing the Arab leadership and justifying some of the government’s measures, such as supporting the charges laid against MK Azmi Bishara in court and the attempt of the Central Election Committee to disqualify him and his party from running. On the public level, the Jewish

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community in general expressed hostility toward the Arab citizens. This was indicated by public opinion surveys that showed their support for discrimination against Arabs and their readiness to transfer the Triangle area, with its predominantly Arab population, to the Palestinian authority. There were also reactions from other public and private elements. One example was a new Web site called “Hebrew Employment,” which listed businesses that do not employ Arabs. (The state attorney ordered an investigation of the Web site to see if it was violating antidiscrimination laws.) 91 Finally, the intensified situation led also to a Jewish terrorist action against innocent Israeli Arabs in Shifa‘amru in August 2005. Eden Nathan Zada opened fi re in a bus in Shifa‘amru and killed three Arab passengers and the driver (who also was an Arab) before being killed himself. A few Arab citizens were charged with lynching the shooter. Arabs protested these charges, and in 2007 it seemed as if the court would discharge the persons who were arrested for the lynching. Bills Initiated by Members of the Knesset Legislative initiatives by members of the Knesset, even when rejected, reflect the public atmosphere. In the three years following the breakout of the intifada in 2000, Knesset members, especially the right-wing ones, introduced many bills in response to the Arab leaders’ challenges. The most radical proposal was that of MK Michael Kleiner (Likud, Herut) who submitted a bill encouraging emigration of Israeli Arabs to Arab countries: those who emigrated and renounced their Israeli citizenship would receive fi nancial aid from the state. The Committee for Knesset Affairs did not disqualify the bill, in spite of the fact that the Knesset legal advisor, Ana Schneider, stated that it was undemocratic and should not even have a fi rst reading. This indicates that the bill had support beyond the extreme right. However, in the end, the bill was not brought before the Knesset for technical reasons.92 Another bill aimed eliminating the Nakba commemoration as an alternative ceremony to Israel’s Day of Independence. The Knesset members of HaIhud HaLeumi party, together with MK Nahum Langental from NRP, submitted a bill called “Independence Day and the Prohibition of Nakba Commemorations.” In explaining the bill, they stated that Arab elements were undermining the existence of the state of Israel in order to disintegrate it from

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within. In response, the Balad-affi liated Mada al-Carmel Center argued that this bill demanded that the Arabs be happy on a day of their mourning.93 Jewish Knesset members also reacted to the Supreme Court ruling in the Qa‘adan case in which the Katzir (Jewish) settlement could not bar an Arab from purchasing land owned by the JNF to build his house (see chapter 8). The bill, submitted in February 2002 by twenty-two right-wing Knesset members (initiated by MK Haim Drukman from the NRP), was intended to circumvent the judgment and allow the Jewish Agency to allocate land to Jewish settlements only, if it was necessary to preserve the character of the settlements. The explanatory note of the bill stated explicitly that the law was initiated in response to the Supreme Court ruling: In its judgment, the Supreme Court actually invalidated the operation of the Jewish Agency according to its goals and purposes and pulled the carpet from under the basis of its activity of Jewish settlement in Israel. The court preferred the principle of equality, of a state of all its citizens over the value of a Jewish state, when it recognized the right of the plaintiff to construct his house right in the midst of a commune settlement, even when the plaintiff could purchase state land for housing on a nearby hill within the boundaries of the same settlement and in the same regional council.94

Here again, the Knesset Presidential Committee approved the submission of the bill in spite of the fact that the Knesset legal advisor wrote that it was racist. The government expressed its support for the bill, and it was only strong public criticism that led to its suppression by a Knesset committee. It should be noted that sixty-one Knesset members signed the bill, and presumably a majority would have approved it.95 Another bill reacting to Arab political behavior—one that would outlaw the Islamic Movement—was submitted in November 2000 (one month after the October riots) by MK Israel Katz (Likud). In the explanatory note to his bill, Katz wrote that the Islamic Movement organized conventions in stadiums around the country during which speakers urged the Muslim population to act against Israeli rule. Katz later froze his bill because he could not get a majority in the Knesset. However, the General Security Service recommended in September 2002 that the government outlaw the Islamic

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Movement after the seventh convention that the movement organized claiming “al-Aqsa is in danger,” but no action was taken.96 A number of bills were aimed at the challenge by Balad and other Arab political groups to the Jewish nature of the state. In November 2000, nineteen Knesset members submitted a bill named “Basic Law, the state of Israel as a Jewish and Democratic state,” which included, among other things, an assertion that Israel is bound by the values of the Jewish people throughout the generations. Other bills submitted by Jewish MKs from both Likud and Labor aimed at entrenching Jewish symbols associated with the state, and some of them also suggested removing Arabic as an official language.97 None of these bills, however, were passed by the Knesset.98 Statements by Jewish Public Figures The strong concern felt by Jews about the processes in the Arab sector resulted in a large number of articles and public announcements in the press. The views of As‘ad Ghanen of Haifa University, also codirector of the Sikkuy association (a Jewish-Arab NGO striving for equality for Arab citizens), spurred Aharon Layish, a professor at Hebrew University and a member of the board of directors of Sikkuy, to publish an opinion piece in which he stated, “The ideological trends that are apparent among Arab intellectuals who are citizens of the state, and whose cultural and political identity had been constructed in Israel, are disturbing. Ghanem’s call to change the nature of the state, stemming from his nonacceptance of its existence, is crossing the line. The very discussion of such an option might impede the delicate relationship between the Jewish and Arab public in Israel.”99 Senior politicians including current and former prime ministers announced that dangerous trends were developing among Israeli Arabs. Some said even nondemocratic measures needed to be taken against the Israeli Arabs. Ehud Barak warned that if the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation continued, the Arab citizens of Israel might be used as the Palestinian front line in their struggle, which could require changes in the constitution in order to safeguard the Jewish nature of Israel. Barak also supported the transfer of territories that contained large Arab populations such as Umm alFahm and the Little Triangle to the Palestinian state within the framework

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of a future exchange of territories. He added that such an action would take a mutual settlement and recommended that government spokespeople discuss it openly.100 The historian Benny Morris (who interviewed Barak) said that the Arab minority is a threat to the existence of the state, a small threat that may become an existential threat in the not-so-distant future due to demographic developments.101 Binyamin Netanyahu made similar comments.102 Ariel Sharon also supported this line of argument. In a visit to the “security fence,” he said that a small minority of Israeli Arabs assist the terrorists, and their number is growing.103 Another episode that demonstrated the belief that Arabs were the enemy was a bill submitted by MK Israel Katz (Likud) aiming to disqualify Knesset members who support terror. When his bill was heard in the plenum, Katz distributed pamphlets to Knesset members titled “Everyone and His Own bin Laden: We Have to Stop the Terror inside the Knesset.” He included pictures of Arab members of the Knesset alongside a picture of Osama bin Laden.104 Even MK Ayub Qara, a Druze Knesset member from Likud, defi ned his Arab colleagues in December 2002 as “extremists” who are existential threats to the state of Israel. He said that he would not think twice about outlawing the more extreme Arab members of Knesset: fi rst and foremost, Ahmad Tibi and Azmi Bishara. He added, “The real enemy of the state of Israel is not Arafat but these members of the Knesset who make cynical use of democracy, and they are a real existential danger to Israel.”105 Prior to his nomination as minister of justice, MK Yosef (Tomi) Lapid, one of fi fteen MKs from the Shinuy party, wrote in his party’s newspaper, The exacerbation of the relationship with Israeli Arabs is the severest of dangers, and one must combat the phenomenon of betrayal with increased intensity. Until the current intifada, Israeli Arabs displayed loyalty to the state, perhaps even to a surprising extent. However, the case of the Bakri family [who assisted a terrorist to detonate a bomb on a bus in the Meron junction] from the Bi‘na village, the exposure of twenty-five terrorist organizations among Israeli Arabs in the last year, extreme demonstrations by the Islamic Movement, hostility of Arab students in the universities, and the demagogic incitement of the Arab members of Knesset, all of these raise substantial suspicion that there is a nationalistic-Islamic current among significant sections of the Arab public.106

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A more radical statement was made by a retired judge known for his right-wing views. Uri Shtruzman said in a newspaper interview, “I certainly recognize the principle of equality. I certainly agree that every person was created in God’s image. But we are in a situation that no nation has faced before; a state with a national minority whose extended family members— brothers, cousins, and brothers-in-law—fight against the state. Therefore, in existential matters, Arabs simply have no right to participate in decision making. At best, their opinion will be colored by a confl ict of interest. Ahmad cannot decide about the budget for my security while Yusuf is fighting against my son in Ramalla.”107 Attacks by Jewish Journalists and Academics Jewish public figures from the entire political spectrum strongly attacked the Israeli Arab leadership, especially after the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada. Columnist Ari Shavit, for example, wrote that Azmi Bishara did not make the effort to distinguish between a legitimate struggle against the occupation and an illegitimate struggle against the existence of the Jewish nation-state. He stated, “From the moment that a parliament elected a member who publicly supports using violence against his own state, he has crossed the line, he leaves the realm of ideological discussion and enters the sphere of a blood struggle. Consciously or not, he becomes a partner to those who attempt to bring the state—to whose parliament he belongs—to its knees.”108 Public Opinion Surveys and Support for Transfer A number of public opinion surveys conducted in Israel between 2001 and 2003 showed that some Jews delegitimized Arabs in a manner that borders on racism. In a survey conducted by the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies in April/May 2001, 53 percent of the Jews surveyed said that the al-Aqsa intifada changed their attitude toward the Arab citizens for the worse. The following are some specific attitudes revealed in the Mada al-Carmel report and in other surveys. Loyalty to the State. In a survey conducted by Ma‘ariv-Gallup published on 25 May 2001, 67 percent of the Jews said that, in their opinion, Arab

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citizens of Israel were not interested in the state of Israel existing as an independent state. Only 24 percent said that Arabs were loyal to the state (compared to 38 percent who believed so in February 2000).109 In another survey, most of Jews responded that Arabs would display more loyalty to a Palestinian state than to Israel.110 Depriving Arabs of Political Rights. A poll of late 2000 found that 72 percent of Jewish interviewees said, that in their view, Arab members of the Knesset who openly support Syria and the Palestinians should be dismissed. Another fi nding was that 58 percent of the Jews said that if Ehud Barak won the elections due to Arab votes, he did not have a mandate to sign a peace agreement with the Palestinians.111 In another survey conducted by the Jaffa Center in 2002, 80 percent of Jews said that they opposed the participation of Arabs in key national decisions such as the return of territories and the determination of the state’s borders. This survey also found that 72 percent of the Jewish respondents opposed the inclusion of Arab parties in the government coalition (compared to 46 percent before the October 2000 protests).112 Transfer of Arabs from the State. In a survey conducted by Badi Hassaissi and Reuven Pedatzur in November 2000, 62 percent of the Jews supported the idea of government encouragement of Arab emigration. These supporters were not split along lines of education level. Among them, 25 percent were from the left.113 The Status of Israeli Arabs. A 2003 survey conducted by Asher Arian found that 47 percent of the Jewish interviewees believed the Arab citizens received overly sympathetic treatment from the government, 71 percent believed that complaints by Arabs regarding their situation were unfounded, and 58 percent believed that the behavior of Israeli Arabs was the main cause of tensions between Jews and Arabs.114 The survey also found that only 11 percent of the Jews believed that the state was responsible for the condition of the Israeli Arabs; 49 percent believed the Arabs were responsible for their own condition and the rest (40 percent) believed that the responsibility falls on both parties. Half of the interviewees believed that the government should be strict about enforcing the law on the Arabs and the other half thought the state ought to treat them equally.115

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Preference for Jews. In a survey conducted in November 2001, it was found that 57 percent supported the statement that the government should give priority to its Jewish citizens when allocating resources.116 Democracy. The counteractions mentioned in this chapter indicate the weakening of the state’s democratic fabric as the Jewish public and its leaders take action to suppress the political opposition of Arab citizens to the Jewish state. A study conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute showed that 53 percent of the Jews were opposed to the idea of equality for Arabs and 77 percent believed that a Jewish majority is needed for critical decisions. Only 31 percent supported the inclusion of Arab parties in the government coalition, and 57 percent believed that emigration of Arabs should be encouraged by the government. The study defi ned the Israeli democracy as a formal rather than a substantial democracy.117 Amos Schocken, the publisher of Haaretz, also came to the conclusion that the democratic values of Israel are weakening, as he said in a lecture to the Israeli Media Association on 13 April 2003 at Bar Ilan University. Schocken argued that the Israeli public was losing interest in democracy and that to call Israel a democracy today was like calling the apartheid regime in South Africa a democracy.118 Schocken perhaps exaggerated in his assessment, but his argument certainly indicates that the Israeli democracy was undergoing a crisis. An Israeli-Jewish Covenant The ever-widening splits within Israeli society, as well as the spreading awareness of the demographic discourse, led to the “Kineret Covenant,” a document drafted in 2001 by sixty Jews from the entire political spectrum. The goal of the covenant was to stress the Jewish nature of the state while expressing readiness to give equal personal civil rights to Arab citizens. Among those who signed the document were right-wingers such as Effie Eitam, Uzi Arad, and Yoram Hazoni; rabbis from different perspectives such as Rabbi Yoel Ben-Nun, Rabbi Yirenboim, Rabbi Eliyahu Ben Shlomo, Rabbi Moti Bar Or, and Rabbi Yehuda Gilad; political centrists such as Arnon Soffer, General Hertzel Bodinger, and General Uzi Dayan (who initiated the project); and leftists such as Yael Tamir (Labor).

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The fi fth article of the covenant stated, The state of Israel has the duty to treat all its citizens in an equal manner without bias. In the particular areas where non-Jewish Israeli citizens suffer from discrimination and neglect, the state should act decisively and immediately to implement the principle of civil equality in practice. Israel should recognize the right of the Arab minority to preserve its linguistic, cultural, and national identity. The Jewish history and the Jewish tradition have taught us the disastrous consequences of discrimination against minorities. Israel cannot overlook this lesson, the Jewish nature of the state of Israel should not be used to justify discrimination between one citizen and another.119

The covenant drafters were criticized for not including Arab citizens in their discussions. They responded that the document’s primary objective was to achieve an internal agreement between Jews, and once this was achieved it could serve as a basis for dialogue in an attempt to reach an understanding with the Arab minority. Five years later, Arab organizations would produce their own national manifests challenging the Jewish nature of the state (to be discussed in chapter 12). Conclusion In the period discussed in this chapter, Jews and Arabs in Israel felt the aftershocks of the October 2000 protests and highly intensified developments in the Palestinian-Israeli arena. During this time, the Palestinian issue and particularly Israeli Arabs’ solidarity with the Palestinian intifada overshadowed government policy in its contribution to the escalation of the confl ict. The events in this realm intensified the process of delegitimization of the two ethnonational communities in Israel. The political atmosphere and public discourse were loaded with hostile expressions between the two groups. Among Jews, this tendency was reflected in the increase in the number of those who supported the idea of transferring Arabs outside the state and restricting the freedom of Arab politicians. Among Arabs, it was indicated by the amplification of challenges to the Jewish nature of the state, increased

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participation in boycotts of the general elections, and expressions of solidarity with enemies of Israel. Judging by the political behavior of Arabs and Jews, the period of the second intifada under Ariel Sharon as prime minister marked a significant escalation in the minority-majority confl ict in Israel. The Jewish public and its representatives in the Knesset were active during this period in taking actions versus the Arab minority and its political leaders. The government, a player in both the internal and the external confl icts with Palestinians, chose to follow a fi rm deterrent policy on both fronts. The clash took a violent form between Arabs and Jews in October 2000 and afterward continued in a discursive form, reflecting a major reality in the minority-majority confl ict in Israel. The Arabs viewed the October events as a legitimate protest and their support for the Palestinian intifada as a legitimate expression of their political position opposing Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. For Jewish Israelis, the Palestinian “resistance” was terrorism against civilians, and Arabs who identified with such actions were siding with an enemy at a time of war, betraying their state. The interlocking dimension of the internal confl ict is all pervasive. The IsraeliPalestinian external confl ict strongly influences the internal confl ict to the extent that it overshadows government discriminatory policies; the coercive measures taken by the Jewish establishment described here express a counterreaction to the political activity and discourse of the Arab leadership.

11

Future Vision

du r i ng a r i e l s h a r on’s t e n u r e , Ehud Olmert was widely viewed as Sharon’s right-hand man because he was his most important ally during the unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip. When Sharon announced his intention to leave Likud, due to its opposition to his disengagement strategy, and form a new party, Kadima, Olmert was one of the fi rst to join him. Israel implemented the disengagement plan in August–September 2005 successfully. In preparation for Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, Fatah and Hamas had called a cease-fi re on attacks against Israel in February 2005, but after the Israeli withdrawal, Palestinian attacks from the Gaza Strip against Israelis resumed. In January 2006, Ariel Sharon suffered a severe hemorrhagic stroke and entered a long period of coma. Ehud Olmert became acting prime minister, and two months after the general elections of March 2006, Olmert formed the government. The Political Setting In the March 2006 Knesset elections, Kadima gained twenty-nine seats and was the largest party in the Knesset. Labor obtained nineteen seats and Likud decreased to an all-time low of only twelve seats. In May, Olmert formed a coalition government of seventy-eight MKs with Labor (nineteen seats), Israel Beitenu (eleven seats), Shas (twelve seats), and the new pensioners’ party Gil (seven seats). In 2006 and 2007, Olmert’s government has faced three major external challenges that have affected internal politics: fi rst, Israel’s second war with Lebanon in July–August 2006, followed by the Winograd Commission of Inquiry that placed much of the blame for Israel’s inadequate performance in the war on PM Olmert; second, the Palestinian 268

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confl ict, particularly the daily launch of Qassam rockets and mortar bombs from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip at the Israeli town Sderot and other localities close to Gaza; and third, Iran’s nuclear project combined with its president’s hostile pronouncements against Israel’s right to exist. In July 2008, Olmert announced that he would resign once his Kadima party elected a new leader. His deputy, Tzipi Livni, won the primary election but failed to form a government coalition. The Israeli general election on February 2009 ended with a clear reinforcement of the right-wing parties over the center-left parties: 53 percent versus 44 percent—a reverse from the 2006 elections. Labor shrank to thirteen seats in the parliament and the fourth party in size, while Israel Beitenu headed by Avigdor Lieberman increased from eleven to fifteen seats in the Knesset and not only became the third biggest party but also had decisive power in the formation of the government’s coalition. Lieberman’s major banner was aimed against the Arabs in Israel: “No Citizenship Without Allegiance.” The breakdown of the election results showed that the right-wing parties won landslide support in Israel’s periphery in the south and north—the regions that were targeted by Hizballah’s rockets in 2006 and Hamas rockets in the south. Lieberman was the main challenge of the Arab parties. Polls prior to the elections showed that Arab voters’ turnout would significantly decrease (from 56 percent to about 45 percent). In addition, the Central Committee of Elections, with a dominant representation of (mostly Zionist) parties, decided to ban two Arab parties (Raam-Taal and Balad) under the election law that rules out a party or a candidate opposing Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and identifying with terrorist organizations. The High Court overruled this decision, but it appears that the Central Committee’s effort to ban these two parties boosted their popularity among the Arab electorate. It was also a concern that Balad would not cross the threshold in the event of low turnout. However, in the last hours of election day, members of Arab parties used megaphones in the streets to call upon eligible voters to respond actively to Lieberman, who represents Zionism in their eyes. Strengthening the Arab parties was their response to both Zionism and Lieberman’s program. As a result the Arab turnout decreased by 3 percent (to 53 percent) of the electorate. However, support for the Zionist parties diminished from 27 percent in 2006 to 18 percent—the lowest in

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Israel’s history. The Arab parties gained eleven seats in the Knesset: Hadash and Raam-Taal (four seats each) and Balad (three seats, including a woman, Hanin Zu‘bi), and three Druze were elected, one in each of the Kadima, Likud, and Israel Beitenu parties. While in the transition period before the elections, Olmert announced that peace with the Palestinians is acheivable as well as with Syria, and that Israel should return Arab neigborhoods in Jerusalem to the Palestinian Authority in a framework of a peace agreement. Other regional tensions also intensified during this term, including the ongoing war in Iraq and the deterioration of relations between Israel and Syria and Iran. The Iranian nuclear project was a major issue for the Israeli government in 2008, as well as creating a significant challenge for the U.S. administration. During his campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama said that diplomacy should be used together with other economic measures to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. In the international context, Israel has no choice but to rely on the United States and the European Union in regard to Iran. Its government can only urge the United States to exert political pressure with economic sanctions and UN resolutions in the hope of pressuring Iran to suspend its nuclear project. However, the Israeli government decided to take direct action in Syria. In September 2007, the Israeli airforce destroyed a Syrian nuclear facility that was secretly being developed with North Korean assistance. With the global economic meltdown of 2008, both the United States and Israel have been left in a weaker position. These events strengthened the right wing of Israeli Jewish society. The political and security threats to Israel from the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and from Hizballah in the north from Lebanon strongly affected Olmert’s government and made his political platform of unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank irrelevant. Indeed, the year 2006 saw a number of events that boded ill for further Israeli withdrawals. In January 2006, Hamas’s victory in the PA elections put them in control of the Legislative Council. The continuous attacks against Israelis by radical organizations from the Gaza Strip were followed by an armed action from Gaza against an IDF installation, which resulted in the abduction of an Israeli soldier in June 2006. Shortly afterward Hizballah carried out an unprovoked military attack on Israel’s border with Lebanon that resulted in the death of three Israeli soldiers and a claim that they had

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abducted another two soldiers. However, only when a deal of exchange of prisoners had been made between Israel and Hizballah was it discovered that the two “abducted” were actually dead bodies. These events triggered Israel’s second Lebanon war. Due to Israel’s poor performance in the war, Olmert’s popularity ratings plummeted. After the Winograd Commission of Inquiry decided that Olmert was responsible for the failure of the second Lebanon war, many expected him to leave office, but he refused to do so. Additionally, there have been a series of police investigations into accusations of private and public corruption. In response to these pressures, Olmert has tried to push for dialogue with the Palestinians, causing tensions in his coalition. In November 2008 Democrat Barack Obama won the U.S. elections and was sworn in 20 January 2009, only twenty days before Israel’s election that brought the right-wing Likud party’s Binyamin Netanyahu to power. Obama appointed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, and his agenda regarding the Middle East was for a policy of engagement as a means to manage or solve confl icts in the theaters of Iraq, Iran, and Palestine/Israel. The Palestinian Dimension After Yasser Arafat’s death in 2004, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) was his successor. On 9 January 2005, Abbas was elected with 62 percent of the vote as the new president of the Palestinian Authority while Hamas boycotted the election. On December 14, Abbas called for an end to violence in the al-Aqsa intifada and a return to nonviolent resistance. However, attacks by militant groups continued after his election as a direct challenge to his authority, and in the January 2006 PA elections to the Legislative Council, Hamas won a majority of votes while Fatah lost its popularity. Hamas openly states that it does not recognize Israel’s right to exist, although they have expressed willingness to negotiate a long-term hudna or truce. In June 2006, violence on both sides escalated, and Hamas called off its sixteen-month-old cease-fi re. Since that time, Israeli military incursions into Gaza and Palestinian rocket attacks on Israeli cities have continued. Later in June 2006, an Israeli soldier was abducted by Palestinian militants. Israel reacted by arresting sixty-four Hamas politicians in the cabinet and Legislative Council.

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On 17 March 2007, a Palestinian unity government was formed incorporating members of both Hamas and Fatah, with Ismail Haniyeh (Hamas) as prime minister and independent politicians taking many key portfolios. However, following the discovery of a Hamas plot to overthrow Fatah control in the Gaza Strip in June 2007, Abbas dissolved the Hamas-led unity government and declared a state of emergency, and appointed Salam Fayyad in his place. The PA was now split between two governments, one in each of its territories. Gaza has been subjected to economic sanctions due to Hamas’ nonrecognition of Israel, and sporadic fighting between Israel and Hamas in Gaza has continued. The policy of Israel, the United States, and several allied governments, was to censure Hamas for its nonrecognition of Israel, and to assist and deal with President Abbas and Fatah, in support of their stance in favor of recognition of Israel. With the assistance of Egypt, Israel and Hamas unofficially agreed upon a six-month “calmness” (tahdi’ah) arrangement of ceasefi re in the second half of 2008. The two parties had different interpretations of what led to the end of the ceasefi re, which culminated in an Israeli military onslaught in Gaza. The operation named “Cast Lead” resulted in about 1,300 Palestinian and 13 Israeli soldiers’ deaths, a large number of injured among the Palestinians, and houses damaged or razed by aircraft bombs or tank rockets. It was expected that Israeli Arabs in such a situation would empathize with Hamas against Israel’s operation. In this sense the Gaza operation only accelerated the process of polarization between Jews and Arabs in Israel. U.S. president George W. Bush initiated the Annapolis Peace Conference, which took place in November 2007, a forum for Israelis and Palestinians to agree upon an outline for negotiating a permanent solution in the framework of the two-state solution. PA president Abbas and Israeli PM Olmert had been meeting repeatedly since June 2007 in an attempt to agree on some basic issues ahead of the conference. Following the Annapolis conference, Israeli and Palestinian teams continued to meet on a regular basis. In January 2008, following Israel’s negotiation with the PA on the permanent issues, the Israel Beitenu party left the coalition, and the Shas party threatened to leave if Olmert negotiated the permanent status of Jerusalem. The negotiation process ended in December 2008 when Israel launched the military onslaught against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. PM Olmert announced

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that negotiations were bringing Israel and the PA very close to reaching an agreement. Whether this was an accurate estimate or not, the process did not yield an agreement. Government Policy In October 2006, tensions between the Jewish and Arab communities were inflamed when Prime Minister Olmert decided to include the right-wing Israel Beitenu party in his coalition government. This decision was controversial due to a proposal by party leader Avigdor Lieberman to transfer a heavily populated Arab area (the triangle bordering the West Bank) from Israel to the Palestinian Authority as part of a peace proposal; Arab Israelis did not want to change their citizenship. Several months after this appointment, the fi rst Arab minister in Israel’s history, Ghaleb Majadla (Labor), was appointed as minister without portfolio. He later became a full-fledged government minister of Culture, Science, and Sport. This was perhaps the most significant policy change during Olmert’s tenure. Majadla was put forward by the head of the Labor party, Amir Peretz, who received significant support in the internal Labor elections from Arab voters facilitated by Majadla. Majadla is a street-smart politician who gained his political experience and support by long activity in the Histadrut, but he characterizes the 28 percent Arab voters to the Zionist parties. Arab parties’ leaders and activists criticized his nomination and said that this is only a titular action that neglects the Arab need to be treated as equals to the Jews in Israel in terms of their national rights.1 Olmert made another symbolic gesture by dedicating a day-long meeting with a group of thirty Arab and thirty Jewish academics and public figures convened by the Israel Democracy Institute on suggested policies regarding the Arab minority. In his concluding words to the forum, Olmert addressed Shawqi Khatib by his title as the head of the Supreme Follow-up Committee, which shows a sign of official recognition of this leading Arab national committee.2 Olmert made it clear that he did not view the Arab minority as a strategic threat to the state and reported actions taken by his office in order to reduce disparities between Arab and Jewish localities: allocating 33 percent of the budget to rehabilitate north Israel after the Lebanon war to be invested in

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Arab localities, plans to establish an agency for economic development of the Arab sector and a private equity fund to be invested in forty to eighty joint ventures between the government and private Arab entrepreneurs annually, investing 400 million NIS to solve the sewage problems of Arab localities, and establishing joint Jewish-Arab industrial zones. Olmert concluded the meeting with a statement that within one year he would convene a special PM’s convention for Arab minority issues. However, the outcomes of this meeting with Olmert did not meet the participants’ expectations, nor did his follow-up convention. In 2006, the Adalah Center, in the name of the Supreme Follow-up Committee, submitted an important fi le to the Israeli Supreme Court in regard to the “National Priorities Zones” list, resulting in a landmark court decision.3 Since 1993, fi nancial priority (including educational funding) had been given to a list of 500 localities, which included only four Arab villages. The Supreme Court ruled that this distribution was illegal as it contradicted the concept of the equality of all citizens.4 As a result, the government abolished the whole fi nancial prioritizing system of “National Priority Zones.” This was an important victory for the Arab population. However, three government actions in the period 2006–2008 angered the Arab population. The fi rst was the continuing policy to prevent naturalization of Palestinians (and other citizens from Arab countries) who had married an Israeli Arab spouse by extending the implementation of the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (Temporary Provision) which was discussed in chapter 10. The second policy issue that inflamed Arab citizens was a decision by the Land Authority to prevent Arabs from bidding on JNF-owned land in Jewish localities. This issue, discussed in chapter 1, was intensively debated by the public during the period under review. In 2007, a bill submitted by Uri Ariel (NRP), Zeev Elkin (Kadima), Moshe Kahlon (Likud), and sixteen more MKs aimed to bypass the Supreme Court’s ruling regarding the JNF lands.5 In July 2007, this bill passed its preliminary reading by a massive majority of 64 to 16. Interestingly, left-wing MK Ami Ayalon (Labor) was among the supporters of the law.6 Hadash chairman MK Muhammad Barakeh called the bill “abominable legislation” and added that “the Knesset’s face is the face of Uri Ariel, the radical of the settlers.” He maintained, “This

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is another expression of a series of racist laws that are passed every day in the state of the Jews. The Arab population won’t accept the theft of their rights to the lands that have been expropriated from them for years.” MK Elkin, however, said that the bill was introduced to prevent the state of Israel from breaching the basic treaty between the state and the JNF and to make historical justice.7 In September 2007, the Supreme Court agreed to delay a ruling on the law by at least four months. A temporary settlement was reached where the JNF is prevented from discriminating on grounds of ethnicity but when land is sold to a non-Jew, the ILA will compensate it with an equivalent amount of land, thus ensuring the total amount of land owned by the JNF remains the same.8 Also in 2007, the JNF and the government exchanged all JNF urban lands for substitute government lands in the Negev. In addition, a precedent was introduced, when an Israeli Arab, Ra’adi Safuri, was chosen by the Meretz party to become the fi rst Arab to be one of the twenty-two JNF governors. Three members of the JNF’s General Assembly attempted to block the appointment in Jerusalem’s District Court, but were unsuccessful.9 The third issue to anger the Arab population was a decision by the Ministry of Education to establish in every school in Israel a “Nation’s Educational Corner” in honor of Israel’s sixtieth anniversary in which the 1948 Declaration of Independence would be presented and students could add their signature to the thirty-seven original signatories. Arab political leaders and educators objected, asserting that although the declaration calls for integrating Arabs on equal footing, it did not represent the historical narrative and outlook of the Arab minority.10 In July 2008, the Israeli Knesset passed a law stating that whoever visited an enemy country could not be elected to the Knesset. The law was aimed to prevent Arab MKs from visiting Syria and other countries hostile to Israel and the reelection of MK Azmi Bishara (Balad). Arab Political Behavior Four things during Olmert’s term reflect an escalation in the Arab attitude toward the state and the Jewish majority: the 2006 election results, solidarity with Hizballah in the second war with Lebanon, a series of constitutional-

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like manifestos reflecting the Arab elite’s vision for the future, and popular opposition to the government’s introduction of voluntary civilian service for Arab youth who are exempt from military service. The March 2006 elections showed a significant decrease in Arab participation from 62 percent in 2003 to 56 percent in 2006. Although voter turnout declined among Jews also (63 percent), the decrease of participation among Arabs reflected a decade-long trend (from 77 percent in 1996). Majid al-Haj grounded this phenomenon in three reasons: the fact that Arabs are excluded from having an effective influence on policies, popular rejection of the Arab leaders and parties who fail to unify their forces, and ideological factors.11 The Arab party that gained the largest percentage of voters was the Arab Unity List (AUL) joined by Ahmad Tibi’s Ta‘al (AMC) party, who received 37.5 percent of the Arab electorate (four seats in the Knesset). This was the only party that addressed the aspiration of many Arab citizens for unifying their forces. Hadash obtained 34 percent and three seats and Balad gained 28.5 percent and three seats as well.12 Nationally, Zionist parties lost 3 percent support of Arab voters (from 31 percent in 2003 to 28 percent in 2006). The Lebanon war of July–August 2006 erupted as an Israeli reaction to Hizballah provocation. Israel conducted a massive air strike in Lebanon, and Hizballah reacted by launching four thousand rockets and missiles at the northern part of Israel. Although 41 percent of the Israeli civilians who were killed in the rocket strikes were Arab citizens, the Arab population expressed sympathy with Hizballah and called for an immediate cessation of the Israeli military operation. A survey conducted shortly after the war found that 48.3 percent of the Arab population justified Hizballah’s rocket fi ring into Israel.13 As noted earlier, four weeks after the war, three Arab Knesset members of the Balad party together with two former MKs visited Syria, challenging Israeli law and provoking the Israeli Jewish public. The Arabs’ alienation from the state was also indicated by the fi ndings of the 2006 Patriotism Survey of the Herzlia Institute for Policy and Strategy. The survey results showed that 56 percent of Israeli Arabs were not proud in their Israeli identity and 73 percent were unwilling to fight to defend the state. Only 24 percent defi ned themselves as Israeli patriots while 48 percent defi ned themselves as Palestinian patriots. Ironically, a relatively

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high percentage—77 percent—believed that Israel provides better welfare facilities than most other states, compared to 66 percent of the Jews who so believed; 53 percent of the Arabs were proud of its welfare policies compared with only 17 percent of the Jews.14 In the realm of strategy construction, the “Future Vision” manifestos signify a landmark in the development of Israeli Arabs as a national minority that challenges Israel’s legitimacy to exist as a Jewish and Zionist state. Between December 2006 and May 2007, leading Arab organizations published four documents presenting their visions regarding the state of Israel and their future status in the state. The first and most challenging from a Jewish point of view was “Future Vision,” drafted by forty Arab academics and public figures under the umbrella of the National Committee of Arab Heads of Local Authorities.15 Shortly afterward, the “Democratic Constitution” was published by Adalah Center as an alternative constitution for Israel and a position paper called “An Equal Constitution to All” by Yousef Jabareen was published by the Mossawa Center.16 In May 2007 another manifesto, the “Haifa Declaration,” was published by the Mada al-Carmel Institute.17 The last document was made public on May 15—the official beginning of the 1948 war, which was marked by Arab organizations in Israel as Nakba Day.18 The drafting of these documents began in 2002 following the Kinneret Covenant discussed in chapter 10. They were also motivated by the activity among Jewish institutions and the Knesset Committee on the Constitution and Law to compose a constitution for Israel. The Arab elites thought that a constitution that enshrined the defi nition of Israel as a Jewish state would not only not give room to their interests but, once it was enacted by the Knesset, their situation might deteriorate further. As long as Israel had no constitution, if the Arabs felt discriminated against they could seek recourse at the Supreme Court of Justice. However, they did not expect that a constitution would put them on equal footing with Jews on issues such as immigration laws and cultural rights. Hence Arab MKs boycotted the sessions of the Committee on Law, Constitution, and Justice dealing with drafting of a constitution.19 Four major policy statements in the Future Vision documents challenged the existing system and the Jewish vision in Israel. The fi rst was a historical outlook that delegitimizes the raison d’être of Israel as a Jewish state. The

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documents view Israel as a colonial product and claim that Israel has the sole responsibility for the 1948 war and its “injustices” regarding the Palestinians. The second point was the strong rejection of the nature of the state as Jewish while suggesting in its place power sharing or a bilingual and multicultural state. Finally, the documents presented radical demands to reverse the post-1948 political situation with restitution and repatriation. The “Future Vision” document describes Israel as an “outcome of a settlement process initiated by the Zionist-Jewish elite in Europe and the west and realized by colonial countries contributing to it and by promoting Jewish immigration to Palestine.” The drafters argue further that “Israel cannot be defi ned as a democratic state. It can be defi ned as an ethnocratic state such as Turkey, Sri Lanka, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia (and Canada forty years ago).” The Haifa Declaration puts the historical perception even more strongly: “Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Zionist movement initiated its colonial-settler project in Palestine. Subsequently, in concert with world imperialism and with the collusion of the Arab reactionary powers, it succeeded in carrying out its project, which aimed at occupying our homeland and transforming it into a state for the Jews. In 1948, the year of the Nakba of the Palestinian people, the Zionist movement committed massacres against our people, turned most of us into refugees, totally erased hundreds of our villages, and drove most inhabitants out of our cities.” Regarding the defi nition of Israel, “Future Vision” states that “the official defi nition of Israel as a Jewish state created a fortified ideological barrier in the face of the possibility of obtaining full equality for the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel.” These citizens “also seek to obtain full equality with the Jewish majority” by means of self-rule within the state and a system based on consensual democracy that embodies the presence of two groups, the Jews and the Palestinians. With consensual democracy, the drafters seek to turn Israel from a Jewish and democratic state into a state of two nations that would exist within the same borders on an equal footing in power sharing and in the allocation of resources. This would include the right of the national minority to self-determination, to self-rule in education, culture, religion, and communication, and to veto decisions related to their vital interests. The drafters of this document seem to envision that a minority

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of 15 percent of the population would wield 50 percent of the country’s political power and resources.20 The proposed consensual democracy system of the Future Vision document differs from the model of the scholar who developed this concept, Arend Lijphart.21 Lijphart suggested an institutional power-sharing system in deeply divided societies that was governed by a broad political coalition that included all elements of the society.22 However, Lijphart himself noted that in order for this model to succeed, the society has to have a political culture of consensus in its community orientation and social awareness.23 Lijphart did not suggest overrepresentation of minorities as the Future Vision document is doing by giving a small minority half of the power. One of the critics of power sharing, Ian Lustick, noted that consensual democracy suffers from a number of deficits and could lead to a collapse of the regime, as happened in Lebanon and, more recently, Belgium.24 Israeli Jews would also criticize the consensual democracy concept because of their location. In the regional setting of nonstability, the Arab minority had an irredentist notion with the Arab and Muslim majority in the Middle East region. There might be a justification for nonproportional power sharing with a minority if it is at risk of assimilation and culture disappearance. This is not the situation of the Arab minority in Israel, whose culture is manifested in twenty-two countries populated by more than 300 million people; Islamic culture is presented in fi fty-seven countries and 1.3 billion people. The drafters of Future Vision demand that the state would fi rst recognize the injustices of the past toward the Palestinians. They do not show any readiness to take historical responsibility for the Arab and Palestinian roles in the resistance to the 1947 UN partition resolution and the declaration of war in 1948. To address these injustices, they demand to repatriate refugees to their original locations, return lands and abolish all laws referring to land settlement and ownership that discriminate against Arabs, forestall implementing the current Planning and Housing Law until equality is achieved, and fi nally, be partners in controlling and administering the public sphere. The Democratic Constitution drafted by the Adalah Center suggests an innovative model of a bilingual and multicultural democracy that views the future of Israel as having two hegemonic cultures on an equal footing, while political power would be granted by proportional representation. The

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Democratic Constitution demands a veto right only regarding public culture issues and state symbols. However, Adalah’s document undermines the Jewish essence of the state by demanding the abolition of the Law of Return and total separation between state and religion, and by introducing a dual state: Jewish and Palestinian-Arab, and a complete bilingual system on the national level including the courts and the media. The authors of the Democratic Constitution suggest three principles for a future constitution: distributive justice, restorative justice, and equality. Since they defi ne the Arab minority as a “minority in its homeland,” restorative justice includes the return of all land previously owned by Arabs and compensation for the lost years of using their land. They also demand state recognition of “traditional patterns of ownership” of the Bedouins over lands possessed by them. In the realm of foreign relations, the Democratic Constitution demands a withdrawal of Israel to the pre-June 1967 borders and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. They ignore the problem of confl ict of loyalties when they demand open contact of Arab citizens with the Arab and Muslim worlds (they do not exclude countries or organizations who are at war with Israel). The Arab political and academic elites who wrote these manifestos opted to explicitly put forward their political outlook and strategy, which envisions a 180 degree turn from the present reality in Israel. The Future Vision document uses the terminology of struggle. It aims fi rst at building up an elected Arab representative body to perhaps act as the minority’s parliament, and then to extend advocacy in the international community. Interestingly, the Hebrew version of the documents speaks about “changing the patterns of the Arab and Arab-Jewish struggle in the direction of multitrack and escalation of the struggle” while the English version does not mention the escalation, saying only “changing the Arab and Arab-Jewish struggles’ characteristics.”25 The constitution-like documents composed by Arab organizations during 2006 and 2007 envision a return to the pre-1948 situation and a revolutionary change of the state from a Jewish democratic state to power sharing, whether fi fty-fi fty or proportional, in a future Arab-Jewish state. The documents reflect the complete opposition of these Arabs to the present

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Israeli constitutional, political, and legal systems. In their view, they cannot obtain equality even through the Supreme Court of Justice. Therefore, they suggest overturning the existing political structures rather than reforming them. Shawqi Khatib, the head of the National Committee of the Heads of Local Authorities in Israel (and of the Supreme Follow-up Committee), expressed in his introduction to “Future Vision” the intention to have a dialogue with the Jewish majority on the proposals of the document. However, it is unclear how that text, which delegitimizes the right of Jews in Israel to self-determination and the very existence of the Jewish state, would serve as a basis for a dialogue. Unsurprisingly, soon after its publication “Future Vision” was strongly attacked by Jewish public opinion shapers. Two weeks after the publication of the document, the senior academics and members of the board of the Israel Democracy Institute, a key Jewish think tank, publicized “A Call to Israel’s Arabs”:

We wish to emphasize the severe anguish we feel in light of these documents. These papers deny the very nature of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. We reject this denial and its implication that there is an inescapable contradiction between the state’s Jewish and democratic nature. The documents present another repudiation, albeit more indirectly, of the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in Israel, including an indirect call to rescind the Law of Return. These documents delineate a binational model for our country, in which the Arab public demands, and rightly so, that the right of Palestinians to self-determination in a sovereign state alongside Israel be realized. Nonetheless, the rejection of the vision of two separate states for two peoples concerns us, as does the double standard applied to Jewish self-determination and Palestinian self-determination . . . these documents may even hinder future relations between Jews and Arabs. We fi nd these documents to be promoting separatism and attempting to deny the legitimacy of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination. This approach undermines the desire to create a common foundation of mutual respect and good will. This would be an impediment to the legitimate claims of the Arab public including participating in the government, assuming seniorlevel government positions, and receiving greater autonomy in education . . . Moreover, the contents of the above-mentioned documents are liable

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to encourage antidemocratic tendencies that, unfortunately, already exist in the Israeli public. What this will ultimately generate is a polarized discussion—a surefi re recipe for deepening the rifts and mutual hostility, fear, and mistrust.26

The ideological position of the Arab leadership was manifested again in November 2007. When Israel’s demands from the Palestinian delegation to recognize Israel as a Jewish state were publicized on the eve of the Annapolis Peace Conference, the Supreme Follow-up Committee sent a letter to PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas demanding that the Palestinian delegation reject such recognition. A third issue reflecting further polarization in 2007 was the campaign that the Arab leadership launched against the government’s introduction of a civilian service track for Arabs (and ultraorthodox Jews) who did not serve in the army. The Supreme Follow-up Committee and other Arab organizations were involved in actions in the media and on the ground against young Arabs who had volunteered for the community service. They warned that such an initiative might lead to conscription of Arabs into the army. The Follow-up Committee organized a convention on 27 October 2007 in Haifa following the government decision to establish a voluntary civic service program for Israeli Arabs instead of compulsory conscription. The convention was organized by Baladna—a special organization established to campaign against the civilian service proposal. The committee decided to advise Arab citizens to refrain from joining the service. MK Jamal Zahalqa said, “In our view, whoever would volunteer to the national service would be regarded as a leper and the Arab society would vomit him out, because the state attempts to ‘Israelize’ the Arab youth by blurring their Arab identity.”27 The leadership was not voicing the opinions of its constituents, however. A survey by Smooha underlined the gap between the Arab leadership and population regarding the civilian service: 75 percent of the interviewees supported the idea of the service, in contrast to their leadership’s strong opposition to the idea.28 One more step reflecting frustration with state policies was the Arab Educational Follow-up Committee’s decision to form a separate pedagogical unit to construct an educational strategy for the Arab population. This group would be a step toward self-administration of the Arab education system.29

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The above four political actions and positions of the Arab population versus the Israeli Zionist system and government policies in both domestic and foreign affairs were reflected in public opinion surveys conducted during 2005–2007. Sammy Smooha’s survey for the 2006 Coexistence Index showed the collective fears of Arabs and Jews of each other: 77.4 percent of the Arab citizens feared the expropriation of their land, 73.8 percent were afraid of state violence against them, and 71.5 percent of Jews’ violence; 60 percent were afraid that Israel would act to transfer them out of the state. Most (75.7 percent) of the Arab interviewers viewed Israel as a racist state, 28 percent denied the Holocaust, 34.6 percent supported boycotting elections, and 59.1 percent expressed satisfaction with the victory of Hamas in the 2006 elections to the PA legislative council. Smooha concluded that between 2003 and 2006 there has been a significant decrease in the number of Arabs who agree that Israel has right to exist.30 Regarding the question of how Arabs envision the future regime of Israel, two different surveys had totally different results. A survey conducted by Constitution by Consensus (IDI) indicated that 75 percent of the Arabs supported a constitution that would identify Israel as a Jewish and democratic state while safeguarding equality for all of its citizens.31 However, another survey conducted in late 2006 and early 2007 by the Yaffa Center found that only 13.9 percent of the Arabs (including Druze, many of whom serve in the army) supported the current identification of Israel as “a Jewish and democratic state,” while 39.7 percent preferred “a state of all its citizens” and 25.5 percent supported “a Jewish and democratic state safeguarding full equality to all of its citizens.”32 In light of the demands that were raised in the series of semi-constitutional manifestos, the survey found that 65.7 percent of the Arabs questioned suggested many of the ideas of the Future Vision document of consensual democracy; 68.5 percent supported an elected body to represent the Arab-Palestinians in Israel; 86.5 percent supported the return of internal refugees to their original villages. Nevertheless, 61 percent determined the relationship between Jews and Arabs as good or very good, which means that the Arabs distinguished between their personal attitudes toward Israeli Jews and the state policies and political agendas.33 In reference to Israel’s policy toward the Palestinian issue, a survey conducted by the Balad-affi liate Mada al-Carmel Center on the eve of the

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Annapolis Peace Conference (November 2007) found that 73 percent of Israeli Arabs were opposed to the PA and Israeli negotiation teams discussing an exchange of land based on demography, fearing that the Arabs of the Triangle would lose their citizenship rights in Israel. At the same time, 65 percent opposed recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, 79 percent insisted on the right of refugees to return, 81 percent believed that the Palestinian side in the Annapolis conference had no right to make concessions on the issue of Jerusalem, and 60.8 percent believed that it would be impossible for the Arab citizens of Israel to achieve equality while the state defi nes itself as Jewish. When the interviewees were asked for their opinion about a letter to be sent by the Follow-up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel to the Palestinian president Abu Mazen, demanding that he not recognize Israel as a Jewish state, 39.5 percent said that they support it, 30.6 percent opposed it, and 29.9 percent replied that they did not know.34 As for the right of return for Palestinian refugees, it emerged from the survey that 42.8 percent of the Arab citizens in Israel consider that the most appropriate solution is to give the refugees the right to return to their land in Israel. Many other attracted responses: 18.5 percent think that they should be allowed to choose between return and compensation, 8 percent think that some of the refugees ought to be allowed to return (especially those living in severe conditions) and granted compensation based on terms to be negotiated, 6 percent would settle the refugees in the Arab countries where they are living and compensate them, 5.8 percent would give fi nancial compensation only, and 6.6 percent did not know what the most appropriate solution is. Regarding the question about the role of Arabs in Israel in achieving the right of return, 66.9 percent replied that Israeli Arabs should actively demand the right of return, while 26.7 percent replied that they should not do so.35 An important UN resolution in 2007 regarding the rights of indigenous minorities might encourage the Arab leadership’s political agenda. By a vote of 143 in favor to 4 against (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States), with 11 abstentions (including Israel), the UN General Assembly passed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which sets out the individual and collective rights of the world’s 370 million native peoples, calls for the maintenance and strengthening of their cultural .

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identities, and emphasizes their right to pursue development in keeping with their own needs and aspirations. The declaration states that native peoples have the right “to the recognition, observance and enforcement of treaties” concluded with states or their successors. It also prohibits discrimination against indigenous peoples and promotes their full and effective participation in all matters that concern them.36 Although the resolution is not binding, it will undoubtedly affect the international discourse on minority rights and serve as a reference for future demands and resolutions. Jewish Political Behavior The dialectical dynamic of radicalizing attitudes toward the other ethnonational group is manifested by the Jewish majority’s actions and positions versus the Arab minority. The majority of the Jews in Israel who see the Arab citizens as belonging to their enemy camp only strengthened this view in light of the Arab positions and actions described above. The most antagonistic Arab positions during this period were their solidarity with Hizballah during and after the war in Lebanon and the section of the “Future Vision” manifest that claimed that Israel is a product of colonialism. The position of many Israelis hardened against compromise during 2006–2008 due to the ongoing violence. There were daily attacks from the Gaza Strip, in spite of Israel’s withdrawal from this territory in the summer of 2005, and violence in the north, in spite of Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. Right-wing politicians increased their counterattacks. For example, Minister for Strategic Threats Avigdor Lieberman called on the government to outlaw the Supreme Follow-up Committee. When he resigned from Olmert’s government in January 2008, he verbally attacked Arab leaders: MKs “Baraka and Tibi are more dangerous [to Israel] than the leaders of Hamas and Hizballah, Khalid Mashal and Hasan Nasrallah.”37 Following the participation of Arab MKs in the funeral of George Habash, the founder and head of the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine, which is regarded by Israel as a radical terror organization, Lieberman addressed the Arab MKs from the Knesset podium: “You represent terror organizations in the Israeli Knesset and you are leading Israeli Arabs towards destruction.” His party colleague MK Esterina Tartman added, “You are a fi fth column, a poisonous

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snake that we are raising in our bed.” Another right-wing MK, Zvi Handelman (NU-NRP), called on the Arab MKs to leave the country and not come back, as Azmi Bishara had done.38 The bills regarding the JNF and Law of Citizenship, which were supported by a majority vote in the Knesset, are also an indication of hardening attitudes, and the support for them showed that the negative attitude of Jews toward Arabs was not limited to the right wing. In 2007 the Knesset approved in a preliminary vote a bill submitted by MK David Rothem (Israel Beitenu) to amend the oath of allegiance of Knesset members, enumerating allegiance to: “I obligate myself to keep allegiance to the state of Jewish and democratic Israel, its values and symbols.”39 As Arabs have fears about Jews, Jews have also fears about the Arab minority. Public opinion surveys show that the majority of the Jews in Israel have negative and sometimes even hostile views against the Arab citizens. Smooha’s survey for the 2006 Co-existence Index revealed that most Jews (64.4 percent) are afraid that Arabs endanger the security of the state because of their high birth rates; 71.3 percent fear their struggle to change the nature of the state and 68.4 percent are afraid of mass subversion or uprising (intifada) by Israeli Arabs. Moreover, 75.4 percent of the Jews believe that “an Arab citizen who identifies himself as ‘a Palestinian Arab in Israel’ cannot be loyal to the state”; 80.1 percent think that “in critical decisions regarding the nature and borders of the state a Jewish majority is crucial, and a majority among all citizens is not enough”; 55.6 percent of the Jews support banning Hadash and 72.6 percent expect that Arabs would be more loyal to the Palestinian state than to Israel. These positions are translated into a growing tendency to support what are perceived as “quick-fi x” solutions, such as transfer (supported by 50 percent of the poll respondents), nullifying Arab Israeli citizens’ right to vote (42 percent), and government incentives for Arab emigration (55 percent).40 More severe is a report by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which concluded that in 2006 there was an increase of 26 percent in racist actions by Jews against Arab citizens and a 100 percent increase in hatred against them.41 However, Smooha also found in his survey some positive results: 56.3 percent of the Arabs and 68.5 of the Jews think that the two parties have historical rights to the land, and 64.4 percent of the Jews agree that the

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state should take urgent and major steps to close the gaps between Jewish and Arab citizens. In October 2008, a violent Jewish-Arab clash occurred in the northern town of Acre, a mixed city with Arab citizens comprising 23 percent of the total population and holding five out of seventeen seats in the municipal council. The event was triggered by an Arab who drove a car playing loud music into a predominately Jewish area on Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day of Atonement), offending the Jewish people who were fasting. A Jewish group reacted by stoning the car’s passengers (ultraorthodox Jews will also stone secular Jews who drive in their areas on the Sabbath). After a young Muslim falsely announced via a mosque PA system that an Arab had been killed by Jews, Arabs attacked Jewish residents and the Jews retaliated. The police intervened, but a number of Jews and Arabs were injured. Jewish and Arab local and national radical politicians used this incident to inflame their supporters. The Jewish mayor of Acre, Shimon Lankri, who took advantage of the clash to consolidate support for his municipal election campaign, decided to cancel the Acre Theatre Festival, which provides the Arab shops with a significant source of income. The Arabs retaliated by announcing an alternative festival. Although moderate politicians intervened and the situation was soon contained, these developments reflected the tense relationship between Arabs and Jews even in a city that was known for its coexistence between the two communities. Conclusion During 2006–2007, the outer confl icts in which Israel is involved with the Palestinians and Hizballah impacted strongly on the internal split between Jews and Arabs, reflecting again the interlocking dimension of minority-majority relations in Israel. Public opinion surveys as well as political behavior of Arab and Jewish politicians and decision makers indicated an escalation and intensification of the tensions between the two communities. Government policy did not introduce a significant change although an Arab minister was appointed to the cabinet. The drafting of the Arab Future Vision documents inflamed Jews who were newly exposed to these views and radicalized their attitude toward

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the Arab minority as a whole. However, we should bear in mind that the documents were the result of a four-year brainstorming process following the October 2000 riots and the Jewish manifest “The Kinneret Covenant.” To conclude this chapter, I quote Judge Hashim Khatib, a member of the Or Commission: “Three years after the publication of the Or Commission Report, the government policy regarding the Arab citizens has not changed and has remained discriminatory in its nature. More severe is the relationship between the Jewish and Arab populations. . . . Not only this did not improve, on the contrary: the suspicion and mistrust between the two communities has even increased.”42 Yet, despite this somber reality, Arabs and Jews by and large do not resort to violence as a means of promoting their group interests. One fi nds a variety of spheres of coexistence.

Conclusion

t h e r e l a t ion s h i p be t w e e n the Jewish majority and the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel is an unusual case of an ethnonational confl ict that I argue should be viewed as an extension of the broader Palestinian-Israeli confl ict. As such, it interlocks with other confl icts in the Middle East in which Israel, the Palestinians, and Arab states are involved. Let us fi rst draw some conclusions regarding the confl ict actors and the strategies that they adopted over time. The role that the general public and the leadership plays is different for the two parties to the internal confl ict inside Israel. The Jewish group has been represented mainly by the state apparatus—the government, the legislative body, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the security services, and other national institutions—and, until October 2000, the public was almost not directly involved. In contrast, since the 1976 Land Day protests, the general Arab community has taken a highly active part in political protest and rioting against state policies. Coping with an ongoing radicalization of the Arab minority, the Jewish majority uses its legislative power to enforce political restrictions on the Arabs and to ensure the rigid enforcement of laws controlling the Arab minority and limiting its political liberties. There are three overriding concerns maintained by the state apparatus: the preservation of a Jewish majority, an attempt to settle Jewish population in areas of Arab dominance (the Galilee, the Triangle, and the Negev), and safeguarding the Jewish nature of the state in the public sphere. The Israeli government, for its part, is a major player in the interlocking confl icts in the Middle East and through them is also a player in the international theater in strategies of war and peace in the Middle East. Until the start of the al-Asqa intifada in 2000, the Jewish public as a group, as distinct from the government, was only rarely directly involved 289

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in open clashes with Arab citizens. They were content to accept the government policy of the day and did not challenge either the government’s discriminatory practices or affi rmative action, when this policy was proposed during the Rabin government of 1992–1996. The Jews’ political behavior in opposing government policy was only seen when the right-wing electorate thought the government was “too liberal” versus the Arabs, particularly the potency of Arab representatives in the parliament to influence central decisions regarding the future borders of the state (for example, the Knesset vote on the Oslo Accords in 1993). The Jewish left (Labor and Meretz) depended on Arab electoral support for success but rarely protested against discriminatory policies against Arabs nor against right-wing hostile actions or discourses targeting Arabs. However, the distinction between left and right disappeared when Palestinian terror actions enraged Israelis and at the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada. When Israeli Arab protests turned into riots in October 2000, the Jewish public retaliated against the Arab minority. In this case the reaction was related to the (external) Palestinian-Israeli confl ict more than minority status. The Arab side to the internal confl ict can also be divided into two actors: the leadership and the general public. The Arab political leadership is represented by national bodies such as the Supreme Follow-up Committee, the National Committee of Arab Heads of Local Authorities, Arab political parties, members of the Knesset, and NGO activists. For several reasons, the Arab minority leadership is more radical and militant than the general public even though the public is active in mass-scale protests and riots. The reasons for this include competition between parties and personalities, exposure in all-Arab media, and desire to exploit populism. However, it seems that the public expects its leaders to voice radical national goals while actually behaving in a more opportunistic or at least less radical manner in their everyday lives. The public manifests in its behavior a greater pragmatism, compromise, and willingness to delay confrontations, but this more moderate approach is rarely voiced. The Arab minority underwent a rapid process of self-empowerment, resulting in a significant increase of higher-education graduates, expansion of the middle class, and population increase. These processes contributed to the crystallization of Israeli Arabs as a Palestinian Arab national minority

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(with a dominant Islamic identity) and to their belief that they are an extension of the surrounding Arab and Islamic world. These processes also aided the gradual formation of a national leadership, and in particular the establishment of communal institutions and civil society organizations. Since the 1970s, the Arab population has experienced disillusionment on two major fronts: the possibility of being integrated into the national citizenry of Israel and of establishing a Palestinian state with Israel back to the pre-1967 borders. Therefore, they have opted for the strategy of insulating themselves in an attempt to form a more official political mechanism to achieve their goals. The strategy of the Arab minority underwent a radical change during the 1990s (described in chapter 9) although the origins of the new strategies can be traced to the 1980s. The current political goal of the Arabs in Israel is to strive for a change from Jewish dominance to a full partnership in governance and to change the defi nition of the state from a Jewish state to some kind of a binational one, where Arab Israelis would enjoy equal status and power with Jews, or at least to improve their civil status by implementing some form of consensual democracy. In order to achieve this purpose, the Arabs have introduced a range of initiatives since the 1990s. Their strategies include forming independent institutions appealing to the international community, advocacy in the Supreme Court, identity construction of an indigenous and homeland minority entitled to collective rights and restitution, and mass demonstrations. These various strategies have been significantly affected by the external confl ict and have heightened the alienation between the majority and minority groups within Israel. As an additional strategy, Israeli Arab elite groups are discussing the formation of their own representative institutions and boycotting elections to the Israeli parliament. In the external domain, one cannot underestimate the political significance of the link between Arabs in Israel and Palestinians in the territories (and Palestinian institutions, the PLO and PA) as an immediate political resource. The Arab and Islamic world are their regional strategic depth. The Arab minority also has developed independent connections with international associations and institutions in a modest but dynamic way. The global increase of awareness of human and minority rights and the increasing interest of the international community in ethnic confl icts further empowers the Arab minority within Israel.

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Political Behavior Analysis of political behavior of Israeli Jews and Arabs between 1967 and 2008 reveals a general trend of escalation of hostility although there have been some short periods of de-escalation. At the public level, in relation to protests or actions as well as hostile discourses against the other, Jewish political behavior as compared with Arabs has been more moderate; they have used legislation and negative discourse to accomplish their goals but rarely violence. The fact that Jews are generally less expressive in their confl ict with the Arab minority is not unexpected, since the Arabs have much more to protest about than the Jews who are in power. The Jews’ intensification of confronting actions or expressions was driven by the influence of the broader confl ict on the internal one, particularly during the two intifadas, largely because the Jews believe that the Arab citizens of Israel side with their Palestinian enemies such as Hamas and other armed groups. On the official level, the picture is more complicated. Israel was established as a state for all Jews. No constitution to protect the minorities or to safeguard equal rights was formulated, although Israel’s Declaration of Independence promised the Arab minority full and equal citizenship and due representation in all institutions. During the fi rst two decades following Israel’s establishment, the martial government in Arab-populated areas fermented an extremely negative attitude to the Arab minority. Government policy since the 1960s has incrementally improved the status and rights of Arabs. However, the Arab minority was not satisfied with its constructed inferiority in the Jewish state. Arabs were particularly outraged when they felt that the state reproduced military government policies on issues of land expropriation, the demolition of houses built without a permit, and similar government policies. Since 1967, the Jewish majority has undergone religious-nationalist radicalization, strengthened by the Jewish settlement movement in the Palestinian-populated territories and reflected in the election of the Likud government in 1977, ending a thirty-year hegemony of Labor governments. This process affected relations with Israeli Arabs on the broader confl ict plane. However, since the 1980s, Jewish society underwent a process of expansion of democratization with government officials admitting to discriminatory

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policies previously instituted against Arabs and making efforts to remove inequalities and bridge socioeconomic gaps. During this period, the state policy regarding the Arab minority has been more attuned to their needs, because Labor and Likud realized the importance of the Arab electorate for winning elections. Generally speaking, Likud governments have been more punitive, imposing harsh policies against Arabs on issues related to land use and building without a permit. During the period of the Rabin (Labor) government in 1992–1995, innovative policies were proposed to improve the position of the Israeli Arabs. However, in parallel, there have been increasing demands from Jews to enhance the Jewish identity of the state to compensate for the loss of (occupied) territories. Looking at the Arabs’ political behavior reveals three escalative peaks parallel to the periods of intensification of political behavior among the Israeli Jews: Land Day of 1976, the first intifada between 1988 and 1992, and the October 2000 riots and second intifada. The Arab minority used from 1976 onward more violence because it reacted not only to discriminatory government policies but also to Israel’s policies regarding the broader Palestinian issue. Analysis of the political behavior of the Arab minority clearly demonstrates that since 1967 they have strengthened their Palestinian and general Arab national identity and they have radicalized their positions and strategies versus the state. Yet the process of Palestinization and radicalization does not necessarily lead to an escalation from political actions to mass-scale violence, civil disobedience, or rebellion. The intensification of the confl ict could also be manifested, as was the case during the 1990s, by self-empowerment of the minority and building institutional capacities and internal consolidation for future challenges. Conflict Generators My analysis shows that during the three escalative events (Land Day, the fi rst intifada, and the second intifada), government policy generated the escalation of hostility in the fi rst event while the Palestinian-Israeli confl ict was the major generator in the last two events. In these two periods of intensification, government policy also affected the internal confl ict but not at the same high level as the broader confl ict between Israel and the Palestinians.

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Thus, the debates over historical narratives, the character of the state, land and settlement, and civic and national identity reflect the historical depth of the internal confl ict as a continuation of a hundred-years-old confl ict between Zionists and Palestinians. It is understandable that the PA leadership of the West Bank and Gaza, following the 1967 war and the Israeli occupation, sees Israeli Arabs as an important lobbying group in the Israeli Knesset for supporting the Palestinian agenda. Key Arab Israeli members of the Knesset, such as Ahmad Tibi and Azmi Bishara, and their political parties (Ta‘al, Balad, and some members of Hadash) have been particularly active in pushing this agenda. The link between the internal and external confl icts in which Israel is involved (marking the interlocking dimension of these confl icts) is also demonstrated by the fact that, when forming coalitions in the Knesset, the Labor party has turned more often to the center-right of the political map even though the Arabs have played a vital role in providing political support for the Labor party. The Labor leadership fears losing votes among Jewish constituencies if they become fully dependent on the support of Arab voters, who are perceived by Jews as supporting Palestinian violence in the broader context of the Middle East confl ict. So the argument asserted in many studies—that the main generator of the Israeli ethnonational confl ict development is the construction of Israel, the inherent contradiction between its Jewish and democratic values—is incorrect. While this clearly is a factor, the dominating issue affecting the internal relations between the two ethnic groups is the Israeli-Palestinian confl ict. Another fi nding refers to the two de-escalative periods: 1984–1986, during the Labor-Likud unity government with Minister Ezer Weitzman’s policy of appeasement toward the Arab minority, and 1992–1996, with Rabin’s policies of peace and affi rmative action. In both cases, the two factors that I defi ne as the major generators of the confl ict were on a low scale. Compared with the Palestinian issue, government policy has affected the confl ict in a more moderate way, with two exceptions: in the 1976 Land Day protests, it played the primary role and during the Netanyahu-Barak-Sharon tenures (1996–2005) it played a relatively high role compared to previous government tenures in generating escalation of the confl ict.

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In conclusion, escalation of the confl ict is a result of a drastic negative development in one of the major factors influencing the confl ict, while the second factor influencing the confl ict is on a medium or high level of intensity. Such was the case during the fi rst mass-scale riots of the Arab minority on the Land Day of March 1976. The dramatic change in behavior by Arabs was a response to ongoing government policy that culminated with government action to expropriate Arab lands. However, the developments in the West Bank and Gaza following the 1967 and 1973 wars added much to the outrage of the Arab citizens. The same is true regarding the second rebellious manifestation of the minority—the October 2000 riots. The retreat of government policy helpful to Arabs after Rabin’s assassination contributed to the escalation, but this was only a secondary cause. This study found that the two Palestinian intifadas strongly influenced the confl ict in an escalative direction, more than is usually believed. The third example is the de-escalation process during Rabin’s tenure when there were positive developments in both dimensions of the confl ict: peace in the Israeli-Palestinian domain and government policies aimed at reducing discrimination. The analysis of the two confl ict generators shows that in many periods under review, when one of the two factors reached a high level and the other factor a medium level, the result was escalation to a high level of confl ict. This was detected in government tenures under which the Palestinian issue was highly intensified and the government policy was nonliberal without radical changes for the better or worse, such as under Yitzhak Shamir, Binyamin Netanyahu, and Ehud Barak. Sammy Smooha’s argument—that simultaneously with Palestinization phenomenon, the Arab minority is undergoing a process of Israelicization and that there are negative and positive forces acting upon the Arabs and Jews in Israel that create balances and prevent open confl icts between them—is correct, with one condition. Israelicization of the Arabs does not necessarily mean legitimizing Israel as a Jewish (and not only Zionist) state. It might merely mean the process of inculcating some democratic norms and current universal (Western) values for reasons of political pragmatism in order to improve their social and economic status, or even sponsor some kind of hedonism at the expense of their religious ideology. Compared with the

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neighboring developing and nondemocratic Arab societies, the status quo does not drive most Arabs (including the Islamists) to overturn the existing system, even if it is discriminatory. The Arabs tend to passively accept the modus vivendi as a minority in a Jewish state as long as the state does not act against what they regard as vital or existential interests and as long as the state leaves at least one open door for improving their status, such as the Supreme Court of Justice. My analysis of the political behavior of the two adversary groups since 2000 does not support Smooha’s conclusion that the balances created between the two collectives prevent open confl icts between them. Jewish-Arab relations in Israel, as with any other minority-majority confl ict, develop in a dynamic and dialectical mode of action-reaction-counteraction. As this study indicates, the October 2000 riots signaled an alarming new stage of reaction. One could only speculate what the situation would have been if the police had not suppressed the riots so aggressively with the loss of thirteen lives. The Jewish counterattacks since then also indicate that the situation is unstable. Thus, to return to a question that I posed in the introduction: it is clear why Arab citizens sympathize with their state’s enemy in a situation of war, even if they risk their lives in the “enemy’s” attacks (for example, in the second Israeli war in Lebanon in the summer of 2006). Israeli Arabs feel a necessity to be part of the Arab majority in the region—a fact that psychologically assists them to cope with their siege mentality. Therefore, they strongly identify as Arabs and as Palestinians while state policy has done very little to counteract this process and appeal to them as fellow citizens of the state. The second question that I raised was what prevents Israel’s government and the Jewish majority from fully integrating the Arab minority and from granting them equal rights? Here again, the answer is a combination of factors. First, developments in the Palestinian confl ict keep the Arab minority as a suspect and untrustworthy group, a “demographic bomb” or a security threat in the eyes of Jews. Second, the system of the state as Jewish and Zionist is rigid and leaves very little room for changing the inherent status of the minority as an underprivileged group. Significant positive change is possible, but the constant atmosphere of confl ict between Israel and the Palestinians erodes motivation to repair the relationship between the two groups. Third,

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the lack of political power of the minority to mobilize itself in the Israeli polity keeps them at the bottom of the priorities in a state with relatively limited fi nancial resources. Finally, the nondemocratic tendencies among different segments of Israeli society and their political parties on the right create a barrier for the government to achieve a supportive public opinion for extending the rights of the Arab minority. The only mechanism of protecting minority rights and of improving their status is the Supreme Court. But this recourse is limited, since it maneuvers within the existing Zionist paradigm of the state of Israel. In the last fi fteen years, Palestinian Arabs within Israel have also sought assistance from international organizations. This strategy is also a limited one. First, the international community is hesitant to involve itself in internal disputes. Second, many European countries have their own problems with minorities, and in the area of minority cultural rights, Israel is, in fact, more liberal than many of its European counterparts. This indicates the complexity of the position of the Israeli Arabs in an ethnodemocracy, which seeks at the same time to follow a liberal approach to its minority group within the cultural context. Summing up, the Jewish-Arab confl ict in Israel appears to be irresolvable as long as the broader Israeli-Arab confl ict has not been settled. Toward Conflict Management Based on the above analysis, I conclude that crisis could still result in the wake of radical developments in the major factors impacting the confl ict (the Palestinian issue and government policy regarding the minority rights). This conclusion is also a learning tool of confl ict resolution, or, more relevant to our case, confl ict management aiming at reducing intensification. If the Israeli government seeks to avoid internal destabilization and an open ethnic feud, it should avoid a radical negative change in the two main parameters of the confl ict. Since the Palestinian issue looks much more difficult to control, improving the rights and status of the minority is the only way to manage the internal confl ict. Much can be achieved in this realm without endangering the Jewish nature of the state. Moreover, following such a policy is vital in order to safeguard the democratic fabric of the society. Ezer Weitzman’s approach

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of combining inclusive discourse with modest actions in resolving problems of the minority is one example of what could be done. Another example is the 1992–1996 Rabin government’s efforts to reduce disparities between Arabs and Jews. Much more could be achieved if Israel and the Palestinian Authority could reach a peaceful resolution, and if the state apparatus would adopt an effective reformative approach and a conciliatory policy toward the Arab minority. The Israeli government can play a key role to improve the situation in the following three domains: First, the Israeli government should realize that any progress in controlling, managing, or resolving Israeli-Palestinian strife would contribute much to decreasing the anger of its Arab minority. This understanding should reinforce its efforts to negotiate with the PA. Second, as I have argued in chapter 1, since most Israelis see the defi nition of the state as Jewish (and democratic) as a must, a clear determination of what this entails should be adopted and given constitutional stance. The law should clarify that the Jewishness of the state has a narrow meaning and it applies only to the realm of immigration laws and public culture (particularly state symbols). Third, the government can officially recognize an Arab leadership body as its partner in order to have constant dialogue to implement equality in all civil rights, including cultural collective rights and other problems of the Arab minority. A relative share (some 15 percent) in representation in public bodies and in national budgets should be the goal for the majority government. The minority leadership for its part should reduce public expressions that inflame the Jewish majority. Contribution to some kind of community service alternative to the military would also be beneficial. If such steps were taken, there would be an improvement of majority/ minority relations within Israel. As this study has shown, there have been significant periods of high escalation of tensions in these relations, and these suggested steps could help to change this pattern. However, it is vital for the government to work on achieving broader peace and resolving the IsraeliPalestinian dispute to fully deal with the internal ethnonational confl ict.

Notes | Bibliography | Index

Notes

Introduction 1. For a report on Israeli Arabs and the war, see Elie Rekhess and Arik Rodnizky, eds., “The Arabs in Israel and the War in the North: A Special Report” (Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center of Tel Aviv University and the Konrad Adenaur Foundation, August 14, 2006). 2. Sammy Smooha, Index of Arab-Jewish Relations in Israel 2006 (Haifa: Haifa University, 2006). 3. On the relation between an external and a domestic confl ict, see Raymond Tanter, “Dimensions of Confl ict Behavior Within and Between Nations,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 10 (1966): 41–64; Jonathan Wilkenfeld, “Some Further Findings Regarding the Domestic and Foreign Confl ict Behavior of Nations,” Journal of Peace Research 2 (1969): 147–56; James N. Rusenau, “Theorizing across Systems: Linkage Politics Revisited,” in Conflict Behavior and Linkage Politics, ed. Tamar Yagnes (New York: David Mckay, 1973), 25–26. 4. Oren Yiftachel, Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 91–93. 5. See the following examples: Ian S. Lustick, Arabs in a Jewish State: Israel’s Control of a National Minority (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980); As‘ad Ghanem, The PalestinianArab Minority in Israel, 1948–2000: A Political Study (New York: SUNY, 2001); Aziz Haidar, Arab Population in the Israeli Economy (Tel Aviv: International Center for Peace in the Middle East, 1990); idem., On the Margins: The Arab Population in the Israeli Economy (London: Hurst, 1995); Claude Klein, Israel as a Nation-State and the Problem of the Arab Minority in Search of Status (Tel Aviv: International Center for Peace in the Middle, 1987); David Kretzmer, The Legal Status of the Arab in Israel (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995; updated edition in Arabic, Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute, 2002); Jacob M. Landau, The Arab Minority in Israel, 1967–1991: Political Aspects (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Noah Lewin-Epstein and Moshe Semyonov, The Arab Minority in Israel’s Economy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993); Majid al-Haj, Education, Empowerment, and Control: The Case of the Arabs in Israel (Albany: SUNY, 1995); Majid al-Haj and Henri Rosenfeld, Arab Local Government in Israel (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1989); Dan Rabinowitz, Overlooking Nazareth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Dan Rabinowitz and Khawla Abu-Baker, Coffins on Our

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Shoulders: The Experience of the Palestinian Citizens of Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Nadim Rouhana, Palestinian Citizens in an Ethnic Jewish State: Identities in Conflict (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Sammy Smooha, The Orientation and Politicization of the Arab Minority in Israel (Haifa: University of Haifa, Jewish-Arab Center, 1984); Elia Zureik, The Palestinians in Israel: A Study in Internal Colonialism (London: Routledge and Paul Kegan, 1979); Sabri Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976); Yiftachel, Ethnocracy. 6. Elie Rekhess, “Israeli Arabs and Arabs in the Territories: Political Affi liation and National Solidarity 1967–1988,” HaMizrah HeHadash 32 (1989): 128–45; idem., The Arab Minority in Israel: Between Communism and Arab Nationalism 1965–1991 (Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center and Hakibutz Hameuhad, 1993); Landau, The Arab Minority; Dan Shueftan, “The New Identity of the Arab MKs,” Tchelet (Fall 2002): 23–39. See also the reports submitted to the Or Commission by Alexander Bligh and Rephael Israeli’s report in Sarah OzackyLazar and As‘ad Ghanem, eds., The Or Commission Testimonies (Jerusalem: Keter and the Institute for Peace Research, 2003), 143–61. 7. Milton J. Esman and Itamar Rabinovich, eds., Ethnicity, Pluralism, and the State in the Middle East (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 3–24. See also Ofra Bengio and Gabriel Ben-Dor, eds., Minorities and the State in the Arab World (Boulder: Lynne Reiner, 1999), 1–21; Ronald D. McLaurin, ed., The Political Role of Minority Groups in the Middle East (New York: Praeger, 1979), 1–15, 76–108. 8. Louis Kriesberg, “Interlocking Confl icts in the Middle East,” Research in Social Movements, Conflicts, and Change 3 (1980): 99–119; Kriesberg, Constructive Conflicts: From Escalation to Resolution (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998); Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov, “Interlocking Confl icts in the Middle East: Structural Dimensions,” in Conflicts and Conflict Resolution in Middle Eastern Societies: Between Tradition and Modernity, ed. Hans-Jorg Albrecht et al. (Berlin: Duncker and Humbold, 2006), 215–28. 9. Kriesberg, Interlocking Conflicts; Kriesberg, Constructive Conflicts. 10. Kriesberg, Constructive Conflicts, 50. 11. Bar-Siman-Tov, “Interlocking Confl icts,” 215. 12. For the defi nition of a confl ict, see Christopher R. Mitchell, The Structure of International Conflict (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 17. 13. For an Arab academic explanation of why the Arabs rejected the Partition Plan, see Fawzi Asadi, “Some Causes for the Rejection of the Partition Plan by the Palestinian Arabs,” in Triumph and Catastrophe: The War of 1948, Israeli Independence, and the Refugee Problem, ed. Ian S. Lustick (New York: Garland, 1994), 59–71. 14. For writings presenting the various narratives, see Paul Scham, W. Salem, and B. Pogrund, eds., Shared Histories: A Palestinian-Israeli Dialogue (Jerusalem: Panorama and Yakar, 2005); Yitzhak Reiter, “Parallel Narratives and Adverse Strategies: The Arab Minority in the Jewish State,” Australian Journal of Jewish Studies 19 (2005): 162–87; Ziad Abu Zayyad and Daniel Bartal, eds., Narratives of 1948. Special issue of Palestine Israel Journal 9 (2002).

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15. Dr. ‘Adel Manna‘ in a symposium. Author’s notes. 16. Sayed Qashu, Dancing Arabs (Ben Shemen: Modan, 2002), 78. 17. Yitzhak Reiter, “The Nakba and Revival,” in The Visions’ Book, ed. Ozacky-Lazar Sara and M. Kabaha (Jerusalem: Civil Accord Forum, 2008), 140–58; Lustick, Arabs in a Jewish State; Ghanem, The Palestinian-Arab Minority; Haidar, Arab Population; Claude Klein, Israel as a Nation-State; Kretzmer, The Legal Status; Al-Haj, Education, Empowerment, and Control; Al-Haj and Rosenfeld, Arab Local Government; Majid al-Haj and Henri Rosenfeld, “The Emergence of an Indigenous Political Framework in Israel: The National Committee of Chairmen of Arab Local Authorities,” Asian and African Studies 23 (1989): 205–44. 18. Rabinowitz, Overlooking Nazareth; Rabinovitz and Abu-Baker, Coffins on Our Shoulders; Rouhana, Palestinian Citizens; Zureik, The Palestinians in Israel; Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel; Nadim Rouhana and As‘ad Ghanem, “The Crisis of Minorities in Ethnic States: The Case of Palestinian Citizens in Israel,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 30 (1998): 321–46; Ilan Saban, “Minority Rights in Deeply Divided Societies: A Framework for Analysis and the Case of the Arab-Palestinian Minority in Israel,” New York University Journal of International Law and Politics 36 (2004): 885–1003; Yiftachel, Ethnocracy; Oren Yiftachel, N. Carmon, and D. Rumley, “The Political Geography of Minority Control in Israel and Malaysia,” in The Political Geography of Peace and Conflict, ed. S. Waterman and N. Kliot (London Pinter, 1991): 184–201. 19. Basic Law the Knesset 1985 (was changed in the Political Parties Law of 1992). 20. Ari Shavit, “Chosen Land,” Haaretz Appendix, 3 January 2003, 16–18. 21. Usama Halabi, “The Impact of the Jewishness of the State of Israel on the Status and Rights of the Arab Citizens in Israel,” in The Palestinians in Israel: Is Israel the State of All Its Citizens and “Absentees?” ed. Nur Massalha (Haifa: Galilee Center for Social Research, 1992), 7–33. Another Arab researcher, Ahmad Sa‘di from Ben-Gurion University, also does not perceive Israel as a democracy but rather as a “dictatorship of the majority.” See Ahmad H. Sa‘di, “The Peculiarities of Israel’s Democracy: Some Theoretical and Practical Implications for Jewish-Arab Relations,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 12 (2002): 119–33. Sa‘di is criticizing the following articles: Alan Dowty, “Is Israel Democratic? Substance and Semantics in the ‘Ethnic Democracy’ Debate,” Israel Studies 4, no. 2 (1999): 1–15; Ruth Gavison, “Jewish and Democratic? A Rejoinder to the ‘Ethnic Democracy’ Debate,” Israel Studies 4, no. 1 (1999): 44–72. See also Andre E. Mazawi, “Palestinians in Israel: Educational Expansion, Social Mobility and Political Control,” Compare: A Journal of Comparative Education 24, no. 3 (1994): 277–84; Yoav Peled and Gershon Shaphir, “The Roots of Peacemaking: The Dynamics of Citizenship in Israel,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 28 (1996): 391–414. 22. Claude Klein, Israel as a Nation-State; Rabinovitz and Abu-Baker, Coffins on Our Shoulders; Rouhana, Palestinian Citizens; Zureik, The Palestinians in Israel; Rouhana and Ghanem, “The Crisis of Minorities in Ethnic States”; Saban, “Minority Rights”; Oren Yiftachel, The State and Ethnic Relations: Lebanon, Israel, and Cyprus, Working Paper No.

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3 (Beer Sheva: Negev Center for Regional Development, Ben-Gurion University, 1996); Yiftachel, Carmon, and Rumley, “The Political Geography of Minority Control.” 23. Yiftachel, Ethnocracy. 24. Smooha, Arabs and Jews in Israel, 190. 25. Muhammad Amara, “The Collective Identity of the Arabs in Israel in an Era of Peace,” Israel Affairs 9, nos. 1–2 (2003): 252. 26. Mitchell, The Structure of International Conflict, 47. 1. The Confl ict Sources 1. Mitchell, The Structure of International Conflict, 26. 2. See, as an example, the Arab 48 Web site, http://www.arabs48.com/display.x?cid=6& sid=5&id=31793; and the Palestine Remembered site, http://www.palestineremembered .com/Nazareth/Saffuriyya/index.html#Town%20Statistics%20&%20Facts. 3. Zeev Weis and Zvika Zuk, “National Park Zippori” (Israel Nature and Parks Authority, n.p., n.d.). 4. National Parks Authority, http://parks.org.il/ParksENG/zippori.html. 5. In an interview quoted in Hillel Cohen, The Present Absentees: The Palestinian Refugees in Israel since 1948 (Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute, Institute for Israeli Arab Studies, 2000), 103. 6. Haaretz, 15 March 2006, b3. 7. On the Jewish narratives, see Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein, Israel and the Family of Nations: Jewish Nation-State and Human Rights (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 2003), 24, 208, 414–26; Reuven Gafni, Our Historical-Legal Right to Palestine (Jerusalem: Torah and Avodah, 1933); Yoram Hazony, The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Robert Wistrich and David Ohana, eds., The Shaping of Israeli Identity: Myth, Memory, and Trauma (London: Frank Cass, 1995); Anita Shapira, ed., Israeli Identity in Transition (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004). 8. For a later attempt to justify the Arab rejection of the UN resolution 181, see Asadi, “Some Causes for the Rejection.” 9. On the Arab narrative, see ‘Adel Manna‘, ed., The Palestinians in the Twentieth Century: An Inside Look (Beit Berl: Institute for Israeli Arab Studies, 2005), 5–30; Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 10. Ari Shavit, “Chosen Land,” Haaretz Appendix, 3 January 2003, 16–18. 11. Haaretz, 15 March 2006, B3. 12. Ministry of Education, 100 Terms in Heritage, Zionism, and Democracy ([Jerusalem]: 2003). 13. See Yoav Peled, “The 100 Terms Program: A Rawisian Critique,” Adalah’s Electronic Newsletter 27 (2006).

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14. Ibid. 15. Term 29, “Zionism,” in the Hebrew version. 16. Amal Jamal, Mu‘jam al-Muwatana li-Tulab al-Madaris al-‘Arabiyya fi Israe’il (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 2005); As‘ad Ghanem, Hawiyya wa-Intima’: Mashru‘ al-Mustalahat al-Asasiyya lil-Tulab al-‘Arab (Tamra: Ibn Khaldun Center, 2005). 17. Ibid., 10–11. 18. The term “181 Partition Resolution,” in Jamal, Mu‘jam al-Muwatana, 90. 19. Ibid., 91. 20. The section on heritage in the Ministry of Education program gave the Arabs and the Druze a special program of their own. However, the Arab cultural heroes were medieval scientists and philosophers such as Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Rushd, and Ibn Sina. Not one modern figure was included. 21. The term “Arab-Palestinian Minority in Israel,” in Jamal, Mu‘jam al-Muwatana, 96. 22. The term “National Minority,” in ibid., 95. 23. As‘ad Ghanem, “Identity and Belonging: A Pioneering Project, Which Must Be the Starting Point for an Alternative, Comprehensive Educational Plan,” Adalah’s Electronic Newsletter 27 (2006). 24. The legal defi nition of Israel as a democratic state was added later in the basic laws of 1992. 25. See Yakobson and Rubinstein, Israel and the Family of Nations. 26. Elie Rekhess and Sara Ozacky-Lazar, eds., The Arabs in Israel: The Status of the Arab Minority in the Jewish Nation State (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 2005), 19–26 and 59–83 respectively. 27. Baruch Kimmerling, “Jurisdiction in an Immigrant-Settler Society: The “Jewish and Democratic State,” Comparative Political Studies 35, no. 10 (2002): 1119–44. 28. Ehud Sprinzak, The Israeli Arabs: From Conflict Resolution to Conflict Management (Herzlia: Interdisciplinary Center, 2003), 39, justly claimed that Israel gave a broad interpretation to the Jewish nature of the state as a legitimate basis for a policy of discrimination against the Arabs. 29. A bill submitted by MK Haim Drukman from the Agudat Israel party, which was endorsed by the Ariel Sharon government, aimed at circumventing the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Katzir/Qa‘dan case, i.e., to enable the state to allocate land for Jewish settlement only. The bill was never fi nally approved by the Knesset. 30. In a discussion at Ben-Gurion University on 14 July 2002 organized by the Civil Accord Forum documented in Haskama (Civil Accord Forum Bulletin) 4 (August–September 2002): 11. 31. Ariel Rozen-Tzvi, “Jewish and Democratic State: Spiritual Fathership, Alienation and Simbiosys: Could the Circle Quadretized?” ‘Iyuney Mishpat 19, no. 3 (1995): 489. 32. Avishay Margalith, “The Fair Society and the Question of Citizenship,” Panim 8 (1999): 30–33, claims that the Arabs view the discrimination they suffer by a community with

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which they do not identify as a humiliating as well as unjust. Unequal allocation (of resources) is a form of humiliation. You do not want the person discriminating against you to defi ne you; you are not interested in his company, but you do not want him to determine that you are not entitled to affi liate with his society. Arabs are happy that they do not serve in the army, but they are unhappy about not being called to serve; it is not a problem of justice in allocation but an issue of humiliation and dignity. Any kind of second-degree citizenship is humiliating and discriminatory. In order to change the citizenship in Israel to equal citizenship, Maragalith suggested adding an additional component to the concept of citizenship, symbolic citizenship: being included in the society’s pool of symbols. As an example, the language of a minority group should be recognized as an official language of the state. 33. Yiftachel, Ethnocracy, 91–93. 34. For the research of the Israel Democracy Institute, in which Israel is tested in comparison to thirty-five democracies, see http://www.idi.org.il/english/article.asp?id=31052007 141057. 35. Ruth Gavison, “A Jewish and Democratic State: Political Identity, Ideology, and Law,” ‘Iyuney Mishpat 19, no. 3 (1995): 631–82; idem., Conditions for Israel’s Prosperity: Without a Vision, Nation Gets Lost—A Super-Purpose for Israel and Its Consequences (Haifa: Technion–Shmuel Neeman Institut, 2006), 120–30. 36. Shlomo Hasson, Between Nationalism and Democracy: Scenarios on Majority and Minority Relations in Israel (Jerusalem: Floersheimer Institute for Policy Studies, 2007). 37. SCJ (Bagatz) 11280/02 Central Committee to the Elections for the 16th Knesset vs. Ahmad Tibi and Azmi Bishara, Piskey Din 57 (4), 1: 101. 38. Claude Klein, Le Caractere Juif de l’etat d’israel (Paris: Cujas, 1977), defi ned three issues, avoiding the issue of land. 39. For a critical discussion of the case, see Yiftachel, Ethnocracy, 101. 40. Arnon Golan, Wartime Spatial Changes: Former Arab Territories Within the State of Israel, 1948–1950 (Sede Boker: Ben Gurion University, 2001). 41. For a discussion of the land regime in Israel, see Yiftachel, Ethnocracy, 136–42. 42. Calculated from Oren Yiftachel and Alexander Kedar, “On Power and Land: Israel’s Land Regime,” Teoria VeBikoret 16 (2000): 67–100. 43. “Palestine,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Bless_sins/Palestine. 44. Haim Zandberg in a conference on the legal status of Arabs in Israel (Minerva Center 19–21 May 2002 (author’s notes); Sandi Kedar in a lecture at the Israel Democracy Center 22 February 2000 (author’s notes); Adv. Avraham Hilleli (2004), an expert on lands who served in a senior position at the JNF claimed that 75 percent of the territory that became Israel was state land, 15 percent was purchased by the JNF, 2.5 percent was Christian and Muslim trust land, 7.5 percent is privately owned land, of which mostly is Arab (“Land in Israel,” paper submitted to the Truman Institute, author’s notes, 2004). 45. Walid Khalidi, ed., All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992).

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46. Henri Rosenfeld, The Social Class Status of the Arab National Minority in Israel (Haifa: Mahbarot LeMehkar UlBikoret 3, 1979), 22, 29. 47. Uzi Benziman and Atallah Mansour, Subtenants (Jerusalem: Keter, 1992), 159. 48. Emergency report by an inter-university research team submitted to Prime Minister Ehud Barak in November 2000, 13–20. 49. Ibid. 50. Arnon Golan, “The Transfer to Jewish Control of Abandoned Arab Land During the War of Independence,” in Israel: The First Decade of Independence, ed. S. I. Troen and N. Lucas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 403–40. See also Amiram Bareket, “Half of JNF Lands: 1948 Refugees’-owned Appropriated lands,” Haaretz, 4 February 2005, A4. 51. Yitzhak Reiter, “Ha‘arachat HaReforma BeMmosad HaHheqdesh HaMmuslemi BeIsrael: HaWaqf Be‘Akko,” HaMizrah HeHadash 32 (1989): 21–45; Michael Dumper, Islam and Israel: Muslim Religious Endowments and the Jewish State (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1994). 52. When the law of citizenship was discussed in July 1950 in the Knesset, the Mapai faction debated the issue of discrimination between Jews and Arabs in the procedure of naturalization. MK Shmuel Dayan resisted the moral arguments and demanded a practical policy: “perhaps it is not right and not moral [to deprive Arabs of their land and to prevent the return to their homes]; however, if we seek to be just and moral who knows what the result will be.” Quoted by Benziman and Mansour, Subtenants, 127. 53. See ‘Adel Manna‘‘s statement at http://www.idi.org.il/hebrew/confl ict.asp?id=1604. 54. Haaretz, 13 March 2006, B3. 55. Haim Ganz, “The Law of Return and Affi rmative Action,” ‘Iyuney Mishpat 19, no. 3 (1995): 683–97; Asa Kasher, “Justice and Affi rmative Action: Naturalization and the Law of Return,” Israel Yearbook on Human Rights 15 (1985): 101–12. 56. Benziman and Mansour, Subtenants, 131–34. 57. On naming Arab places with Hebrew names, see Meron Benvenisti, “The Hebrew Map,” Teoria VeBikoret 11 (1997): 7–29; Yoav Kave, “Avodat HaShem,” Haaretz Appendix, 4 March 2005, 46. 58. Moshe Dayan, Avnei Derekh (Jerusalem: Idanim, 1976), 27. 59. Tom Segev, “Tel Aviv Searches for Good Arabs,” Haaretz Appendix, 13 July 2007. 60. Benziman and Manour, Subtenants, 149. 61. Yitzhak Reiter, “Qadis and the Implementation of Islamic Law in Present Day Israel,” in Islamic Law in Theory and Practice, ed. Robert Gleave and U. Kermeli (London: I. B. Tauris, 1997), 205–31. 62. On the legal and practical status of Arabic in Israel, see Mala Tabory, “Language Rights in Israel,” Israel Yearbook on Human Rights 11 (1981): 272–306; Muhammad Amara, “The Place of Arabic in Israel,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 158, no. 1 (2002): 53–68; Nimer Sultany, “The Language Space and Collective Rights: The Arabs and Arabic in Israel,” in Deliberations on Collective Rights and the National State, ed. Amal Jamal

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Notes to Pages 26–32

(Haifa: Mada al-Carmel, 2005); Ori Stendel, “The Israeli Arabs’ Right to Diversity: Legal Aspects,” Hamizrah Hehadash 32 (1989): 192–202. 63. The gulf between the legal status of Arabic as an official language, equal to Hebrew, and its status or use in practice will be discussed later in the book. 64. Benziman and Mansour, Subtenants, 71–72. 65. On the security aspect of the confl ict, see Sarah Ozacky-Lazar, “Security and Israel’s Arab Minority,” in Security Concerns: Insights from the Israeli Experience, ed. Daniel Bar-Tal, D. Jacobson and A. Kleiman (London: JAI Press, 1998), 347–69. 66. Herzliyya Ephrati, Introduction to National Security (Tel Aviv: Broadcasted University, Ministry of Defense Press, 2003), 74. See also review by Daniel Ephrati, in Haaretz Books Appendix, 6 May 2003, 4. 67. Maariv, 13 March 2007. 68. Letter by Adalah to State Attorney Menachem Mazuz dated 22 March 2007. 69. Letter by Yuval Diskin to Menachem Mazuz dated 26 April 2007 quoted at Adalah Electronic Newsletter 36 (May 2007). 70. Yuval Yuaz, “The GSS: It Is Our Right to Eavesdrop on a Person Even if His Activity Is Legal,” Haaretz, 21 May 2007, A12; Amir Oren, “From Little Issar to Big Yuval,” Haaretz, 29 May 2007, B1; Yitzhak Laor, “Democracy for Jews Only,” Haaretz, 30 May 2007. 71. Benziman and Mansour, Subtenants, 31. 72. Liav Orgad “The Arab Minority in Israel and the Security Service Obligation,” HaMishpat 19 (2005): 26–39, argues that the collective exemption of the Arabs from military conscription is based on a weak legal ground. 73. Benziman and Mansour, Subtenants, 118. 74. Alouf Hareven, Retrospect and Prospect Full and Equal Citizenship?—The Arab Citizens of Israel on the Fiftieth Anniversary: Civic Achievements together with Critical Issues of Civic Inequality and Prospects beyond the Year 2000 (Jerusalem: Sikkuy, 1998); Uri Davis, Citizenship and the State: Comparative Study of Citizenship Legislation in Israel, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon (Reading: Ithaca Press, 1997); Uri Davis, “Who Is a Hebrew?” SAIS Review 20, no. 1 (2000): 107–16. 75. On laws stemming from Israel’s defi nition as a Jewish state, see Kretzmer, The Legal Status of the Arab in Israel (Arabic edition), 29. On the necessary and unnecessary practicalities of Israel as a Jewish state, see Yitzhak Reiter, “Between a Jewish State and a State of Its Residents: The Civil Status of the Arabs in Israel in an Era of Peace,” HaMizrah HeHadash 37 (1995): 45–60. 76. Reiter, “Between a Jewish State and a State of Its Residents”; Benziman and Mansour, Subtenants, 133. 77. Nimer Sultany, Citizens without Citizenship, Mada’s First Annual Political Monitoring Report: Israel and the Palestinian Minority 2000–2002 (Haifa: Mada–Arab Centre for Applied Social Research, 2003), 123. 78. Ibid., 113.

Notes to Pages 34–40

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2. The Earthquake 1. Yair Bäuml, A Blue and White Shadow: The Israeli Establishment’s Policy and Actions among Its Arab Citizens: The Formative Years: 1958–1968 (Haifa: Pardes, 2007). 2. See Lustick, Arabs in a Jewish State; Jacob M. Landau, The Arabs in Israel: A Political Study (London: Oxford University Press, 1969); Sarah Ozacky-Lazar, The Arab Citizens in Israel: The First Decade (unit 12) (Tel Aviv: Open University, 2006); Bäuml, “The Military Regime”; Bäuml, A Blue and White Shadow; Ahmad Sa‘di, “The Incorporation of the Palestinian Minority by the Israeli State, 1948–1970: On the Nature, Transformation, and Constrains of Collaboration,” Social Text 21, no. 2 (2003): 75–94; Benziman and Mansour, Subtenants; Zureik, The Palestinians in Israel; Eyal Kafkafi, “Segregation or Integration of the Israeli Arabs: Two Concepts in Mapai,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 30, no. 3 (1998): 347–67; Hillel Cohen, Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Services and the Israeli Arabs (Jerusalem: Ivrit-Keter, 2006). 3. Ami Gluska, The Israeli Military and the Origins of the 1967 War: Government, Armed Forces, and Defence Policy 1963–67 (Oxford: Routledge, 2006), chapter 4. 4. Elie Rekhess, “Israeli Arabs after 1967: Worsening the Orientation Problem” (Tel Aviv: Shiloach Institute–Tel Aviv University, 1976), 13. 5. Yohanan Peres and Nira Yuval-Davis, “Positions of Arab Students towards Jews as Individuals and towards the State of Israel,” Megamot 16, no. 3 (1970), 259. 6. Rekhess, “Israeli Arabs and Arabs in the Territories.” 7. Sarah Ozacky-Lazar and As‘ad Ghanem, Green Line, Red Lines: Israeli Arabs and the Intifada (Givat Haviva: Institute for Arab Studies, 1990), 25; Aharon Layish, The Arabs in Israel: Continuity and Change (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1981), 242–43. 8. Lecture in a conference at Tel Aviv University, 24 March 2005 (author’s minutes). 9. Rekhess, “Israeli Arabs and Arabs in the Territories,” 168–69. 10. Landau, The Arab Minority, 121–22. 11. Ibid.; Rekhess, “Israeli Arabs and Arabs in the Territories,” 165–66. 12. Rekhess, The Arab Minority in Israel, 37–39. 13. See Daniel Bartal at the educational Snunit Web site: http://www.snunit.k12.il/ peace/doc302.html. 14. See, as an example, an interview with the writer Sarah Shiloh by Meron Rapapport, Haaretz, 22 September 2006, B3. 15. Rekhess, The Arab Minority in Israel, 45. For the Hebrew translation of the poem, see Avraham Yinnon, “Tawfiq Zayyad: ‘We Are the Majority Here,’” in The Arabs in Israel: Continuity and Change, ed. Aharon Layish (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1981), 234. 16. Shmuel Toledano, “Israeli Arabs,” 19 September 1974 (author’s collection). 17. Rekhess, The Arab Minority in Israel, 101. 18. Moshe Ma‘oz, Palestinian Leadership on the West Bank (London: Frank Cass, 1984), 134.

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Notes to Pages 40–49

19. Lustick, Arabs in a Jewish State. 20. Avner Regev, “Israeli Arabs: Between Integration and Struggle” (unpublished draft, Jerusalem: Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, 1986, author’s collection), 16–28. 21. Lustick, Arabs in a Jewish State, 258. 22. Ibid., 258. 23. Shmuel Toledano, policy paper dispatched to the Labor party, 16 April 1973 (author’s collection). 24. Anton Shammas, “Reading Diary,” in One Out of Every Six Israelis: On Relations Between the Jewish Majority and the Arab Minority in Israel, ed. Alouph Hareven (Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute, 1981), 40–42. 25. Toledano, “Israeli Arabs.” 26. It is possible that Toledano himself directed the writing of the letter to convince the prime minister. 27. “Operating a Reward and Punishment Policy,” 5 December 1974 (author’s collection). 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. On collaboration of Arabs with the Israeli authorities, see Sa‘di, “The Incorporation”; Hillel Cohen, Good Arabs. 31. HaMa‘arach, “Israeli Arabs: Policy,” 16 April 1979 (author’s collection). 32. For Toledano’s narrative, see David K. Shipler, Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 401–6. 33. Rekhess, The Arab Minority in Israel, 142. 34. Author’s conversation with Alderotti, 5 March 2007. Cf. Regev, “Israeli Arabs”; Shipler, Arab and Jew, 406. 35. Israel Koenig, “Memorandum: Treating Israeli Arabs,” 1 March 1976 (author’s collection). 36. Israel Koenig, “Second Memorandum,” 9 April 1976 (author’s collection). The second memorandum primarily dealt with the actions of Arabs on Land Day. It completely overlooked the motives for the protests, and interpreted the violence as emerging from the Arabs’ hostility to the state. In this document, he proposed a brainstorming team headed by the general director of the Ministry of the Interior that would prepare operational plans for the immediate, medium, and long-term period. 37. Leqet MeHamitrahesh BaMigzar Ha‘Aravi (Jerusalem: Prime Minister’s Office, Bureau of the Advisor on Arab Affairs) (1978–9), no. 4 (15 February 1979), 5. 38. Al-Anba’, 10 September 1976, 23 September 1976; Ma’ariv and Al-Hamishmar, 29 September 1976, cited by Elie Rekhess, “The Israeli Arabs and Land Expropriation in the Galilee” (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, Shiloach Institute, 1977, Sekirot no. 35), 7. 39. Ahmad Sa‘di, “The Koenig Report and Israeli Policy Towards the Palestinian Minority, 1965–1976: Old Wine in New Bottles,” Arab Studies Quarterly 25, no. 3 (2003): 51–62.

Notes to Pages 50–63

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311

40. Ibid. 41. Ozacky-Lazar, The Arab Citizens in Israel. 42. Uziel O. Schmeltz, “Demographic Trends of Jews and Arabs in the State of Israel,” HaMizrah HeHadash, 37 (1995), 30. 43. Ruti Sinai, “A Call to Doctors of the Council for Demography to Resign,” Haaretz, 28 November 2002, A9. 44. The Amendment to the Released Soldiers Law (Return to Work), 1970. 45. Benziman and Mansour, Subtenants, 128–29. The released soldiers’ preferential treatment in regards to child allowance was abolished in the mid-1990s, and in the late 1990s the two groups who have a high birth rate and do not serve in the army—Arabs and ultraorthodox Jews—succeeded in enacting a law to increase the allowances to large families regardless of army service record. In addition to state funding for the absorption of Jewish immigrants, Israel also supported Jewish returnees fi nancially. A special decree of the Ministry of Finance was issued in 1975, according to which Jewish returnees received exemptions from purchase taxes (again under the criterion of “released soldiers”). See Halabi, “The Impact of the Jewishness of the State of Israel,” 7–33. 46. Lustick, Arabs in a Jewish State, 269. 47. Ibid., 271. 48. Kriesberg, Constructive Conflicts, 165. 49. National Committee for the Protection of Arab Lands, Al-Kitab al-Aswad (Nazareth, 1976), 50. 50. Rekhess, “The Israeli Arabs and Land Expropriation,” 5. 51. Pamphlet of the National Committee for the Defense on Arab Lands, 1976, 82, quoted by Rekhess, “The Israeli Arabs and Land Expropriation,” 34. 52. Rekhess, “The Israeli Arabs and Land Expropriation,” 34. 53. Ibid., quoting the pamphlet of the National Committee for the Defense on Arab Lands, 1976. 54. Ibid., 36. 55. Ibid., 35. 56. Maariv, 27 April 1976, quoted by Rekhess, “The Israeli Arabs and Land Expropriation,” 36. 57. Ra‘anan Cohen, Strangers in their Homeland: Arabs, Jews, and the State of Israel (Tel Aviv: Dyunon, Tel Aviv University, 2006), 284. 58. Moshe Kol, “Policy Trgarding the Israeli Arabs,” Tmurot (September 1979): 5–8, writing, “During my 11 years of being a cabinet member I warned that there is a Palestinian problem, but the government did not want to recognize in its existence or the existence of the Palestinians even; now a high price is being paid.” The article by Amnon Rubinstein was published in Haaretz, 21 September 1979. 59. Government Decision 702 of 23 May 1976. Maariv, 7 June 1976. 60. On the waqf reparations, see Reiter, “Ha‘arachat HaReforma.”

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Notes to Pages 63–75

61. Session of 9 May 1976 reveals the views expressed by government experts on Arab affairs on the issue (the experts were Mordechai Avitzur, the general director of the Ministry of Welfare; Haim Ben Yitzhak from the police; Joseph Ginat from the PM’s office; Meir Jarrah, Information Division of the PM’s office; Yehoshua Habushi of the Ministry of Labor; Emanuel Kopelevitz of the Ministry of Education; and Reuven Katzav of the Histadrut). 62. Committee minutes of 9 May 1976. 63. Ibid. 64. The committee decided to devote its second session to the following topics: land policy, reward and punishment, housing and industry, mixed cities, public education, and an operational cabinet or a team of general directors of ministries. 65. Maariv, 7 June 1976. 66. Al-Ittihad, 23 April 1976, quoted by Rekhess, “The Israeli Arabs and Land Expropriation,” 38. 67. Muhammad Amara, Political Violence among the Arabs in Israel: Its Incentives and Characteristics (Givat Haviva: Institute for Peace Research, 1997), 25. 68. Rekhess, “The Israeli Arabs and Land Expropriation.” 69. Kriesberg, Constructive Conflicts, 155. 70. Rekhess, “The Israeli Arabs and Land Expropriation,” 16. 71. Azmi Bishara, “On the Question of the Palestinian Minority in Israel,” Teoria VeBikoret 3 (1993): 13. 3. Arabs under Likud: The 1977 Political Reshuffle 1. Don Peretz and Gideon Doron, “Israel’s 1996 Elections: A Second Political Earthquake?” Middle East Journal 50, no. 4 (1996): 529–46. 2. Excluding mixed cities, the percentage was 51. See Ra‘anan Cohen, 284. 3. Ibid., 255. 4. Towards Peace in the Middle East, Report of a Study Group (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1975). 5. On the Begin-Sadat initiative, see Kenneth W. Stein, Heroic Diplomacy: Sadat, Kissinger, Carter, Begin, and the Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace (New York: Routledge, 1999). 6. Ghanem, The Palestinian-Arab Minority, 88. 7. Israel’s Law Book (Sefer HaHukim), 1980, 186. 8. Moshe Ma‘oz, Palestinian Leadership on the West Bank (London: Frank Cass, 1984), 182. 9. Ibid., 164. 10. Ibid., 191–93. 11. Benziman and Mansour, Subtenants, 14. 12. In a session of 25 December 1978. See Prime Minister’s Office, Leqet MeHamitrahesh BaMigzar Ha‘Aravi 1978–9, no. 3 (15 January 1979).

Notes to Pages 75–82

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13. Benzinam and Mansour, Subtenants, 26. 14. ‘Abd al-Majid Hussein and Assaf Adiv, Misgav and Carmiel: Judaization in the Name of Coexistence (Jaffa: Hanitzotz-Sharara, 1997), 14. 15. Amnon Linn, Stormy Skies (Tel Aviv: Karni, 1999), 121. 16. Soffer Arnon and Rachel Finkel, The Mitzpim in the Galilee, Goals, Achievements, Lessons (Rehovot: Center for the Study of Rural and Urban Settlement, 1988); Arnon Soffer and Yevgenia Bistrov, Israel, Demography 2004–2020 in Light of the Disengagement Process (Haifa: Haifa University, 2004). 17. Oren Yiftachel, Watching over the Wine Yard: The Example of Majd al-Kurum (Raanana: Institute for Israeli Arab Studies, 1997), 45. 18. Ibid. 19. Ra‘anan Weitz, “Safeguarding Lands in the Galilee: Operational Program” (unpublished document, Jewish Agency, Departmant of Settlement, 1978, author’s collection). 20. Al-Ittihad, 1 December 1978. 21. Rachelle Alterman and Tami Stav, Conflict and Consensus through Language: Trends of Change towards the Arab Sector as Reflected in Urban and Regional Plans in Israel (Tel Aviv: Tamy Steinmaz Center for Peace Studies, 2001). 22. The founding of the observation settlements was viewed by the chair of the Arab Associations Organization, Ittijah—Amir Makhul, as a colonial project, the same attribute he used to describe the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. He views Israel as a “continuous historical crime” in which the Jewish character of the state adds to the crime. Amir Makhul, “Bayna Jawhar Isra’il wa-Tajzi’at al-Hulul,” Al-Adab 7/8 (2002) 37–41. 23. The Koversky Report (Jerusalem: Ministry of the Interior, 1976). 24. The Markovitz Report (Jerusalem: Ministry of the Interior, 1979). 25. Isma‘il Abu Sa‘d, Sikkuy Report on Equality and Integration of the Arab Citizens in Israel 1999–2000, 47. 26. Joseph Ben-David, Feud in the Negev: Bedouins, Jews, and the Land Dispute (Beit Berl: Institute for Israeli Arab Studies, 1996), 66–67, quoting B. Hameiri, “Four Senior Civil Servants Were Acquitted from Violation of a Supreme Court Order,” Maariv, 16 July 1980. 27. Yiftachel, Watching over the Wine Yard, 56. 28. Ibid., 54–56. 29. Davar, 27 February 1979. See also the memoirs of Sayf al-Din al-Zu‘bi, Shahed ‘Ayan (Shifa‘amru: al-Mashreq, 1987), 212. 30. Landau, The Arabs in Israel, 92–107. 31. Ori Stendel, The Arabs in Israel Between Hammer and Anvil (Jerusalem: Academon, 1992), 241. The founders included Anis Qardush, Kamil al-Zahir, Bishara Mu‘ammar, Bassam Touma, Walid Fahoum, Ra’iq Jarjoura, and Rashid Salim. 32. Prime Minister’s Office, Leqet MeHamitrachesh BaMigzar Ha‘Aravi, 1978-9, no. 5 (15 March 1979), 6. 33. Report of the Police Bureau for Special Duties, 1 April 1979.

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Notes to Pages 82–93

34. Al-Tahaddi, pamphlet of the Arab Students in Jerusalem, November 1978, 6–8. 35. Stendel, The Arabs in Israel, 251. The gathering took place in 21 December 1980. 36. Yitzhak Reiter and Reuben Aharoni, The Political Life of Arabs in Israel (Beit Berl: Institute for Israeli Arab Studies, 1993), 25. 37. Thomas Mayer, “The Young Muslims in Israel,” HaMizrah HeHadash 32 (1989): 20–30. 38. Ibid. 39. Rekhess, The Arab Minority in Israel, 21. 40. Ibid., 165–67. 41. Ibid. 42. Amara, Political Violence, 24. 43. Rekhess, The Arab Minority in Israel, 85. 44. Smooha, Arabs and Jews in Israel, 2: 51, table 5.2. 45. Rekhess, The Arab Minority in Israel, 46. 46. Yiftachel, Watching over the Wine Yard. 47. Shipler, Arab and Jew, 406. 48. Smooha, Arabs and Jews in Israel, 1: 59, table 5.7. 49. Mitchell, The Structure of International Conflict, 62. 4. Palestine First: West Bank and Gaza Projection 1. After the war, U.S. military forces were stationed in Beirut as part of a multinational force to facilitate the withdrawal of foreign forces from Lebanon and assist the Lebanese government and military in establishing sovereignty and authority over Beirut. In October 1983, a Hizballah suicide bomber driving a truck laden with explosives blew up the U.S. forces headquarters in Beirut resulting in the deaths of 241 U.S. Marines. 2. Treaty of peace between the Arab Republic of Egypt and the state of Israel, 26 March 1979. 3. Dan Shueftan, Jordanian Option: Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians (Tel Aviv: Hakibuts Hameuhad, 1986), 465. 4. Without the mixed cities, 37 percent. See Ra‘anan Cohen, 428. 5. Jacob M. Landau, “The Arab Vote,” in The Roots of Begin’s Success, ed. Dan Caspi, A. Diskin, and E. Gutmann (London, Canberra and New York: Croom Helm and St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 185. Only 4,521 Jews voted for Hadash and only 10,765 Arabs voted for Likud. 6. Landau, The Arab Minority, 101. 7. Stendel, The Arabs in Israel, 11. 8. Rekhess, The Arab Minority in Israel, 165–67. 9. See the Israeli parliament Web site, http://www.knesset.gov.il/lexicon/heb/ cohen_va.htm.

Notes to Pages 94–100

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10. Ma‘oz, Palestinian Leadership, 203. 11. Nadav Shragai, The Mountain of Dispute, the Struggle over the Temple Mount: Jews, Muslims, Religion (Jerusalem: Keter, 1995), 161. 12. Al-Ittihad, 20 April 1982. 13. Ma‘oz, Palestinian Leadership, 203. 14. Interview given to Al HaMishmar, 26 August 1983. 15. Benziman and Mansour, Subtenants, 195. 16. Atalla Mansour, “New Committee for the Israeli Arabs,” Haaretz, 16 November 1982; Muhammad Khaliliya, “New Era in the Arab Sector: Collaboration of Labor and Rakah,” Davar, 16 November 1982. 17. Benziman and Mansour, Subtenants, 209. 18. Ibid., 194. 19. Al-Ittihad, 22 January 1988. 20. Benziman and Mansour, Subtenants, 194. 21. In 1981, MK (and writer) Moshe Shamir proposed a bill aimed at legalizing the prioritization of the Hebrew language. Arab leaders were offended by this initiative and wrote a letter to the chairman of the labor committee of the Knesset, MK Ora Namir, in which they claimed that such preference would seriously harm the status of the Arab language and culture. Although the bill states, “an Arabic speaking person has the right to use this language in every matter,” they felt that government support for Arabic would not be available. The bill was vetoed by Prime Minister Begin. 22. Yedioth Aharonoth, 20 November 1983. 23. Al-Ittihad, 22 March 1983. See also al-Anba’, Haaretz and Davar of 2 May 1983, and Prime Minister’s Office, Leqet MeHamitrahesh BaMigzar Ha‘Aravi 1978-9, no. 25–26 (Feb.–March 1983), 7. 24. Ibid. 25. Oren Yiftachel, “The Political Geography of Ethnic Protest: Nationalism, Deprivation, and Regionalism among Arabs in Israel,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series 22, no. 1 (1997): 91–110; the National Committee for Protecting Arab Land in Israel organized in February 1982 a convention named Land and Housing Day. 26. Rekhess, The Arab Minority in Israel, 168. 27. Prime Minister’s Office, Leqet MeHamitrahesh BaMigzar Ha‘Aravi 1978-9, issue 14: 20. 28. Rekhess, “Israeli Arabs and Arabs in the Territories.” 29. Al-Ittihad, 20 April 1982. 30. Ibid., 14 May 1982. A few weeks later, Tawfiq Zayyad met with the dismissed mayors of Nablus and Ramalla. 31. Atallah Mansour, Haaretz, 5 October 1982, quoted by Rekhess, The Arab Minority in Israel, 170. 32. Ibid.

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Notes to Pages 100–107

33. Prime Minister’s Office, Leqet MeHamitrahesh BaMigzar Ha‘Aravi, September– October 1982, no. 20–21. 34. Ibid., 1–9. 35. Ibid.; emphasis added. 36. Benziman and Mansour, Subtenants, 195. 37. On the place of local Arab newspapers among Israeli Arabs, see Amal Jamal, The Culture of Media Consumption among National Minorities: The Arabs in Israel (Nazareth: I‘lam, 2006), 75. 38. Reiter and Aharoni, The Political Life of Arabs, 31. The article was fi rst published in Al-Sharq al-Awsat, 12 December 1980. Another organization that assisted Arab associations was Shatil, founded in 1982 by the New Israel Fund, whose mission was the guidance and enhancement of grass-roots associations. Other examples are the Center for the Revival of Palestinian Heritage in Tayba, founded by Salih Baransa, an activist of the al-Ard movement following his release after serving some ten years in prison for his activity against Israel; al-Nahda in Tayba (also associated with Salih Baransa); the al-Fajr Association in the village of ‘Ar‘ara; the al-Sawt Association and the Jaffa Center, both in Nazareth; and al-Aswar Association in Acre. 39. Rekhess, The Arab Minority in Israel, 120. 40. Ibid., 135. 41. Stendel, The Arabs in Israel, 135. 42. Smooha, Arabs and Jews in Israel, 1: 51, 145. 43. Ibid., 113, 143. 44. Ibid., 51, 145. 5. Turning the Scales Between Likud and Labor 1. Israeli parliament Web site, http://www.knesset.gov.il/history/heb/heb_hist11.htm. 2. Menachem Klein, Antagonistic Collaboration: PLO-Jordanian Dialogue 1985–1988 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Leonard Davis Institute, 1988). 3. On the intifada, see Zachary Lockman and Joel Beinin, eds., Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising against Israeli Occupation (Washington, D.C.: Merip, 1989); Jamal R. Nassar and Roger Heacock, eds., Intifada: Palestine at the Crossroads (New York: Praeger, 1990); Don Peretz, Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990); Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari, Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising—Israel’s Third Front (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990); Aryeh Shalev, The Intifada: Causes and Effects (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Post, 1991); Amikam Nachmani, “The Palestinian Intifada 1987–1993: The Dynamics of Symbols and Symbolic Realities, the Role of Symbols, Rituals and Myths in National Struggles,” Civil Wars 4, no. 1 (2001): 49–103; Edgar O’Ballance, The Palestinian Intifada (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998); Alexander Bligh, “The Intifada and the New Political Role of the Israeli Arab Leadership,” Middle East Studies 35, no. 1 (1999): 134–64. 4. Haaretz, 24 August 1984.

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5. Benjamin Neuberger, “The Arab Minority in Israeli Politics 1948–1992: From Marginality to Influence,” Asian and African Studies 27, no. 1–2 (1993), 169. 6. Yitzhak Reiter, “The Arab Democratic Party and Its Location in the Israeli Arabs’ Orientation,” in The Arab Vote in Israeli Parliamentary Elections, 1988, ed. Jacob M. Landau (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, 1989), 63–84. 7. On the PLP, see Reiter and Aharoni, The Political Life of Arabs, 19–20; Landau, The Arab Minority, 84–88; Benjamin Neuberger, The Arab Minority: Alienation and Integration (Tel Aviv: Open University, 1998), 111–17. 8. Ilan Greilsmer, “Rakah and the Elections to the 12th Knesset,” in Landau, The Arab Vote, 57. 9. Stendel, The Arabs in Israel, 184. 10. Landau, The Arab Minority, 102. 11. The vote directly for the Zionist parties rather than satellite lists was wrongly interpreted as an indicator of political moderation of the Arab citizens. See Frisch, 1996. 12. Stendel, The Arabs in Israel, 362. 13. Rekhess, “Israeli Arabs and Arabs in the Territories,” 184. 14. Ibid. Hadash and PLP Knesset members had addressed this issue in the past. 15. Moshe Za’k, Hussein Makes Peace (Ramat-Gan: Bar Ilan University, Begin Sadat Center, 1996), 261. 16. On the intifada, see note 3 above. 17. On 25 November 1987, a Palestinian militant aboard an ultralight aircraft successfully entered northern Israel from southern Lebanon, landing at night on a military base and killing six soldiers before being shot dead. 18. Shalev. 19. Ibid. 20. Joseph Ginat, “Palestinization or a Protest Vote,” in The Elections in Israel 1984, ed. Asher Arian and Michal Shamir (Tel Aviv: Ramot, 1986), 151–67; Joseph Ginat, “Voting Patterns and Political Behavior in the Arab Sector,” in Landau, The Arab Vote, 3. 21. Benziman and Mansour, Subtenants, 85–87. 22. Ginat, “Palestinization or a Protest Vote.” The document reveals that in within Israel there were 162 refugee villages and housing clusters; of them, 44 relate to internal refugees (those who fled to another place, but remained in Israel). 23. Based on my personal observation as advisor to Weitzman. 24. Benziman and Mansour, Subtenants, 89–90. 25. Ministry of the Interior, Report of the Interministerial Committee for the Illegal Building in the Arab and Druze Sector (Jerusalem: Ministry of the Interior, 1987); also known as the Markovitz Committee Report. 26. Benziman and Mansour, Subtenants, 88. 27. Amin Fares, Report on the Social, Economic, and Political Status of Arab Citizens of Israel (Haifa: Mossawa Center, 2001), 14–20.

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Notes to Pages 118–31

28. Leaked to the press: Haaretz and Ma‘ariv, 25 October 1987. Benziman and Mansur, Subtenants, 27, 87–93. 29. Government Decision no. 373 of April 1987. 30. Wakim Wakim, “The ‘Internally Displaced’: Seeking Return Within One’s Own Land,” Journal of Palestine Studies 31, no. 1 (2001): 32–38. 31. Paper presented by Alexander Bligh in a conference at the Davis Institute, Hebrew University, 5–6 November 1991 (author’s notes). 32. See SCJ (Bagatz) 6354/03 Awni Sbeyt vs. Government of Israel, and SCJ 840/97 Sbeyt vs. Government of Israel. 33. David Grossman, Sleeping on a Wire (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hameuhad, 1992), 41–42. 34. Ibid., 42. 35. Elie Rekhess, “Israeli Arabs and the Intifada,” in From the Conflict Perspective: The Intifada, ed. Gad Gilbar and Asher Susser (Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center and HaKibutz Hameuchad, 1992), 100–101; cf. Elie Rekhess, “The Arabs in Israel and the Intifada,” in The Intifada, ed. Robert O. Freedman (Miami: Florida University Press, 1991), 343–69. 36. Rekhess, The Arab Minority in Israel, 180. 37. Alexander Bligh’s paper submitted to the Or Commission on 8 July 2001. 38. Rouhana, Palestinian Citizens, 16; Smooha, The Orientation, 50, table 21. 39. Smooha, Arabs and Jews in Israel, 2: 143, table 14.6. 40. “General Security Service,” in Hebrew Wikipedia. 41. After Israel released in August 1985 some 1,000 Arab and Palestinian prisoners charged for security matters in the “Jibril Deal,” the Jewish support for Kahane increased to an equivalent of eleven seats in the Knesset according to a survey conducted by Greilsmer, 59. 42. Ibid. 43. Smooha, Arabs and Jews in Israel, 2: 145, table 14.9. 6. The First Intifada and the Madrid Conference 1. Stendel, The Arabs in Israel, 321. 2. Asher Arian and Michal Shamir, eds., The Elections in Israel: 1988 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990), 1–10. 3. Majid Al-Haj, “Elections in the Arab Sector in the Shadow of the Intifada: Propaganda and Results,” in Landau, The Arab Vote, 39, quoting Hadashot, 29 January 1988. 4. Ginat, “Voting Patterns,” 16. 5. Joni Gal, The Elections to the Twelfth Knesset, November 1988 (Givat Haviva: Institute for Arab Studies and the Center for Socialism Studies, 1989). 6. Reiter, “The Arab Democratic Party,” 69. 7. Arian and Shamir, The Elections in Israel, 1–10. The decrease of the Hadash power in the Triangle and Kafar Kana indicated that the Islamic movement strengthened in these areas. 8. Gal, The Elections to the Twelfth Knesset.

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9. Elie Rekhess, “Israeli Arabs as a Bridge to Peace,” HaMizrah HeHadash 37 (1995), 84, believes that the frequent visits of Israeli Arab figures to Tunis influenced Israeli public opinion and brought the Oslo negotiations closer. 10. Ibid., 83. 11. Tibi was present in Madrid at a the request of Yasser Arafat, but he played a secondary role. He said his companion Radwan Abu ‘Ayyash would be present as the spokesperson of the Palestinian delegation. See Shayke Ben Porath, Discussions with Ahmad Tibi (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Hapoalim, 1999), 105. When asked how he could advise the Palestinian delegation against the Israeli interest, Tibi responded that Israeli law does not prevent him from doing so. Afterwards an attempt to legislate such a law especially for him failed. Ibid., 11. 12. Dawlat Filastin, Majzarat al-Aqsa, Shahadat wa-Watha’iq (n.p.: PLO, Women’s Union for Social Action, 1992). 13. Stendel, The Arabs in Israel, 316. 14. Sarah Ozacky-Lazar and Riad Kabaha, The Madrid Conference as Reflected in the Arab Newspapers in Israel (Givat Haviva: Institute for Arab Studies, 1991), 1. 15. Elie Rekhess, “Opening of the 1948 fi les,” in From Intifada to War, ed. Tamar Yagnes (Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center, 2003), 119–26. 16. Stendel, The Arabs in Israel, 411–16. 17. Ozacky-Lazar and Kabaha, The Madrid Conference, 4. 18. Al-Sinara, 8 November 1991, quoted in ibid., 8. 19. In al-Sinara, 22 November 1991; later he denied it in al-Ittihad, 29 November 1991, and al-Diyar, 29 November 1991. 20. Ozacky-Lazar and Kabaha, The Madrid Conference, 4, quoting al-Watan’s editorial of 8 November 1991. 21. Elie Rekhess, “The Arabs in Israel after Oslo: Localization of the National Struggle,” HaMizrah HeHadash 43 (2002), 297. 22. Al-Diar, 29 November 1991, quoted in Ozacky-Lazar and Kabaha, The Madrid Conference. 23. Yossi Melman, “The GSS Demanded Equality. So What,” Arab Pictures, a special issue of Haaretz, 25 May 2004, 11. 24. Atalla Mansour, “For the First Time a Master Plan was Approved for Umm al-Fahm,” Haaretz, 12 April 1991. 25. Atalla Mansour, “The New By-Laws Would Easy Permits for New Buildings in the Arab Sector,” Haaretz, 2 January 1991. 26. Yerah Tal and Ruti Heiman, “Rahat Will Become the First Bedouin Town in Israel,” Haaretz, 4 March 1992. 27. Atalla Mansour, “Pains, but Less,” Haaretz, 14 May 1991. 28. Majid Al-Haj and Henri Rosenfeld, Arab Local Government in Israel (Tel Aviv: International Center for Peace in the Middle East, 1988), 123; Majid Al-Haj and Henri Rosenfeld, “The Emergence.”

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Notes to Pages 137–43

29. Menahem Horowitz, “Arab Councils Will Strike Next Week Protesting Non-fulfi llment of Promises to Assist,” Haaretz, 13 May 1991. 30. Ibid.; Yerah Tal, “A Financial Agreement Between the Arab Municipalities and the Government Ministries,” Haaretz, 23 May 1991. See also Yerah Tal’s reports in Haaretz 25 August 1991, 27 August 1991, 28 August 1991. 31. “Der‘i to Heads of Arab Municipalities: Your Distress Will Be Solved Soon,” Haaretz, 22 August 1991. 32. Reiter, “Between a Jewish State and a State of Its Residents,” 45. 33. Stendel, The Arabs in Israel, 7. 34. Ibid. 35. “A Bill to Develop the Arab Sector Will Be Discussed in the Cabinet,” Haaretz, 25 August 1991. 36. Memorandum by Ehud Olmert mailed to Minister of Finance Shimon Peres. 37. Muhammad Amara and Sufian Kabaha, Divided Identity: A Study of Political Division and Social Reflections in a Split Village (Givat Haviva: Institute for Study of Peace, 1996), 56–57. 38. Ibid. 39. Amara, “The Collective Identity,” 259. 40. Ibid., 253. 41. Rekhess, “Israeli Arabs and the Intifada,” 101–2; Rekhess, “The Arabs in Israel and the Intifada.” 42. Nadim Rouhana, “The Intifada and the Palestinians of Israel: Resurrecting the Green Line,” Journal of Palestine Studies 19, no. 3 (1990), 67. 43. Oren Yiftachel, “The Concept of Ethnic Democracy and Its Applicability to the Case of Israel,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 15, no. 1 (1992), 131–32. 44. Ozacky-Lazar and Ghanem, Green Line, Red Lines, 8–10. 45. Ibid., 16–17. 46. Rekhess, “Israeli Arabs and the Intifada,” 102. 47. Kol Ha‘emek Vehagalil (Upper Nazareth’s local newspaper), 27 May 1988; Alexander Bligh’s paper submitted to the Or Commission in 8 July 2001. 48. Ian S. Lustick, “The Changing Political Role of Israeli Arabs,” in The Elections in Israel: 1988, ed. Asher Arian and Michal Shamir (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990), 127. 49. Benziman and Mansour, Subtenants, 94; Bligh’s report to the Or Commission. 50. Ibid. 51. Adalah Notebooks 4 (Spring 2004): 105. 52. Rouhana, “The Intifada and the Palestinians of Israel,” 68. 53. Ozacky-Lazar and Ghanem, Green Line, Red Lines, 8. 54. Rekhess, “Israeli Arabs as a Bridge,” 81. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 82.

Notes to Pages 143–54

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57. Ibid., 112–13. On Israeli Arabs and the intifada, see also Rouhana, “The Intifada and the Palestinians of Israel”; Elia Zureik and Aziz Haidar, “The Impact of the Intifada on the Palestinians in Israel,” International Journal of the Sociology of Law 19 (1991): 475–99. 58. Rouhana, “The Intifada and the Palestinians of Israel,” 61. 59. Grossman, Sleeping on a Wire, 142. 60. Azmi Bishara, “The Uprising’s Impact on Israel,” in Lockman and Beinin, 219. 61. Stendel, The Arabs in Israel, 321. 62. “The UN’s Fourth Asiatic Seminar and the Symposium of the NGOs regarding the Question of Palestine, Nicosia, 20–24 January 1992.” See Alexander Bligh’s report to the Or Commission in 8 July 2001. 63. Stendel, The Arabs in Israel, 321. 64. Neuberger, “The Arab Minority in Israeli Politics,” 164. 65. Smooha, Arabs and Jews in Israel, 2: 51, table 5.2; 143, table 14.6. 66. Following this action, the Rabin government deported 415 Hamas activists from the West Bank and Gaza to Lebanon. See the Betselem Organization (monitoring human rights in Israel and Palestine) Web site: http://www.btselem.org/hebrew/Deportation/1992_Mass_ Deportation.asp. 67. Aziz Haidar, Al-Filastiniyyun fi Isra’il fi Zill Iittifaqiyat Uslu (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1997), 139–40. 68. International edition of the Jerusalem Post, 6–12 November 1983. 69. Reiter and Aharoni, The Political Life of Arabs, 23. 70. Reiter, “The Arab Democratic Party,” 76. 71. Smooha, Arabs and Jews in Israel, 2: 52, table 5.4. 72. Ibid., 113, table 10.4. 73. Ibid., 145, table 14.9. 7. Peace and Affi rmative Action 1. Al-Ittihad, 20 April 1992, quoted by As‘ad Ghanem, The Arabs in Israel towards the Elections to the Thirteenth Knesset (Givat Haviva: Institute for Arab Studies, 1992), 41. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Asher Arian and Michal Shamir, eds., The Elections in Israel: 1992 (Boulder: SUNY Press, 1995), 1–14. 5. Jerusalem Report, 11 February 1993. 6. Elie Rekhess, “Israel’s Arab Citizens and the Peace Process,” in Israel under Rabin, ed. Robert O. Freedman (Boulder: Westview, 1995), 194. 7. Majid al-Haj, in a lecture at the Center for Strategic Studies–Jordanian University, 27 August 2002; cf. Haidar, Al-Filastiniyyun fi Isra’il, 144.

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Notes to Pages 155–59

8. Sarah Ozacky-Lazar, The Elections for the Thirteenth Knesset among the Arabs in Israel (Givat Haviva: Institute for Arab Studies, 1992); Yitzhak Reiter, The Elections to the 1992 Knesset (Beit Berl: Institute for Israeli Arab Studies, 1992). 9. Zu Haderech, 15 July 1992; Reiter, The Elections to the 1992 Knesset. 10. See Ilan Shhori, “We Shall Equalize the Arab Municipalities, Promised Labor to Hadash and the ADP,” Haaretz, 13 July 1992; Dan Rabinowitz, “Remembering the Subtenants,” Haaretz, 15 July 1992. 11. Gideon Alon, “Ministerial Cabinet Chaired by Rabin to Engage in Equaling the Terms of the Arab Sector,” Haaretz, 15 July 1992. 12. Gideon Alon and Zvi Zerahiya, “In the Knesset: In the Corridors,” Haaretz, 20 December 1995. 13. Gideon Alon and Zvi Zerahiya, “In the Knesset: A Committee to Promote Arab Citizens Was Formed,” Haaretz, 5 November 1992. 14. Gideon Alon and Zvi Zerahiya, “In the Knesset: In the Corridors,” Haaretz, 10 November 1993, 9 December 1993, 16 December 1993. 15. Yoseph Elgazi, “Unnecessary Filters,” Haaretz, 14 March 1995. Professor Majid alHaj from Haifa University stated, “The continuing existence of the institution of experts who are termed Arabists in the new government is a byproduct of the paternalistic attitude towards the Arab population in Israel, which totally ignores the major changes that this population has undergone in its needs and aspirations.” 16. See both testimony by Dan Rabinovitz and a paper submitted by Shuli Dichter to the Or Commission of Inquiry, Ozacky-Lazar and Ghanem, The Or Commission Testimonies, 122–42. 17. In a lecture at the Truman Forum for Public Debate, 30 October 2002. These words were criticized by Balad. See the Arab 48 Web site, http://www.arabs48.com, 7 November 2002; Israeli TV channel 10 of 2 November 2002, 21:10. 18. Yair Ettinger, “Fondly Remembering the Old Days,” Haaretz, 17 October 2002. 19. Ibid. 20. Gideon Alon and Zvi Zerahiya, “The Ministerial Budget for the Arab Sector Was Increased by 236 Million NIS,” Haaretz, 3 March 1993; idem., “Amur: Sheves Return Us to the Days of Salah Shabati,” Haaretz, 3 March 1993. 21. Haaretz, 9 December 1996, A5. See also Elie Rekhess, “Dialogue Between the Deaf,” Ma‘ariv, 18 August 1994. 22. Yoseph Elgazi, “More But Not Enough,” Haaretz, 29 January 1995. 23. Nili Mendler, “Ministry of Education Decided to Transfer 15,000 Study Hours from National Religious Education to National Arab Education,” Haaretz, 16 February 1993. 24. Nili Mendler, “The Ministry of Education Announced Affi rmative Action to the Arab Sector in Budgets for the Coming School Year,” Haaretz, 31 August 1993. 25. Yoseph Elgazi, “So We Have a Computer Class, But What about the Toilets?” Haaretz, 13 April 1995.

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26. Gabi Zohar, “The Ministry of Education Recognized the Islamic College of Teachers Training,” Haaretz, 27 August 1993. 27. Yoseph Elgazi, “The I‘bilin High School Will Become an Academic College,” Haaretz, 12 March 1995. 28. As‘ad Ghanem, The Arabs in Israel: Towards the Twenty-first Century: A Survey of Basic Infrastructure (Givat Haviva: Institute for Peace Research, 1993). 29. Noa Vaserman, “The Ministry of Housing Will Extend Its Budget to the Arab Sector by 80 Million NIS,” Haaretz, 15 June 1994; see also Ghanem, The Arabs in Israel: Towards the Twenty-first Century. 30. Ibid. 31. Yoseph Elgazi, “The Arab in Israel Is a Second Rate Citizen,” Haaretz, 7 March 1994. 32. State Controller’s Report of 2002. 33. Rekhess, “Israel’s Arab Citizens,” 193. 34. “Bill Regarding Supply of Electric Power Will Enable Connecting Another Part of Arab Houses in the Country,” Haaretz, 15 June 1994. 35. Ali Elad, “About 45 percent of the Sewerage Budget Is Invested in the Arab and Druze Sectors,” Haaretz, 24 November 1993. 36. Yoseph Elgazi, “The Minister of Interior Affairs on Leave Issued a Decree to Expand the Jurisdiction of Nazareth, Mahshad, and Yafi‘a,” Haaretz, 1 June 1995. 37. Alterman and Stav, Conflict and Consensus Through Language. 38. Haidar, On the Margins, 58. 39. Sikkuy Report on Equality and Integration of the Arab Citizens in Israel During 1998– 1999, 31. 40. Amin Fares, “Accounting,” Kol Hair Plus, 3 May 2002, 5. 41. Of these houses, 84.6 percent are made of stone or concrete whereas in the Negev there are some 9,000 of which only 25 percent are made of this material (50 percent are huts and the rest are tents). See the Arab 48 Web site, http://www.Arabs48.com, on the Committee of Forty. In a survey conducted by As‘ad Ghanem, The Arabs in Israel: Towards the Twenty-first Century, in thirty-two villages of Galilee, he found that seventeen had more than 100 persons and seven had more than 200 residents. In 1992, Rasem Khamaisi conducted a survey in twenty-eight unrecognized villages in the Negev, in which 34,340 people resided, indicating that some 3,000 additional people were dispersed among at least thirty clusters with approximately 50 people per cluster. 42. Yerah Tal, “Three Villages in the North including Ein Hod Were Recognized by the Ministry of the Interior,” Haaretz, 19 May 1991; Yoseph Elgazi, “Connected to the Land Only,” Haaretz, 25 January 1993. 43. Judi Meltz, “The Government and the Jewish Agency Will Assist Rehabilitating Arab Localities,” Haaretz, 4 October 1993. 44. Yoseph Elgazi, “The Head of the Fasuta Municipality: The Decision to Recognize Arab Localities as Front Line Localities Was Not Implemented,” Haaretz, 15 August 1995.

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Notes to Pages 164–71

45. Sikkuy Report on Government Integrating Arab Citizens, 2000. 46. Yitzhak Reiter, Integrating Arab Academics Within the Israeli Civil Service (Beit Berl: Institute for Israeli Arab Studies, 1996). 47. Gideon Alon, “Cabinet Committee Recommends to Repatriate the Displaced for Ikrit and Bir‘em in their Villages,” Haaretz, 25 December 1995; idem., “The Inhabitants of Ikrit and Bir‘em Would Not Be Allowed to Practice Agriculture,” Haaretz, 25 December 1995; Dan Rabinovitz, “Sabotage the Vineyards as Victims,” Haaretz, 26 December 1995; Gabi Zohar, “Nobody Says Welcome (Returnees),” Haaretz, 27 December 1995; Gabi Zohar and Itim, “The Ikrit Displaced Prayed in the Village Church for the Return of All their Families to their Homes,” Haaretz, 28 December 1995. 48. The Sharon government and a new Supreme Court ruling blocked this initiation. See chapter 10. 49. Sarah Ozacky-Lazar and As‘ad Ghanem, Between Peace and equality: The Arabs in the Half Tenure of the Labor-Meretz Government (Givat Haviva: Institute for Peace Research, 1995). 50. Shuli Dichter, “The Relations Between Jews and Arabs as Factor in the October Events” (Jerusalem: Sikkuy, 2001). 51. Rekhess, “Israel’s Arab Citizens,” 200. 52. Majid al-Haj, “The Political Behavior of the Arabs in Israel in the 1992 Elections: Integration Versus Segregation,” in The Elections in Israel: 1992, ed. Asher Arian and Michal Shamir (Boulder: SUNY Press, 1995), 157. 53. Aziz Haidar, On the Margins, 146–66. 54. Ibid. 55. Landau, The Arab Minority, 104. 56. Ibid. 57. Ozacky-Lazar, The Elections for the Thirteenth Knesset, 2, 7, 17; Aziz Haidar, AlFilastiniyyun fi Isra’il, 142. 58. Ghanem, “The Arabs in Israel Towards the Elections to the Thirteenth Knesset,” 41. 59. Amara, Political Violence, 30. 60. “The Arab Public in Israel Will Not Strike on Land Day,” Haaretz, 17 March 1995. 61. Bishara, “On the Question of the Palestinian Minority.” 62. ‘Ali ‘Ashur, “Al-Tajamu‘ al-Watani al-Dimuqrati ila Ayna?” al-Ittihad, 12 February 1994; on Arab sorrow after Rabin’s assassination, see al-Sinara, 7 November 1995, and Kul al-Arab, 11 November 1995. 63. Yoseph Elgazi, “What Is a State?” Haaretz, 14 November 1994. 64. Ibid. 65. Ozacky-Lazar, The Elections for the Thirteenth Knesset, 17. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Amara, Political Violence, 30.

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69. Al-Mu’tamar al-‘Amm lil-Jamahir al-‘Arabiyya fi Isra’il, Nazareth 13–14 December 1996. 70. Benziman and Mansour, Subtenants, 197. 71. In 1999, right-wing parties succeeded in passing the Law of Rule and Jurisdiction Order (Abolishment of Imposition of Law, Administration and Jurisdiction) initially introduced in 1995, which required 61 out of 120 MKs votes in any decision that concerned concessions, including a concession on the Golan Heights. This bill aimed at neutralizing the influence of Arab MKs on the overall vote. 72. Yedioth Aharonoth, 28 May 1993; Rekhess, “Israel’s Arab Citizens,” 195. 8. The Emergence of a National Minority 1. Round Table on Jewish-Arab Relations in Israel: Scenarios and Policies, Florsheimer Institute for Policy Studies (in Jerusalem), 16 July 2002. 2. Peretz and Doron, 533; Ilana Kaufman and Rachel Israeli, “The Odd Group Out: The Arab-Palestinian Vote in the 1996 Elections,” in The Elections in Israel: 1996, ed. Asher Arian and Michal Shamir (Boulder: SUNY Press, 1999), 85–115. 3. Arian and Shamir, The Elections in Israel: 1996, 1–23. 4. Ibid. 5. Kaufman and Israeli, “The Odd Group Out.” 6. Peretz and Doron, “Israel’s 1996 Elections”; Kaufman and Israeli, “The Odd Group Out.” 7. Yitzhak Reiter, “The Status Quo at the Temple Mount/al-Haram al-Sharif under Israeli Rule 1967–2000,” in Sovereignty of God and Man: Sanctity and Political Centrality on the Temple Mount, ed. Yitzhak Reiter (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, 2001), 310, 313. 8. Sikkuy Report on Equality and Integration of the Arab Citizens in Israel During 1998– 1999, 19. 9. Report Summarizing the Government Ministries’ Actions in the Non-Jewish Sector in 1997 (Jerusalem: Prime Minister’s Office, Bureau of the Advisor on Arab Affairs, 1998). 10. Ibid. See also Yosef Elgazi, “The Sikkuy Association: Since Netanyahu Was Elected the Process of Closing Disparities Between the Jewish and Arab Populations Was Stopped,” Haaretz, 30 November 1997. 11. As‘ad ‘Azayza, “The Situation in the Arab Municipalities: Policy and Implementation 1999,” Sikuuy Report on Equality and Integration of the Arab Citizens in Israel During 1999–2000, 55. 12. Yosef Elgazi, “Dialogue of Deaf,” Haaretz, 15 June 1997. 13. On page 19. 14. On al-Ruha training zone, see Amiram Oren and Rafi Regev, A Land in Khaki Colors: The Defense Map of the State of Israel (Jerusalem: Karmel, 2008).

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Notes to Pages 180–86

15. Yosef Elgazi, “For the First Time Since the Massacre in Kafar Qasem a Minister Represented the Government in the Annual Memorial of Slain Persons,” Haaretz, 29 October 1997; idem., “Katzav Came to Apologize in Kafar Qasem but was Welcomed by Shouts ‘Pardon of Butchers,’” Haaretz, 30 October 1997. Two years later, Minister of Education Yosi Sarid appealed to teachers to commemorate the annual memorial of the Kafar Qasem massacre. See Yosef Elgazi and Rali Saar, “The Kafar Qasem Municipal Council: Israel Should Admit Its Responsibility to the ‘56 Massacre and Form a Committee of Investigation,” Haaretz, 6 October 1999; Tamar Rotem, “The Kafar Qasem Massacre Comes Out of the Closet,” Haaretz, 27 October 1999. 16. They demanded the following: allocation of equal resources, elimination of discriminatory policy of any kind (including the distinction between those who served in the army and those exempted from army service), an end to land expropriation and the rescission of previous expropriation, repatriation of the displaced refugees to their original villages, allocation of lands for new housing, consolidation of illegal housing in the Arab settlements, recognition of the Bedouin nonrecognized settlements and their acceptance as far as land ownership demands, the release and return of all the waqf properties, and the transfer of abandoned mosques and cemeteries to the administration of the Muslim community, egalitarian representation in the public administration of government companies, planning, and housing councils in the Israel Land Authority and the Histadrut, recognition of national organizations to represent the Arab sector, an end to the exclusion of Arab members of Knesset from government coalitions, the establishment of an independent Arab educational department, respecting the status of the Arabic language, establishing an Arab university, and transferring authority over the electronic media in the Arabic language to Arab citizens. See Or Commission Report, 62. 17. Al-Hayat al-Jadida, 11 January 1999; emphasis added. 18. Yosef Elgazi, “45 Percent of the Arabs Would Support an Arab Candidate to PM, 30 Percent Would Support Barak,” Haaretz, 4 December 1997, A7. 19. Gad Barzilai, “Community, Law, and Identities among the Palestinian Arabs in Israel,” Adalah’s Review 1(1999): 9–11. 20. Dan Shueftan, “The New Identity of the Arab MKs,” Tchelet 13 (Fall 2003): 23–49. 21. Ibid. 22. See the description in the The National Commission of Inquiry of the Clashes Between the Security Forces and the Israeli Citizens in October 2000 (Jerusalem: Government Press, 2003), 75; hereinafter cited as the Or Commission Report. 23. Or Commission Report, 84. 24. Ibid., 187. 25. Fawzi Abu Tu‘ma, “Ma‘rakat al-Ahali li-Isti‘adat Aradihim Athmarat: Ittifaq alRuha” (The Inhabitants Popular Battle Yielded: The al-Ruha Agreement), al-Sinara, 15 December 2000, 20. 26. Yosef Elgazi, “Positive Precedent,” Haaretz, 24 December 2000.

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27. Yosef Elgazi, “Agricultural Land Expropriation for Training Zone,” Haaretz, 26 January 2000. 28. Kaufman and Israeli, “The Odd Group Out”; Rebecca Kook, “Citizenship and Its Discontents, Palestinians in Israel,” in Citizenship and the State in the Middle East, Approaches and Applications, ed. Nils A. Butenschon, U. Davis, and M. Hassassian (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 263–87. See also Bishara, “On the Question of the Palestinian Minority,” 219. 29. Approved by the National Committee in August 1999. 30. See Shani Payes, Palestinian NGOs in Israel: The Politics of Civil Society (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2005). 31. See the Israeli parliament Web site, http://www.knesset.gov.il/elections16/heb/ protocols/prot311202.htm. 32. On the project, see Uzi Benziman, ed., Whose Land Is It? A Quest for Jewish-Arab Compact in Israel (Jerusalem: Israel Democracy Institute, 2006). For the minutes of the discussions, see the Israel Democracy Institute Web site, http://www.idi.org.il. 33. Israel Democracy Institute Web site, http://www.idi.org.il/hebrew/confl ict/confl ict.php?id=1578. 34. Ibid., http://www.idi.org.il/hebrew/confl ict/confl ict.php?id=1602. 35. Ibid., http://www.idi.org.il/hebrew/confl ict/confl ict.php?id=1595. 36. Conference titled “The Kinneret Covenant: A Jewish Consensus as a Solution to Israeli Arabs,” Tamra 17 March 2002 (author’s notes). 37. Muna Muhaysen-Hamza, Palestine Report, 27 February 1998; Dani Rabinowitz, Haaretz, 16 February 1998. 38. Al-Sinana, 4 April 1998. 39. Rekhess, “Opening of the 1948 Files.” 40. Hillel Frisch, “Ethnicity or Nationalism? Comparing the Nakba Narrative among Israeli Arabs and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza,” Israel Affairs 9, no. 1–2 (2003): 165–84. 41. Israeli parliament Web site, Http://www.knesset.gov.il/elections16/heb/protocols/ prot311202.htm. 42. Ari Shavit, “The Chosen Land,” Haaretz Appendix, 3 January 2003, 16–18. 43. Efrat Ben-Ze’ev and Issam Aburaiya, “Middle Ground Politics and the Re-Palestinization of Places in Israel,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 36, no. 4 (2004): 639–55. 44. See Leon A. Mayer and J. Pinkerfeld, Some Principal Muslim Religious Buildings in Israel (Jerusalem: Ministry of Religious Affairs, 1950). 45. Gabi Zohar, “Adalah Association Protests: The Ministry of Religious Affairs Allocates Only 1.43 percent of Its Budget to Arab Communities,” Haaretz, 16 December 1996. 46. Moshe Reinfeld, “The Supreme Court Will Hear Today the First Joint Appeal Against the Ministry of Religious Affairs,” Haaretz, 28 September 1997.

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Notes to Pages 192–94

47. Moshe Reinfeld, “The Supreme Court Refused to Increase the Budget for Religious Services in the Arab Sector but Stated: Discrimination Exists,” Haaretz, 4 December 1998. 48. SCJ (Bagatz) 240/98 and 1113/99 Adalah et al. vs. Minister for Religious Affairs et al.; Moshe Reinfeld, “Supreme Court: Ministry of Religious Affairs Discriminated Against Arab Cemeteries,” Haaretz, 19 April 2000. 49. For an analysis of the state 2004 budget regarding the Arab sector, see Amin Fares, “The State Budget and the Arab Citizens in Israel, a Social and Economic Report,” (Haifa: Mossawa Center, 2005). 50. Moshe Reinfeld, “Supreme Court: Substantial Duty to Give Proper Representation to Arabs,” Haaretz, 15 July 2001. 51. Moshe Reinfeld, “Supreme Court Ordered the State to Inform When Would Road Signs Inscribed in Arabic al Well,” Haaretz, 27 November 1998. The Public Works’ Department Committed to Add Arabic to Intercity Signs within Five Years. See SCJ (Bagatz) 4438/97 Adalah vs. Department of Public Works. See also SCJ 4112/99 Adalah and the Association for Civil Rights vs. Tel Aviv–Yaffo Municipality and SCJ 4112/99 the Association for Civil Rights vs. Haifa Municipality, regarding street signs in mixed cities. In another incident, Adalah appealed to the director of courts Judge Dan Arbel, claiming that his order to limit the translations of court hearings into Arabic contradicts the law and diminishes the status of Arabic as an official language. Adalah demanded that Arbel publish a guideline announcing the right of litigants who do not speak Hebrew to receive the help of a translator provided by the state. For a survey of Adalah’s appeals regarding the status of Arabic, see Adalah Activity Report 1997–2000, 32–49. 52. “Supreme Court: The Jewish Nature of the State Does Not Allow it to Discriminate Against Citizens,” Haaretz, 9 March 2000; “There Are No Jews in Umm al-Fahm, Complained in Katzir,” Haaretz, 9 March 2000; “Invalid Discrimination in Lands,” Haaretz, 9 March 2000; Jamil Dakwar, “To What Extent is it an Achievement?,” Haaretz, 2 April 2001. 53. “Supreme Court: Finish the Acceptance Procedures to Katzir of the Qa‘adan Spouses Within Two Months,” Haaretz, 2 April 2001. Another case relating to housing problems was fi led by Arab residents of Ramla who complained that they were prevented from purchasing apartments in a public housing project that was specified for military graduates; the court dismissed the case. 54. SCJ (Bagatz) 3607/97 Muhammad Sawa‘ed vs. Ministry of the Interior. 55. See the Mossawa Center Web site, http://www.Mossawacenter.org. 56. Ja‘far Farah, Taqrir Fa‘aliyyat li-Sanat 2001 (Haifa: Mossawa Center, 2002), 11–13. Mossawa also lobbied to extend the 1996 Electricity Decree beyond 1999 to be able to connect power to Arab houses built without permit. The organization also published a guide explaining how to get funds from government ministries. 57. Yair Ettinger, “I Am Ready to Treat Jews with Complete Equality,” Haaretz, 21 November 2002.

Notes to Pages 194–203

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58. Kul al-Arab, 18 October 1991. 59. Haaretz, 31 December 1991. 60. Yosef Elgazi, “Arab-Israeli Organizations Would Not Go to Durban,” Haaretz, 24 August 2001. 61. Shuli Dichter, “Civil Action in the International Theatre and at Home Within” (unpublished paper, Ma‘anit, 2001). 62. Ori Nir, “Discrimination Begins in Kindergarten Age,” Haaretz, 12 December 2001, B4. 63. Adalah Review 1 (Winter 1999), 40. For the reports, see the Web site of the UN committee monitoring the human rights convention: http://www.unchr.ch/tbs/doc.ns. 64. Or Commission Report, 63. 65. Rekhess, “Opening of the 1948 fi les.” 66. Yair Ettinger, “Israeli Arabs to UN: Israel Violates International Conventions,” Haaretz, 3 October 2002. Another example, which came from the right of the political spectrum, is the call of MK Michael Kleiner (Herut, Likud) to members of cabinet not to recognize the Arab Follow-Up Committee and to avoid cooperating with it because of the Nakba activity that they were involved in: “Whoever views the establishment of the Jewish state as a catastrophe cannot be an Israeli citizen and participate in determining its future. The government should consider strategic, legislative measures to prevent those who undermine the Jewish nature of the State form participating in the political game,” said Kleiner. 67. SCJ (Bagatz) 6709/98 The General Attorney vs. Moledet-Gezer-Tzomet List, Piskey Din 53, no. 1, 351. 68. Kook, “Citizenship and Its Discontents.” 9. Black October 1. Or Commission Report, 301. 2. This was stated in an interview prior the 2003 elections. See the Web site of the Dayan Center of Tel Aviv University: http://www.dayan.org/eli/adkan3.htm. 3. Or Commission Report, 419–20. 4. Sultany, Citizens without Citizenship, 166. 5. Marwan Dalal, ed., October 2000, Law and Politics before the Or Commission (Shefa‘amer: Adalah, 2003), 178. 6. Dani Rubinstein, “Why Does Azmi Bishara Annoy Arafat?” Haaretz, 5 April 1999. 7. As‘ad Ghanem and Sarah Ozacky-Lazar, “Israel as an Ethnic State: The Arab Vote,” in The Elections in Israel: 1999, ed. Asher Arian and Michal Shamir (Boulder: SUNY Press and the Israel Democracy Institute, 2002), 21. 8. Ibid., 19. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 20.

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Notes to Pages 203–8

11. See “Let Bishara to Praise,” Haaretz, 19 September 2006. 12. As‘ad Ghanem Sarah Ozacky-Lazar, The Arab Vote to the Fifteenth Knesset (Givat Haviva: Institute for the Research of Peace, 1999); idem., “Israel as an Ethnic State,” 25. 13. Document submitted in 12 April 1999 by Tawfiq al-Khatib and Talab al-Sani‘ to Ehud Barak; a letter dated 27 April 1999 from the Hadash General Secretary Muhammad Barake to Ehud Barak. 14. See Gilead Sher, Just Beyond Reach: Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations 1999–2001 (Routledge, 2005); Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004); Ahron Bregman, Elusive Peace: How the Holy Land Defeated America (Penguin, 2005); Clayton E. Swisher, The Truth about Camp David: The Untold Story about the Collapse of the Middle East Peace Process (New York: Nation Books, 2004); Shlomo Ben Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Charles Enderlin, Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, 1995–2002 (Other Press, 2003); Robert Malley and Hussein Agha, “Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors,” New York Review of Books, 9 August 2001; Dennis Ross, G. Grinstein, H. Agha, and R. Malley, “Camp David: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books, 20 September 2001; Benny Morris, “Camp David and After: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books, 13 June 2002; “Camp David and After Continued,” New York Review of Books, 27 June 2002. 15. Or Commission Report, 576–77. 16. Press release, National Committee of Arab Heads of Local Authorities, “Three Agreements with no Actions,” 17 November 1999. 17. Yosef Elgazi and Dalia Shehori, “Today, a General Strike in Arab Municipalities,” Haaretz, 1 December 1999. 18. Amin Fares calculated that developing infrastructure in the Arab sector would cost 18 billion NIS, and that the Four Billion Plan only doubles the 2001 share of Arab localities of the development budget from 4 percent to 8 percent. See Report on the Social, Economic and Political Status of Arab Citizens of Israel (Haifa: Mossawa Center, 2001), 14–20. 19. The Sikkuy Report on Equality and Integration of the Arab Citizens in Israel During 1999–2000, 11. 20. Ibid., passim. 21. Ibid. 22. Ori Nir, “The Implementation of the Arab Sector Developing Plan was Delayed,” Haaretz, 25 September 2001; Farah, Taqrir Fa‘aliyyat li-Sanat 2001; Yair Ettinger, “Surprise in the Arab Sector: Sharon Speeds Up the Development,” Haaretz, 5 September 2002. 23. Government Decision no. 4464 of 15 November 1998. 24. Only one Arab farmer was entitled to subsidies for raising chickens, and his chicken farm was not even an active one. Sikkuy Report on Equality and Integration of the Arab Citizens in Israel During 1999–2000, 22–23. 25. Ibid., 34.

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26. Majid al-Haj, “Trends of Change and Continuity in the Arab Education System in Israel,” in The Arab Citizens in Israel Towards the Twenty-first Century, ed. Jackob M. Landau, A. Ghanem and A. Hareven (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1995), 87–107. 27. Sikkuy Report on Equality and Integration of the Arab Citizens in Israel During 1999–2000. 28. Ori Nir, “Increase in Number of Arabs and Druze Employed in the Civil Service,” Haaretz, 16 January 2001. 29. ‘Ali Haidar, “The Arab Citizens in the Civil Service,” Sikkuy Report on Equality and Integration of the Arab Citizens in Israel During 2000–2001, 17. 30. Sikkuy Report on Equality and Integration of the Arab Citizens in Israel During 1998– 1999, 33. 31. Sikkuy Report on Equality and Integration of the Arab Citizens in Israel During 2000– 2001, 22. 32. Sikkuy Report on Government Integrating, 2000, 11. 33. Government Firms Law (Amendment no. 11) 2000. 34. Ori Nir, “For the First Time: Twenty Arabs Participate in a Course to Train them as Government Firms Governors,” Haaretz, 8 November 2000. 35. See Reiter, “Integrating Arab Academicians”; Majid al-Haj, “The Predicament of Employment among the Arabs in Israel” (unpublished proceedings of a conference conducted by the Jewish Arab Center, Haifa University, 11 June 1987); Sikkuy Report on Government Integrating, 2000. 36. In 2004, the fi rst Arab judge was nominated to the Supreme Court. 37. Sikkuy Report on Equality and Integration of the Arab Citizens in Israel During 2001– 2002, 21. 38. Ibid., 5. 39. Nimrod Luz, Land and Planning Majority-Minority Narratives in Israel: The MisgavSakhnin Conflict as Parable (Jerusalem: Floersheimer Institute for Policy Studies, 2007). 40. Ibid., 37. 41. Yosef Elgazi, “After Katzir Followed Sakhnin,” Haaretz, 3 April 2000. 42. Rabinowitz and Abu-Baker, Coffins on Our Shoulders, 130–33. 43. Ibid. In October 2000 the universities banned demonstrations within the campus. 44. Baruch Qra, “A Sense of Huge Discrepancy,” Haaretz, 23 April 2000. 45. Or Commission Report, 87. 46. Rouhana and Ghanem, “The Crisis of Minorities in Ethnic States”; Barzilai, “Community, Law, and Identities”; Amara, Political Violence, 35; Alexander Bligh, “The Final Settlement of the Palestinian Issue and the Position of the Israeli Arab leadership,” Israel Affairs 9, nos. 1–2 (2003): 290–308 (published also as The Israeli Palestinians, ed. Alexander Bligh [London: F. Cass, 2003]); idem., “Israeli Arab Members of the Fifteenth Knesset: Between Israeli Citizenship and their Palestinian National Identity,” ibid., 3–15.

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Notes to Pages 214–20

47. Documents of the Orient House—an East Jerusalem political center of the Palestinian Authority—revealed an exchange of views and mutual assistance between PA officials and Israeli Arab politicians. In one letter to Faisal al-Husayni, Muhammad Zaydan, former head of the Follow-up Committee, promised to assist Orient House with information, and he asked al-Husayni’s assistance in promoting the idea of an Israeli Arab delegation to the Arab League. See Or Commission Report, 770. 48. Sprinzak, 29. 49. Gideon Alon, “Head of GSS in the Knesset: The Israeli Arabs’ Leadership Is Responsible for the Outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada,” Haaretz, 18 July 2001, 3a. 50. Smadar Peri, “The Complete Text of Abu Mazen’s Speech,” Yedioth Aharonoth, Weekend Appendix, 29 November 2002, 22, 25. 51. For a picture of the stone, see Haaretz, 26 September 2005, 3b. 52. Ozacky-Lazar and Ghanem, The Or Commission Testimonies. See also Rabinovitz and Abu-Baker, Coffins on Our Shoulders. 53. During October 2000 alone, eight articles and one editorial in Haaretz expressed this argument. See articles by Avner De-Shalit (10 October 2000); Shlomo Zand (10 October 2000); Hasan Jalal (23 October 2000); Ori Nir (4 October 2000, 27 October 2000); Zeev Segal (16 October 2000); Zvi Barel (3 October 2000); and the editorial of 15 October 2000. 54. Or Commission Report, 56. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 65. 57. Ibid., 47. See Supreme Court 840/97 of 26 June 2003. 58. Ibid., 59. 59. Ibid., 63. 60. Ibid., 91. 61. Ibid., 45. 62. Ibid., 61. 63. Ibid. This analysis is similar to that of Azmi Bishara. See his “Fasl Jadid fi Ta’rikh al-Jamahir al-‘Arabiyya fi al-Dakhil,” Majallat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyya 44 (2000): 3–25; and his “Reflections on October 2000: A Landmark in Jewish-Arab Relations in Israel,” Journal of Palestine Studies 30, no. 3 (2001): 54–67. 64. Haaretz, 19 September 2005. 65. Yuval Yoaz, “Arab Rights Group to Seek UN Intervention on October 2000 Riots Case,” Haaretz, 28 January 2008. 66. The Accused (Shefaram: Adalah, 2007). 67. Yitzhak Zamir, The Administrative Authority (Jerusalem: Nevo, 1996), 44; see also the SCJ (Bagatz) 4112/99 Adala vs. Tel Aviv Yaffo Municipality, Piskey Din, 52, p. 271 quoted in the Or Commission Report, 29. Zamir in 2004 presented a different opinion. See his article in Rekhess and Ozacky-Lazar, 59–83. 68. Or Commission Report, 36.

Notes to Pages 220–24

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69. Ibid., 576. 70. Ibid., 38. 71. Galit Yamini, “10 percent of the Arab Sector Do Not Buy Israeli Products,” Haaretz, 20 December 2002, C6; Tamar Rotem, “Too Radicals for the Co-existence Industry,” Haaretz, 24 May 2001. 72. Arin Hawari and Hanin Zu‘bi, “Bayna al-Tadhayyul wal-Nadiyya fi al-‘Amal al‘Arabi/al-Yahudi” (Between the Underfoot and Generosity in the Arab/Jewish Work), Fasl al-Maqal, 8 November 2002; Ori Nir, “The Follow-up Committee Exposed Firms in the Settlements to Be Boycotted,” Haaretz, 13 May 2001, A12. 73. Amir Makhul, “Searching for a Different Legitimacy,” Haaretz, 4 March 2002, b2; Ori Nir, “Israeli Arabs Recruit International Support to Defend Their Rights,” Haaretz, 3 December 2000, A4. 74. Ori Nir, “Massive Assistance of Israeli Arabs to the Palestinians,” Haaretz, 24 April 2002; Yair Ettinger, “The Charity Boxes of Kafar Kana Fund a Pharmacy in Jenin,” Haaretz, 16 April 2003. 75. Arnon Reguler, “Area A,” Kol Ha‘ir, 13 April 2001. 76. Seminar paper of my student Yoav Ben-Harosh, 2002. 77. Gideon Alon, “New Law Anchors the Basic Rights of the Arabs in Israel,” Haaretz, 27 July 2000; MK Muhammad Barake of Hadash also submitted a similar bill, entitled “Basic Law: Equality of the Arab Population.” 78. Basic Law: Equality to the Arab Population. The Knesset Presidential Committee decided to reject the Knesset legal advisors’ recommendation due to their opinion that the bill rejects the existence of Israel as a state of the Jewish people, and to bring the bill to be discussed in the Knesset’s plenum. Gideon Alon, “Burg Suggests to Approve the Discussion of the Bill: Equality to the Arab Population,” Haaretz, 30 November 1999; idem., “Bill: Equality to the Arab Population would be Discussed in the Plenum,” Haaretz, 4 January 2000. 79. Basic Law: The Arab Minority as a National Minority, Bill no. 2705, submitted 21 May 2001. 80. Bill: Amendment—Naturalizing Arabic Language Speakers, 2002. 81. Zvi Zinger, “MK Barake Was Investigated on His Attendance at the Hamas Convention,” Ma‘ariv, 25 December 2001. 82. The Dolphinarium disco is located near the Hasan Bey Mosque; twenty-one people died in this bombing. Sa‘id Badran et al., “Tibi: The Resistance in Jenin Is an Honorable Heroic Action,” Ma‘ariv, 10 April 2002; Jeki Hugi et al., “MK A-Sani‘ on the Terror Action in Tel Aviv: Legitimate Struggle,” Ma‘ariv, 6 August 2001. 83. As‘ad Ghanem, “The New Choice,” Haaretz, 12 February 2001, b2. 84. Ori Nir, “On the Road to Form National Institutions,” Haaretz, 26 December 2001. 85. Figures provided by the General Security Service in a document circulated by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Four Years of Confl ict: General Data,” September 2004, 14–18.

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Notes to Pages 225–38

86. Ori Nir, “Two Arab Leaders Investigated in Suspect of Incitement,” Haaretz, 10 January 2001. 87. Rafi k Jabarin, “Hidden Transfer,” Haaretz, 23 April 2002; Ori Nir, “We Are Not the Jews’ Cats to Be Deprived,” Haaretz, 25 April 2002. 88. Interview by Yoav Ben-Harosh dated 7 July 2002 for a seminar paper titled “Israeli Arabs Where To?” 10. The Jewish Counterattack 1. Kriesberg, Constructive Conflicts, 163. 2. The U.S. White House Web site, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/ 04/20040414-3.html. 3. Ruti Sinai, “Adalah to the Attorney: Prevent Government Funding to the Council for Demography,” Haaretz, 11 September 2002; Merav Sarig, “We Love You Giving Birth,” Haaretz, Weekend Appendix, 1 November 2002, 16–22; Ruti Sinai, “A Call to Doctors of the Council for Demography to Resign,” Haaretz, 28 November 2002, A9. 4. Gideon Alon, “Womb in the Service of the State,” Haaretz, 9 September 2002. 5. Aluf Ben, “Barak: Israeli Arabs Might Lead the Struggle,” Haaretz, 20 May 2002. 6. Shaul Arieli, D. Schwartz, and H. Tagari, Injustice and Folly: On the Proposals to Cede Arab Localities from Israel to Palestine (Jerusalem: Floersheimer Institute for Policy Studies, 2006). 7. Ephraim Yaar and Tamar Herman, “Peace Index: March 2000,” Haaretz, 1 April 2002, B3. 8. Eli Ashkenazi, “Poll: 2/3 of Jewish Public View Israeli Arabs as a Demographic Threat,” Haaretz, 23 March 2006. 9. Amiram Bareket and Jeki Chugi, “62 percent of Jews for encourage emigration of Israeli Arabs,” Haaretz, 10 May 2006. 10. Yoav Stern, “Survey: A Jewish Majority in Israel Supports Encouraging Arab Emigration,” Haaretz, 4 April 2005. 11. Avraham Tal, “Jewish-Arab Dissonance,” Haaretz, 19 April 2001, B1. 12. Central Bureau of Statistics, http://www1.cbs.gov.il/reader/cw_usr_view_SHTML ?ID=629. 13. See also Bennett Zimmerman, R. Seid and M. L. Wise, The Million Person Gap (2006, available at the Web site of the Begin-Sadat Institute of Bar-Ilan University, http:// www.biu.ac.il/Besa/mideast.html). 14. Yair Sheleg, “Beware, Arabs,” Haaretz, 23 March 2001. The team hinted at the possibility of transferring Palestinians to Jordan “if they would not restrict their high birth rate.” It also criticized the policy of welfare remittances “that endorse the natural growth of non-Zionist populations.”

Notes to Pages 238–42

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15. Avraham Tal, “It’s the Ideology Not the Demography,” Haaretz, 19 October 2006. 16. Haaretz, 3 September 2002. 17. Gideon Alon, “This Is How We Shall Be Powerful in the Knesset and In the Demographic Battle,” Haaretz, 26 July 2005, B3. 18. Sultany, Citizens without Citizenship, 88. 19. Ibid. 20. Onn Winckler, “Fertility Transition in the Middle East: The Case of the Israeli Arabs,” Israel Affairs, 9, nos. 1–2 (2003): 39–67; idem., “Israel and the Demographic Bomb: A Story of a Wrong Myth,” ‘Iyunim Bitqumat Israel 17 (2008): 197–237. 21. Israeli parliament Web site, http://www.knesset.gov.il/mmm/data/docs/m00009 .ppt#1. 22. The need to cut state expenses during the second Palestinian uprising served as an opportunity for the government to decrease child allowances in general and decrease them by 20 percent to families who had no member who served in the army. The attorney general blocked a total cut and estimated that the Supreme Court would not view a cut of 20 percent as a discriminative practice worth of court intervention. 23. Zvi Zrahiya, “MK Masalha Divorced the Labor Due to the Economic Program,” Haaretz, 7 June 2002; Ruti Sinai, Supreme Court Will Hear Today the Case of Cutting Child Allowances,” Haaretz, 13 October 2002. 24. Law of Citizenship and Entrance to Israel (Provisional Law) 2003, Israel’s Law Book (Sefer HaHukim) 1993, 544. On the policy, see “Court File Against Approval of the Minister of the Interior’s Plan,” Haaretz, 13 May 2002; Avraham Tal, “Is Denmark Racist As Well?,” Haaretz, 18 July 2004. At the Camp David summit of July 2000, Israeli negotiators informed that it accepts an average of 2,000 Palestinians on a humanitarian background. See Shelly Frid, “In 48 Family Unification Was Not Rejected,” Haaretz, 25 July 2001, B2; Shahar Ilan, “21 Thousand? 5,000 Barely,” Haaretz, 22 September 2005, B3. In the Triangle Tayba Shari‘a Court in the fi rst half of 2001 some 115 mixed marriages were registered and 88 in the fi rst half of 2003. SeeYair Ettinger, “The Arabs and the Law of Citizenship,” Haaretz, 19 July 2002; Adalah Newsletter, June 2007. 25. Yuval Yonatan, “In the Robe of Security Justifications,” Haaretz, 7 July 2003, b2. 26. Haaretz editorial, July 19, 2004, B1. 27. Uzi Benziman, “Relief for Nationalist Inclinations,” Haaretz, 3 August 2003. 28. Aviv Lavi, “We are the Affl iction in Need of Extermination,” Haaretz Appendix, 8 August 2003. 29. See Gavizon, Conditions for Israel’s Prosperity. 30. Article published in Ynet website, 5 August 2003. 31. Shahar Ilan, “A Child and a Half per Woman,” Haaretz, 31 August 2006. 32. “The Poet and Writer Shafiq Habib from Dir Hanna Was Released from House Detention: Alleged of Supporting a Terrorist Organization,” Haaretz, 2 July 2000.

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Notes to Pages 243–47

33. Sultany, Citizens without Citizenship, 27. 34. The bill was submitted by MKs Eliezer Cohen, Tzvi Hendel, and Michael Noodleman (from Haihud Haleumi-Israel Beitenu party) and Nissim Ze’ev (Shas party). Sultany, Citizens without Citizenship, 32. 35. Gideon Alon, “The Bishara Law, Limiting the Substantial Immunity, Was Approved,” Haaretz, 23 July 2002. 36. Sultany, Citizens without Citizenship, 58. 37. Gideon Alon, “The Committee for Knesset Affairs: Restrict MK Tibi’s Freedom of Movement,” Haaretz, 29 May 2002. The Committee’s decision limited his privilege as an MK to enter a Military Zone. Arabs viewed the decision as illegal. 38. See SMJ Kol Ha’am Company Limited v. Minister of the Interior (1953). 39. Gideon Alon, “Arab MKs: Approval of the Law of Incitement is a Black Day to the Politics,” Haaretz, 16 May 2002, A4. 40. Sultany, Citizens without Citizenship, 28. 41. Gideon Alon, “Rubinstein Closed the File Against MK al-Sani‘,” Haaretz, 1 February 2002. 42. Yair Ettinger, “Organizations Advocating Arab Minority’s Rights: A Campaign Is Held Against Our Representatives in the Knesset, Haaretz, 22 October 2002. 43. Yair Ettinger, “Islamic Movement’s Organ Editor: The First to Be Charged According to Law of Incitement,” Haaretz, 2 July 2004. 44. “The Poet and Writer Shafiq Habib from Dir Hanna Was Released from House Detention: Alleged of Supporting a Terrorist Organization,” Haaretz, 2 July 2004. 45. Gideon Alon, “The Goal Is Knesset without Bishara, Tibi and Dahamsha,” Haaretz, 4 June 2002. 46. Moshe Reinfels, “The Supreme Court: Allegations Against Bishara in a Judgment— Void,” Haaretz, 17 February 2003. 47. Editorial of 22 December 2002 titled “The Boundaries of the Right to Be Elected.” 48. Sultany: Citizens without Citizenship, 15. 49. Yair Ettinger, “Surprise in the Arab Sector: Sharon Is Boosting Development,” Haaretz, 5 August 2002. 50. Motti Basok, “Mayor of Umm al-Fahm: The Government Lacks Economic Strategy to Develop the Arab Sector,” Haaretz, 20 April 2001. 51. Based on a government report. See Yoav Stern, “Report: The Development Promised to the Arabs Was Not Achieved,” Haaretz, 23 September 2005, A12. 52. Mossawa Center, Report, 2001. 53. SCJ (Bagatz) 6488/02 The National Committee of Arab Mayors vs. The Council for Combating Unemployment. 54. SCJ (Bagatz) 2273/98 The Supreme Follow Up Committee vs. The Prime Minister of Israel.

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55. “Rubinstein: Integrate Arab Lawyers in Government Ministries,” Haaretz, 7 August 2001. 56. Avi Shamul, “68 Settlements Are in Operational Stages: Not One of Them Is Aimed for the Arab Sector,” Haaretz, 14 October 2001. 57. Tzahar Rotem, “A Village in the Negev Is Aimed at Preventing the Expansion of the Bedouins,” Haaretz, 16 December 2002. 58. Adalah and the Forum for Coexistence in the Negev appealed to the court against a master plan for legalizing some 30 Jewish one-family ranches. The plan was labeled “the wine route” to serve for agricultural and touristic ends. However, the plaintiffs claim that their sole mission is to grant large plots of land to private owners at the expense of the Bedouin population in order to control the land and prevent its occupation by Bedouins. Tzafrir Rinat, “Cheese and Wine Enterprise or a Zionist Plot?,” The Marker, 21 April 2006, 8. 59. Tzafrir Rinat, “The Government Would Endorse Settlement of Singles in the Negev and the North,” Haaretz, 3 May 2003. 60. Yair Ettinger and Tzahar Rotem, “A Government Cabinet Approved 1.1 Billion NIS for the Bedouins, Haaretz, 9 April 2003; Tzafrir Rinat, “Government to Advance Settlement of Singles in the Negev and the North,” Haaretz, 4 May 2003. 61. Ori Nir, “The Follow-up Committee: Destroying Crops in Negev Crosses the Border of Racism,” Haaretz, 17 February 2002. For the court ruling of April 15, 2007, see SCJ (Bagaz) 2887/04 Salim Abu Mudayghim vs. ILA. 62. For a criticism of the Or Commission Report, see Yoav Peled, “Restoring Ethnic Democracy: The Or Commission and Palestinian Citizenship in Israel,” Citizenship Studies 9 no. 1 (2005): 89–105. 63. Resolution 772 of 14 September 2003 titled: “Improving Equality and Integration of Israel’s Arab Citizens.” 64. Sikkuy’s monitoring of implementation of the Or Commission’s report: http://www .orwatch.org/deot/Reuven_Gal.doc. 65. Uzi Benziman, “Throwing a Bone to the Arab Sector,” Haaretz, 31 August 2003. 66. Haaretz, 11 September 2003. 67. Ibid. 68. Conversation with Reuven Gal, former deputy head of Israel’s National Security Council, who attended the session. 69. Gideon Alon and Yoav Stern, “Lapid: The Members of the Committee of Implementing the Or Report Opposed its Conclusions,” Haaretz, 29 June 2005. 70. Theodor Or, “A Year to the State Investigative Commission on the October 2000 Events” (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, Konrad Adenaur Program for Jewish-Arab Cooperation, 2004), 18. 71. Yair Ettinger, “93.5 Percent of Israeli Arabs: Government Policy Is Injustice,” Haaretz, 29 December 2004.

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Notes to Pages 251–58

72. Nadim Rouhana, N. Saleh, and N. Sultany, Voting without Voice: The Palestinian Minority in the Israeli Parliamentary Elections 2003 (Haifa: Mada Center, 2004), 61, 92. 73. Al-Quds al-‘Arabi, 22 November 2002; Sawt al-Haqq wal-Huriyya, 29 November 2002; Jalal Bana, “The Follow-up Committee: Vote to Prevent Right-wing Government,” Haaretz, 28 November 2002. 74. Yoav Stern, “Instead of Voting to the Knesset. We Shall Establish an Arab Parliament,” Haaretz, 6 February 2006, B3. 75. Yoav Stern, “Today Land Day with No Strike,” Haaretz, 30 March 2005; Sarah Ozacky-Lazar and As‘ad Ghanem, “Intifadat Al-Aksa Among the Palestinian Citizens in Israel: Motives and Results” (Givat Haviva: Institute for Peace Studies, 2001). 76. Rali Saar, “The National Students’ Union Bans Demonstrations by Arabs,” Haaretz, 14 April 2002. 77. Jeki Chugi, “Nazareth: Hundreds Participants in a Pro-Syria Convention,” Haaretz, 30 December 2005, A17. For a different Arab view, see an opinion article by Badi Hasaysi, Haaretz, 3 January 2006. 78. Yair Ettinger, “In a Summer Camp of Israeli Arab Children Praising Suicide Terrorist Actions and Call to Return to Ashdod,” Haaretz, 31 July 2003. At the same time, other Jewish-Arab organizations conducted a commemoration ceremony at the Har Nof neighborhood in Jerusalem to commemorate the Dir Yassin massacre in 93 Arabs found their deaths, among them 14 children. They conducted a ceremony of naming the names of the Palestinian victims on the backdrop of an Arab national musical instrument, the “Udd.” Among the protestors, the association Zochrot, including some 70 Jews and Arabs led the event. 79. Yair Ettinger, “Israeli Arabs to the UN: Israel Violates International Conventions,” Haaretz, 3 October 2002. 80. Adalah Notebooks, no. 4 (Spring 2004), 115. 81. Conference at the Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem, 2003 (author’s notes). 82. Ibid. 83. Uzi Benziman, “The Arab Dictionary for Politically Correct,” Haaretz, 1 September 2002. 84. Survey by Mada al-Carmel available at the Web news agency MSN, http://news.msn .co.il/news/Internal/Internal/200601/2060112718746.htm. 85. Sammy Smooha, Index of Arab-Jewish Relations in Israel 2004 (Haifa: Haifa University, 2005), 11–12. 86. Elie Rekhess, “The Separation Between the Jewish and Zionist Character of the State Is Not New,” Du-Et 7 (Fall 2005): 16. 87. Smooha, Index of Arab-Jewish Relations in Israel 2004, 23–32. 88. Ibid., 35. 89. Uzi Benziman, “The New Collaborators,” Haaretz, 6 April 2003. 90. Amnon Rubinstein, “The Roots of Anxiety,” Haaretz, 5 February 2003.

Notes to Pages 259–64

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91. Sultany, Citizens without Citizenship, 164–65. The Mossawa Center reacted by announcing that Arabs will boycott those enterprises who listed themselves and advertised on that Web site. Yehonatan Liss, “Mossawa: We Shall Boycott the Enterprises Listed in the Avoda Ivrit Web Site,” Haaretz, 25 September 2002. 92. Gideon Alon, “Law Encouraging Emigration of Arabs was approved for Preliminary Hearing,” Haaretz, 19 February 2002. 93. Sultany, Citizens without Citizenship, 40. 94. Ibid., 40–42. 95. Ibid. See also an op-ed: Mark Ismailoff, “Technical Solution for a Substantial Problem,” Haaretz, 1 August 2002. 96. Sultany, Citizens without Citizenship, 43. 97. Yair Sheleg, “The Response for the Non-Zionists was overthrown by the Knesset,” Haaretz, 21 December 2000; Gideon Alon, “MK Eldad Suggests to Abolish the Status of Arabic as an Official Language,” Haaretz, 5 January 2005: Gideon Alon, “MK Eldad Suggests to Abolish the Status of Arabic as an Official Language,” Haaretz, 5 January 2005. 98. Sultany, Citizens without Citizenship, 45–47. 99. Aharon Layish, “Severe Damage to the Fabric of Relationship,” Haaretz, 29 June 2003, B2. 100. Morris, 2002. 101. Meron Rapfaport, “The Arabs Are the Same Arabs,” Yedioth Aharonoth, Weekend Appendix, 11 November 2001. 102. Sultany, Citizens without Citizenship, 133. 103. Yedioth Aharonoth, 28 December 2001; Haaretz, 19 March 2003; Sikkuy Report on Equality and Integration of the Arab Citizens in Israel During 2001–2002, 40. Declarations in support of the Palestinians made by Arab politicians led to strong reactions, resulting in expressions that de-legitimized the Arab members of Knesset and the Arab population in general. See Sultany, Citizens without Citizenship, 143. 104. Sikkuy Report on Equality and Integration of the Arab Citizens in Israel During 2001–2002, 39. 105. Yedioth Haifa, issue 666 of 6 December 2002. 106. Yosef Lapid, front page article of Hashinuy, issue 17 (September–October 2002). 107. Eyal Gonen, “Strait Out,” Yedioth Aharonoth, Seven Days Appendix, 22 November 2002, 21. 108. Ari Shavit, “Between Democracy and Nasserism,” Haaretz, 6 January 2003. 109. Sultany, Citizens without Citizenship, 102. 110. Ephraim Yaar and Tamar Hermann, “Peace Index: March 2000,” Haaretz, 1 April 2002, 3. 111. Sultany, Citizens without Citizenship, 103. 112. Asher Arian’s survey of 2003 also found that 68 percent of the Jews opposed the inclusion of Arab parties in a coalition compared to 72 percent in 2002, 67 percent in 2001

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Notes to Pages 264–75

and 54 percent in 2000. 79 percent opposed granting the Arabs a political right to decide in critical issues regarding the borders of the state. See Asher Arian, Israeli Public Opinion on National Security 2003 (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, Jeffee Center for Strategic Studies, 2003), 30. 113. Ibid., 112. In another survey conducted by the Steinmetz Centre it was found that most of the Jews in Israel were in favor of transferring the Triangle territory to the Palestinian authority as part of a territory exchange. 52 percent of the Jews but only 20 percent of the Arabs supported the exchange of territories. The Arian survey of 2003 found that 46 percent of the Jews supported the transfer of the Palestinians from the territories, while 33 percent supported also the transfer of Arab citizens of Israel. A higher rate of Jewish interviewees—57 percent—supported the idea that the government ought to encourage the emigration of Arabs from Israel. Ephraim Yaar and Tamar Hermann, “Peace Index: March 2000,” Haaretz, 1 April 2002, B3. 114. Sultany, Citizens without Citizenship, 117. 115. Arian, Israeli Public Opinion, 30. 116. Sultany, Citizens without Citizenship, 123. In a survey conducted by the Jaffa Center in February 2002, 60 percent supported this statement. Ibid., 113. 117. Press Release of 15 May 2003. 118. See Haaretz, 25 April 2003; Moli Peleg, “Save the Democracy,” Haaretz, 25 August 2001. 119. Vered Levi-Barzilai, “In Tiberias We Defi ned the Jewish State,” Haaretz, 2 January 2002. 11. Future Vision 1. See Wadi‘ ‘Awawda, “Who Needs an Arab Minister,” Haaretz, 16 January 2007. 2. My personal notes as a participant. 3. Adalah Activities Report 2006. 4. Ibid. 5. Uri Ariel’s bill was titled “ILA (amendment: JNF Land Administration in Favor of the Jewish People) —2007.” 6. Shahar Ilan, “The JNF, Backed into a Corner,” Haaretz, 30 July 2007. 7. Yoav Stern and Shahar Ilan, “Bill Allocating JNF Land to Jews Only Passes Preliminary Reading,” Haaretz, 19 July 2007. 8. See Amiram Bareket, “Buying the State of Israel,” Haaretz, 10 February 2005; Meron Benvenisti, “With All Due Respect for the ‘Blue Box,’” Haaretz, 29 May 2007; Stern and Ilan, “Bill Allocating JNF Land”; Anshel Pfeffer and Yoav Stern, “High Court Delays Ruling on JNF Land Sales to Non-Jews,” Haaretz, 24 September 2007. 9. See “Israeli Arab Appointed as a JNF Governor Despite Court Appeal,” Haaretz, 5 July 2007.

Notes to Pages 275–80

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10. Yoav Stern, “Another Attempt to Humiliate the Victim,” Haaretz, 14 October 2007. 11. Majid al-Haj, “Patterns in Israeli Arabs Vote to the Knesset,” in The Arab Minority in Israel and the Seventeenth Knesset Elections, ed. Elie Rekhess (Tel Aviv University, Konrad Adenaur Foundation for Jewish-Arab Co-operation, 2007), 19. On ideological abstention from election, see Haidar, 2007. On the Arab leadership, see Amal Jamal, “Sovereignty and Leadership: A Sociological View on the Arab Leadership in Israel,” in The Arab Minority in Israel and the Seventeenth Knesset Elections, ed. Elie Rekhess, 40–48. 12. Rekhess, The Arab Minority in Israel and the Seventeenth Knesset Elections, 61–63. 13. Smooha, Index of Jewish-Arab Relations in Israel 2006. 14. Arad Uzi and Gal Alon, Patriotism and National Strength in Israel: the Patriotism Survey (Herzlia: Institute for Policy and Strategy, the Interdisciplinary Center, 2006). 15. Adalah Association Web site, http://www.adalah.org/news/newsletter/eng/dec06/ tassawor-mostaqbali.pdf. 16. The Mossawa Center Web site, http://www.mossawacenter.org/fi les/fi les/File/ An%20Equal%20Constitution%20For%20All.pdf. 17. The Mada al-Carmel Institute Web site, http://www.mada-research.org/archive/ haifaenglish.pdf. 18. See also the opinions of other Israeli academics: Rekhess, “The Evolvement of an Arab-Palestinian National Minority in Israel,” Israel Studies 12, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 1–28; Sammy Smooha, “The Arab Visionary Documents: A Strategic Threat or a Basis for Dialogue?,” Daf Emda no. 6 (Berl Katzenelson Fund, June 2007), 2–8; Ilan Saban’s opinion at the Adalah Association Web site, http://www.adalah.org/newsletter/heb/mar07/ilan/php. 19. Shahar Ilan, “Arab MKs Boycott the Constitution Sessions,” Haaretz, 4 May 2007, 11. 20. Reiter, “The Nakba and Revival.” 21. Arend Lijphart, “Consensus and Consensus Democracy: Cultural, Structural, Functional, and Rational-Choice Explanations,” Scandinavian Political Studies 21, no. 2 (1998): 99–108; idem., Thinking About Democracy: Power Sharing and Majority Rule in Theory and Practice. (Routledge, 2008). 22. Arend Lijphart, Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-one Countries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); idem., “The Power-Sharing Approach,” in Conflict and Peacemaking in Multiethnic Societies, ed. Joseph V. Montville (New York: Lexington Books, 1990): 491–509. 23. Arend Lijphart, Patterms of Democracies: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty Six Countries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 306. 24. See Ian S. Lustick, “Stability in Deeply Divided Societies: Consociationalism Versus Control,” World Politics 31 (April 1979): 325–44; idem., “Lijphart, Lakatos, and Consociationalism,” World Politics 50 (October 1997): 88–117. See also the criticism of Hanf regarding Lebanon: Theodore Hanf, Coexistence in Wartime Lebanon: Decline of a State and Rise of a Nation (London: I. B. Tauris, 1993). 25. Future Vision document, p. 18 (Hebrew version), p. 18 (English version).

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Notes to Pages 282–88

26. Israel Democracy Institute, http://www.idi.org.il/english/article.asp?id=17012007 132457. 27. MSN news, 27 October 2007. 28. Presented by Professor Sammy Smooha at the January 2008 Herzlia Convention. 29. To be headed by Ayman Aghbariyya. See Yoav Stern, “The Arab Educational Follow Up Committee would form an Independent Body to Supervise Arab Schools,” Haaretz, 7 December 2007. 30. Smmoha, Index of Arab-Jewish Relations in Israel 2006. 31. Yoav Stern, “Survey: 75 percent of the Arabs would Support a Constitutional Identification of Israel as Jewish and Safeguarding Equality,” Haaretz, 30 April 2007. 32. Survey conducted by the Yaffa Center in Nazareth for the Konrad Adenaur Foundation for Jewish-Arab Co-operation directed by Elie Rekhess. 33. Ibid. 34. Mada al-Carmel survey of November 2007. 35. Ibid. 36. See United Nations, http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2007/ga10612.doc .htm. On a 1996 draft declaration, see Julian Burger, “The United Nations Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples” St. Thomas Law Review 9 (1996): 209–29. 37. Ynet, 16 January 2008. 38. Shahar Ilan, “The George Habash Funeral,” Haaretz, 29 January 2008. 39. Talia Sasson, “Fals Pledge,” Haaretz, 31 May 2007. 40. Quoted from Elie Rekhess’ position paper at the Dayan Center (Tel Aviv University) Web site, http://www.tau.ac.il/dayancenter/frameana.htm. His data is from the Racism Index Survey of 2006 and the Democracy Index Survey of 2007. 41. Yuval Yoaz, “Report: Increase of 100 Percent in Hatred of Jews Versus Arabs,” Haaretz, 9 December 2007. 42. Hashim Khatib, “The Arabs in Israel: Three Years after the Or Commission Report” (Tel Aviv: Konrad Adenaur Foundation for Jewish-Arab Co-operation, 2007), 25–26.

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Index

Note: A page number followed by an m indicates a map and a t indicates a table. Abbas, Mahmoud, 233–35, 271–72,

Adalah Legal Center for the Rights of

282

the Arab Minority in Israel: aid to

Abd al-Hayy, Tariq, 64

Or Commission, 216; alternative

Abd al-Nasser, Gamal, 35

constitution for Israel, 277–78, 280,

Abd al-Shafi, Haidar, 133

281; appeal against legalizing Jewish

Abna’ al-Balad movement: boycott of 1992

ranches, 337n. 58; appeal for Ara-

elections, 169; challenge to Hadash,

bic translation to court transcripts,

102; emergence of, 36, 81; fiction

328n. 51; appeal for return to 1948

between Hadash and, 81–82; impact

landscape, 328n. 51; appeal to UN

on 1981 elections, 92; Land Day dem-

for human rights, 253; establishment

onstration, 82; organization of Camp

of, 187; as legal advocate for Arabs’

of Return, 252; relationship to Land

civil rights, 191–93; promotion of

Day riots, 67

government recognition of/services to

absorption basket, 22

unrecognized villages, 193; on Public

Abu al-Hija, ‘Abd al-Rahman, 199, 225

Advisory Council of Demography, 238;

Abu ‘Asaba, Khaled, 188–89

submission of fi le to Supreme Court on

Abu ‘Ayyash, Radwan, 134, 319n. 11

National Priorities Zones, 274; turn to

Abu Basma, 248

UN for justice in October 2000 riot

Abu Jihad, 112, 143

cases, 219–20

Abu Mazen. See Abbas, Mahmoud

ADP. See Arab Democratic Party (ADP)

Abu Nidal, 93

Advisor on Arab Affairs, 179

Abu Qaren family, 79

affi rmative action policies: under Barak

Abu-Salih, Shaykha, 211

government, 206, 208, 209, 220;

Abu Sita, Salman, 9

de-escalation of tensions through, 294;

Academy for Arabic Language, 26

Jewish Israelis’ acceptance of, 290; as

Academy for Hebrew Language, 223

means to alleviate tensions, 298; Or

“Accused, The” (Adalah), 220

Commission on, 220; under Rabin

Acre, 191, 287

government, xx, 155–65, 159, 164,

361

362

|

Index

affi rmative action policies (cont.) 166–67t, 167–68, 173, 208, 293;

anti-Semitism, 5–6 al-Aqsa intifada: bills initiated in Knes-

reversal under Netanyahu, 179–81,

set during, 259–66; call for end to

196; of Sharon government, 250; as

violence, 271; destabilization of Barak

Supreme Court requirement, 192

government, 230; effect on Israeli

Afghanistan, 74, 90, 92, 107, 231

Arab political behavior, xxvii, 233,

Aghbariya, Sulayman, 185

251–57; effect on Israeli government

Agranat Commission on Inquiry, 69

policies, 234, 235–51, 335n. 22; effect

agriculture: of Arabs in Palestinian terri-

on Jewish Israelis’ political behavior,

tories vs. Israel, 66–67; blocking block

257–59, 290; effect on Jewish view of

agreement on, 116t; budgeting for

Israeli Arabs, xviii, 263–65; funding

under Netanyahu, 179–81; develop-

for, 221; IDF fight against, 233; as

ment of Negev, 162; discrimination in

initiating cause of October 2000 riots,

government policies toward, 161–62;

295; initiating incident, 199–200, 205,

effect of training zones on, 118; ILA

213, 227; laws enacted to restrict Arab

destruction of Bedouin crops, 253;

MKs during, 241–46; October 2000

land expropriation and, 67; restrictions

riots and, 213–21; as peak in Arab

on cultivation of al-Mal, 56; return of

political behavior, 293; responses to,

Zone 9 to original owners for, 116;

229; terrorist attacks by Israeli Arabs

subsidies, 207–8, 330n. 24 Agudat Yisrael, 238

during, 224 al-Aqsa Mosque: Goodman’s attack on,

Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 232

94, 99, 104; Israel domination at, xix;

al-‘Alami, Sa‘d al Din, 99

massacre at, 132–33, 142; Sharon’s

Alderotti, Tzvi, 46

visit to Temple Mount, 199–200, 205,

Almozlino, Shoshana Arabelli, 235, 238 Alon, Yigal, 41 Aloni, Shulamit, 108

213; as source of Arab cohesiveness, 5 Arab Association for Human Rights (AHR), 192–93, 194–95, 253, 328n. 51

Alpert, Haim, 238

Arab Associations Organization, 313n. 22

Alternativa, 108–9

Arab Center for Equal Rights. See Mos-

alternative constitution, 277–78, 280 Amal, Fawzin, 222

sawa Center Arab Democratic Party (ADP): 1988

Amara, Muhammad, xxiv, 140, 171

election, 130–31; 1992 election, 152,

American Jewish organizations, 20

168; 1996 election, 177; 1999 elec-

American Joint Distribution Committee,

tion, 203; blocking block agreement,

20

155–65, 166–67t, 167–68; formation

Amir, Yigal, 154

of, 122, 129, 144; Oslo Accords and,

al-Anba’, 101

154; proposed no-confidence vote,

Annan, Kofi, 221

169–70, 215; shift of Arab vote to,

Annapolis Peace Conference, 272, 273,

148; willingness to join Labor coalition

282

in 1990, 146, 151

Index

Arab Educational Follow-up Committee, 282

|

363

110–11, 124; peace talks between Syria/Israel, 152; Rhodes ceasefi re

Arab emirates, 127

agreement (1949), 6, 22, 29, 30;

al-‘Arabi, 144

superpowers involvement in, xxv, xxvi,

Arabic language: Adalah demand for

38, 71–72, 74, 90, 106; treaty between

court transcripts in, 328n. 51; bills to

Egypt and Israel, xxvi; trends in, xxvii–

remove as official language, 261; bill to

xxx; uniqueness of, xxiv–xxv; visits of

designate as second official language,

Balad members to Syria, xi, 252, 276.

222–23; legal status of, xxi, 25, 26;

See also Iran; Iraq; Jordan; Lebanon;

suggestion to raise status of, 118;

Six Day War (1967); Syria; War of

Supreme Court case ordering Arabic

Independence (1948); Yom Kippur

street signs, 192, 328n. 51; use in schools, 24 Arab-Israeli confl ict: Arab MKs visits to

War (1973) Arab Knesset members: actions during government crisis of 1990, 145–46;

Syria, xi, 242, 277; broader Middle

approval of Oslo Accords, 172; Arab

East confl icts’ influence on, xvi, xix,

extremists’ view of, 251; blocking

xxv–xxvii, 38, 74, 106, 127, 128, 144,

block agreement, 153–65, 166–67t,

152, 231–32, 270, 276–77, 289, 332n.

167–68; boycott of constitution draft-

47; confl icting narratives as source

ing committee, 277; call for change in

of, 1–11; effect of Israeli invasion of

nature of Israel, 186–87, 236, 258; as

Lebanon on, 90; Egypt-Israel peace

chair of committee/in cabinet, 247;

agreement, xxvi, 72, 85, 87, 91; focus

charges against, 203; competition

of studies, xii–xiii; Gulf War and, xxiv,

among, 84, 88, 182–83, 203, 212,

xxvi, 127–28, 144, 152; influence of

219; condemnation of, 286; demands

Palestinian-Israeli confl ict on, xvi–xx;

of, 204; disqualification of, 245, 253,

influence on Israeli society, 129,

258; effect of radicalism of on Jewish-

285, 288, 289; influence on Jewish-

Arab relations, 236–37; election of in

Palestinian confl ict, xxv; interlock-

1950s, 41; endorsement of Palestin-

ing dimension of, xii–xxx, 35–40;

ian struggle, 223–24; escalation of

Israel-Hizballah war (2006), xi–xii,

political discourse, 223–24, 253–54;

xxvi, 268, 276–77, 285, 296; Jewish

exclusion from coalitions, 130, 172–73,

democratic state structure as source

204; on Follow-up Committee, 96;

of, 11–16, 31; Jordan-Israel peace

inciting violence, 257–58; investiga-

accords, 150; Jordan’s involvement in

tion of, 242; Jewish measure dealing

Palestinian struggle, xvi, 128, 334n.

with, 241–46; Jewish members’ view

14; Jordan’s relations with U.S./Israel,

of, 262; Knesset’s response to extreme

xxv; Madrid Peace Conference, 127,

positions of, 241–46, 276; Knesset’s

128, 133–35, 319n. 11; peace accord

restriction of Mahamid’s movements,

between Jordan and Israel, 150; peace

153; on legitimacy of Jewish state, 7,

agreement between Jordan/Peres,

21, 188; Masalha’s view of radical

364

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Index

Arab Knesset members (cont.)

Arab nationalists, 45; approach of, 212. See

approach, 183; need for moderation

also Abna’ al-Balad movement; Balad

of public expressions, 298; no-confi-

party; Bishara, Azmi; Hadash party;

dence vote and, 173; participation in Habash’s funeral, 285; qualifications

Rakah party; Tibi, Ahmad Arab organizations/institutions: develop-

of, 108; reasons for radical behavior of,

ment of, 36, 45, 96, 101–2, 104, 187,

290; right-wing condemnation of, 286;

298, 316n. 38; Or Commission on,

role in inciting violence, 257–58; time

220–21. See also Adalah Legal Center

spent on issues relating to Palestinian

for the Rights of the Arab Minority

realm, 104; viewed as threat to Israel,

in Israel; Mossawa Center; National

262; visit of solidarity to Gaza, 152;

Committee of Arab Heads of Munici-

visits to Syria, xi, 242, 276; visit with

palities; non-government organizations

Arafat in Tunis, 132, 319n. 9; vote

(NGOs); Supreme Follow-up Commit-

against peace agreement, 86. See also

tee for Arab Citizens

specific Arab MK Arab leadership: appeal to international

Arab-Palestinian movement, 16 Arab political parties: 1996 election, 176,

forums, 194–95, 253; call for general

177; 1999 election, 202, 203; 2006

strikes (See general strikes); competi-

election, 276; 2009 election, 269;

tion among, 41, 61–62, 81–82, 84,

Barak coalition and, 203–4; bill to

88, 102, 182–83, 203, 212, 219;

block of PLP, 109, 123, 125; block-

development of, 67, 290–91; escala-

ing block agreement and, 155–56,

tion of violence, 196–97; investiga-

157–65, 166–67t, 167–68, 173;

tion of, 225, 242; Jewish recognition

boycott of independence celebration,

of body of, 298; Land Day riots

212–13; changes in election system

and, 59–60; need for moderation of

and, 176; competition among, 84, 88,

public expressions, 298; opposition

92, 182–83, 203, 212, 219; differences

to violence, 142; role in confl ict, xv,

among, 213; exclusion from Rabin’s

290; role in October 2000 riot, 214.

Labor coalition, 155–58, 294; legisla-

See also Adalah Legal Center for the

tion disqualifying parties not recogniz-

Rights of the Arab Minority in Israel;

ing Jewish state, 195–96, 197; support

Arab Knesset members; Mossawa

of Labor party in 1990, 145–46. See

Center; National Committee of Arab

also Arab Democratic Party (ADP);

Heads of Municipalities; Supreme

Arab Unity List party; Balad party;

Follow-up Committee for Arab Citi-

elections; Hadash party; Progressive

zens; Zayyad, Tawfiq

List for Peace (PLP); Rakah party;

Arab League, xxv–xxvi, 332n. 47 Arab League Peace Initiative (March 2002), xix, xxvi, 128 Arab municipal councils, 95 Arab Nationalist Liberation Movement, 83

Ta‘al party (AMC) Arab Revolt (1936–39), 6 Arab Riots (March 1976). See Land Day riots (1976) Arabs, xv, xxii, 1–4, 240

Index

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365

Arabs of 1948, xiv

summit, 205, 230; commemoration of

Arabs of the Inside, xiv

fi ftieth anniversary of Nakba, 189–90;

Arab states: influence on level and direc-

death of, 234, 271; move to Tunis, 93;

tion of Arab-Israeli confl ict, xvi,

nomination of Amal for contact with

xx–xxv; Islamic terrorism in, 232; view

1948 Arabs, 222; replacement of in

of Israeli Arabs, xxiii; view of state of

negotiations, 233; request for Tibi’s

Israel, xix. See also Arab-Israeli confl ict;

attendance at Madrid Conference,

Middle East; specific state

319n. 11; visits from Israeli Arab lead-

Arab Student Council (Haifa University), 211

ers, 132, 319n. 9 Arbel, Dan, 328n. 51

Arab terrorists, xxvi, 141, 177, 231, 232

Arbiv, Menashe, 200

Arab Unity List party, 177, 276

al-Ard, 80, 88

Arab villages/municipalities: Barak gov-

Arens, Moshe, 113, 117, 118–19, 125,

ernment policies, 206–8; budgets for, 136–37, 158–59, 160, 180, 181, 246; demolition of houses in (See demolition

142, 238 Arian, Asher, 129, 264, 339n. 112, 340n. 113

of Arab houses); enforcement of laws

Ariel, Uri, 276

under Netanyahu, 180; Four Billion

army duties, 27–33

Plan, 193, 206–7, 246, 330n. 18;

As‘ad, As‘ad, 133

government recognition of/services to,

‘Ashur, ‘Ali, 170

193; housing projects in, 136; inclusion

al-Assad, Bashar, 204, 242, 252

in Frontline Zone, 163; infrastructure,

Association for Civil Rights in Israel, 286,

159–61, 194, 328n. 56, 330n. 18; land

328n. 51

allocation increase, 161; master plans/

Association of Forty, 163

zoning plans created for, 135, 161,

Avitzur, Mordechai, 312n. 61

163, 207, 210, 250; recognition of,

Avnery, Uri, 109

156, 162–63, 194, 323n. 41; return

‘Awawda, Wadi‘, 7

of refugees to Ikrit/Bir‘em, 115–16,

Ayalon, Ami, 274

119, 124, 164–65; strike of heads of

‘Ayyash, Yahiya, 252

local councils, 158; upgraded status of, 136. See also National Committee of Arab Heads of Municipalities; specific

Badawi, Khulud, 211

village/municipality

Baladna, 282

Arab voting patterns, 61. See also elections

Balad party: 1999 election, 202, 203;

Arad, Uzi, 237, 265

2006 election, 276; 2009 election,

Arafat, Yasser: acceptance of two-state

269; call for boycott of 2003 elections,

solution, 131; advise to Bishara, 202;

251; candidate for prime minister, 202;

agreement to curtail terrorism, 178;

competition with Hadash, 212; con-

call for Arab participation in 1992

tribution to October 2000 riots, 218;

election, 151, 169; Camp David II

disqualification of, 245–46, 253, 269;

366

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Index

Balad party (cont.)

Barak government: Arab political behavior

establishment of, 170; on globalizing

during, 210–25; Arab representation

Israeli politics, 195; goals of, 186–87;

in civil service under, 208–9; budget-

members as lobbyists for PA, 294;

ary policies, 206–8; clashes between

members’ visits to Syria, xi, 252,

police/Arab protesters, 197–98; educa-

275; rejection of Jewish/Zion-

tional advances under, 208; instabil-

ist nature of state, 187–88, 218,

ity of, 230; Jewish political behavior

261; youth support of, 212. See also

during, 225–26; Jewish settlement

Bishara, Azmi

expansion under, 204; land/housing

Balfour Declaration, xvi, 5

policies of, 209–10; October 2000

Baqa al-Gharbiyya, 136

riots/al-Aqsa intifada during, 213–21;

Barak, Aharon, 15–16, 32, 192–93

peace process under, 204; policies

Barak, Ehud: 1999 election, 201, 202;

toward Israeli Arabs, 205–10; policies

2001 election, 224, 230; contribu-

toward Palestinian issue, 204–6; role

tion to violence, 205, 210, 219, 227;

in confl ict escalation, 227, 294, 295

formation of coalition, 203; Jewish

Baram, Uzi, 110, 161, 163

settlement expansion under, 204;

Baransa, Salih, 316n. 38

nomination of Or Commission,

Bar Or, Rabbi Moti, 265

216; participation in Camp David II

Bar-Siman-Tov, Yaacov, xiii

summit, 230; peace agreement with

Barta‘a, 140–41

Palestinians and, 264; peace talks with

Barzilai, Gad, 182

Syria, 204; reception in Shifa‘amru,

Basic Law, 72, 109, 242, 245

212–13; report on Arab land needs,

“Basic Law, the state of Israel as a Jewish

18; representation of Camp David II summit, 205, 230; resignation of, 230; response to Arab demands, 204; territorial exchange proposal and, 236, 261–62; warning to Israeli Arabs, 261;

and Democratic state” bill, 261 Basic Law: Equality to the Arab Population, 333n. 78 Basic Law: The Arab Minority as a National Minority, 222

withdrawal from Lebanon, 203. See

Bat-Yam terrorist attack, 151

also Barak government

Bayadsi, Rasmi, 62

Barake, Muhammad: on bill to prevent

Bedouins: agricultural development of

Arabs from bidding on JNF land, 274;

Negev and, 162; agricultural subsi-

call for Hamas convention on Israeli

dies for, 207; allocation of lands of,

Arabs, 223; on connection between

20, 22–23; demand for restoration

program for equality/Palestinian

of land ownership patterns for, 280;

liberation/statehood, 181; election

demonstration against government,

campaign in 2006, 4; investigation

79, 87; dispersion of in Negev, 43; ILA

of, 242; Lieberman’s attack on, 285;

destruction of crops of, 253; in Israeli

nationalistic approach of, 212; role in

military, 30, 31, 119; legalization of

inciting to violence, 257–58

Jewish ranches and, 247–48, 337n.

Index

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367

58; Likud policies toward, 78–79,

Benizri, Shlomo, 238

107; Netanyahu government’s plan

Ben-Nun, Rabbi Yoel, 265

for development of villages of, 207;

Ben Shlomo, Rabbi Eliyahu, 265

priority in development funding, 180;

Ben Yitzhak, Haim, 312n. 61

recognition of villages of, 163; reloca-

Benziman, Uzi, 18, 29–30, 240, 254, 257,

tion of, 138, 248 “Before We Deteriorate to Apartheid” (Balad), 254 Begin, Menachem: call for early elections, 71; encouragement of Jewish settlement of West Bank, 86, 91; expropriation of land in West Bank, 73; Golan

311n. 45 Bill of Families Blessed with Many Children, 97–98 bin Laden, Osama, 231 Bir‘em, 115–16, 119, 124, 164–65, 217–18, 324n. 48 birth rate; government policies concern-

Heights Law proposal, 93; as head

ing, 51, 65, 235, 238–39 (See also child

of Likud party, 70; intensification of

allowances); of Israeli Arabs, 43, 65,

law enforcement, 78–80; land/demo-

235, 237, 241, 334n. 14; Koenig on,

graphic policies of, 75–77, 80, 87;

48

order of invasion of Lebanon, 73, 74,

Bishara, Azmi: 1999 election, 202, 203;

93; peace agreement with Egypt, 72;

affi rmative action legislation, 208–9;

policy toward Palestinian issue, 73, 74;

on al-Ruha affair, 185–86; attack

as prime minister, xxix, 68; reelection

on Hadash, 170; charges in court

of, 91; repatriation of Ikrit/Bir‘em

for speeches, 203; departure from

villagers and, 115; resignation of, 93;

Israel, 286; disqualification of, 193,

response to Palestinian violence, 73;

245, 253, 258; effect of radicalism

settlement of West Bank/Gaza Strip

of on Jewish-Arab relations, 236–37;

and, 73; veto of Hebrew legalization

establishment of Balad, 170; inciting

bill, 315n. 21

violence, 257–58; injury at protest,

Begin government: 1977 election, 69–71;

210; investigation of, 242; justification

intensification of law enforcement and,

for resistance to Jewish nature of Israel,

78–80; Israeli Arab political behavior

170; on legitimacy of Jewish state, 7,

during, 80–86; Jewish political behav-

21, 188; as lobbyist for PA, 294; on

ior during, 86–87; land/settlement

meaning of Nakba, 190; nationalis-

policies of, 75–78; Palestinian dimen-

tic approach of, 144, 212, 222–23;

sion of, 71–74; policies toward Israeli

relationship with PLO, 145; Shavit’s

Arabs, 74–80

article on, 263; trips to Syria, 242;

Beilin, Yossi, 164, 236

viewed as threat to Israel, 262; visits to

Beirut, 37, 93, 94, 314n. 1

Syria, 252, 275; on withdrawal from

Beit-Lid junction suicide bombing, 173

Lebanon, 203

Ben Eliezer, Binyamin, 160

Bishara, Suhad, 238

Ben Elisar, Eliyahu, 75

Bishara Law, 243, 336n. 35

Ben-Gurion, David, 19, 27–28, 29–30, 69

“Black Book” (Na‘amne), 56–58

368

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Index

Black October. See October 2000 riots

Bush, George H. W., 127, 128

Black Patrol, 78–79

Bush, George W., 234, 272

Bligh, Alexander, 142–43, 145 blocking block agreement: evaluation of, 165, 167–68; exclusion of Arab parties from coalition and, 173; implementa-

“Call to Israel’s Arabs, A” (Israel Democracy Institute), 281

tion of, 157–65, 166–67t; provisions

Camp David II summit, 204–5

of, 155–56, 166–67t

Camp of Return, 252

Block of Loyalty movement, 71

Carter, Jimmy, 71–72

Bodinger, Hertzel, 265

Cast Lead operation, 272

Boim, Ze’ev, 243

Cave of the Patriarchs (Jewish), 5

boycott of Jewish products, 221

ceasefi re between Israel/Hizballah, 153

British Mandate: 1948 war over, xiii–xiv,

Center for Demography, 51, 235, 238

xvi, xvii; establishment of Zone 9, 56;

Center for Local Government report,

land controlled by, 17–18; struggle between Arabs/Jews for land during, 6, 16; Zionist development during, xvii

136–37 Center for the Revival of Palestinian Heritage, 316n. 38

British rule, xvi

Center party, 203

Brookings Institution, 71

Central Committee for Security, 42

budgetary policies: Arens’s policies,

Central Election Committee, 109, 245,

119; of Barak government, 206–8;

253, 258, 269

discrimination in, 58–59; five-year

Central National Command, 111

budget plans (Arab sector), 156;

Cheshin, Michael, 220

five-year development plans (Arab

child allowances: cuts in during second

sector), 49–50; following intifada,

Palestinian uprising, 237, 240, 335n.

128; following military rule, 50; Four

22; equalization of, 156, 162; Families

Billion Plan, 193, 206–7, 246, 330n.

Blessed with Children Law, 238;

18; under Netanyahu, 179–80, 181;

Herzlia Convention recommendations,

of Olmert government, 273–74; Or

237; Koenig’s recommendations con-

Commission recommendations, 220;

cerning, 47–48; preferential treatment

under Rabin government, 155–56,

of Jews, 51, 97–98, 311n. 45; Supreme

158–62, 165, 166–67t, 167–68; under

Court and, 97

Shamir government, 128, 135–39; of

Circassian men, 30, 31

Sharon government, 246–47; split in

civil organizations (Arab), 102

Sharon coalition over, 230; stick-and-

civil rights: as factor precipitating Land

carrot strategy, 96–97; Supreme Court

Day riot, 65; of Israeli Arabs, xxi, 135,

rulings on, 192, 246–47, 274. See also

165, 168, 171; Israeli Arabs demand

child allowances

for, 181, 326n. 16; as issue in Arab-

Bukeirat, ‘Abd al-Rahman, 244–45 Bureau of Statistics, 237, 241

Israeli confl ict, xvi Civil Rights Association, 29

Index

civil service: admission of Arabs, 62, 164,

|

369

Day riots, 61–64; as policy following

175, 208–9; exclusion of Israeli Arabs

1948, 40; as product of Jewish nature

from, xxii, 27–31, 305–6n. 32, 308n.

of state, xx; Toledano’s policies, 41;

72; Lapid Committee’s recommenda-

two fronts of, 51–53. See also budget-

tion, 250; Sharon’s policy toward Arabs

ary policies; child allowances; Jewish

in, 75, 247

settlements; land policies

civil society, 101–3

cross-Israeli expressway, 167

Clinton, Bill, 152, 178, 204 Clinton, Hillary, 271 co-existence between Arabs/Israelis, xv, 288

Dahamsha, ‘Abd al Malik, 236–37, 257–58

Coexistence Index (2006), 283, 286

Dahla, Muhammad, 7, 190

Cohen, Eliezer, 238

Darawsha, ‘Abd al-Wahab: activities on

Cohen, Ra‘anan, 236

behalf of Palestinians, 110; advocacy

Cohen, Ya‘akov, 41

of independent Palestinian state, 129;

Cold War, xxv, 90, 128

appointment to Knesset, 103; election

Committee for Early Release of Prisoners,

of 1988, 130–31; election to Knesset,

123

108; exclusion from Rabin’s Labor

Committee for Knesset Affairs, 259

coalition, 155; formation of Arab

Committee of the Defense of Arab Lands,

Democratic Party, 122, 129; planned

81–82, 98 Committee on the Constitution and Law (Knesset), 277 Communist party, 53, 61, 80, 91–92, 170. See also Hadash party; Rakah party competition: between Abna’ al-Balad/

participation in PNC, 110; relationship with PLO, 145; view of Rabin’s leadership, 157 Darwish, Mahmoud, 37 Darwish, Samir, 136 Dash party, 69, 70, 91

Hadash, 81–82; within Arab leader-

Dayan, Shmuel, 307n. 52

ship, 41, 61–62, 81–82, 102; between

Dayan, Uzi, 265

Arab nationalist parties, 80–85, 88, 92,

Declaration of Independence, xxi, 10, 11,

102, 182–83, 203, 212, 219; between

26, 292

Labor/Likud, xxviii, 114, 129, 135.

Declaration of Principles, xviii, 4, 153

See also Labor party; Likud party

Declaration of Rights of Indigenous

Congress of Arab Masses, 84, 88, 92, 96

Peoples (UN), 285

consensual democracy system, 278–79, 283

Decree of Purchase Tax, 22

constitution, xxi, 28

Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee

Constitution by Consensus (IDI), 283 control and co-optation policies; based on reward and punishment, 40 (See also stick-and-carrot policies); effectiveness of, 45, 52–53, 65; following Land

(Knesset), 75 “Demands of the Arab Citizens in Israel for Equal Rights, The,” 181, 326n. 16 democracy: Arab demand for inclusion, 186–87; Arab public opinion concerning,

370

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Index

democracy (cont.)

Dichter, Shuli, 165, 195

254; discriminatory policies and, 32,

diplomatic corps, 164

51; of Israel; Israeli Arabs’ view of,

Dir Yassin massacre, 338n. 78

278, 283–84; Israeli form of, xx–xxv,

Diskin, Yuval, 28–29

11–16, 31–33; as issue in Arab-Israeli

Dome of the Rock, 94, 99, 104

confl ict, xvi; Jewish nature of state

Dorner, Dalia, 246

and, 11–16, 28–29, 31–32, 229, 235,

Drukman, Haim, 260, 305n. 29

238, 239, 246, 261; laws protecting,

Drukman law, 13, 260, 305n. 29

242–43; Or Commission of Inquiry

Druze: call for abolition of conscription of,

on, 217; Sharon on, 172; stick-and-car-

171; demand for release of, 99; election

rot policies and, 42, 44; strengthening

to Knesset, 270; Golan Heights Law

of, 65, 132; Supreme Court’s enhance-

and, 93; infrastructure for villages of,

ment of, 191; weakening of, 265

119; in Israeli military, 30, 31; Labor

Democratic Constitution, 277–81

district established for, 147; Likud

Democratic Front for Peace and Equality

courting of, 107; priority in develop-

(DFPE). See Hadash party demographic policies: of Likud admin-

ment funding, 180 Dudin, Mustafa, 73

istration, 75; of Sharon government, 235–41; as source of dispute, 20–22, 32, 65, 218–19. See also child

East Jerusalem, 39, 237

allowances; immigration; Jewish

economic development, xvi, 65, 137

settlements

economy: distress in 1992, 151; effects of

demography, 16–17, 51

al-Aqsa intifada, 246; inflation during

demolition of Arab houses: in 1980s, 163;

1980s, 101, 107, 109; meltdown of

Arab response to, 292; under Barak,

2008, 270; under Netanyahu, 177;

209–10, 227; of Bedouins, 248; fi rst

political crisis in 1983 and, 93; split in

Likud government policy for, 78; goals of, 163; in Ikrit, 115; during intifada,

Sharon coalition over, 230 education: Arabs in colleges/universities,

112; in Majd al-Kurum, 79–80, 82;

212; bridging of gaps between Jewish/

Markovitz committee on, 116–17; near

Arab schools, 136–37; at Camp of

Nahef, 210, 242; under Netanyahu,

Return, 252; as contributing factor in

180, 183–84; Or Commission on, 220;

Arab political organization, 84; estab-

of pre-1948 villages, 18; procedure for,

lishment of Nation’s Educational Cor-

209–10; al-Sahali affair, 180, 183–84,

ner, 275; funding under Netanyahu,

196–97; as source of violence, 183,

180, 181; of Israeli Arabs, xxii, 24–25,

209–11

65, 84, 159, 290; of Jewish children,

Der‘i, Ariye, 136

xxiii; Lapid Committee’s recommenda-

détente, 74

tion, 250; 100 terms program, 7–10;

Diaspora, 5

segregation within, 24–25; strategy

Dichter, Avi, 214

for Arab population, 282; teaching of

Index

fundamentalist Islam in Arab schools,

Elon Moreh, 73

83; under Barak government, 208

Emergency Regulations, 242

Egypt: ceasefi re in Yom Kippur War, 38;

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371

employment of Israeli Arabs: Hebrew

Hamas ceasefi re and, 272; involve-

Employment Web site and, 259;

ment in Arab-Israeli confl ict, xvi; peace

Koenig’s recommendations concerning,

agreement with Israel, xxvi, 72, 85, 87,

47, 48; Lapid Committee’s recommen-

91; relations with U.S./Israel, xxv

dation, 250; opening of labor market

Eight percent plan. See Four Billion Plan

for, 50, 52, 65. See also civil service

Eitam, Ephie, 226, 265

Endreus, Zuhayr, 199

Eitan, Raphael, 58, 147

“Equal Constitution for All, An” (Jaba-

elections: Arab boycotts of, 215, 223,

reen), 277–78

228, 251, 267, 283, 291; Begin’s

Eshkol, Levi, 40, 51

resignation and call for, 71; changes

Ethiopian Jews, 110

in system, 176; decline in Arab vote,

Europe (terrorism in), 232

276; exercise of amendment disqualify-

European Convention of Protecting

ing candidates, 245; of Histadrut in 1989, 145; of Histadrut in 1993, 170;

National Minorities, 12 European Union (EU): exposé on Four

of Knesset 1996, 176–77; of Knesset

Billion Program and, 193; funding of

in 1950s, 41; of Knesset in 1972, 80;

Arab advocacy groups, 194; involve-

of Knesset in 1977, 70, 81; of Knesset

ment in Middle East, xxvi; Israel’s

in 1981, 91, 102; of Knesset in 1984,

dependence on in regard to Iran, 270;

94, 102, 107–9, 122–23; of Knesset in

role in road map for peace in Israel, 233

1988, 122, 129–31, 147; of Knes-

expropriation of Arab land: in 1948 war,

set in 1992, 132, 150–51, 168–69;

1–4, 16–20; Arab response to, 292;

of Knesset in 1996, 197; of Knesset

Arab view of, 58–59, 65; by Begin

in 1999, 193, 201–4; of Knesset in

government, 75; change of strategy,

2003, 193, 230, 245, 253; of Knesset

66–67; for cross-Israeli expressway,

in 2006, 4, 268–70, 276; for Knesset

167; effect on Arab agriculture, 67;

in 2009, 269; of Meir, 41; Nazareth

fear of, 283; Galilee Development

municipal elections of 1975, 46, 70; in

Plan, 45–46, 49, 53–55, 59, 66, 68,

PA in 2005, 271; in PA in 2006, 271;

75; goals of, 18; Israeli Arab resistance

of prime minister 1996, 176–77; for

to, 39, 59; Jewish settlement and,

prime minister 1999, 201–4; for prime

19; by Labor government, 75; Land

minister in 2001, 215, 224, 230, 251;

Day riots as result of, 49, 54, 56–57,

for prime minister in 2006, 268; for

58–60, 68, 295; rationale for, 18;

prime minister in 2009, 269; in Upper

al-Ruha affair, 56–57, 180, 184–86,

Nazareth in 1998, 196; in West Bank,

185m, 197, 206; in Safuriya, 1–5;

39–40, 72

Sakhnin affair, 210–11; Toledano’s

Electricity Decree, 328n. 56

opposition to, 47–48; in West Bank/

Elkin, Zeev, 274

Gaza Strip, xiv, 39

372

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Index

al-Fajr Association, 316n. 38

116, 313n. 22; plan to promote Zionist

family courts, 25

majority in, 247; priority in develop-

Fares, Amin, 330n. 18

ment funding, 180; response to Koenig

Fatah, 73, 227, 268, 272

Memorandum on, 48–49; riots in,

Fayyad, Salam, 272

142; unrecognized Arab villages in,

Finance Committee (Knesset), 97

162–63, 323n. 41

fi nancial benefits for Jews/Jewish immigrants, 311n. 45 five-year budget plans (Arab sector), 156 five-year development plans (Arab sector), 49–50 Follow-up Committee. See Supreme Follow-up Committee for Arab Citizens Follow-up Committee for Health Issues, 194 Forum for Coexistence in the Negev, 337n. 58 Four Billion Plan, 193, 206–7, 246, 330n. 18

Galilee Association for Research and Health Studies, 194 Galilee Development Plan, 45–46, 49, 53–55, 59, 66, 75 Galilee Judaization Plan, 53, 54 Gans, Haim, 21–22 Gavison, Ruth, 15, 241 Gaza Strip: al-Aqsa intifada and, 200; Arab MKs’ visit of solidarity, 152; Arab view of Jewish settlements in, 313n. 22; attacks on Israel following withdrawal, 268, 269, 270–71, 272, 285; Begin-Sadat agreement and, 72;

Frisch, Hillel, 190

boycott of products from Jewish settle-

Frontline Zone, 163

ments in, 221; consequences of occu-

Furaydis, 199

pation of, 106; Dash party and, 69;

Future Vision manifestos, 12, 277–78,

deportation of Hamas activists from,

280–81, 283–84, 287–88

152, 321n. 66; Gaza plan, 231; Gush Emunim settlement movement in, xviii–xix, 71, 73, 86, 91, 92; Hamas

Gal, Reuven, 249

plot to overthrow Fatah in, 272; influ-

Galilee: Arab population in, 46, 50, 68;

ence of developments in on Jewish-

call for autonomy of Arabs in, 144;

Arab relations, xviii; intifada (1987),

demography before Judaization Plan,

111–12, 131; Israeli invasion of in

51; dismantling of Zone 9 training

2008, 272; Israeli military operation

camp, 116; establishment of regional

in 2004, 234; Israeli withdrawal from,

council Misgav in, 77; Galilee Develop-

234, 268; Israel’s occupation of, xvii,

ment Plan, 45–46, 49, 53–55, 66,

39; Jordanian Option, 91, 129; Likud

75; inclusion in ceasefi re of 1949,

policies toward, 90; mass violence over

22; intensified law enforcement in,

tunnel opening, 178; Palestinian self-

79, 180; Jewish settlement in, 237,

rule in, 91; relationship to Land Day

289; Judaization of, 75, 87; Koenig’s

riot, 68; restored contact with Israeli

recommendations concerning, 46–47;

Arabs, 36–37, 50, 83, 85; security

observation points in, 61, 75–77, 87,

issues in, 34; Shamir’s discussions

Index

|

373

with leaders in, 111; Sharon’s plan to

Jewish, 170; evaluation of Rabin’s poli-

disengage from, 234

cies, 165; as leader of election boycotts,

General Director’s Committee, 114

224; response to views of, 261; survey

General Security Service (GSS): army

of infrastructure/services of Arab

security power transferred to, 34; fi rst

municipalities, 160

intifada and, 121; on interministerial

Gilad, Rabbi Yehuda, 265

council, 62; investigation of writers/

Gilbo‘a, Amos, 117, 118, 142

poets, 245; on Israeli Arab terrorists,

Gil party, 268

224, 241; Koenig’s recommendations

Ginat, Joseph, 113–14, 115–16, 312n. 61

concerning, 47; Land Day riots and,

glasnost, 106

49, 60; objection to repatriation of

Golan Heights, 204

Ikrit/Bir‘em villagers, 115; opinion

Golan Heights Law, 93, 99, 102

on qualifications of Balad party, 245;

Goldstein, Baruch, 169

policy toward Israeli Arabs, 28–29,

Goodman, Alan, 94, 99, 104

135; recommendation to outlaw

Gorbachev, Mikhail, 106–7, 128

Islamic Movement, 260–61; response

government policy: from 1948–1976,

to general strike in Oct 1990, 142;

40–61; during Barak’s tenure, 204–11;

response to intifada, 121–22; response

based on Jewish nature of Israel, xx–xxi;

to Land Day commemoration in 2000,

of Begin government, 74–80; coercion

211; response to March 1976 general

under military rule, xx; discriminat-

strike, 57; security powers of, 34; sup-

ing against Arabs, xx–xxiv, 12–15,

port of Galilee Development Plan, 54;

21–22, 32, 135, 161–62, 217, 239–40,

view of call for change in defi nition of

241–46, 248–49, 290, 307n. 52, 330n.

Israel, 28–29

24; effect on Jewish-Arab relations, xvi,

general strikes: of 30 March 1982, 98–99;

xx–xxv, 74–80, 87–89, 219, 292, 294,

in Arab municipalities over budgets,

296, ; failure to implement Or Com-

137; commemorating intifada victims,

mission recommendations, 249–51;

121; during intifada, 111, 125, 141;

following Land Day riots, 60, 61–64;

in March 2002, 252; over al-Aqsa

for control of population, 51, 65, 235,

massacre, 94, 133, 142; over dismissal

238–39 (See also child allowances);

of West Bank mayors in 1982, 94,

improvement of Arab status since

98–99, 102; prior to 1988 election,

1960s, 292; as indicator/reflection of

122; protesting Sabra/Shatilla mas-

confl ict, xxviii; influence on Arab-

sacres, 99–100; protesting unfulfi lled

Israeli confl ict, xvi, xx–xxv, 216, 227,

promises, 145

229, 289; as initiating cause of Land

Ghanem, As‘ad: alternative educational

Day riots, 295; as initiating cause of

program designed by, 8, 10–11; on

October 2000 riots, 295; Israeli Arabs

Arab’s right to ownership of homeland,

view of, 283–84; as justification for

253; on Arab vote in 1992, 169; call

armed struggle, 72; during Likud rule,

for change in defi nition of Israel as

71, 72, 78–79, 90, 91, 104, 107, 293;

374

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Index

government policy (cont.)

Habibi, Emile, 39

under military control, 40–61; during

Habushi, Yehoshua, 312n. 61

Netanyahu’s tenure, 174, 178–81, 196,

Hadash party: 1977 election victory, 81;

237; during Olmert’s tenure, 273–76;

1981 election, 91–92; 1988 election,

Or Commission of Inquiry on, 217–20;

130, 131; 1992 election, 155–58, 168;

during Rabin’s tenure, 150, 153, 154,

1996 election, 177; 1999 election, 203,

158–65, 166–67t, 167–68, 173; in

212; 2006 election, 276; 2009 election,

response to October 2000 riots, 235–51,

269; acceptance of coalition with Labor,

258, 267; Six Day War’s effect on, 52;

151; blocking block agreement, 155–58;

Toledano’s policies toward Israeli Arabs,

campaign against Sharon, 251; demands

41; toward Bedouins, 78–79; toward

on Barak government, 204; distribution

West Bank/Gaza Strip, 90; during unity

of “The Sixth of June Convention,” 85;

government, 113–19; Watad’s view

establishment of, 70; fiction between

of policies toward Israeli Arabs, 95;

Abna’ al-Balad and, 81–82; Jewish sup-

Weitzman’s policies toward Israeli Arabs,

port of banning of, 286; Jewish view of,

113–17, 124. See also affirmative action

123; members as lobbyists for PA, 294;

policies; budgetary policies; child allow-

Oslo Accords and, 154; PLP challenge

ances; control and co-optation policies;

to, 109; PLP criticism of, 144; proposed

demographic policies; demolition of

no-confidence vote, 169–70; radical-

Arab houses; expropriation of Arab

ization of, 88, 92, 102, 109, 171; on

land; Jewish settlements; land policies;

representation of Israel Arabs at Madrid,

stick-and-carrot policy

133; as representative of moderate Arab

Great Arab Revolt (1916), 6

interests, 81–82; response to dismissal

“Great Crossing, The” (Zayyad), 38

of West Bank mayors, 98; response to

Green Line, xviii, xix, 36, 140–41, 142–43

intifada, 121; shift in Arab political affili-

Green Patrol, 78–79

ation to, 53, 61; view of Egyptian-Israeli

Greentzweig, Emille, 93

agreement, 86. See also Rakah party

Grossman, David, 120

Hadassa House, 73

GSS. See General Security Service (GSS)

Haidar, Aziz, 165, 237

guerilla operations, 36

Haifa, 24, 190, 328n. 51

Gulf states, xxv

Haifa Declaration, 277–78

Gulf War (1990-91), xix, xxiv, xxvi, 127,

Haifa University, 211

144, 152

HaIhud HaLeumi party, 231, 259–60

Gur Ariyeh, Binyamin, 96, 113

al-Haj, Majid, 165, 276, 322n. 15

Gush Emunim movement, 71, 73–74, 91

Halabi, Marzuk, 134

Gvaot Bar, 247

Halabi, Usama, xxi, 21 Hamafdat party (NRP), 45, 70, 71 Hamas: attacks on Israel from Gaza, 269;

Haaretz, xxx, 240, 245–46, 252

botched assassination attempt on

Habib, Shafiq, 245

Mahs‘al, 179; boycott of 2005 election

Index

|

in PA, 271; Cast Lead operation

Herzog, Chaim, 98

against, 272; cease-fi re, 233, 268, 271;

High Court, 115

deportation of activists, 152–53, 321n.

Hilleli, Avraham, 306n. 44

66; derailing of peace process, 176;

Histadrut, 50, 145, 170

election to PA Legislative Council,

Hizballah: attack on Israel’s border in

375

234, 270; international censure of,

2006, 270–71; bombing of U.S.

272; Iranian Shi‘ite influence in, xxvi;

troop headquarters in Beirut, 314n. 1;

Israeli Arabs’ identification with, xviii,

ceasefi re agreement with Israel, 153;

283; Israeli arrest of politicians, 271;

clashes with IDF in Lebanon, 153,

kidnapping of border police, 147; as

201; Israeli Arabs’ solidarity with,

leader of fi rst intifada, 111; resump-

xi, xxiv, 242–43, 285; launching of

tion of violence in 2006, 271; terrorist

rockets into Israel, xi, 153, 163, 269,

actions of, 153, 173, 179; use of Israeli

276; terrorist attacks following Rabin’s

Arab suicide bombers, 224–25; victory

assassination, 175; as threat to Israel,

in PA elections, 270

270; war with Israel in 2006, xi–xii,

Hamdalla, Wahid, 72

xxvi, 276

Hamer, Zevulun, 136

holidays, 25–26

‘Al Hamishmar, 100

Holocaust, 5–6, 25, 28, 29, 190, 283

Handelman, Zvi, 286

housing: construction of, 135; discrimina-

Haniyeh, Ismail, 272

tion in, 328n. 53; enforcement of laws

al-Haram al-Ibrahimi, 5

under Netanyahu, 180, 196; increase

al-Haram al Sharif: al-Aqsa massacre,

in budget to Arab municipalities, 160;

132–33; Goodman’s attack on, 94,

lack of land for, 67; policies of Barak

99, 104, 142; visit of Sharon to, xxvii,

government, 209–11; shortages in

xxviii, 199–200, 205, 213

Arab villages/municipalities, 4; in

al-Hariri, Rafiq, 252 Haropp, William, 145

unrecognized Arab villages, 323n. 41. See also demolition of Arab houses

Hassaissi, Badi, 264

Hubayshi, Sakhar, 224

HaTchiyah party, 131

Human Rights Report (U.S. Justice

Hausner, Gideon, 55

Department), 145

Hazoni, Yoram, 265

Human Rights Watch, 195

Head of Minorities Division, 157

Husayn, Ibrahim Nimr, 94, 99

Hebrew calendar, 26

al-Husayni, Hajj Amin, xvii

Hebrew Employment Web site, 259

Husayniyya, 193, 194

Hebrew language, xxiii, 15

Hushi, Abba, 40, 41–42

Hebron, 73, 74, 169, 178, 196

al-Hussayni, Faisal, 332n. 47

Herut party, 69

Hussein (king of Jordan), 110–11, 112,

Herzlia Convention, 237, 342n. 14 Herzlia Institute for Policy and Strategy, 276

124, 129 Hussein, Saddam, xxiv, 127, 144, 148, 231–32

376

|

Index

I‘bilin school recognition, 159

133–35; goals of National Committee

Ibn ‘Ali, Al-Husayn, 6

of Displaced People in Israel, 4, 10;

Ibn Khaldun Center, 9

from Ikrit/Bir‘em, 115–16, 119, 124,

ideology: Arab shift to left, 53, 61, 71, 80,

164–65, 217–18, 324n. 48; Judaiza-

148; blur between security and, 28–29;

tion of lands of, 23; number of, 4; Or

competition between Labor/Likud,

Commission recommendations, 218;

xxviii, 114, 129 (See also Labor party; Likud party); of Jewish state of Israel, 28; rise of competing factions among Israeli Arabs, 80–85; as source of confl ict, xvi. See also democracy; Jewish nature of Israel Ikrit, 115–16, 119, 124, 164–65, 217–18, 324n. 48 immigration: Arab appeal to U.S. for

Oslo Accords and, 4, 154 International Environment and Water Tribunal, 194 international organizations, 145, 194–95, 291, 297. See also European Union (EU); United Nations (UN) intifada (1987): attacks on IDF, 317n. 17; consequences of, 140–41; duration of, 127; effect on Israel Arabs politi-

equal funding for absorption, 194–95;

cal behavior, 140–46, 148; effect on

of Arabs into Israel, 241; before/

Jewish Israelis, 146–48; eruption of,

during British rule, xvi; of Ethiopian

111–12, 125; escalation into Israel,

Jews, 110; as source of confl ict, xvi,

151; establishment of ADP and, 144;

194–95; of Soviet Jews, 112, 128,

Hadash’s verbal attacks on Rabin

131, 136, 138, 151; state encourage-

during, 109; impact of, 119, 120–22,

ment of Jews, 51

125, 132–33; interlocking dimension

immigration laws. See Law of Citizen-

of, xviii, xxvii, 128; link to Land Day

ship (1950); Law of Entrance to Israel

riots, 295; as peak in Arab political

(1952); Law of Return (1950)

behavior, 293; political setting of, 105,

“Independence Day and the Prohibition of Nakba Commemorations” bill, 259–60

107, 129–32 intra-Arab confl ict; effect on Jewish-Arab

Independent Liberal party, 55, 61, 69, 70

relations, xxv–xxvii (See also Arab-

Index of Arab-Jewish Relations project,

Israeli confl ict: broader Middle East

255–56, 283 Institute of Peace Studies survey, 210 interlocking confl icts, xii–xxx, xiii. See also Arab-Israeli confl ict internal refugees: 1948 fi les and, 154,

confl icts and); Gulf War as result of, xix, xxiv, xxvi, 127, 144, 152; Iranian Shi‘ite influence in Iraq, xxvi Introduction to National Security, 28 Iran, xxv, 74, 83, 91, 232, 269

169, 170; attempts to return to lands,

Iran-Hizballah-Hamas combination, 31

4; ceasefi re 1949 and, 22–23; demand

Iraq: coalitions of Western powers dur-

for return of to original villages,

ing U.S. invasion of, xxvi; Gulf War

169, 170–71, 175, 227–28, 283–84;

(1990-91), 127; Iranian Shi‘ite influ-

demand for right of return, 284; expec-

ence in, xxvi; Israeli Arabs’ solidarity

tation for Madrid Peace Conference,

with Hussein, xxiv, 127, 144; loss of

Index

|

377

Soviet support, 131; U.S./Britain war

233; Hizballah killings of soldiers,

against, 231–32, 270

153, 270–71, 317n. 22; incursions into

‘Isa, ‘Abdalla Nimr Darwish, 83

Gaza, 270; on interministerial council,

Islamic college recognition, 159

62; intifada and, 111, 112, 129;

Islamic movement: 1999 election, 203;

invasion of Lebanon, 73, 74, 93, 107;

Arab-Israelis identification with, xviii;

Jewish nature of, xxiii; Kafar Qasem

bill to outlaw, 260; call for boycott

massacre, 180; Operation Account-

of 2003 elections, 251; campaign to

ability, 153; Operation Defense Shield,

restore/preserve Muslim places, 191;

127, 252; Operation Grapes of Wrath,

on case against Bukeirat, 245; chal-

175–76; operation through South

lenge to Hadash, 102; contribution

Lebanese Army, 177; Palestinian ter-

to violence, 218, 225; effect on Arab

rorist attacks on, 223; recruitment of

culture in Israel, 25; emergence of in

minorities, 30–31; response to intifada,

Israel, 83; establishment of as extra-

121; response to Land Day riots, 60;

paramilitary organization, 84; festive

riots over dismissal of mayors and, 99;

conventions, 183; strengthening of

soldiers caught in March 1976 demon-

during intifada, 144

stration, 87; training Zone 9, 9, 55m,

Islamic Resistance Movement, 111

55–57, 66, 116, 124; withdrawal from

Islamist terrorism, 177, 231, 232

central Lebanon, 109; withdrawal from

Israel Beitenu party, 231, 268, 269, 272, 273 Israel Democracy Institute, 188, 265 Israel-Hizballah war (2006), xi–xii, xxvi, 269–71, 275–76, 285, 296 Israeli-Arab confl ict. See Arab-Israeli confl ict “Israeli Arabs and International Community” (Bligh), 145

Lebanon, 203 Israeli Democracy Institute, 236, 273, 281 Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement, xxvi, 72, 85 Israeli government: acknowledgment of discriminatory policies, 151, 292–93; Arab resistance to Jewish nature of state, 169; bombing of Iraqi nuclear reactor, 91; change in policy following

Israeli Association for Civil Rights, 191, 192

Land Day riots, 60; change in policy

Israeli Defense Forces (IDF): attack on

toward Israeli Arabs, 129, 134–46;

installation from Gaza, 270; attack

concern over Arab appeal to interna-

on Nazareth in 1948, 2; bombing of

tional organizations, 145; curtailment

Tunisian PLO headquarters, 110; Cast

of inflation, 109; dealing with extreme

Lead operation, 272; demolition of

positions of Arab MKs, 241–46;

Arab houses, 78, 115, 116; effect on

defi nition of Israeli Arabs, 63–64;

presence in Lebanon on 1996/1999

demographic policies of, xxiii, 20–22,

elections, 201; encouragement of Arab

65, 235–41 (See also child allowances;

voluntary service, 119; expropria-

demographic policies; Jewish settle-

tion of land for training zones, 180,

ments); deportation of Arabs follow-

184–86; fight against al-Aqsa intifada,

ing Hebron violence, 74; dismissal of

378

|

Index

Israeli government (cont.) National Coordination Committee,

Israel-Jordan ceasefi re agreement, 140 Israel Land Authority (ILA): Arab par-

73; dismissal of West Bank mayors,

ticipation in, 209; demolition of Arab

94, 98–99, 102; focus of, 97; goals of,

houses, 78; destruction of Bedouin

26; hardening of policies toward West

crops, 248–49, 253; improvement of

Bank/Gaza Strip, 90; Jewish attitudes

Arab municipalities’ infrastructure,

toward Arab inclusion in, 46–47, 265;

160; objection to repatriation of Ikrit/

as Jewish democratic state (See Jewish

Bir‘em villagers, 115; prevention of

nature of Israel); opening of labor

Arab bids for JNF land, 274; proposal

market to Arabs, 46–47, 50, 52, 65;

of Galilee Development Plan, 54;

Operation Solomon, 110; outlawing

replacement of JNF land sold to Arabs,

of Arab political bodies, 80, 83, 84,

274; suggestion of intensification of law

85, 88–89, 96; overriding concerns

enforcement, 77–78; transfer of JNF

of, 289; perception of Israeli Arabs as

land to, 20

security threat, 27–30, 34, 37–38, 50, 51–52, 86, 236, 254, 261–63, 286,

Israel-PLO peace agreement (1993), 111, 112

296; policies 1948-1976, 40–61; poli-

al-Ittihad, 84–85, 96, 101, 138, 142, 170

cies toward Arabs following military

Ittijah association, 187, 221

control, 50, 51–53; policy toward

Izra‘el valley, 48, 237

PLO, 110; prevention of Arab political movement, 46–47, 80, 96, 114, 221; proposed exchange of territories, 236;

Jabareen, Yosef, 277–78

as reflection of Jewish public’s political

Jabarin, Taqfiq Ahmad, 244–45

behavior, xxviii; rejection of Arens’s

Jaffa, 24, 183, 190, 328n. 51

bill, 119; resistance to Arab integra-

Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies survey,

tion/equality, 296–97; response to

263, 264

Follow-up Committee, 96; response to

Jaljulia explosive laboratory, 225

intifada, 112; response to Palestinian

Jamal, Amal, 8, 9, 10

violence, 73; reward and punishment

Jarrah, Meir, 63, 312n. 61

policy toward Arabs, 42–61, 45–50,

Jerusalem, 72

51–65, 75; role in confl ict, xv, xx–xxv,

Jewish Agency: bill to limit land sales to

31–32; role in management of internal

Jews, 260; Bishara’s nationalist bill

confl ict, 298. See also government

and, 223; creation of observation

policy; Israeli Defense Forces (IDF);

settlements, 75–77, 313n. 22; fund-

Labor government; Likud govern-

ing for Jewish settlers in Negev, 248;

ment; security issues; unity government

Katzir case, 192–93; land policies

(fi rst); unity government (second); spe-

favoring, 19, 20

cific prime minister of prime minister’s

Jewish-Arab Council, 250

government

Jewish-Arab groups, 194, 195

Israeli-PLO talks, 128

Jewish Black Panthers, 70

Index

|

379

Jewish immigrants; as source of confl ict,

security measures, 28–29; proposal of

xvi, 194–95 (See also Jewish settle-

Israel as binational state and, 64–65;

ments); under British rule, xvi; from

resistance to Arab integration/equality

Ethiopia, 110; fi nancial benefits for,

due to, 296–97; Sharon’s view of, 172;

22, 311n. 45; immigration laws favor-

as source of confl ict, 11–16, 171, 216,

ing, 21, 51; narrative of 1948 war, 3;

294; Zionist state vs., 256

from Soviet Union, 112, 128, 131,

Jewish Sephardic Shas party, 136

136, 138, 151

Jewish settlements: Arab view of, 65;

Jewish leadership. See specific person by name

Barak’s policy toward, 204; contribution to Land Day riot, 66; established

Jewish Messianism, 86

under Sharon government, 233;

Jewish nature of Israel: Adalah’s Demo-

Galilee Development Plan, 45–46, 49,

cratic Constitution and, 280; amend-

53–55, 59, 66, 75; Galilee Judaization

ment to disqualify candidates/parties

Plan, 53, 54; Ikrit/Bir‘em lands expro-

not recognizing, 245; Arab call for

priated for, 115; influx of Soviet Jews

change, 170, 182, 186–89, 197, 204,

and, 138; Israeli Arabs’ demand for

218, 254, 291; Arab challenge to

change laws referring to, 279; Katzir

legitimacy of, 277, 278–79; as basis of

case and, 192–93; military removal

discriminatory government policies,

from West Bank, 73; in Nazareth,

xx–xxiv, 235–43, 261; democracy

46–47; in Negev, 237, 247–48, 289;

and, xx–xxi, 11–16, 28–29, 31–32,

new program following Land Day

229, 235, 238, 239, 246, 261; effect

riot, 61; observation points in Galilee,

on Jewish perception of Israeli Arabs,

75–76; as overriding concern of Israeli

31–33, 168; internal Jewish-Arab rela-

government, 289; radicalization of

tions, 11–16, 170, 171, 172, 186–89,

Jews through, 292; during Sharon gov-

195, 197, 216; internationalization

ernment, 247–49; as source of dispute,

of Israeli Arab grievances and, 195;

218–19; in training Zone 9, 55m, 116;

Israeli Arabs perceived as internal

in Triangle, 289; use of Arab villages

threat to, 28–29; Israeli Arabs’ view of,

for, 163; U. S. policy concerning those

28, 253–54, 283–84; Jewish demand

close to 1967 borders, 234; in West

for enhancement of, 293; Jewish need

Bank/Gaza Strip, xviii–xix, 39–40,

for territorial compromises and, 154;

59, 60, 71, 73, 75, 86, 91, 92, 95, 234,

Jewish response to Arab demand for

237; Zionist vs. Jewish state policies,

change, 195, 223, 229, 235, 241;

256

Kineret Covenant and, 265–66; law

Jewish symbolic/cultural space: Arab

requiring Knesset members commit-

argument for restoration of Arab

ment to, 242–43; maintenance of as

culture/symbols, 190; establishment

overriding concern of Israeli govern-

of, xxiii, 2, 15, 22–26; as source of

ment, 289; need for constitutional clarification of, 298; as object of national

dispute, 32 Jewish terrorists, 132, 141

380

|

Index

Jewish Underground, 74, 123

Kamane, 194

Jibril Deal (1985), 123, 222, 318n. 41

Kana‘ne, Muhammad, 252

Jihad, 224

Karmiel, 138

Jihad Clan, 84

Kasher, Assa, 21–22

Jiraysi, Sami, 67

Katz, Israel, 242–43, 260, 262

Jiryis, Sabri, 36, 37

Katzav, Moshe, 179, 180

JNF (Keren Kayemet LeIsrael), 19, 223,

Katzav, Reuven, 312n. 61

260, 274–75 Jordan: botched assassination attempt

Katzir case, 192–93 Katzir/Qa‘dan case, 16, 305n. 29

by Mossad in, 179; disengagement

Keren, Uzi, 248

from West Bank, 112; involvement

Keren Kayemet LeIsrael. See JNF (Keren

in Arab-Israeli confl ict, xvi; Madrid

Kayemet LeIsrael)

Peace Conference, 128; negotiation

Khalayla, Hamad, 97–98, 102–3

with PLO, 107, 124; peace accords

Khallaf, Karim, 72, 94

with Israel, 150; peace agreement

Khamaisi, Rasem, 323n. 41

with Peres, 110–11, 124; possibility of

Khamis, Saliba, 77

transfer of Palestinians to, 334n. 14;

Khatib, Hashem, 216, 288

reception of deported Palestinians from

Khatib, Kamal, 225

Saudi Arabia/Kuwait, 128; relations

Khatib, Shawqi, 157, 206, 240, 273, 281

with U.S./Israel, xxv

al-Khatib, Tawfiq, 226

Jordanian Option, 91, 110–11, 112, 124, 129

Khunefes, Saleh, 41 Kinneret Covenant, 265–66, 277, 288

Jordan-Israel peace accords, 150

Kleiner, Michael, 259, 329n. 66

Jubran, Salem, 157, 171, 189

Knesset: 1972 election, 80; 1977 election,

Judaization, xxiii, 2, 15, 23. See also Jewish settlements Jumayyed, Bashir, 93

53, 70, 81; 1981 election, 91–92, 102; 1984 election, 94, 102, 107–9, 122–23; 1988 election, 122, 129–31; 1992 election, 132, 168; 1996 election, 176–77; alienation of Israeli

Kabaha, Jawdat, 120

Arabs, 225–26; amendment declar-

Kabaha, Sufyan, 140

ing Jerusalem as capital, 72; Arab

Kabaha family, 140

members’ role in inciting violence,

Kach party, 123

257–58; Arab members’ visits to Syria,

Kadima party, 231, 268, 269

xi; Arab members’ vote against peace

Kafar Qasem massacre, 180, 222

agreement, 86; attempt to disqualify

Kahalani, Avigdor, 184

Bishara from elections, 193; Basic

Kahan Commission, 93

Law: Equality to the Arab Population,

Kahane, Rabbi Meir, 122–23, 125, 129,

333n. 78; bills initiated during al-Aqsa

318n. 41 Kahlon, Moshe, 274

intifada, 259–66; bills to decrease Arab political power, 238; bill to amend

Index

|

oath of allegiance, 286; bill to block

Kollek, Teddy, 110

sale of JNF land to Arabs, 260, 274;

Kook, Rebecca, 197

bill to eliminate commemoration of

Kopelevitz, Emanuel, 312n. 61

Independence, 259; block of PLP/

Koversky, Haim, 78

Kahane, 109, 123, 125; celebration of

Kriesberg, Louis, xiii, 53, 67

100 years of Jewish settlement, 102;

Kriesberg’s theory. See interlocking

changes in Basic Law, 72; Citizenship

381

confl icts

and Entry into Israel Law amend-

Kul al-‘Arab, xxx, 101

ment and, 240–41; condemnation of

Kuwait, 127, 128

Arab MKs in, 285–86; discrimination against Israeli Arabs, 13; discussion of child allowance preferences, 51, 97–98;

Labor government: Arab access to, 97;

discussion of civil service for Arabs, 75;

influence on Israeli political behavior,

drafting of constitution, 277; election

xxviii; military control under, 40;

of Arab members in 1950s, 41; election

prevention of Arab political movement,

to as right of Arabs, xxiii; enactment of laws strengthening democracy, 132; establishment of Academy of Arabic Language, 26; Golan Heights

80. See also Eshkol, Levi; Meir, Golda Labor-Likud coalition government. See also unity government (fi rst); unity government (second)

Law, 102; Jibril Deal, 123; Law of

labor market, 50, 52, 65

Associations, 101; Law of Rule and

Labor party: 1977 Knesset election, 70;

Jurisdiction Order passage, 325n. 71;

1981 election, 91, 92; 1988 elec-

law on visiting enemy countries, 275;

tion, 130; 1992 election, 151–52;

legislation disqualification of parties,

1996 election, 176; 1999 election,

195–96, 197; minutes of in Arabic, 26;

201, 202–3; 2001 election, 224;

Presidential Committee’s rejection of

2006 Knesset elections, 268; 2009

advisors’ recommendation, 333n. 78;

election, 269; acknowledgment of dis-

proposed exchange of territories, 236;

criminatory policies, 151; advocacy of

proposed voting requirements, 237;

exchange of Palestinian territories for

response to extreme positions of Arab

peace, 129; attempt to facilitate peace

MKs, 241–46; restriction of Maha-

negotiations, 131; attraction of Arab

mid’s movements, 153; shift of Arab

votes, 107, 108, 169; coalition with

affi liation to Arab parties, 53, 71; vote

Likud party, 107–8, 130; Darawasha’s

on Oslo Accords, 290

defection from, 122, 129; decline in

Knesset Presidential Committee, 260

power in 2003, 230–31; defection

Koenig, Israel, 45–50, 95

from Sharon coalition, 230; depen-

Koenig Memorandum, 46–50

dence on Arab vote, 70, 151, 154, 290,

Koenig second memorandum, 310n. 36

293, 294; effect of Rabin’s assassina-

Kol, Moshe, 55, 61–62, 311n. 58

tion on, 154; effect of radicalization of

Kol Ha‘am, 244

segment of Arab minority, 80; end of

382

|

Index

Labor party (cont.)

Day riots (1976); al-Ruha affair); of

rule, 69; exclusion of Arab parties from

Barak government, 209–11; of Ben-

coalition, 172, 294; Israeli Arabs’ sup-

Gurion, 19–20; concerning return

port of, 170; Jordanian Option and,

of Palestinian lands, 4; confl ict over,

91; Koenig Memorandum and, 46;

xviii–xix, 15–20, 32, 183–86, 209–11,

meetings with PLO, 147; nomination

219 (See also Land Day riots (1976);

of Majadla for minister of Culture,

al-Ruha affair; Sakhnin affair); demoli-

Science, and Sport, 273; in Olmert

tion of Muslim villages/cemetery,

coalition, 268; ousted from unity gov-

1–4; following 1948 war, 2–3, 22–23;

ernment, 131; Perets as leader of, 231;

following Yon Kippur War, 39; Galilee

policy toward Israeli Arabs, 148, 173

Development Plan, 45–46, 49, 53–55,

(See also blocking block agreement);

59, 66, 75; before Galilee Judaiza-

policy toward Palestinians, 106; politi-

tion Plan, 51; government recognition

cal competition with Likud party, 129;

of/services to unrecognized villages,

response to intifada, 147; Sharon coali-

193; influx of Soviet Jews and, 138;

tion and, 230, 231, 234; voters shifted

Israeli Arabs’ demand for return of

to PLP, 109; Watad’s challenge to, 95.

lands, 280; Israeli Arabs’ view of, 182;

See also Mapai/Labor party’s rule

Israeli-Palestinian confl ict and, 59–60;

labor union strikes, 151

Jewish control in Jewish state, 15–16;

Landau, Jacob M., 92

Katzir case and, 192–93; Koenig’s

Landau, Uzi, 250

recommendations concerning, 46–47;

Land Day riots (1976): avoidance of general

Land Day riots as result of, 49, 53–57,

strike due to peace process, 169; com-

59, 65, 66; of Likud administration,

memorations of, 54, 82, 98, 141–42,

72–73, 75–78, 87, 95–96, 293; neces-

211; effect on Israel Arabs, 37; effect on

sity to Jewish state, 32; of Netan-

Jewish-Arab relations, 34; factors pre-

yahu government, 180–81, 184–86,

cipitating, 53–57, 64–68; as final release

196–97; Or Commission on, 217–18,

from military rule, 35; government

220; of Rabin government, 161;

response to, 57–58; Koenig Memoran-

restriction of use of Zone 9, 55–57;

dum and, 49, 310n. 36; as peak in Arab

of Sharon government, 247–49; since

political behavior, 293; ramifications of,

Land Day riot, 67. See also demolition

59–61; relationship to Israeli-Palestinian

of Arab houses; expropriation of Arab

conflict, 59; role of developments

land; Jewish settlements

in West Bank/Gaza in, 295; role of

Langental, Nahum, 259–60

government policy in, 294, 295; shift in

language. See Arabic language; Hebrew

Arab political affiliation following, 53; Tarabey’s testimony of, 57–58

language Lankri, Shimon, 287

Land Defense Committee, 66

Lapid, Yosef, 230, 250, 262

land policies; as trigger for violence, 82,

Lapid Committee, 250

83, 135, 209–11, 212 (See also Land

Lavi jet, 118

Index

law enforcement: goals of, 46–47; Koenig

|

383

Operation Grapes of Wrath, 175–76;

Memorandum on, 46–47; under Likud

ousting of PLO, 90, 93; Sabra/Sha-

government, 77–80, 87, 293; under

tilla massacre in, 93, 94, 96, 99; U.S.

Netanyahu, 180, 196–97; under Sha-

involvement in, 314n. 1; war between

ron government, 248

Israel/Hizballah in 2006, xi–xii, xxvi,

Law of Associations, 101

268, 270–71, 276–77, 285, 296; with-

Law of Citizenship (1950), 10, 21, 22,

drawal of IDF, 203; withdrawal of IDF

223, 253, 274, 307n. 52 Law of Citizenship and Entry into Israel, 240 Law of Election to the Knesset and to the

from central Lebanon, 109 left-wing parties, 106, 152, 154–55, 231, 269, 290. See also Labor party; specific party or election

Prime Minister’s Office amendment

Levinger, Moshe, 71

46, 242

Libai, David, 164

Law of Electric Power, 161 Law of Entrance to Israel (1952), 21, 32 Law of Families Blessed with Many Children, 238

Lieberman, Avigdor, 225, 236, 253, 269, 273, 285 Lijphart, Arend, 279 Likud government: Arab political behavior

Law of Freedom of Occupation, 132

under, 69–89; coalition with religious/

Law of Human Dignity and Liberty, 132

right-wing parties, 91; consequences

Law of Immunity of Members of Knesset,

on Arab political agenda, 87; desire

Their Rights and Duties, 243, 336n. 4

for peace/retention of Palestinian ter-

law of incitement, 243–44

ritories, 129; effect on Jewish-Arab rela-

Law of National Education, 208

tions, 292; endorsement of settlement

Law of Ottoman Associations, 101

in Palestinian territories, 71, 73, 90,

Law of Return (1950), 10, 21, 254–55,

92; Golan Heights Law proposal, 93;

256, 280 Law of Rule and Jurisdiction Order, 325n. 71

inaction on post-Land Day resolutions, 74; invasion of Lebanon, 73, 93, 104; Jewish political behavior during, 103–4;

Layish, Aharon, 261

land policies, 75–78, 86, 87, 95–96;

leadership. See Arab leadership; specific

law enforcement under, 77–80, 87;

leader by name Lebanon: deportation of Hamas activists

Misgav Affair, 95; Palestinian dimension of, 94; policies toward Bedouins,

to, 152–53, 321n. 66; IDF presence in,

78–79; policies toward Israeli Arabs,

201; involvement in Arab-Israeli con-

74–75, 95–98, 104, 148, 293; policies

fl ict, xvi; Iranian Shi‘ite influence in,

toward Palestinian issue, 71, 72, 91, 92,

xxvi; Israeli Arab solidarity with Hiz-

104, 106; political setting of, 90–94;

ballah, xxiv, 285, 296; Israeli invasion

as reflection of Jewish radicalization,

of, 73, 74, 90, 93, 94, 104, 107; killing

292; reinforcement of Jewish settlement

of IDF soldiers in security zone in,

in West Bank/Gaza Strip, 90; salience

153; Operation Accountability in, 153;

of Palestinian issue under rule of, 68;

384

|

Index

Likud government (cont.)

on bill to eliminate commemoration

second term, 90; settlement in Palestin-

of Nakba, 260; Haifa Declaration,

ian territories, 71; Sharon’s departure

277–78; poll on Arab view of Jew-

from, 231, 268; Watad’s view of policies

ish nature of Israel, 254; report on

toward Israeli Arabs, 95. See also Begin,

Jewish attitudes toward Israeli Arabs,

Menachem; Netanyahu government

263–65; survey prior to Annapolis

Likud party: 1981 election, 91; 1988 election, 130; 1992 election, 150–51, 152, 169; 1996 election, 176; 1999 election,

Peace Conference, 284 Madrid Peace Conference (1991), 127, 128, 133–35, 319n. 11

201, 202; 2001 election, 224; 2003

Madrid railway bombings, 232

election, 230; 2006 Knesset elections,

Magen, David, 139

268; 2009 election, 269; attack on

Mahamid, Hashem, 152, 203

legitimacy of Rabin government, 172;

Mahs‘al, Khaled, 179

attempts to block peace negotiations,

Majadla, Ghaleb, 247, 273–74

131; coalition with Labor party, 107–8,

Majd al-Kurum, 79–80, 82

130; courting of Arabs, 107; delegiti-

Makhul, Amir, 24, 221, 313n. 22

mization of Israeli Arabs, 147; depen-

Makhul, ‘Issam, 212

dence on Arab vote, 293; influence on

al-Mal, 56

Israeli political behavior, xxviii; opposi-

Manna‘,‘Adel, 188

tion to Gaza disengagement program,

Manna‘, Muhammad, 79

231; policy toward Palestinians, 106;

Mansour, Atallah, 18, 29–30, 311n. 45

political competition with Labor party,

Mapai/Labor party’s rule: Arab Riots

129; rise to power, 34, 69–70; second

during, 34; demographic policies,

Sharon coalition, 230; Sharon coalition,

75; end of, 69; Koenig Memorandum

230; Sharon’s departure from, 231

and, 46; Mapai faction, 307n. 52;

Linn, Amnon, 40, 41–42, 76

military control under, 40; reward

Lipkin-Shahak, Amnon, 180, 184

and punishment policy toward Arabs,

Litani river operation, 73

42–61. See also Rabin, Yitzhak

Livnat, Limor, 7–8, 9–10, 11, 225–26

Mapam party, 54–55, 70, 108, 307n. 52

Livni, Tzipi, 269

Markovich, Ya’kov, 78

Lod, 183, 209–10

Markovich committee, 76, 78

London Accords, 110–11, 124

Markovitz committee (second), 117,

London underground terrorist attack, 232

161

Lubrani, Uri, 27

Maronite Christians, 93

Lustick, Ian, 40, 52, 279

martial law. See military rule Marzel, Baruch, 245 Masalha, Abd al-Hakim, 245

Ma‘arach party, 70, 98

Masalha, Ahmad, 64, 153

Mada al-Carmel Center: on amendment

Masalha, Nawaf, 164, 183, 209

disqualifying candidates/parties, 246;

Mashhad, 161

Index

mass demonstrations: by Bedouins, 87; by

|

385

231–32, 270; U.S. involvement in,

Jews, 147, 211; justification of, 182;

xxv, 38, 74, 107, 127, 128, 131, 314n.

Land Day commemorations, 66; in

1; U.S. policy toward, 71, 271; USSR

March 1976, 54; in Nazareth during

involvement in, xxv–xxvi, 38, 74, 106.

fi rst intifada, 129; in October 1975,

See also Arab-Israeli confl ict; specific

59; over death of Abu-Salih, 211;

Arab nation

over demolition of houses, 183–84,

Milhem, Muhammad, 72

209–10; over land expropriation, 49,

military: development of in Israel, 35;

54, 58, 59, 60, 65, 68, 184–86; pro-

exemption of Arabs from, xxii, 30–31,

testing opening of tunnel to Western

119, 276, 305–6n. 32, 308n. 72;

Wall, 183–84; protesting Sabra/Sha-

Ginat’s proposal for Arab service, 114;

tilla massacres, 99–100; in September

preferential treatment in payment of

2000, 242; during Sharon’s tenure,

child allowances, 51; removal of Jewish

251–53; Weitzman’s appeasement and,

settlements from West Bank, 73. See

120. See also al-Aqsa intifada; general strikes; intifada (1987); Land Day riots (1976); October 2000 riots; riots master plans: created by Barak government, 207, 210; created by Rabin gov-

also Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) military rule: end of, xx, 34, 35, 65; enforcement of, 30; negative attitudes fermented during, 292; policies during, 40–61

ernment, 161; lack of for Arab villages,

Milo, Roni, 142

78, 117; lack of funding for, 117; Lapid

Minister (Ministry) of Labor and Welfare,

Committee’s recommendation, 250;

208, 238

for legalizing Jewish ranches, 337n. 58;

Minister of Defense, 30–31, 56–57, 66

for observation points, 75; preparation

Minister of Internal Security, 184

of as part of blocking block agreement,

Minister of Justice, 164, 223

166t; preparation of for Umm al-Fahm,

ministers of Arab affairs, 139

135; prepared by Association of Forty,

Ministry of Agriculture, 180, 207

163; for Sakhnin, 211

Ministry of Education: Arab heritage

Mazen, Abu, 214, 284

program, 305n. 20; defi nition of

Mazuz, Menachem, 29, 219

minorities, 9–10; employment of Israeli

McMahon (British resident in Egypt), 6

Arabs, 208; establishment of Nation’s

media coverage, xxx, 193, 211

Education Corner in each school,

Meir, Golda, 40, 41

275–76; narrative of 1948 war, 8; 100

Meretz party, 108, 152, 203, 275, 290

terms program, 7–8, 9–10; prohibition

Mi‘ari, Mu’ayad, 212

on use of Ghanem’s program, 11

Mi‘ari, Muhammad, 109, 131, 134, 145

Ministry of Energy, 161

Middle East: Gulf War (1990-91), 127,

Ministry of Environment, 161

152; influence on level and direction

Ministry of Finance, 97, 208, 311n. 45

of Arab-Israeli confl ict, xvi, xxv–xxvii,

Ministry of Health, 208

71, 74; U.S. invasion of Iraq, xxvi,

Ministry of Housing, 248

386

|

Index

Ministry of Industry, 161

216, 227; al-Aqsa massacre, 132–33,

Ministry of Interior Affairs, 136, 210

142; clash in Acre over, 287; disposi-

Ministry of Regional Cooperation, 247

tion of Muslim Waqf lands, 17, 20;

Ministry of Religious Affairs, 51, 97, 191,

Goodman’s attack on al-Aqsa, 94, 99,

192, 208 Ministry of the Interior, 41, 78, 137, 161, 163, 212–13

104; international anti-Israel, antiJewish feelings, 31; Israeli domination at al-Aqsa Mosque, xix; Jewish

Ministry of Tourism, 161

Messianism and, 86; mayors refusal

Ministry of Trade and Industry, 179

to build Shihab al-Din mosque, 203;

Ministry of Welfare budget, 137

murder of worshipers at Ibrahimi

Minorities in Israel, The (Toledano paper),

Mosque, 169; Muslim Waqf lands, 50;

42

opening of tunnel from Western Wall,

al-Mirsad, 101

178, 183–84; preservation of Muslim

Misgav Affair, 95

cemeteries/mosques, 191; Sharon’s visit

Misgav municipal jurisdiction, 77, 87, 95,

to Temple Mount/al-Aqsa, 199, 205,

98, 104 Misgav regional council, 167

213. See also Islamic movement; Jewish nature of Israel

Mitchell, Christopher, xxvii, 1, 88

Muslim Waqf lands, 17, 20, 50

Mitzna‘, Amram, 230

Muways, Hanna, 64, 96

Moledet party, 129, 131, 152 Morocco, 110 Morris, Benny, 262

Na‘amat, 235

Mossad, 179

Na‘amne, Mahmud Sa‘id, 56–57

Mossawa Center: establishment of, 187; on

al-Nahda, 316n. 38

Four Billion Plan, 207; on laws restrict-

Nahef, 210, 242

ing Arab MKs, 244; lobbying for

Nakba of 1948: bill to eliminate commem-

equal funding, 193–94; lobbying for

oration of, 259; commemoration day

extension of Electricity Decree, 328n.

for, 25, 189; commemoration of fi ftieth

56; plan for development of capacity of

anniversary of, 189–90; defi nition of,

executive body, 187; publishing of “An

xxii; demolition of villages as reminder

Equal Constitution for All,” 277–78

of, 5; Ibn Khaldun Center narrative of,

mufti, xxii

9; Jamal’s narrative of, 9; land policies

Muhana, Khalid, 83

and, 16; as living memory/demand for

municipal councils (in Arab sector), 41,

restitution, 7. See also War of Indepen-

49. See also National Committee of Arab Heads of Municipalities Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, 84 Muslim clans, 107 Muslim-Jewish confl ict: al-Aqsa intifada, xviii, xxvii, 199–200, 205, 213–14,

dence (1948) Nakhle, Khalil, 101 Naming Committee of Tel-Aviv Yaffo municipality, 24 Namir, Ora, 315n. 21 National Committee for Naming, 23

Index

National Committee for the Protection of Arab Land, 67

|

387

increased land allocation to, 161; Jewish settlement in, 46–47; Koenig’s

National Committee of Arab Heads of

recommendations concerning, 49; land

Municipalities: boycott of indepen-

added to, 161; Land Day riots in, 100;

dence celebration, 212–13; condemna-

mayors refusal to build Shihab al-Din

tion of dismissal of West Bank mayors,

mosque, 203; municipal elections in

99; decisions based on consensus vote,

1975, 39, 46, 70, 71; Nazareth 2000

xxviii; declaration of strike protesting

program, 161; protest in during inti-

unfulfi lled promises, 145; establish-

fada, 129; protest in support of Syria,

ment of, 36, 45; formation of, 39;

252; riots in, 183; status of developing

formation of political platform, 101;

area granted to, 161

Future Vision manifesto, 12, 277–78,

Nazareth Progressive Movement, 81, 102

280; internationalization of Israeli

Negev: agricultural development program

Arab grievances, 145; list of demands

in, 162; call for autonomy of Arabs in,

presented to Netanyahu, 181, 326n.

144; demolition of Bedouin houses in,

16; plan for development of capacity

248; as exchange area, 237; inclusion

of, 187; reasons for radical behavior of,

in ceasefi re of 1949, 22; intensified law

290; relationship to Land Day riots,

enforcement in, 78–79, 180; Jewish

67; response to Goodman’s attack, 94;

settlements in, 237, 247–48, 289;

response to government defi nition of

legalization of Jewish ranches in, 247,

Israel Arabs, 64

337n. 58; resettlement by Jews follow-

National Committee of Displaced People in Israel, 4 National Coordination Committee, 72–73

ing 1948 war, 22–23; unrecognized Arab villages in, 162–63, 323n. 41 Netanyahu, Binyamin: 1996 election, 176; 1999 election, 201; 2009 election,

National Parks Authority, 78–79

269, 271; contribution to violence,

National Priorities Zones list, 274

210–25; perception of Israeli Arabs

national protest of October 1975, 59

as internal threat, 262; policy toward

National Religious Party (NRP), 45, 203

Israeli Arabs, 237; response to Hamas

Natur, Ahmad, 62

terrorist attacks, 179; reversal of

Nazareth: Arab political organization in, 81; convention of Committee of

Rabin’s policies, 174 Netanyahu government: 1999 election,

the Defense of Arab Lands, 81–82;

202; Arab demand for recognition as

demonstrations against Sabra/Shatilla

national minority, 186–95; celebration

massacres, 99–100; destruction of

of fi ftieth anniversary of statehood,

Safuriya cemetery, 1–5; emergence of

189; contribution to October 2000

Progressive Movement Nazareth, 81,

riots, 227; election of, 177; escalation

102; fi rst association of Arab University

of internal confl ict during, 295; failure

graduates formed in, 81; Follow-up

to implement Oslo Accords, 174, 196,

Committee convention in 1995, 71;

197; instability of, 177; Israeli Arab

388

|

Index

Netanyahu government (cont.)

290; Israeli government’s policy

behavior during, 181–95; Jewish politi-

following, 235–51; Or Commission

cal behavior during, 195–96; land/set-

report on, 216–21; outcome of, 206,

tlement policies of, 180–81, 183–86;

214–16, 221–28, 249–51; as peak in

opening of tunnel from Western

Arab political behavior, 293; precursors

Wall, 178, 183, 196–97; Palestinian

to, 197–98, 205, 209–13; reasons for,

dimension of, 177–79; policy toward

227, 295; responses to, xxviii, 213–15,

Israeli Arabs, 179–81, 196; promise to

225–26, 229, 250

develop Bedouin villages, 207; role in

oil boycotts, 71

confl ict escalation, 294; al-Ruha affair,

Olmert, Ehud: accusations of corruption,

180, 184–86; al-Sahali affair, 180,

271; as acting prime minister, 268;

183–84; Why River Accord, 178, 196

Annapolis Peace Conference, 272–73;

Neuberger, Benyamin, 146

appointment of Majadla as minister,

New Israel Fund, 316n. 38

273–74; cabinet of, 247; discussion

newspapers, 101, 142–43. See also specific

of radicalization of Israeli Arabs, 28;

newspaper 1948 Arab fi le, 7, 134, 154, 169, 170, 195–96

failure to implement Or Commission recommendations, 288; formation of coalition, 268, 273; meeting with

1948 war. See War of Independence (1948)

academics on policy for Arab minor-

1967 war. See Six Day War (1967)

ity, 273; as minister of Arab affairs,

no-confidence vote (proposed), 169–70,

139; negotiations with Abbas, 282; on

173, 215 non-government organizations (NGOs),

opportunity for peace/transfer of Arab neighborhoods to PA, 273; policies

20, 28, 101, 174, 290; documents call-

toward Israeli Arabs, 273–76; as prime

ing for change in defi nition of Israeli

minister, xxix; resignation of, 269;

state, 28. See also Adalah Legal Center

role in unilateral disengagement from

for the Rights of the Arab Minority in

Gaza, 268; view of Israeli Arabs, 274;

Israel; Mossawa Center; Supreme Fol-

Winograd Commission of Inquiry and,

low-up Committee for Arab Citizens nuclear capability, 35

268, 271 Olmert government: Annapolis Peace Conference, 273; challenges of, 268–71; fi rst Arab minister appointed

Obama, Barack, 270, 271

by, 273–74; formation of coalition,

observation settlements, 61, 75–77, 87,

268, 273; Israeli Arab political behav-

116, 313n. 22 October 2000 riots: Barzilai’s predic-

ior during, 276–85; Jewish political behavior during, 285–87; Palestinian

tion of, 182; change in government

dimension of, 272–73; policies toward

policy contributing to, 295; creation of

Israeli Arabs, 273–76

instability in Israel, 296; effect on Jew-

100 terms program, 7–10

ish Israelis’ political behavior, 257–59,

One Israel, 201

Index

|

389

Operation Accountability, 153

Barak’s policy toward, 204–6; Camp

Operation Defense Shield, 230, 252

David II summit, 204–5; dissolution

Operation Desert Shield, 127

of unity government, 272; Hamas elec-

Operation Grapes of Wrath, 176

toral victory, 270; Hamas politicians

Operation Solomon, 110

arrested by Israel, 271; Israel with-

Or, Theodore, 216, 250

drawal from Gaza, 268; Oslo Accords

Or Commission of Inquiry: on Arab

and, 178; peace talk in Oslo, 154;

MK’s contribution to violence, 257;

proposed exchange of territories, 236;

on Barak’s attitude toward Israeli

proposed withdrawal from West Bank,

Arabs, 205–6; effects of, 206; failure

270; role in October 2000 riot, 214;

to implement, 249–51, 288; fi ndings

unity government formed, 272; view of

of, 216–19; members/mission of, 200;

Israeli Arabs, 294

nomination of, 216; recommendation

Palestinian identity, 182

of, 219–21; submission of report to

Palestinian leadership, xxviii, 72. See also

Sharon government, 249 Orgad, Liav, 308n. 72

Arafat, Yasser Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO):

oriental Jews, 69, 70, 86

acceptance of two-state solution, 131;

Orient House, 332n. 47

adoption of Land Day, 66; armed

Oron, Haim, 156

actions led by, 73; bill to limit activity in

Oslo Accords (1993): approval in Knesset,

Jerusalem, 169–70; change in strategy,

134, 172, 290; Arab vote for, 151;

110; commemoration of Nakba, 189;

effect on 1996 election, 176; effect

exclusion of Israeli Arabs from agenda,

on Jewish-Arab relations, 173; end of

134, 171; focus of, 134; goals of, 171;

intifada with signing of, 111; failure of,

IDF bombing of in Tunisia, 110; impact

xviii, 153, 171, 174, 178, 204; Israeli

of Gulf War on, 128; inclusion of

Arabs’ visits to Arafat and, 319n. 9; as

Israeli Arabs in agenda, 143; intifada as

issue in 1999 elections, 202; marginal-

surprise to, 111; Israeli Arabs’ affiliation

ization of Israel Arabs’ interests, 171;

with, xv, xviii, 36, 37, 81, 145, 148; link

negotiation of, 152–55; Netanyahu’s

between Land Day riot/Israeli-Palestin-

intentions toward, 177–78; political

ian conflict, 59–60; loss of Soviet sup-

setting of, 112, 152–55; preparation

port, 131; at Madrid Conference, 134;

for, 128; provisions of, 4, 177–78

meetings with Labor party leaders, 147;

Ozacky-Lazar, Sara, 165

negotiation with Jordan, 107, 124; Oslo Accords (1993), xviii, 4, 153; ousting from Lebanon, 90, 93, 94, 107; peace

Palestinian-Arab nationalism, xvi

accords with Israel, 150; role in conflict

Palestinian Authority: 1999 election in

over dismissal of West Bank mayors, 98;

Israel and, 202; 2005 election, 271;

Shamir’s attempt to bypass, 111; terror-

2006 election, 271; attacks on Israel

ist actions in Israel, 110; view of Israeli

following Israeli withdrawal, 270;

Arabs, 227

390

|

Index

Palestinian Muslim fundamentalist movement, 83 Palestinian Muslims, 83 Palestinian National Authority, 222 Palestinian National Council (PNC), 37, 60, 110, 112, 122, 143

for, 19; U. S. policy concerning, 234. See also internal refugees Palestinians of the West Bank/Gaza Strip, xiv, 36–37 Palestinians of West Bank/Gaza Strip: Bishara’s bill to allow naturalization of,

Palestinian Nation Charter, 178

223; Carter’s peace initiatives and, 72;

Palestinian organizations: attack on Israel’s

Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law

ambassador in London, 93; attack on

amendment and, 240; criticism of Arab

yeshiva in Hebron, 73; Israeli Arabs’

role in October 2000 riots, 214–15;

affi liation with, xxiv; Israeli attack on

failure of Jordan-PLO negotiations

in Lebanon, 73, 74; killing of IDF sol-

and, 107; general strike over Goodman

diers in security zone in Lebanon, 153;

shooting incident, 94; Gush Emunim’s

ousting from Lebanon, 90, 93, 94,

violent actions against, 73–74; impact

107; role in confl ict, xv, xviii; terrorist

of Gulf War on, 128; intifada in 1987,

attacks, 230; as threat to Israel, 91.

107, 111–12, 151; Israeli Arab dona-

See also Hamas; Hizballah; Palestin-

tions to, 221; Israeli Arabs’ identifica-

ian Authority; Palestinian Liberation

tion with, 242–43; Jewish support

Organization (PLO)

of transfer out of territories, 340n.

Palestinian police, 178

113; Madrid Peace Conference, 128;

Palestinian refugees: 1948 Arab fi le

narrative of Palestinian occupation,

concerning, 7, 134, 154, 169, 170,

6–7; policy preventing naturalization

195–96; Arab view of right to return,

of, 274–75; possibility of transfer to

7–8, 9, 138; attempts to return to

Jordan, 334n. 14; resistance to Israeli

lands, 4; demand for repatriation/

occupation of West Bank/Gaza Strip,

reparations for, 7, 169, 170–71, 190,

90; restored contact with Israeli Arabs,

227–28, 256, 278, 279, 283–85; effect

36–37, 50, 83, 85; riots over dismissal

of October 2000 riots on repatriation

of mayors in 1982, 94; role in October

of, 214–15, 227–28; expropriation

2000 riot, 213–14; sanctions against

of land of, 16–19; Israeli narrative of

worker in Israel, 179; Sharon’s policy

1948 war and, 8; Israel’s rejection of

toward, 233–34; terrorist attacks in

right to return, 6; in Lebanon, 90;

Israel, 94, 151, 196; view of Egyptian-

massacre of in Lebanon, 93, 94, 96;

Israeli agreement, 87. See also Hamas;

Nakba and, xiv, 17–18; number of, 4;

Hizballah; Palestinian Authority;

PLO’s view of Israeli Arabs as separate

Palestinian Liberation Organization

from, 36; refuge in Lebanon, 90;

(PLO)

repatriation prevented, 21; return of

Palestinian state, 37, 233, 236, 280

as threat to Jews, 4, 116, 119; Sabra/

Palestinian territories. See Gaza Strip; West

Shatilla massacre, 93, 94, 96, 99, 104; UN resolution 194’s recommendation

Bank Palestinian unity government, 272

Index

|

391

Palestinization of Israeli Arabs: affi li-

peace process: Annapolis Peace Confer-

ation with PLO, xxv, xxviii, 36,

ence, 273, 282; collapse of under

37, 145, 148; assault on West Bank

Barak, 227, 230; effect on Israeli

mayors and, 84, 87; Camp of Return

Arab political behavior, 169; effect

and, 252–53; competition between

on Jewish-Arab relations, 171, 173;

Arab nationalist groups and, 84–85;

Egypt-Israel peace agreement, xxvi, 72,

Congress of Arab Masses and, 87, 92;

85, 87, 91; Hamas terrorism and, 176;

discriminatory policies in Israel and,

on internal Jewish-Arab relations, 171,

141; effect on Jewish-Arab relations,

173; as issue in Arab-Israeli confl ict,

36–37; effect on Palestinian-Israeli

xvi; Jordan-Israel peace accords, 150;

relations, xviii–xix; factors influenc-

Law of Rule and Jurisdiction Order

ing, 141; failure of peace process and,

passage, 325n. 71; Madrid Peace

xviii; goals of Israeli Arabs and, 291;

Conference (1991), 127, 128, 133–35,

Goodman’s attack on al-Aqsa and, 99;

319n. 11; Netanyahu government’s

intifadas and, xviii, xxvii, 120–22,

retreat from, 174, 196, 197; Oslo

140–41, 213, 215, 219, 293, 295;

Accords, xviii, 4, 111, 112, 128, 134,

Jewish nature of Israel and (See Jew-

153–55, 174, 177–78, 196, 319n. 9;

ish nature of Israel); Jewish paranoia

PLO-Israel peace accords, 150; Rabin

causing, 37–38; Jewish response to,

government and, 165; removal of

xviii, 105, 125, 215, 266–67, 295;

Likud government and, 169; right-

Land Day riots and, 37; legislation

wing parties objections to, 172; treaty

in response to intifada and, 242–44;

between Egypt and Israel, xxvi

Misgav municipal jurisdiction and,

Pedatzur, Reuven, 264

98–99; rapprochement with PLO,

Peled, Matityahu, 109

222; as response to government poli-

Peled, Nathan, 54

cies concerning territories, 251–52;

Penal Law amendment 66, 243–44

restored contact with Palestinians in

Peres, Shimon: 1996 election, 176; admis-

territories, 36–37, 50, 83, 85; result-

sion of Arabs to diplomatic corps, 164;

ing view of Israeli-Egyptian peace

agreement with Hussein, 110–11, 124;

agreement, 85–86; rise of competing

attempt to facilitate peace negotiations,

factions among, 80–84; Sabra/Shatilla

131; crisis of 1990 and, 145–46; elec-

massacre and, 99–100; strengthening

tions in West Bank, 39–40; as minister

of during Begin’s tenure, 87. See also

of fi nance, 130; policy toward Israeli

radicalization of Israeli Arabs

Arabs/Palestinians, 124; as prime

Palmon, Yehoshua, 41

minister, 105, 108, 113, 175; replaces

pan-Arabism, 35

as leader of Labor party, 231; view of

Partition Plan (1947), 22

Arab radicalization/Israeli handing of,

Patriotism Survey (2006), 276

80; visit to Morocco, 110

Peace Day, 121

Peres government, 175–76, 207

Peace Now movement, 71, 91, 154

perestroika, 107

392

|

Index

Peretz, Amir, 231

and the Policy of the Iron Fist Will Not

personal status tribunals, 25

Oppress Them, The” (Toledano), 48

Pines, Offi r, 12

Popper, Ami, 132, 141

Planning and Housing Law, 279

Porath, Chanan, 71

PLO. See Palestinian Liberation Organiza-

prime minister’s advisor on Arab affairs,

tion (PLO) PLO-Israel peace accords, 150, 153 police: actions of Palestinian police in riots, 178; al-Aqsa massacre, 133, 142;

52–53, 156–57. See also Sharon, Moshe; Toledano, Shmuel prisoner exchange. See also Jibril Deal (1985)

army security power transferred to, 34;

prisoner exchange, 123, 179, 318n. 41

clashes during Barak’s tenure, 197–98;

Progressive List for Peace (PLP): 1992

clashes during Land Day Commemora-

election, 168; 1996 election, 177;

tions, 99; clashes during Netanyahu’s

challenge to Hadash, 109; defection

tenure, 196–97; clashes with Israeli

of Jewish Alternativa movement, 144;

Arab leaders, 244; closure of Camp

disqualification of, 109; in election

of Return, 252–53; discriminatory

of 1988, 130, 131; formation of, 81;

treatment of protests, 199–201, 213,

Knesset block of, 125; shift of Arab

221; fi rst intifada and, 121–22, 146; on

vote to, 148; shift of Labor votes to,

interministerial council, 62; investiga-

109

tion of Arab poets/writers, 245; inves-

Progressive Movement for Peace, 92

tigation of Israeli Arab leaders, 225,

Progressive Movement Nazareth, 102. See

242; March 1976 general strike and, 57; October 2000 riots and, 199–200,

Progressive List for Peace (PLP) psychological processes: confl icting narra-

213–14; Or Commission’s recommen-

tives, 1–11; demographic policies, xxiii,

dations for, 219, 250, 254; response

20–22; establishment of Jewish demo-

to al-Aqsa intifada, 200; response to

cratic state, 11–16; establishment of

al-Ruha protesters, 184–85; response to

Jewish symbolic/cultural space, 22–26;

demonstrations over opening of tunnel

Israeli land policy, xxiii, 16–20; precipi-

to Western Wall, 178; response to Jew-

tating Land Day riot, 65; security and

ish attacks on Arabs, 200–201; response

national duties as source of confl ict,

to Land Day riots, 60; response to mass demonstrations, 213; response to October 2000 riots, 199, 213–14; role in

27–31; as sources of disputes, 1 Public Advisory Council of Demography, 235, 238

clashes over land/buildings, 196, 197,

Public Works Department, 328n. 51

209–10, 211; role in restricting Arab

purchase taxes, 22, 311n. 45

MKs, 244; Sabra/Shatilla massacre demonstrations and, 99–100; al-Sahali affair, 183–84; security powers of, 34 “Policy of a Soft Hand toward Israeli Arabs Will Not Calm Them Down,

Qa‘adan, Adel, 192–93 Qa‘adan affair, 192–93, 260 al-Qa‘ida, xxvi, 177, 231, 232

Index

|

393

Qara, Ayub, 262

for local municipalities, 158–59, 160;

al-Qawasme, Fahd, 72

de-escalation of tensions during, 149,

Qaysi, Ashraf, 257

294, 295; deportation of Hamas activ-

Qurei, Ahmad, 233

ists and, 152–53; election of, 150–52; equalization of child allowances, 162; evaluation of, 165, 166–67t, 167–68,

Ra‘am party, 203, 204

322n. 15; improvement of Arab

Raam-Taal party, 269

municipalities’ infrastructure, 159–61;

Rabin, Yitzhak: affi rmative action

inclusion of Arab villages in Frontline

policies, 164, 165; approval of Oslo

Zone, 163–64; as incubation/crystal-

Accords and, 134; assassination of,

lization of Arab resistance to Jewish

153, 154, 171; blocking block agree-

nature of state, 169; Jewish political

ment, 155–65, 166–67t, 167–68; as

behavior during, 172–73; land policies,

candidate for Labor in 1992, 151–52;

161–62, 164–65; Netanyahu’s reversal

contribution to violence, 210; deporta-

of policies of, 174; no-confidence vote,

tion of Hamas activists, 321n. 66;

169–70; Palestinian dimension of,

end of Operation Accountability, 153;

152–55; peace accords signed by, 150;

formation of committee to study illegal

policy toward Israeli Arabs, 153, 154,

housing, 78; Hadash’s verbal attacks

155–58, 173, 197; political setting of,

on, 109; Koenig Memorandum and,

150–52; recognition of Arab villages,

46, 49; Kol’s recommendations and, 61–62; as minister of defense, 130;

162–63; rise to power, 150–52 radicalization of Israeli Arabs: 2006

no-confidence vote against, 169–70;

Patriotism Survey and, 276; bills

no confidence vote against, 215; Oslo

submitted by Arab MKs, 223–24;

Accords and, 128; policies toward

boycott of elections, 224; call for

Israeli Arabs, 173; policy toward inti-

change in defi nition of Israel as Jewish,

fada, 129; resignation of, 63; response

28; competition among nationalist

to intifada, 112, 125; return of Zone

groups and, 81–84, 88, 92, 102–3,

9 to original owners, 116; solution to

170, 182–83, 219; demolition of Arab

Ikrit/ Bir‘em problem, 164–65; sup-

houses and, 183–84, 196–97, 209–10;

port of Galilee Development Plan, 55;

development of Arab organizations

surrender to delegitimization cam-

and, 81–82, 83, 96, 100–101, 218,

paign, 172

291, 293; disadvantage to Labor party,

Rabin government: admission of Arabs

80; due to lack of civil rights, 58–59,

to diplomatic corps/civil service, 164;

211–12, 213, 214, 217, 220, 289; due

affi rmative action policies, xx, 159,

to lack of government response to

164, 168, 173, 208, 290, 293, 295,

grievances, 197; education of Israeli

298; Arab political behavior under,

Arabs and, 7–10, 219, 274–75, 282;

169–71; blocking block agreement,

effect on internal Jewish-Arab rela-

155–65, 166–67t, 167–68; budgets

tions, 170–71, 181–95, 236–37, 293;

394

|

Index

radicalization of Israeli Arabs (cont.)

movement, 83–84; self-empowerment

escalative peaks of, 293; exclusion

and, 101–3, 293; solidarity with Hiz-

from PLO negotiations, 36–37, 197;

ballah, 275–76; as threat to security

failure of peace process and, 197, 213;

of Israel, 28–29; Toledano on, 48;

fi rst intifada’s effect on, 120–22, 125,

withdrawal of political participation,

140–46; Future Vision manifestos,

275; Zayyad and, 82; al-Zu‘bi’s recom-

277–80; involvement in terrorist

mendations concerning, 80. See also

attacks, 224–25; Jewish response to,

Palestinization of Israeli Arabs

xviii, 105, 125, 215, 218–19, 295; lack

radicalization of segment of Jewish popula-

of implementation of affi rmative action

tion: assault on West Bank mayors,

programs and, 219; lack of recogni-

84, 87; effect on Palestinian-Israeli

tion of Arab organizations and, 220;

relations, xix; following Land Day

leaders’ encouragement of, 214, 218;

riots, 88; Goodman’s attack on Temple

over Jewish radicals’ attacks, 94; over

Mount, 94, 99; Messianism, 86; in

religious issues, 196–97; Palestin-

response to Arab radicalization, 197;

ian struggle’s influence on, 98–100,

in response to October 2000 riots,

120–22, 125, 197, 199–200, 210–25,

285–87, 288

219, 233, 291, 294–95; Palestinians’

Rahat, 136

view of, 214–15; peak periods of, 293;

al-Rahman, Hashim ‘Abd, 83

police behavior and, 199–200, 213–14,

Rakah party: as Arab political party,

221, 225, 242, 245; policy of collective

39; counterbalancing force to, 45;

representation for Arab minority and,

establishment of DFPE, 70; Koenig’s

96; radical Islamic trends, 219, 292;

presentation of, 46; as only party for

reflected in public opinion surveys, 85,

Arabs, 43; response to Koenig Memo-

103, 122, 255–57, 282–83; as response to demolition of houses, 87, 183–84, 196–97, 209–10, 292; in response to

randum on, 49. See also Hadash party Ramadan War. See Yom Kippur War (1973)

discriminatory policies, 58–60, 97,

Ramia, 138

125–26, 196, 213, 217, 220, 274,

Ramla, 183, 328n. 53

294–95; in response to government

Raphi party, 69

intervention in city politics, 84, 87, 98;

Rapp, Helena, 151

as response to Israeli actions in Leba-

Ravitz, Avraham, 191

non, 96–97, 99–100; as response to

Reagan, Ronald, 74, 90, 106

Kahane phenomenon, 125; as response

refugees. See internal refugees; Palestinian

to land/settlement policies, 59–60, 86,

refugees

87, 95–96, 184–85, 196–97, 210–13,

refugee villages, 317n. 22

219, 220, 274, 292; as response to

Rejection Front, 81

voluntary civilian service, 276, 282;

Rekhess, Elie, 60, 92, 120–21, 165,

as result of limitations on options for redress, 97, 218; rise of Islamic

181–82, 255 religious holidays, 25

Index

|

395

religious issues. See Muslim-Jewish confl ict

2000, 209–10, 211; over Sabra/Sha-

religious law, 25

tilla massacres, 94, 99–100, 104; Peace

religious parties: 1988 election, 130; 1992

Day, 121–22; al-Sahali affair, 180,

election, 152; coalition with Labor

183–84; of September 1996, 178; Tar-

party in 1999, 203; coalition with

pat riots, 6; on West Bank campuses,

Likud party, 131; in Sharon coalition,

110; in West Bank in 1976, 40. See also

230; withdrawal from Barak coalition,

al-Aqsa intifada; intifada (1987); Land

230 reward and punishment policy. See stickand-carrot policy Rhodes ceasefi re agreement (1949), 6, 22, 29, 30

Day riots (1976) Rivlin, Reuven, 243 road map for peace, 233 Rothem, David, 286 Rouhana, Nadim, 143, 144, 253–54

Riad summit (March 2007), xix

Rozenfeld, Henry, 18

right of ownership, xxiv–xxv

Rubinstein, Amnon, 62, 75, 159, 258

Right of Return, 83

Rubinstein, Elyakim, 244

right-wing parties: 1992 election, 152;

al-Ruha affair, 180, 184, 185m, 197, 206

2009 election, 269; amendment to

Russia, 233

disqualify candidates/parties, 245; bills initiated during al-Aqsa intifada, 259–66; counterattack following October 2000 riots, 287; delegitimization

Sabra refugee camp massacre, 93, 94, 96, 99, 104

of Israeli Arabs, 147, 238; Law of Rule

al-Sadat, Muhammad Anwar, 72

and Jurisdiction Order passage, 325n.

Sadeq, Walid, 164

71; policy toward Palestinians, 106; in

Sa‘di, Ahmad, 50

Sharon coalition, 230, 231; undermin-

Safuri, Ra’adi, 275

ing of Labor party, 172; withdrawal

Safuriya, 1–5

from Barak coalition, 230. See also

Safuriya Association, 4

Likud party

al-Sahali affair, 180, 183–84, 196–97

riots: in Acre on Yom Kippur, 287; al-

Sakhnin affair, 210–11

Ruha affair, 180, 184–86; al-Aqsa

Salah, Ra’id, 83, 184, 185

intifada and, 199–200; under Ehud

al-Sani‘, Talab, 244, 257–58

Barak government, 197–98; express-

San Remo agreement, 5

ing solidarity with Palestinians rioters,

Sarrid, Yossi, 108, 161

183; intifada (1987), 111–12; during

Saudi Arabia: Arab League Peace Initia-

Mapai/Labor party’s rule, 34; on

tive, xix, xxvi; bombing of U.S. troop

March 21, 1990, 141; in October 2000,

housing in, 177; relations with PLO/

xxviii, 199, 205, 213–21; over demoli-

Palestinians following Gulf War, 128;

tion of houses, 209–10; over dismissal

relations with U.S./Israel, xxv, 127;

of West Bank mayors in 1982, 94, 98–99, 102, 104; over land issues in

terrorist attacks in, 232 Sawt al-Haqq wal-Hurriyya, 143, 244–45

396

|

Index

al-Sawt Association, 316n. 38

Liberation Organization (PLO); Six

Schneider, Ana, 259

Day War (1967); terrorist attacks; al-

Schocken, Amos, 265

Aqsa intifada; Yom Kippur War (1973)

Security Cabinet, 114

self-rule for Arab population, 144

security issues: Arab call for change of

Session of 9 May 1976, 312n. 61

defi nition of state, 12, 28–29, 170,

Shak‘a, Bassam, 72, 74, 94

182, 186–89, 197, 204, 218, 236, 266,

Shakour, Elias, 159

291; Arab challenge to legitimacy of

Shamir, Michal, 129

state, xviii–xix, 277; Arab demand for

Shamir, Moshe, 315n. 21

restitution/repatriation of refugees, 7,

Shamir, Shimon, 216

169, 170–71, 175, 227–28, 278, 279,

Shamir, Yitzhak: on Arab vote in Knes-

284; Arab leaders’ visits to enemies,

set, 107; as Begin’s replacement, 93;

xi, 132, 152, 242, 243, 275–76, 286,

change in policy toward Israeli Arabs,

319n. 9; Arabs in Israel perceived as,

137; coalition with Labor party (1988),

xxi, 27–30, 34, 37–38, 50, 51–52, 86,

130; election of 1992, 152; intifada

174, 236, 238, 254, 261–65, 286, 296;

during tenure of, 127; opposition to

challenges to Likud administration, 91;

Madrid Peace Conference, 128, 150;

at creation of Israel, xxi; democracy in

policy on Palestinian issue/intifada,

Israel and, 14; demographic policies

131; policy toward Israeli Arabs/Pal-

and, 20–22, 235–41; impact of Octo-

estinians, 124, 148; as prime minister,

ber 2000 riots, 215; increase in Jewish

105, 108, 125, 130, 131–32; rejec-

population and, 51; Israeli Arabs’

tion of peace agreement with Jordan,

identification with Palestinian struggle

111, 124; request for release of Jewish

(See Palestinization of Israeli Arabs); Israeli Arabs’ solidarity with Hamas,

Underground prisoners, 123 Shamir government: allocation of funds

xviii, 283; Israeli Arabs’ solidarity

to religious institutions, 151; Arab

with Hizballah, xi, xxiv, 242–43, 285;

political behavior during, 140–46;

Israeli Arabs’ solidarity with Hussein,

budgetary policies, 136–37; change in

xxiv, 127, 144, 296; of Jewish state in

villages’ status, 136; changes in educa-

Israel, 15–16; municipal councils in

tion, 136; internal Jewish-Arab rela-

Arab sectors as, 46–47; radicalization

tions and, 295; intifada during tenure

of Arab minority (See radicalization of

of, 127; Jewish political behavior dur-

Israeli Arabs); as source of dispute, 32;

ing, 146–48; land/settlement policies

transfer of power to police/GSS, 34;

of, 138–39, 151; master plans prepared

in West Bank/Gaza Strip, 34. See also

by, 135; Olmert’s advise, 139; opposi-

Arab-Israeli confl ict; General Security

tion to Madrid Peace Conference, 150;

Service (GSS); general strikes; Hamas;

Palestinian dimension of, 132–35;

Hizballah; intifada (1987); Land

policy on Palestinian issue/intifada,

Day riots (1976); mass demonstra-

131; policy toward Israeli Arabs/Pales-

tions; October 2000 riots; Palestinian

tinians, 124, 148; political setting of,

Index

|

397

129–32; realization of discriminatory

endorsement of Drukman law, 305n.

policies, 135; vote of no confidence

29; failure to implement Or Commis-

against, 215

sion recommendations, 249–51; fight

Shammas, Anton, xx–xxi

against al-Aqsa intifada, 233; Jewish

Sharabi, Hisham, 101

political behavior during, 257–59;

shari‘a court system, 50

Knesset bills initiated during, 259–66;

Sharon, Ariel: 2001 election, 224, 230;

land/settlement policies of, 247–49;

accusation against Israeli Arabs, 257;

measures dealing with Arab MKs’

Arab campaign against in 2003, 251;

extremism during, 241–46, 253–54;

call for election in 2003, 230; decision

military operation in Gaza in 2004,

concerning Ikrit/Bir‘em repatriations,

234; Palestinian issue/war on terror,

119; as defense minister, 91; delay of

231–35; proposed exchange of ter-

Four Billion Plan, 207; delegitimiza-

ritories, 236; role in confl ict escalation,

tion of Israeli Arabs, 147; deployment

294

of IDF to Lebanon, 93; disengage-

Shas party, 152, 203, 268, 272

ment from Gaza, 234, 268; failure to

Shatil, 316n. 38

implement Or Commission recom-

Shatilla refugee camp massacre, 93, 94, 96,

mendations, 249–51, 288; formation

99, 104

of Kadima party, 231, 268; as head

Shavit, Ari, 263

of Shlomzion party, 70; initiative for

Shem-Tov, Victor, 54

observation points, 76; opposition to

Sheves, Shimon, 156, 158

Arab political participation, 172; oppo-

Shifter Report, 145

sition to unity government, 107–8;

Shinuy party, 230

perception of Israeli Arabs as internal

Shitrit, Meir, 223, 244

threat, 262; policy toward Arabs in

Shlomzion party, 70

civil service, 247; policy toward Pales-

Shmuelevitz, Matityahu, 96

tinian issue, 233–34; as prime minister,

Shouman, ‘Abd al-Majid, 11, 101

229; responses to al-Aqsa intifada,

Shteinitz, Yuval, 241

267; strokes, 234, 268; visit to Temple

Shtruzman, Uri, 263

Mount, 199, 205, 213

Shukri, Hasan, 23

Sharon, Moshe, 74–75

Shukri, Suhayl, 23

Sharon government: Arab political

siege mentality, xix

behavior during, 251–57; Arabs in

Sikes-Picot agreement, 6

civil service during, 247; blockage of

Sikkuy, xxx, 210, 240

Ikrit/Bir‘em repatriation, 324n. 48;

al-Sinara, xxx, 101

budgetary policies, 246–47; dealing

Six Day War (1967): consequences of,

with extreme positions of Arab MKs,

36–37, 66; effect on Jewish-Arab

241–46; delay of Four Billion Plan,

relations, 34; effect on policies toward

207; demographic policies, 235–41;

Israeli Arabs, 52; factors precipitating,

disengagement from Gaza, 234, 268;

35; occupation of West Bank/Gaza

398

|

Index

Six Day War (1967) (cont.)

stinking exercise, 131

strip following, xvii–xix, 30; as proof

strikes, 206. See also general strikes

of Arab desire to destroy Israel, 6;

Subtenants (Benziman/Mansour), 29–30

strengthening of Israeli right, 69

Sulayman, Husayn, 158

“Sixth of June Convention, The,” 84–85, 88 Smooha, Sammy: argument concerning internal confl ict in Israel, 295–96; Coexistence Index (2006), 283, 286–87; on gap between leadership/

superpowers. See European Union (EU); United Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR); United States Supreme Committee for Land Expropriation, 54

population, 283; Index of Arab-Jewish

Supreme Coordination Committee, 82–83

Relations project, 255–56; survey by,

Supreme Court: ability to annul Knes-

85, 87, 103, 122, 146, 282

set legislation, 132; Arab advocacy

Sneh, Ephraim, 226, 236

through, 191, 281, 291, 328n. 51,

Soffer, Arnon, 76, 117–18, 237, 241, 265

328n. 53, 328n. 56; case against child

South Lebanese Army, 177

allowances bill, 97; cases concerning

Soviet Jews: change in Jewish demography

Arabic names of streets, 328n. 51;

due to, 131; construction projects trig-

decision on National Priorities Zones

gered by, 136; economic distress due

list, 274; inclusion of Arab villages in

to, 151; influx of, 112; land/settlement

Frontline Zone and, 163; Katzir case,

issues created by, 138; Oslo negotia-

192–93; as only venue for minority

tions and, 112; U.S. fi nancial support

grievances, 297; prevention of expan-

for absorption of, 128

sion of discrimination, 196; ruling

Soviet Union. See United Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) special ministerial committee, 62–63, 312n. 61, 312n. 64

of Arabic street signs, 192, 328n. 51; ruling on Arab participation in public agencies, 192; ruling on destruction of Bedouin crops, 249; ruling on

Split Identity (Amara/Kabaha), 140

disqualification of MK candidates, 245,

Sprinzak, Ehud, 305n. 28

253, 269; ruling on law preventing

State Controller Report (1992), 136

Arabs from bidding on JNF land, 275;

state symbols, 26

ruling on PLP, 109; ruling on Qa‘adan

Steinmetz Centre survey, 340n. 113

case, 260, 275; rulings on budgetary

Stendel, Ori, 92

discrimination cases, 192, 246–47; rul-

stick-and-carrot policies: demographic/

ings on Ikrit/Bir‘em repatriation, 115,

land policies, 51–53; effectiveness of, 65; following military rule, 51–52;

119, 165, 324n. 48 Supreme Follow-up Committee for Arab

Koenig Memorandum and, 45–50;

Citizens: boycott of independence cel-

Land Day riots and, 53–64; under

ebration, 212–13; boycott of products

Likud government, 75; selective social/

from Jewish settlements, 221; calls for

economic integration, 50; Toledano’s

general strikes, 121, 122, 142, 183–84;

proposal of, 42

commemoration of fi ftieth anniversary

Index

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399

of Nakba, 189; commemoration of

Taliban, 231

Land Day in 2005, 252; contribu-

Tamir, Avraham, 113

tion to violence, 257; convention in

Tamir, Yael, 265

Nazareth in 1995, 171; on cuts in

Tarabey, Jamal, 57–58, 64

child allowances, 240; decisions based

Tarif, Salih, 208–9

on consensus vote, xxviii; demand

Tarpat riots, 6

for rejection of Palestinian recogni-

Tartman, Esterina, 285–86

tion of Israel, 282; on destruction of

Tawil, Ibrahim, 72

Bedouin crops, 248–49; establishment

Tel Aviv, 200–201, 251

of, 96, 101, 104; expansion of, 120;

Temple Mount (Jewish): al-Aqsa intifada,

Israeli concerns about during intifada,

xxvii, xxviii, 199–200, 205, 213; al-

142–43; Jewish call for outlawing of,

Aqsa massacre, 132–33, 142; as source

285; Khalayla’s affi liation with, 102;

of Jewish cohesiveness, 5

list of demands presented to Netan-

Temple Mount Faithful (Jewish), 132–33

yahu, 181, 326n. 16; Olmert and, 139;

territorial exchange, 340n. 113

Or Commission on, 220–21; protest

terrorist attacks: amendment to disqualify

against Sabra/Shatilla massacres, 96;

candidates/parties identifying with,

reasons for radical behavior of, 290;

245; during al-Aqsa intifada, 257,

submission of fi le to Supreme Court on

262; assassination of Rabin, 153,

National Priorities Zones, 274

154; during fi rst intifada, 141, 151,

Supreme Follow-up Committee for the Nakba and the Sumud, 189

224–25, 227, 251, 257, 262; following assassination of Rabin, 175; by Hamas,

Supreme Muslim Council, xxii, 99

147, 153, 173, 176, 179; by Hizbal-

Suwayd, Hanna, 4

lah, xi, 175, 270; at Ibrahimi Mosque

Swisa, Eliyahu, 191

in Hebron, 169; increase in globally,

Syria: anti-Western regime in, xxv; deterio-

231–32; Islamic attacks against Ameri-

rating relations with Israel, 270; Golan

can/European targets, 177; Jewish

Heights Law and, 93; involvement in

retaliation for, 230, 231; by Jews, 94,

Arab-Israeli confl ict, xvi; Israeli Arab

99, 104, 132, 141, 142, 259; during

MKs’ trips to, xi, 242, 275; Israeli

Netanyahu’s administration, 177; by

destruction of nuclear facility, 270; loss

Palestinian organizations/Palestinians,

of Soviet support, 131; peace talks with

94, 110, 132, 230, 252, 268; punish-

Israel, 152, 204

ments for aiding in, 257; by al-Qa‘ida in U.S., 231; resumption of following collapse of road map to peace, 233;

Ta‘al party (AMC), 276 Taha, Amin, 4 Taha, Muhammad ‘Ali, 138, 245

in Tel Aviv on military targets, 244; against yeshiva in Hebron, 73 Tibi, Ahmad: 1996 election and, 176;

Tal, Avraham, 236

1999 election, 203; assistance in peace

Tal, Nachman, 135

talk preparations, 132; bill for equal

400

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Index

Tibi, Ahmad (cont.) active civil partnership, 222; disqualifi-

Umm Jihad, 143 United Nations (UN): 1947 Partition

cation of, 245, 253; effect of radicalism

Plan, 5, 9, 170; Arab appeal on behalf

of, 236–37, 257–58, 285; as lobbyist

of Syria, 252; Declaration of Rights

for PA, 294; at Madrid Conference,

of Indigenous Peoples, 284; Interna-

319n. 11; meeting with Arafat, 243;

tional Convention of Civil and Political

on Palestinian attacks against IDF,

Rights of Minority Peoples, 12; Israeli

223–24; relationship with PLO, 145;

Arab grievances expressed to, 145, 195,

viewed as threat to Israel, 262

219–20, 221, 253; Israel’s dependence

Toledano, Shmuel: election to Knesset,

on in regard to Iran, 270; Resolution

74; on Israeli Arabs’ confidence, 39;

181, 22; Resolution 1994, 164; resolu-

Koenig Memorandum and, 46, 48–49;

tion of 1975, 23; road map for peace in

Kol’s recommendations and, 61; letter to prime minister and, 310n. 26; nomination of municipal councils, 45; opposition to Galilee Development Plan, 54–55; policy toward Israeli Arabs, 41, 42–61, 62; political struggle with Linn, 40 Touma, Emil, 39, 58–59

Israel, 233 United Nations Commission on Human Rights, 253 United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, 240 United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, 59 United Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR):

trade strike, 60

Carter’s peace initiatives and, 72;

training Zone 107 (al-Ruha), 180,

disintegration of, 112, 127, 128; effect

184–86, 185m, 197

of dissolution on Israel, 131; Gor-

training Zone 9, 55–57, 66, 95, 116, 124

bachev’s policies for, 106–7; involve-

Triangle: call for autonomy of Arabs in,

ment in Middle East, xxv–xxvi, 38,

144; as exchange area for West Bank

74; popularity with Israeli Arabs, 92;

settlements, 236, 237, 259, 261, 340n.

support of Arab strategies, 106; U.S.-

113; inclusion in ceasefi re of 1949, 22;

Soviet strategic partnership, 128; war

Jewish settlements in, 289; riots in, 142; unrecognized Arab villages in, 162–63

in Afghanistan, 90, 92, 107 United States: Annapolis Peace Conference and, 272, 273, 282; assistance in Israeli

Tubi, Tawfiq, 39

peace talks, 204; Camp David II sum-

Tunisia, 110, 112

mit, 204–5; change in policy toward

two-state solution, 37, 233–34, 236, 278

Middle East, 71; Cold War strategies in

Tzemach, Mina, 86

Middle East, xxvi; dialogue with PLO,

Tzomet party, 131, 147, 152

131; economic meltdown of 2008, 270; election of Clinton, 152; Gulf War (1990-91), 127, 152; inclusion of Israel

Umm al-Fahm, 82, 83, 135, 261

in report on human rights, 193–94;

Umm al-Sahali, 180, 183–84, 196–97

influence on Why River accord, 196;

Index

|

401

interest in Israeli Arabs’ plight, 145;

130; Israeli political behavior dur-

invasion of Iraq, xxvi, 231–32, 270;

ing, 140–46; ousting of Labor, 131;

involvement in Israeli peace negotia-

peace talks with Jordanian-Palestinian

tions with Jordanian-Palestinians, 131;

delegation, 131; policy on Palestinian

involvement in Jordan-PLO nego-

issue/intifada, 131

tiations, 107; involvement in Middle

universities, 211–12

East, xxv, 38, 74, 127; Iranian nuclear

Upper Nazareth, 46, 53, 196

project and, 270; Israel as ally of,

Usrat al-Jihad, 84

xxv; Madrid Peace Conference, 128;

U.S.-Soviet strategic partnership (1991),

Obama’s policy toward Israel, 271; Oslo Accords and, 177; policy toward Hamas/Fatah, 272; Reagan’s meeting

128 USSR. See United Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR)

with Gorbachev, 106; relations with Jordan, xxv, 314n. 1; road map for peace in Israel, 233; support of Israel,

Vilnai, Matan, 206

90, 106; terrorist attacks against, 177,

voluntary civilian service, 276, 282–83

231; view of Golan Heights Law, 93; war against Iraq, 231–32 unity government (fi rst): Arab politi-

Wadi ‘Ara. See Triangle

cal behavior under, 120–22; Arens’s

Wahba, Magali, 247

budgetary policies, 118; curtailment

war between Israel/Hizballah (2006), xi-

of infl ation, 109; de-escalation of

xii, xxvi, 269–71, 275–76, 285

tensions during, 294; demolition of

War of Attrition (1969-1971), 37

houses under, 116–17; Jewish political

War of Independence (1948): Arab view

behavior during, 122–24; Markovitz

of, 29, 278; boycott of celebration of,

committee (second), 116–17; Opera-

212–13; effect on Arab population,

tion Solomon, 110; Palestinian dimen-

xxii, 1–2; effect on attitudes toward

sion, 110–12; policy toward Israeli

Israeli Arabs, 28, 29; fi ftieth anniver-

Arabs, 113–19, 124; policy toward

sary celebration, 189; Ibn Khaldun

PLO, 110; political-security policies,

Center narrative of, 9; Jamal’s narrative

114; political setting of, 106–10;

of, 9; Ministry of Education narrative

prime ministers of, 105; repatriation

of, 8; security/demographic challenges

of Ikrit/Bir‘em villagers, 115–16;

propelling, xxi; strategy of, 20. See also

return of Zone 9 to original owners,

Nakba of 1948

116; withdrawal of IDF from central

wars, xviii. See also specific war by name

Lebanon, 109

Watad, Muhammad, 95, 97–98, 102, 108,

unity government (second): change in

110

policy toward Israeli Arabs, 134–39,

water resources, 35

148; confl icting approaches to peace

al-Wazir, Intisar, 143

negotiations, 131; formation of,

al-Wazir, Khalil, 112, 143

402

|

Index

Weitzman, Ezer: appeasement toward

issues in, 34; Shamir’s discussions with

Arabs, 114, 124, 294, 297–98; Arab

leaders in, 111; Sharon’s plan to sepa-

political behavior during tenure of,

rate Jewish settlements from Arab in,

120; demolition of housing and,

234; tension over Israeli rule/Jewish

116–17, 184; election of 1977, 70; as

settlements in, 39–40; violent clashes

minister of Arab affairs, 113; relation-

in, 87

ship with Tibi, 132; repatriation of

Why Memorandum (1998), 178

Ikrit/Bir‘em villagers and, 115–16;

Why River accord, 196

resignation of, 71; return of Zone 9 to

Winograd Commission of Inquiry, 268, 271

original owners, 116

World Jewish Agency, 76

Welfare Association, 11, 101

World Zionist Organization, 223

West Bank: 1976 elections, 72; al-Aqsa intifada in (See al-Aqsa intifada); Arab view of Jewish settlements in, 313n.

Ya‘ar, Efraim, 181–82

22; assault on Palestinian mayors in,

Yadin, Yigal, 69

84–85; Begin-Sadat agreement and,

Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 25

72; boycott of products from Jewish

Yaffa Center, 254–55, 283

settlements in, 221; closure of universi-

Yafi‘a, 161

ties in, 110; consequences of occupa-

Yasin, Badi, 213

tion of, 106; considered in exchange of

Yassin, Ahmad, 179

territories, 236; Dash party and, 69;

Yehoshua, Avraham B., xx–xxi

deportation of Hamas activists from,

Yiftachel, Oren, xii, xxi, 14, 76

152–53, 321n. 66; dismissal of mayors,

Yihya, ‘Ali, 164

94, 98–99, 102, 104; expropriation of

Yihya, Rafiq Hajj, 137

land in, 73; Gush Emunim settlement

Yirenboim, Rabbi, 265

movement in, 71, 73, 75; influence on

Yokobson, Alexander, 12

Jewish-Arab relations, xviii, 65–66;

Yom Kippur War (1973), 6, 38, 66, 69

intifada (1987), 111–12, 131; Israel’s

Young Muslims, 84

occupation of, xvii, 39; Jewish settlement in, xviii–xix, 73, 86, 91, 92, 237; Jordanian Option, 91, 129; Likud

Zada, Eden Nathan, 259

policies toward, 90; mass violence

Zahalqa, Jamal, 194, 202, 282

over tunnel opening, 178; Operation

Zamir, Yitzhak, 12, 220

Defense Shield in, 127, 252; Oslo

Zayd, Giora, 2

Accords provisions concerning, 177,

Zayd, Qasem, 100

178; Palestinian self-rule in, 91; pro-

Zaydan, Muhammad, 206, 211, 332n. 47

posed withdrawal from, 270; protest

Zayyad, Tawfiq: challenge to extremist

in 1975 over control of, 59; restored

groups, 82; declaration of oneness

contact with Israeli Arabs, 36–37, 50,

of Palestinians, 99; on demolition of

83, 85; riots in, 40, 68, 94; security

Arab houses, 82; on representation of

Index

|

403

Israel Arabs at Madrid, 133; response

vs., 256; Jewish symbolic/cultural space

to Goodman’s attack, 94; response to

and, 26; narrative of right to Palestine,

refugee camp massacres, 100; rise as

5–6; preservation of Jewish unity,

leader of Arabs, 39; self-empowerment

xxii–xxiii; response to UNCERD,

of, 68; visit to Gaza following deporta-

241; struggle for land in Palestine, 16;

tions, 152; writing of poem praising

taught in schools, 7–8; Umm al-Fahm

Egyptian army, 38 Zeedani, Sa‘id, 144 Zionism: activities of, xvii; Arab view of,

Convention’s view of, 83 Zionist parties, 169, 170, 202, 269, 278. See also Labor party

6–7, 278; aspiration of, xx; under Brit-

Zippori, 2

ish rule in Palestine, xvi; contradiction

zoning master plans, 135

in Jewish democracy and, 12; desig-

Zore‘a, Meir, 54

nated as racist by UN, 23; Jewish state

al-Zu‘bi, Sayf al-Din, 39, 41, 80