RESEARCH ON THE PALESTINIANS in Israel was first undertaken by non-professional writers who wished to present either the official Israeli line or individual grievances of members of the community.1 This genre continued to appear later on, mainly from Israelis who were involved in one way or another in shaping the policy towards the Palestinian minority in the state. So this was a literature informed by one's stance in the ideological debate inside Israel and did not attempt a professional approach – nor did its writers possess such qualifications.2
The ideological or political divide was also explicit when the professionalization of the research on the Palestinians in Israel commenced in earnest during the 1970s. Very broadly defined, research lay on a spectrum between a Zionist thesis and an anti-Zionist antithesis on this charged topic. By this we do not mean that every academic work is a political statement or an ideological tract, far from it; but that the author's ethical and moral departure point is important in deciding where their professionalism will take them. Support for the hegemonic ideology of the Jewish state was more explicit in the less professional books, such as those written by Ori Stendel,3 and less so in the academic research that appeared mainly in the social science departments. But it was present in both types of literature. The more implicit support for the hegemonic ideology, as this term is defined by Noam Chomsky,4 came from the field of modernization theories which ainstream academics used to analyse the case studies of the Palestinians in Israel. Hegemonic ideology, according to the Chomskyan approach, prevails in almost every modern society in the West and it is a powerful concept that governs the life of every citizen. This ideology is a conceptual and ethical value system that interprets and explains the reality to the society at large. More often than not, this interpretation fuses with the interest of the powerful sections and groups within the society. The theory of modernization is one such hegemonic ideology and it is still the main theoretical infrastructure for Israeli academic study of the topic today. Due to the impressive scholarly output it has inspired it also informs this book, which tries to challenge some of its basic assumptions, as discussed below.5
The first decade after the 1967 war was one of euphoria in general in Israel: the victory was sweet and its bitter fruits recognized only by very few. Politicians and generals, who continued to regard the minority community of Palestinians as a ‘fifth column’ and a grave security risk, were willing to let military rule continue, and even contemplated the Palestinians' forcible removal from the state. At the same time, however, academics were developing hopeful scenarios for the future. In both its self and external image, Israel was a new super-regional power ruling over vast areas of Egypt, Palestine and Syria. Academically this translated into a sense of a mission, subscribed to by many members of the scholarly community in a way, as argued convincingly in a recent book by Gabriel Piterberg, that did not differ significantly from academic writing in other settler colonialist societies in the past.6 When leading researchers wrote about Mizrahi Jews (who came from the Arab world) or the Palestinians themselves, their work bore the unmistakable overtones of the ‘white man's burden’. Israel, and in particular its Ashkenazi citizens, had a mission to modernize everything in sight, be it the Mizrahim or the Palestinian minority. The ‘mission’ was not easy. Sammy Smooha, one of the most progressive of those who chose the Palestinians in Israel as his subject matter, nevertheless wrote about difference in core values between Arabs and Jews as part of the reason for inequality, although emphasizing the role of discriminatory policies.7
In short, Smooha saw the Jewish community as a progressive, modern society while the Palestinian minority was a primitive one. He argued that there was a modernization process going on, but that it was slow and might lead to a clash of civilizations that, due to the balance of power, would end in the demise of the Palestinian minority in Israel, or alternatively their integration as a modern society. Smooha predicted that the former scenario was more likely to occur. To his credit, in later works he would move away from this essentialist and orientalist depiction of Palestinian society and would cast as much blame on Israel's discriminatory policies as on the intrinsic problems of ‘Arab’ society and culture.
However, his articles from that period indicate that inside and outside Israeli academia the Palestinian minority was not only considered to be primitive and non-modern but – as surveys from the period among Jewish citizens showed – also one which would never become modern unless it was de-Palestinized and de-Arabized. Since these perceptions were prevalent in academia and the media, as well in the corridors of power, one can see why the removal of military rule after 1967 did not change much in practice, as the third chapter in this book tries to explain.
The dominance of the modernization theory as the principal prism through which the reality of the Palestinian minority should be viewed was helped by the august presence in Israeli academia of one of the world's most renowned theorists on modernization, Samuel Noah Eisenstadt, who died in 2010. His students at the Hebrew University examined the Palestinians in Israel as a classical case study of a successful modernized and Westernized community in transition and added scholarly weight to the more ideological aspirations of the political elite.8
The basic assumption was that the community at large was a traditional society that was modernized through its incorporation within the state of Israel. More specifically, it was seen as a society in ‘transition’ between traditional and modern phases. These academic observers were looking for quantifiable evidence of the transformation of an Arab society and its adoption of a Western way of life. At the same time, this methodology was applied in a similar way to the Jews who came from Arab countries, the Mizrahim. Both were conceived as ideal objects for the study of modernization and Westernization.9
This school of thought would have a large number of successors, who followed the search for modernization with a more focused examination of the chances of ‘Israelization’ versus ‘Palestinization’ of the community. In other words, successful Westernization was equated with a collective acceptance of being part of the Jewish state, while adhering to a national Palestinian identity was considered a failure. The problem with this approach was that it was not clear whether the political elite in Israel wished to Israelize the Palestinians in the state and, far more importantly, whether a successful modernization could have led to extra ‘Palestinization’ of the Arabs in Israel. As the theorists among these researchers knew only too well, the politicization and nationalization of communities such as this one was a common predication by modernizationists around the Middle East and beyond. Thus a bizarre model of modernization developed, one which saw the acceptance of Israel as a Jewish state as a positive outcome of the process and regarded modernization as questionable if it produced an impulse among the Palestinians in Israel to continue their struggle in the name of Palestinian nationalism and against the Zionization of the country.
The most advanced and comprehensive attempt to deal with the subject matter from this perspective has been attempted in the last decades by Sammy Smooha, mentioned above, whose many professional and meticulous books and articles defined the state as an ethnic democracy, which was the end result of the push for Palestinization of the Arabs in Israel and the limited Israelization the Jewish state allows them. This is probably the farthest one could go without directly challenging the basic assumptions of Zionism or modernization theories.10
This was until recently a dominant feature of the research, but it is much more marginalized today as a result of the overall decline of modernization theories and the new tensions that have emerged in the twenty-first century, which cast doubts on the sanguine assumptions of such researchers. What caught the critics' eyes were also some methodological questions. The common methodological approach in terms of research on the Palestinian community, throughout its history, has been the in-depth interview. Given that this is an oppressed community that conceives any questionnaire, whether official or academic, as an attempt to invade its privacy and expose its disloyalty, relying on the answers to questions asked by Israeli Jewish scholars is the least scholarly method one could think of.
This was the major problem in authenticating the reported answers on Palestinian attitudes in Israel towards either ‘Israelization’ or ‘Palestinization’. But in more general terms, even when they have been carried out in a more open atmosphere free from exogenous pressures, such interviews quite often provide an incomplete picture of people's political or ideological attitudes. The analysis in the mainstream research on the attitudes of Palestinians towards Israel was based on the common social-science practice of dividing a political attitude into three components: cognitive, behavioural and emotional. The social-science research in general, and not only in this case, fails constantly to deal with the last of the three, which in the case of nationalist sentiment and attitude is crucial.
This book has attempted in a modest way to examine the positions of individuals and groups as they were manifested in the realm of emotions. One helpful approach is that which draws on various disciplines and recent developments in cultural studies, and in particular from the new meeting point between historiography and hermeneutics. This last juncture has produced some excellent conceptualizations of human behaviour as a textual representation. Further developments in this particular aspect of research have also opened new vistas to those who sense that the researcher's own understanding of someone else's understanding of a reality – an area developed by the late Paul Ricoeur – plays a crucial part in books like this one.11 Very few, if any, academics who have written about the Palestinians in Israel are detached enough from the issue; in fact most of them are deeply involved in the affairs of the community in one way or another. Hans-Georg Gadamer has suggested, compellingly, that we should accept historiographical understanding as a limited affair by which the historian's contemporary interpretation of reality, familiar and clear, fuses with that of his subject matter, distant and murky, and it is impossible to turn them into two discrete explanations.12 But more important for our case is the ability, with this interdisciplinary approach in mind, to extract the attitudes and positions of Palestinians towards the Jewish state from cultural works, be they poems, novels or movies, in addition to the more conventional sources concerning the Palestinians in Israel's attitudes towards the Jewish state and to their Palestinian affiliations.
Adopting the modernizationist paradigm did not necessarily mean condoning Israeli policies. During the 1970s, Israeli anthropologists, like their peers in the general field of Middle Eastern studies, condemned the accelerated modernization that undermined the rural areas without providing adequate infrastructure elsewhere. One should also say that although this mainstream anthropological effort came under severe criticism from non-Zionist scholars13 – and it was very valid criticism in most cases in my view – these anthropologists developed closer human ties with the Palestinians themselves, their language and culture.14
It should be noted that modernization is still an approach that is present in the continuing research on the Palestinians in Israel, although it is much more marginal than before. It was first challenged from outside Israel in the early 1970s by Palestinians researching abroad and by some interested scholars who began to appreciate the value of examining these case studies more closely.
The opposing theory developed in three different locations simultaneously. It was a mixture of individual and collective effort. The first impressive push of the envelope was done by Elia Zureik, originally a Palestinian Israeli who left to study and teach abroad in the early 1970s. His The Palestinians in Israel: A Study of Internal Colonialism (1979) was the first Palestinian scholarly attempt to engage with the issue and analyse the Palestinian community within the framework of critical sociology that examined them as an ethno-national group surviving within a colonialist model.15 Zureik himself noted rightly how different his study was from all the previous works on the subject, the vast majority of which were written by Israeli sociologists who focused more on Israeli policies and less on the Palestinian community itself.
Zureik's book not only posed a theoretical challenge, but also demanded that critical analysis of Israel be seen as legitimate, at a time when any criticism of Israel's policies was attacked as being anti-Semitic. Zureik realized that any book on the Palestinians in Israel was also a book about Israel, and that any book written from the minority's point of view was quite likely to challenge the Israelis' self-image, endorsed by many people in the West at the time, of Israel as being a progressive, socialist and democratic society.
Zureik located the Palestinian community in what he called the third cycle of colonization in Palestine: the first being the Ottoman, the second the British and the third Zionist/Israeli. This was also the most modern and institutionalized form of colonialism because the modern state was the vehicle, the infrastructure and the justification for the discriminatory policies towards the Palestinians. Zureik was the first to expose, layer by layer, the tightness of the administrative, legal and educational grip the Jewish state had over the Palestinian population.
His very lengthy and loaded theoretical preface to the book implies a comparison of Israel with apartheid South Africa and a rejection of Israel's new face in the 1980s, that of the pluralist society. The pluralist model implies a soft criticism of modernization, and suggests that there was no need for the brutal elimination of traditional ways of life and modes of behaviour but rather demands that the state allow the various communities that made up the Israeli society to keep their individuality to some extent. Zureik demanded the exclusion of the Palestinians from this benevolent model as they were not just a community in the multicultural fabric of Israel but a colonized minority.
Co-optation and control was the theoretical matrix the American political scientist Ian Lustick chose to challenge the accepted research agenda for the study of the Palestinians in Israel. His book, Arabs in the Jewish State: Israel's Control of a National Minority, was a novelty even down to its title, since the American academic establishment followed the Israeli suit and did not refer to the Palestinians in Israel as a national minority (and the PLO was still regarded as a terrorist organization and not a national movement).16
While Zureik was interested in offering a new paradigm for understanding Israel's policy, Lustick wanted to know why the Palestinian minority in Israel was ‘quiescent’. He recorded the modes of protest, individual and collective, of Palestinians in Israel but concluded they did not amount to sustained political activity. His answer to the question was that the Jewish state constructed a very intricate system of control that kept the Palestinians oppressed on the one hand, but also disinclined to rebel on the other. Lustick's work was impressive, not the least because it was a PhD turned into a book. Very few doctoral students in the USA showed either an interest in, or an empathy for, the Palestinians in Israel. Lustick did not go as far as Zureik in adopting the colonialist paradigm – he preferred the pluralistic one. But his depiction of the daily realities conveyed a picture of anything but pluralism in Israel's relations with the Palestinian minority.
In this respect it is important to mention the pioneering work of Khalil Nakhleh and Sami Khalil Mar'i. Nakhleh was a native son of Rameh in the Galilee; he was one of the first Palestinians to graduate from an American university, in anthropology in the early 1970s, and later became the first director of the Arab Institute in Belmont, Massachusetts. His work posed the first challenges to the hegemonic anthropological Zionist depiction of the Palestinians in general and those in Israel in particular. This was one of the first affirmations of the possibility of basing the Palestinian identity of the community on sound academic research.
Sami Khalil Mar'i was one of the first Palestinian lecturers in the Israeli academy to write critical books and articles on the Arab education system in the Jewish state. To appreciate his work, which in hindsight seems to be much more tame and cautious than twenty-first-century work on similar subjects, one has to realize that he began writing when the political elite outside the ivory towers was still following a hesitant and careful line, and was only at the beginning of escaping from the oppressed margins into which it was squeezed by the Jewish state.
This was the early 1980s, and what followed was the entry of local and younger Palestinian academics into the research fray. They were not a homogenous group: some of them followed their Jewish teachers and looked at the minority as a case study of failed modernization, but cast the blame on Israeli policies rather than on an essentialist analysis of the community's ‘backwardness’. Others, the majority, continued Zureik's work but with an additional theoretical framework that helped in one way or another to explain both the nature of the Israeli oppression and the relatively muted Palestinian reaction inside Israel. Several of them, such as Nadim Rouhana, Majid al-Haj, As'ad Ghanem, Ramzi Suleiman, Adel Manna and Ahmad Sa'di, to mention but a few, were focused on the double marginality model, which explained not only their location within the Jewish state but also the changing relationship with the Palestinian national movement. On the margins of double marginality and impressive, though very limited in numbers, a feminist critique emerged of a triple marginality, that of women inside the community.17
One of the first voices in this respect was that of Said Zaydani, now a scholar and resident of the West Bank, but formerly a Palestinian citizen in Israel. He went further than some of his other colleagues by offering not only an analysis of the situation but also a prognosis, and introduced the term ‘cultural autonomy’ as a kind of a minimum demand on behalf of the national minority. Zaydani was not the only one to leave the confinement of Israeli Jewish academia and prefer an occupied, but distinctly Palestinian, academic milieu in the West Bank. Sharif Kannaneh moved from the north of the country to Bir Zeit, but before that contributed significantly to the research on culture and history and laid the foundation for a more Palestinian-orientated historical research.
His general work was followed by other Palestinian historians in Israel, but, unlike him, very few went back to write the history of the 1948 catastrophe. Even today this is still chiefly the domain of critical Israeli Jewish historians; one can venture a somewhat psychological explanation for this reluctance, that of repression: an unwillingness to confront the trauma of loss and destruction. In any case, this has been changing in recent years. Recently Mustafa Abbasi of the University of Haifa, Mustafa Kabha of the Open University and Adel Manna, head of the Arab Society section at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem produced straightforward historical work on the 1948 period.18 Before them, the historians of the Ottoman period, Butrus Abu-Manneh and Mahmoud Yazbak, explored the history of the land through a narrative that challenges the Zionist myth of a ‘Land without People waiting for a People without a Land’, whether before or during 1948. Others began writing about the history of military rule and particularly challenged the depiction of Israel as a liberal democracy.19
Parallel to these individual efforts, in the late 1970s and early 1980s a group of scholars at the University of Haifa started to develop a more critical engagement with the topic. Their works came out in a short-lived Hebrew publication, Notes of Criticism (Mahbarot Bikoret), part of an overall Marxist critique of the Israeli society. Hence it included not only an examination of the situation of the Palestinian minority but also that of workers, women, Jews who came from Arab and Islamic countries and other marginalized groups, including the Druze community.20
In their wake the beginnings of a more systematic view of Israel as a settler colonialist society followed, while at the margins of the argument committed anti-Zionist activists and academic members of Matzpen added their own, at times feverish but very poignant, critique of the state. Matzpen was an offshoot organization that separated from the Israeli Communist Party in 1962, criticizing the party's obedience to Moscow and its support for the idea of a two-state solution in Israel and Palestine. It had in its midst, before it dissolved in 1982, quite a large share of academics and scholars.
In 1985, Nira Yuval Davis and Oren Yiftachel introduced another fresh perspective that would be adopted by others later on: the indigenous versus settler colonialist theoretical paradigm for understanding spatial and demographic policies against the Palestinian community in Israel; in effect, that the settlers' community received all the advantages at the expense of the indigenous population.21 While the mainstream academia did not adopt this vocabulary, it did accept, even when it was pro-Zionist in its inclination, that ethnicity is the most powerful ingredient in the relationship between the Palestinians and the Jewish state; so powerful that it affects cultural, political and economic relationship.22
The last wave of innovative thinking appeared in the 1990s, and though its impetus weakened at the beginning of the twenty-first century it is still present in the research on the Palestinians in Israel. Elsewhere I have termed this wave post-Zionist research, referring mainly to Jewish scholars who have written critical works on the Zionist past and the Israeli present.23 During that same period, however, Palestinian researchers in Israel have expanded their research, which became more professional and assertive than ever before, bringing them closer to direct confrontation with the state, especially after 2000 when the whole political system in Israel moved to the right.
An important part of the post-Zionist phenomenon has been the work of the critical sociologists in Israel. Theirs was a frontal deconstruction of the modernization theories and assumptions. In addition the research was boosted by developments elsewhere. While Jewish scholars developed a more critical approach to Zionism, past and present, Palestinian scholars looked for academic freedom outside the university and developed their own think-tanks and research institutions so as to be able to widen the scope of the research even further.
An intriguing precursor of this critique was provided by an American-Palestinian scholar, Raja Khalidi. In the late 1980s he identified the strong connection between the application of the modernization theory and the Israeli policy towards the Palestinians in Israel. The Israeli Zionist scholars have attempted to portray the benefits accruing from Israeli citizenship rather than the problems. The stress was thus placed on economic performance in comparison to neighbouring Arab states or to the Mandatory period; the theoretical rights granted by law – in particular the right to vote and to be elected; and the right to education and health services. Khalidi showed that this depiction was based on the conceptions of the modernization theories and their distorted tools for measuring success and development. Thus movement away from traditional patterns of economic production and political behaviour was depicted as morally desirable, and intensified contact with Israeli Jews was seen as improving life for the Palestinians in Israel. In fact, modernization moved economically at two different paces, and thus the Palestinian economy in Israel was an enclaved market within the Israeli economy.24
Leading this trend was by now the famous politician Azmi Bishara, still in his role as an academic, who contributed extensively both theoretically and practically to the study of the community. His main impact was in locating the Palestinians in Israel firmly within the overall Palestinian history and even beyond the Arab world as a whole. In a pioneering article written in 1993 he argued forcefully for the inclusion of the history of the Palestinian community within the general Palestinian and Arab histories. The Palestinians in Israel, he wrote, ‘have the same historical departure point as the other Palestinian groups’.25 This observation enabled him to chart more clearly the uniqueness of the community's national agenda within the general Palestinian reality.
What made them different is their location as a national minority on the margins of the Jewish state. They became citizens of a state they had not chosen to join and it had not elected to have them as citizens.
Bishara's personal history, as well as the growing involvement of Palestinian Israeli scholars in the research into the group, indicates how superfluous it would be to look for ‘objective’ or even neutral research on the topic. Similarly, the counter-narrative of a community enjoying a benevolent modernizing state that offers them a better future than that of other Arab peoples is only provided by Israeli scholars who declare themselves to be loyal Zionist citizens of the state. This is not to say that the research is not professional, but it is full of contradictions because, apart from a very few outsiders, the subject directly affects those who write about it. The history of the research is thus marked by these affiliations and identities as much as by the declassification of new material or the development of new theoretical approaches.
In the 1990s a plethora of articles and books enriched beyond recognition the study of the Palestinians in Israel – ironically at a time when the overall peace process totally ignored them. This author contributed, and subscribed to the more critical point of view, as this book clearly shows, but nonetheless has relied heavily on the works and professionalism of the more conventional and mainstream scholars with whom he disagrees ideologically.
The critical, and one can say currently the dominant, view is that of Israel as an ethnic state imposed on a bi-national reality. The tension between the practical and symbolic representations of the state as purely Jewish in an absolute reality of bi-nationalism has been the main source of the tensions in the past and could be crucial in determining Israel's fate in the future. So far, governments and the establishment have succeeded in maintaining by force a correlation between the Jewish national boundaries and the civil one, which has left the Palestinians outside the common good, in republican terms, and made them stateless members of the state. Growing numbers of researchers have warned that this may not be sustainable in the long term.
What has marginalized the more loyal research are the facts on the ground. Even mainstream scholars could not deny that sixty years of continued discrimination could be explained merely as a policy; it reflected a strategy. Through analysis of the education system, the official language, spatial policies, legal practices, media treatment26 and other aspects of life, the discrimination has become more evident, even if at times subtle. All this essential research has been done by Palestinian scholars teaching and working in Israel.27 This academic representation challenges the Israeli pretence that it is the only democracy in the Middle East (which it is, but only for its Jewish citizens). It is also impressive as an interdisciplinary scholarly effort that at times has needed collaborative work, quite often by Arab and Jewish academics working together, to provide a comprehensive picture of the reality in which the Palestinians in Israel live.
Some (for example the human rights and peace activist Uri Davis) went as far as to define the state as an apartheid state on the basis of its present laws, practices and realities.28 The record in terms of economic policies is from any theoretical perspective damning, but the record in terms of standard of living and health (for instance) less so. The colonialist paradigm was also introduced to the study of the Palestinian community; the methods employed by the white settlers in South Africa were emulated by the early Zionists and the discourse explaining why White had a supreme right over the land was echoed by some of the writings of the mainstream Zionist ideologues, as can be seen from the studies by the Palestinian scholar Nur Masalha.29 This model, as can be seen from a later book by Jimmy Carter,30 is reserved more commonly for the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This is a good place to highlight the importance of Nur Masalha's contribution over the years. Born in Daburiyya in the Galilee and blocked from pursuing a decent academic career in Israel, he moved to England but never lost his interest in the community. His knowledge of Hebrew and of the Israeli Jewish mindset enabled him to analyse and explain Israeli policies over the years. He was also one of the first scholars to highlight the plight of the internal refugees in Israel.
The new research has also contributed to a different vocabulary and political dictionary. In Israel the term ‘Arabs’ has been replaced with all kinds of variations on the theme of the Palestinians in Israel. The new discourse also includes dichotomies that have never used before, such as settlers versus native or indigenous population.
The preferred term for the Israeli state now seems to be an ethnocracy, or the alternative (invented by Sammy Smooha, who is still an important voice in research on the Palestinians in Israel) of an ethnic democracy.31 The former does not recognize the constitutional and political regime in Israel as democratic, apart from superficial and formal democratic procedures, whereas the latter includes Israel as one possible sample, albeit a flawed one, of a democratic regime. In this respect, the works of Nadim Rouhana, Oren Yiftachel and As'ad Ghanem are important consolidations of this conceptual approach.32
Whether Israel is analysed as an ethnocracy or as an ethnic democracy, in both models it is a regime obsessed with demographic questions, an obsession which has overridden any other considerations when it comes to the formulation of policies towards the Palestinian minority. Thus even sixty years on, the academic research navigates between a meta-narrative of oppression, internal colonialism and discrimination on the one hand, and individual stories of relative success and loopholes in the system that enable some sort of equality and normality on the other. In the background also are hopeful statements by the government about allocating more money to the ‘sector’ (as official Israeli discourse defines the Palestinian minority) while at the same time every political representative who is not a member of a Zionist party is frequently called in by the police to be investigated on charges of treason or incitement.
The bottom line is a very rich literature which, especially in recent years, covers almost every aspect of life in the Palestinian community. It forms an articulate position not only about the Palestinians in Israel but also about the history of knowledge production on them. This literature has not always resonated with the agenda and the problems of the Palestinian community itself, but its discussions, even in the most abstract way, of issues such as identity, tradition and dignity, often echo less academic and more popular discussions within the Palestinian community.
The obsession with demography should have given demographers an unprecedented role in academic research on the community, and there is a high proportion of that kind of research in Israel. Most of it is still in the form of very professional, jargon-heavy, quantitative social-science articles. Some of these works are not even overtly ideological or political. Thus thedemographers were able to extract more information from the Palestinian community, not only as a result of political awareness or commitment, but by the improvement of the techniques in this particular field.33
Demographers have also done essential work over the years in exposing the improvements in the community's living standards, the decrease in death and birth rates, the rise in the age of those getting married and similar features that have breathed fresh air into the unfashionable modernization theories of transformation. While the data reaffirmed a process of change within the recognizable parameters of modernization, when compared to the patterns of change in the Jewish community it suggested the same oppressive, and in part stagnant, picture depicted by the other academic disciplines. And, as mentioned, nowadays the preferred explanation for the gap is the ethnocratic model, that is, an intentional discrimination and favouritism towards one ethnic group at the expense of the other.
I have not mentioned every type of research that has been carried out, as the Palestinian community has been the subject matter of almost every theory in the human and social sciences that one can think of. Thus, for example, psychology students quite often targeted the Palestinian community in order to test the validity of socio-psychological theories, and through them tried to understand the relationship between the Jews and the Arabs in Israel – a pioneer in this field was Ramzi Suleiman of the University of Haifa. Theories that engaged with inter- and intra-group conflicts, self and external images in the making of conflicts – the work done by Daniel Bar-Tal and his associates at the University of Tel Aviv has been particularly extensive – and the role of group therapies in solving the tensions are quite abundant and useful.34
But the most important work has been and is still being done in political sociology, geography, political science and cultural studies. Put together, as has been attempted in this book, they compensate for the lack of media attention and for the world's indifference to this crucial group of people on whom much of what happens in Israel and Palestine may depend in the not-so-distant future.