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The Palestinians in Israel Readings in History, Politics and Society Edited by Second Volume
Abstract and Figures
The Palestinians in Israel: Reading in History Politics and Society. Vol 2
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... This regional urbanism characterized Palestinian urban life before the 1948 Nakba and continues to be one of its most salient features. Secondly, we follow Rouhana and Sabbagh-Khoury (2019) in identifying a widening practice of a 'return of history', whereby pre-1948 urbanism is remembered, celebrated and practiced both through an immaterial collective consciousness and in various material ways (Sabbagh-Khoury, 2018). ...
... Against this backdrop, the destruction of Palestinian cities since the Nakba 4 has been profound. From a society with multiple, flourishing urban centres, most Palestinians were forced into non-urban living both inside and outside their Historic Cities (Tamari, 2008;Sabbagh-Khoury, 2018). 5 While the specific Zionist and Israeli operations that took place in each city varied, Palestine was de-urbanized and Judaized through a few key measures. ...
... 8 Despite their demographic composition, these cities' classification as 'mixed' is bitterly disputed for its contribution to the enduring erasure of Palestinian urbanism in general and the histories and identity of Historic Cities in particular. As such, mixed cities are more critically referred to as settler-colonial cities (Sabbagh-Khoury, 2018). ...
This essay puts forward a theoretical framework for Palestinian Indigenous urbanism. It argues that the specific and diverse expressions of this urbanism are partly an outcome of the fact that Palestinian cities—as a modern urban form—predate the Zionist settler colonization of Palestine. We centre the longue durée of Palestinian urbanism as a constitutive mode for contemporary experiences of Palestinian citizens in Israel and link it to Israel's persistent attempts to erase the urban landscapes of Palestine, symbolically and materially. We discuss how the de‐urbanization of Historic Palestinian cities in Israel since the beginning of the Nakba has drastically changed the urban and rural landscapes of these cities, ultimately leading Palestinians to adapt, develop and create new forms of urbanism in and around cities. Although Palestinians live in very different types of cities today, Palestinian urbanism broadly manifests as a presence of the absence, namely as the recursion of pre‐1948 urban life. Thus, in this essay we provide a new lens through which to understand Indigenous urbanism as a recursive and relational anti‐hegemonic structure that predates and can outlive settler‐colonial violence.
The Bedouin and Jewish inhabitants of the southern Israeli desert region share a common desert vista. However, they are diverse, multicultural communities who suffer inequity in access to valuable resources such as water. Between 2019 and 2021, Common Views art collective initiated a socially engaged durational art project with Bedouin and Jewish inhabitants entitled Common Views. The art collective seeks to enact sustainable practices of water preservation as a mutually fertile ground for collaboration between the conflicted communities, by reawakening and revitalizing rainwater harvesting, as part of traditional local desert life. Their interventions promote new concepts of Environmental Reconciliation, aiming to confront social-ecological issues, the commons, and resource equity, grounded in interpersonal collaborative relationships with stratified local communities. Their site-specific art actions seek to drive a public discourse on environmental and sustainable resources, while reflecting on the distribution of social and spatial imbalance. They take part in contemporary art discourse relative to socially engaged practices, yet their uniqueness lies in conflictual sites such as the discord arising from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and their proposed model for resolution linking politics with environment. It utilizes renegotiation with histories and heritage, as a vehicle to evoke enhanced awareness of mutual environmental concerns in an attempt at reconciliation on political grounds.
This article explores how brucellosis became a racialized disease in Israel, where almost all patients are Palestinians. Informed by legal and historical research, the article demonstrates how colonial and settler-colonial policies have targeted Palestinians and their goats and contributed to the distribution of brucellosis along ethno-national lines. Goats, once ubiquitous to the landscape, became enemies of the Israeli state and were blamed for the “destruction” of nature. Under Israeli rule, legal policies not only seized and confiscated Palestinian land but also targeted goat grazing and led to a steep reduction in the number of goats. The resulting depeasantization and concentration of Palestinians in dense poor townships shaped goat grazing as a backyard practice with lack of trust in the hostile state and its brucellosis eradication campaigns. We argue that state policies of organized violence and organized abandonment have shaped the current ecology of brucellosis as a racialized disease.
IMPORTANCE The importance of this article is the novelty in combining public health, colonial studies, and legal research to understand the ecology of human brucellosis. This approach allows us to move from a “snap-shot” reading of diseases and cultural practices toward a reading of bacteria, animals, and humans within their political and historical context. The article uses a settler colonial lens to examine the racialized distribution of human brucellosis in Israel and traces colonial policies toward Palestinians and goats—both seen as unwanted intruders to the newly established Israeli nation state. We place these policies in a context of organized violence and organized abandonment, building on the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore to read the power hierarchies of humans, animals, and diseases and how they shape practices and disease.
This volume presents new perspectives on Israeli society, Palestinian society, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Based on historical foundations, it examines how Israel institutionalizes ethnic privileging among its nationally diverse citizens. Arab, Israeli, and American contributors discusses the paradoxes of democratic claims in ethnic states, as well as dynamics of social conflict in the absence of equality. This book advances a new understanding of Israel's approach to the Palestinian citizens, covers the broadest range of areas in which Jews and Arabs are institutionally differentiated along ethnic basis, and explicates the psychopolitical foundations of ethnic privileges. It will appeal to students and scholars who seek broader views on Israeli society and its relationship with the Arab citizens, and want to learn more about the status of the Palestinian citizens in Israel and their collective experience as both citizens and settler-colonial subjects.
The relationship between Palestinians and the Israeli state was shaped firstly through the trauma of the Nakba and the subsequent threat of another expulsion. The events of the Nakba engendered revolutionary changes in the demography, geography, and the architecture of Palestinian physical space, and turned the Palestinians in Israel into a national minority. Yet Palestinian discourse in Israel, much like the general Palestinian discourse, did not collectively raise the issue of the Nakba in the public sphere until recently. It was only in 1998 that the Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Internally Displaced Refugees organized the first Nakba march. Since then parades to the destroyed villages take place every year on Israeli Independence Day and different groups organize memorials to the Nakba. Up until then, those who had been displaced would more privately visit their villages on this day to mourn and relive the memories of their expulsion from their villages. Sanbar points out that "paradoxical though it may seem, as long as their exile remained absolute the Palestinians said practically nothing about their exodus-only about its consequences. It is as if the trauma they experienced had made them mute" (Sanbar, 2001: 93). This truncated discourse suggests a notion of split colonial consciousness. This chapter presents the voices of Palestinian political leaders on issues regarded as taboo in Israeli discourse; they offer their perception of historical justice in relation to Jewish immigration and the repatriation of Palestinian refugees. It locates and theorizes a principal source of tension in the majority-minority relations in the State of Israel by giving voice to the subordinated Palestinians on the Israeli state's policies of immigration. This is to overcome an oversight in existing studies, which refer to Israeli policies of immigration and Israeli demographic practices, but do not delve deeply into the multiple layers of Palestinian discourse about them. The findings of this research are, however, specific to the Palestinian political leadership. Further research is required to explore whether generalizations can be made to the larger Palestinian society in Israel. Though they all came from parties that criticized the exclusionary Zionist foundation of the state, the interviewees expressed a variety of opinions on the Israeli Law of Return and the Palestinian right of return. Using Bhabha, I argue that under Israeli internal colonialism the discourses of the colonized are rife with contradictory logics, conflicting desires, and bewildering anomalies of the double silence on hegemonic perspectives related to Jewish immigration and refugee repatriation. I found a strong divide at the core of the interviews. Previous seminal work in postcolonial literature focused on a dichotomous colonizer-colonized relationship. Franz Fanon, for example, focused chiefly on the consciousness of the colonized whereas Edward Said's earlier work generally analyzed the colonizers' consciousness (Moore-Gilbert, 1997: 116; Fanon, 1990; Said, 1978). Bhabha (1994) on the other hand, offers a model that links the two and examines the "forms of multiple and contradictory beliefs" among both the colonizer and colonized (Moore-Gilbert, 1997: 116). He highlights the tensions, disturbances, and fractures within colonized discourses (Bhabha, 1994: 116). Similarly, Spivak's skepticism regarding the ability of the subaltern to speak (Spivak, 1994) suggests that when we speak about the voices of colonial subjects we, to some extent, romanticize their resistance to colonial violence. Palestinians on the one hand resist the Jewish state, and on the other, want to participate in its developed economy. Colonial subjects live simultaneously in several political spaces and develop a multifaceted, sometimes contradictory, consciousness because of their compound living circumstances and political exigencies. In this vein, Raef Zreik (2003a, 2003b) describes two dominant alternating drives prevailing in Palestinian politics since 1948: the "Pole of Justice" and the "Pole of Power." According to the "Pole of Justice," Palestinians sense profound feelings of injustice that resulted from the trauma of 1948 and from discrimination against them produced by the establishment of a Jewish state. The "Pole of Power" results from the sense of powerlessness and inability to affect the existing reality. This strategy is founded on a "pragmatic" evaluation of the limitations on the Palestinian minority's abilities in comparison to the power of the state. Following Memmi (1991), a sense of weakness influences Palestinian perceptions of the existing political reality, as is the case in every colonial system. Thus, Palestinians manifest a colonized consciousness, split in this case between justice politics and everyday existence. I found both poles reflected in the interviews, sometimes invoked by the same person. Different processes may be at work simultaneously, including self-censorship, denial, fear, or the dictation of economic interests. All these processes work together, and none can serve as the sole explanation. Foucault (1995) emphasizes that subjugation in the modern era involves constant subordination, control, and monitoring of subjects of the state. I contend that the oppressive practices that the State of Israel has used against Palestinians over the years-starting with the Nakba and followed by the military government and its transformation to less-visible forms of control-created fear among Palestinians with a prolonged deterrent effect. While not irreversible, this effect lowered the threshold of demands made by the Palestinian minority for many years. Self-censorship operated even when the oppressive Nakba practices were not actually implemented. The very fact that Palestinians thought that such practices could be expected was enough to forgo opposition to issues considered taboo in mainstream Israeli discourse. As a result of the collective trauma experienced, the Palestinians repressed dealing with its collective ramifications and consequences, including Jewish immigration and the Palestinian refugee issue. They tried to survive and resist the state's oppressive daily practices and discrimination and maintain their presence in the homeland, while fearing further transfer. Fear alone cannot explain the entire phenomenon of the absence of a discourse on the repatriation of refugees. Otherwise, the gradually intensifying discourse on the right of return since 2000 cannot be accounted for. In the historical conditions and political circumstances of the late 1980s, the prevailing political movements at the time did not articulate the question of the return of refugees. Although the state employed tremendous power, it failed to achieve its aim of capitulation on the issue of the right of return. Most Palestinians still hold the view that the refugees should return to their homeland regardless of the prevailing power structures between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
During the rise in Arab nationalist mobilization in the 1950s throughout the Arab world, al-'Ard was established in Israel parallel to these movements but with a unique combination of nationalist pan-Arab ideology tailored to the special situation of Palestinians in Israel. While its ideology was pan-Arab, its activities and demands focused on issues that were most urgent to Palestinians, such as the right of return, and on issues specific to Palestinians within Israel, including the cessation of the military government and of land confiscation, and the extension of social and economic rights. In my discussion of al-'Ard, I attend to the agency of Palestinian citizens who resisted Israeli dominance in various and innovative ways; they presented a challenge to Israeli claims of democracy by asserting their rights to negotiate their status as part of the new state and as part of their history. These attempts faced profound Israeli repression and an extensive system that the Israeli government utilized to maintain its control over the Palestinians. This repression and control were part of the Israeli rejection of Palestinian political rights as a national minority and as citizens of the state. It is also an expression of the Israeli policy that clearly viewed Palestinian rights as limited by the existing definition of the state as Jewish. Any attempt to challenge this definition led the state to combat it, asserting that it was acting as a "defensive democracy" in repressing Palestinian political mobilization. When al-'Ard started as a political movement, the Israeli government was still in the zenith of its use of military repression against the Arab minority that stayed within the state in order to assure they would remain a marginalized minority that would not interfere with the Zionist program to build the "Jewish state" in Palestine. The international situation, the tension with Egypt and the Arab world, and the fresh memories of the 1948 and 1956 wars did not allow any space for Palestinian discourse within Israeli society to be voiced. The Israeli-Jewish public, told that its very existence was still endangered, was all too ready to accept governmental policies toward and representations of the Palestinian minority, including the claim that al-'Ard was an agent of the Arab world set to destroy the state. In this tense context, al-'Ard's leaders expressed their ideas in a direct, uncompromising manner and were influenced by statements of Nasser and the nationalist discourse in the Arab world that they often repeated. This contributed to alienating the movement from the Israeli public, which viewed it as a threat. It also isolated al-'Ard from big segments of the Palestinian community who lived under the repressive mechanisms of military rule and witnessed the suppressive measures used against the movement. This isolation aided the government in its determination to break it. Al-'Ard members were harassed and the movement was restricted and eventually banned. It was not allowed to practice political freedom in a democratic way and could not compete to win the support of public opinion for the ideas it represented. Although many of the positions and struggles that al-'Ard assumed at the time already existed within the Israeli Communist Party, the latter was tolerated more due to the CPI's joint Arab-Jewish nature, and to the greater caution that its activists exercised in expressing their positions. By 1965, al-'Ard was banned and all its activities were terminated. Edward Said asserts that it was the first resurgence of Palestinian national consciousness after 1948 (Said and Barsamian, 1994: 24). Its members maintain that the movement's political impact and inspiration remained (Qahwaji, 1978: 66). They claim that they raised and strengthened national awareness, organized national activism, exposed oppressive Israeli policies, and led to a greater involvement of Communist activists in the nationalist movement (Qahwaji, 1972: 474). They also maintain that they developed a young leadership who were pioneers in the struggle for Arabs' rights in Israel thereafter (Amun et al. 1981: 27). They contend that the founding of al-'Ard led to an ideological continuation in nationalist Palestinian groups and parties that developed later, including Abna' al-Balad (Sons of the Village) and al-Tajamu' al-Watani al-Dimuqrati (National Democratic Assembly) (interviews, Me'ari and Jiryis, 2005). However, although both of these movements espoused an ideology similar to al-'Ard, they developed in different historical contexts and played different roles, especially after the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. At the same time, it could be argued that the oppressive measures that were taken against al-'Ard deterred others from trying to establish other political parties and from being active within the Palestinian community in Israel. It took almost twenty years until another independent party, the Socialist List led by Muhammad Me'ari, was established. However, during that time, there was no lack of Palestinian community activities, as the CPI gained strength as the main oppositional voice of the community. It is hard to determine, after the fact, what the long-term impact of al-'Ard was. In particular, it is difficult to assess the extent of the support it achieved; furthermore, the support it could have achieved had it not been suppressed is hard to verify. The openly pan-Arab nationalist discourse it used helped make it part of the wider Palestinian discourse outside Israel. Yet, even members of the movement itself were obliged to take further precautions in their future political activities or leave the country altogether. What is clear from exploring the history of al-'Ard is that Palestinians within Israel found various ways and utilized different spaces in order to resist Israeli hegemonic and exclusionary policies and assert their identity.
In terms of its political appeal the Islamic revival of the last few decades is in some ways a unique phenomenon. We can plausibly understand this appeal to arise from the relevance of certain elements of the Islamic heritage to the predicament of Muslim populations living in Third-World conditions. At the same time we can argue that other religious heritages have less to offer their contemporary adherents in this context. Here the idea of fundamentalism can be helpful: on one simple definition it serves to highlight a feature of the Islamic revival that is particularly adaptive under contemporary conditions. Finally, it is worth noting that despite its exceptional features, the basic elements of the Islamic revival are familiar in contexts closer to home.
This highly original historical and political analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict combines the unique perspectives of two prominent segments of the Middle Eastern puzzle: Israeli Jews and the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Written jointly by an Israeli anthropologist and a Palestinian family therapist born weeks apart to two families from Haifa, Coffins on Our Shoulders merges the personal and the political as it explores the various stages of the conflict, from the 1920s to the present. The authors weave vivid accounts and vignettes of family history into a sophisticated multidisciplinary analysis of the political drama that continues to unfold in the Middle East. Offering an authoritative inquiry into the traumatic events of October 2000, when thirteen Palestinian citizens of Israel were killed by Israeli police during political demonstrations, the book culminates in a radical and thought-provoking blueprint for reform that few in Israel, in the Arab world, and in the West can afford to ignore.
As member of this group called "Israeli Arabs", I am going to try, through my own experience, that I now qualify as a Palestinian and no longer "Israeli Arab", to explain the reasons of this change. My actual identity and my socio-political consciousness of a minority in the Israeli State are made of several elements in which unfairness and daily humiliations to Israeli Arab play a major role. During the war in Lebanon in July 2006, the Israeli Arab showed their solidarity with the Lebanon people and the resistance and their hostility to the Israeli politics. Jewish Israeli have seen in it the undeniable loyalty of Israeli Arabs, as the later consider that the attitude of the Jewish Israeli towards them as the brightest manifestation of their impossiblity to accept their presence.