As one who knew the old Palestine, Edwin Samuel reports on the present situation of the Arabs in Israel, drawing on his uniquely intimate and many-faceted experience with the Arabs, gained in army service in World War I, then while a Mandate official, and finally as an official of the Israeli government.
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It is not easy to answer the question so often asked of Palestinian old-timers: “What do people like yourself feel about the Arabs in Israel today?” The further question usually implied, rather than asked, is: “What about the Arabs no longer here?”
During the Mandatory period I lived much among the Arabs. Once I lived for a whole year at Ramallah, in the Samarian hills, riding on horseback round my sixty hill villages as District Officer and Magistrate, the only Jew among 30,000 Moslems. Another year I spent at Nazareth as the Assistant District Commissioner in charge of Galilee—from the Lebanese frontier to the Emek and from the Jordan River to Nahalal. (It was then that I started the Peasant House in Nazareth to sell Arab handicrafts; from Nazareth I transferred the peasant costumes to the Citadel in Jerusalem, and so became a co-founder of the Folk Museum.) To deal with the peasants I had to learn Arabic; but with the more educated ones I could speak English or French. I knew King Abdullah of Jordan; the Mufti of Jerusalem; his arch-enemy, Ragheb Bey Nashashibi, the Mayor of Jerusalem; and a host of Arab colleagues in the Palestine Civil Service, several of whom subsequently became cabinet ministers or civil servants in Jordan or other Arab states.
Do I miss them? I do: and, in spite of the bitter racial struggle that went on around me, I miss them very much indeed. For two years I was on the Mufti’s list of British officials to be assassinated and had to take very careful precautions to remain alive. In the free-for-all at the very end of the Mandatory period I was wounded by the Arab bomb that exploded, with many fatalities, in the courtyard of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem (nothing personal, of course). Three weeks later I was fired upon, and missed, three times by a group of Arabs who had been sent to take me as a hostage. Yet I still miss them.
Today, my wife and I live in the split city of Jerusalem, on the Israeli side of the line. I do not like being cut off from the Old City—not so much because I am a Jew as because I am an ex-Palestinian and (I hope) a civilized man. I feel just the same about my exclusion from Bethlehem. I do not like closed frontiers anywhere: I merely accept them as political realities. In the past six years I have made no attempt to get permission to visit the other side, although several Jews I know have managed it—my father, David Kessler of the London Jewish Chronicle, and Professor J. C. Hurewitz of Columbia University.
Perhaps it is wounded pride that prevents my applying for a visa. Perhaps it is subconscious fear. The strain of living in Talbieh, the last mixed Arab-Jewish quarter in Jerusalem as late as March 1948, has left its mark. The government radio station of which I was director was also in a largely Arab quarter, the Musrara, and was guarded by the Arab Legion against Jewish terrorists in the Irgun Zvai Leumi. All my Jewish staff had been evacuated to the Jewish district of Rehavia to put them out of reach of Arab attacks, while my British staff were behind barbed wire in the German Colony so as to be safe from Jewish attacks. It was all rather complicated, especially since I was paymaster for all three sections. Even reporting each month to the High Commissioner at Government House during the last few months of the Mandate meant crouching at the bottom of a Government House car while the British police-sergeant driver crashed through the unofficial Arab civic guards at the roadblocks they had thrown up on all the roads leading from the Jewish areas. Even now, I have a recurrent nightmare in which I find myself back by mistake in Nablus, the heart of the Arab Rebellion from 1936 to 1938. Luckily, when I am recognized and challenged, I float rapidly away over the heads of the hostile crowds.
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Yet I am sad—and I have no doubt many other Jews are too—to see so few Arabs walking about today among Jews in Israel. Most of those still in Israel stay in their own villages in Galilee, or in the town of Nazareth itself. There are small groups still in Jaffa, Haifa, and even in the Israeli part of Jerusalem. You still can see an occasional peasant woman from the hill village of Abu Ghosh, fifteen miles away, unconcernedly walking in Jerusalem, bearing on her proud head a straw basket full of eggs or figs. But the lawyers and the doctors, the landlords and the teachers have all fled from Jewish Palestine: their ghosts still haunt the fine stone town houses that they built and in which they once lived. The problem of internal racial conflict now hardly exists: partly, perhaps, because there is practically no competition, since those Arabs who could compete have withdrawn and left the field almost wholly to the Jews. The leaderless peasantry in the North is ruled largely by the Jewish Military Government in Nazareth: the Bedouin in the South by the Jewish Military Governor in Beersheba.
Apart from Arab Communist activity in Nazareth itself, the Arabs of Israel give little trouble. Their situation, however, is an unhappy one and has been set out with courage and accuracy by Don Peretz in a recent article in the Middle East Journal of Washington, D. C. (Vol. 8, No. 2). There he describes the ambivalent attitude of the Israeli government, and public opinion generally, towards the Arab in Israel. There is little rancor or fear, but at the same time there is little confidence. That is the unfortunate position of most strong governments faced with “disaffected minorities.” Of course, the unhappy relations between Jew and Arab long antedate the war. Actually, the Arabs in Palestine were never “affected” towards the Jews—except perhaps in “the good old days” before World War I, when both Arab and Jew were equally despised and oppressed by their common Turkish master. But then they hardly knew each other: after that, for the next thirty years they were locked in a struggle for Palestine. Now the victorious Jews face a defeated and sullen Arab minority of their own. To integrate them with the Jewish majority in Israel calls for the highest arts of government.
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In its handling of its own Arab minority, the Israeli government, as governments go in a difficult world, is not doing so badly. It has the right ideas. The Ministry of the Minorities, established in 1948, was soon abolished, for it was felt that, as citizens of Israel, Arabs in Israel should, like other citizens, deal directly with the several ministries and not through a “consulate” of their own. The 100,000 Arabs remaining in Israel were enfranchised and, now 180,000 strong, are represented in the Knesset by eight members, of which five appear on wholly Arab slates—three on mixed ones. For the first six years of the new state, Arab young men were not liable for military service, but that discriminatory rule has now been rescinded—not without objection from some Arab leaders, however.1 Arab travel restrictions within Israel have now been lifted except for the frontier areas, where Arabs still require military permits. But it is perhaps in matters of health and education that the most advance has been made. The proportion of Arab boys—and above all, girls—now at school, is higher today than under the British Mandate, or than in Arab countries themselves, with the possible exception of Lebanon. An Arab teachers’ training school is run by the Israel Ministry of Education—but not, of course, on the same scale as the Arab College maintained in Jerusalem under the previous administration. Hebrew is taught in Arab schools as the first foreign language. Nevertheless, it will take many decades before the Arabs of Israel are completely integrated. There are already mixed trade unions, but Arabs are not full voting members yet of the Histadrut—the General Federation of Labor—while labor exchanges in Jewish areas do not provide work for Arabs.
The desired integration is thus, generally, painfully slow. The process is constantly interrupted by frontier incidents that result in Jewish deaths, reprisals across the border, and Arab deaths. The strain on Jewish nerves is constant but the strain on Arab nerves in Israel is almost as great. It seems clear that without a political settlement between Israel and the Arab states, there is little hope of Israel’s Arabs being able to settle down to become loyal Israel citizens.
The chief trouble is that the Israel-Arab war of 1948 was a war that nobody won. Israel didn’t lose, and the forces of Egypt and Jordan and Syria did not march in triumph through Tel Aviv. On the other hand, Israel’s forces did not march in triumph through Cairo, or Amman, or Damascus. The Great Powers damped down the war fever and brought about an armistice, but they were not able to prevent the fever, or cure it. Even today there are many men both in Israel and in the Arab states who sincerely believe that, when the whistle blew, they were just on the point of delivering a knockout blow to their adversaries. In these circumstances, in which both sides feel, so to speak, irredentist, it is impossible to get the two parties together round a table to discuss a peace settlement.
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In the Middle East they say “I am against my brother. My brother and I are against our cousin. My brother, my cousin, and I are against the whole world.” It is only against a common enemy that threatens their very existence that Arabs and Jews might be expected to unite. Russia is the only power that might offer such a threat today; but Russia is so adept at setting its enemies by the ears that even the threat of an immediate Russian invasion today is unlikely to bring the Arab states and Israel together.
The only other powers capable of exercising any influence on Israel and the Arab states are the United States, Great Britain, and Turkey—and, in the case of Lebanon, France. Would diplomatic, or even financial, pressure by these powers (particularly United States pressure on Israel and British pressure on Jordan) bring the two sides together? Israel has declared its willingness to discuss peace terms directly with the Arab states. They have steadily refused: and indeed there is little apparent advantage to the Arabs if they accept. Except, perhaps, to Jordan, which might get a free zone in Haifa Harbor and thereby reduce the price of its imports. Even so, the present economic blockade of Israel, by keeping Israel’s exports out of Arab markets, is a direct advantage to the Arab states, especially to Egypt and Syria, who export manufactured goods. On the other hand, Israel would be a good customer for many Arab exports. Meanwhile, the Arab blockade has forced Israel to bestir herself and find new export markets, which she has done with considerable success.
There are some optimists, in the United States in particular, who believe that joint Arab-Israeli economic action, such as the Jordan Plan, can lead to a political settlement. But this is putting the cart before the horse. I personally believe that there is little chance of the Jordan Plan as a whole going through—involving joint action—until there has been a political settlement. International agreements for common use of natural assets are notoriously difficult to achieve, even when there are strong links of friendship between the countries concerned (for example, the St. Lawrence scheme). When each side is opposed to any agreement that gives the smallest advantage to its “enemies,” an economic agreement without a prior political settlement seems a hopeless dream.
Many Jews talk airily of Israel’s willingness to negotiate a peace settlement with the Arab states. But Israel is, diplomatically, in a very vulnerable position. The more extreme Arab spokesmen start off with a demand for Israel’s complete abolition. The more moderate insist on: (a) Israel’s ceding Western Galilee and the Negev, Ramleh, Lydda, and the Arab districts of Jerusalem; (b) the return of all the refugees to their homes; and (c) compensation for all Arab property destroyed, including all the Arab villages destroyed during and after the fighting. Israel, on the other hand, asks for a peace settlement based on the situation as it now is—that is: (a) no cession of territory; (b) no return of refugees except those already readmitted to reunite families; (c) payment by Israel of compensation for Arab land and buildings taken over, but not for Arab property destroyed, except perhaps movable property, and only after Israel’s counterclaim for Jewish property behind the Arab lines has been set off (the Jewish Quarter in the Old City; the old Hebrew University and Hadassah Hospital; half a dozen Jewish villages in the Ramallah and Bethlehem hills, and the potash works north of the Dead Sea).
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Given these positions, there is little room here for maneuver by Israel.
In the Middle East, financial settlements are usually reached by the familiar process of carpet-dealing. I ask a thousand dollars, you offer me a hundred; several hours and many cups of coffee later, we settle for four hundred; and we are each happy at having got the better of the other. But it is very difficult for Israel to play the game in traditional fashion. Take the question of frontiers, for example. Six years ago, revision might have been possible, before the frontiers crystallized again. The opportunity was lost by the Arab states and will not return. Meanwhile Israel has resettled the Arab towns and much of the Arab lands with Jews. Public opinion in Israel would never agree now to a return of the frontiers proposed in the 1947 Partition Plan. Minor rectification of frontiers might be possible here and there, to consolidate the holdings of frontier villages, but nothing on a scale that would satisfy even moderate Arab opinion.
The whole problem of the compensation payable by Israel for the Arab property it has taken over is dealt with at length in another excellent article by Don Peretz in the Middle East Journal (Vol. 8, No. 4). Although Israel has agreed to pay compensation, the sum claimed by the Arabs is twenty times the sum assessed by the UNRWA claims committee. Even the UNRWA assessment would be a heavy burden on Israel and could only be paid over a long period, probably through a United Nations loan. The method of payment, to whom, and how the payments are to be utilized have also to be settled. But that is not primarily a matter for Israel to decide.
The main subject for bargaining will no doubt be the return of the Arab refugees to Israel. The Arab states say, “Take back all of them.” Israel was once prepared to consider taking back 100,000, but today the public says, “Not even one more.” Israel’s refusal must be seen against the position at the end of the Mandate, when Jews in Palestine were outnumbered by two to one, though the Jews even then, with the support of world Jewry, managed to make great headway. If the 750,000 Arab refugees were re-admitted to Israel, they would form over one-third of the population and, with support from the neighboring Arab states, could wreck Israel. Even the present Arab 10 per cent in Israel is regarded by many Jews there and abroad as a potential fifth column in time of war. Israel does not want any more Arabs to cope with. Jews know all about the story of the Trojan Horse.
Personally, I think that, without undue risk to Israel’s security or economy, she could take back some Arab refugees. It would cost a great deal to resettle them in Israel, their villages having mostly been razed and their lands and town buildings taken over by new Jewish settlers. But if 40,000 to 50,000 Arabs were re-admitted, the Arab population of Israel would still not exceed 250,000 by the time the Jewish population reached 2,500,000 (largely by further Jewish immigration). The proportion of 10 per cent would thus not be disturbed.
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What do we want our Israeli Arabs to become? Do we want them to become good Israelis, speaking Hebrew and indistinguishable from their Jewish fellow citizens? Or do we want to keep them on as a racial minority, speaking Arabic and wearing distinctive Arab dress? This question was raised in the late 1920’s by the Brit Shalom Society, of which I was a founding member. The late Dr. Judah L. Magnes was our spiritual guide, and we were supported by several other leading figures in the Hebrew University. We then believed that Palestine could contain two separate cultures—one Jewish and the other Arab; twin yolks in a single egg. Dr. Magnes envisaged a constitution so delicately balanced that neither Arab nor Jew could ever dominate the other. Even before the end of the Mandate, it became clear that such a scheme would have been an organized deadlock, and that it would have been difficult to maintain such a delicate balance even if it were found desirable.
The situation in Israel today is much simpler. With an overwhelming Jewish majority, it is extremely doubtful whether a separate Arab culture can be maintained. It seems more than probable—even if the Arab population reaches 250,000—that it will become rapidly assimilated to the prevailing Jewish culture. Hence Israel would no doubt insist on selecting those refugees that it could assimilate and would be prepared to readmit—i.e. farmers, craftsmen, and teachers. It is unlikely that the Arab states would agree for a moment to this. Nor is it certain, when the matter came to the final test, that many Arab refugees would be willing to go back to “Palestine” under a Jewish regime.
If one is to be practical, it is against this somber political background that the Israeli attitude to the Arabs still in Israel must be viewed. Since 1948 about 750,000 Arabs have moved out of Israel, and about 750,000 more Jews have moved in to take their place. Many of these are themselves from the Middle East, speaking Arabic, wearing “Oriental” clothes on festive occasions (for example, the Yemenites) and eating “Arab” food. Even the Western Jew likes “Arab” food for a change; and the many Oriental restaurants formerly run by Arabs for Arabs and patronized occasionally by Jews have been replaced by an increasing number of restaurants run by Oriental Jews for Oriental Jews and patronized occasionally by Western Jews. Jewish music in Israel has a strong Oriental flavor, and several of the most popular radio singers are Yemenites. Israel has the problem of integrating its own Oriental Jews and its Western Jews into one community. Integrating as many as 250,000 Arabs as well would not seem to be an insoluble problem.
In any case, “the good old days” are gone forever. We have lost the savor of the East, and many will admit it, especially “the old Palestinians.” More and more of the Arabs of Israel will wear “Western” clothing; more and more will speak fluent Hebrew—which is very easy for an Arab to learn. They will play their part in the civil service and police. And it will be a matter of surprise to find that the man you are talking to is an Arab, not a Jew. Arab culture will flourish in Arab lands. But even there it is becoming rapidly Westernized: in Israel the Arab has little chance of maintaining his identity. To those who have known life in Palestine in the past, this would seem to be a mixed blessing.
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1 There was always a minorities unit in the Israeli army composed of Druze and Circassian volunteers, with a few Arabs among them.
