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Abstract
The term settler-colonialism has recently gained traction among scholars of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict who use it to address all forms of Zionist ideology and practices. This article, however, benefits from a conceptual distinction between colonial and settler-colonial Zionist policies when assessing the first two decades of Israel's existence. During this period, Palestinian-Arabs who remained within the state borders were granted nominal citizenship. At the same time, the state also subjected the majority of this population to the Military Government, a form of martial law which suspended many of the rights and legal protections that citizenship afforded. The article considers Israel's various forms of right-granting, social-democratic tendencies, and liberal policies as the post-Nakba continuation of Zionist settler-colonial consolidation. Conversely, Israel's Military Government and other forms of discrimination the Palestinian-Arab citizens endured could be considered colonial institutions that existed in tension with the logic of settler-colonial consolidation. My claim is that when Israel, during its first two decades, slowly dismantled the Military Government, it effectively abandoned a colonial form of interaction with the Palestinian-Arabs and thereby inched toward consolidating the Zionist settler-colonial project. I begin my article with a short discussion on colonialism and settler-colonialism as linked yet distinct historical phenomena. Then I present the colonial features of the Military Government and explain why they inhibited settler-colonial consolidation. After setting the stage, I analyze the Jewish-Israeli discourse formulated against the Military Government and show that in fact Zionists clearly saw a Zionist interest in adopting a more liberal attitude toward the Palestinian-Arab citizens. Finally, I show how this Zionist perception took over Israel's highest decision-making circles leading to the abolishment of the Military Government.
Acknowledgements
Research for this article was completed during my doctoral studies at the UCLA History Department, under the devoted mentorship of Gabriel Piterberg. I would like to express my deepest thanks to Lorenzo Veracini and Susan Slyomovics who have helped me immensely and followed this piece from its first drafts.
Funding
I would like to thank UCLA History Department, Graduate Division, and the Center for Jewish Studies for their financial support.
Notes
1. Yazid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993 (Oxford; New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 1997); Avraham Sela, The Decline of the Arab-Israeli Conflict : Middle East Politics and the Quest for Regional Order (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); Moshe Shemesh, Arab Politics, Palestinian Nationalism and the Six Day War: The Crystallization of Arab Strategy and Nasir's Descent to War, 1957–1967 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2008).
2. This paper refers to the Palestinian population living in Israel and holding Israeli citizenship as ‘Palestinian-Arabs.’
3. See also, Sabri Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976); Uzi Benziman and Atallah Mansour, Dayare Mishneh: ‘Arviye Yisrael: Ma'amadam Veha-Mediniyut Kelapehem (Yerushalayim: Keter, 1992); Sarah Ozacky-Lazar, ‘Hitgabshut Yahasay Ha-Gomlin Bayn Yehudim Le-‘Aravim Bi-Medinat Yisrael: Ha-'Asor Ha-Rishon 1948–1958’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Haifa University, 1996); Hillel Cohen, ‘Aravim Tovim : Ha-Modi`in Ha-Yisreeli Veha-`Arvim Be-Yisrael: Sokhnim U-Maf`ilim, Meshatfim U-Mordim, Matarot ve-Shitot (Yerushalayim: Hotsaat `Ivrit : Keter, 2006); Yair Bauml, Tsel Kahol Lavan: Mediniyut Ha-Mimsad Ha-Yisreeli U-Fe‘ulotav Be-Kerev Ha-Ezrahim Ha-’Aravim Be-Yisrael: Ha-Shanim Ha-Me’atsvot 1958–1968 (Hefah: Pardes, 2007).
4. Shira Robinson, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel's Liberal Settler State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 3, 8–11, 15–16, 55–58, 69–70, 72, 80, 97–98, 137, 152, 160, 198.
5. Ibid., 42, 55, 66–67.
6. Ibid., 5, 13–18.
7. Ibid., 189–192.
8. Omar Jabary Salamanca et al., ‘Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine’, Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 1 (2012): 1–8; Ilan Pappé, ‘Shtetl Colonialism: First and Last Impressions of Indigeneity by Colonised Colonisers’, Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 1 (2012): 39–58; Mary Boger, ‘A Ghetto State of Ghettos: Palestinians Under Israeli Citizenship’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, CUNY, 2008); Hunayda Ghanem, ‘Lo Mamash Apartheid: ‘Al Ha-Dinamiqa Bayn Kolonialism Hityashvuti Le-Kibush Tzva'i’, Hamerhav Hatizburi 6 (2012): 95–112.
9. Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel (London: Verso, 2008), 61–78; Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Introducing: Settler Colonial Studies’, Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (2011): 1–12.
10. Veracini, ‘Introducing: Settler Colonial Studies’.
11. Patrick Wolfe, ‘Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race’, The American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (2001): 866–905.
12. Ibid.
13. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 2003); Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1967); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
14. I use this term in a similar the same manner as Patrick Wolfe uses ‘elimination’, and Lorenzo Veracini uses ‘transfer’. See Wolfe, ‘Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race’; Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Houndmills, Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Gabi Piterberg utilized the word ‘erasures’ to describe what various forms of Zionist discourse mean for Palestinian-Arabs, see ‘Erasures’, New Left Review 10 (2001).
15. Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 25.
16. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘The State of Shame: Australian Multiculturalism and the Crisis of Indigenous Citizenship’, Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998): 582; Wolfe, ‘Land, Labor, and Difference’, 893; Elizabeth Povinelli, ‘The Governance of the Prior’, Interventions 13, no. 1 (March 2011): 13–30.
17. Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Differenceâ€.
18. Veracini, Settler Colonialism, chap. 1.
19. Ibid., chap. 2.
20. James Tully, ‘The Struggles of Indigenous Peoples for and of Freedom’, in Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, ed. Duncan Ivison, Paul Paul, and Will Sanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 36–59.
21. In reality, Israeli citizenship was granted only to 40% of the Palestinian-Arab who resided in the state and was gradually extended to most others in the following years, see Robinson, Citizen Strangers, 68–112.
22. Sarah Ozacky-Lazar, ‘Ha-Mimshal Ha-Tzva'i Ke-Manganon Shlita Ba-Ezrahim Ha-'Aravim’, Ha-Mizrah Ha-Hadash 43 (2002): 104–132.
23. Sabri Jiryis, Ha-'Aravim Be-Yisrael (Haifa: Al-Itihad Publishing, 1966), 21.
24. From the 1956 Ratner commission on the Military Government, quoted in Ozacky-Lazar, ‘Ha-Mimshal Ha-Tzva'i Ke-Manganon Shlita Ba-Ezrahim Ha-'Aravim’, 106.
25. For an extensive study of this period see Benny Morris, Israel's Border Wars, 1949–1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War (Oxford; New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 1993).
26. Ozacky-Lazar, ‘Ha-Mimshal Ha-Tzva'i Ke-Manganon Shlita Ba-Ezrahim Ha-'Aravim’, 106; Hillel Cohen, Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs 1948–1967 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 65–94.
27. Jiryis, Ha-’Aravim Be-Yisrael, 44–45; Habib Qahwaji, Al-`Arab Fi Zill Al-Ihtilal Al-Israili Mundhu 1948 (Bayrut: Munazzamat al-Tahrir al-Filastiniyah, Markaz al-Abhath, 1972), 147–159.
28. Bauml, Tsel Kahol Lavan, 71–73.
29. Yair Bauml, ‘Shi'abud Ha-Kalkala Ha-'Aravit Le-Tovat Ha-Migzar Ha-Yehudi, 1958–1967’, Ha-Mizrah Ha-Hadash 48 (2009): 101–129.
30. Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel, 8; Cohen, `Aravim Tovim, 119–149.
31. Morris, Israel's Border Wars, 1949–1956, 419–425.
32. Ozacky-Lazar, ‘Ha-Mimshal Ha-Tzva'i Ke-Manganon Shlita Ba-Ezrahim Ha-'Aravim’, 115–119.
33. Historian Yair Bauml enumerated the immediate reasons for the persistence of the debate on the Military Government: (1) the continued pressure from leftist and centrist coalition parties; (2) new voices against the Military Government, now from within the ruling MAPAI and the Israeli security establishment; (3) a growing criticism against the Military Government in light of the Kafr Qassem massacre trials; (4) the growing economic demand for free access to Arab laborers; and (5) the Jewish realization that another mass exodus of Palestinians will not occur and that the Palestinian-Arab citizens are there to stay. The two latter elements, the need for working hands and the coming to terms with the Arab citizenry, speak of liberal economic consideration, alongside the security needs, for the democratic attitude of Zionists toward the Palestinian-Arabs. Yair Bauml, ‘Ha-Mimshal Ah-Tzva'i ve-Tahalikh Bitulo, 1948–1966’, Ha-Mizrah Ha-Hadash 43 (2002): 138.
34. For other scholarship which successfully incorporated a comparative approach to settler-colonialism or explicitly used settler-colonial studies in their research on Zionist history see: Baruch Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory: The Socio-Territorial Dimensions of Zionist Politics (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1983); Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism; Lorenzo Veracini, Israel and Settler Society (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2006).
35. The drive to assimilate the Palestinian-Arab community in order to erase it has been discussed thoroughly in Piterberg, ‘Erasures’, 43–46; Bauml, Tsel Kahol Lavan, 29–69.
36. See the speech given by Elimelekh Rimalt, MK from the General Zionists Party and representing the Religious National Party, MAPAM, Ahdut ha-‘Avoda, and MAKI in Haboker, 30 July 1959, 1, 3; Gil Eyal, The Disenchantment of the Orient: Expertise in Arab Affairs and the Israeli State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 152–184; Cohen, `Aravim Tovim, 50; Shira Robinson, ‘Occupied Citizens in a Liberal State: Palestinians Under Military Rule and the Colonial Formation of Israeli Society, 1948–1966’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Stanford, 2005); Robinson, Citizen Strangers.
37. Robinson, Citizen Strangers, 33–34.
38. Elia Zureik, The Palestinians in Israel: A Study in Internal Colonialism (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1979); Bauml, ‘Shi'abud Ha-Kalkala Ha-'Aravit Le-Tovat Ha-Migzar Ha-Yehudi, 1958–1967’.
39. Jiryis, Ha-’Aravim Be-Yisrael, 50–52; Tom Segev, 1949: Ha-Yisraelim Ha-Ri'shonim (Jerusalem: Domino, 1984), 61–65. See also the correspondences of an Israeli tax clerk with his official on the lack of cooperation of the Military Government in the triangle; Israel Defense Forces Archive, file no. 53/233/1955.
40. Gabriel Baer, ‘The Office and Function of the Village Mukhtar’, in Palestinian Society and Politics, ed. Joel S. Migdal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 103–123.
41. Cohen, Good Arabs; Bauml, Tsel Kahol Lavan, 83.
42. Haim Hefer, ‘Military Governors (song)’, in Revi‘iyat Mo‘adon ha-Teatron, Shirei ha-Frere Jacques,1977 found in Robinson, Occupied Citizens in a Liberal State; Robinson, Citizen Strangers, 93–95; Benziman and Mansour, Dayare Mishneh; Qahwaji, Al-`Arab Fi Zill Al-Ihtilal Al-Israili Mundhu 1948; Jiryis, Ha-’Aravim Be-Yisrael. See also Baruch Gitlis’ novel , Ha-Moshel Ha-Mekho'ar (The Ugly Governor) in which he claimed authenticity to the events of corruption and feasting depicted in the book.
43. Eyal, The Disenchantment of the Orient, 17–32; Alina Korn, ‘From Refugees to Infiltrators: Constructing Political Crime in Israel in the 1950s’, International Journal of the Sociology of Law 31, no. 1 (March 2003): 1–22.
44. Ozacky-Lazar, ‘Ha-Mimshal Ha-Tzva'i Ke-Manganon Shlita Ba-Ezrahim Ha-'Aravim’, 115–119.
45. Yossi Amitay, Ahavat-`Amim Ba-Mivhan: Mapam, 1948–1954: `Amadot Be-Sugyat `Arvyay Eretz Yisrael (Tel-Aviv: Ts'erikover, 1988), 13–66; Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 434.
46. I thank Gabriel Piterberg for coining this term.
47. Amitay, Ahavat-`Amim Ba-Mivhan, 101–105.
48. “‘Al ha-Mimshal ha-Tzva'i,†‘Al ha-Mishmar, March 11, 1956, 1.
49. Yigal Allon, Masakh Shel Hol, 1968 ed. (Tel Aviv: ha-Kibuts ha-Meuhad, 1959), 337.
50. Ibid., 324.
51. Ibid., 329.
52. Aharon Cohen, ‘On the Arab Problem in Israel’, ‘Al ha-Mishmar, April 9, 1952, 4; Peretz Berstein, ‘Arviyay Yisrael’, Haboqer, July 13, 1956, 3; ‘It is time to Abolish the Military Government in its Current Form’, Haboqer, July 30, 1959, 3; The two parties united in 1961 to form the Israeli Liberal Party. The Progressive Party was headed by Pinhas Rosen who in 1959 was appointed by the Ben-Gurion government to head an inquiry on the issue of the Military Government. Rosen and two other members from this party recommended it be abolished.
53. Yohanan Bader, ‘Be-Kenut Klapay ha-‘Aravi Ezrah Yisrael’, Herut, May 22, 2
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
56. Herzl Rosenblum, ‘Ha-Gal ha-‘Akhur (editorial)’, Yediot Aharonot, January 1, 1962, 2; ‘The Military Government Serves the Ruling Party in the State’, Herut, November 16, 4.
57. See Vladimir Jabotinsky and Rafaela Bilski-Cohen, Li-Mahutah Shel Ha-Demokratyah: Mishnato Ha-Liberalit Veha-Demokratit Shel Zeev Zhabotinski (Tel Aviv: Hotsaat ha-misdar `al-shem Zeev Zhabotinski, 2001); Dimitry Shumsky, ‘Brith Shalom's Uniqueness Reconsidered: Hans Kohn and Autonomist Zionism’, Jewish History 25, nos. 3–4 (July 12, 2011): 339–353.
58. Shimon Peres, ‘Ha-Mimishal Ha-Tzva'i hu Pri shel Mimshal Milhamti’, Davar, January 26, 2; ‘Davar Hayom (editorial)’, Davar, December 1, 1955, 1; ‘Le‘et Kazot? (editorial)’, Herut, December 4, 1955, 2; ‘Martin Buber ve-Hamimshal ha-Tzva‘i’, Yediot Aharonot, January 16, 1962, 5; Herzl Rosenblum, ‘Be-Lev Patuah’, Yediot Ahronot/7 Yamim, February 22, 1963, 12; Herzl Rosenblum, ‘Tzvi‘ut’, Yediot Ahronot, February 20, 1963, 2; See ‘Davar Hayom’ editorials in Davar, December 31, 1961; January 8, 1962; February 2, 1962; November 14, 1962; December 5, 1962; February 20, 1963; February 21, 1963.
59. ‘Rosh ha-Memshala Soqer’, Davar, March 17, 1959, 2; ‘Ben-Gurion Makhriz’, Herut, March 17, 1959, 2.
60. ‘Eshkol with Meir, July 9, 1963’, Israel State Archives, A/7921/1 (Hereafter ISA).
61. ‘Eshkol with the Department of Arab Affaires, July 23, 1963’, ISA.
62. Ibid.
63. ‘Meeting on Arab Affairs (‘inyanay ‘aravim)’, August 8, 1963, ISA, particularly the opinions of Eshkol and Peres.
64. ‘Our Minister's (sareynu) meeting’, September 12, 1963, ISA.
65. Bauml, Tsel Kahol Lavan, 130–203.
66. ‘Eshkol with the Department of Arab Affaires’, July 23, 1963, ISA.
67. See the opinions of Aba Eban; Sh. Bendor; G. Polak, in Ibid.
68. Shafir, Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914; Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism, 69–78.
69. See the comments of Rehav‘am Amir, Eshkol and Abba Eban in the same meeting above.
70. ‘“Our Comrades†(havereinu) meeting’, October 9, 1963,†ISA.
71. ‘Our Minister's (sareynu) meeting’, September 12, 1963, ISA.
72. Ibid.