IT IS NOT DIFFICULT to choose the image to represent the last decade of our story. All the possibilities come from three days in October 2000. It could be the picture of police snipers shooting at a gathering of youths and throwing stones and blazing bottles at them. It could also be Muhammad Asil, aged eighteen and a member of one of the very few Arab–Jewish youth peace movements, Seeds for Peace, who was shot at close range by a police officer when sitting under a tree as he watched the demonstration and clashes in his town of Sakhnin. It could be the image of eighteen-year-old Wesam Yazbak, the nephew of the leading Palestinian historian in Israel and later president of the Israeli Oriental Society Mahmoud Yazbak, who was shot in the back while trying to calm down his comrades in the narrow alleys in Nazareth. It could be the two young women being beaten in front of the camera by the special police units for just walking along the main road between Yafat al-Nasrah and Nazareth.
The images presented to the Jewish public were different, of course. The keynote of their newspapers and radio and TV contributors was ‘back to 1948’, showing isolated Jewish settlements in the Galilee stormed by masses of people, cut off by stoning on the roads leading to their homes and a sense of insecurity unknown before. It was the age of the second Intifada, which had subsided by 2010 in the West Bank and inside Israel, but which still smoulders on in the Gaza Strip.
The second Intifada raged from October 2000. It spilled over into Israel itself, where the old frustrations of the Palestinian minority burst out in solidarity with the Palestinians killed in Jerusalem in the confrontations that followed the visit of the then opposition leader, Ariel Sharon, to Haram al-Sharif, the holiest Islamic site in Palestine and the third sacred site after Mecca and Medina. Unarmed Palestinians went out to protest against the Sharon visit as well as against the failure of the Oslo Accords and promises. Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line rejected Israeli and American accusations that the extremism of the Palestinian leadership was responsible for this failure. Despite his declining popularity, large sections of the community resented the demonization of Yasser Arafat as a warmonger for refusing to accept the Israeli diktat for peace in the Camp David Summit in the summer of 2000.
But more than anything else, Sharon's visit triggered a response from people whose hopes had been falsely raised for a moment only to be hurled to the floor as unattainable and illusionary. Thirty-three years of occupation seemed to be far from reaching an end, notwithstanding the charade of peace and negotiations. And when women, men and youngsters went into the streets to demonstrate, they were met by the fully equipped Israeli border police.
The Follow-Up Committee and leading politicians among the Palestinians in Israel proposed days of solidarity in the old way of calling a national strike and a huge public gathering. In response, a huge demonstration was staged in Umm al-Fahem in Wadi Ara in a show of solidarity with the Palestinians in the occupied territories. More spontaneous demonstrations took place in villages located near some of Israel's main highways and newly built outposts, recently erected as part of the Judaization of the Galilee. On these spots, sensitive locations for both communities, the demonstrators blocked the roads and in some cases began marching into these settlements, many of them gated communities where people had been oblivious until that moment to how Palestinian was the environment in which they had settled, on land confiscated from the locals.1
It is worth mentioning that the Judaization of the Galilee, which was the main trigger for the Day of the Land events in 1976, was an ongoing process. And therefore even when the agenda of a particular juncture such as the one in October 2000 was outrage against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the two agendas, the land confiscation and the occupation, fused into one. This connection was recognized by the Orr Commission, the official inquiry committee appointed by the government to investigate the causes for, and the events of, October 2000, of which more is said later. The report summarized what various Palestinian NGOs and human rights activists had been saying for years, in Hebrew, and what had been written in the numerous memoranda submitted since 1976 to government agencies, which it seems no one had read or paid any attention to.2
The Orr Commission singled out the Israeli policy of land confiscation as one of the main causes for the frustration among the Palestinians in Israel. The problem was the absence of any master planning that would have approved expansion and building of new houses and flats. The official excuse for not allowing any new building, or extensions to existing buildings, between 1976 and 2000, was the absence of these master plans. But of course they were not created because ideologically the Jewish state did not want to allow its Palestinian community to improve its living conditions, or at least did not care about the predicament of insufficient living space.
The committee, in a very subdued tone compared to the one used by the investigative NGOs, including the Israeli Association for Civil Rights, stated ‘that the natural rights and needs of the Arab population were not met or cared for’.3 What they did not mention was a far worse aspect of the land policy of Israel. These natural needs led to illegal building on a large scale, which was met by an aggressive policy of house and flat demolitions. As mentioned earlier, in Jaffa and Ramleh alone during that period, thousands of flats and houses were demolished and a similar policy was implemented wherever Palestinians lived in the Jewish state. In October 2000, it was the sight of a demolished flat or house and not a knowledge of the discriminatory policy that impelled demonstrators to risk a direct confrontation with the might of the Israeli forces.4
The organized demonstration in Umm al-Fahem and the sporadic protest marches began on 1 October 2000. From the Israeli police's point of view the most dangerous development was the actions by a small number of demonstrators who left the main event and stationed themselves on the Wadi Ara highway connecting the city of Hadera to the city of Afula, blocking it and stoning passing cars suspected of being driven by Jews. The police reacted with live ammunition, which was unprecedented inside Israel but quite common in the occupied territories. Whether from above, or on the ground, commanders and officers decided this was the West Bank and not Israel proper. The uprising spread elsewhere, with the same scenes of demonstrations and retaliation with rubber bullets and live ammunition. It lasted for a week and became known as the ‘Events of October’.
A second wave began on 7 October and involved violent attacks by Jewish citizens on Palestinian cars, neighbourhoods and citizens, propelled not only by the disturbances elsewhere but also by the kidnap of three soldiers by Hezbollah in the north. The battlefield between the citizens was the border zone connecting Nazareth and Upper Nazareth. By around 10 October it was all over. The balance of dead and wounded was worse than that of 1976. Thirteen Israeli Palestinian citizens had been shot dead by the police; one Jewish citizen died when a stone hit his car on the Haifa–Tel Aviv road. Hundreds were wounded and thousands were arrested.
These violent confrontations have already been the subject of scholarly research. Several reasons were suggested for their ferocity, making the same points as those mentioned by the inquiry commission appointed by the government at the end of October 2000. The first is the conventional sociological theory of uprisings, which is depicted as an accumulative process of oppression that becomes at one point unbearable – quite often due to a mundane rather a dramatic event – and then the volcanic mountain erupts. This was also used to explain the connection between a road accident in December 1987 in Gaza and the eruption of the first Intifada.5
Other explanations were more specific, such as the disappointment with Ehud Barak's government, which had been elected in 1999 with the help of the Palestinian electorate. The religious aspect of Sharon's visit of course touched a nerve in the more Islamic sections of the community, and even in those who were more secular and saw the violation as a national rather than a religious slur. The Israeli authorities and the official inquiry committee also blamed the politicians of the Palestinian community for incitement – but this does not appear as a significant cause for the consequences of the clashes with the police and indeed ‘incitement’ when used by governments on such occasions quite often could mean motivation to respond to, and representation of, the people's own feelings on a given issue – which is how most scholarly analyses of the event tend to explain it.
One of these leaders, Azmi Bishara, asserted that the main reason for the vast demonstration, overshadowing any other agenda, was solidarity with the Palestinians under occupation. He pointed out that a consensual body, the Follow-Up Committee (made up of all the Palestinian members of the Knesset, directors of NGOs and heads of municipalities), had called for the general protest and was fully heeded. In other words, it was not the actions of some radical elements that dragged the community as a whole into the demonstrations; it was a reflection of wide sections of the community and a position that united all the political parties and factions in it.6
But Bishara's main point was that it was not meant to be a violent clash, and when such days of solidarity were organized again, when Israel attacked Lebanon in 2006 and carried out its Operation ‘Defensive Shield’ on the West Bank in April 2002 and ‘Cast Lead’ in January 2009, a restrained police and army reaction produced very different results. It is I think now clear that the reaction of the police and the army, prodded by the Shabak's insistence on the need to be ruthless in such scenarios, inflated and inflamed a crisis that could have ended differently. Bishara's point has been substantiated by a recent PhD dissertation on the issue of mobilization in the October events. The high level of mobilization of the community, by a leadership that carried very little authority, lacked organizational skills and was not always respected, was remarkable and unprecedented.7
What all concerned agree upon was that somehow things got out of hand, whether the narrative is the official Israeli one of an ‘incited mob’ that had to be contained, or the more suspicious Palestinian one that the security octopus of Israel had been looking for a long time for an opportunity to intimidate and silence the assertive national minority. The first official narrative described a violent demonstration, not enough policemen on the spot, a real danger to neighbouring Jewish settlements – towards which some groups of demonstrators gravitated with anger – and the use of live ammunition by one or two demonstrators, all of which resulted in an excessive police reaction that ended in the killing of thirteen citizens (mainly from snipers' fire).
The Palestinians in Israel's narrative, to which the author of this book also subscribes – not as an objective observer but as someone who was there on the ground – is summarized well by several Palestinian scholars who wrote on the affair. They suggest that the Israeli modus operandi became evident when the first demonstration gathered in October 2000. The police, the border police, the secret service and the Mistaravim (covert agents disguised as Arabs and already used to infiltrate the occupied territories) infiltrated the Palestinian villages and towns and were supported from above by snipers who fired live ammunition into the crowd or coldbloodedly approached the demonstrators and killed them. If one can summarize the Palestinian take on what lay behind October 2000, it would be to say that this was an institutional use of state power to deliver a message to a fifth of its population: be docile and accept your status as second-class citizens, or encounter the wrath of the army and security forces.
The Palestinian NGO Mussawa (‘Equality’ in Arabic) probably represented the consensus in the community well when it depicted the events as the following: ‘in response to a demonstration by unarmed Arab citizens in response to the violation of Haram al-Sharif by Ariel Sharon, the Israeli police shot live ammunition at the demonstrators and killed thirteen citizens’. A similar depiction can be seen in Adalah's detailed examination of the report:
At the beginning of October 2000, many of the Arab citizens of Israel protested against the oppressive Israeli policy in the occupied territories. These protests developed and were directed against the lethal actions by the police. As a result thirteen citizens were killed and hundreds were wounded. The police shot live and rubber bullets at the demonstrators, and even used snipers. All in direct violation of the police's own code and regulations.8
The clash, namely a national day of protest spilling over from the areas where Palestinians live into exclusive Jewish spaces, roads and highways, was indeed an eruption of frustration over many years of discrimination. But it need not have ended the way it did, had the Israeli police not employed – as they did in 1976 – live ammunition against unarmed citizens. Already in 1998, it was possible to gather from the Israeli mainstream media that the security apparatuses were seriously discussing how to fend off what they saw as a dangerous radicalization among the Palestinians in Israel. From the election of Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister in 1996, the political elite supported the scenario that in times of emergency the traditional policy of co-opting the Palestinians through integration should be pushed aside and a green light be given to the security forces to deal with such a situation according to their understanding.
The excessive use of force was seen before the events of 2000 in the increased number of house demolitions within the Palestinian areas in Israel. In April 1998, helicopters hovered in the air above a small neighbourhood in the south-western margins of the city of Shefa-'Amr. The army and the police encircled this place, Umm al-Sahali, in numbers unseen before in such operations. Similar might was used in the Daliyat al-Ruha area in Umm al-Fahem, and in Wadi Ara, where the army confiscated 500 dunams from the inhabitants to turn them into training fields. The land had been used for pastoral and agricultural purposes for years and its takeover in March 2000 was deemed a pure provocation rather than the result of any shortage of firing spaces for the army.
But the main indicator and precursor for the drama that unfolded in October 2000 was hidden from the public eye. A month before the events the Israeli police ran through a simulation of a large-scale confrontation with the Palestinian population in the north.
Welcome to the war game ‘Tempest’. We are hosting you in the Centre for Police Studies [in Shefa-‘Amr]. Fifty-two years ago, this very front, was occupied by Brigades 7 and Golani … and here we are still engaged with the same problem as then, not occupying the country but keeping it safe.
Thus opened the commanding officer of the manoeuvre, or more precisely the war game in which the police practised confronting a national day of demonstrations by the Palestinian community in the north. For him such a scenario represented a continuation of the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, when the Palestinian community was the enemy and was ethnically cleansed as a result. The ‘Front’ was dozens of villages occupied and uprooted, and on one of them the police built its school for junior officers where the meeting took place.9
As noted before, reality is murkier than plans, and although the role of the security forces seems to me, ten years later, to be the crucial factor in explaining the severity of what happened, far more important is what this clash revealed. The historian of the Spanish Civil War Professor Shlomo Ben-Ami, who entered politics and was tricked by Ehud Barak into taking the impossible portfolio of the Police Ministry, observed rightly that the fracture exposed the ‘genetic code’ of the conflict.10 He was less well-suited to overseeing a police force that, contrary to his orders, used snipers and assault units that were trained to deal with terrorists assaulting civilians; not civilians demonstrating against terrorist policies. He lost his job after that.
Theodore Orr, a judge of the Supreme Court, headed the official inquiry commission that looked into the events in retrospect. He is a Polish Jew who arrived in Palestine in the 1930s and, after practising in private law, entered the judicial system. He was chosen to head the commission as he had worked for most of his career as a judge in Palestinian areas. His main claim to fame until this appointment was his releasing of a well-known Israeli industrialist, Eli Hurvitz, who had been sent to jail by a regional judge.
Established after the leaders of the Palestinian community exerted heavy pressure on Ehud Barak's government, the committee also included the Israeli historian of the Middle East Shimon Shamir and the Palestinian judge Sahil Jarah, who resigned soon after the committee began its deliberations, unhappy with its course, and was replaced by another Palestinian judge, Hashem Khatib. The official website of the Israeli Ministry of Justice reports that Khatib was born in Israel in 1941 (when of course Israel did not exist). He also served in Palestinian locations such as Acre and Nazareth and of course being a Palestinian in Israel added more symbolic credence to the committee.
The committee began real work only in November 2000 as the leaders of the committee were displeased with its initial limited authority and succeeded in expanding it. The bone of contention was the committee's insistence that its recommendation should lead to the prosecution of those found guilty of violating the law (at the end of the day no such indictments were ever submitted to the Attorney General, despite the promises to do so, nor were post-mortems conducted by the government to confirm or refute the results of private autopsies by the families of the deceased that showed the victims had been shot in the back at close range).
The meetings took place in the Supreme Court building, a new additional bizarre-looking complex on the government hill on the western side of Nazareth. During the early days, one of the police officers accused of shooting unarmed demonstrators, officer Reif, gave testimony. Abd al-Muni'm Add al-Salih, whose son Walid was killed in that incident, could not bear what he felt was the officer's distortion of the truth and approached the bench and kicked the officer in the face. As a result the next testimonies, and there were many of them, were given behind a glass screen that segregated the witnesses from the public. Another police officer, Ayino Attalah, who stood next to Reif – there were quite a few Palestinian policemen and a few officers present during the police attempt to control the demonstrations – testified that Reif was shooting live bullets not only at demonstrators in the village of Kafr Manda, but also at the village's elders who tried to calm down the situation. Reif was the commander of the Misgav police station. Misgav is the main Jewish settlement in the settlement bloc, named Segev, created in the 1970s as part of the second wave of Judaization, referred to earlier on in this book.11
The police used this incident as a pretext for limiting the public presence in the committee to forty people, including journalists. Each of the families of the bereaved was allowed only one representative. ‘The murderers sit in the hall, and we are thrown out,’ commented Asali Hassan, a representative of the families. Gamila Asala, the mother of the youth Asil, told the press that her family got up at 4 a.m. in the morning to get to the hearings and was refused entry: ‘Not only did they kill our children, they do not allow to sit in the hall.’
Adalah represented the community at large in these discussions, and the families also established their own committee to make sure that neither the government nor the Palestinian politicians would forget what happened or neglect the inquiry. Palestinian politicians asked, without success, to have a similar standing to that given to the Northern Irish community in the Saville Inquiry into the events of the 1972 Bloody Sunday killings by the British Army, at which the Northern Irish community were treated as equal parties to the government and the army, and their representatives were allowed to be present at all of the proceedings. (Coincidentally, Bloody Sunday also involved the death of thirteen citizens at a demonstration, in that case Irish Catholics killed in Derry. The inquiry, which took place in Derry itself, was established by the British government in 1998 after years of campaigning and following an earlier inquiry that was widely seen as a whitewash of the British forces involved.)
Two years later, letters warning some police officers that they might be prosecuted were sent, but were never acted upon. Apart from the obvious reluctance of the authorities to bring the policemen to trial, it was also a time of political upheaval and instability. During the inquiry the Barak government fell and the first Ariel Sharon government was elected (it was re-elected in 2003). Sharon and his Minister for Internal Security (formerly the Ministry of the Police), the right-wing hardliner Uzi Landau, were hostile to the committee and the submission of the final report in September 2003 was a low-key event. Its conclusions, that blame should be shared between the Arab politicians for ‘inciting’ the protestors and the police for being ill-prepared, disappointed many Palestinians and left the scars open and wounds still bleeding.
Despite the inquiry, the fences between the two communities were not easily mended. It took time before Jewish customers returned to shop on Saturdays (when Jewish shops are closed) in nearby Palestinian villages and neighbourhoods and dine in their restaurants. But ten years later one can say that slowly this dynamic and active cohabitation is back to what it used to be.
Politically, however, the divide grew and the fences remain broken. In the aftermath of the killing, a new assertive young generation of Palestinians stuck to the strict definition of their community as a national one and demanded in an even clearer voice than before that Israel be made into a state for all its citizens. In turn, they faced an even more ethnocentric, quite racist, Jewish majority, for whom removing the Palestinian minority if things got out of hand was a serious possibility.
One of the most striking absences in the Hebrew and Jewish media discussion of the Orr Report was the apparent lack of interest in the backgrounds of those shot by the police, which did not match in any way the depiction in the Commission of an incited mob or a gang of hooligans, or even over-enthusiastic demonstrators. Similarly, in 2010, following the attack by Israeli commando units on the Turkish flotilla that attempted to break the siege on Gaza, the Israeli press claimed that the initiative was led by terrorists; the local media did not provide the profiles of the nine Turks killed, who were ordinary citizens and not members of al-Qaida. In contrast, any Jewish Israeli soldier or citizen who is killed in a terrorist attack is described in detail and mourned at length in the printed and electronic media.
The impact of October 2000 over the next few years was more disastrous than predicted by even the more pessimistic observers. The police legitimized in its own eyes and in the eyes of the public the killing of demonstrators as part of its response. Forty Palestinian citizens were killed by the police in the next few years, although in incidents involving petty crime or mistaken identities rather than at demonstrations. However, demonstrations after these dramatic events were relatively peaceful as the police did not use snipers again, nor did they enter the villages and towns when commemorations of October 2000 and other events took place.
No less worrying for the Palestinian community was the full support the Israeli media gave the police and the lack of any sympathy or solidarity with the victims and their families. Very few critical voices were heard in a democracy when thirteen of its citizens were shot dead. Those who remained silent included some who had been regarded in the past as natural allies of the Palestinian cause inside Israel.
If this narrative of events and its aftermath is accepted then one important fact of life emerges for the first decade of the twenty-first century, which brings this book up to the present. There was nothing spontaneous on either side of the divide about the October 2000 events. The Palestinian community was building a civil society that was able to do what the political elite had failed to do for years – mobilize people to participate in a mass civil disobedience at the right moment. On the other hand, the police were ready for such mass action, responding with a prompt violent reaction, which was meant to send a message that such demonstrations would not be tolerated. The latter message may have been successful for a while, as can been seen by the very low-key mobilizations in response to the 2006 Lebanon war and the 2009 massacre in Gaza.
The structure of this book suggests, however, a more intricate reality. The second half of 1990s was a moment of hope unfulfilled, and the frustration over the false liberal discourse inside Israel and the language of peace in the occupied territories augmented the outrage and the willingness to confront a very powerful regime despite the imbalance of power and past experience. When the bullets began flying on both sides of the Green Line – directed at Palestinians opposing the occupation and against discrimination – the positive energy still remaining in the realm of peace and reconciliation petered out. The Israeli society closed its ranks and talked in one voice, which left the Palestinian minority even farther away than before from the republican common good and located it in the enemy camp with whom official Israel had once more been at war since 2000. The political and educated elites of the Palestinians in Israel lost all belief in ‘coexistence’, liberal Zionist discourse or a future of change within the present parameters of the Jewish state. ‘This is a humiliated, hurt community still able to contain its rage, but only just,’ wrote a journalist in Haaretz who covered the commemoration of the October events in 2009.12
The public arena for Palestinians in Israel was now moving from one pitfall to another, although none was as bloody or traumatic as the October 2000 events. A year after the October events, public attention was drawn once more to Azmi Bishara.
Since 1999 Bishara had run an individual campaign inspired by his vision for Israel as a state for all its citizens, which the powers that be found difficult to tolerate and accept. His eloquent appearances on television had defeated both many of Zionism's best spokespersons and the Palestinians who collaborated with the state. In 1999, he nearly ran as a candidate for the Prime Minister's post, stretching the pretence of equality almost to breaking point.13
Bishara had roamed the Arab world ever since he founded his party: kings, prime ministers and leaders of revolutionary organizations such as Hassan Nasrallah were among the many he embraced and with whom he discussed the future of the area in general and of Palestine in particular. Some of the leaders he met – such as Bashar Assad of Syria, who still holds political prisoners without trial – did not add to his popularity among his voters. But during his decade of activity, no other minority intellectual or politician has achieved what he has in the field of self-assertion and self-dignity.
In November 2001 the Knesset decided to revoke Bishara's parliamentary immunity to open the way to indict him for violating the Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance from 1948 and the fifth regulation of the Emergency Regulations (which covers participation in subversive action against the state). He was accused of twice giving speeches which supported the Palestinian resistance in the occupied territories and praising Hezbollah for forcing the Israeli army out of southern Lebanon.
This was a serious escalation in the authorities' interference with Palestinian freedom of speech in Israel. Can Palestinians support the right of the Palestinians in the occupied territories and the Lebanese forces to resist the occupation by Israel? The answer to this, as rightly pointed out by Richard Falk, depends on whether one interprets this resistance according to Israeli law or to international law. From the international perspective Bishara's speeches were totally legitimate and legal; however, according to the Israeli Emergency Regulations they were deemed to support terrorism.14 The idea that international law is relevant to the relationship between the state and the national minority is at the heart of the matter of Palestinian citizenship in Israel. After 2000 the ‘internationalization’ of this issue, or rather predicament, seemed to many Palestinian activists in Israel to be a proper and fruitful strategy. The Israeli authorities, for their part, rejected vehemently such an expansion and struggled hard against those supporting these views.
Bishara won that legal struggle but the campaign against him was not over. In September 2006, he went on a visit to Syria with several members of his party. This was a month and a half after the start of what was called the second Lebanon war: a widespread Israeli military operation against the Hezbollah in response to the abduction of three soldiers on its borders that ended with more than a thousand deaths in Lebanon and hundreds in Israel. Bishara openly backed the Syrian position of supporting Hezbollah and demanding the return of the Golan Heights, and struggling against the Israeli hegemonic position in the area.
On his return, the Attorney General declared he would consider another legal action against him. The public was in the dark about what happened next. In April 2007 it was announced that Bishara had left Israel and on 22 April Bishara handed his resignation letter from the Knesset to the Israeli consul in Cairo. He left because he was about to be arrested for allegedly contacting a Hezbollah agent and providing him with information on the strategic location of potential targets for the organization's missiles. It was also rumoured that he would be accused of smuggling funds from ‘subversive’ elements for his party's activity. The first and more serious allegation, which would be repeated against several leading members of the Palestinian community in 2010, was totally ridiculous. Palestinians in Israel know very little about these matters; they do not serve in the army and what they know can be gathered from Google Earth. More plausible was the allegation that Bishara personally transferred money from outside sources for maintaining his political career. The secret service made a connection, not necessarily correctly, between the money and the alleged passage of information. One way or another it was clear that Bishara was targeted as a leading political personality who contributed significantly to the newly won self-assertiveness, confidence and identity of the Palestinian community in Israel in a way that troubled the powers that be.
A similar attack was launched against Sheikh Raid Salah, the leader of the Islamic movement, whose greatest achievement was that of putting the issue of Jerusalem, and the related Israeli policies, into the centre of the global Muslim and regional Arab consciousness. In his case the allegation was contacts with Hamas, but he stayed on, sat in jail for a year without trial and won the legal struggle when no serious allegations were proved in court (Bishara might have not survived a year like this in jail, suffering as he did from serious kidney problems).
Bishara was not the only Palestinian Member of the Knesset, or activist, to be targeted by the authorities on charges of potentially collaborating with the enemy; as if Palestinian leaders inside Israel could develop an anti-Palestinian stance to satisfy the apprehensions of the political and security establishment of the Jewish state.
The growing numbers of both Palestinian academics at Israeli universities (in relative terms; they are still a tiny fraction of overall numbers) and critical sociologists interested in the topic produced a clear definition of Israel, at least from the perspective of its national minority: ethnocracy. In an ethnocracy, the minority is granted partial equality and a limited integration as individuals into its political and economic life. At the same time, a long-term and unchanging policy of control and surveillance guarantees the continuation of the majority's dominance and the minority's marginality.15
The adoption of the paradigm of ethnocracy also helps to reshape the historical narrative of the Palestinians in Israel. The model included the explanation of how an ethnocracy was formed: when a dominant group seizes control of the mechanisms of the state and makes ethnicity, rather than citizenship, the key to the distribution of resources and power. The next historical chapters are also easily explained by this paradigm. Politics undergoes a gradual process of ethnicization, according to ethnic-based classes: in this instance the introduction of the Law of Return and the land policy from the 1950s onwards. If one visits the Hebrew Wikipedia, dominated by Zionist discourse, and reads the entry for the October 2000 events, the background section starts with the early Zionist colonization of Palestine, and although the discourse is different, as is the music, the factual analysis and the lyrics are the same. There is a direct line, even in this popular presentation of history and politics, between formative periods in the life of both ethnic communities and the eruption of violence in 2000.
It is a very useful perspective, allowing those who subscribed to it to understand better how to locate the formal side of democracy from which the Palestinians in Israel have undeniably benefited. The basic rights such as suffrage, the right to be elected, freedom of expression, movement and association are there, but they are all identified with a single and superior ethnic group. These basic rights are granted not by the rule of the majority, but from one ethnic group to the other.
The links between economic and social deprivation and ethnocracy were also clarified through this prism. The demographic growth of the Palestinians in Israel, much faster than the Jewish equivalent, has not been met by an adequate economic, occupational and spatial development.
It is not clear if everything can be pinned on the ethnocratic nature of the state, but if one accepts this is the best way of describing the Israeli regime, one can also clearly detect its impact on other aspects of life in the twenty-first century, which do not originate with its power but are highly affected by it. One such issue is the prominence of the clan, the Hammula, in social life, especially in the rural areas. Despite the key economic role played by the nuclear family, the traditional hierarchal and patriarchal structure of the clan still played a dominant social role at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This is best demonstrated by the detailed research on the topic by As'ad Ghanem, who noted the resurgence of the Hammula as an alternative and retrograde political grouping. It affected a variety of decisions taken by the community: from who would marry whom to who would win the local elections and how the economic resources of the community would be divided.16
The average Palestinian citizen encountered ethnocracy less as an abstract political or legal structure and more as a matrix of walls and glass ceilings that prevented integration or equality. The walls were not only imaginary. More and more Jewish communities living in proximity to Palestinian villages or neighbourhoods wished to emulate the segregation wall Israel built in the West Bank. As the Haaretz journalist Lili Galili put it (in her case it should be read as a sarcastic remark): ‘Who wants to wake up in the morning and see an Arab? Alongside the big separation wall from the Palestinians, national and social separations emerge inside the state. Fences, walls, ramps, bisect the land and turn it into a huge maze.’
A case in point is the village of Jisr al-Zarqa, one of only two villages remaining on the Mediterranean coast, out of the sixty-four which were cleansed by the Israeli forces. Its location, far away from the rest of the Palestinian community, turned it into one of the poorest villages in Israel. It lies 30 kilometres south of Haifa near Kesaria (Caesarea), built on the ruins of the Palestinian village Qaisariya, one of the first to be cleansed in 1948, and now the home of many of Israel's richest Jewish citizens. In 2002 the Kesaria development corporation began to build an earthen embankment dividing their town from Jisr al-Zarqa.
Izz al-Din Amash was the head of the village's council for twelve years. He was the first academic graduate of the village and a member of Meretz, a Zionist party on the left. And yet he said in an interview when trying to climb on the ramp the people of Kesaria built, ‘I am afraid to come here. I feel like I need a special permit to do so.’ A local physician, Raji Ayat, explained two months after the embankment was built that the main reason was not racist but economic – the houses in proximity to the village had a lower value in the housing market and it was hoped the separation would put them on a par with the rest of the housing in Kesaria.
The people of Nir Zvi, a wealthy settlement near Ben-Gurion Airport, live in proximity to the city of Lod (in Arabic al-Lid), a Palestinian neighbourhood. They also built a wall of separation. Ahmad Abu Muamar, a seventeen-year-old dweller in the nearby Arab neighbourhood, commented cynically, ‘Even in the occupied territories they did not built such a huge wall.’ Ali Abu Qtaifan said, when the wall was finished and was located two metres from his home, ‘I cannot see the sky and the sun. My house has vanished away and so did I.’
The people of Gani Dan in Ramleh also built a wall between them and the Jawarish neighbourhood. A year before the building of the wall, a huge police force – ‘larger than the one the Americans used for capturing Saddam Hussein’, said one of the dwellers to Haaretz – came and demolished houses that were too near to the wall, so as to create a wider distance between the Jewish citizens and unwanted Palestinian ones.17
It is mainly the poorer sections of the Palestinian community that have been the victims of these policies of gates and enclavements. Among the better off, the first decade of the twenty-first century was a period to try to break out of the ethnic disadvantages imposed on them by the Jewish state. This was possible since not everyone was an activist struggling all the time, and not every field of life demanded activism in order to succeed or to integrate.
Browsing through the new public space, the Internet, with all its meeting places such as forums, websites, Facebook, Twitter and similar virtual arenas, one can see an individualization of the Palestinian experience in Israel. The anonymity and the nature of the intercourse and discussion that characterizes the Internet enables Palestinian and Jewish citizens to interact without the continual need to flag their identity or wave their ethnicity. The Internet can be a tool to advance political and ideological causes, but it can also be blind to ethnicity and race.
Interesting examples are forums that seem on the face of it totally void of any relevance to ethnicity, such as forums of car lovers, those suffering from particular medical complaints or other social forums. A random example would illustrate this point. In April 2004, a young Palestinian, Nur from Kafr Qara in Wadi Ara, was trying to join a car forum, and was very honest about his anxiety about how he would be treated as a Palestinian; to be on the safe side he reminded the other participants that two of Israel's best rally drivers were Palestinian Israelis. Either this information or the relative depoliticization of car lovers helped him to be enthusiastically invited to join the forum. This could go on as long as he kept silent about current events, on which the other members began to comment in a typical anti-Arab fashion; his association with the forum did not last for long.
But boundaries in this century, as in the previous one, are charted from above, and not by the bi-national reality on the ground. Jewish society, self-centred and still licking the wound of the Rabin assassination, is looking for a new consensus. The one constant feature in it has been the absence of the Palestinians in the redefinition of Israeliness in the twenty-first century.
On the shores of the Sea of Galilee at the end of 2001 about fifty Jewish academics and intellectuals, journalists, military men and politicians gathered. They included well-known figures from the Zionist left, right and centre. And they came as ‘Israeli citizens of the Jewish people’, according to their self-declared definition.18
It was a very well-publicized event, one can say with confidence, the first of its kind attempting to formulate an intellectual and civil Zionist attitude towards the Palestinian minority in Israel. That this was done within civil society and not in the governmental corridors of power is not surprising. The mushrooming of NGOs and the privatization of the political and ideological scene (in the sense of offering either a substitute for parliamentary politics or a parallel form of it) moved the debate on the Arab–Jewish relationship from the government to the public arena of civil society. According to As'ad Ghanem, in 1990 there were one hundred and eighty NGOs and by 2001, more than six hundred had been added. One should stress that only the debate was moved across – policy was still the domain of the government and its agencies.19 When Palestinian NGOs modestly and cautiously initiated polices of their own – for instance preparing curricula for the Arab schools – this would be brutally blocked by the government.
Not much united the luminaries and pundits who came to spend a few days on the lake's shores. The only issue that bonded them together was the demographic fear: the number of Palestinians inside the historical space of Palestine. For the politicized and activists among the Palestinians in Israel this became a landmark in their relations with the Zionist left. The latter's discourse of ‘we have to keep our state Jewish’ did not sound very different from the extreme right-wing call for the transfer of the Palestinians in Israel. The way in which the main spokesperson of the Zionist left and centre presented the demographic discourse was akin, in the eyes of the Palestinian Israeli observers and citizens, to the most racist discourse now delegitimized in the West.20
These views were summarized in the document which emerged from that meeting: Amant Kinneret, the Kinneret Charter. A Jewish democratic state within the boundaries that the government would delineate in the future was an old vision repackaged as a new one. According to this point of view, democracy and solely Jewish ethnicity were not mutually exclusive but rather compatible, and anyone who rejected this future was disloyal to the state and its values. How would the Palestinian citizens fit in? As one of the leading thinkers behind the Kinneret Document, the author A.B. Yehoshua, commented: ‘We have a real problem and this is how to make the Israelization of the Arabs work.’21 It is indeed a difficult task if one considers a later interview he gave to Haaretz, in which he stated that he would rather not live in a building where Arab families resided.22
His literary work, like that of other famous Israeli writers such as Amos Oz, reflected this wish to modernize the Arabs, to get rid of them or to turn them into Jews.23 In the first decade of the twenty-first century scholars produced some illuminating work on the representation of the Palestinians in canonical Israeli literature, films and theatre. But these rather one-dimensional, negative, and at times demonized images did not shock anyone in the Jewish public after the October 2000 events, if indeed anyone bothered to read about them, as surveys of public opinion confirmed that these images and perceptions were deeply rooted in Israeli Jewish society.24
It seems the authors, academics and state officials were particularly desperate about, or rather fearful of, the Bedouin in the Negev. The officials we have mentioned in an earlier chapter, who were responsible for the transfer of the Bedouin into reservation-like enclaves in the 1970s and early 1980s and monitored their lives closely in unrecognized villages, shared the same image of this more nomadic section of the Palestinian community with the producers of high and popular culture in Israel, even at the beginning of the twenty-first century; to quote a description in Jewish Week from 1992:
Bloodthirsty Bedouin who commit polygamy, have thirty children and continue to expand their illegal settlements, taking over state land … In their culture they take care of their needs outdoors … They don't even know how to flush a toilet.25
These images conjured up by the officials were not a far cry from Amos Oz's description of the Bedouin in his novel Nomads and a Snake, a 1965 tale about an Israeli retaliation against Bedouin stealing the local kibbutz's water:
In the defence of the retaliators I will say that the Bedouin shepherd has the shiftiest of faces: one eyed, broken nose, drooling mouth full of long and sharp twisted foxy teeth. One who looks capable for perpetrating any atrocity.26
Four Palestinian NGOs, the Follow-Up Committee, Mussawa, Adalah and research institute Mada al-Carmel, published their own vision documents, not only in response to the Kinneret Charter but also in reaction to a vision master document prepared by the ‘Israel Democracy Institute’, a leading think-tank which is highly influential in Jewish Israeli politics. The Institute's project, which did not diverge much from the Kinneret principles, but was more professional and academic in tone and content, described a ‘consensual constitution’, which was deemed provocative by many intellectuals in the Palestinian community, who were not taken into account in the process of its preparation and did not see even their most basic aspirations reflected in it.27
The countering Arab visions were also a reaction to the October 2000 events and the eventual crisis that followed this juncture. They were also, as one of their authors Shawqi Khatib, who was the chair of the Follow-Up Committee at the time, explained, a response to the continued fractions fragmenting the community's political scene, and thus a straightforward attempt to present a more unified position in the future.28
The four documents do not differ much from each other and the absence of one single document was the unfortunate result of the internal personal and organizational strife in the Palestinian community, which affects not only parliamentary and party politics but also the world of the NGOs and the civil society. They all shared a historical narrative that depicts Zionism as a colonialist movement that dispossessed the indigenous people of Palestine by force. They question Jewishness as a national identity but recognize the ethnic rights of the Jews who settled in Palestine to live within a bi-national state within the pre-1967 borders.29
They seek a concessional democracy, like the one that was intact for a while in the post-Soviet Czech Republic and those that still survive in Belgium, Switzerland and Canada, in which the right of the 1948 refugees to return would be recognized and the Palestinians would enjoy cultural autonomy; according to their demographic share they would be represented in the legislative, executive and constitutional arms of the state and hence in the distribution of resources and budgets. Finally, the documents demanded an equal status for Arabic and national Palestinian insignia in the state. Some documents also suggested a power of veto over crucial strategic decisions pertaining to the society as a whole.
The vision documents also later facilitated the construction of national bodies to deal with the rise in crime, family and gender violence in the community, as well as jointly tackling widespread corruption on a local level and dysfunctional administrative services on a regional level. The authors pointed out that as intellectuals and professionals they had a duty to face the apparent decrease in the level of education and even of the number of Arab students in recent years. In short, the authorities displayed indifference and a lack of agency, hence the need to take the initiative. In some of the documents the Israeli governments are blamed for manipulating these internal rifts and weaknesses to their advantage, but that does not absolve the community itself for bearing some responsibility for the dismal reality.
Gender issues too were very high on the agenda and were engaged with in a progressive feminist way. Written and based on the liberal feminist approach, the documents isolated religious fanaticism as the main cause of the abuse of, and discrimination against, women. The documents include far-reaching statements about the advancement of women's rights within the Palestinian community, with strong condemnation of honour killings and violence in the family. There was even a clause about the future of gays and lesbians in the future society, but there was a last-minute decision to exclude this very sensitive issue. This was too progressive for the Islamic movement, which did not endorse the vision documents, partly because of this but mainly because they conveyed a vision of a secular state as the best solution in the future.
The section on women's rights brought to the fore a subject that needs further elaboration: the status of women in Palestinian society in Israel. So far in this book we have stressed the connection between the socio-economic development in the rural areas, most importantly the semi-proletarianization of the farmers' lives, which enabled women to go out to work and to seek a greater role in running family affairs. This was a process that began in the 1960s and continued until the early 1990s, when the entry of Russian immigrants limited the employment choices for women.
In the sphere of education and career, the numbers of independent women grew, not due to Israeli policy, but as part of a much wider phenomenon in the whole Arab world of women's emancipation and empowerment. Social and educational achievements were also bringing women to the fore in political life, although by the beginning of the twenty-first century women were still under-represented in political parties. The situation in the NGOs was much better as one could easily notice their growing numbers among the student community and, as in Israel, they were the main teaching force in the educational system.
The feminist impulse was studied closely by the Palestinian research centre Mada al-Carmel, which showed that assertive action on women's rights, life and dignity went hand in hand with a stronger belief in and determination to struggle for the overall rights of the Palestinian minority.30 The fusion of these two agendas can be seen in the personality of the only national Palestinian member of the Knesset, Hanin Zuabi, from Nazareth, whose rights as a member of the Knesset have been recently partly denied due to her participation in the Turkish flotilla to Gaza in 2010. In that same year, the Minister of Interior, Eli Yishai, sought a special legislation against her, claiming she was a traitor with no right of citizenship. It is both her feminism and her national stance which the Israeli male politicians find hard to digest and accept.
No less impressive was the struggle of women in several spinning mills ever since the 1990s for better conditions and against widespread sacking. This hard labour was undertaken by Palestinian women for many years, especially in the north, but after the Israeli–Jordanian peace agreement in 1994 and the globalization of the textile economy, they lost their positions to even cheaper labour in Jordan. Those who remained in the industry had to struggle hard to maintain a reasonable level of pay. They could only work in factories next door, partly due to traditional suspicions about working far away from home, partly due to the fact that most Palestinian villages are still not connected by public transport, while all the Jewish settlements are (which inadvertently accelerated the number of independent women drivers within the Palestinian community, which is now at a level similar to Western societies). According to some very recent research, quite a large number of women sacked from the textile industry have moved into the tourist industry, a previously exclusive Jewish domain where there is now a significant Palestinian presence for the first time, as staff and owners of guesthouses and restaurants.31
Yet even given the considerable transformation in women's status, the vision documents went further into feminist issues than some of the more conservative sections of the Palestinian society would have wanted them to go; this brings home again As'ad Ghanem's assertion that to define streams in the politics of Palestinians in Israel only on the basis of people's attitudes to Zionism is too reductionist and that a fuller picture emerges if one assesses their stances towards wider issues of tradition and modernity.32 The assertion was that the Islamic movement did not endorse fully the vision documents due to the question of women's status.
The vision documents, claims Mary Totary, a Palestinian political scientist from Haifa, reflected a desire for a change in a society that, due to its long years of deprivation and oppression, succumbed too easily to the simplistic, traditional and religious ways of life offered by the Islamic movement or existing in nearby Arab countries. According to her analysis, in such circumstances traditional organizations seem safer and more attractive than an unclear modern chaos. This explains, Totary argues, the huge popularity in 2007 of the Syrian soap opera Bab al-Hara, ‘The Gate to the Neighbourhood’, broadcast on the Saudi channel MBC, which had one of the highest ratings among the community's viewers. This is a story of the victory of the traditional Arab way of life over modernity, showing all the former's positive aspects – hospitality, solidarity and honour – and also the negative ones – degradation of women and disrespect for individuality.33
But criticism of the visions came also from other quarters. Abna al-Balad rejected the documents since the party was opposed to the partition of the land, but otherwise these documents did seem to represent faithfully the aspirations of Palestinians in Israel. However, it should be noted that Sammy Smooha claims otherwise and insists that his findings show that 65 per cent of the community accept life in a Jewish democratic state and therefore condemn the documents as too radical. There could be indeed a gap between reconciling with a reality and hoping for something better; however, Palestinian sociologists who carried out their own survey of public opinion vehemently reject Smooha's findings and claim very strong support for the vision's basic features.34
From left to right, the Israeli Jewish public, through its newspapers, members of the Knesset, government ministers and populist pundits, declared the vision documents as a statement of war. The worst part for them was the fact that, for the first time in sixty years, the Palestinian community had taken the initiative itself and adopted the language of the indigenous people versus the settler state. Yet a far more existential danger for the Palestinian community in 2007 was the demographic and geographic, rather than academic, struggle over the future. In this realm time seemed to be frozen and the strategies, policies and discourse employed were those heard for the first time in 1948.
Although limited new areas were allocated for physical expansion of the Palestinian habitat, for the first time since the creation of the state of Israel, they were insignificant and – more importantly – insufficient for the demographic growth of the community, which is still double that of the Jewish one. This was due to continued expropriation of land and the lack of urban planning for the vast majority of the Arab towns and villages. Hence the trends begun at the end of the previous century continued with force in the new one. Despite policies of segregation, individual Palestinians disrupted this master plan by continuing to move into Jewish neighbourhoods in mixed towns and to rent houses in Jewish development towns.
The message from the government, Jewish mayors and the press was the same: the growth of the Palestinian community in Israel is a national threat. Writing this sentence, I wonder whether readers can imagine how it feels for the birth of your child to be perceived as a threat to the state of which you are a citizen?
From the Prime Minister to social organizations to proposals and legislative debates in the Knesset, there is an almost obsessive interest in increasing the Jewish birth rate or Jewish immigration to confront this ‘demographic danger’, wrote one Palestinian scholar, depicting faithfully the mood and policy in Israel.35
In the first decade of this century the Judaization of the country continued to be a high government priority and a major concern for Jewish individuals and collectives, which were now able to expand already existing ownership of their land due to the continued privatization of the land regime in Israel – a major reform promised and executed by the newly re-elected Benjamin Netanyahu in 2009. But even before 2009, under the Sharon and Olmert governments (2001–2009), the distribution of the Arab population in Israel, its demographic growth and political tendencies were all lumped together into the alarming concept of a ‘strategic threat’ – a term used frequently when the heads of states, leading academics and experts meet annually at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Herzliya, a private university run mainly by retired professors from other universities. Kenes Herzteliya, the Herzliya Conference, became the principal platform for the heads of states to give their equivalent of the American State of the Nation address (this is where Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared his Disengagement Plan from the Gaza Strip in 2005).
The second wave of the Judaizing the Galilee (Yihud Ha-Galil in Hebrew), as mentioned, began with the first Rabin government, which was keen to diminish the number of Arabs in the Galilee by increasing the numbers of Jews in it and by strangulating the Arab rural population, forcing it to either emigrate or stagnate. The three blocks of settlements built throughout the next thirty years were meant to disrupt the natural geographical continuity of these villages by driving Jewish wedges in between them.36
The Jews came, but the Palestinians did not leave, so a third wave of Judaization began in 2001. This time the Judaizer of the past, Shimon Peres, now a minister for developing the Galilee and the Negev, joined Ariel Sharon, the Judaizer of the West Bank. This was also not very successful; Jews, for all their sins, preferred to live in Tel Aviv. In 2002, Prime Minister Sharon declared: ‘If we don't settle the Galilee, someone else would do it.’37
It was in such a speech that the plans for the most recent wave of Judaization in the Galilee, Wadi Ara and the Negev were announced in 2005. (It is not a coincidence that this was the same year of the disengagement from Gaza: a seemingly dovish move in the occupied territories had to be ‘compensated’ by a hawkish move inside Israel.) Worried Palestinian heads of councils met in the village of Kafr Manda to oppose a plan for expanding territorially more than one hundred Jewish settlements at the expense of land belonging to Arab landowners. The other side of the plan (not stated openly, but presumed by the participants in the Kafr Manda meeting) involved disallowing the expansion of Palestinian villages.
The architect of the 2005 plan was Sharon's deputy prime minister, Shimon Peres, who also suggested at a Jewish meeting in Carmiel before the Manda meeting that 10,000 units would be sold cheaply to Jewish citizens to enhance the plan of Judaization. ‘The development of the Negev and the Galilee is the most important Zionist project in the next years,’ he declared. The costs for this project were supposed to come from the American administration as part of the $2.1 billon promised by President George W. Bush in compensation for Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005.
In those days, the Israeli policy makers realized that they could no longer rely on Jewish immigration from abroad as the best means of maintaining their demographic superiority in the state, however its future borders were demarcated. These human resources were running out so all they could do was to encourage Jews to leave the metropolitan centres of Israel and resettle in the north and the south, encouraging them with tax exemptions, the quality of life and an ‘Arab-free’ environment. In 2010 one can say with some confidence that this drive has totally failed. The Jewish population of both these peripheries remains as it was in 1950: poor, unemployed and with weak occupational and service infrastructures. The few spots of wealthier middle-class suburbia that have emerged are the exceptions to the rule, and not enough to attract other people. The next shots in the struggle to Judaize Israel are two new towns with a population of more than 10,000 orthodox Jews, with the highest birth rate in the country: one near Nazareth on land confiscated from the village Ayn Mahel, west of the city, and one in the midst of Wadi Ara.
A fourth wave of Judaization began under Ehud Olmert's government (2006–2009). This cabinet went into a destructive war against both Lebanon in 2006 and the Gaza Strip in 2007. But it was also very active in the ‘Judaization’ project especially in three areas: Greater Nazareth, Wadi Ara and the Negev. The aim was to look for new ways of de-Arabizing and Judaizing these regions.
This last and present project was continued with even more zeal by the centre-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu which came to power in 2009. This wave was motivated by the failure of the previous policies to make all these areas, and the greater Nazareth area in particular, Jewish. People and economies move in mysterious ways and instead of the Nazarethians leaving, the well-off among them began purchasing homes in the very citadel that was meant to evict them.
In his speeches as the leader of the opposition in 2005 Benjamin Netanyahu made it clear that he already regarded this new reality as a grave danger to Israel's national security. But if you want to know where the governmental consensus lies in twenty-first-century Israel, you listen to the members of the Labour Party – partners in the coalition government of both Olmert and Netanyahu. One such representative is the head of the regional council of lower Galilee, Motti Dotan, who said in 2008: ‘If we lose the Jewish majority in the Galilee this is the end of the Jewish state.’ This member of the allegedly left-wing Zionist party added: ‘I would like to imagine a Galilee without Arabs: no thefts, no crimes …we will have normal life.’ If the ‘left’ talks in such a manner, you can imagine what the language used by members of Likud and Israel Beitenu (Lieberman's party) might be.38
A new aspect to the current attempts to Judaize the Galilee has been the open support given to it by ecologists, industrialists and academics, including the Jewish National Fund and the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel. Diminishing the Palestinian presence in the Galilee was also fully endorsed by the prestigious union of Israeli wine producers, who adopted a new plan prepared by leading academic figures from the Technion. The plan was publicized in 2003 and stated that the Jewish ‘takeover’[!] of the Galilee was a national priority. It began by saying: ‘It is either them or us. The land problems in the Galilee proved that any territory not taken by Zionist elements is going to be coveted by non-Zionists.’39 The gist of what they suggested was to seize land by force in any territory deemed important strategically and to keep it until Jews settle on it. The director general of AMPA, the leading Israeli electrical manufacturer proudly stated in 2004 that his company was not only making refrigerators but also supported the ‘Judaization of the Galilee’ by building new communities in the area: ‘We are not ashamed to say that our plans [for building villages for the company's veterans] have a Zionist element of Judaizing the Galilee.’40
This and other plans became governmental policies when Shimon Peres was the deputy prime minister responsible for the Galilee in Ehud Olmert's government in 2006. The first victim of this new strategy was the beautiful village of Ayn Mahil, east of Nazareth and adjacent to Upper Nazareth. It was already only accessible in 2006 by one road that went, purposely, through a Jewish religious neighbourhood in upper Nazareth (thus for instance on the Day of Atonement, the people of Ayn Mahil could not leave or enter their village). In the new plan they will be encircled by a new town called Shacharit (‘dawn’ in Hebrew, and also and more importantly the name for first Jewish prayer of the day). The intended population are 10,000 ultra-orthodox Jews. The officials of the state do not hide their hope that this community will procreate at an exponential pace and rectify the ‘unfavourable’ demographic balance, as well as physically strangulate Ayn Mahil and separate it from the greater Nazareth area. The village's ancient and famous olive groves have already been uprooted in 2009 in preparation for the new town. Needless to say, it will be built on land exclusively expropriated from the village and its people. The construction of the new town is accompanied by an additional web of roads and highways that separate other villages from each other and from Nazareth.41
In this new matrix, another two villages are facing a far graver danger than losing their living space. Under Emergency Regulations available to him as Minister of National Infrastructure in the 1990s, Ariel Sharon decided to further the cause of Judaization by building a new heavy industrial site on land expropriated from the Palestinians in the midst of the Palestinian villages surrounding Nazareth. Named Ziporit, the site houses a glass factory Finicia and a poisonous aluminium factory – both not allowed by international law to be built in proximity to human habitation. The nearest village is Mashad and since the opening of the new industrial site the number of deaths from cancer there has risen by 40 per cent.
Similar tactics, of building new cities, disrupting the geographical continuity between Palestinian villages and a large urban centre and between themselves by the erection of walls and roads, are occurring wherever there are Palestinians in high concentration in Israel: in the Galilee, Wadi Ara and the Negev. In 2006, the government announced its plan to create a town, called Harish with 150,000 ultra-orthodox Jews, for the very same reasons that Shacharit was contemplated. The ultra-orthodox colonization worked well in increasing the number of Jewish settlers in the occupied territories and it was hoped it would be beneficial here as well.
This new policy is not surprising. It is another chapter in the history of Palestinian fragmentation. Ever since 1948, the Palestinians have been dispersed and divided into different communities, each suffering the consequence of Israeli policies in a different way. The bifurcation and bisection of the Palestinian existence by Israel enabled the Jewish state to deal more effectively with a people and a society that cast a huge question mark on the state's legitimacy, prosperity and, from a Zionist point of view, existence.
The division of the Palestinians in the 1967-occupied territories into the mini-states of Gaza and of Ramallah plays ideally into this Israeli strategy of control and oppression. The smaller the Palestinian community and the more isolated it is, the better it can be ruled. This sense of having things under control also characterized the relationship of the Jewish state with its own Palestinian minority.
The model for these new Israeli policies is the strategy pursued over the last twenty years in the Greater Jerusalem area. The aim of the policies against the two holy cities of Jerusalem and Nazareth is the same: to disrupt physical and geographical continuity. In the Greater Jerusalem area villages are separated from one another and from Jerusalem itself by Jewish neighbourhoods, bypasses, military camps and the infamous apartheid wall. This matrix of control must have been visible to the Pope when he visited both Jerusalem and Nazareth in 2010 but he chose to remain silent.
In 2009, many of my Palestinian friends inside Israel were alarmed by a rumour that the Egyptian foreign minister had been told by Israeli generals of a master plan to ethnically cleanse all the Palestinians from Israel. This was probably unfounded and the Egyptian politician denied it later. However, the faked (in this case) smoke emanates from a real fire of hate and racism. In a lecture he gave at Tel Aviv University the former and esteemed President of the Supreme Court of Israel, Aharon Barak, summarized the Israeli attitude towards democracy:
‘If you ask the Jews in Israel whether they would like to live in a democracy, the vast majority would say yes. The same vast majority would say yes to the proposition to expel all the Palestinians from Israel.’ He and his happy listeners giggled when he said this. This is however, no joke. Given Israel's history, the nature of Zionist ideology and the present policies on the ground, it is quite possible that the democratic wish of the Jewish in Israel will become a nightmarish reality in years to come.
It is important to stress that these efforts have the widest possible consensual support from the Jewish population, intellectuals, educated people and academic experts. Businessmen who are involved in production of goods traditionally provided by Palestinians also chipped in enthusiastically in favour of Judaization: olive growers, coffee makers, tourist agents and similar trades. Some do it from a cynical economic evaluation of the benefits reaped from such projects, but most out of obedience to the hegemonic ideology controlling the state since its foundation. Yeshua, ‘salvation’, and Geula, ‘redemption’, previously ecclesiastical terms describing the individual road to heaven, are now state jargon for the land policy of Israel.
The lack of space increased the movement of Palestinians into ‘Jewish areas’. The successors of Kahana were now supported by a party which had senior representatives in the government, Avigdor Lieberman's Israel Beitinu (‘Our home’) party, which employed the familiar language of rabid racism and anti-Semitism to warn against the ‘Arabs’ harassing ‘our daughters’, committing crimes and contemplating a total takeover of ‘our houses’. Violent eruptions were around the corner; the worst were a few days of clashes in Acre where Arabs and Jews live precariously in joint houses in the modern part of the city.
But life sometimes is more complex than the simplicity of governmental racist policies or politicians' ideologies. The situation over the last few years in Upper Nazareth is a good example of this.
If you call the spokesperson of Upper Nazareth, a city overlooking the old Nazareth, and ask how many Palestinians live in the new ‘Jewish’ city, the answer would be long and winding but would lead you nowhere. Officially, there are none. This is also the impression you get if you visit the city's elegant website (which appears only in Hebrew and in Russian). But wait, you may insist, as I did, ‘I am standing in front of a house which is decorated by an engraved epitaph which states: ‘“There is no power but in God” in Quranic Arabic.’ And I added, ‘I know there are two Palestinian members of your city council.’ ‘We still do not have enough information about the numbers,’ is the official reply and so to all intents and purposes there are no Arabs in Upper Nazareth.
Twenty per cent of this city's population are in fact Palestinians. They moved into the city mainly from the crowded city of Nazareth and from the villages surrounding it. Some of them had to pay as much as three million shekels (the equivalent of about £500,000 or $800,000) for a flat or a house, three times more than its market value. The people who sell the houses are Russian immigrants gravitating towards Tel Aviv. The Palestinians in the city have no schools or kindergartens, thus the roads connecting the real Nazareth with Upper Nazareth are overcrowded when schools open and close. But Israel being Israel, the non-existent 20 per cent have representation in the local municipality and demanded, and received, a promise to build an Arab school in Upper Nazareth for the absent Palestinians. They are sitting together in a coalition with the ultra-right-wing party of Avigdor Lieberman, who declared in August 2009 that stopping the immigration of Arabs into Nazareth, as he calls it, is a national priority. His representative in the town, the mayor, needed the two Palestinians to defeat the rival Labour Party. But he is also committed to the ‘Judaization’, namely the de-Arabization, of his city.
A huge pressure on this delicate reality were the wars in Lebanon in 2006 and the attack on Gaza in 2009, and alongside them the issue of the media's credibility. By 2006, during the second Lebanon war, it became clear that, for more than a decade, the Palestinians in Israel had been using the Arab satellite media, and especially but not exclusively the television channel al-Jazeera, as a far more reliable, informative and inspirational source of information than the Israeli equivalent. The misinformation by the Israeli army's spokesperson, exposed by the leader of Hezbollah, accentuated this process.
The networks in the Arab world opened a window not only to current news and developments, but also the dynamic and vibrant cultural scene all over the Arab world. New books, poems and songs can now reach and enrich the Palestinian community in Israel (among them those written by the Palestinians from Israel who would rather publish in Beirut, Cairo or Amman than in the very few publishing houses in Palestine, which are located mostly in Jerusalem and the West Bank). Ever since 1987 there has been a process of strengthening the ties not just with the Palestinian polity and nationality, but also with Arab heritage and culture. Unlike the 1950s, this was not done in secret, but as part of a new assertion of a cultural and not just a national identity. Mada al-Carmel, the Palestinian research institute in Haifa, found that 75 per cent of the Palestinians in Israel accepted the Hezbollah and al-Jazeera narratives of the second Lebanon war in the summer of 2006.42
In 2005 the Palestinian NGO I'ilam and Tel Aviv University political scientist Amal Jamal conducted a very comprehensive survey on the level of confidence in the media in the Middle East. This exposed what Jamal called ‘a serious crisis of confidence of the Arab citizens in the Israeli media’. Sixty-five per cent of the Palestinians believed al-Jazeera more than any Israeli new channel.43 This crisis of confidence only accentuated other fractures in the already fragile edifice of the Arab–Jewish relationship in Israel. As before, both the majority and the minority survived these tensions well, but I fear that, as such episodes accumulate, as an inevitable consequence of the historical circumstances in which the Jewish state was born and of its hegemonic ideological nature and stance, the likelihood of similar crises passing peacefully in the future looks more and more doubtful.
Meanwhile, as Nadim Rouhana has noted, a unique Palestinian identity has developed: segregated from the Israeli Jewish one, but also different from that of the other Palestinian community. Its language is Arabrabiya – an Arabic in which words of Hebrew are now an integral part of the dialect (vividly demonstrated in the most famous Israel film in recent years, Ajami, a tale of the tough Jaffa or Yafa neighbourhood, played by the citizens themselves and not by professional actors). This Palestinian way of life can for the time being be protected by a very low profile, not attracting the attention of the authorities, or maybe at the price of total depoliticization. But life is not just made up of material needs, and it is almost impossible to divorce cultural from political questions. Moreover, safety from individual or state harassment is not guaranteed if one wanders outside the Palestinian areas into the more public space in Israel.
But the issue that most significantly clouds the growing number of individual success stories is the shape of the regime in recent years, and in years to come. For the Palestinians in Israel, the Jewish state has legally become a secret-service state, with dire implications for the future.