Settler Colonialism and Conflict: The Israeli State and its Palestinian Subjects

Summary

Magid Shihade argues that communal identity, conflict and violence among the ‘1948 Palestinians’ — the Palestinians who remained after 1948 and became Israeli ‘citizens’ — are better understood through the way religion was exploited to further the Israeli settler colonial project than through culturalist explanations of ‘Arab violence’ (Settler Colonialism and Conflict: The Israeli State and its Palestinian Subjects, PDF p.1-2 / printed p.108-109). Defining itself as a Jewish state turned Judaism into an official ethnic and national category while turning the remaining Palestinians, on their identity cards and in the label ‘Israeli Arabs’, into a collection of religious sects — Christians, Muslims and Druze — internally divided by religion and externally disconnected from the Palestinian and Arab peoples; the Druze were further separated by recognition as a separate ethnic group in the 1950s, military conscription, a separate education system and preferential funding, though never treated as equals of Jews (PDF p.3-5 / printed p.110-112). Against that structure Shihade sets three cases: the April 1981 Kafr Yassif attack, in which, after a football match against neighbouring Druze Julis, police who had been warned in advance did not intervene, blocked aid from neighbouring villages while leaving the attackers’ entrance open, and were absolved by a government investigation that ended in an imposed Sulha blaming the victims (PDF p.7-10 / printed p.114-117); the 2005 Druze-Christian fighting in Al-Maghar, at which police were present and at times participated (PDF p.10-11 / printed p.117-118); and the 2006 Christian-Muslim conflict in Deit Jarir in the West Bank, which the Israeli military prolonged by preventing a Palestinian Authority detachment from reaching the village until calls from the American Embassy in Jerusalem secured its entry (PDF p.11 / printed p.118). The community was not passive: from Kafr Yassif’s early nationalist-communist coalition under Yanni Yanni to Druze resistance to the draft, Palestinians resisted through organising, coalition building and memory; Shihade concludes that Palestine Studies must link the 1948 and 1967 Palestinians, because the pattern established in 1948 was replicated in 1967, and that a state established as a settler colonial structure “cannot allow for coexistence unless it dismantles a founding ideology” and commits to acknowledgement and reparation (PDF p.12-15 / printed p.119-122).

What the file is

• The file is Magid Shihade’s article in settler colonial studies 2, 1 (2012), the special issue Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine, ISSN 1838-0743; printed pages 108-123, PDF p.1 carrying printed p.108 and PDF p.16 carrying printed p.123, so printed page = PDF page + 107 throughout. The running head is Shihade, ‘Settler Colonialism and Conflict’.
• The byline is Magid Shihade, Birzeit University (PDF p.1). The Biographical Note (PDF p.15 / printed p.122) specifies that he teaches at the Abu-Lughod Institute for International Studies at Birzeit University; his research interests are modernity, violence and identity, and his articles had appeared in the Journal of Alternative Perspectives in Social Sciences, the Mediterranean Journal of Human Rights and Arab Studies Quarterly.
• Structure: an abstract and introduction (PDF p.1-2); the headed sections ‘The Racialisation of Religious Communities: Muslims, Christians and Jews’ (PDF p.2-6), within which sit the subsections ‘Jew and Palestinian’ (PDF p.3-4), ‘Christians, Muslims, and Druze’ (PDF p.4-5) and ‘Education, Segregation, and Divide-and-Rule Policies’ (PDF p.5-6); ‘Instances of Communal Conflict and Violence among Palestinians’ (PDF p.6-11), with its three numbered cases; ‘Settler Colonialism, Police State, Resistance’ (PDF p.11-13); ‘Conclusion’ (PDF p.13-15); then the Biographical Note (PDF p.15) and 22 Notes (PDF p.15-16).
• Method as stated: the Kafr Yassif case rests on “more than three years of fieldwork (2002-2005), interviews of eye witnesses, archival work in the village, and Israeli official reports on the incident”; the other cases rest on media reports and brief interviews with local witnesses and community leaders (PDF p.2 / printed p.109). The article is a condensed treatment: note 13 refers readers to Shihade’s MA dissertation Why the Palestinians in Israel have been so ‘Peaceful’? (University of Washington, 2001) for details of the events, and note 6 to his book Not Just a Soccer Game: Colonialism and Conflict among Palestinians in Israel (Syracuse University Press, 2011).
• Access basis given with delivery: open-license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0), downloaded from the URL in the frontmatter.
• Text copy: the supplied text copy (raw/2012-shihade-settler-colonialism-and-conflict.txt) is clean and complete for all 16 pages, with PDF page markers at the head of each page, about 5,933 words in the copy as delivered. No passage required reassembly from the original beyond following sentences across page breaks; printed slips and one garbled fragment are recorded under Open questions.

Section by section

Abstract and introduction (PDF p.1-2 / printed p.108-109)

The abstract (PDF p.1) announces the subject — the relationship between Israeli settler colonialism, group identities, conflict and violence, focused on ‘1948 Palestinians’ — the Kafr Yassif case study of 1981 Galilee communal violence between two religious groups within the Palestinian Arab community, the tracing of that event “to a larger structure rooted in the history of settler colonialism in Palestine, thus shifting attention away from culturalist explanations of ‘Arab violence’”, the brief additional cases, and the framework’s importance for Palestine Studies. The text proper defines its subject: ‘1948 Palestinians’ are “Palestinians who managed to stay on their lands after the 1948 War and became Israeli ‘citizens’” (see Remainers). Their predicament is a settler-colonial condition, to be understood by studying the origins of the Israeli state and how it deals with its colonised subjects; despite Israeli rhetoric of the ‘rule of law’, ‘democracy’ and ‘modernity’, its policies “have led to conflicts and violence within the Arab Palestinian native community”. The thesis, completed across the page break: “the question of communal/group identity, conflict and violence among Palestinians in Israel is better understood with reference to the ways in which religion was exploited to further the settler colonial project” (PDF p.1-2). One similar case from the 1967 territories is included to show how the state advances intercommunal conflicts there too. The article’s order: first the religious communities and their relationship to the state, then the test cases.

The racialisation of religious communities: the Mandate, 1948, and why transfer was not completed (PDF p.2-3 / printed p.109-110)

Britain occupied Palestine by the end of WWI and established the British Mandate, “facilitating over the course of two decades the economic, social, and political infrastructures for the establishment of the future settler colonial Israeli state, while repressing the economic, political, and social structure of the Palestinian native society” (note 1, to Walid Khalidi, Ilan Pappe and Edward Said). “The war on Palestine and the creation of the Israeli settler colonial state in 1948 led to the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian native society and to the destruction of Palestinian cities and villages” (note 2). The figures (note 3): “From close to one million Palestinians only around 150,000 remained in the newly created state. From 500 villages, only 100 remained undestroyed by the Zionist Israeli troops, and all major cities were emptied of most of their Palestinian residents. Those that remained became minority enclaves in the Jewish dominated environment.” British and Israeli imprisonment, deportation and targeted killing of leaders — undertaken “because of the challenge the leaders posed to the British-Zionist settler colonial project” — left those who remained almost leaderless, a minority in a state “built on their own lands” that was and continues to be anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian, “that looks at them with contempt, as a threat, as a demographic ‘time-bomb’, and as an obstacle to Jewish rein state” [fragment as printed; see Open questions]. Transfer of the remainder “was and continues to be contemplated by Zionist and Israeli Jewish leaders”, but no such step has been taken: decolonisation movements have risen worldwide since the mid-twentieth century; communications advances would expose such actions faster than previous genocides and ethnic cleansings by other settler colonial projects; and Israel relies on Western support and on presenting itself as “a ‘democratic peace loving state’, and a state that respects Western modernity’s mantra – ‘the rule of law’” (note 4). “Instead, Israel designed several policies and strategies aimed at repressing, marginalising and dispossessing its Palestinian citizens on the basis of national identity and religious affiliations” (note 5, to Shihade’s MA dissertation).

Jew and Palestinian (PDF p.3-4 / printed p.110-111)

With the establishment of the state, policy on ethnicity, national identity and religious affiliation “became crucial. It continues to be so to this day”. By defining itself “as a state for the Jewish people, or a Jewish state, Israelis turned the Jewish religion into an official ethnic and national category” — the millennia in which Judaism was a religion and Jews lived as a religious community among different societies, including Arab and Palestinian societies, “did not matter”. The parallel move (see Racialisation of religious communities): the Palestinians who remained were turned “into members of various religious communities lacking national identity”, identified on national identity cards as Christian, Muslim or Druze, and labelled in the dominant terminology ‘Israeli Arabs’. “The aim was not only to divide and rule, but also to disconnect them from the larger Palestinian community and the Arab people at large” (note 6, to Shihade’s Not Just a Soccer Game). “Internally, they are defined as a collection of religious sects; to the outside they are branded as ‘Israeli Arabs’, so that they are disconnected from each other internally on a religious basis, and at the same time they remain disconnected from the Palestinian people and from the larger Arab identity. A policy of internal ghettoisation and of external disconnection defined the position of the Israeli state towards them from early on.” Jews were categorised religiously and ethnically-nationally at once; Palestinians were defined as ‘Israeli Arabs’, “a category that makes them belong fully to neither”, and by religious affiliations the state also created: “Thus, as of 1948, they turned from being Palestinians, to become Christians, Muslims, and Druze” (note 7, to Rebecca Kook, The Logic of Democratic Exclusion).

Christians, Muslims, and Druze (PDF p.4-5 / printed p.111-112)

Most Palestinians resisted in 1948 in a variety of ways; some, “as in most cases of colonial interventions, cooperated with the colonial power. Among those who cooperated were the Druzes, members of an Islamic religious sect who, as access to their lands and source of living was in the hands of Zionist troops, were forced to cooperate with the Israeli leaders” (see Druze). Under the military regime imposed in 1948 no Druze could leave his village without the military governor’s permit; as farmers who needed to reach their land, they fell under intense pressure — “Collaborating allowed them to get permits and make a living” — and some Druze leaders “took advantage of the new situation and helped in swaying the Druze community to the Israeli side” and, soon after the state’s creation, “helped impose military conscription on the Druze community. This was the first major split between the Druze and the rest of the Palestinian community” (note 8, to Kais Firro and Laila Parsons). In the 1950s the state recognised the Druze as an ethnic group as well as a religious community: “Their religious identity was thus ethnicised, politicised, and directed towards hostility against Arabs and Palestinians.” Against the sect’s actual origin — “only formed in the 10th century Fatimid Egypt” — “the myth of an ancient affinity between Druze and Jews, who both suffered under the hands of Muslim Arab rule, became established in the Israeli official narrative. But myths are never enough to solidify identities”; conscription likewise “helped creating and advance an anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab identity”, backed by further economic and educational measures (note 9).

Education, segregation, and divide-and-rule policies; the military regime (PDF p.5-6 / printed p.112-113)

A separate education system for Jews and for Palestinians, and within the latter a separate Druze system: the Druze curriculum “emphasised conflict with Palestinians and Arabs and affinity with Jews and Israel”, while the system for the rest of the Arab community “emphasised the positive character of Jews and Israel to the detriment of Islam and Arabs” (note 10). Druze localities received more state funding than Christian and Muslim ones, and Druze soldiers receive benefits including “subsidised housing loans, access to Israeli academic institutions, and privileged access to some jobs”. Religious Jews are exempt from military service by law yet “still enjoy preferential treatment in education, jobs, loans, and state funding for their localities”, so the military-service criterion “is only used against the Palestinians, Christians and Muslims alike”. The qualification is explicit: Druze “are not treated on equal footing with Jews in Israel. Rather, they remain discriminated against”; they are treated better than the rest of the Palestinian community but fall behind Jews in quality of education, jobs and locality funding, and “Druze land was also the subject of land confiscation, which is never practiced against Jews”. The military regime imposed from the state’s creation restricted movement and political organising and imposed economic and social repression; it segregated Palestinians from Jewish citizens and from each other — “no person was allowed to leave his/her village without a permit, which was not often given without pressure to co-operate with the state” — and nighttime curfews prevented socialising, visiting, events and meetings. Over time the 1948 Palestinians “became ghettoised, familiar only with nearby villages”, estranged from the Palestinian and Arab communities outside, from their own land and from each other (note 11). The framing for the cases follows: communal conflict and violence “must be understood in this context. They remain within a supremacist ethnic settler colonial state that favors Jews (even those who live worldwide) over them”; for more than 20 years they lived without contact with the Palestinian community in the 1967 territories or those in exile, and their national identity and economic and social cohesion remain under ongoing repression (note 12).

Instances of communal conflict and violence: introduction (PDF p.6-7 / printed p.113-114)

Three cases — one at length, two briefly — “in order to illustrate the link between Israeli settler colonialism and communal conflict”: two among 1948 Palestinians and one from the 1967 areas, examined for “patterns of internal communal conflicts and violence, as well as the behavior of state security forces”, for how the conflicts erupt “and, more importantly, how the state encourages them”, and for community responses (note 13).

Case 1: Kafr Yassif, April 1981 (PDF p.7-10 / printed p.114-117)

The full narrative is on Kafr Yassif attack, 1981 and Kufr Yasif. On 11 April 1981 a decisive promotion football match between Kufr Yasif (majority Christian, with Muslim and Druze inhabitants) and neighbouring Druze Julis was preceded by a threatening phone call to the Kafr Yassif manager apparently from Julis; the manager and the mayor repeatedly asked the regional police for a preventive presence, and “Only 4 policemen were present at the Kafr Yassif football ground the following day.” Druze soldiers “often carry arms, and have used them on several occasions, even in the context of internal fighting within the Druze community”; such misuse “is not allowed within the Jewish community, but it is tolerated within the Druze community and no one has been punished for such offenses”. Kafr Yassif scored first; its own officials asked its players at the break to let Julis win; Julis won 2-1; Julis fans attacked anyway, mass fighting followed, one Julis man was stabbed and “a grenade killed one young person from Kafr Yassif”. Police present “did not interfere to prevent or stop the fighting” (PDF p.7-8). The mayor and leaders complained, were told the station head “had not expected violence”, sought reinforcements against threatened further violence, mobilised the larger Palestinian community to initiate a Sulha, and worked through Israeli Communist Party members of parliament to the Minister of Interior. The Sulha secured a Hudna (truce), then collapsed after two days: its committee reported that “influential leaders within the Druze community, individuals who had strong connections with the Israeli establishment, were advising against it”, and promised men from neighbouring villages if further attacks came. “Three days after the game, Julis residents attacked Christian residents of Kafr Yassif using Israeli military arms, vehicles,” and equipment (PDF p.8-9): two more Kafr Yassif residents died, over 20 were injured, and scores of houses were bombed, burned or damaged, while more than 20 policemen present withdrew in a manner eyewitnesses perceived as coordinated with the attackers, who moved neighbourhood to neighbourhood “using military communication equipment” in what eyewitnesses recognised as an organised military operation. Police inside let the Julis entrance open while detachments at the other two entrances blocked aid from neighbouring villages. The official narrative is indicted as contradictory — police who “did not expect violence to erupt” also held that “violence is part of Arab society and culture”, in which telling Druze suddenly count as part of the Palestinian Arab community rather than a separate group with ancient ties to Jews; police who could not block the narrow Julis road blocked the two wider entrances against helpers (PDF p.9). The government refused Kafr Yassif’s demand for an independent investigation and appointed its own committee, which absolved the government and security forces and only recommended that “‘such incidents should be taken more seriously in the future by the police’”; “Not one official was held responsible”, and the committee “only talked to Israeli security officials and ignored eyewitnesses”. The government then forced Kafr Yassif to accept a different, government-initiated Sulha, “accompanied by threats of more violence”, which named no one responsible and “hinted at the responsibility of Kafr Yassif and its mayor, and some unnamed ‘irresponsible individuals’”. “Here, the party accused (the Israeli government being responsible for the interior ministry and police) became the judge of its own actions.” The pattern generalises: “Almost all investigations end with Israel taking hardly any responsibility, and often blaming the victims, as outlined by Edward Said” (note 15, to Said and Christopher Hitchens, Blaming the Victims), and accused officials “are often promoted in their military and political careers, as Emile Habibi writes” (note 16; see Emile Habibi).

Case 2: Al-Maghar, 2005 (PDF p.10-11 / printed p.117-118)

“Fighting took place in 2005 between Druze and Christian communities in the village of Al-Maghar in Galilee. Resulting from a conflict between two families, one Christian and one Druze, an attack on shops and homes belonging to members in the Christian community took place for a full day, and was renewed again the next day.” Eyewitnesses indicated Israeli police were present in most places where the violence occurred and that at times police “even participated in the attacks”. Much property damage and injuries resulted, and “shock and fear led many members of the Christian community to flee the village until a Sulha secured their return” (see Al-Maghar).

Case 3: Deit Jarir, 2006 (PDF p.11 / printed p.118)

In the West Bank village of Deit Jarir near Ramallah, between area A and area C, a conflict between a Christian and a Muslim family escalated in 2006. Village leaders called on the Palestinian Authority; it “immediately sent a security detachment to Deit Jarir, but was unable to reach the village because the Israeli military prevented it from going further. It took calls from the American Embassy in Jerusalem to allow this force to enter the village and stop attacks against property. While no one was injured or killed, the attack produced extensive damage.”

Settler colonialism, police state, resistance (PDF p.11-13 / printed p.118-120)

The structural account resumes: from its inception the state repressed, marginalised and demobilised the Palestinian community — a military regime that “officially lasted until 1966”, Palestinian areas declared military zones filled with checkpoints, movement restrictions paralleled by repression of political organising, expedited land confiscation, and Jewish settlements built in areas that “limited the expansion of the Palestinian residential areas and destroyed the Palestinian farming sector”, a pattern later repeated in the areas colonised in 1967; “Land confiscation and house demolitions are still practiced against the native Palestinian citizens in the 1948 areas.” The controlled education system suppresses Palestinian national history and identity while promoting a Zionist version seeking loyalty; and although the military regime ended officially in 1966, “hundreds of emergency regulations are still intact to this day. They severely constrain the political, economic and social empowerment of the Palestinian community” (note 17). Against acquiescence narratives, Ahmad Sa’di “focuses on coalition building and resistance” (note 18, as printed to Lustick; see Open questions): “Resistance started immediately after 1948 and continues to this day.” Sa’di’s own illustration is Kafr Yassif, where — from his study and Shihade’s archival work — “a coalition was established between nationalists and communists in Kafr Yassif challenging attacks on the local council headed by Yanni Yanni, a well-known nationalist leader (of Greek origin)” (see Yanni Yanni); residents also challenged land confiscation and the military governor’s attempt to deport refugees from neighbouring destroyed villages who had taken refuge in Kafr Yassif. The struggle reached print in Al-Ittihad, “especially a well-known article by Emile Habibi calling on all Arabs to follow the example of Kafr Yassif. The news of the village reached Europe, and led to a visit by Simone De Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre” [names as printed]. Druze ethnicisation was likewise resisted from within: “a formal association against the military draft was established in the 1970s and is still active to this day”, Druze continue in Palestinian political organising, and their opposition owed also to discrimination and land confiscation (note 20). The dialectic in sum: the community “has not been passive” but challenges state violence “through continuous political organising and protests, coalition building, maintaining and developing its national identity, language and historical memory, and constantly connecting to the rest of the Palestinian community in the 1967 areas as well as in the diaspora”, through poetry, art, official and unofficial projects and direct and virtual communication; “[a]s Nadim Rouhana argues, among others, they remain alienated from the Israeli state” (note 21; see Nadim Rouhana). Even the renaming of towns, villages and geographic locations “is challenged by the community’s resilience and memory of the original Arabic names. The dialectic between repression, erasure, denial, and memory continues to this day.”

Conclusion (PDF p.13-15 / printed p.120-122)

The paper’s focus was one form of internal violence; others occur — within families, within one religious community, between political parties especially around elections, and between gangs, sometimes with guns — always reported in Arab and Hebrew media, while leaders’ calls for state policies to address the problem are ignored: “Israeli security forces seem to only focus on the Palestinian community through the perspective of a security lens, always monitoring what they call the ‘radicalisation’ of the Palestinian public. Israeli security forces only intervene forcefully to suppress political organising and protests.” The case finding: “it appears that the Israeli state encourages internal divisions, continues to repress the Palestinian collective identity, and lets conflicts erupt into violence”; the community’s responses are continued calls on the state to keep internal peace, local conflict-management methods, and party and organisational work for unity. The programmatic claim: linking 1948 and 1967 is “not only about countering the rupture that took place in 1948” but can illustrate the establishment’s intentions and future scenarios. “Failing to focus on the origins of the state, and on relations between settlers and natives, has led to a flawed understanding of the Israeli state and its relations to native Palestinians in the field of Palestine Studies”; scholarship not grounded in the state’s origin “even legitimates the settler colonial structure established in 1948” and misses “a pattern that started in 1948 and was replicated in 1967”. Hence: “A state that was established as a setter colonial structure [sic] on the ruins of the native population, cannot allow for coexistence unless it dismantles a founding ideology and goes through an historical self-evaluation. This must include the acknowledgement of past wrongs and a commitment to reparation.” And: “Settler colonialism, as many theorists have argued, is based on a genocidal attempt to displace indigenous peoples” (note 22, to Elkins and Pedersen (eds), Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century, and to Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’). “This produces endlessly conflicting relations with the native population”; the paper’s contribution is “linking the studies of settler colonialism with communal and group conflicts and violence. If the Israeli policy has been to divide and disperse, the Palestinian people, in response must be to unite and converge.”

Biographical Note and Notes (PDF p.15-16 / printed p.122-123)

The Biographical Note is summarised under What the file is. The 22 Notes (PDF p.15-16) are recorded in the reading notes at each marker and grouped under Evidence below: the 1948 and remainder literature (notes 1-3), Shihade’s own dissertation and book (notes 4-6, 13), the Druze literature (notes 8-9, 20), Arab education (note 10), the remainers’ memoirs and studies (note 11), Sulha (note 14), Said and Habibi on blaming the victims (notes 15-16), and the closing citations to Sultany, Lustick, Sa’di, Rouhana and the settler colonial theorists (notes 17-22).

Key passages

• “Palestinians who managed to stay on their lands after the 1948 War and became Israeli ‘citizens’” (PDF p.1 / printed p.108)
• “From close to one million Palestinians only around 150,000 remained in the newly created state.” (PDF p.2 / printed p.109)
• “turned the Jewish religion into an official ethnic and national category” (PDF p.3 / printed p.110)
• “The aim was not only to divide and rule, but also to disconnect them from the larger Palestinian community and the Arab people at large.” (PDF p.3 / printed p.110)
• “A policy of internal ghettoisation and of external disconnection defined the position of the Israeli state towards them from early on.” (PDF p.4 / printed p.111)
• “Thus, as of 1948, they turned from being Palestinians, to become Christians, Muslims, and Druze.” (PDF p.4 / printed p.111)
• “This was the first major split between the Druze and the rest of the Palestinian community.” (PDF p.4 / printed p.111)
• “Their religious identity was thus ethnicised, politicised, and directed towards hostility against Arabs and Palestinians.” (PDF p.4-5 / printed p.111-112)
• “They became ghettoised, familiar only with nearby villages, while the Jewish localities that they visited or lived in remained alien to them.” (PDF p.6 / printed p.113)
• “Only 4 policemen were present at the Kafr Yassif football ground the following day.” (PDF p.7 / printed p.114)
• “Here, the party accused (the Israeli government being responsible for the interior ministry and police) became the judge of its own actions.” (PDF p.10 / printed p.117)
• “the community has not been passive” (PDF p.13 / printed p.120)
• “Israeli security forces only intervene forcefully to suppress political organising and protests.” (PDF p.14 / printed p.121)
• “cannot allow for coexistence unless it dismantles a founding ideology and goes through an historical self-evaluation” (PDF p.15 / printed p.122)
• “If the Israeli policy has been to divide and disperse, the Palestinian people, in response must be to unite and converge.” (PDF p.15 / printed p.122)

Evidence the work relies on

• For the Kafr Yassif case, the work’s own primary research as stated: more than three years of fieldwork (2002-2005), eyewitness interviews, archival work in the village, and Israeli official reports on the incident (PDF p.2). For the Al-Maghar and Deit Jarir cases: media reports and brief interviews with local witnesses and community leaders (PDF p.2).
• For the 1948 displacement and those who remained: Walid Khalidi, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1991); Ilan Pappé, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel (Yale University Press, 2011); Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (Times Books, 1980) (note 1); Azmi Bishara, The Ruptured Discourse and Other Stories (2002) and From the Jewish State to Sharon (2005); Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of Transfer in Zionist Political Thought (1992); Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim (eds), The War for Palestine (2001) (note 2); and Uri Davis, Israel: An Apartheid State (Zed Books, 1987) (note 3).
• For the non-completion of transfer and the repression of Palestinian citizens: Pappé, The Forgotten Palestinians, and Shihade’s own Why the Palestinians in Israel have been so ‘Peaceful’? (MA dissertation, University of Washington, 2001) (notes 4-5); for the categorisation argument, Shihade, Not Just a Soccer Game: Colonialism and Conflict among Palestinians in Israel (Syracuse University Press, 2011) (note 6), and Rebecca Kook, The Logic of Democratic Exclusion (Lexington Books, 2002) (note 7).
• For the Druze: Kais Firro, The Druzes in the Jewish State: A Brief History (Brill, 1999), and Laila Parsons, The Druze between Palestine and Israel: 1947-1949 (Macmillan Press, 2000) (note 8); Sami Swayd, The Druzes: An Annotated Bibliography (1998) (note 9); and Firro, ‘The Formation of the Exceptionalism of Druze in Israel’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 24, 2001 [as printed] (note 20).
• For education: Sami Mar’i, Arab Education in Israel (Syracuse University Press, 1978), and Majed Al-Haj, Education, Empowerment, and Control: The Case of the Arabs in Israel (SUNY Press, 1995) (note 10).
• For the military-regime period as lived: Fouzi Asmar [as printed], To Be an Arab in Israel (Frances Pinter, 1975), and Sabri Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1976) (note 11); for cultural connection, Maria Sunaina [as printed] and Magid Shihade, ‘Palestinian Hip-Hop: Youth, Identity, and the Nation’, ORIEN, III, 2010, pp.26-35 [journal name as printed] (note 12).
• For Sulha: Elias Jabbour, Sulha: A Palestinian Traditional Peacekeeping Process (House of Hope Publications, 1996) (note 14).
• For the investigation pattern: Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens, Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestine Question (Verso, 2001) [attribution as printed] (note 15); Emile Habibi, The Secrets of Said, Ill Fated Pessoptimist [title as printed] (Vintage Press, 1982) (note 16).
• For the post-1966 order and resistance: Nimer Sultany, Citizens without Citizenship (Mada Al-Carmel, 2003) (note 17); Ian Lustick, The Arabs in the Jewish State: Israel’s Control of a National Minority (University of Texas Press, 1980) (note 18, printed against the Sa’di sentence); Ahmad Sa’di, ‘Control and resistance at a Local-Level Institutions: A Study of Kafr Yassif’s Local Council under Military Government’, Arab Studies Quarterly, 3, 23 (2001) [as printed] (note 19); Nadim Rouhana, Palestinian Citizens in an Ethnic Jewish State: Identities in Conflict (Yale University Press, 1997) (note 21).
• For settler colonialism’s genocidal displacement: Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen (eds), Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, and Legacies (Routledge, 2005), and Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8 (2006), pp.387-410 (note 22).

Analysis

The article’s method is structural explanation by case study: a general account of how the state racialised religious affiliation into national and ethnic categories is established first, and three episodes of intra-Palestinian violence are then read against it, so that the explanatory weight falls on the conditions the state created and on the security forces’ conduct during the episodes — presence without intervention at Kafr Yassif and Al-Maghar, active blocking of helpers and of the Palestinian Authority at Deit Jarir, and self-absolving investigations afterwards — rather than on the immediate triggers (a football result, two family disputes), which the article reports but does not treat as causes. Its perspective is that of Palestine Studies re-grounded in 1948: the editors’ programme for the issue (Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine) is here carried out for the Palestinians inside Israel, the population that programme accused occupation studies of fragmenting away. The argument’s strongest internal support is the Kafr Yassif narrative, which is also its only deeply researched case — fieldwork, village archives, eyewitnesses and official reports behind a sequence (advance warnings, four policemen, a collapsed community Sulha, an organised attack under police eyes, blocked aid, a government committee and an imposed Sulha) in which each step is checkable against the state’s own stated rationale, whose contradictions Shihade sets out himself. Its limits follow from the compression: Al-Maghar and Deit Jarir are each a single paragraph resting on media reports and brief interviews, with no names, dates beyond the year, or casualty figures beyond injuries; the general historical claims of the first sections (the figures for 1948, the transfer deliberations, the education and funding differentials) are carried by the notes’ secondary literature and by Shihade’s own dissertation and book, to which the article repeatedly defers for detail; the Druze cooperation account is stated in the community’s collective terms, with the coercion (land access, permits) given as its mechanism and the counter-current of Druze resistance reserved to the resistance section; and no Israeli official, police report or participant in the 1981 attack is named, so the complicity account rests on eyewitness perception and on the investigation’s procedure as Shihade reports them, not on quoted documents. The conclusion’s prescription — dismantling the founding ideology, historical self-evaluation, acknowledgement and reparation as preconditions of coexistence — is presented as the consequence of the structural diagnosis, not argued separately.

People, organizations, places and events

Magid Shihade, Ahmad Sa’di, Nadim Rouhana, Yanni Yanni, Emile Habibi, Kais Firro, Sabri Jiryis, Azmi Bishara, Walid Khalidi, Ilan Pappe, Edward Said, Nur Masalha, Patrick Wolfe · Birzeit University, Al-Ittihad, Palestinian Authority, Druze · Kufr Yasif, Julis, Al-Maghar, Deit Jarir, Galilee, West Bank · Kafr Yassif attack, 1981, Kafr Kassim, Day of the Land

Concepts

Settler Colonialism, Racialisation of religious communities, Sulha, Politics of fragmentation, Remainers, Present Absentees, Transfer, Nakba, Ethnic Cleansing, Logic of Elimination

How it relates to other sources

• The article is one of the case studies surveyed in the Editors’ Introduction to the same issue, which describes Magid Shihade’s contribution as treating state practices fragmenting and dissolving Palestinian social identities (Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.5-6); Shihade also appears in that Introduction’s Acknowledgements as one of the additional editors of the Arabic translation of Wolfe’s ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’ printed in the issue (PDF p.6-7). Where the Introduction states the programme in general, Shihade supplies its mechanism inside Israel: categorisation by religion, then policing.
• With Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, in the same issue: Lloyd’s Palestinians in Israel hold formal citizenship (ezrahut) without nationality (le’om); Shihade gives the same structure its administrative form — identity cards registering religious affiliation, the ‘Israeli Arabs’ label, and separate education — and its lived consequences in communal violence. Lloyd’s exception is governed by proliferation of law; Shihade’s emergency regulations likewise persist by the hundreds after the military regime’s official end in 1966.
• With Nakba and Survival: Manna’s Remainers are Shihade’s ‘1948 Palestinians’, and both centre Kufr Yasif — Manna as a Non-expulsion case saved by a Druze-mediated surrender in 1948 and a site of the nationalist-communist coalition under its council head (spelled Yani Yani by Manna, Yanni Yanni by Shihade; see Open questions), Shihade as that coalition’s continuation and as the 1981 attack’s target village. Their figures for those who remained differ in form: Shihade’s “around 150,000” (PDF p.2) against Manna’s 156,000 summer-1949 consensus figure, which Manna’s own Chapter 2 then revises (see Remainers). On the Druze the accounts are complementary rather than contradictory: Pappé and Manna record the 1948 agreements and their protective effects for Druze villages; Shihade records the post-1948 ethnicisation those agreements began, and the Druze resistance to conscription that Manna’s ‘blood pact’ framing does not centre.
• With The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine: Shihade’s note apparatus rests in part on Pappé’s The Forgotten Palestinians (2011), a different Pappé work from the one ingested here; the accounts agree that the Druze defection of 1948 alienated the Druze from the rest of the Palestinians — Pappé through the staged battle and the Galilee cleansing (PDF p.145), Shihade through conscription as “the first major split” (PDF p.4).
• With Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope: Falk’s Politics of fragmentation names the British divide-and-rule inheritance and the fragmentation of the Palestinian minority from the rest of the Palestinian corpus as its most fundamental form; Shihade gives that form its earliest and most concrete institutional history, and a case — Kafr Yassif — in which fragmentation was enforced at village level by police conduct.
• With Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics, in the same issue: Wolfe’s Logic of Elimination is cited at Shihade’s conclusion for settler colonialism as “a genocidal attempt to displace indigenous peoples”; Shihade’s addition, in his own terms, is to link that structure to communal and group conflict within the native community that was not displaced.

Open questions

• PDF p.3 / printed p.110: the sentence on the state that remained prints “as an obstacle to Jewish rein state”, a garbled fragment in the text copy (apparently a line-break or typesetting loss around ‘rein’); the surrounding sense is given in the reading notes as printed, and no completion is supplied by the work itself.
• Printed slips kept as printed: “setter colonial state” for settler colonial state (PDF p.3 / printed p.110, and again “setter colonial structure”, PDF p.15 / printed p.122); “It is worth nothing” for noting (PDF p.7 / printed p.114).
• Note 18 (PDF p.16 / printed p.123): the text credits Ahmad Sa’di with the focus on coalition building and resistance, but note 18 as printed lists only Ian Lustick, The Arabs in the Jewish State (1980); Sa’di’s Kafr Yassif article is cited in note 19. Whether the Lustick citation belongs to the Sa’di sentence or stands as a general citation for the control system is not resolved by the work.
• Note 19 (PDF p.16): Sa’di’s article is cited as Arab Studies Quarterly, “3, 23 (2001)”, and note 20 cites Firro’s Journal of Palestine Studies article as “24, 2001”; both volume/issue forms are reproduced as printed and are incomplete or reversed as printed.
• Names as printed whose spelling the work does not settle: “Deit Jarir” for the West Bank village of case 3 (no other spelling is given in the work); “Fouzi Asmar” in note 11, against the Fouzi El-Asmar form in Manna’s bibliography; “Maria Sunaina” and the journal “ORIEN” in note 12; “Simone De Beauvoir” and “Jean Paul Sartre” (PDF p.12). The Yanni Yanni of this article (PDF p.12) is the Yani Yani of Manna’s account of Kufr Yasif (see Yanni Yanni); each source’s spelling is kept on its own pages.
• The 1981 account names no victims: the young person killed by the grenade on match day, the Julis man stabbed, and the two residents killed in the attack three days later are all unnamed, as are the Kafr Yassif mayor of 1981, the police station heads, and any attacker. The work gives no source for the ‘American Embassy in Jerusalem’ formulation in case 3 beyond its stated basis in media reports and brief interviews.
• Figures: “close to one million” Palestinians before displacement, “around 150,000” remaining, “500 villages” of which “only 100 remained undestroyed” (PDF p.2) are given in round numbers credited to note 3’s works (Khalidi, Pappé, Davis) without a breakdown; Manna’s differing counts for those who remained are recorded on Remainers and are not reconciled here.
• Al-Maghar (PDF p.11): the work gives no month for the 2005 fighting, no names for the two families, and no number for the injured; Deit Jarir (PDF p.11) likewise gives no month and no property-damage figure. Both cases rest, by the work’s own statement, on media reports and brief interviews rather than the fieldwork behind Kafr Yassif.

Coverage

PDF p.1-16 of 16, read in full