Abstract
This paper seeks to re-examine the relationship between Israel and its Palestinian citizens. It offers an alternative reading, that while acknowledging the procedural connection of citizenship, introduces the settler-colonial structure as a central analytical framework for understanding the origins of this complex relationship and its evolution. We trace, with a broad brush, the various phases of the Palestinian citizens' collective political experience from 1948, when they were transformed from being an integral part of the fabric of a nation fighting and losing a double struggle against a settler-colonial project – the Zionist project that sought to establish a ‘Jewish national home’ in their homeland – and a struggle of independence against British colonial rule, to a fully dominated minority in a foreign state established on their homeland and bringing about the expulsion of the majority of their people. We also anchor their experience as an integral part of the people of Palestine in the pre-1948 period when their homeland was an intrinsic part of a larger Arab World, and in their post-1948 experience when they became hermetically isolated from the rest of their people and the whole Arab World.
1. Introduction
This paper considers Israel's relationship with its Palestinian citizens as a special and complex case of settler-colonial control.Footnote1 In this case, outsiders come to a populated land that they claim as their own, and displace most of its indigenous inhabitants while granting citizenship to those who are not expelled for reasons related to the international circumstances surrounding the recognition of the settler-colonial state. We argue that although the relationship was settler colonial in essence, other unique characteristics of this case moderated the impact of the settler-colonial policies in some instances, aggravated them in others, and often blurred them, precisely as a result of Israel's decision to grant citizenship to those Palestinians who remained on the part of Palestine that became Israel.
Understanding the evolution of the Palestinian collective political position within Israel requires contextualization within the framework of the conflict between the Zionist movement – a settler-colonial movement with national claims – and the indigenous Palestinian national movement. As part of the pre-1948 Palestinian social and political fabric, the Palestinians (including those who later became citizens of Israel) endured Zionist immigration and the expanding settler colonies in their home/land. They resisted what they considered a settler-colonial project to take over their home/land. From their own point of view, it was not what most of them did or did not do as a collective that made their political destiny after the 1948 war different from that of other Palestinians, but rather the Zionist plans and the extent of their implementation in the face of Palestinian resistance and the intervention of Arab armies.
In fact, historical research is lacking as to the circumstances of these Palestinians' remaining in the part of Palestine that became Israel – whether in their own villages and cities or as internally displaced persons (IDPs) who were expelled from their towns but found refuge in other Arab towns.Footnote2 Yet they conceived their destiny as a subsidiary outcome of a chaotic process of ethnic cleansing in which the majority of their people were expelled from their homeland, mostly to neighboring states.
After the 1948 war and the various ceasefire agreements with the neighboring Arab countries, approximately 156,000 Palestinians stayed in the post-war borders of the Jewish state, representing 18% of its total population.Footnote3 Small communities remained in some major Palestinian cities whose Palestinian residents had been expelled, including Jaffa, Ramle, Lydda, Acre, and Haifa, many of whom are IDPs.Footnote4 Other cities, such as Safad, Tiberias, and Bisan were completely cleansed of their Arab residents.Footnote5
In fulfillment of the United Nations' stipulations for the partition of Palestine, Palestinians who managed to stay in the Jewish state were given Israeli citizenship. Yet the confines of rights and duties of their citizenship were governed by the national interests of the Zionist state whose future depended on bringing in millions of settlers who were Jewish citizens of other countries. Therefore, in 1948, the Palestinian citizens were immediately placed under strict military government and emergency regulations.Footnote6 Although the state claimed that it imposed military rule on the Arab population out of security concerns, the most evident aims included control of land, economy, and demographic balance, as well as keeping the Arab population under the complete domination of Jewish society.Footnote7 However, this apparatus had to be implemented against those who had become citizens in the newly established state, hence the need for modifications of some characteristics like those that defined other settler-colonial cases. Thus, the foundations of a new type of citizenship were established under the military rule, providing for what we now call ‘settler-colonial citizenship’.
This paper traces the evolution of settler-colonial citizenship over four historical phases, and the Palestinian community's attempts to confront it. We examine the state's settler-colonial structures that constitute settler-colonial citizenship and address the community's collective political responses to these structures. Thus, we discuss citizenship under military rule (1948–1966), the earliest phase, during which the foundations of settler-colonial citizenship were constituted. We then highlight the ascendance of what we call ‘The Equality Paradigm’, a phase in which hegemonic political forces within the Palestinian community sought to achieve equality in the state without challenging its Jewish Zionist identity (1970s–1990s) or addressing its settler-colonial structure. The 1990s marked the emergence of a new political program that appeared after the Oslo Agreements in 1993 and called for Israel to be transformed from an ethnic Jewish state to a democratic state for all its citizens; starting after the events of October 2000, this phase witnessed the emergence of demands for collective rights among the Arab political elites and professionals. While these political and academic elites did not initially describe Israel's relationship to its Arab citizens as settler-colonial, the settler-colonial perspective was gradually invoked by them during the third phase to describe this relationship. Finally, we introduce the newest phase in the Palestinian citizens' political experience – what we term ‘the return of history’, which emerged parallel to the gradual decline of the two-state paradigm. It is in this phase that the consciousness of a settler-colonial condition also re-emerged.
Before we start, we should briefly emphasize three points. First, although the paper covers four separate historical periods, we do not assume that there has been a linear development from one ‘mode’ of political thought and political experience to another. This is not a developmental argument. We simply seek to trace the emergence of new phases (such as the equality paradigm) that became dominant in particular historical periods, that challenged previous paradigms (such as the state for all its citizens which challenged the equality paradigm), or that built on previous phases. Second, the phases are not necessarily characterized by the total domination of a single mode of political thinking. To the contrary, all phases have seen multiple discourses and perspectives among the diverse Arab community in Israel. Rather, it is the prominence of some perspectives over others that we seek to highlight. Third, each phase was the result of systemic interactions among complex social and political forces, including internal developments within the Palestinian community, regional developments, and dynamic interactions with Israel's Zionist ideology and policies. We do not claim to offer an analysis of these interactions, but merely to identify the main characteristics and historical context of each phase.
2. The foundations of settler-colonial citizenship: the military government period
Although most Palestinians originally saw the occupation of their homeland by the Jewish Zionist forces and the Arab inhabitants' evacuation from the land as a temporary development that would most likely be reversed, the first two decades of Israeli statehood constituted a critical period in which the foundations of the relationship between the state and its Arab citizens were laid down so as to define the characteristics of settler-colonial citizenship. For the majority of the Arab residents, the establishment of a Jewish state on their land meant that foreigners, mainly from Europe, came to rule over them and over their homeland.Footnote8 They did not consider the new state to be their own, nor did the new state consider them to be part of its project. To the contrary, the Arabs in Israel were perceived and treated as an obstacle to achieving the state's Zionist goals, that is, to colonize the land for the purpose of establishing on it the state of the Jewish people. In order to overcome this obstacle – the very presence of the Palestinians who remained and the land that they owned – Israel laid the legal, political, and cultural foundations to achieve its settler-colonial goals. But, as mentioned above, these Palestinians were granted Israeli citizenship and Israel's Declaration of Independence referred to them as ‘full and equal’, thus complicating the efforts to openly implement overt settler-colonial policies against them. Indeed, the decision to grant citizenship to the indigenous residents has had a critical impact on the dynamics of relations between Israel and its Palestinian citizens, between Israel and the Palestinians in general, and on Israel's own place and legitimacy in the international community.
Israel granted citizenship to the Arabs who remained partly in fulfillment of the international demands and also to facilitate acceptance of the UN General Assembly's partition plan. Offering citizenship was not objectionable to various Zionist groups, as these Palestinians, a small and unorganized community, were not likely to pose a demographic threat to the hegemony of the majority.Footnote9
One of the most prominent features of citizenship, the right to vote and be elected, was granted, as were other social and economic rights. But at the same time, Israel introduced policies that made meaningful citizenship unattainable. After ‘getting rid’ of most of the Palestinians in its territory, the settler-colonial project sought to circumvent the Palestinians who remained and to whom citizenship was granted. The settler-colonial project now had to deal with Arabs who were granted citizenship constituting approximately 18% of its citizens. Their citizenship was overlooked when Israel opened the gates of the country to Jewish immigration only and closed it to Palestinians who were expelled from the country; established an exclusive Jewish sovereignty in a homeland which is now considered the homeland of the Jewish people only; maintained Zionist hegemony that emphasized exclusive Jewish control over land and space; and institutionalized and constitutionalized the state as Jewish. In a sense, Israel made the part of Palestine on which it was established a settler colony of itself. Israel played the role of the metropolis, with the immigrants (whose right to citizenship was determined by Israel based on their being Jewish or the extent of their relationship to Jews) becoming the colonizers.Footnote10 Its most evident aims related to land and space; culture, history, and Arab traces in the country; demography; political control, and the extraction of economic resources; and advancing an epistemological and psychological infrastructure to justify the settler-colonial project. In order to achieve the first four of these goals (and other objectives), Israel imposed military rule on the Arab Palestinian population from 1948 to 1966. For almost a whole generation, the Arab communities in Israel were isolated from each other, from the Arab World, and from the Jewish population. Many of these goals were justified by Israel on the basis of national security, which makes sense only if national security is defined in settler-colonial terms – that is fulfilling the settler-colonial project as discussed below. In what follows, we will discuss the first four goals – achieved under military rule, in a settler-colonial framework.
2.1. Control of land and appropriation of space
Perhaps the most prominent aspect of the settler-colonial project for the native Palestinians was the continuous appropriation of their space.Footnote11 From its early years, the Israeli state sought to control the spoils of war, and transfer them to Jewish ownership – including Arab lands, as well as the property that the Palestinians left behind, including private and public real estate, farms and factories, stores, and banks.
This process was done in various ways, often publicly and openly, and given the name ‘Judaization’, which means the transformation of Palestinian space into ‘Jewish space’. Since the Israeli state's inception, it has used different programs to ‘Judaize’ the space.Footnote12 Through well-documented legal manipulations, much of the land was transferred to the Jewish National Fund and came under the exclusive ownership of ‘the Jewish people’, which includes Jews who are not citizens of Israel but excludes citizens of Israel who are not Jewish.Footnote13 For example, Article 125 of Israel's emergency regulations (the same regulations that were applied by the British mandate), which allowed the military governor to declare a place ‘closed’ due to unspecified security reasons, was used to forbid Arab citizens from reaching their lands. Once the land was not cultivated for a specified number of years, it was then ‘legally’ confiscated by the state.Footnote14 In the first three years after the state of Israel was established, 305 Jewish settlements were constructed, many of them on land expropriated from Palestinians,Footnote15 but to this day, not one single Arab town has been established (other than the Bedouin concentration townships, which were constructed in order to evict the Bedouin from their land).Footnote16
Palestinian space was erased both physically and symbolically. Hundreds of towns that had been inhabited by Palestinians who left their homes with the ethnic cleansing that took place during the 1948 war were completely demolished, and the physical evidence of their existence obliterated.Footnote17 This process continued vigorously after 1967. Even the space that was not physically destroyed was symbolically erased. For example, Ein Houd was one of the very few Palestinian villages that was not physically eliminated, but its Palestinian inhabitants were expelled and became either refugees in Arab countries or internally displacedFootnote18 (many camping just outside their town).Footnote19 However, its houses and their town's landscape were almost completely preserved and the town transformed into an ‘artists’ town’ that is now known by the Hebrew name Ein Hod, Hebraizing the original Arab name. As such, its Palestinian features were severed from their cultural and certainly political and national identity.Footnote20 Thus the Palestinian town, even if powerfully present, became a live example of the vigor of the Zionist propensity for symbolic erasure.Footnote21
Similarly, the Palestinian neighborhoods that stayed intact in many cities whose inhabitants were expelled in 1948 were stripped of their national identity and used to settle the influx of Jewish immigrants.Footnote22 While these neighborhoods, such as the Katamon neighborhood in Jerusalem or the artists' neighborhood in the old city in Jaffa, remained physically intact, they went through a similar process of symbolic erasure in which their political identity and cultural history were erased and they became disconnected from their indigenous national character in the settler-colonialist consciousness. They were simply transformed into Jewish neighborhoods.Footnote23 Even many Palestinian houses and buildings that were built with unique Arab architectural flavor were used to settle the influxes of Jewish immigrants while maintaining ‘authentic character’, thus gaining higher market value. These structures, which became known in the real estate market innocuously as ‘Arab houses’, went through a similar process of erasing their indigenous national identity.
This drive was so powerful that it was even applied to mosques, some of which were transformed to spaces for public use, such as bars and restaurants.Footnote24 The erasure of space also focused on the map, including Palestinian names of streets, mountains, streams, and valleys. This Judaization was done in a deliberate way in which a governmental committee determined the naming process in order to eliminate Palestinian history or disguise Palestinian origins.Footnote25 Occasionally, new Hebrew names were selected that resonated with the original Palestinian names to give the impression that the Palestinian places were originally Jewish places that had now been re-taken by Jews – their original owners.
This process resembles the state's course of action vis-à-vis the Palestinians who remained in their homeland – simultaneously granting them citizenship while trying to erase their history and identity. A profound manifestation of the settler-colonial erasure is the name used to refer to the Palestinian citizens. They have been referred to as ‘Israeli Arabs’, the ‘Arabs of Israel’, and ‘minorities’. For decades, the Israel Statistical Bureau referred to them as ‘non-Jews’. Sometimes they are called, lightly, ‘our Arabs’. Today, the Israeli media refers to Palestinian citizens commonly as ‘Arviyeh Yisrael’ (‘the Arabs of Israel’). What is common about these terms is that they erase Palestinians' national identity, deny their Palestinian indigeneity, while at the same time clarifying that they are not part of the colonialist group.
Erasing the traces of the indigenous people served a number of settler-colonial aims – severing the relationship between the Palestinians and their history and land, physically blocking refugees' from returning to ‘their homes’ if home is defined as the physical space of their towns, and hiding traces of the dispossession project from the Jewish public.
2.2. History and culture
A comparable process has been applied to history and culture – eliminating Palestinian history and replacing it with Jewish history. These processes were implemented using powerful state institutions such as media, education, and carefully designed military service. Jewish settlers needed an epistemological structure that justified establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. Erasing physical traces of the Palestinians, as well as their history and culture, became essential to the epistemological and psychological justificatory system. In addition to place names, time coordinates that defined the history of the country were radically reallocated to underscore biblical Jewish history and de-emphasize Arab history, in effect drawing a continuous connection between biblical history and modern Zionist history.Footnote26
The state controlled the educational system that determined the curriculum for both Arabs and Jews, placing the Arab educational system under the control of the state security apparatus.Footnote27 The Zionist narrative has prevailed ever since, silencing the pre-1948 history and the expulsion and displacements that the Palestinians endured from both the Arab and Jewish curricula.Footnote28 Silencing continued in the Israeli academic sphere until the mid-1980s with the appearance of what became known as post-Zionism and new-sociology,Footnote29 but it continues to this day in school curricula. In parallel, through oral history and Nakba family stories, Palestinian citizens maintained the essence of their history in the face of the hegemonic Zionist narrative that seeks dominance in the official public sphere.Footnote30
The settler-colonial eliminatory impulse was employed against Palestinian culture, particularly those aspects that required institutional support, such as theater, cultural associations, and cultural production. Like Palestinian history, Palestinian culture that was rooted in identity and narrative came close to being a taboo. The name ‘Palestine’ was erased not only from maps, the media, and educational material, but also from public discourse; the ‘Palestinian people’ as a whole were made invisible by the Israeli establishment from the eyes of the Jewish public and replaced euphemistically with ‘Arab refugees’, ‘Arabs of the Land of Israel’, ‘locals’, and other similar names. This elimination included the naming of the Palestinian citizens themselves, who were given various names so as to eliminate their historical roots and connection to their homeland, to deny their national identity, and to avoid the word ‘Palestine’.
One of the most far-reaching and devastating goals of this settler-colonial project was its attempt to eliminate the very relationship of the Palestinians with their homeland. Palestinians, particularly in the context of presence on land and of demography, were described as ‘foreigners’, ‘invaders’, ‘infiltrators’, and other terms that deny their authentic relationship with their homeland. Thus, the settler immigrants were recast as natives, replacing the actual natives, who had been eliminated by expulsion and by symbolic means.
Like Palestinian history, Palestinian cultural productions – poetry, folksongs, literature, fine arts – were developed and preserved in the private sphere, and much of this work was promoted outside the state's official spaces. Culture was nourished by Arab society in private spaces, precisely because it was easier to escape the censorship of the military government. In addition, Palestinian culture was promoted by Palestinians in the Israeli Communist Party (ICP) in its literary periodicals, other publications, and public meetings as long as the cultural content stayed away from the explicit political sphere.Footnote31 This is why cultural modes were a main vehicle for expressing the Palestinian narrative and a central medium in nourishing a Palestinian identity that re-emerged among the Arab citizens only in the early 1970s.Footnote32
2.3. Demographic elimination (riddance)
It was obvious to most approaches within the Zionist movement – certainly to the mainstream as represented by Labor Zionism and its leadership headed by Ben Gurion, that a Jewish state would entail getting rid of as many of the Palestinian inhabitants of the land as possible.Footnote33 Although the radical ‘Zionist left’, such as Mapam, at the time did not agree with this view, they participated in the ethnic cleansing practices and benefited from the outcome.Footnote34 Throughout the extensive deliberations about the future of the Arabs (what was known as the ‘Arab Question’ in the Zionist vernacular until 1948Footnote35) and in particular the issue of their expulsion,Footnote36 physical elimination was not considered an option, as it was for some other settler-colonial projects. Many massacres against Palestinians took place,Footnote37 some of which were discussed in the Zionist narrative. We agree with the historians who argue that the goal of many of these massacres was not the physical elimination of the Palestinians but rather their evacuation from Palestine.Footnote38 Massacres were strategically used to terrorize Palestinians into leaving their towns. One can call this ‘demographic elimination’ to distinguish it from ‘physical elimination’. Following Wolfe, we argue that the logic of demographic elimination is an inherent component of the Zionist project as a settler-colonial project, although it has taken different manifestations since the founding of the Zionist movement.Footnote39
Once the territories occupied by the Jewish forces were evacuated of most of their Palestinian inhabitants, the newly established state sought to maintain that ‘achievement’ by settling Jewish immigrants in the places that belonged to Palestinians. The Law of Return and the Citizenship Law together constitute the bases for acquiring citizenship in Israel. According to the 1950 Law of Return, immigration to Israel is an almost absolute right for Jews and their family members. In conjunction with (and total contrast to) the Law of Return and the active and sometimes aggressive recruitment of Jewish citizens of other countries as immigrants (or even non-Jewish immigrants who have family relations to JewsFootnote40), Palestinians who were expelled or who left under the duress of war were prohibited from returning to their homes or to any other place in the country (except for a few thousand cases of family reunification under strict conditions).Footnote41 Those who tried to return from across the borders after the ceasefire were considered ‘infiltrators’, and in thousands of cases, they were killed while en route to their homes.Footnote42 These steps guaranteed that the reversal of the demographic composition of the country by force of law was completed early in the military rule period.
These settler-colonial demographic restrictions on Arab immigration have continued and, recently, even tightened by passage of laws preventing certain spouses of Arab citizens from becoming Israeli citizens. The Knesset enacted the Citizenship and Entry to Israel Law (Temporary Order 2003), which imposed prohibitions on family reunification in cases where a Palestinian citizen of Israel is married to a Palestinian residing in Palestinian territories that were occupied in 1967, making it impossible for these families to live together legally in Israel. Since the law's enactment, despite the fact that its name indicates its temporality, the Israeli Parliament has consistently extended its validity, making it a permanent feature of the Israeli legal framework on immigration.Footnote43
Despite the massive demographic elimination that took place, Israel is still obsessed with the same settler-colonial mindset – what is known in Israeli Zionist parlance as the ‘demographic ghost’, referring to the increase in the number of Palestinian citizens, an increase that is essentially limited to natural growth.Footnote44 Israeli politicians have over the years offered various policy ideas to deal with this ‘ghost’, all of which include a common element – more demographic elimination by various means to alter the demographic balance in the country in their favor and to maintain the significant Jewish majority.Footnote45
3. The political organization laws and the tyranny of the majority
In order to enable the implementation of its settler-colonial policies, Israel has applied Emergency Regulations to prevent and abort meaningful national political organization by its Palestinian citizens. These regulations have been used to prohibit collective and national political organization and to limit the rights and liberties of the Palestinian citizens.Footnote46 At the same time, Israel attempted to colonize the politics, in addition to the culture and consciousness, of its Arab citizens. For example, the dominant political parties at the time, mainly Mapai (the predecessor of the Labor party), tried to establish subservient Arab satellite parties while not accepting them as regular members in the overall party in order to recruit Arab votes and serve the party's agenda.Footnote47
At the same time, independent Arab political organization was made illegal, as demonstrated by the experience of the al-Ard Movement. In 1965, a group of Arab activists associated as al-Ard (‘the land’), forming a ‘Socialist List’ in order to run for office in the parliamentary elections.Footnote48 The movement had been declared an ‘illegal association’ before the elections because of its political activities and attempts to organize the Palestinians in Israel as part of a larger Palestinian collective and Arab nation. Al-Ard's effort to participate in Israeli elections was the first organized attempt by Palestinians to participate in the elections as an Arab party, as opposed to a Jewish-Arab party (like the Communist Party), but it was thwarted by the Supreme Court, which invoked ‘defensive democracy’ arguments.Footnote49
After this abortive experience, no similar attempt was made until 1984, when the Progressive List for Peace (PLP), a joint Arab-Jewish list headed by former al-Ard activist Mohammad Mi'ari, sought to participate in elections. The Central Election Committee banned the list from participating. The list appealed to the Supreme Court, which accepted the appeal and allowed it to participate in the elections. As a result, the Knesset enacted Section 7A of Basic Law: The Knesset in 1985. This section gave the Central Election Committee the authority to ban the participation of any list if its goals and actions, explicitly or by implication, include ‘the negation of the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people’, the negation of its democratic character, or incitement to racism. This section was amended in 2002, combining the two components into one, changing the language of the law to read ‘the negation of the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state’, while adding support of armed conflict by an enemy state or terror organization.Footnote50 This provision seriously confines the limits of Arab political participation. Israel, by the law of the majority, made it illegal to challenge Zionist hegemony, by, for example, demanding openly (or even implicitly) that Israel should not be a Jewish state but rather a state for all its citizens, or a state that represents the two national groups – Arabs and Jews – as a binational state. The Jewish Zionist majority guaranteed that Zionist goals, whose foundations were laid out during the military government, continue in different and pervasive forms.
Thus, the combination of demographic and political organization laws constitute the structural foundation for the continuation of the tyranny of the majority. On the one hand, existing demographic laws (mainly citizenship laws) guarantee an overwhelming Jewish majority for the foreseeable future. On the other hand, this majority advances laws to maintain settler-colonial privilegesFootnote51 and ensure that it is illegal to challenge the sources of these privileges – that Israel is the state of the Jewish people and not all its citizens. At the same time, a system of fear was instilledFootnote52 through a sophisticated system of surveillance.Footnote53 Details of how community members were recruited to spy on each other in return for basic rights are still being revealed.Footnote54
4. The equality paradigm and the seeds of challenge to the Jewish state
With the abolition of the military government in 1966, Palestinian citizens could move without needing a pass or military permission. But when they traveled in their homeland, they found that the geographical scene had been transformed, as most of the Palestinian villages had been demolished and the Palestinian cities Judaized.
The possibility to move freely created new opportunities for employment, education, and political reorganizing. Direct surveillance under the military regime was gradually transformed to a new, non-direct system of control.Footnote55 This settler-colonial subjugation, with the accompanying fear it instilled, deeply affected political discourse and political and cultural organization.Footnote56 Amid these new realities, the 1967 war erupted, ending with Israel occupying Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in addition to Sinai and the Golan Heights, thus putting the entirety of Mandatory Palestine under Israeli control and making contact between Palestinians all over historic Palestine possible for the first time in a generation – albeit under Israeli control.
Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 has had what, on the face of it, appeared as contradictory effects. On the one hand, it made possible the renewal of contacts between the isolated Palestinians in Israel with other Palestinians, revived the dormant nationalism among Palestinians in Israel, and ended the hermetic isolation of the Arab community within Israel, providing a window – narrow as it might be – to the Arab world through the West Bank and Gaza. On the other hand, it made the rights they had acquired as citizens’ salient in comparison to the glaring absence of civic rights of Palestinians in the 1967 occupied territories. The uniqueness of Palestinians in Israel as ‘citizens’, albeit with settler-colonial citizenship, was underscored by the dominant Arab political leadership within Israel – that of the ICP, which emphasized their political status in comparison to Palestinians under occupation.
It is in this context that the ‘equality paradigm’ championed by the ICP dominated the discourse from the 1970s through the early 1990s. Equality resonated with realizing the citizenship status for the Palestinians in Israel – now free of the military government – and with ending the occupation and achieving statehood for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, further accentuating the divergent status of the two Palestinian communities. The slogan ‘equality and no less than equality’ captured the dominant political discourse as far as the Palestinian citizens were concerned.
The ICP's equality paradigm highlighted discrimination in resource distribution in areas such as education, local government budgets, state services, and economic opportunities, as well as human rights, broadly defined. One central cause that emerged at this time was the expropriation of Arab land, which had accelerated under the military government and continued well into the 1970s. For historical reasons, the ICP constituted the dominant political force among the Arab population.Footnote57 Being the only non-Zionist political party with significant Palestinian leadership that Israel allowed among Arab citizens, it became home for many Arabs who opposed Israel and its policies but who were not necessarily followers of the party's ideology and who differed with it on central issues such as the importance of class struggle in the Israeli–Palestinian case or acceptance of the UN partition plan. Thus in 1977, the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (DFPE), a coalition that included Arab groups and prominent community leaders as well as some marginal Jewish left-wing groups, was established with the ICP as its spinal column.Footnote58
As its name indicates, the DFPE focused on two central issues: peace with the Palestinians in the framework of a two-state solution according to the 1967 borders – making it one of first political parties in the whole Middle East to champion the slogan of ‘two states for two peoples’ (a position that adhered to the Soviet Union's view on this issue); and second, equality for the Palestinian citizens in Israel. Both of these political demands became the central elements of a broad political consensus within the Palestinian community in Israel for years.
The dominant discourse among Palestinians, led by the ICP and later by the DFPE, adhered to the equality paradigm without challenging the existing political framework – that is, the concept of a Jewish state. Indeed, by focusing mainly on a limited meaning of citizenship, which related to distribution of resources and human rights, this paradigm has not explained the implications of equality for the state's identity and how the Arab community will be integrated in this structure. This effectively meant accepting the UN partition plan and seeking equality within the framework of the emergent state that expanded beyond that plan; however, the state itself did not recognize Palestinians as part of its own project. It excluded them, even if citizens, from the collective that defined the ‘we’ that the state sought to encompassFootnote59 and continued to deprive them of their own resources, the most prominent of which was land. Thus, the struggle for equality within the equality paradigm could not stop the crippling settler-colonial project that sought to control as much land as possible, turning land – in the eyes of the colonized, as well as the colonizer – into the symbol of the conflict, with additional emotional significance for the colonized.
On Land Day (30 March 1976), the National Committee for the Defense of Arab Lands, the first organization to claim representation for the entire Palestinian community in Israel, called for a national strike in response to the continued confiscation of Palestinian landFootnote60 as part of the planned ‘Judaization of the Galilee’. As a result of the strike and various local demonstrations, five Palestinian men and one woman were killed, many were wounded, and hundreds were arrested by both police and army forces. Land Day has since become a national day commemorated by the whole Palestinian people, both those on their land and those in exile. The significant historical events of Land Day exemplified the protracted struggle between a state representing a settler-colonial project and the native population over the land. But like other struggles, its settler-colonial nature was obscured by the obfuscatory discourse of equality, which was made fleetingly credible by the citizenship that Israel had granted the Arabs in 1948.
The equality paradigm defined Palestinian discourse in various areas, including resources allocated to education (but less related to the question of the right to define the group's educational policies), employment, and municipal budgets. Fighting manifestations of discrimination in various areas of life became popular. In the early 1980s, The Arab Higher Follow-up Committee (composed of Arab mayors, Arab members of the Knesset, secretaries and chairpersons of the political parties, and leaders of non-governmental organizations) established sub-committees on health, education, social welfare, and so forth to investigate inequalities and provide information for advocacy groups.Footnote61 On 24 June 1987, ‘Equality Day’ was declared as a day of national strike to protest discrimination and advocate equality. This approach continued even after the paradigm was challenged in the 1990s. Thus, a number of active NGOs seeking equality were established, most prominently Mossawa (‘equality’) Center – the Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens in Israel, which advocates for equality in various areas, and Adalah (‘fairness’), the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which uses legal means to work toward the advancement of equal rights. These organizations became two of the most well funded (by international donors) and most active NGOs in the Arab community. Another NGO, Sikkuy (‘a chance’), an Arab-Jewish NGO funded by many American Jewish family foundations, zeroed in on manifestations of discrimination without contesting their ideological and structural foundations which necessarily lead to the settler-colonial foundations that constituted the citizenship as settler-colonial citizenship.
While the equality paradigm dominated the discourse and defined the directions of internal Arab policy advocacy after the Oslo Agreements and well into the 1990s, it has been criticized by different factions in the Arab community. Many argued that the ICP had de-emphasized the national dimension into a conflict between Zionism and the Palestinian national movements in favor of class struggle. Although the ICP fought against national discrimination, it focused much attention on the interests of the working class – Jews and Arabs – and the struggle for class equality. Nationalist groups that emerged at the beginning as local associations stressed the national component and the privileges that Jews have regardless of their class status within the structure of the Jewish state. Some of these assumed that equality within the Jewish state was impossible to achieve; indeed, academics started highlighting the contradiction between the idea of a Jewish state and the principle of equality.
Although significant political work was done within the equality paradigm on both the micro and macro levels, its scope was limited by the ideological constraints of the leading force of this paradigm – the ICP – and, in particular, its forward-looking approach to fighting discrimination at the expense of the past-looking approach, which emphasizes compensatory justice and the ideological structure that underpins inequality. Thus, the struggle over land confiscation concentrated on stopping further land expropriation rather than requesting a return of the land that had already been confiscated within a compensatory justice framework that brings history and past injustice to the fore. Such a framework would necessitate examining the foundations for a new relationship that should be embraced considering that the existing relationship between Israel and the Palestinians is based on a settler-colonial order.
Finally, by focusing on resources, services, and opportunities, the equality paradigm stayed away from fundamental issues of importance to the Arab population, issues that emanate from the very essence of their relationship with Israel as a settler-colonial project: the privileges granted to Jewish citizens and non-citizens over Arab citizens by virtue of being defined as Jews, including state structure and identity, the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state, and the rights of expelled Palestinians to return.
The political challenge to this paradigm was organized on various fronts. First, a different conceptual framework for understanding the conflict between Zionism and the Palestinian national movement was offered by a group called the Abnaa al-Balad (‘sons of the country’) Movement, which held its first national conference in 1972.Footnote62 This group, which saw itself as an extension of the Palestinian national movement in exile, did not recognize the legitimacy of the UN partition plan in Palestine or the legitimacy of the Jewish state. It considered Zionism a settler-colonial movement and adopted a political plan that was originally presented by the PLO for resolving the Israeli–Palestinian conflict by establishing a secular democratic state in all of Palestine with full equality among the three religious groups: Christians, Jews, and Muslims. In contrast to the ICP, which it considered an Israeli party that accepted the rules and legitimacy of the Jewish state, the Abnaa al-Balad Movement emphasized the settler-colonial historical aspects of the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians. This movement attracted some support among elites and Arab students in Israeli universities, but failed to achieve broad popular support; its main influence was in propagating political ideas and discourse in the public sphere, as opposed to political activism. Yet it was strong enough to provoke, at various points in time, severe attacks from the adherents of the equality paradigm as well as persecution by the state security apparatus. Its main influence was in challenging the dominant political framework championed by the ICP and constantly reminding the community and the political elites of the fundamental issues of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In the 1990s, factions of this movement joined a new political party that competed for leadership among the Arab citizens, while others who refused to recognize the legitimacy of the state, as implied in parliamentary participation, continued to boycott the parliamentary elections.
Since the mid-1980s, challenges to the equality paradigm have increased. In 1982, the Progressive List for Peace (PLP) emerged on the political scene.Footnote63 Despite opposition from the state's security apparatus, the Supreme Court ruled the PLP a legal list that could run in Knesset elections. Despite a fierce ICP campaign questioning the new party's credibility, the PLP was the first ‘legal’ political party outside the DFPE to declare full solidarity with the Palestinian cause. The PLP was distinguished by emphasizing the national Palestinian identity of Arabs in Israel as well as the conflict's nationalist dimension (as opposed to the DFPE's class analysis). Although operating within the boundaries of Israeli citizenship, it underscored the Palestinian component of the Arab citizens' identity, de-emphasized their Israeli belonging, and made clear that its first loyalty was to the Palestinian cause.Footnote64 As such, it was considered a strong opponent of the ICP and its equality paradigm. By highlighting the national Palestinian dimension in the internal relations between Israel and its Palestinian citizens, this party, while not invoking a settler-colonial framework, was more consistent with such a framework. The PLP was made up of local Arab nationalist organizations from within the Palestinian community who were joined by left-wing Jewish individuals. The PLP served in the Knesset from 1984 to 1992. In the 1992 Knesset elections, the PLP failed to achieve sufficient support to send representatives to the Knesset.Footnote65
From the 1980s onward, the Islamic Movement was gaining increasing support,Footnote66 becoming a significant political actor in the Arab community with two factions – one that participates in parliamentary elections and one that boycotts them.Footnote67 The Movement mainly looked forward, focusing on promoting a self-sustained society, providing local services, supporting human needs of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and providing services to Islamic holy places. Ideologically, the Movement's goal was to achieve an Islamic state in Palestine, making the question of equality just a pragmatic concern.
In summary, the dominant political forces among Palestinian citizens sought to achieve equality without pointing out explicitly that full equality is incompatible with the Zionist structure of the state. However, they failed to get even the verbal commitment of the state for this goal. The case of the ICP and its utter failure in light of the state's increasing emphasis on Jewish identity inadvertently confirmed the settler-colonial essence of the Israeli state to many Palestinians.
5. A ‘state for all its citizens’ and collective rights
As mentioned above, we do not claim that there has been a linear development from one collective political position to another. To the contrary, there have been gradual developments of new modes that occupied center stage and competed with existing modes or paradigms. Usually, these coincided with major historical developments that galvanized fresh ways of thinking. Thus, the Oslo Agreement in 1993 brought what turned out to be the false hope that a two-state solution to the conflict could be achieved.
The first few years following Oslo have had an enormous impact on the political thought and organization of the Palestinian citizens, with often contradictory effects. The agreement provided significant validation for the equality paradigm by supporting two central elements of the Palestinian citizens' achieved consensus: peace with the Palestinians and their legitimate leadership, the Palestine Liberation Organization; and equality for the Palestinian citizens within Israel. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's (1992–1995) government started speaking openly about existing discrimination (which had usually been denied) and reducing state discrimination against Arab citizens in various spheres.Footnote68 As it became clear that, if the Oslo process were to succeed, the future of Arab citizens would be inside the Israeli state as Israeli citizens, this development opened the door for more fundamental questions about their destiny. The sense of temporariness that had hitherto permeated much of the political consciousness regarding their collective future started to fade away. This realization, therefore, brought to the fore the question of their political status and their own relationship with the state concerning three issues: the meaning of equality and its political implications, questions that the equality paradigm had not posed; collective status and collective rights of the Arab citizens within the state of Israel; and state identity.
The challenge to the Palestinian elites was to present a democratic vision that could give substantive political and constitutional meaning to equality and at the same time deal with one of the most fundamental concerns that remained under the surface – the legitimacy of the Jewish state, which by and large Palestinians did not accept.Footnote69 This challenge was well articulated by the emergence of a new political party, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), which placed the transformation of Israel into a ‘state for all its citizens’ at the center of its political platform.Footnote70 It was an alliance of leading political activists who left the ICP after self-criticism instigated by the Glasnost policy in Moscow during the late 1980s and the pursuant fall of the Berlin wall, factions of the Abnaa al-Balad Movement, cadres of the National Progressive Movement, and a number of members of other nationalist organizations. It was headed by a charismatic leader, Azmi Bishara, who became known across the Arab world as a leading public intellectual. The party attracted Arab elites and intellectuals and posed a serious challenge to the concept of a Jewish state. In addition to its political program, which centered around the demand for democratic citizenship in a state for all of its citizens and not just one group, and in contrast to the ICP, the party argued that the Arab community should be empowered through organization on a national basis in the public space: NGOs, culture, political organizations, and elected national leadership in the existing, but unelected, High Follow-up Committee for Arab Affairs.
The simple democratic idea of a state for all its citizens posed fundamental challenges to Zionism and to the concept of a Jewish state, finally bringing the fundamental contradiction between being a Jewish state and claiming to be a democratic state to the surface of political discourse. Many Israeli academics had pointed to a ‘tension’, but not a contradiction, between being Jewish and being democraticFootnote71; however, other, mainly Arab, academics had claimed that this is a fundamental contradiction that cannot be bridged.Footnote72 Theories in Israeli academia were offered to reconcile and perhaps justify the contradiction, such as the concept of ‘ethnic democracy’, which was presented by SmoohaFootnote73 and broadly endorsed by others. Many Arab scholars and some Israelis dismissed the theory as a desperate, politically motivated futile academic exercise, attempting to paper over a profound and irreconcilable contradiction.Footnote74
The vigorous political debates that involved Arab and Jewish academics and politicians left their mark on Israeli public discourse. The Arab public, by and large, endorsed the discourse that the NDA party introduced and accepted the meaning of equality that the party had offered without necessarily adhering to its line on other issues. Thus, even the strongest adherents of the ‘equality paradigm’ incorporated the concept of the state for all its citizens, the substantive questions about equality, and the sharp contradiction between being Jewish and democratic into their political discourse. Within the Jewish community, the reactions were diverse, ranging from considering the slogan of ‘a state for all its citizens’ to be a fatal threat to the Jewish state, to seeking to reconcile that with, what is in our view, a self-contradictory definition of Israel as ‘Jewish and democratic’. The end result of this debate was that the contradiction between the interests of a Jewish state and equal citizenship came to be understood, in Arab consciousness, as the defining character of the relationship between the Palestinian citizens and the state of Israel.
The slogan of ‘a state for all its citizens’, while bringing the question of the Jewish state to the forefront of the political and intellectual discussion in both communities, never went so far as openly adopting a settler-colonial studies perspective when directly interacting with the state institutions. While the manifestations of Israel's policies as a settler-colonial project were rather explicit in the NDA's literature, settler colonialism as such was not made central in the political discourse. That started to emerge more strongly in the context of the demands for collective rights. The NDA's emphasis on national organization, cultural autonomy, and national empowerment resonated with the academic and cultural elites. Three separate groups gathered around the same time (2005–2007) in the form of expansive ad hoc think tanks to examine the collective status of the Palestinian citizens in a future two-state solution. After extensive discussion, they issued three separate documents, collectively referred to as ‘The Future Vision Documents’, which asserted that the Palestinians in Israel seek collective rights, mainly by claiming national rights within Israel in the form of a binational or multicultural state.Footnote75 The Jewish political elites' reaction to these documents that referred to Israel as a settler-colonial project was intense and threatening,Footnote76 mainly because all three documents made clear that a Jewish state cannot also be democratic.
In our view, these documents contributed to reviving and heightening the settler-colonial discourse among some Palestinian elites. The Haifa Declaration, in particular, which was endorsed by hundreds of community leaders, academics, and intellectuals, offered a paradigm of reconciliation between Israelis (not Zionism) and Palestinians that is consistent with those used in other settler-colonial settings. Yet, it should be noted that this debate about the nature of collective rights and settler colonialism remained within limited Palestinian elite circles without permeating broader public awareness, even if the understanding of Israel as a settler-colonial project was always implicit within broad groups in the Palestinian community. What eventually energized the settler-colonial consciousness was what we call ‘the return of history’Footnote77 which, not coincidentally, was concurrent with the simultaneous realizations that equality within the Jewish state is unattainable; and the conviction that reaching a viable two-state solution has passed.
6. The return of history and the consciousness of settler-colonial citizenship
The last 15 years or so have witnessed a new phase in the history of the Palestinians in Israel, a phase that we refer to as the ‘return of history’ in contrast to other phases that were characterized by competing paradigms, such as the equality paradigm or ‘a state for all its citizens’. In essence, there is a growing awareness among Palestinians across the partisan divide that their citizenship is rooted in the historic events of the Nakba – the term Palestinians and other Arabs use to describe the dismantlement of Palestine in 1948 as a monumental historical process.
In 1998, on the 50th anniversary of the Nakba, some Palestinian organizations in Israel started to coordinate the Nakba March along with Palestinians in the territories that Israel occupied in 1967. The first march took place on 15 May, Israel's Independence Day according to the Gregorian calendar and the day that Palestinians commemorate the Nakba, which does not coincide with the Hebrew calendar that Israel follows to actually celebrate its Independence Day. The following year, the Committee started to organize the ‘Return March’, choosing a different destroyed Palestinian village as each year's destination. The marches, which sought to bring the displacement of the Palestinians from their towns to the forefront, took place on the actual Israeli Independence Day in order to remind Israelis that ‘Your day of independence is our Nakba’. This march was the first collective articulation of Nakba-related Palestinian history in the official public sphere.Footnote78
While Palestinians' emphasis is, in general, on Nakba commemoration in both the 1967-occupied territories and across their places of dispersion, Palestinian discourse in Israel additionally emphasizes the issue of return, as powerfully symbolized by the massive ‘return’ to one displaced town for one day. Accessibility to the displaced villages is a ‘privilege’ made possible by Israeli citizenship, a privilege that other Palestinians do not have. The collective action this accessibility allows is instrumental to the return of history. The Arab citizens' mourn when the state celebrates; their massive, organized marches surrounded by police forces while speeches on homeland and return tell the story of a different kind of citizenship that is caused by the Nakba they commemorate. Unlike Palestinian commemorations in other places, they commemorate the Nakba within the framework of citizenship: what the state did to us. What is highlighted by the Return March, in addition to the question of refugees and Palestinian return, is the settler-colonial essence of their citizenship – ‘their’ state's actions of displacing them, refusing to let them return, and giving their towns to Jewish citizens.
The fact that the march is organized inside Israel on the actual day of independence poses a serious challenge to the narrative of the Jewish state and its history. During the first five decades of the state's independence, Israeli Jews celebrated Independence Day without challenge. The Return Marches have become a living reminder of the settler-colonial actuality that, in our view, underlies Israel's ‘Nakba Law’, enacted in 2011 which ‘calls on the government to deny funding to any organization, institution, or municipality that commemorates the founding of the Israeli state as a day of mourning’.Footnote79
The Return March turned out to be one of the most important collective activities initiated by the Palestinians in Israel since the start of the Nakba. For several years, it was Land Day, commemorated annually since 1976, often by national strikes, which galvanized the collective popular action of the Palestinian citizens. But the emergence of the Nakba March a whole generation later and its rise to prominence signifies the return of history and marks a change in the popular understanding of the meaning of citizenship.
We argue that Palestinians' rising preoccupation with their history stands behind the re-emergence of a different phase in their understanding of citizenship – that it is a settler-colonial citizenship acquired in a settler-colonial framework. This, in fact, closes the circle, which started with the same view. We do not claim that the average person articulates their citizenship status in settler-colonial terms, but that they perceive the state of Israel as having taken over their homeland by force in the name of the Jewish people, see genuine citizenship status as reserved for Jews only, and their own citizenship – despite the rights it does provide – as empty. Although this sense of empty citizenship is descriptive rather than analytical, we argue that it is precisely the consequence of the settler-colonial policies we have described and that there is a rising awareness among Palestinians of the settler-colonial situation.
Three factors contributed to emerging awareness of the settler-colonial situation and its relationship to the Nakba. The first is the spectacular failure of the earlier paradigms and, in effect, their impossibility within a Zionist state. To be clear, the adherents of the equality paradigm seemed to believe in it because of their ideological roots as Communists who accepted the partition plan and the legitimacy of sovereignty of a Jewish state. They sincerely believed that equality was possible if Israel changed its policies. But the continued settler-colonial process, particularly in regard to land, space, culture, and demography, and also in resources, services, and employment opportunities, brought this to an end. The recent plans to expropriate more lands from Palestinian Bedouin citizens in the southern part of the country and transfer them to Jewish citizensFootnote80 highlighted the fact that maintaining a Jewish state entails continued settler-colonial policies that relentlessly transfer resources from the colonized to the colonizer.
Unlike the equality paradigm, which its visionaries believed was achievable, the ‘state for all its citizens’ paradigm was presented in order to contest Zionism and show that Zionism is incompatible with the basic democratic principle of a state for all its citizens. The intense public reaction to the ‘vision documents’ only highlighted what was already clear – that a Jewish state and equality are fundamentally incompatible.
Second, the increasing public conviction among both Palestinians and Israelis (each for their different reasons) that the Oslo Agreements failed and that the two-state solution is an illusion gave rise to considering alternatives to partition, including one state with equality for Arabs and Jews in the whole area of historic Palestine. The discussion brought back the previous partition narrative and the subsequent Nakba. History is an essential consideration in such alternatives, and the validity and legitimacy of partition and its aftermath in terms of Palestinian dispossession and Jewish privileges sharpens awareness about the settler-colonial characteristics of the Jewish state.
Third, while the Arabs behaved as citizens, the state, in critical moments, treated them openly as subjects of a settler-colonial project. In addition to our description above, particularly during the military rule period, perhaps it suffices to provide one example. In October 2000, after the failure of the Camp David negotiations in July, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza started demonstrations that developed into what became known as the second intifada. When dozens of Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in the area of Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem and elsewhere, Palestinians in Israel demonstrated in solidarity with the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. They went out as citizens to protest the killing of other Palestinians and to support the cause of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. However, Israel treated them no differently than the other Palestinians: 13 were killed, dozens wounded, and hundreds arrested. Even then, these Palestinians reacted as citizens, demanding an official commission to investigate the killings of the 13 citizens, rather than the hundreds who were killed in the 1967 occupied Palestinian territories during the same period.
The Or Commission that was established, in response to the persistent demands of the Palestinian public before national Israeli elections, to investigate the events that led to the killing of the citizens occupied a central place through public hearings until its report was published in 2003.Footnote81 But instead of taking advantage of the proceedings and the report as an historic occasion to deal with the deep feelings of injustice, the state demonstrated that citizenship provides no protection. One major demand of the Arab public was that those who had shot Arab demonstrators be prosecuted. But in 2008, after lengthy legal deliberations, the government chose to close the investigation file because of ‘lack of evidence’ in what human rights organizations believed contradicted the Commission's report.Footnote82 This decision convinced Palestinians that the state does not view their citizenship as seriously as they do. The demonstration against this decision has been described as one of the Palestinian citizen's biggest demonstrations since the state's inception.
This incident demonstrated not only that equality was not possible, but also that, at moments of crisis that are perceived to challenge the state's settler-colonial system, Palestinians would be treated as settler-colonial subjects rather than as citizens. Such moments, which are frequent in both personal (airport and crossing points) and collective (with police, land, immigration laws, etc.) experiences, have been critical in cementing Palestinians' awareness that their relationship with the state is, in fact, a settler-colonial one.
In summary, this paper has argued that the relationship between Palestinians who became citizens in the Israeli state and the state of Israel itself is best characterized as settler-colonial citizenship. We also argued that the foundations of this citizenship were established during the first two decades after the start of the Nakba through the imposition of a military government from 1948 to 1966. We traced Palestinians' relations with the Israeli state from their perspective by focusing on their political discourse and collective organization, claiming that those have gone through different phases but now seem to be returning to the point of departure – settler-colonial citizenship.
Under the military government, Palestinians tried to live in dignity, maintaining their roots but with little power to resist the settler-colonial policies after the traumatic experience of having lost their nation and their homeland and fearing expulsion from their homes. The military rule symbolized foreign rule, but citizenship was granted by the state which, in their language at the time, ‘occupied them’.Footnote83 This citizenship, together with other regional developments such as the rise of the two-state-solution paradigm in the international discourse about the conflict, obscured the settler-colonial nature of their relationship with Israel. Thus, these Palestinians vainly attempted to grapple with different frameworks in order to be equal citizens. In the first phase after military rule, they advanced the discourse of equality without challenging what it really implied for the state identity and structure. However, since the mid-1990s, a different political framework emerged that demanded a ‘state for all its citizens’, stressing both full citizenship and historical justice while anchoring their citizenship as a consequence of the Nakba, arguing that Israel cannot be a state for all its citizens and still be Jewish. The discourse of ‘a state for all its citizens’ became accepted by the various political parties among Palestinian citizens.
We also argued that a new phase started after the failure of the ‘equality paradigm’ and the realization that a state of all its citizens is incompatible with a Zionist Jewish state, alongside the dissipating hopes of achieving a two-state agreement. In this phase, characterized by ‘the return of history’ to the political discourse and consciousness, many Palestinians are guided by the origins of their relationship with Israel–the Nakba and its consequences for them and for the Palestinian people. If this process continues, it will highlight the awareness of their settler-colonial situation, thus closing a circle in their historical relationship with Israel, going back to its very beginning.
Notes
1. We distinguish in this article between colonialism and settler colonialism. On this distinction in Palestine see L. Veracini, ‘The Other Shift: Settler Colonialism, Israel and the Occupation’, Journal of Palestine Studies 42, no. 2 (2013): 26–42.
2. These circumstances are only now emerging as a subject of important historical research that seeks to shed light on the critical first decade of their experience under Israeli control. See, for example: A. Sabbagh-Khoury, Constructing Settler-colonial Sovereignty in Palestine: Political Economy, Collective Memory and Archives among the Kibbutzim of Hashomer Hatzair in the Jezreel Valley (PhD diss., Tel Aviv University, Forthcoming).
3. N.N. Rouhana, Palestinian Citizens in an Ethnic Jewish State: Identities in Conflict (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 30.
4. For more information about the Palestinians in these cities see A. Sabbagh-Khoury, ‘Palestinians in Palestinian Cities in Israel: A Settler Colonial Reality’, in The Palestinians in Israel: Readings in History, Politics and Society, ed. N.N. Rouhana and A. Sabbagh-Khoury, 2nd ed. (Haifa: Mada al-Carmel – Arab Center for Applied Social Research, 2014) and D. Monterescu and D. Rabinowitz, eds., Mixed Towns, Trapped Communities, Historical Narratives, Spatial Dynamics, Gender, Relations and Cultural Encounters in Palestine-Israeli Towns (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 1–34.
5. For historical accounts of the ethnic cleansing of the vast majority of the Palestinians in the part of Palestine on which Israel was established, see I. Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006); W. Khalidi, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); N. Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948 (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992) and N. Masalha, Maximum Land, Minimum Arabs: Israel, Transfer and the Palestinians, 1949–1996 (Beirut, Lebanon: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1997) (Arabic).
6. For more information on the military government and emergency regulations, see Y. Bauml, 2011, ‘The Military Government’, in The Palestinians in Israel: Readings in History, Politics and Society, ed. N.N. Rouhana and A. Sabbagh-Khoury (Haifa: Mada al-Carmel – Arab Center for Applied Social Research, 2011), 47–57 and S. Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976). For an in-depth study of the military rule period, see Shira Robinson, Citezen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel's Liberal Settler State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).
7. For the debate on the security justification of the military rule, see Y. Bäuml, ‘The Discrimination Policy Towards the Arabs in Israel, 1948–1968’, Iyunim Bitkumat Israel, Studies in Zionism, The Yishuv and the State of Israel 16 (2006): 391–413 (Hebrew) and Y. Bäuml, A Blue and White Shadow: The Israeli Establishment's Policy and Actions Among its Arab Citizens: The Formative Years: 1958–1968 (Haifa: Pardes, 2007) (Hebrew).
8. It is possible that some Palestinians who operated within the Israeli Communist Party accepted the legitimacy of the Jewish state based on their ideological public support for UN Resolution 181.
9. See Sabbagh-Khoury (2015).
10. These characteristics had far-reaching implications for the course of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its future dynamics. For implications on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, see Rouhana, 2014.
11. L. Veracini, ‘Introducing: Settler Colonial Studies’, Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (2011): 1–12 and P. Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409.
12. R. Khamaisi, ‘Territorial Dispossession and Population Control of the Palestinians’, in Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory and Power, ed. E. Zureik, D. Lyon, and Y. Abu-Laban (New York: Routledge, 2011), 335–52; N. Bashir, Judaizing the Place: Misgav Regional Council in the Galilee (Haifa: Mada al-Carmel – Arab Center for Applied Social Research, 2004) (Arabic); and G. Falah, ‘The Facts and Fictions of Judaization Policy and its Impact on the Majority Arab Population in the Galilee’, Political Geography Quarterly 10, no. 3 (1991): 297–316. Many Palestinian citizens saw a racist project in the term “Judaization” and the policies it pursued. Many Israelis also complained about the racist overtone of the term. Thus the terms “Galilee Development” or “Development” of the Naqab are often euphemistically used to describe the project (Y. Jabareen, ‘National Planning Policy in Israel’, in The Palestinians in Israel: Readings in History, Politics and Society, ed. N.N. Rouhana and A. Sabbagh-Khoury, 2nd ed. (Haifa: Mada al-Carmel – Arab Center for Applied Social Research, in press).
13. A. Kedar, ‘The Legal Transformation of Ethnic Geography: Israeli Law and Palestinian Landholder 1948–1967’, New York University Journal of International Law and Politics 33, no. 4 (2000): 923–1000; W. Lehn and U. Davis, The Jewish National Fund (London: Kegan Paul International, 1988).
14. Y. Bäuml, A Blue and White Shadow and S. Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel.
15. Y. Jabareen, ‘National Planning Policy in Israel’, in The Palestinians in Israel: Readings in History, Politics and Society, ed. N.N. Rouhana and A. Sabbagh-Khoury, 2nd ed. (Haifa: Mada al-Carmel – Arab Center for Applied Social Research, in press).
16. I. Abu-Saad, ‘The Indigenous Palestinian Bedouin of the Naqab: Forced Urbanization and Denied Recognition’, in The Palestinians in Israel: Readings in History, Politics and Society, ed. N.N. Rouhana and A. Sabbagh-Khoury (Haifa: Mada al-Carmel – Arab Center for Applied Social Research, 2011), 120–7, http://mada-research.org/en/files/2011/09/ebook-english-book.pdf.
17. A. Golan, Changing the Space – War's Results: Previous Arab Spaces in the State of Israel (1948–1950) (BeerSheba: Ben Gurion Heritage Institute, 2001) (Hebrew).
18. For more information on the IDPs, see A. Sabbagh-Khoury, ‘The Internally Displaced Palestinians in Israel’, in The Palestinians in Israel: Readings in History, Politics and Society, ed. N.N. Rouhana and A. Sabbagh-Khoury (Haifa: Mada al-Carmel – Arab Center for Applied Social Research, 2011), 26–45 and H. Cohen, The Present Absentee: Palestinian Refugees in Israel Since 1948 (Jerusalem: The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, 2000) (Hebrew).
19. D. Grossman, Sleeping on a Wire: Conversations with Palestinians in Israel. Trans. H. Watzman (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1993).
20. Similar processes of symbolic erasure took place in other Palestinian spaces, such as Jaffa and Jerusalem.
21. For more information on the story of Ein Houd, see A. Slyomovics, The Objects of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998) and D. Grossman, Sleeping on a Wire. To complete the ironic story of Ein Houd, it should be mentioned that some of its original Arab population who gathered on part of the town's land outside the town itself built a small community that became one of the unrecognized Arab villages. The state recognized the town in 1996 after a long legal struggle and it became known as Ein Hawd with the emphasis on the classical Arabic pronunciation and transliteration of the original town in order to distinguish it from the now Juadized town Ein Hod.
22. H. Yacobi, ‘The Architecture of Ethnic Logic: Exploring the Meaning of the Built Environment in the “mixed” City of Lod – Israel’, Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography 84, no. 3/4 (2002): 171–87.
23. M. LeVine, ‘Planning to Conquer: Modernity and its Antinomies in the “New-Old Jaffa”’, in Constructing a Sense of Place: Architecture and the Zionist Discourse, ed. Haim Yacobi (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2004), 192–221; M. LeVine, Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel-Aviv and the Struggle for Palestine 1880–1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); and D. Monterescu, ‘The Bridled Bride of Palestine: Orientalism, Zionism and the Troubled Urban Imagination’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 16, no. 6 (2009): 643–77.
24. J. Cook, ‘Israeli Eradication of History: Disappearing Mosques’, Al-Akhbar, July 9, 2012, http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/9554 (accessed November 15, 2013).
25. M. Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
26. Benvenisti, M., ibid.
27. M. Al-Haj, Education, Empowerment, and Control: The Case of the Arabs in Israel (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995).
28. N.N. Rouhana and A. Sabbagh-Khoury (2014) describe silencing in the Arab community itself in a climate of fear under military government. They explain the silence about the traumatic events partly as emanating from the fear the community felt regarding its own fate. See N.N. Rouhana and A. Sabbagh-Khoury, ‘The Return of History, and the Future’, in Ethnic Privileges in the Jewish State: Israel and its Palestinian Citizens, ed. N.N. Rouhana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
29. See, for example L. Silberstein, The Postzionism Debates: Knowledge and Power in Israeli Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999).
30. N.N. Rouhana and A. Sabbagh-Khoury, ‘The Return of History, and the Future’, in Ethnic Privileges in the Jewish State: Israel and its Palestinian Citizens, ed. N.N. Rouhana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). F. Kassem, Palestinian Women: Narrative Histories and Gendered Memory (London: Zed Books, 2011); and I. Nusair, ‘Gendering the Narrative of Three Generations of the Palestinian Women in Israel’, in Displaced at Home: Ethnicity and Gender among Palestinians in Israel, ed. R. Kanaaneh and I. Nusair (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 75–92.
31. N.N. Rouhana and A. Sabbagh-Khoury, eds., The Palestinians in Israel: Readings in History, Politics and Society, 2nd ed. (Haifa: Mada al-Carmel – Arab Center for Applied Social Research, in press).
32. N.N. Rouhana, Palestinians in an Ethnic Jewish State.
33. Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
34. A. Sabbagh-Khoury, Constructing Settler-colonial Sovereignty in Palestine: Political Economy, Collective Memory and Archives among the Kibbutzim of Hashomer Hatzair in the Jezreel Valley (PhD diss., Tel Aviv University, Forthcoming)
35. See, for example, Y. Gorni, Zionism and the Arabs, 1882–1948: A Study of Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
36. See, for example, N. Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians; N. Masalha, Maximum Land, Minimum Arabs; and I. Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
37. S. Jawad, ‘Zionist Massacres: The Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem in the 1948 War’, in Israel and the Palestinian Refugees, ed. E. Benvenisti, C. Gans, and S. Hanafi (New York: Springer, 2007), 59–127.
38. See, for example, S. Jawad, ‘The Arab and Palestinian Narratives of the 1948 War’, in Israeli and Palestinian Narrative of Conflict: History's Double Helix, ed. Robert Rotberg (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), 72–114 and S. Jawad, ‘Zionist Massacres: The Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem in the 1948 War’.
39. P. Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’.
40. See I. Lustick, ‘Israel as a Non-Arab State: Implications of Mass Immigration of Non-Jews’, Middle East Journal 53, no. 3 (1999): 417–33.
41. See D. Peretz, Israel and the Palestine Arabs (Washington, DC: Middle East Institute, 1958).
42. B. Morris, Israel's Border Wars, 1949–1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation and the Countdown to the Suez War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
43. M. Masri, ‘Family Reunification Legislation in Israel’, in The Palestinians in Israel: Readings in History, Politics and Society, ed. N.N. Rouhana and A. Sabbagh-Khoury, 2nd ed. (Haifa: Mada al-Carmel – Arab Center for Applied Social Research, in press).
44. R. Kanaaneh, Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
45. Over the years, Israel considered various plans to reduce the number of Arab citizens. Recently, many politicians have advanced plans promoting the idea of a land exchange with the Palestinian Authority, including, for example, a “population exchange” which involves annexing land with Jewish settlements in return for land with Arab citizens (D. Newman, ‘The Geopolitics of Peacemaking in Israel-Palestine’, Political Geography 21, no. 5 (2002): 629–46; and C. Kaufmann, ‘When All Else Fails: Ethnic Population Transfers and Partitions in the Twentieth Century’, International Security 23, no. 2 (1998): 120–56.
46. S. Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel.
47. I. Lustick, Arabs in the Jewish State: Israel's Control of a National Minority (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980) and N.N. Rouhana, ‘Collective Identity and Arab Voting Patterns’, in Elections in Israel, 1984, ed. A. Arian and M. Shamir (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1986), 121–49.
48. L. Dallasheh, ‘The Al-Ard Movement’, in The Palestinians in Israel: Readings in History, Politics and Society, ed. N.N. Rouhana and A. Sabbagh-Khoury, 2nd ed. (Haifa: Mada al-Carmel – Arab Center for Applied Social Research, in press).
49. N.N. Rouhana, Palestinians in an Ethnic Jewish State.
50. M. Masri, ‘Family Reunification Legislation in Israel’.
51. N.N. Rouhana and A. Sabbagh-Khoury, ‘Dominance, Tolerance, Space and the Privileged Situation’, in Knowledge and Silence: On Mechanisms of Denial and Repression in Israeli Society, ed. H. Herzog and L. Kinneret (Jerusalem: Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and the Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2004), 62–74 (Hebrew).
52. Cf. the Panopticon effect that influenced the political discourse and organization for years as described by A. Sabbagh-Khoury, ‘Palestinian Predicaments: Jewish Immigration and Refugee Repatriation’, in Displaced at Home, ed. R. Kanaaneh and I. Nusair, 171–88.
53. N. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, ‘Settler Colonialism, Surveillance, and Fear’, in Ethnic Privileges in the Jewish State: Israel and its Palestinian Citizens, ed. N.N. Rouhana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
54. H. Cohen, Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917–1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
55. Y. Bäuml, ‘The Military Government and the Process of Its Abolishment, 1958–1968’, The New East 23 (2002): 133–56 (Hebrew).
56. A. Sabbagh-Khoury, Between the Right of Return and the ‘Law of Return’: Contemplation on Palestinian Discourse in Israel (Master's Thesis, Tel Aviv University, 2006) and A. Sabbagh-Khoury, ‘Palestinian Predicaments’.
57. As mentioned earlier, Israel did not permit the emergence of Arab national parties or political (or even cultural) organizations during the military government period and beyond. The ICP was allowed to operate for multiple reasons: It was an Arab-Jewish party with dominant Jewish leadership, it accepted the UN partition plan and supported the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine according to that plan, and it kept open channels to the Soviet Union that supported the partition plan. Yet it was (and still is) considered to be outside the Israeli-Zionist consensus, and as such has been under the watchful eyes of the state apparatus. For detailed discussion of the relationship between the ICP and the Israeli state, see E. Rekhess, The Arab Minority in Israel: Between Communism and Arab Nationalism 1965–1991 (Tel Aviv: University of Tel Aviv, 1993) (Hebrew).
58. A. Adiv, ‘Israel's Communist Party: At the Crossroads, 1948–2012’, in The Palestinians in Israel: Readings in History, Politics and Society, ed. N.N. Rouhana and A. Sabbagh-Khoury, 2nd ed. (Haifa: Mada al-Carmel – Arab Center for Applied Social Research, in press); E. Rekhess, The Arab Minority in Israel.
59. In a critically important deliberation of Section 7A of the Basic Law: The Knesset, the Israeli Knesset considered the various possibilities of what should Israel be: a state for the Jewish people (in Israel and outside Israel), a state for its citizens, or a state for the Jewish people and its citizens; it voted overwhelmingly for being the state of the Jewish people. See N.N. Rouhana, Palestinians in an Ethnic Jewish State for a discussion of the Knesset debate and decision, and its implications for the Palestinians.
60. K. Nakhleh, ‘Yawm al-Ard (Land Day)’, in The Palestinians in Israel: Readings in History, Politics and Society, ed. N.N. Rouhana and A. Sabbagh-Khoury (Haifa: Mada al-Carmel – Arab Center for Applied Social Research, 2011), 83–9; N. Bashir, Judaizing the Place.
61. M. Amara, ‘The Higher Follow-Up Committee for the Arab Citizens in Israel’, in N.N. Rouhana and A. Sabbagh-Khoury, The Palestinians in Israel: Readings in History, Politics and Society, 1st ed. (Haifa: Mada al-Carmel – Arab Center for Applied Social Research, 2011), 90–9.
62. A. Haidar, ‘The Nationalist Progressive Movement’, in The Palestinians in Israel: Readings in History, Politics and Society, ed. N.N. Rouhana and A. Sabbagh-Khoury (Haifa: Mada al-Carmel – Arab Center for Applied Social Research, in press).
63. Ibid.
64. N.N. Rouhana, Palestinians in an Ethnic Jewish State.
65. I. Pappe, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011) and N.N. Rouhana, Palestinians in an Ethnic Jewish State.
66. A. Ghanem, ‘State and Minority in Israel: The Case of Ethnic State and the Predicament of its Minority, Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 3 (1998): 428–48.
67. N. Ali, ‘The Islamic Movement in Israel: Historical and Ideological Development’, in The Palestinians in Israel: A Reading in History, Politics and Society, ed. N.N. Rouhana and A. Sabbagh-Khoury, 2nd ed. (Haifa: Mada al-Carmel – Arab Center for Applied Social Research, in press).
68. T. Sorek, ‘Public Silence and Latent Memories: Yitzhak Rabin and the Arab-Palestinian Citizens of Israel’, Israel Studies Review 26, no. 1 (2013): 78–97.
69. N.N. Rouhana and A. Saabneh, Attitudes of Palestinians in Israel on Key Political and Social Issues: Survey Research Results (Haifa: Mada al-Carmel – Arab Center for Applied Social Research, 2007), http://mada-research.org/en/2007/10/30/attitudes-of-palestinians-in-israel-on-key-political-and-social-issues-survey-research-results-english-2007/ (accessed on 2014).
70. The party did not openly state that it sought the transformation of Israel from a Jewish state to a democratic state for all its citizens. It simply emphasized the latter part, “the state for all its citizens,” in order to avoid being outlawed according to Israeli laws that do not allow a party to run for the Knesset if it rejects Israel as a Jewish state. Indeed, the party was banned by the Elections Committee, but the decision was later reversed by the Supreme Court (M. Masri, ‘Family Reunification Legislation in Israel’, in The Palestinians in Israel; N. Sultany and A. Sabbagh-Khoury, Resisting Hegemony: the Trial of Azmi Bishara (Haifa: Mada al-Carmel – Arab Center for Applied Social Research, 2003).
71. R. Gavison, ‘Jewish and Democratic? A Rejoinder to the ‘Ethnic Democracy’ Debate’, Israel Studies 4, no. 1 (1999): 44–72; S. Smooha, ‘Types of Democracy and Modes of Conflict-management in Ethnically Divided Societies’, Nations and Nationalism 8 (2002): 423–31.
72. A. Bishara, ‘Reflections on October 2000: A Landmark in Jewish-Arab Relations in Israel’, Journal of Palestine Studies 30, no. 3 (2001): 54–67. A. Bishara, From the Jewish state to Sharon: A Study in the Contradictions of Israeli Democracy (Ramallah: MUWATIN – The Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy, 2005) (Arabic); N.N. Rouhana, Palestinian Citizens in an Ethnic Jewish State.
73. S. Smooha, ‘Ethnic Democracy: Israel as an Archetype’, Israel Studies 2 (1997): 198–241.
74. A. Bishara, ‘Zionism and Equal Citizenship: Essential and Incidental Citizenship in the Jewish State’, in Ethnic Privileges in the Jewish State: Israel and its Palestinian Citizens, ed. N.N. Rouhana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). A. Jamal, ‘Beyond “Ethnic Democracy”: State Structure, Multi-Cultural Conflict and Differentiated Citizenship in Israel’, New Political Science 24, no. 3 (2002), 411–31. N.N. Rouhana, Palestinians in an Ethnic Jewish State; N.N. Rouhana, ‘Jewish and Democratic? The Price of a National Self-Deception’, Journal of Palestine Studies 35, no. 2 (2006): 64–74; A. Ghanem, N.N. Rouhana, and O. Yiftachel, ‘Questioning “Ethnic Democracy”: A Response to Sammy Smooha’, Israel Studies 3, no. 2 (1998): 253–67; O. Yiftachel, ‘“Ethnocracy”: The Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine’, Constellations 6, no. 3 (1999): 364–90; O. Yiftachel, Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
75. The documents are: “The Future Vision” by the National Committee for the Heads of the Arab Local Authorities in Israel (http://www.bitterlemons.net/docs/future-vision-english.pdf); “The Democratic Constitution” by Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (http://adalah.org/Public/files/democratic_constitution-english.pdf); the “Haifa Declaration” by Mada al-Carmel – Arab Center for Applied Social Research (http://mada-research.org/en/files/2007/09/haifaenglish.pdf).
76. E. Reckhess, The Arab Minority in Israel: An Analysis of the “Future Visions” Documents (New York: American Jewish Committee, 2008).
77. N.N. Rouhana and A. Sabbagh-Khoury, eds., The Palestinians in Israel: Readings in History, Politics and Society, 2nd ed. (Haifa: Mada al-Carmel – Arab Center for Applied Social Research, in press).
78. For a discussion of the distinction between official and unofficial public spheres, see A. Sabbagh-Khoury, Between the Right of Return and the ‘Law of Return’: Contemplation on Palestinian Discourse in Israel (Master's Thesis, Tel Aviv University, 2006) and A. Sabbagh-Khoury, ‘Palestinian Predicaments’.
79. See J. Kestler-D'Amours (2011). Israel Criminalizes Commemoration of the Nakba, http://electronicintifada.net/content/israel-criminalizes-commemoration-nakba/9289
80. Amara, ‘The Higher Follow-Up Committee’.
81. The State Commission of Inquiry into the Clashes Between Security Forces and Israeli Citizens, 2003, http://elyon1.court.gov.il/heb/veadot/or/inside_index.htm (accessed November 15, 2013).
82. International Center for Transitional Justice, 2010. Israel: Time to Heed Victims' Call for Justice, http://ictj.org/news/israel-time-heed-victims-call-justice.
83. Perhaps the best description of their collective experience at the time can be seen in the scant literary work produced about that period. See, in particular, E. Habibi, The Secret Life of Saeed The Pessoptimist, trans. S.K. Jayyusi and T. LeGassick (New York: Vantage Press, 1982).