14 - 20 December 2000
Issue No.512
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 14 - 20 December 2000 Issue No.512 |
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The Israeli Arabs
One of the most significant developments of the Intifada has been the extension of the Palestinian protest movement into Israel itself, where its Arab citizens took to the streets to express their outrage at the excessive force used by the Israeli security forces to put down the mass demonstrations sparked off by Sharon's provocative visit to Al-Aqsa Mosque on 28 September. However, notwithstanding their status as Israeli citizens, they were subjected to the same harsh treatment as that meted out to the Palestinians of the West Bank. When the inhabitants of Umm Al-Fahm, a Muslim town close to Israel's border with the West Bank, demonstrated in solidarity with the Palestinian victims of Israeli brutality, the Israeli police acted once again in the most heavy-handed way: ten Israeli Arabs were killed and over 150 wounded in the first few days alone. This has sent shock waves throughout Israel's Arab population, and highlighted the ambivalent nature of their position within Israel.
In the aim of avoiding such pro-Palestinian demonstrations inside Israel proper, the subject of territorial exchange between Israel and the Palestinian state was raised during the Camp David summit. According to the proposal, some of the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories would remain under Israeli sovereignty, in return for the transfer of Israeli Arab communities, including the town of Umm Al-Fahm, to Palestinian control. Objecting to the proposal, Israeli experts claimed that Israeli Arabs prefer Israel to the Palestinian Authority. Just before the Intifada, the well-known Israeli commentator Joseph Algazy published an article in Ha'aretz alleging that a survey conducted among 1,000 residents of Umm Al-Fahm, both male and female, from all of the town's clans and large families as well as all segments of the local political spectrum, showed that 83 per cent of respondents opposed the idea of transferring their town to Palestinian jurisdiction. Algazy concludes from this that "the residents of Umm Al-Fahm have expressed not only their own views and feelings but also the views and feelings of Israel's Arab community in general." However, his conclusion is refuted by the reaction of Israeli Arabs to the Intifada.
In another article published in Le Monde Diplomatique shortly after the Intifada began, Algazy had to admit that two apparently contradictory but actually complementary phenomena have asserted themselves among the Arab citizens of Israel: on the one hand, a tendency towards Palestinisation as evidenced by their manifestation of solidarity with their fellow Palestinians in the occupied territories; and, on the other, a tendency towards Israelisation as evidenced by their demand for greater integration into Israeli society.
For more than half a century, the Arabs of Israel have been docile citizens of a state that was imposed on them, that kept them under military rule for almost 20 years and that has deprived them of most of their land through a series of expropriation measures aimed, first and foremost, at preserving the Jewish character of the state of Israel. They have also been heavily discriminated against in the allocation of funds for the development of their own towns and villages, which lag behind in essential services such as health and education. It is by providing such services to the Arabs of Israel that the Islamic movement has been able to become a significant force in places such as Umm Al-Fahm and Nazareth.
The recent upsurge of Palestinian nationalism among Israeli Arabs raises the question of which of the two allegiances has greater weight in the Arab Israeli community. In the past, though persecuted and ill-treated by the Jewish population of Israel, the Arabs of Israel were suspected by the rest of the Arab world of loyalty to the Zionist state and were boycotted along with the rest of Israel's citizens. But with the advent of the peace process, the status of Israel's Arab minority was bound to change. Neither side could afford to ignore them any longer or consider them a marginal group doomed to remain forever without a voice in the political discourse of the region. With 13 out of 120 seats in the Knesset, they have become a considerable force to be reckoned with.
It is interesting here to trace the development of Palestinian self-affirmation as a political force. The movement originated among the Palestinian Diaspora, as represented by Fatah and the other resistance organisations constituting the PLO, which were all based in Arab countries outside Palestine. When the Madrid peace process was launched, the epicentre shifted to the occupied territories, to representatives chosen from among the notables of Gaza and the West Bank, while the PLO leadership was deliberately sidelined. It is only thanks to the Oslo accords that Arafat and Fatah were integrated into the peace process. The Palestinian Authority was created and Arafat was recognised by all concerned, including Israel, as the person empowered to negotiate in the name of the Palestinian people.
There are good reasons to believe that the epicentre is now moving into Israel itself, where the most eloquent spokesman for the Palestinians is the Nazareth-based member of the Knesset, Azmi Bishara, who is using his parliamentary position to articulate Palestinian national aspirations, as well as to promote equal rights and cultural autonomy for the Arab population of Israel. A major source of inspiration for Bishara has been the civil rights movement waged by America's blacks in the '60s under the leadership of Martin Luther King. As he himself admits, "membership in the Knesset as an Arab Palestinian contains many contradictions that are not exclusive to membership in the Knesset. Probably the Knesset sharpens these contradictions. Just being an Arab citizen of Israel is in itself a contradiction. If you want to avoid contradictions, you must leave the country; this is the only choice."
Bishara adds: "In the Knesset, the contradictions become more intense because they are political. Any attempt to reconcile them is futile. Rather, you should sharpen and clarify them, not try to blur or hide them. Otherwise you foster a perverse political personality that acts as if it is half Arab and half Israeli; in other words, you become a marginal figure in both societies. I don't think these contradictions should be reconciled, but transformed into a momentum for development rather than into a destructive and perverting force."
By articulating the identity problems of the Palestinian Arab community in Israel, Bishara reveals that the Palestinian body politic is not limited to the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank under PA rule, or, more generally, to the Diaspora Palestinians, including the refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and elsewhere, but extends also to the Palestinians living inside Israel and holding almost 11 per cent of the Knesset's voting power. True, the Arab members of parliament are not united and belong to different parties, but potentially they represent a formidable voting block. The mini-Intifada of Umm Al-Fahm offers a taste of the possibilities inherent in this new rationale.
Those Israelis who favour the creation of a Palestinian state, even if this entails a territorial exchange between that state and Israel so that Jewish settlements in the occupied territories would remain under Israeli sovereignty in return for the transfer of Israeli Arab communities to Palestinian control, are driven by the realisation that the cohesiveness, not to say the future survival, of the state of Israel entails the physical separation of Palestinians and Israelis. The alternative formula proposed by the PLO at an earlier stage, which is the establishment of a unified democratic secular state in Palestine, as a substitute for its partition into separate Jewish and Arab states, may prove, after all, to be less utopian than was believed at the time.
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