by Ilan Pappe
Under the rubric of ‘terrorism’, Israeli historiography lumped together the sporadic and desperate acts of expelled Palestinians with the guerrilla warfare of Fatah. This was presented as a direct continuation of the Palestinian terror in the pre-state period. A summary of this point of view can be found in English in, for instance, a book by the pro-Zionist novelist and essayist Jillian Becker, who relied heavily on Israeli sources and perspectives.32 It is certainly true that some Palestinian actions were directed against innocent citizens in Israel; the worst instance of this was an attack on an ordinary passenger bus on 17 March 1954, in which eleven passengers were murdered. A serious historiographer would no doubt regard such an act as terrorism, but would not characterise an entire national movement as a ‘terrorist organisation’ because of individual acts such as these.
By 1954, Israeli retaliation policy against the more innocent infiltrations was well known: to shoot on sight any Palestinian attempting to enter or return to Palestine. Around five thousand people lost their lives in these infiltrations, and yet it was they who were depicted as terrorists. State policies of any kind, even as brutal as shooting on sight, are not mentioned in Israel apart from the aforementioned work by Benny Morris.33 The idea that Palestinian resistance on Israel’s borders was pure terrorism was used by the Israeli government in 1956 to justify the collusion with Britain and France on the confrontation over the Suez Canal. Updated historiography, especially that provided by Avi Shlaim, has revealed that the principal objective of this operation was a wish to topple Gamal Abdul Nasser, who was a thorn in the side of Britain (because of his nationalisation of the Suez Canal), of France (because of his support of the FLN), and of Israel (because of his attempts to radicalise Arab states that were somewhat favourable to Israel, including Lebanon and the Hashemite regimes of Jordan and Iraq).34
The occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in June 1967 by Israel and the defeat of the pan-Arab military forces sharpened the focus of the Palestinian national movement. Between 1967 and 1974, under the influence of Third World revolutionary theories, armed struggle came to be deemed the exclusive means of ending the Israeli occupation and even of achieving the liberation of Palestine as a whole. In practice, the movement was engaged in an abortive attempt to organise a popular revolt against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and a more successful effort to attract world opinion to the plight of the Palestinians.
During those years, the armed struggle resorted to every possible tactic: terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and direct military confrontation with the superior army of Israel. Terrorism was manifested mainly in the hijacking of airplanes, a speciality of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (the DFLP, led by Naif Hawatmeh) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (the PFLP, led by George Habash). Here, for the first time, several Palestinian groups linked up directly with what the professional literature would define unhesitatingly as pure terrorist groups, including the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Japanese Red Army, but also with other liberation movements, such as ETA and the IRA. These were, however, short-term associations. The 1972 murder by three members of the Red Army of twenty-six (some say twenty-four) passengers at Ben Gurion Airport (then still known as Lod Airport) was the most notorious operation of that kind – unquestionably an act of pure terrorism. There were also growing tensions between the PLO and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on whose territory the units had trained and operated, and as a result of that deterioration, ending with the massacre of several thousand Palestinians by the Jordanians in September 1970, the PLO moved to Lebanon. These developments marked the end of that revolutionary moment.
The guerrilla operations included attempts to infiltrate the occupied West Bank in order to organise popular resistance there. After 1970, there were similar operations based in Lebanon, which targeted civilians in Israel for purposes of kidnap and negotiation. Quite often these ended in disaster, including the murder of civilians, either because of an aggressive Israeli salvage action despite prudence having dictated further negotiations, or because of the callousness of the kidnappers. One infamous operation took place at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, where eleven Israeli athletes were killed. Another took place in Ma’alot, where a school was taken; during the salvage operation, twenty-two students were killed. It must be said that today Israeli scholars do refer to Ma’alot as a failed salvage operation but nonetheless present it as a classic case study of Palestinian barbarity and terrorism.
Another chapter of the guerrilla efforts was a war of attrition that went on until September 1970, in which the PLO bombarded Israeli settlements in the Jordan valley. After the Munich operation, the Mossad initiated its own campaign of terror, with names such as Operation Wrath of God (killing PLO personnel in Europe) and Operation Spring of Youth (the assassination of PLO leaders in Beirut in 1973). The most famous of the Israeli retaliation operations took place at Karameh in 1968, a confrontation that the Israelis called Mivtza Tofet (Operation Hell), which triggered unexpectedly fierce Palestinian and Jordanian resistance.
Judging by the balance sheet, Palestinian actions were a failure – not one square inch was liberated. But some change was achieved: the PLO became the sole and authentic liberation movement, even though losing the battle of liberation while winning the struggle for legitimacy did transform its strategy. In the mid-1970s, the organisation developed what its commanders called the stages plan: a realistic political strategy that accepted the failure of a pure military solution and opted for a diplomatic effort and resolution of the conflict with Israel.
Israel, however, did not reciprocate this pragmatism. On the ground, the occupied territories became a mega-prison under strict military rule – which in many ways continues to this day. The Israeli discourse of peace was soon exposed as an attempt to conceal the vast Judaisation of the Palestinian territories while confining the Palestinian population to the rest of the territories. With time, the Palestinians would be offered to turn these circumscribed areas into a state and to declare the conflict at an end, which they would refuse to do.
Nor was pragmatism manifested in the continued depiction of the PLO as a mammoth terrorist organisation, at least prior to the signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993. The PLO and Israel were employing all kinds of means, including actions that would be defined by scholars as terrorism whether executed by states or by non-state actors. (See, for instance, the scholarly description of the PLO, terrorism, and Oslo in the entry ‘PLO’ on the popular Israeli website Ynet, an offshoot of the widely read daily paper Yedioth Ahronoth.)
Since the beginning of the occupation, Palestinian paramilitary activity included attacks on three different kinds of targets: the military, the settlers, and civilian targets inside Israel. The latter began in earnest only after the failure of the first uprising, the First Intifada, which erupted in 1987. There are few academic analyses of the First Intifada in Israel, but there are journalistic assessments that have appeared as books and that represent mainstream perception. Although the uprising consisted mainly of stone throwing and mass demonstrations, and occasionally even successful short-term takeovers of villages and neighbourhoods, the more popular books still summed it up as another chapter of terrorism.35
In the mid-1970s, the Israeli Orientalist Yehoshua Porath published two volumes, which later appeared in English, about the emergence and history of the Palestinian national movement between 1918 and 1939.36 He was the first to refer to the people who lived in Palestine before 1948 as Palestinians. This was a novelty. Despite the famous remark by Golda Meir that there was no such a thing as the Palestinian people, they have been referred to ever since as Palestinians, including in discussions of the period before 1948.
Palestinians appear in Porath’s book as petty politicians of a clannish society, concerned only about their own interests and united solely by their negation of Zionism. Porath’s books make an ideal case study for Edward Said’s model of Western Orientalism
. Although they do recognise the existence of the Palestinians as a people before 1948, the local population is described in one-dimensional terms as primitive, moved only by tradition, religious fanaticism, and a shifty urban élite. Nowhere in these works is the proposition that the Palestinians were, at least in their eyes, struggling against a colonialist movement mentioned or explored.
Yehoshafat Harkabi, a head of military intelligence during the 1950s, who moved to academia in the 1970s, wrote a more contemporary history of the PLO and came to the conclusion that it was purely a terror organisation determined to destroy the State of Israel: ‘The objective which has been proclaimed day and night by the Arab leaders is the liquidation of the state of Israel’, he wrote in 1974. This position left no space for Arab leaders’ various debates about Zionism ever since 1882.37 A decade later, however, some of his students – and in the 1990s, towards the end of his life, he himself – developed a new approach that differentiated between the different PLO positions towards Israel. One student of Harkabi’s, Matti Steinberg, who also came to academia from the security and intelligence world, employed theoretical tools to show that pragmatism was an inevitable development in organisations like the PLO, and he advocated dialogue with the movement.38 Other of Harkabi’s students, such as Moshe Shemesh, Avraham Sela and Shaul Mishal, to mention but a few, adopted similar views.39 Their analysis was less demonising and more informative, at least about the history of the PLO since its inception and until their own time.
The Palestinians in Israel: Between Orientalism and Terrorism
The Palestinian minority in Israel was first researched by nonprofessional writers who wished to present either the official Israeli line or the individual grievances of members of the community. This genre continued to be pursued, mainly by Israelis involved in one way or another in shaping policy towards the Palestinian minority. But even the more academic works that appeared in the late 1970s were not devoid of ideological leanings and biases, even though their methodology was professional and their reliance on factual infrastructure more solid. Broadly defined, their research lay on a spectrum between Zionist and anti-Zionist positions.
Among those scholars who wrote within the framework of Zionism, the paradigm of modernisation was their favourite theoretical point of departure. If we apply for a moment Noam Chomsky’s analysis of how academics in the West in general and in the United States in particular relate to hegemonic ideology, we have here a rare example not merely of academic bowing to an interpretation of past and present realities in such a way as to satisfy the powers that be but also of basing the interpretation on a solid theoretical infrastructure for the validity of the ideology. As social scientists, they were not only loyal to Zionism for emotional and utilitarian reasons but also convinced that the theory of modernisation validated the ideology – in this case, reinforcing the attitude towards the Palestinian minority in Israel.40
The Palestinian minority was regarded as a potentially subversive element and hence was put under severe military rule. In the euphoric mood that sprang up after the 1948 war, politicians and generals, who regarded the minority community as a ‘fifth column’ and a grave security risk, were willing to let military rule continue and even contemplated the Palestinians’ forceful removal from the state.41 But change came with the end of the Ben-Gurion era. Ben-Gurion was supremely paranoid in regard to the future of the minority; following his disappearance from the political scene, the politicians abolished the straightforward military rule that had been imposed on the Palestinian minority and substituted it for a more complex matrix of discrimination, dispossession and colonisation.
Meanwhile, academics were developing hopeful scenarios for the future. In both its self- and its external image, Israel had become a new regional superpower, ruling over vast areas of Egypt, Palestine and Syria. Academically, this translated into a sense of mission.
But the ‘mission’ was not easy. One of the most progressive of those who chose the Palestinians in Israel as his subject matter, Sammy Smooha, wrote at that time:
The cultural differences between Jews and Arabs in Israel are due to stark differences in fundamental values … there are significant differences in ways of thinking, personal traits, impulses for achievements, patterns of leisure, etc.42
In short, the Jewish community was a progressive, modern society, whereas the Palestinian minority was a primitive one. Modernisation was slow and could lead either to a clash of civilisations that, owing to the imbalance of power, would end in the demise of the Palestinian minority in Israel or to its integration within a modern society. Smooha predicted that the latter scenario was the more likely. To his credit, in later works he moved away from this essentialist, Orientalist depiction of Palestinian society and cast as much blame on Israel’s discriminatory policies as on the intrinsic problems of Arab society and culture – before joining everyone else after 2000 and returning to his earlier point of departure in his 1978 book Israel: Pluralism and Conflict, which, after trials and tribulations and attempts to think out of the box, the prediction that the Palestinian minority would be Israelised, but with great difficulties, became his main mantra about the Palestinian minority in Israel. In brief, it was a non-modern group that recognised the superiority of modern Jewish society and wished to integrate into it but was hindered by, on the one hand, the Arab nationalism around it and, on the other, Jewish racism in Israeli society.43
Smooha’s articles from that period indicate that, both inside and outside Israeli academia, the Palestinian minority was considered not only to be primitive and non-modern but, as shown through surveys among Jewish citizens at that time, also one that would never become modern unless it was de-Palestinised and de-Arabised.44 The dominance of the modernisation theory as the principal prism through which the reality of the Palestinian minority should be viewed was facilitated by the august presence within Israeli academia of one of the world’s renowned theorists on modernisation, Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, a favourite target of the new sociology. His students at the Hebrew University presented the Palestinians in Israel as a classic case study of a successfully modernised and Westernised community in transition and added scholarly weight to the more ideological aspirations of the political élite towards this sizeable minority.45 Their basic assumption was that the community at large was a traditional society that was modernised through its incorporation within the State of Israel. More specifically, it was seen as a society in ‘transition’ between traditional and modern phases. These academic observers were looking for quantifiable evidence of the transformation of an Arab society and its adoption of a Western way of life.
This methodology was also applied to the Mizrachim. Both were conceived as ideal subjects for the study of modernisation and Westernisation and as proof of one of the more successful implementations of these enterprises. Thus, for instance, Israeli sociologists attributed the lower fertility rates of the Mizrachim after their arrival in Israel as ‘adopting modern Western patterns of fertility’, which rescued them from the fate of remaining primitive and poor. The subsequent increase in fertility rates was seen as a sad failure of modernisation among some segments of the Mizrachi Jews.46
This school of thought would have a large number of successors, who followed the search for modernisation with a more focused examination of the minority community’s chances for ‘Israelisation’ versus ‘Palestinisation’. Successful Westernisation was equated with a collective acceptance of being part of the Jewish state; whereas adherence to a Palestinian national identity was considered a failure. The problem with this approach was that it was not clear that the political élite in Israel in fact wished to Israelise the Palestinians in the state: a great number of them harboured a vision of a pure, ethnically Jewish state, and, more important, there was a risk that successful modernisation could, perhaps paradoxically, have led to further Palestinisation of the Arabs in Israel. As the theorists among these researchers knew only too well, if you modernise a society, you also increas
e its politicisation and nationalisation. Thus arose a bizarre model of modernisation, which saw Palestinian acceptance of Israel as a Jewish state as a positive outcome of the process and yet regarded modernisation as questionable if it produced an impulse among the Palestinians in Israel to continue their struggle in the name of Palestinian nationalism and against the Zionisation of the country.
A more cautious approach was developed in the 1970s by Israeli anthropologists, who, like their peers in the overall field of Middle Eastern studies, condemned the accelerated modernisation that undermined the rural areas while not providing adequate infrastructure elsewhere. Nevertheless, mainstream anthropological efforts came under severe criticism from non-Zionist scholars – criticism that in some instances seems valid. These anthropologists developed intimate relationships with the Palestinians themselves, spoke quite good Arabic, and sometimes became truly close to the culture and the region. They, too, became ostracised – condemned as traitors during the neo-Zionist epoch that commenced in 2000 and still exists today.
It should be noted that the modernisation approach continues to be used, albeit more marginally, in research on the Palestinians in Israel, although it has been challenged, initially, in the early 1970s, by Palestinians doing research abroad as well as interested scholars who began to appreciate the value in a closer examination of this case study.47 What was entirely absent from even the most advanced social-science research on the Palestinian minority in Israel was their history: how did the indigenous population of the land, once an almost absolute majority, become a minority? As the official Palestinian and Zionist narratives both associated the refugees only with the events of 1948, this community – about 10 per cent of the Palestinian population in Mandatory Palestine – was forgotten, its connection to the events of 1948 disregarded.
