There is nothing that Likud has done that the Israeli Labor Party didn’t
do before it
There is a
comforting myth beloved of ‘left’ Zionism that before 1967 and the 6 Days War
and Occupation, life for Israeli Palestinians (‘Arabs’) was idyllic compared to
life under Likud. From 1948-1977 the Israeli Labor Party formed Israel’s
governments. Racism in Israel according to supporters of Labour Zionism and the
Two State Solution only began from 1977 onwards.
The article When
the Shin Bet Chief Warned That Educated Arabs Are a 'Problem' for Israel by
Israeli historian Adam Raz in Ha’aretz demolishes this myth and shows what life
was really like in Israel for Israeli Palestinians.
Far from life
being idyllic if you were an Arab, life was in many ways worse than under Likud.
From 1948 to 1966 85% of Israeli Arabs were under military occupation. They
couldn’t leave their village to go to the next one without permission of the
army and local governor.
As Adam says the
typical myth about Israel which racists like Keir Starmer promote, is that it
is a ‘rumbustious
democracy’. It is anything but. Israel has a permanent State of
Emergency, because according to its security mythology, it is ‘under attack’ by
the Arabs, despite the fact that it has a peace agreement with Jordan and
Egypt. In Syria Israel regularly conducts bombing raids and in Lebanon it is
Israel which has always done the attacking though today the border is quieter
because Israel knows that Hezbollah has the capability to retaliate to Israeli
aggression.
It would not be
stretching things to say that Labour Zionism was more racist than its Revisionist cousins.
When the ‘socialist’ Zionists were campaigning to boycott Arab Labour and
Produce in the 1920s and 30s, literally picketing orange groves and work places
to prevent Arabs working for Jewish employers, the Revisionists were happy to
employ Arab labour (because it was cheaper).
David
HaCohen, former Managing Director of Solel Boneh, Histadrut’s building company,
described his difficulties explaining to other socialists the dilemmas of
socialist Zionism
‘I had to fight my friends on the issue of Jewish socialism, to defend
the fact that I would not accept Arabs in my Trade Union, the Histadrut; to
defend preaching to housewives that they should not buy at Arab stores; to
defend the fact that we stood guard at orchards to prevent Arab workers from
getting jobs there... to pour kerosene on Arab tomatoes; to attack Jewish
housewives in the markets and smash Arab eggs they had bought... to buy dozens
of dunums from an Arab is permitted but to sell God forbid one Jewish dunum to
an Arab is prohibited; to take Rothschild the incarnation of capitalism as
a socialist and to name him the ‘benefactor’ – to do all that was not easy.’[i]
Not for nothing did the
late Professor Ze’ev Sternhell describe Labour Zionism as ‘nationalist socialism’. [Founding Myths of Israel] He made clear
that but for the associations with the Nazis he would have called it ‘national
socialism’. And before anyone cries ‘anti-Semite’ they might pause to consider
that Sternhell was a child survivor of the Nazi ghetto of Przemsyl. The ‘socialist’
Zionists opposed class struggle against Jewish employers because for Zionism
unity of Jews, regardless of class, was more important than class solidarity
with Palestinians.
David Ben Gurion, the
most important figure in Labour Zionism and Israel’s first Prime Minister
coined the slogan ‘from class to nation’. In other words the class struggle was
to be waged as a national struggle against the Arabs.
This is another example
of the similarity of Zionism with Nazism ideologically. For the Nazis, their
‘socialism’ consisted of attacking the Jews as the representatives of
capitalism. Whilst German capitalism was to be respected, Jews were fair game.
Anti-capitalism was transmuted into anti-Semitism.
As Adam Raz makes
clear, archival documentation of the repression of Israel’s Palestinians is
very exceptional today. With the advent of digitalisation of archives Israel’s
censors have taken it as the opportunity to reclassify what were once declassified documents. This would be
unheard of in Britain and the United States yet Israel’s political echelon
never misses an opportunity to inhibit any research that demonstrates the
historic oppression and structural inequality of the Arab sector.
Adam describes how the
ILP government ‘espoused a policy of segregation and of subordinating Arab
society to Jewish society’. Of course Israel’s military argued that they hadn’t
done enough to ‘suppress the development of Arab society’. Indeed ‘Some thought
that it would be useful to exploit a future war to expel the Palestinian
citizens.’
You can see in both the
security and political sectors all the old attitudes of the British ruling
class to native peoples. Amos Manor, head of Shin Bet (Israel’s security
service) ‘viewed the traditional clan-based hierarchy among the Arabs as the
basis of what used to be called in the British Empire ‘indirect rule’ i.e. rule
through collaborators, local chiefs and village elders. “We must not expedite processes with our own hands. The existing social
frameworks should be preserved… as a convenient governing tool.”
This is colonisation in
its purest form. Manor warned of the dangers of an educated class: ‘“As long
as they’re half-educated, I’m not worried.” When the Nazis invaded Poland their
first target for extermination was not the Jews but Polish intellectuals. More
Jews died in the first 2 years of Nazi occupation because they were
intellectuals than died because they were Jewish.
We see the same attitudes amongst
Israeli Labor Party’s military apparatchiks as in the officials who ruled the
Raj. Manor explained that “Revolutions
are fomented not by the proletariat, but by a fattened intelligentsia,”
Manor would not have been out of place as a District Commissioner in Nigeria in
the 1920s or in an India that was being deliberately under-developed.
Aharon Chelouche of the Israeli
Police admitted that it might be “reactionary”
to strengthen the Arabs’ conservative social structure, “but… by means of these frameworks, we control the Arab territory better.”
In Africa this was called tribalism. The Nazis also followed a policy of
strengthening the traditional leaders.
It is fascinating to
eavesdrop on these private conversations. Today any discriminatory measures
against Israel’s Arab population is justified by the all-embracing term ‘security’. Jewish security of course. Israel’s Supreme
Court bends its knee at the very mention of the word. Everything can be
justified by this one word. Yet in
private it was a different story.
Yosef Harmelin, the next head of
Shin Bet explained the real “problem”:
“Our interest is to preserve
Israel as a Jewish state. That is the central problem. When we say ‘security,’
that is what’s meant. Not necessarily a revolution by the Arabs.”
Pinhas
Kopel, the Police Commissioner elaborated and in the process described exactly
what a Jewish State really meant:
“Every such action must be seen not in terms
of what’s good for the Arabs, but what’s good for the Jews.”
As Adam
explains
‘throughout the 1965 discussion,
the question of the possibility of expelling Palestinian citizens from the
country kept surfacing’.
This is
the answer to those who pretend that talk of the Naqba is an ‘Arab
lie’ (Tzipi Hotoveli, Israeli Ambassador).
Aharon
Chelouche explained that although he had tried to create “an atmosphere of emigration in Jaffa,” this was not possible in
1965. Too many people were watching but the security echelon were hoping for
another war which would provide the pretext for more ethnic cleansing.
Meir
Amit, the head of Mossad (MI6) was a hardliner who urged a ‘hard hand, not halfway.” He urged that “Please, if [we have] a whip –
strike.”
Verbin,
the commander of the military government, didn’t, as Adam says, beat around the
bush.
“We expelled around half a million Arabs, we burnt
homes, we looted their land – from their point of view – we didn’t give it
back, we took land… We want to say to ourselves, ‘You, the Arabs, should be
happy about what we are doing,’ [but] we stole the land and we will continue to
steal, and from our view point that is ‘redemption of the Galilee.’”
He warned
that unfortunately “to generate a war
catastrophe” which would allow further ethnic cleansing “is out of the question,”.
Officials
like Meir Amit, the head of Mossad Verbin, Ezra Danin, an Arab affairs adviser
in the Foreign Ministry, took a more ‘liberal’ approach. But this too is
reminiscent of British imperialism. There were those, like Thomas MacCaulay
and Governor General Bentinck who believed in educating a native Indian middle
class whereas the majority of British officials and those like Lord Curzon believed
in the efficacy of an iron hand.
British
like Israeli colonial policy was a result of intense discussions among colonial
officials and their masters.
As Adam
says, we will need to wait a few more decades to find out what the top security
officials of today think about the country’s Palestinian citizens. I imagine
that there will be no surprises because a Jewish state cannot be other than a
state of racial supremacy.
Those who
pretend that Israel can be a Democratic and a Jewish State are fooling
themselves. Not only because enshrining in
its constitution that a certain ethnic/racial group should be in a majority is
racist in itself, but because an ethno-national Jewish state cannot be other
than racist towards non-Jews.
In his second article How
Israel Tormented Arabs in Its First Decades – and Tried to Cover It Up Adam
Raz describes the testimony of military officers in the Kafr
Qasim Massacre. In 1956, on the eve of the Suez War, when Israel
attacked Egypt, the Border Police deliberately massacred 49 inhabitants of Kfar
Qasim, men, women and children, on order from the military command. No killer
served more than 13 months in prison because, then as now, Arab life was cheap.
One officer was asked, were you “imbued
with the feeling that the Arabs are the enemies of the State of Israel?” to
which he replied “Yes.” He was asked,
“Would you kill anyone? Even a woman, a
child?” “Yes,” he reiterated.
Another police officer testified that had he been ordered to do so, he would
have opened fire at a bus packed with Arab women. Another explained, “I was always told that every Arab was an
enemy of the state and a fifth column.”
One
officer remarked that if he were to come across an infant who had “violated”
curfew – “It might sound cruel, but I
would shoot him. I would be obligated to do so.”
This
is the State that western politicians defend with every last breath in their
body
Tony
Greenstein
Bedouin Arabs outside the military governor’s office in Be’er Sheva in 1950. The clan-based hierarchy worked to the benefit of Jewish authorities.Credit: GPO
When
the Shin Bet Chief Warned That Educated Arabs Are a 'Problem' for Israel
Extraordinary
declassified documents reveal the reasons cited by Israel’s top security
officials for repressing the country’s Arab minority
Adam Raz
Sep. 16, 2021
When it
comes to the state’s attitude toward its Palestinian citizens, the policy of
making available historical documents from the archives is made on the basis of
several criteria. One of them starts with the assumption that declassifying
documentation that reveals a policy of inequality is liable to harm the
country’s image and generate a possible reaction from Israel’s Arab population.
Because
the state’s approach to the Arab public has long been essentially repressive,
it’s not surprising that the documentation
available for perusal is very limited. It follows, then, that any
attempt to present an ongoing description of the positions taken by senior
figures in the security establishment over the years is almost doomed to fail.
Nonetheless, two files that recently became available for perusal in the Israel
State Archives offer an exceptional look at the bedrock views of the country’s
top security officials toward the country’s Palestinian citizens during its
early decades, and reveal their guiding principles.
The two
documents in question were declassified following a request submitted by the
Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research. The first, titled
“Summary of a Meeting about the Arab Minority in Israel,” relates to a meeting
held in February 1960, at the request of Uri Lubrani, the Arab affairs adviser
to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Lubrani convened the heads of the security
units that dealt with the “Arab issue,” a term used frequently in discussions
during that period.
The
second document, “Basic Policy Guidelines Regarding the Arab Minority in
Israel,” from July 1965, contains dozens of pages of remarks made during
another meeting by senior government officials and the ranking security
authorities. Its goal was to sum up the results of 17 years of policy, since
1948, in regard to Israel’s Palestinian citizens and to recommend both short-
and long-term policy on that subject.
In both
cases, a clear picture arises. The security authorities were a tool in the
hands of those in the government who espoused a policy of segregation and of
subordinating Arab society to Jewish society. In both cases, the security
officials argued that in the years since the 1948 war the government had not
taken sufficient
actions to suppress the development of Arab society. Some
thought that it would be useful to exploit a future war to expel the
Palestinian citizens.
In the
1960 discussion, for example, the police commissioner, Yosef Nachmias, stated,
“The Arab sector must be kept as low as possible, so that nothing will happen,”
meaning, the status quo would be maintained there. He added that Israel had not
yet reached the “limits of exploitation” of the Palestinian citizens, and care
must be taken not to arouse the Arab “appetite.” Similarly, Amos Manor, the
head of the Shin Bet security service, ‘viewed
the traditional clan-based hierarchy among the Palestinian citizenry as
providing an advantage for the Jewish authorities.’ Manor was of the
opinion that “We must not expedite
processes with our own hands. The existing social frameworks should be
preserved… as a convenient governing tool.”
Manor
warned that educated Arabs could constitute a “problem” and added, “As long as they’re half-educated, I’m not
worried.” Israel, he stated, must preserve the Palestinian citizens’ “traditional social regime,” because it “slows the pace of progress and
development.” He warned that the quicker the Arab sector progresses, "the more trouble we'll have. In 40
years we'll have problems that can't be solved."
The Shin
Bet director had a sociological justification for why Palestinian citizens
should be prevent from acquiring education. “Revolutions are fomented not by
the proletariat, but by a fattened intelligentsia,” he explained. His next
remarks are noteworthy: “All the laws must be applied, even if they are not
pleasant. Illegal means should be considered [by the authorities] only when
there is no choice, and even then – only on condition: that there are good
results… Aggressive governance must be maintained, without taking public
opinion into account.” Aharon Chelouche, the head of the special-ops unit in
the Israel Police, stated in the 1965 meeting that it might be “reactionary” to
strengthen the Arabs’ conservative social structure, “but… by means of these
frameworks, we control the Arab territory better.”
Amos
Manor, who headed the Shin Bet between 1953-1963.Credit: IDF Spokesperson's
Unit
Outwardly,
the “Arab issue” was always presented as a security matter, but in the closed
meeting in 1965 the participants allowed themselves to comment on the subject
with exceptional openness. Yosef Harmelin, who succeeded Manor as Shin Bet
chief, laid things on the line: “Our interest is to preserve Israel as a Jewish
state. That is the central problem. When we say ‘security,’ that is what’s
meant. Not necessarily a revolution by the Arabs.” Yehoshua Verbin, the
commander of the military government that Arab citizens were subject to between
1948 and 1966, made it clear to the participants that “there is no public
problem that is not a security problem.”
Pinhas
Kopel, the police commissioner, seconded them and added, “Every such action
must be seen not in terms of what’s good for the Arabs, but what’s good for the
Jews.” Moshe Kashti, the director general of the Defense Ministry, an example
of a local “liberal” type, said, “I am in favor of liberalization of the
economy. I am somehow against liberalization among the Arabs.” Self-criticism
was voiced by Shmuel Toledano, the prime minister’s adviser on Arab affairs. He
noted the existence of two schools of thought on the so-called Arab issue and
was critical of the leading one, which saw every social problem through a
security prism. He was in the minority.
Throughout
the 1965 discussion, the question of the possibility of expelling Palestinian
citizens from the country kept surfacing. Scholarly research, drawing on
historical documentation, previously found that among some decision-makers, a
policy and even concrete plans to deport Arab citizens were dominant until the
1956 Sinai War. The newly declassified minutes show that similar ideas
continued to exist into the 1960s as well. Reuven Aloni, deputy director
general of the Israel Lands Administration, a body that to this day continues
(as the Israel Land Authority) to play a major role in the discriminatory
distribution of land in Israel, spoke frankly and asked rhetorically, what,
“theoretically,” if Israel could act as it wished, “would we want to do?” He
also answered his question: “Population exchange.” He said he was “quite
optimistic that a day will come, in another 10, 15 or 20 years, when there will
be a situation of a certain kind, with a war or something resembling a war,
when the basic solution will be a matter of transferring the Arabs. I think
that we should think about this as a final goal.”
The
representative of the police, Aharon Chelouche, also spoke about “emigration”
and immediately explicated, “In this business, we have a Jew who succeeded and
expelled an entire city [after the end of the 1948 war] – Majdal [now
Ashkelon], in 1949-1950.” He said he had tried to create “an atmosphere of
emigration in Jaffa,” but that it was not possible to rely on such plans today.
Harmelin,
the Shin Bet director, agreed with others that the “Arab minority” would never
be loyal to the state. In his view, “the
solution then was to expel the Arabs,” but today that is “a solution that we are all familiar with,
[but] which is not practical.” He added, “I have a number of thoughts” – without elaborating – about how “to prevent an increase in the Arabs’ share”
of the country.
Ezra
Danin, an Arab affairs adviser in the Foreign Ministry who had dealt with this
subject for decades, was concerned not only with the impractical nature of
various “emigration” plans, but also their moral implications. “How will we
solicit the help of the world, which we need, while we implement actions that
the fascists or the Iranians carry out?” He wondered how the government could
accept a “satanic proposal” of a “population exchange” and noted, “One doesn’t
arrive at a population exchange from a position of comfort. One arrives at
population exchange by bringing things to that pass.”
From 1948
to 1966, the military government was the principal instrument for oppressing
the country’s Palestinian citizens. Meir Amit, the head of the Mossad between
1963 and 1968, thought that the policy in practice was too polite. He urged a
“hard hand, not halfway.” Amit’s view was that “we have a whip, we use it to
make a loud noise,” but “we lash the air, and below the surface everything
grows.” He concluded, “Please, if [we have] a whip – strike.”
Yosef
Nachmias, the police chief, suggested that "The Arab sector must be kept as
low as possible," adding that "we haven't yet reached limits of
exploitation” of Palestinian citizens.
Verbin,
the commander of the military government and one of the country’s “experts” on
the “Arab problem,” wasn’t someone who beat around the bush. He explained the
problem facing the Jewish authorities: “Today’s
Arabs are not the Arabs of 17 years ago. The generation of the desert is dying
out. Those we harassed, those from whom we took their homes, are the good ones,
with them we get along.” The worst of the lot, he said, were those who were
born around the mid-1940s. He didn’t mince words:
“We expelled around half a million Arabs, we burnt
homes, we looted their land – from their point of view – we didn’t give it
back, we took land… We want to say to ourselves, ‘You, the Arabs, should be
happy about what we are doing,’ [but] we stole the land and we will continue to
steal, and from our view point that is ‘redemption of the Galilee.’” He
added that “to generate a war catastrophe”
in the shadow of which the Arabs will be expelled “is out of the question,” and there was no knowing what the future
would bring.”
Not all
the participants espoused identical views, but it’s clear that the majority
agreed that “we’re not talking equality.” Danin, for example, was critical of
the isolationist stance that was taken in the discussion. While Shmuel Ben Dor,
the deputy director general of the Prime Minister’s Office, wondered, “How can we talk about all the means that
have been raised here and at the same time talk about means that display a just
approach to the citizen?”
Verbin
rebuffed the criticism of the military government’s toughness and broadened the
scope of the discussion: “If someone is
harassing the Arabs, it is the State of Israel… The Yishuv [i.e., the state]
and the [national] institutions are the biggest anti-Semites regarding the Arab
problem… If there is anyone that is being cruel when it comes to the Arab
subject, it is the whole Yishuv… The Yishuv is harassing them and will continue
to harass them for many years to come.”
In
December 1966, a year and a half after the 1965 meeting, the military
government was abolished. The result was the lifting of some of the
restrictions and of the supervision that had been imposed on these Israeli
citizens, and a heightening of their equality with the country’s Jewish
citizens. But that wasn’t enough. It’s clear that many among the Jewish public
thought that with the justified abolition of the military government, the
segregationist policy toward the Arab citizens had also been terminated. That
was not the case then and it is not the case today.
In
practice, the viewpoint expressed by the ranking security officials in the
1960s continues to define the state’s attitude toward its Palestinian citizens.
We will need to wait a few more decades to find out what the top security
officials of today think about the country’s Palestinian citizens.
Adam Raz
is a researcher at Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research.
Military
policemen inspect a suspicious sack of onions found in possession of Arab
citizens, in 1952. Credit: Beno Rothenberg/National Library
A person who violates a curfew shouldn't be
killed, but they can be slapped and hit with a rifle: Newly declassified
documents reveal the ways military rule embittered the lives of Israeli Arabs
The origins of the brutality documented in all its
ugliness last week – an Israeli soldier shooting an unarmed Palestinian who was
trying to protect the electric generator he needs to function, amid the abject
poverty of the South Hebron Hills – date back quite a few decades, to the
period of military rule in Israel proper. Testimony from recently declassified
documents, together with historical records in archives, shed light on the
acute violence that prevailed in the “state within a state” that Israel foisted
upon extensive areas of the country where Arab citizens lived, from 1948 until
1966.
For more than 18 years, about 85 percent of the
country’s Palestinian citizens were subject to an oppressive regime. Among
other strictures, any movement outside their own villages had to be authorized,
their communities were under permanent curfew, they were forbidden to relocate
without formal approval, most political and civil organizing was prohibited,
and entire regions where they had lived before 1948 were now closed to them.
Although this part of the past has largely been repressed among most of
Israel’s Jewish population, it constitutes an integral part of the identity and
collective memory of the country’s Arab citizens. Those memories include, in
addition to the regime of authorizations, daily abuse and a web of informants
and collaborators.
In practice, for those subjected to the military
government, Israeli democracy was substantively different than it was for the
Jews. Yehoshua Palmon, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s adviser on Arab
affairs, wrote to the headquarters of the military government – in a letter
from October 1950 culled from the State Archives – that reports had been
received according to which military government personnel in the Triangle (a
concentration of Arab communities adjacent to the Green Line, in the center of
the country) were employing “illegal pressure during interrogations of
residents, such as using dogs [against them], threats and the like.”
A year later, Baruch Yekutieli, Palmon’s deputy,
explained to the cabinet secretary that the situation in the Arab areas
sometimes required “a strong hand on the
part of the authorities.” Although he did not go into detail about that
policy, testimonies that have been made public describe its implementation –
and all of them reflect an experience of humiliation and subjugation.
Thus, it became known that representatives of the
military government threatened citizens so as to prevent them from complaining
about actions taken against them; a military governor (there were three, for
the Negev, the Triangle and the north) demanded that people frequenting a
village café show their respect by standing up when he entered and threatened
anyone who disobeyed; soldiers amused themselves when intimidating an Arab
citizen by leaning on him by placing a firearm on his shoulder; and others
prevented Muslim citizens from praying. In other cases, military government
representatives harassed farmers and destroyed their property; people were
humiliated regularly and addressed in coarse language; violence was perpetrated
on children; and military government personnel made threats against Arab
citizens if they didn’t vote in elections for the candidates favored by the
authorities.
The military governor in the south, Yehoshua Verbin,
maintained in testimony he gave in early 1956 to a government committee – and
recently made public at the request of the Akevot Institute for
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research – that “the military government is too liberal and gentle. Let us not speak of
cruelty at all, because that is groundless, it is a calumny for which there is
no basis in any case.”
However, remarks by the governor of the Triangle,
Zalman Mart, in his 1957 testimony in a trial relating to the Kafr
Qasem massacre the previous year – when Border Police shot and killed 49
Arab villagers who were unaware that a curfew had been imposed – refute
Verbin’s assertions. According to Mart, there was no obligation to kill a
person who violated a curfew, but there was a sort of protocol for punishment:
“You can slap him, hit him with a rifle on the leg, you can shout at him.”
A cluster of lengthy testimonies by Border Police
personnel, who acted as the police force in the Arab villages, offers a picture
of day-to-day life under the shadow of the military government. The officers’
unabashed candor in their testimony in the Kafr Qasem trial is harrowing. Were
you “imbued with the feeling that the
Arabs are the enemies of the State of Israel?” one officer was asked – to
which he replied, simply, “Yes.” The
police officer was asked, “Would you kill
anyone? Even a woman, a child?” “Yes,”
he reiterated. Another police officer testified that had he been ordered to do
so, he would have opened fire at a bus packed with Arab women. And another
explained, “I was always told that every
Arab was an enemy of the state and a fifth column.”
The officers showed little sense of pity when asked
about shooting helpless individuals, most of them affirming that they would do
so if required. One of them noted that if he were to come across an infant who
had “violated” curfew – “It
might sound cruel, but I would shoot him. I would be obligated to do so.”
Men interrogated by an Israeli army officer,
1952.Credit: Beno Rothenberg/National Library
Some of the complaints made by the subjects of the
military government were submitted anonymously. A report of the Jewish-Arab
Association for Peace, sent in 1958 to a ministerial committee, opened by
explaining the reasons for the anonymous charges: “In previous cases the military government apparatus employed threats
and pressure against people [meaning Palestinian citizens of Israel] who gave
testimony against it.” The association compiled a large number of accounts
and appended the complainant’s name to each one, requesting that “the honorable ministers ensure that there be
no such pressure and that people not be made to suffer because of their
testimony.”
Several testimonies from the village of Jish (Gush
Halav) dating from 1950, stored in the Yad Yaari Archive, shed light on what
the military government tried to conceal. A local resident, Nama Antanas,
related how its personnel had burst into his house in the middle of the night
and taken him for an interrogation. Antanas was accused of buying a pair of
smuggled shoes. The interrogators told him that if he wasn’t going to talk,
they would see to it that he did. According to his testimony, “Amid this, I was ordered to take off my
shoes and remove my head covering. When I did so, I was forced to sit on the
floor and my legs were lifted and placed on a chair. At that moment, two
soldiers approached me and started to beat me on the soles of my feet with a
wooden stick made from the rough branch of a date tree.” Afterward, he was
thrown out, unable to walk.
For those subjected to the military government,
Israeli democracy was substantively different than it was for the Jews.
Another person, who was identified as al-Tafi, also
related that security forces had burst into his house and beat him mercilessly.
One military government official explained that they were going to execute him
and ordered him into a car, as his wife stood by, distraught. After a short
drive the car pulled over to the side of the road and a pistol was pressed
against Al-Tafi’s head. After he was pummeled again and thrown into an animal
pen, where, he said, he languished for two weeks.
Hana Yakub Jerassi was subjected to similar treatment,
after the military governor told him he was “garbage.” He was beaten on his
hands until they bled. “Afterward I was taken out and one of my friends was
brought in, and they did the same to him as to me. Then a third was brought in
and they did the same.”
For many, that was the routine.
The diverse sets of testimony we have uncovered compel
us to doubt the words of Mishael Shaham, the commander of the military
government between 1955 and 1960. In 1956 he told a government committee that
was debating the future of that body that it was “not serious,” and that it even “constitutes
an element for education to good citizenship.”
What’s clear is that the state took steps to conceal
from the public information about what went on within the realm of the military
government. In February 1951, then-Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Yigael
Yadin was furious at the publication of a report about the expulsion of 13 Arab
villagers from their villages. According to Yadin, “Reports of this sort are liable to be harmful to the state’s security,
so a way needs to be found for the censorship to delay their publication.” The
poet Natan Alterman knew what he was talking about when he wrote “Whisper a Secret,” a poem that
criticized the tough censorship regime, a year later.
The military government apparatus was dismantled years
ago, but its spirit lives on in Israel and outside it – in the occupied
territories. Back then this apparatus supervised and ruled the country’s
Palestinian citizens within the Green Line, whereas now policing actions are
conducted by soldiers against a civilian population across the Green Line. And
there is another similarity. Now, as then, the majority of the Israeli public
lives with the wrongs being perpetrated and is silent.
Adam Raz is a researcher at the Akevot Institute for
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research. This article is based upon the book
“Military Rule, 1948-1966: A Collection of Documents,” published this month by
Akevot.
