The split identity of Israel’s 900,000 Arab citizens was highlighted again this week, as Israeli Arabs seized the national consciousness by marking Land Day with a general strike.
Despite fears of unrest, however, Wednesday’s protests passed quietly, with the national police chief, Rafi Peled, praising the Arab community for its “maturity and responsibility” as the day drew to a close.
Land Day, held annually on March 30, commemorates violent protests against the confiscation of Arab land in the Galilee in 1976, in which six Arabs were killed.
This year, Land Day was a closely watched harbinger. February’s massacre in Hebron had thrown the dual role of Israeli Arabs into the foreground, with signs boding both good and bad for the prospects of continued coexistence.
As Palestinians, Israeli Arabs had reacted with an unprecedented wave of unrest when Muslims were killed by a Jewish settler while praying in Hebron.
But as an Israeli, an Arab judge from Nazareth is serving on the commission investigating the massacre, effectively sitting in judgment on the army and playing an unprecedented high-profile role in Israeli democratic life.
‘AN ULTRA-COMPLEX SITUATION’
“We are dealing with an ultra-complex situation where different currents and contradictory trends all mix together,” explained Elie Rekhess, a consultant to the Prime Minister’s office on Arab affairs.
The result is that Israeli Arabs are experiencing both “a growing sense of Israeliness and at the same time a growing sense of belonging to the Arab nation and the Palestinian people,” said Rekhess, who is a senior fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center of Tel Aviv University.
Rekhess said these processes have been accelerated by the accord signed last September between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization.
For Israeli Arabs, the accord recognized the Palestinian national identity. But they also see it as having eliminated the Israeli-Arab conflict long used by Israel as an excuse for avoiding the challenge of providing equality to Israeli Arabs.
The sense of a renewed Palestinian identity was evident in the traumatic bursts of hostility and violence that characterized the Israeli Arabs’ reactions to the tragedy in Hebron.
For several days afterward, the scenes on the streets of Arab towns and villages inside Israel were reminiscent of the early days of the intifada, the grass-roots Palestinian uprising in the territories that began in 1987.
It seemed as if the Palestinian uprising had finally, and perhaps decisively, crossed the Green Line.
The Jews of Israel reeled in collective shock as this incipient mayhem even swept through Jaffa, now a mixed Jewish-Arab section of Tel Aviv.
The shops and restaurants of this bustling, picturesque section have yet to recover from the clashes between Arab youngsters and police that were widely televised during those tension-filled days in late February.
In the Bedouin township of Rahat, in the northern Negev, a young man was killed by police fire — the first Israeli Arab to die in this way in almost 20 years.
But in less than a week, the unrest subsided swiftly and totally, a fact likely linked to the naming of Judge Abdel Rahman Zouabi of the Nazareth District Court to the five-member panel investigating the massacre.
Indeed, that appointment may have been the first major achievement of Chief Justice Meir Shamgar, who heads the commission.
Israel’s Arab citizens were profoundly, and positively, affected by the appointment.
Within the Shamgar Commission, Judge Zouabi has been able to cross verbal swords with Ehud Barak, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Force.
Zouabi has been the toughest interrogator of IDF witnesses throughout the hearings. And in his questioning of Barak, he made it blatantly clear to the chief of staff, and to the Israelis glued to their television screens, that he did not accept the logic that routinely allowed Israelis to carry their weapons into the Tomb of the Patriarchs.
At around the same time, the potential of Israeli Arabs to serve as a bridge between Israel and its neighbors appeared to receive one of its biggest boosts in the first-ever visit by Israeli citizens to Damascus in early March.
The 50-member delegation of Israeli Arabs paid their respects to Syrian President Hafez Assad on the recent death of his son.
AN AMBIGUOUS IDENTITY
But this bit of history-making also reflected the ambiguous nature of Israeli Arab identity. Knesset Member Abdel Wahab Darawshe of the Arab Democratic Party, a leader of the delegation, made statements in Damascus that seemed to identify him more with Palestinian nationalism than with the Israeli polity.
Another signal that the overwhelming sentiment in Arab public opinion is still a strong identification with the Palestinian cause came March 23 in a protest by Arab leaders against Israel’s military operation against fugitives in Hebron.
The coordinating committee of Israeli Arab local authorities, under Islamic leader Ibrahim Nimr Hussein, sent a cable to the prime minister protesting the operation.
The cable, in its tenor and tone, was regarded as the most forthright public protest and denunciation of the army by the Israeli Arab leadership in recent memory.
Amid these conflicting signals, observers had feared that Land Day might reveal the quiet to be but the calm before the storm.
Indeed, tensions were primed. The leaders of the Israeli Arab community declared a full-fledged general strike, indicating a higher level of protest than usual.
And they centered their demonstration in the town of Rahat, where mourning was still underway for the Israeli Arab killed by police.
The quiet strike highlighted both facets of the Israeli Arab identity.
Through it, Israeli Arabs expressed their continuing solidarity with the Palestinians under occupation.
But, as Israeli citizens, the strike also afforded an opportunity to vent their grievances over economic and social discrimination, issues perpetually studied by Knesset committees but never fully redressed.
(Contributing to this report was JTA staff writer Larry Yudelson in New York.)
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
