The Palestinian citizens of Israel, the
concept of trapped minority and the
discourse of transnationalism in
anthropology
Dan Rabinowitz
Abstract
Elastic, adaptable and vibrant, minorities often stretch across state borders
in ways traditional concepts of states and nations fail to acknowledge, let
alone theorize. The discourse of transnationalism helps to dislodge the study
of minorities from the analytical straight-jacket of the state. The concept of
‘trapped minority’, developed herein from an analysis of the Palestinian
citizens of Israel, adds to this debate. A trapped minority is a segment of a
larger group spread across at least two states. Citizens of a state hegemonized by others, its members are alienated from political power. Unable to
inuence the deŽnition of public goods or enjoy them, its members are at
the same time marginal within their mother nation abroad. My use of the
concept of ‘trapped minority’ offers a critique of Smooha’s rationalized
concept ‘ethnic democracy’ (1990) and of Yiftachel’s ethno-regionalism
(1999a, after Hechter and Levi 1979), a critique that helps to re-frame and
critique the Oslo-Wye process of Israel-Palestinian reconciliation and is
relevant to similar situations elsewhere.
Keywords: Minorities; nationalism; transnationalism; Palestinians; Israel.
Introduction
The concept of the nation-state, long taken for granted as an inherent
segment of human reality in the modern era, is one of the more durable
contributions of modernism to human history. It hinges on a nonproblematized division of the globe into a series of idealized ‘ultimate
territories’, each ostensibly forming a coherent, homogeneous and representative entity. Within each territory, a perfect Žt is implied between
territory (a bounded stretch with recognized borders), the people living
in it (‘society’), their culture and, above all, the state: a superstructure
Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 24 No. 1 January 2001 pp. 64–85
© 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd ISSN 0141-9870 print/1466-4356 online
DOI: 10.1080/0141987002000655 2
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of regulating mechanisms, offering members focuses for loyalty and
identiŽcation. The construct of the nation-state thus emerges as composite and rationalized.
This unproblematic notion of the state serves as an umbrella for ideological and political etatist clichés, the theoretical weakness of which
becomes apparent with the (re)surfacing of political, economic, genderrelated and other types of minorities and hybrids. This etatism is particularly predatory regarding ethnic and national minorities. Often
perceived by regimes as capable and willing to overthrow the state’s
ideological and coercive supremacy, such minorities become ideological
and political targets. In their strife to marginalize them, state regimes
tend to isolate them as anomalies – more or less tolerable distracting
noises in systems which ostensibly operate smoothly and naturally.
Anthropologists (for example, Appadurai 1991; Kearney 1995;
Hannerz 1996; Vertovec 1999), sociologists (for example, Portes,
Guarnizo and Landolt 1999) and other social scientists, have recently
recognized a growing variety of phenomena that, while taking place
outside the state, are nevertheless more central to the human experience
than hitherto assumed. The discourse of transnationalism, while not
necessarily intended to write against the state, does dislodge the debates
of ethnicity, nationalism and minorities from its analytical straightjacket.
The dynamic nature of the discourse of transnationalism in a globalizing world encourages new ways of conceptualizing minorities and their
relations to the states and regions in which they coexist. Minorities must
not be seen in terms of a simplistic arithmetic equation whereby one collective is outnumbered by another in a bounded territory. Minorities,
like all human collectives, are continuous, elastic, given to diffusion.
They stretch across boundaries in ways that often predate states and the
nations that begot them. Their predicaments beg for historical contextualization.
This need in historicization is the starting point for my depiction of
certain types of ethnic and national minorities as ‘trapped minorities’.
The label assumes a mother nation which stretches across two states or
more. Segments of this mother nation may Žnd themselves entrapped as
minorities within recently formed states dominated by other groups.
Each such segment is thus marginal twice over: once within the (alien)
state, and once within the (largely absent) mother nation.
The idiom trapped minority has spatial as well as temporal dimensions: old homeland minorities are often overtaken by newly established
states that sever the minorities’ ties with their mother nations abroad.
Awareness of the entrapped nature of a minority can fruitfully historicize it, thus redeŽning the minority, the host state, and the relationships
of both with neighbouring states and with the mother nation.
The concept becomes particularly useful when we observe how
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minorities become excluded from political debate and power. Minorities
such as the Palestinian citizens of Israel, on whose case I mainly draw
here, harbour obvious claims to rights, including rights in land. Nevertheless, they are consistently excluded from most political processes that
determine land use, development and well-being in their very homeland.
This paradox, which cannot be explained by conventional liberal-democratic theories of the western state, gains lucidity through the concept of
trapped minority.
This article begins with the testimony of a Palestinian intellectual
about the dynamics that exclude the Palestinian citizens of Israel from
control over the physical environment. A brief review of social scientiŽc
studies of the Palestinian citizens of Israel follows, highlighting the overreliance on the state as a unit of analysis. The discourse of transnationalism is then presented as an alternative, and the concept of
trapped minority elaborated. The insight instigated by the idiom trapped
minority that once collaborated with the subjective views of members of
the minority itself, exposes the weaknesses of concepts such as Smooha’s
‘ethnic democracy’ (1990), the oxymoronic term ‘a Jewish democratic
state’ and the territorial aspect of ethnoregionalism as suggested by
Yiftachel (1997b, 1999a).
Public space, collective time
Ra`if Zraik, a Palestinian lawyer from Nazareth, in his early thirties,
recently published some notes on his perceptions of public space in Israel
(Zraik 1999). His reections convey an acute sense among Palestinian
citizens of Israel of being alienated from public space within their
homeland: in other words, from most of Israel’s land mass.
Public spaces within Palestinian settlements, and certainly beyond
their municipal limits, are perceived by Palestinian citizens of Israel as
having been totally appropriated by the state. Even the poor repair of
sidewalks in Nazareth – a Palestinian town run by Palestinian elected
politicians – is for Zraik (ibid) a direct manifestation of the marginal
status of Palestinians in the Jewish dominated state and its aggressive
mechanisms of exclusion and control.
The war which the Palestinians lost to Israel in 1948 practically erased
their old metropoli as focuses of belonging and identity. Palestinian
urban centres such as Jaffa, Ramla, Lid, Jerusalem, Bir-Sab’a and their
rural hinterlands shrank or disappeared under the rapidly expanding
Jewish Israeli strongholds, now inhabited by newly arrived Jewish immigrants from abroad. The Palestinians were largely left with isolated and
fragmented villages. The 1950s saw many of those villages lose vast
portions of cultivated land and pasture to the Jewish state, mainly
through expropriation.
The spacial discontinuity that ensued damaged the Palestinians’ sense
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67
of communal time, and their ability to forge a coherent identity. Palestinians are acutely aware of belonging to a house, a village, or a neighbourhood. Alienated from continuous control over the physical
environment, however, they cannot maintain a wider horizon for their
collective being. ‘The building materials of our lives,’ Zraik told a group
of environmentalists in Tel-Aviv in mid 1999, ‘are reduced to the individual memories of our private experiences.’
The result is a uni-dimensional person. Palestinians in northern Israel
can locate and relocate only within a small triangle that includes parts
of Acre, Nazareth and Haifa. The rest of the country, while formally
accessible to all, is effectively out of bounds for them. They have little
hope of residence, employment or ownership – let alone of asserting
their collective will and destiny – outside their home villages. In Zraik’s
words to the group of environmentalists in 1999:
In 50 years nobody made an attempt to start a Palestinian neighborhood in Haifa. The end result is suffocation. We can build homes within
our villages, but they are also graves. There is no space beyond the
village we can move within. This may have been the reality when my
grandfather was a young man, before the state of Israel was established.
But had I been the product of a normal history, I would have become
part of a national Palestinian project with cities I could migrate to. At
present this is an option completely absent from my life.
This sense of suffocation produces in turn a feeling of being stuck in
time. The day-to-day economic reality and the limits of Palestinians’
political power within the state of Israel and outside it limit their perceptions of a future. To quote further from Zraik’s 1999 talk to the
environmentalists:
You live for mere survival. You are a slave to the tyranny of the
present, and are, essentially, given to consumerism. You have no sense
of past to lean against, and no conŽdence in any kind of future. You
become a creature with no integrity, with no consistency between
utterance and action. Someone like that cannot exert any impact on
the landscape.
We Palestinian citizens of Israel make no claim for public space within
the state of which we are supposedly rightful and equal citizens. We
retreat into indifference. The Israelis design, develop and revitalize
the land according to their needs and interests. This intensity makes
us lose any sense of a homeland awaiting us.
The experiences which trigger these emotions of deprivation and
confinement among Palestinians of Zraik’s generation are not much
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Dan Rabinowitz
different from those experienced by their parents. The latter, however,
were less willing and able to articulate them. This new awareness,
greatly voiced by Palestinian men and women inside Israel, calls for
new conceptualizations of the experience of minorities in states such as
Israel, who insist on being even-handed, uninterested liberal democracy.
The Palestinian citizens of Israel: a brief epistemology
The territory known as Israel1 is recognized by the Palestinians as
Falastin, their own ancestral homeland. Five to seven million Palestinians scattered between Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and
Gaza (now occupied in part by the newly founded Palestinian Authority)
the Gulf countries and western countries regard themselves as natives
of the land.
The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 on approximately 60 per
cent of the entire disputed territory spelt national calamity for the Palestinians. The majority of the 800,000 Palestinians who had lived prior to
1948 in the areas now included in the state of Israel were expelled or
ed. Most of them became refugees in adjacent Arab countries. Only
some 160,000 remained, mostly villagers in the more remote regions. The
educated urban middle class disappeared almost completely from the
area that was now included under Israeli jurisdiction.
The early 1950s saw a considerable number of refugees return to
Israel. Some re-entered legally, as part of family reuniŽcation schemes
approved by the Israeli government. Others crossed the borders clandestinely. The number of Palestinian citizens in Israel doubled by the
late 1950s, and is currently approximately 850,000. This Žgure represents
about 18 per cent of the population of Israel, and a similar proportion
of the entire, scattered Palestinian people.
Political scientists, sociologists, geographers and anthropologists
writing about Israel have produced a substantial body of research which
either focuses on or takes considerable account of the Palestinian
citizens of Israel. Elia Zureik’s (1979) study takes the marginal status of
the Palestinians within Israel as the deŽning feature of what he typiŽes
as a colonial settler-state. Gershon ShaŽr (1989) in his analysis of land
and labour within Zionism, while stressing the speciŽc circumstances of
the Jewish national movement, nevertheless adheres to the colonial
paradigm. So do, by and large, Michael Shalev’s (1992) study of Israel’s
split economy and Lev Greenberg’s (1991) analysis of the Labour
movement.
Ian Lustick (1980) investigates the structural and institutional features
designed by the Jewish hegemony to contain the Palestinian citizens,
pushing a well-argued case depicting Israel as a system of control.
Yoav Peled (1992) looks at key decisions made by Israel’s supreme
The Palestinian citizens of Israel
69
court judges in their occasional capacity over the years as chairmen of
the central elections committees. Peled convincingly contrasts the
restrictions made on Palestinian candidates and parties with the virtually free access of Jewish Israelis to the republican core of political life
and the common good. His conclusion is that Israel, including Israeli
liberalism, offers its Palestinian citizens no more than a nominal and
weakened form of citizenship. This buttresses his typiŽcation of Israel as
‘ethnic republic’ – a view supported to an extent by works such as Rabinowitz (1997), Rouhana (1997) and Ghanem (1998).
Sami Smooha’s characterization of Israel as ethnic democracy (1990,
p. 391) has gained considerable attention in recent years. Smooha, who
acknowledges the political dominance of Jews in Israel, nevertheless
prefers to highlight what he believes is the democratic nature of the state,
reected in a willingness on the part of the Jewish majority to grant the
Palestinian citizens rights and limited accessibility to power and
resources. While the adjective ‘ethnic’ denotes the dominance of one
hegemonic ethnos over another, the basic liberal idea of individual
freedoms is sufŽcient for Smooha to depict the overall structure of Israel
as democratic.
Smooha’s work attracted considerable criticism and debate. Paramount here is Oren Yiftachel’s critique (1997a), which, like As’ad
Ghanem (1998) identifies the inherent contradiction between Israel’s
pretence to be a Western-style, liberal democracy, and its practices
towards the Palestinian citizens in terms of their collective rights. Yiftachel, adamant that Israel cannot qualify as a democracy, prefers the
term ‘ethnocracy’.
A feature common to all these orientations, including Smooha’s and
his critics, is that they all take the Palestinian citizens of Israel as a case
from which to generalize about the nature of the state. The state thus
remains the primary unit of analysis. The subjective view of the minorities is secondary – more a tool with which to think and analyse than a
focus of attention in its own right.
This tendency is not anomalous. The convergence of the idea of the
state with the notion of nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe and
across the globe throughout the twentieth century has made the nationstate into an all-pervasive feature. It colours our interpretation of social
phenomena to the extent that we often Žnd it difŽcult to make social
analysis in stateless situations.
But overviews of states, alas, are incomplete. There are central
elements of meaning that macro analyses misrecognize. This point
becomes particularly relevant in an era of globalization and transnationalism, in which the weight of states in the daily experience of an
ever-increasing proportion of human beings is reduced, while the signiŽcance of sub- or supra-state dynamics is on the increase (Appadurai
1996).
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The discourse of transnationalism
Globalization theory has emerged in the last two decades as a critique
of classical hegemonic representations of history (Kearney 1995). In traditional historiography time tended to be linear, consistently advancing
in a positive progression towards modernization, development and
growth. The notion of such ‘natural’ chronology came in tandem with a
dichotomous division of global space into an advanced developed centre
in Europe, European North America and Australia versus a yet-to-bedeveloped periphery. The two world spaces were perceived to be connected in asymmetric lines of communication and administration. One,
as it were, was running the other.
Wallerstein’s (1974) The Modern World System and Harvey’s (1989)
The Condition of Post-Modernity have since demonstrated that the
world’s economy and its derivatives in the realms of culture and identity
have always been more integrated than had been assumed. Eric Wolf’s
(1982) critique of classical anthropology in Europe and the People
Without History built on Wallerstein’s and Frank’s (1967) assertions, and
paved the road to a series of anthropological studies that demonstrate
how the local and the global, the developed, and the yet to be developed, constantly invade and impact each other. Space was realized as
more uid, boundaries as less rigid and durable.
Decolonization since the 1950s and the transformations into nationstates of groups hitherto perceived as living fossils – to drive the
metaphor of stasis to its absurd extremity – led once again to reconsiderations of theory and global perceptions, with more emphasis than
before on interconnectedness and interdependence of societies and
cultures. The simple notion of space and culture as bounded, Žnite and
discrete is seriously questioned.
Unlike space, time is more difŽcult to be perceived as non-teleological: progression towards entropy and de-development are, after all,
much harder to envisage. Still, peripheries can collapse and implode into
the centre through immigration (Rouse 1991), electronic media
(Sreberny-Mohhammadi 1991), tourism (McCannel 1989) and imagination (Appadurai 1991). History can be and is being written from the
periphery (Wolf 1982), using hitherto concealed categories and classiŽcations. Culture, social structure and identity are no longer understandable solely in terms of speciŽc places and the ethnographic present at
which Western ethnographers happened to stumble on them. Rather,
much of the human experience is appreciated as taking place in what
Appadurai (1991) has aptly termed ethnoscapes – between the boundaries rather than within the spaces each of them conŽnes.
The March 1999 issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies (vol. 22, no. 2) productively identiŽes the realm of migration and diaspora as a main arena
for studies of transnationalism. The issue uses the ever-increasing
The Palestinian citizens of Israel
71
ubiquity of individual and collective movement to Žne-tune the empirical, analytical, and theoretical tools with which sociologists deal with
relocation and its consequences.
Anthropology, with its traditional emphasis on the local, the unique,
and the systems of signiŽcations and meanings that move people, takes
a somewhat different trajectory. Willing to use transnationalism as an
umbrella for a wider variety of phenomena (perhaps, as Portes, Guarnizo
and Landolt (1999) imply, at the expense of analytical lucidity and clarity
of terms), anthropology shifts the discussion to meaning and signiŽcation. If, as Appadurai suggests, more people than ever before experience
life primarily in ethnoscapes, then the consciousnesses and imaginations
that this new deterritorialized reality begets is a fascinating departure
from the old place-related concept of identity that anthropology was so
familiar with. The result is thus a transnational discourse that is at once
speciŽc theoretically and inclusive phenomenologically.
Whereas globalization looks at global processes, transnationalism
within anthropology, which could equally have been termed transstatism or post-nationalism (Kearney 1995), looks at more concrete and
local contexts. Whereas globalization deals with the impersonal and the
universal, transnationalism looks at the political and the ideological. This
is signiŽcant when one is searching for a theoretically argued alternative
to the analytical straight-jacket of the state.
Fredrik Barth’s (1969) preoccupation with the extent to which cultures
can be said to have borders is now replaced by a preoccupation with the
extent to which borders can be said to have cultures (Rabinowitz 1998).
This new preoccupation produced works such as Anzaldua (1987),
Rosaldo (1988), Donnan and Wilson (1998) and others who all identify
the border zone as a productive unit of analysis. They show that border
areas can no longer be assumed to be marginal, and that the universal
mainstream of the human experience, while deŽned by and in the
metropolis, does not take place exclusively in them. The new perspective from the margins represents experiences shared by an inŽnitely
larger proportion of humanity than hitherto recognized. The borderland,
an interstitial zone where at least two territorial and demographic
segments blur into each other, emerges as a viable alternative to rigid
deŽnitions of wholesome homes. ‘Home’ is thus problematized,
inevitably identiŽed as space implying an earlier displacement of others.
These ideas have sparkled interesting reassessments of the nature of
the state (Herzfeld 1992), ethnic groups within it and on its margins,
(Kapferer 1988), and the relationships between them and the dominant
majority (Rabinowitz 1997). This emancipates minorities from the
dubious status of ethnic clamour in an otherwise tranquil clockwork
operation of the nation-state. Old myths of the state are vigorously problematized, giving way to the realization that the narratives of nationalism, etatism and Western liberal republicanism conceal and silence at
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least as much as they reveal. Rather than the state, it is the former
margins – minorities, border areas, diasporas, the exiled and displaced,
the imploding army of migrant labourers – that are centred now. Their
histories and subjectivities become the new primary objects of analysis.
The concept of trapped minority
The world, from South East Asia to East Africa, from the Baltic to the
Balkans, from the Slavonic nations to Muslim Central Asia, is rapidly
reshaping. With minorities repeatedly peeping from beneath the
bursting seams of states, no wonder that epistemological attention to
nationalism, ethnicity, secessionism, separatism, irredentism, as well as
to their antonym – accommodation and conict regulation, is growing
steadily.
A Žrst step in a typology of minorities is the elementary distinction
between indigenous minorities – groups who live in territories which
they perceive as their primordial homelands, and who are sometimes
also referred to as homeland minorities – and immigrant or exiled ones.
Immigrant and exiled minorities are of less pertinence in the present
context, so I leave them for another occasion.
Within indigenous minorities, Manuel and Posluns (1974) have identiŽed the category of Fourth World: politically weak and economically
marginal groups that constantly experience powerful nations surrounding and overtaking them to usurp their rights. Examples include the Inuit
in Canada and Alaska, Native Americans elsewhere in North America,
Bedouins in the Middle East and Swami in Scandinavia: groups that are
‘fated always to be minority populations in their own lands’ (ibid). Here
again, the concept of Fourth World, which deals with groups of limited
size and political volume, is not sufŽciently applicable to most minority
situations.
Going back to larger homeland minorities, we discover that most
writers implicitly refer to an ideal type of situation, whereby entire ethnic
groups live within a state hegemonized by others. Smith (1992) is satisŽed to identify such groups as culturally distinct and united by a belief
in a common past. Yiftachel (1997b) applies this terminology to the
Palestinian citizens of Israel unquestionably. Ghanem (1998, p. 430) uses
‘ethnic nationality’ for both Jews and Palestinians inside Israel, whereas
others often use national minority. SigniŽcantly, these terms tend not to
problematize the spacial layout and distribution of the group within and
across state borders.
Examples of this phenomenon, which I prefer to label national
minority, include Bretons (and others) in France, Welsh and Scots in
Great Britain, the Ibo of Nigeria, various minorities in the conglomerate of China and many more. A state can have one or more national
minorities within its borders. Some states refuse to recognize national
The Palestinian citizens of Israel
73
minorities; others may be willing to acknowledge them, at least nominally; others still are happy to grant minorities various degrees of collective rights.
As indicated earlier, implicit in the deŽnition of national minority is
the assumption that the entire group is present within the hosting state.
Most cases of indigenous minorities are, however, more complicated
than this, with members spread across two or more states. This, of
course, has far-reaching implications for the group itself, for the relationship with its host state(s) and, as I shall demonstrate later, for the
development and growth of ideology and institutions within the hosting
hegemonic group. This is where the concept of ‘trapped minority’
becomes of analytical help.
Entrapment is a dramatic development. A space initially perceived to
be safe is subject to sudden external interference leading to conŽnement:
a door is closed, a fence erected, a wall cemented. The space becomes a
dangerous enclosure, the subject is suddenly incarcerated. Most
homeland minorities are trapped in two distinct but complementary
dimensions. The Žrst is historical, pertaining to the sequence of undesirable events that brought about their current predicament as a minority
within an alien state. The second denotes entrapment between contemporary entities, and in particular between their host state and their
mother nation. Let me use the case of Palestinians within Israel as an
illustration.
The Palestinians who remained within the conŽnes of the newly established state of Israel following the war of 1948 found their homeland
drastically transformed, falling under the control of Zionist Israel. The
Palestinians in it, who were soon granted formal citizenship including the
right to vote and be elected, were now at the political, economic and
administrative mercy of a regime they never chose. Relations with the
mainstream of their people – the vast majority of Palestinians living
outside the borders and control of Israel – were almost completely
severed.
Let me identify Žve elements which characterize the predicament of
trapped minorities. The Žrst is that the process of disastrous entrapment
usually begins at the very historical juncture which the dominant
majority associates with victory, redemption and the joyful dawning of
a new age. This diametrically opposed historicization catapults the
trapped minority into fundamental descent vis-à-vis the canonic narrative of history fabricated and disseminated by the state in which it lives.
As a Palestinian member of the Israeli Knesset once put it: ‘I am in a
tragic situation, whereby my country is at war with my people’.
The second element of entrapment is the sense of being marginal twice
over, within two political entities. The dominant group that hegemonizes
the new state that entraps the minority tends to treat its members as less
than equal citizens. Even the liberal echelons within the Jewish majority
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Dan Rabinowitz
in Israel are acutely conscious of the extreme otherness of the Palestinians. They tend to misrecognize the rights of Palestinians as natives,
and overlook the tragedy that befell them when the state of Israel was
established.
At the same time, however, and unlike Fourth World groups and
‘simple’ national minorities, trapped minorities may Žnd that their credentials within their mother nations are devalued. Their residence, acculturation and formal citizenship in a state dominated by an alien hegemony
implicates them. Thus, the Palestinian citizens of Israel, labelled ‘Arabs’
or ‘Palestinians’ by Israelis, are equally suspect for Palestinians and Arabs
abroad due to their citizenship of and general association with Israel.
Seen from the Arab world, the Palestinian citizens of Israel emerge as
an ambiguous and problematic element whose status in the national
arena is yet to be determined, and whose very loyalty to the Palestinian
nation might still be suspect. Israel’s willingness, where it exists, to integrate its Palestinian citizens into economic, political and social life, might
in fact further reduce their chances of clarifying their credentials in the
eyes of Palestinians generally. In the 1960s and 1970s, for example, the
Palestinian citizens of Israel were treated by the exiled Palestinian
leadership as a self-seeking, spoilt collective, collaborating with the
Zionist occupation of the homeland. Paradoxically, the very contingent
of Palestinians that managed to remain in situ in the homeland found
itself physically disconnected and morally excommunicated from the
centre of gravity of national crystallization.
Trapped in this dual marginality and held between these two centres
of political gravity, the Palestinian citizens of Israel are painfully aware
of two conicting national narratives, and experience with their lives and
property two systems of legitimization
Trapped minorities can be expected to struggle with the memory of
the traumatic event or process that had the homeland taken over by a
foreign power. The memory is often vivid, leaning on personal experiences, enmeshed in close familial history. The double bind in which they
live, however, may arrest the development of a coherent version of
history as a collective experience. In the case of the Palestinians, the
deŽning historic moment is, of course, the disastrous loss of life, limb,
property and rights during the 1948 hostilities, an event subsumed under
the powerful term al-naqbah – the disaster. And while memories of
personal and local tragedies are rife, a vocabulary that conceptualizes
and memorializes the disaster seldom develops. Ra’if Zraik sees a connection between this diminished sense of collective history and the loss,
on behalf of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, of a vision of ‘a homeland
awaiting’. As he put it in mid 1999:
People with no dream and vision cannot preserve a memory, and thus
we lose our past. Without a vision memories become a burden. The
The Palestinian citizens of Israel
75
old church and the mosque we see at the entrance to Haifa become a
nuisance – disturbing landmarks commemorating our defeat. We keep
suppressing them. We suppress our history.
A similar sensitivity to the politics of memory is found in Azmi
Bishara’s argument about the need of Palestinian citizens of Israel in
formal acknowledgement by the state of their loss in 1948. In his words:
The Israeli public space knows only one collective memory, a castrated
memory the sole purpose of which is to push away the sense of exile
and alienation [of the Jews, D. R.]. The Jewish Other exorcised the
wholly Other, the native, the Other of the place[. . .]. History itself will
prove [. . .] that if the victim is to forgive he must be acknowledged as
the victim. This is the difference between a historic compromise and
a cease Žre (Bishara 1992, p. 6).
The salience of this issue becomes obvious when one looks at negotiations of the place of Palestinian suffering in formal articulations of collective memory in Israel. Should the heavy price paid in 1948 by the
families of people who are today Palestinian citizens of Israel be perceived merely as the punishment that members of the losing side in war
can expect? Or, alternatively, should the argument be made that Palestinians are the group of citizens of Israel who paid the highest possible
price for the establishment of the state?
The point is by no means trivial. Jewish Israeli public discourse habitually uses suffering to engender and calibrate entitlement to rights.
DeŽning the Palestinian tragedy of 1948 as the awful price in blood,
dignity and property that paved the way to the eventual triumph of
Zionism is a revolutionary concept for the majority of mainstream
Israelis. It collapses the dichotomy between the categories ‘Us’ and
‘Them’, and their inherent analogy to ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’, ‘Right’ and
‘Wrong’, ‘those who Suffer’ and ‘those who inict Suffering’.
The fact remains, however, that the Palestinian citizens of Israel have
yet to claim their rightful share in the pantheon of Israel’s public
memory. The debate into the place of the Palestinian nakbah in the commemoration of Israel’s Žftieth anniversary, was initiated by liberal
Israelis, and proceeded to take place primarily among them. The voice
and vision of the Palestinian community within Israel regarding this
highly sensitive issue has still to crystallize and make its full appearance
in Israeli public life.
Third, members of a trapped minority, while sensing solidarity with
their mother nation, are likely to feel excluded from the thrust of
national revival if and when it does commence abroad. This happened
to the Palestinian citizens of Israel as the Palestinian national movement
began in the 1960s to be shaped in bases in the Arab world.
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A case which throws some light on this is Land Day: the day of protest
against the seizure and expropriation of Palestinian rural land by Israeli
state agencies (see Yiftachel 1999b). First commemorated on 30 March
1976 with a mass rally in Sakhnin, in which six Palestinian demonstrators were shot dead by police, this date evolved in the 1980s into a focal
point of protest for the Palestinian citizens of Israel. The strategic choice
that faced them in the years that followed, however, related to the
contents best injected in the annual event. Was it to be conducted as a
civil protest staged by citizens who feel disenfranchised by the state? Or,
alternatively, should it be fused into the general struggle of the Palestinian nation against Israel?. While the two are by no means mutually
exclusive, their articulations in terms of context, discourse, practice and
leadership are quite distinct.
In the Žrst few years Land Day oscillated between a mild civil demonstration, a slightly more bitter protest with accentuated national connotations, and an event exemplifying pan-Palestinian solidarity. These
variations notwithstanding, the event found little space in the crystallizing national calendar of Palestinians abroad. The occasion was gradually
reduced to local contexts, its form determined by the speciŽc political
circumstances prevailing at the time and place of each performance. The
development of an overarching syntax of signiŽcation was arrested. A
similar dynamic, incidentally, can be highlighted in the indecisive stance
of Palestinian citizens of Israel vis-à-vis the Intifada (1988–1992) and to a
large extent in their stance in relation to the Oslo-Wye plantation process
(1993–1998). The linkage between, on the one hand, personal, familial and
local solidarity and, on the other, mainstream national consciousness,
while often attempted (cf. Rabinowitz 1994), remains fragmented. It was
only during the tumultuous events of October 2000 that the Palestinian
citizens of Israel found the unity and resolve to join the protest of the
Palestinians in the occupied territories, and take a confrontational, and
often violent, stance against the state of Israel.
Fourth, a trapped minority is likely to remain non-assimilating. This
may be due to a subjective choice, may result from a dictum made by
the hegemonic group, or could be a combination of the two. SigniŽcantly,
its non-assimilation tends to be perceived as permanent, acculturation
notwithstanding. Thus the Palestinian citizens of Israel, while all the time
acquiring more of the values and symbols of Jewish Israel and gaining
further access to and inuence upon its political arena, neither want nor
are invited to assimilate.
The result is a cultural limbo unlike that which befalls diasporic
minorities, and different also from that which characterizes wholesome
national minorities. Torn between the culture of its mother nation
and its host state, members of a trapped minority have difficulty in participating in the production and consumption of language, theatre,
music, cinema, media and folklore in the hegemonic culture of the state,
The Palestinian citizens of Israel
77
particularly where such production involves exclusive signification of
national identity.
A Žfth, related point, is that being at the crossŽre between at least two
nations, the relationship between a trapped minority and their host state
is inevitably inuenced, sometimes determined, by the liaison between
the two nations. Naturally, the more tense and hostile this relationship,
the more likely it is that the host state will regard the trapped minority’s
quest to maintain a separate national cohesion and identity as dangerously out of line. Smooha (1989) has shown that this is very much the
case with Israel’s view of its Palestinian minority, a point reiterated by
Benziman and Mansour (1992)
The situation of a trapped minority is not, however, a zero sum game.
Neither the host state nor the mother nation is in a position to offer
members of the trapped minority a viable option of full incorporation.
Israel, for one, clearly refrains from offering its Palestinian citizens such
incorporation. Instead, it prefers to hide behind a veil of legalistic, formal
declarative assertions that claim indifference to national afŽliation and
an even-handed, rational treatment of all citizens (cf. Herzfeld 1992).
Likewise, and not less tragically, the Palestinian mother nation is incapable of proposing the Palestinian citizens of Israel a meaningful
alliance, not even in a future Palestinian state (assuming that a genuinely
independent Palestine state will materialize). As a result of this impasse,
neither host state nor mother nation is in a position to demand the
unconditional loyalty of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. In fact, neither
has so far seriously considered demanding that the community sever all
ties with the other, even when at times the other was perceived as the
ultimate enemy.
Finally, and following from the previous Žve characteristics, members
of trapped minorities are likely to display chronic ideological and political internal divisions, and to experience difŽculties in forging a united
front both inside and outside the state. These divisions are related to the
tension and confusion associated with their structural position between
host state and mother nation. Thus, the divisions which have plagued the
Palestinian citizens of Israel since the 1950s can no longer be seen solely
in terms of the Machiavellian system of control employed by the state
and acted out by manipulative political parties, state agencies and locally
co-opted leaders (cf. Lustick 1980). Neither, of course, can this disunity
be attributed to an inherent cultural failure on the part of the Palestinians themselves, as some Israeli orientalists are still prepared to imply. It
is the difŽculty of articulating a historic or at least strategic vision,
stemming from their dichotomous entrapment, that works against their
chances of political unity.
Instances of trapped minorities, a concept which, like Barth’s (1969)
ethnic boundaries, is not dependent on a restrictive deŽnition of territory
or cultural afŽliation, have recently become more numerous and obvious.
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Dan Rabinowitz
A non-comprehensive list would include Kurds in Turkey, Iran and Syria
(their core group and national heartland being in Iraqi Kurdistan);
pockets and enclaves of various elements of former Yugoslavia now
trapped in the newly established independent states that have replaced
the federation, such as Kossovar Albanians within Serbia; Muslims in
various parts of the Balkan, notably Turks in the north east of Bulgaria
and Pomaks across the border between Bulgaria and Greece; Russians in
the Baltics, the Caucas and Trans-Caucas who, after the demise of the
Soviet Empire have found themselves entrapped between their familial
roots in the newly independent non-Russian republics and their ancient
national afŽnity with Russia; Armenians in Azerbeijan, Ukrainians in
Siberia or Kazakhs in Uzbekistan; There were Hungarians in post World
War I Slovakia and Romania; Sudeten Germans between the wars and
after 1945; Catholics in (British) Northern Ireland; Protestants in a future
united Ireland; a variety of groups in Africa and South-East Asia following the establishment of new nation-states such as the Tutsi in Ruanda,
the Hutu in Burundi, the Malays of Southern Thailand and many more.
Moving on to agency, does this historicization of trapped minorities
imply eternal passivity? Is the situation of a trapped minority inherently
static? My answer is negative on both counts. Being a trapped minority
is undoubtedly a predicament, an undesirable situation imposed on the
minority against its will. Being smaller, poorer and often less organized
than the host state, the opportunities for trapped minorities to change
their situation are few. This does not mean, however, that the predicament is Žnite. Entrapment may be powerful, but it is also a dialectic situation in which change is an indispensable possibility, subject to structure
as well as agency. Responsibility for change lies partially with the
trapped ones, who indeed often become active political agents seeking
change. This is the case, in my example, with leading radical public
Žgures and political movements within the Palestinian community inside
Israel. Considerable weight is still given to the larger powers at play,
namely the host state and the mother nation, and is dependent on the
relationship between the two.
SigniŽcantly, the nature and disposition of a trapped minority carries
weight in the quest of the majority to forge its own identity, particularly
when its nation-state is relatively young. Human collectives often deŽne
themselves through perceptions of ultimate Others. Thus, while existence
of a simple national minority is often used by the majority as a backdrop
against which the blueprints of identity become inscribed, the presence of
a trapped minority makes the process more complex. A trapped minority
is, by deŽnition, not easily contained: it spreads across borders into other
territories, adjacent or abroad, forging pacts with enemies and strangers.
Racist discourse repeatedly refers to minorities, especially those with real
or imagined afŽliation abroad, as tips of dangerous icebergs, ominous protrusions of external threats into the nation’s corpus. The metaphor of
The Palestinian citizens of Israel
79
aliens as agents of disease – a foreign entity that invades the body nation,
threatening to destroy it from within – often surfaces in rhetoric that
reects the majority’s darkest xenophobic fear and hatred.
Being a trapped minority thus emerges as not merely complicated and
confusing, but also as potentially dangerous. The presence of people
afŽliated with external, transnational collectives can push even a
powerful majority to adopt a defensive self-image replete with weakness
and vulnerability. Recent history provides more than enough examples
of the violence that may erupt once a nation combines deep-seated fear
of the constructed Other with military might. The horrible example in
1999 of Kossovar Albanians, trapped as they were in the history and the
geography of greater Serbia, is a clear and ominous example.
‘A Jewish democratic state’: ethnic democracy and ethnic regionalism
Historicizing certain national minorities as trapped minorities throws
into relief a number of deŽciencies in current conceptualizations of
minorities and their predicaments. A brief discussion of these shortcomings in relation to Israel/Palestine demonstrates the theoretical
relevance of this critique for other deeply divided countries and states.
Mainstream Jewish Israel fondly wants to believe that Israel is a
Jewish democratic state.2 This line of thought, so dominant within most
contemporary Zionist political movements and parties, is prevalent
among many Israeli scholars writing from liberal and neo-liberal perspectives (prominent examples include Eisenstadt 1967, 1985; Avineri
1981). It is premised on the forgiving claim, most explicitly made by
Horowitz and Lissak (1989) that Israel is essentially a liberal democracy
overburdened by external and internal security and social pressures
which force it to temporarily forgo some liberal tenets. Such aws, the
argument goes, are by no means structural. Given time and reasonable
progress in Israel’s relations with the Arabs, these anomalies will disappear (cf. Neuberger 1998; Gavison 1999).
One line of critique is that the term ‘Jewish democratic’ is a contradiction in terms. Once assigned with a restrictive ethnic adjective (in this
case ‘Jewish’), a state can no longer claim to be inclusive of and evenhanded towards all its citizens. Rather, the term exposes the real nature
of the state: an exclusive ethno-territorial project which serves the
hegemonic group at the expense of others. A state cannot purport to be
democratic, complete with total sovereignty of the rule of law and equal
citizenship and civil rights, while its symbols, power structure and
resource allocation remain safely ‘Jewish’.3
Historicizing the Palestinian citizens of Israel as a trapped minority
offers a different angle of critique here. The state of Israel came into being
as an instant package deal combining the saving of the Jews as individuals,
the nationalist aspirations of political Zionism and the transformation of
80
Dan Rabinowitz
the Jewish religion into a deŽning aspect of a new state. This convergence
was powerful enough to displace the Palestinian collective from the
physical terrain, and to have its rights, historic subjectivity and memory
erased from Zionist cognition. Pre-state Zionism easily identiŽed the
Palestinians as a military force to be reckoned with, and continued to do
so throughout the 1948 war and in many ways into the Žrst decade of the
state. Hence, for example, the military governorate that was imposed on
Palestinian towns and villages from 1948 to 1966. Palestinians as a civilian
population, however, and, more explicitly, as rightful citizens within a
democratic state, were hardly acknowledged.
‘A Jewish democratic state’ is thus a concept that hinges on dehistoricizing Palestinians and the presence of a Palestinian people. Instead, the
Jewish state re-introduces Palestinians as ‘Arabs’ – an element marginal
to Zionist history, now canonized as the underlying narrative of state
ideology (Rabinowitz 1993). ‘The Arab minority’, once recognized by
Israel and Israelis, was treated as if it surfaced out of nowhere. Its history
was truncated, its spatial continuity with Palestinians and Arabs in
adjacent territories arrested. Its entrapment as a Žgment of the Israeli
presence was complete.
It is little wonder that Israeli writers in the 1970s and 1980s, who
focused on mental and cultural characterization of the Palestinian
citizens of Israel (for example, Landau 1969; 1971), their perceived
‘orientation’ (read: loyalty) towards the state (that is, Rekhes 1976) or
their ‘identity’ (Smooha 1988; 1989), did it in a strikingly ahistoric
manner. These works and many others were almost totally synchronic,
and almost all of them overlook the analytical pertinence of the contiguity of Palestinian across international borders.
Smooha’s ethnic democracy is, in many ways, a direct continuation of
the ‘Jewish democratic state’ conundrum, and of the dehistoricizing
nature of earlier studies of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Ethno-territorial projects such as Israel can claim to be democratic using one of two
options. One is a technical and rather restrictive deŽnition of democracy
as a system in which all subjects are granted the right to vote and to be
voted. Smooha, to his credit, rightly discards this simplistic argument.
The option that he selects is to sidestep the historical and personal implications of disenfranchisement, dispossession and dismemberment
experienced by the Palestinians who had previously inhabited the territory, and whose offspring are now trapped in the collective time and
space of the new state. Smooha’s recognition of the positive diachronic
changes in access into Israeli life that Palestinians have gradually
achieved, does not break the synchronic mould that colours his analysis.
The consequences of 1948 fail to be incorporated analytically into his
postulations and defences of the term ‘ethnic democracy’.
Yiftachel, like Peled (1992) and others, does not accept Smooha’s
rather optimistic view of ethnic democracy as a viable description and
The Palestinian citizens of Israel
81
desirable solution. Rightly acknowledging extended ethnic protest
among Palestinians in Israel as an indication that the current situation is
neither stable nor sustainable, Yiftachel looks at potential trajectories
along which this protest is likely to develop. Discarding both Gurr’s
(1993) notion of the emergence of an ethno-class and Smith’s (1992)
ethno-nationalism (Yiftachel 1997b, pp. 93–4), Yiftachel then proceeds
to highlight the relevance of Hechter and Levi’s (1979) and Kofman’s
(1985) notion of ethno-regionalism. He argues that since the options of
irredentism and separatism bear intolerable costs (Yiftachel 1997b, p.
106), the Palestinian citizens of Israel are likely to consolidate a regional
identity, particularly in Galilee, and to deploy their strife for ethnic
identity and for an equal share of state resources through this medium.
Ethno-regionalism must not be summarily negated. It is an option
which, given the right political circumstances, may prove viable.4 This
notwithstanding, Yiftachel’s discussion of it, while not necessarily
implying a static situation, remains deŽcient as it overlooks the continuity of the Palestinian presence across Israel’s borders. The three main
concentrations of Palestinians within Israel – Lower Galilee, The
Triangle and the North-Eastern part of the Negev – are geographically
proximate, economically associated and culturally contiguous with three
respective metropolitan centres of the Palestinian West Bank: Jenin and
its rural hinterland, The Nablus Kalkilia Tul-Karim triangle and Hebron.
Yiftachel’s ethno-regional suggestion treats Israel as a composite and,
even more signiŽcantly, discrete territory, with borders that are culturally and politically impermeable.
This oversight has salient implications for the thesis. Ethno-regionalism in any of the overwhelming Palestinian regions within Israel must
take into account the Palestinian presence on the other side of Israel’s
green line. And it is here, I suggest, that the trapped nature of the community is likely to hinder a fully edged ethno-regional assertion.
The discourse of transnationalism in anthropology, with its emphasis
on border zones and interstitial areas, transmigration and other types of
ethnoscapes, encourages a fresh look at ethno-regionalism too. Ra’if
Zraik’s powerful statement, that highlights ethno-regions as potential
suffocation sites – as graves rather than starting points – suggests, rather
like Ghanem (1998), that the protest is likely to shift towards redeŽnition
of the entire public space engendered by the state and, not less importantly, across its border into transnational, deterritorialized ethnoscapes.
Conclusion: the Palestinian trapped minority and a citique of the
Oslo-Wye process
The Oslo-Wye process of reconciliation between Israel and the Palestinians (I deliberately refrain from labelling it ‘the peace process’),
hinges on the assumption that a division of the territory between the
82
Dan Rabinowitz
states of Israel and Palestine is viable since the national aspirations of
the Palestinians can be satisŽed by a state in the West Bank and Gaza.
It is assumed that the current residents of these territories, together with
those who were forced to leave them to become exiles in the Arab world
and overseas and who might want to return, will be the citizenry of the
new state. Palestinians living elsewhere, according to this vision, are
expected to merge somehow into their current host societies.
The analysis of the Palestinian citizens of Israel and, for that matter,
of the Palestinians in Jordan as trapped minorities, challenges the supposition of stability inherent in the Oslo-Wye process. The intricate
relationships that link Palestinian communities in the West Bank and in
Gaza to those in Israel, Jordan and elsewhere would not be likely to disappear simply because a third state was established. Any settlement that
fails to recognize the solidarity, unity and shared fate that so many Palestinians still experience, is doomed to be inherently unstable.
This renders the notions of ethnic democracy and ethno-regionalism
wanting as bases for an agreement that will breed stability. The analysis
of Palestinians on either side of an Oslo-Wye style Palestinian state as a
trapped minority suggests that the ethnic minority which Smooha advocates will exacerbate their deprivation in terms of collective identity and
the rights that it engenders. Likewise, viable ethno-regional identities
cannot develop on one side of the future Israeli-Palestinian border,
whatever political arrangement is Žnally worked out between Israel and
Palestine.
Acknowledgements
I Žrst made public use of the term ‘trapped minority’ in 1996, at a conference organized by the Centre for Peace Studies (Givat Haviva) in
Zikhron Yaacov.
Papers concerning the idiom and its uses were subsequently given at
ARENA, forum for the study of collective identities (Oslo, September
1997); The 22 Conference of History, Zalman Shazar Center (Jerusalem,
April 1998); Humphery Institute Seminar, Ben-Gurion University
(Beer-Sheva, May 1998); Panel on Nationality and Democracy. The
International Conference on Multicultural Democracy, Bar-Ilan University (Ramat-Gan, June 1998); 5th MESS – Mediterranean Studies
Seminar (Piran, September 1998).
I am indebted to the organizers and participants of all these events for
their interest, insight and suggestions. Full responsibility for the form
and content of this article remains mine.
Notes
1.
This wording is, of course, a simpliŽcation. Israel’s borders are yet to be deŽned, so
in effect one cannot talk of ‘a territory’ known or recognized as Israel. Aware of this
The Palestinian citizens of Israel
83
ambiguity, I nevertheless use this term for the sake of brevity. Likewise, the term Falastin
used by the Palestinians does not denote a speciŽcally delineated territory, but a generalized term.
2.
Schweid (1985) actually uses the term ‘Jewish democracy’ for Israel.
3.
Baruch Kimmerling (1999, p. 339) insists that out of four necessary conditions
needed for a regime to be classiŽed as a democracy, Israel fulŽls only one: periodic free
elections capable of changing ruling parties and élites.
4.
Take, for example, the suggestion of having an electoral system to the Knesset that
will include a regional element, that is, in which a proportion of the seats will be contested
in geographical constituencies. The overwhelming residential segregation typifying Israel,
and the concentration of the Palestinian citizens in three main areas will not necessarily
increase the number of Palestinian politicians actually elected. It will no doubt enhance,
however, the sense of regional awareness and solidarity implied in the ethno-regionalism
thesis.
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DAN RABINOWITZ, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology
and Anthropology, Hebrew University, Israel is currently Guest-Lecturer
at Tel-Aviv University, Israel.
ADDRESS: Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel-Aviv University, Ramat-Aviv, Tel-Aviv 69 978, Israel. email: [email protected]