The Palestinian citizens of Israel, theconcept of trapped minority and thediscourse of transnationalism inanthropology

Dan Rabinowitz

Abstract

Elastic, adaptable and vibrant, minorities often stretch across state bordersin ways traditional concepts of states and nations fail to acknowledge, letalone theorize. The discourse of transnationalism helps to dislodge the studyof minorities from the analytical straight-jacket of the state. The concept of‘trapped minority’, developed herein from an analysis of the Palestiniancitizens of Israel, adds to this debate. A trapped minority is a segment of alarger group spread across at least two states. Citizens of a state hegemon-ized by others, its members are alienated from political power. Unable toin�uence the de�nition of public goods or enjoy them, its members are atthe same time marginal within their mother nation abroad. My use of theconcept of ‘trapped minority’ offers a critique of Smooha’s rationalizedconcept ‘ethnic democracy’ (1990) and of Yiftachel’s ethno-regionalism(1999a, after Hechter and Levi 1979), a critique that helps to re-frame andcritique the Oslo-Wye process of Israel-Palestinian reconciliation and isrelevant to similar situations elsewhere.

Keywords: Minorities; nationalism; transnationalism; Palestinians; Israel.

Introduction

The concept of the nation-state, long taken for granted as an inherentsegment of human reality in the modern era, is one of the more durablecontributions of modernism to human history. It hinges on a non-problematized division of the globe into a series of idealized ‘ultimateterritories’, each ostensibly forming a coherent, homogeneous and rep-resentative entity. Within each territory, a perfect �t is implied betweenterritory (a bounded stretch with recognized borders), the people livingin it (‘society’), their culture and, above all, the state: a superstructure

Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 24 No. 1 January 2001 pp. 64–85© 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd ISSN 0141-9870 print/1466-4356 onlineDOI: 10.1080/0141987002000655 2

of regulating mechanisms, offering members focuses for loyalty andidenti�cation. The construct of the nation-state thus emerges as com-posite and rationalized.

This unproblematic notion of the state serves as an umbrella for ideo-logical and political etatist clichés, the theoretical weakness of whichbecomes apparent with the (re)surfacing of political, economic, gender-related and other types of minorities and hybrids. This etatism is par-ticularly predatory regarding ethnic and national minorities. Oftenperceived by regimes as capable and willing to overthrow the state’sideological and coercive supremacy, such minorities become ideologicaland political targets. In their strife to marginalize them, state regimestend to isolate them as anomalies – more or less tolerable distractingnoises in systems which ostensibly operate smoothly and naturally.

Anthropologists (for example, Appadurai 1991; Kearney 1995;Hannerz 1996; Vertovec 1999), sociologists (for example, Portes,Guarnizo and Landolt 1999) and other social scientists, have recentlyrecognized a growing variety of phenomena that, while taking placeoutside the state, are nevertheless more central to the human experiencethan hitherto assumed. The discourse of transnationalism, while notnecessarily intended to write against the state, does dislodge the debatesof ethnicity, nationalism and minorities from its analytical straight-jacket.

The dynamic nature of the discourse of transnationalism in a global-izing world encourages new ways of conceptualizing minorities and theirrelations to the states and regions in which they coexist. Minorities mustnot be seen in terms of a simplistic arithmetic equation whereby one col-lective is outnumbered by another in a bounded territory. Minorities,like all human collectives, are continuous, elastic, given to diffusion.They stretch across boundaries in ways that often predate states and thenations that begot them. Their predicaments beg for historical contex-tualization.

This need in historicization is the starting point for my depiction ofcertain types of ethnic and national minorities as ‘trapped minorities’.The label assumes a mother nation which stretches across two states ormore. Segments of this mother nation may �nd themselves entrapped asminorities within recently formed states dominated by other groups.Each such segment is thus marginal twice over: once within the (alien)state, and once within the (largely absent) mother nation.

The idiom trapped minority has spatial as well as temporal dimen-sions: old homeland minorities are often overtaken by newly establishedstates that sever the minorities’ ties with their mother nations abroad.Awareness of the entrapped nature of a minority can fruitfully histori-cize it, thus rede�ning the minority, the host state, and the relationshipsof both with neighbouring states and with the mother nation.

The concept becomes particularly useful when we observe how

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minorities become excluded from political debate and power. Minoritiessuch as the Palestinian citizens of Israel, on whose case I mainly drawhere, harbour obvious claims to rights, including rights in land. Never-theless, they are consistently excluded from most political processes thatdetermine land use, development and well-being in their very homeland.This paradox, which cannot be explained by conventional liberal-demo-cratic theories of the western state, gains lucidity through the concept oftrapped minority.

This article begins with the testimony of a Palestinian intellectualabout the dynamics that exclude the Palestinian citizens of Israel fromcontrol over the physical environment. A brief review of social scienti�cstudies of the Palestinian citizens of Israel follows, highlighting the over-reliance on the state as a unit of analysis. The discourse of trans-nationalism is then presented as an alternative, and the concept oftrapped minority elaborated. The insight instigated by the idiom trappedminority that once collaborated with the subjective views of members ofthe minority itself, exposes the weaknesses of concepts such as Smooha’s‘ethnic democracy’ (1990), the oxymoronic term ‘a Jewish democraticstate’ and the territorial aspect of ethnoregionalism as suggested byYiftachel (1997b, 1999a).

Public space, collective time

Ra`if Zraik, a Palestinian lawyer from Nazareth, in his early thirties,recently published some notes on his perceptions of public space in Israel(Zraik 1999). His re�ections convey an acute sense among Palestiniancitizens of Israel of being alienated from public space within theirhomeland: in other words, from most of Israel’s land mass.

Public spaces within Palestinian settlements, and certainly beyondtheir municipal limits, are perceived by Palestinian citizens of Israel ashaving been totally appropriated by the state. Even the poor repair ofsidewalks in Nazareth – a Palestinian town run by Palestinian electedpoliticians – is for Zraik (ibid) a direct manifestation of the marginalstatus of Palestinians in the Jewish dominated state and its aggressivemechanisms of exclusion and control.

The war which the Palestinians lost to Israel in 1948 practically erasedtheir old metropoli as focuses of belonging and identity. Palestinianurban centres such as Jaffa, Ramla, Lid, Jerusalem, Bir-Sab’a and theirrural hinterlands shrank or disappeared under the rapidly expandingJewish Israeli strongholds, now inhabited by newly arrived Jewish immi-grants from abroad. The Palestinians were largely left with isolated andfragmented villages. The 1950s saw many of those villages lose vastportions of cultivated land and pasture to the Jewish state, mainlythrough expropriation.

The spacial discontinuity that ensued damaged the Palestinians’ sense

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of communal time, and their ability to forge a coherent identity. Pales-tinians are acutely aware of belonging to a house, a village, or a neigh-bourhood. Alienated from continuous control over the physicalenvironment, however, they cannot maintain a wider horizon for theircollective being. ‘The building materials of our lives,’ Zraik told a groupof environmentalists in Tel-Aviv in mid 1999, ‘are reduced to the indi-vidual memories of our private experiences.’

The result is a uni-dimensional person. Palestinians in northern Israelcan locate and relocate only within a small triangle that includes partsof Acre, Nazareth and Haifa. The rest of the country, while formallyaccessible to all, is effectively out of bounds for them. They have littlehope of residence, employment or ownership – let alone of assertingtheir collective will and destiny – outside their home villages. In Zraik’swords to the group of environmentalists in 1999:

In 50 years nobody made an attempt to start a Palestinian neighbor-hood in Haifa. The end result is suffocation. We can build homes withinour villages, but they are also graves. There is no space beyond thevillage we can move within. This may have been the reality when mygrandfather was a young man, before the state of Israel was established.But had I been the product of a normal history, I would have becomepart of a national Palestinian project with cities I could migrate to. Atpresent this is an option completely absent from my life.

This sense of suffocation produces in turn a feeling of being stuck intime. The day-to-day economic reality and the limits of Palestinians’political power within the state of Israel and outside it limit their per-ceptions of a future. To quote further from Zraik’s 1999 talk to theenvironmentalists:

You live for mere survival. You are a slave to the tyranny of thepresent, and are, essentially, given to consumerism. You have no senseof past to lean against, and no con�dence in any kind of future. Youbecome a creature with no integrity, with no consistency betweenutterance and action. Someone like that cannot exert any impact onthe landscape.

We Palestinian citizens of Israel make no claim for public space withinthe state of which we are supposedly rightful and equal citizens. Weretreat into indifference. The Israelis design, develop and revitalizethe land according to their needs and interests. This intensity makesus lose any sense of a homeland awaiting us.

The experiences which trigger these emotions of deprivation andconfinement among Palestinians of Zraik’s generation are not much

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different from those experienced by their parents. The latter, however,were less willing and able to articulate them. This new awareness,greatly voiced by Palestinian men and women inside Israel, calls fornew conceptualizations of the experience of minorities in states such asIsrael, who insist on being even-handed, uninterested liberal democ-racy.

The Palestinian citizens of Israel: a brief epistemology

The territory known as Israel1 is recognized by the Palestinians asFalastin, their own ancestral homeland. Five to seven million Palestini-ans scattered between Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank andGaza (now occupied in part by the newly founded Palestinian Authority)the Gulf countries and western countries regard themselves as nativesof the land.

The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 on approximately 60 percent of the entire disputed territory spelt national calamity for the Pales-tinians. The majority of the 800,000 Palestinians who had lived prior to1948 in the areas now included in the state of Israel were expelled or�ed. Most of them became refugees in adjacent Arab countries. Onlysome 160,000 remained, mostly villagers in the more remote regions. Theeducated urban middle class disappeared almost completely from thearea that was now included under Israeli jurisdiction.

The early 1950s saw a considerable number of refugees return toIsrael. Some re-entered legally, as part of family reuni�cation schemesapproved by the Israeli government. Others crossed the borders clan-destinely. The number of Palestinian citizens in Israel doubled by thelate 1950s, and is currently approximately 850,000. This �gure representsabout 18 per cent of the population of Israel, and a similar proportionof the entire, scattered Palestinian people.

Political scientists, sociologists, geographers and anthropologistswriting about Israel have produced a substantial body of research whicheither focuses on or takes considerable account of the Palestiniancitizens of Israel. Elia Zureik’s (1979) study takes the marginal status ofthe Palestinians within Israel as the de�ning feature of what he typi�esas a colonial settler-state. Gershon Sha�r (1989) in his analysis of landand labour within Zionism, while stressing the speci�c circumstances ofthe Jewish national movement, nevertheless adheres to the colonialparadigm. So do, by and large, Michael Shalev’s (1992) study of Israel’ssplit economy and Lev Greenberg’s (1991) analysis of the Labourmovement.

Ian Lustick (1980) investigates the structural and institutional featuresdesigned by the Jewish hegemony to contain the Palestinian citizens,pushing a well-argued case depicting Israel as a system of control.

Yoav Peled (1992) looks at key decisions made by Israel’s supreme

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court judges in their occasional capacity over the years as chairmen ofthe central elections committees. Peled convincingly contrasts therestrictions made on Palestinian candidates and parties with the virtu-ally free access of Jewish Israelis to the republican core of political lifeand the common good. His conclusion is that Israel, including Israeliliberalism, offers its Palestinian citizens no more than a nominal andweakened form of citizenship. This buttresses his typi�cation of Israel as‘ethnic republic’ – a view supported to an extent by works such as Rabi-nowitz (1997), Rouhana (1997) and Ghanem (1998).

Sami Smooha’s characterization of Israel as ethnic democracy (1990,p. 391) has gained considerable attention in recent years. Smooha, whoacknowledges the political dominance of Jews in Israel, neverthelessprefers to highlight what he believes is the democratic nature of the state,re�ected in a willingness on the part of the Jewish majority to grant thePalestinian citizens rights and limited accessibility to power andresources. While the adjective ‘ethnic’ denotes the dominance of onehegemonic ethnos over another, the basic liberal idea of individualfreedoms is suf�cient for Smooha to depict the overall structure of Israelas democratic.

Smooha’s work attracted considerable criticism and debate. Para-mount here is Oren Yiftachel’s critique (1997a), which, like As’adGhanem (1998) identifies the inherent contradiction between Israel’spretence to be a Western-style, liberal democracy, and its practicestowards the Palestinian citizens in terms of their collective rights. Yif-tachel, adamant that Israel cannot qualify as a democracy, prefers theterm ‘ethnocracy’.

A feature common to all these orientations, including Smooha’s andhis critics, is that they all take the Palestinian citizens of Israel as a casefrom which to generalize about the nature of the state. The state thusremains the primary unit of analysis. The subjective view of the minori-ties is secondary – more a tool with which to think and analyse than afocus of attention in its own right.

This tendency is not anomalous. The convergence of the idea of thestate with the notion of nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe andacross the globe throughout the twentieth century has made the nation-state into an all-pervasive feature. It colours our interpretation of socialphenomena to the extent that we often �nd it dif�cult to make socialanalysis in stateless situations.

But overviews of states, alas, are incomplete. There are centralelements of meaning that macro analyses misrecognize. This pointbecomes particularly relevant in an era of globalization and trans-nationalism, in which the weight of states in the daily experience of anever-increasing proportion of human beings is reduced, while the sig-ni�cance of sub- or supra-state dynamics is on the increase (Appadurai1996).

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The discourse of transnationalism

Globalization theory has emerged in the last two decades as a critiqueof classical hegemonic representations of history (Kearney 1995). In tra-ditional historiography time tended to be linear, consistently advancingin a positive progression towards modernization, development andgrowth. The notion of such ‘natural’ chronology came in tandem with adichotomous division of global space into an advanced developed centrein Europe, European North America and Australia versus a yet-to-be-developed periphery. The two world spaces were perceived to be con-nected in asymmetric lines of communication and administration. One,as it were, was running the other.

Wallerstein’s (1974) The Modern World System and Harvey’s (1989)The Condition of Post-Modernity have since demonstrated that theworld’s economy and its derivatives in the realms of culture and identityhave always been more integrated than had been assumed. Eric Wolf’s(1982) critique of classical anthropology in Europe and the PeopleWithout History built on Wallerstein’s and Frank’s (1967) assertions, andpaved the road to a series of anthropological studies that demonstratehow the local and the global, the developed, and the yet to be devel-oped, constantly invade and impact each other. Space was realized asmore �uid, boundaries as less rigid and durable.

Decolonization since the 1950s and the transformations into nation-states of groups hitherto perceived as living fossils – to drive themetaphor of stasis to its absurd extremity – led once again to reconsid-erations of theory and global perceptions, with more emphasis thanbefore on interconnectedness and interdependence of societies andcultures. The simple notion of space and culture as bounded, �nite anddiscrete is seriously questioned.

Unlike space, time is more dif�cult to be perceived as non-teleologi-cal: progression towards entropy and de-development are, after all,much harder to envisage. Still, peripheries can collapse and implode intothe centre through immigration (Rouse 1991), electronic media(Sreberny-Mohhammadi 1991), tourism (McCannel 1989) and imagin-ation (Appadurai 1991). History can be and is being written from theperiphery (Wolf 1982), using hitherto concealed categories and classi�-cations. Culture, social structure and identity are no longer understand-able solely in terms of speci�c places and the ethnographic present atwhich Western ethnographers happened to stumble on them. Rather,much of the human experience is appreciated as taking place in whatAppadurai (1991) has aptly termed ethnoscapes – between the bound-aries rather than within the spaces each of them con�nes.

The March 1999 issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies (vol. 22, no. 2) pro-ductively identi�es the realm of migration and diaspora as a main arenafor studies of transnationalism. The issue uses the ever-increasing

70 Dan Rabinowitz

ubiquity of individual and collective movement to �ne-tune the empiri-cal, analytical, and theoretical tools with which sociologists deal withrelocation and its consequences.

Anthropology, with its traditional emphasis on the local, the unique,and the systems of signi�cations and meanings that move people, takesa somewhat different trajectory. Willing to use transnationalism as anumbrella for a wider variety of phenomena (perhaps, as Portes, Guarnizoand Landolt (1999) imply, at the expense of analytical lucidity and clarityof terms), anthropology shifts the discussion to meaning and signi�ca-tion. If, as Appadurai suggests, more people than ever before experiencelife primarily in ethnoscapes, then the consciousnesses and imaginationsthat this new deterritorialized reality begets is a fascinating departurefrom the old place-related concept of identity that anthropology was sofamiliar with. The result is thus a transnational discourse that is at oncespeci�c theoretically and inclusive phenomenologically.

Whereas globalization looks at global processes, transnationalismwithin anthropology, which could equally have been termed trans-statism or post-nationalism (Kearney 1995), looks at more concrete andlocal contexts. Whereas globalization deals with the impersonal and theuniversal, transnationalism looks at the political and the ideological. Thisis signi�cant when one is searching for a theoretically argued alternativeto the analytical straight-jacket of the state.

Fredrik Barth’s (1969) preoccupation with the extent to which culturescan be said to have borders is now replaced by a preoccupation with theextent to which borders can be said to have cultures (Rabinowitz 1998).This new preoccupation produced works such as Anzaldua (1987),Rosaldo (1988), Donnan and Wilson (1998) and others who all identifythe border zone as a productive unit of analysis. They show that borderareas can no longer be assumed to be marginal, and that the universalmainstream of the human experience, while de�ned by and in themetropolis, does not take place exclusively in them. The new perspec-tive from the margins represents experiences shared by an in�nitelylarger proportion of humanity than hitherto recognized. The borderland,an interstitial zone where at least two territorial and demographicsegments blur into each other, emerges as a viable alternative to rigidde�nitions of wholesome homes. ‘Home’ is thus problematized,inevitably identi�ed as space implying an earlier displacement of others.

These ideas have sparkled interesting reassessments of the nature ofthe state (Herzfeld 1992), ethnic groups within it and on its margins,(Kapferer 1988), and the relationships between them and the dominantmajority (Rabinowitz 1997). This emancipates minorities from thedubious status of ethnic clamour in an otherwise tranquil clockworkoperation of the nation-state. Old myths of the state are vigorously prob-lematized, giving way to the realization that the narratives of national-ism, etatism and Western liberal republicanism conceal and silence at

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least as much as they reveal. Rather than the state, it is the formermargins – minorities, border areas, diasporas, the exiled and displaced,the imploding army of migrant labourers – that are centred now. Theirhistories and subjectivities become the new primary objects of analysis.

The concept of trapped minority

The world, from South East Asia to East Africa, from the Baltic to theBalkans, from the Slavonic nations to Muslim Central Asia, is rapidlyreshaping. With minorities repeatedly peeping from beneath thebursting seams of states, no wonder that epistemological attention tonationalism, ethnicity, secessionism, separatism, irredentism, as well asto their antonym – accommodation and con�ict regulation, is growingsteadily.

A �rst step in a typology of minorities is the elementary distinctionbetween indigenous minorities – groups who live in territories whichthey perceive as their primordial homelands, and who are sometimesalso referred to as homeland minorities – and immigrant or exiled ones.Immigrant and exiled minorities are of less pertinence in the presentcontext, so I leave them for another occasion.

Within indigenous minorities, Manuel and Posluns (1974) have identi-�ed the category of Fourth World: politically weak and economicallymarginal groups that constantly experience powerful nations surround-ing and overtaking them to usurp their rights. Examples include the Inuitin Canada and Alaska, Native Americans elsewhere in North America,Bedouins in the Middle East and Swami in Scandinavia: groups that are‘fated always to be minority populations in their own lands’ (ibid). Hereagain, the concept of Fourth World, which deals with groups of limitedsize and political volume, is not suf�ciently applicable to most minoritysituations.

Going back to larger homeland minorities, we discover that mostwriters implicitly refer to an ideal type of situation, whereby entire ethnicgroups live within a state hegemonized by others. Smith (1992) is satis-�ed to identify such groups as culturally distinct and united by a beliefin a common past. Yiftachel (1997b) applies this terminology to thePalestinian citizens of Israel unquestionably. Ghanem (1998, p. 430) uses‘ethnic nationality’ for both Jews and Palestinians inside Israel, whereasothers often use national minority. Signi�cantly, these terms tend not toproblematize the spacial layout and distribution of the group within andacross state borders.

Examples of this phenomenon, which I prefer to label nationalminority, include Bretons (and others) in France, Welsh and Scots inGreat Britain, the Ibo of Nigeria, various minorities in the conglomer-ate of China and many more. A state can have one or more nationalminorities within its borders. Some states refuse to recognize national

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minorities; others may be willing to acknowledge them, at least nomi-nally; others still are happy to grant minorities various degrees of col-lective rights.

As indicated earlier, implicit in the de�nition of national minority isthe assumption that the entire group is present within the hosting state.Most cases of indigenous minorities are, however, more complicatedthan this, with members spread across two or more states. This, ofcourse, has far-reaching implications for the group itself, for the relation-ship with its host state(s) and, as I shall demonstrate later, for thedevelopment and growth of ideology and institutions within the hostinghegemonic group. This is where the concept of ‘trapped minority’becomes of analytical help.

Entrapment is a dramatic development. A space initially perceived tobe safe is subject to sudden external interference leading to con�nement:a door is closed, a fence erected, a wall cemented. The space becomes adangerous enclosure, the subject is suddenly incarcerated. Mosthomeland minorities are trapped in two distinct but complementarydimensions. The �rst is historical, pertaining to the sequence of undesir-able events that brought about their current predicament as a minoritywithin an alien state. The second denotes entrapment between contem-porary entities, and in particular between their host state and theirmother nation. Let me use the case of Palestinians within Israel as anillustration.

The Palestinians who remained within the con�nes of the newly estab-lished state of Israel following the war of 1948 found their homelanddrastically transformed, falling under the control of Zionist Israel. ThePalestinians in it, who were soon granted formal citizenship including theright to vote and be elected, were now at the political, economic andadministrative mercy of a regime they never chose. Relations with themainstream of their people – the vast majority of Palestinians livingoutside the borders and control of Israel – were almost completelysevered.

Let me identify �ve elements which characterize the predicament oftrapped minorities. The �rst is that the process of disastrous entrapmentusually begins at the very historical juncture which the dominantmajority associates with victory, redemption and the joyful dawning ofa new age. This diametrically opposed historicization catapults thetrapped minority into fundamental descent vis-à-vis the canonic narra-tive of history fabricated and disseminated by the state in which it lives.As a Palestinian member of the Israeli Knesset once put it: ‘I am in atragic situation, whereby my country is at war with my people’.

The second element of entrapment is the sense of being marginal twiceover, within two political entities. The dominant group that hegemonizesthe new state that entraps the minority tends to treat its members as lessthan equal citizens. Even the liberal echelons within the Jewish majority

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in Israel are acutely conscious of the extreme otherness of the Pales-tinians. They tend to misrecognize the rights of Palestinians as natives,and overlook the tragedy that befell them when the state of Israel wasestablished.

At the same time, however, and unlike Fourth World groups and‘simple’ national minorities, trapped minorities may �nd that their cre-dentials within their mother nations are devalued. Their residence, accul-turation and formal citizenship in a state dominated by an alien hegemonyimplicates them. Thus, the Palestinian citizens of Israel, labelled ‘Arabs’or ‘Palestinians’ by Israelis, are equally suspect for Palestinians and Arabsabroad due to their citizenship of and general association with Israel.

Seen from the Arab world, the Palestinian citizens of Israel emerge asan ambiguous and problematic element whose status in the nationalarena is yet to be determined, and whose very loyalty to the Palestiniannation might still be suspect. Israel’s willingness, where it exists, to inte-grate its Palestinian citizens into economic, political and social life, mightin fact further reduce their chances of clarifying their credentials in theeyes of Palestinians generally. In the 1960s and 1970s, for example, thePalestinian citizens of Israel were treated by the exiled Palestinianleadership as a self-seeking, spoilt collective, collaborating with theZionist occupation of the homeland. Paradoxically, the very contingentof Palestinians that managed to remain in situ in the homeland founditself physically disconnected and morally excommunicated from thecentre of gravity of national crystallization.

Trapped in this dual marginality and held between these two centresof political gravity, the Palestinian citizens of Israel are painfully awareof two con�icting national narratives, and experience with their lives andproperty two systems of legitimization

Trapped minorities can be expected to struggle with the memory ofthe traumatic event or process that had the homeland taken over by aforeign power. The memory is often vivid, leaning on personal experi-ences, enmeshed in close familial history. The double bind in which theylive, however, may arrest the development of a coherent version ofhistory as a collective experience. In the case of the Palestinians, thede�ning historic moment is, of course, the disastrous loss of life, limb,property and rights during the 1948 hostilities, an event subsumed underthe powerful term al-naqbah – the disaster. And while memories ofpersonal and local tragedies are rife, a vocabulary that conceptualizesand memorializes the disaster seldom develops. Ra’if Zraik sees a con-nection between this diminished sense of collective history and the loss,on behalf of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, of a vision of ‘a homelandawaiting’. As he put it in mid 1999:

People with no dream and vision cannot preserve a memory, and thuswe lose our past. Without a vision memories become a burden. The

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old church and the mosque we see at the entrance to Haifa become anuisance – disturbing landmarks commemorating our defeat. We keepsuppressing them. We suppress our history.

A similar sensitivity to the politics of memory is found in AzmiBishara’s argument about the need of Palestinian citizens of Israel informal acknowledgement by the state of their loss in 1948. In his words:

The Israeli public space knows only one collective memory, a castratedmemory the sole purpose of which is to push away the sense of exileand alienation [of the Jews, D. R.]. The Jewish Other exorcised thewholly Other, the native, the Other of the place[. . .]. History itself willprove [. . .] that if the victim is to forgive he must be acknowledged asthe victim. This is the difference between a historic compromise anda cease �re (Bishara 1992, p. 6).

The salience of this issue becomes obvious when one looks at negoti-ations of the place of Palestinian suffering in formal articulations of col-lective memory in Israel. Should the heavy price paid in 1948 by thefamilies of people who are today Palestinian citizens of Israel be per-ceived merely as the punishment that members of the losing side in warcan expect? Or, alternatively, should the argument be made that Pales-tinians are the group of citizens of Israel who paid the highest possibleprice for the establishment of the state?

The point is by no means trivial. Jewish Israeli public discourse habit-ually uses suffering to engender and calibrate entitlement to rights.De�ning the Palestinian tragedy of 1948 as the awful price in blood,dignity and property that paved the way to the eventual triumph ofZionism is a revolutionary concept for the majority of mainstreamIsraelis. It collapses the dichotomy between the categories ‘Us’ and‘Them’, and their inherent analogy to ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’, ‘Right’ and‘Wrong’, ‘those who Suffer’ and ‘those who in�ict Suffering’.

The fact remains, however, that the Palestinian citizens of Israel haveyet to claim their rightful share in the pantheon of Israel’s publicmemory. The debate into the place of the Palestinian nakbah in the com-memoration of Israel’s �ftieth anniversary, was initiated by liberalIsraelis, and proceeded to take place primarily among them. The voiceand vision of the Palestinian community within Israel regarding thishighly sensitive issue has still to crystallize and make its full appearancein Israeli public life.

Third, members of a trapped minority, while sensing solidarity withtheir mother nation, are likely to feel excluded from the thrust ofnational revival if and when it does commence abroad. This happenedto the Palestinian citizens of Israel as the Palestinian national movementbegan in the 1960s to be shaped in bases in the Arab world.

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A case which throws some light on this is Land Day: the day of protestagainst the seizure and expropriation of Palestinian rural land by Israelistate agencies (see Yiftachel 1999b). First commemorated on 30 March1976 with a mass rally in Sakhnin, in which six Palestinian demonstra-tors were shot dead by police, this date evolved in the 1980s into a focalpoint of protest for the Palestinian citizens of Israel. The strategic choicethat faced them in the years that followed, however, related to thecontents best injected in the annual event. Was it to be conducted as acivil protest staged by citizens who feel disenfranchised by the state? Or,alternatively, should it be fused into the general struggle of the Pales-tinian nation against Israel?. While the two are by no means mutuallyexclusive, their articulations in terms of context, discourse, practice andleadership are quite distinct.

In the �rst few years Land Day oscillated between a mild civil demon-stration, a slightly more bitter protest with accentuated national conno-tations, and an event exemplifying pan-Palestinian solidarity. Thesevariations notwithstanding, the event found little space in the crystalliz-ing national calendar of Palestinians abroad. The occasion was graduallyreduced to local contexts, its form determined by the speci�c politicalcircumstances prevailing at the time and place of each performance. Thedevelopment of an overarching syntax of signi�cation was arrested. Asimilar dynamic, incidentally, can be highlighted in the indecisive stanceof Palestinian citizens of Israel vis-à-vis the Intifada (1988–1992) and to alarge extent in their stance in relation to the Oslo-Wye plantation process(1993–1998). The linkage between, on the one hand, personal, familial andlocal solidarity and, on the other, mainstream national consciousness,while often attempted (cf. Rabinowitz 1994), remains fragmented. It wasonly during the tumultuous events of October 2000 that the Palestiniancitizens of Israel found the unity and resolve to join the protest of thePalestinians in the occupied territories, and take a confrontational, andoften violent, stance against the state of Israel.

Fourth, a trapped minority is likely to remain non-assimilating. Thismay be due to a subjective choice, may result from a dictum made bythe hegemonic group, or could be a combination of the two. Signi�cantly,its non-assimilation tends to be perceived as permanent, acculturationnotwithstanding. Thus the Palestinian citizens of Israel, while all the timeacquiring more of the values and symbols of Jewish Israel and gainingfurther access to and in�uence upon its political arena, neither want norare invited to assimilate.

The result is a cultural limbo unlike that which befalls diasporicminorities, and different also from that which characterizes wholesomenational minorities. Torn between the culture of its mother nationand its host state, members of a trapped minority have difficulty in par-ticipating in the production and consumption of language, theatre,music, cinema, media and folklore in the hegemonic culture of the state,

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particularly where such production involves exclusive signification ofnational identity.

A �fth, related point, is that being at the cross�re between at least twonations, the relationship between a trapped minority and their host stateis inevitably in�uenced, sometimes determined, by the liaison betweenthe two nations. Naturally, the more tense and hostile this relationship,the more likely it is that the host state will regard the trapped minority’squest to maintain a separate national cohesion and identity as danger-ously out of line. Smooha (1989) has shown that this is very much thecase with Israel’s view of its Palestinian minority, a point reiterated byBenziman and Mansour (1992)

The situation of a trapped minority is not, however, a zero sum game.Neither the host state nor the mother nation is in a position to offermembers of the trapped minority a viable option of full incorporation.Israel, for one, clearly refrains from offering its Palestinian citizens suchincorporation. Instead, it prefers to hide behind a veil of legalistic, formaldeclarative assertions that claim indifference to national af�liation andan even-handed, rational treatment of all citizens (cf. Herzfeld 1992).Likewise, and not less tragically, the Palestinian mother nation is in-capable of proposing the Palestinian citizens of Israel a meaningfulalliance, not even in a future Palestinian state (assuming that a genuinelyindependent Palestine state will materialize). As a result of this impasse,neither host state nor mother nation is in a position to demand theunconditional loyalty of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. In fact, neitherhas so far seriously considered demanding that the community sever allties with the other, even when at times the other was perceived as theultimate enemy.

Finally, and following from the previous �ve characteristics, membersof trapped minorities are likely to display chronic ideological and politi-cal internal divisions, and to experience dif�culties in forging a unitedfront both inside and outside the state. These divisions are related to thetension and confusion associated with their structural position betweenhost state and mother nation. Thus, the divisions which have plagued thePalestinian citizens of Israel since the 1950s can no longer be seen solelyin terms of the Machiavellian system of control employed by the stateand acted out by manipulative political parties, state agencies and locallyco-opted leaders (cf. Lustick 1980). Neither, of course, can this disunitybe attributed to an inherent cultural failure on the part of the Palestini-ans themselves, as some Israeli orientalists are still prepared to imply. Itis the dif�culty of articulating a historic or at least strategic vision,stemming from their dichotomous entrapment, that works against theirchances of political unity.

Instances of trapped minorities, a concept which, like Barth’s (1969)ethnic boundaries, is not dependent on a restrictive de�nition of territoryor cultural af�liation, have recently become more numerous and obvious.

The Palestinian citizens of Israel 77

A non-comprehensive list would include Kurds in Turkey, Iran and Syria(their core group and national heartland being in Iraqi Kurdistan);pockets and enclaves of various elements of former Yugoslavia nowtrapped in the newly established independent states that have replacedthe federation, such as Kossovar Albanians within Serbia; Muslims invarious parts of the Balkan, notably Turks in the north east of Bulgariaand Pomaks across the border between Bulgaria and Greece; Russians inthe Baltics, the Caucas and Trans-Caucas who, after the demise of theSoviet Empire have found themselves entrapped between their familialroots in the newly independent non-Russian republics and their ancientnational af�nity with Russia; Armenians in Azerbeijan, Ukrainians inSiberia or Kazakhs in Uzbekistan; There were Hungarians in post WorldWar I Slovakia and Romania; Sudeten Germans between the wars andafter 1945; Catholics in (British) Northern Ireland; Protestants in a futureunited Ireland; a variety of groups in Africa and South-East Asia follow-ing the establishment of new nation-states such as the Tutsi in Ruanda,the Hutu in Burundi, the Malays of Southern Thailand and many more.

Moving on to agency, does this historicization of trapped minoritiesimply eternal passivity? Is the situation of a trapped minority inherentlystatic? My answer is negative on both counts. Being a trapped minorityis undoubtedly a predicament, an undesirable situation imposed on theminority against its will. Being smaller, poorer and often less organizedthan the host state, the opportunities for trapped minorities to changetheir situation are few. This does not mean, however, that the predica-ment is �nite. Entrapment may be powerful, but it is also a dialectic situ-ation in which change is an indispensable possibility, subject to structureas well as agency. Responsibility for change lies partially with thetrapped ones, who indeed often become active political agents seekingchange. This is the case, in my example, with leading radical public�gures and political movements within the Palestinian community insideIsrael. Considerable weight is still given to the larger powers at play,namely the host state and the mother nation, and is dependent on therelationship between the two.

Signi�cantly, the nature and disposition of a trapped minority carriesweight in the quest of the majority to forge its own identity, particularlywhen its nation-state is relatively young. Human collectives often de�nethemselves through perceptions of ultimate Others. Thus, while existenceof a simple national minority is often used by the majority as a backdropagainst which the blueprints of identity become inscribed, the presence ofa trapped minority makes the process more complex. A trapped minorityis, by de�nition, not easily contained: it spreads across borders into otherterritories, adjacent or abroad, forging pacts with enemies and strangers.Racist discourse repeatedly refers to minorities, especially those with realor imagined af�liation abroad, as tips of dangerous icebergs, ominous pro-trusions of external threats into the nation’s corpus. The metaphor of

78 Dan Rabinowitz

aliens as agents of disease – a foreign entity that invades the body nation,threatening to destroy it from within – often surfaces in rhetoric thatre�ects the majority’s darkest xenophobic fear and hatred.

Being a trapped minority thus emerges as not merely complicated andconfusing, but also as potentially dangerous. The presence of peopleaf�liated with external, transnational collectives can push even apowerful majority to adopt a defensive self-image replete with weaknessand vulnerability. Recent history provides more than enough examplesof the violence that may erupt once a nation combines deep-seated fearof the constructed Other with military might. The horrible example in1999 of Kossovar Albanians, trapped as they were in the history and thegeography of greater Serbia, is a clear and ominous example.

‘A Jewish democratic state’: ethnic democracy and ethnic regionalism

Historicizing certain national minorities as trapped minorities throwsinto relief a number of de�ciencies in current conceptualizations ofminorities and their predicaments. A brief discussion of these short-comings in relation to Israel/Palestine demonstrates the theoreticalrelevance of this critique for other deeply divided countries and states.

Mainstream Jewish Israel fondly wants to believe that Israel is aJewish democratic state.2 This line of thought, so dominant within mostcontemporary Zionist political movements and parties, is prevalentamong many Israeli scholars writing from liberal and neo-liberal per-spectives (prominent examples include Eisenstadt 1967, 1985; Avineri1981). It is premised on the forgiving claim, most explicitly made byHorowitz and Lissak (1989) that Israel is essentially a liberal democracyoverburdened by external and internal security and social pressureswhich force it to temporarily forgo some liberal tenets. Such �aws, theargument goes, are by no means structural. Given time and reasonableprogress in Israel’s relations with the Arabs, these anomalies will dis-appear (cf. Neuberger 1998; Gavison 1999).

One line of critique is that the term ‘Jewish democratic’ is a contra-diction in terms. Once assigned with a restrictive ethnic adjective (in thiscase ‘Jewish’), a state can no longer claim to be inclusive of and even-handed towards all its citizens. Rather, the term exposes the real natureof the state: an exclusive ethno-territorial project which serves thehegemonic group at the expense of others. A state cannot purport to bedemocratic, complete with total sovereignty of the rule of law and equalcitizenship and civil rights, while its symbols, power structure andresource allocation remain safely ‘Jewish’.3

Historicizing the Palestinian citizens of Israel as a trapped minorityoffers a different angle of critique here. The state of Israel came into beingas an instant package deal combining the saving of the Jews as individuals,the nationalist aspirations of political Zionism and the transformation of

The Palestinian citizens of Israel 79

the Jewish religion into a de�ning aspect of a new state. This convergencewas powerful enough to displace the Palestinian collective from thephysical terrain, and to have its rights, historic subjectivity and memoryerased from Zionist cognition. Pre-state Zionism easily identi�ed thePalestinians as a military force to be reckoned with, and continued to doso throughout the 1948 war and in many ways into the �rst decade of thestate. Hence, for example, the military governorate that was imposed onPalestinian towns and villages from 1948 to 1966. Palestinians as a civilianpopulation, however, and, more explicitly, as rightful citizens within ademocratic state, were hardly acknowledged.

‘A Jewish democratic state’ is thus a concept that hinges on dehistori-cizing Palestinians and the presence of a Palestinian people. Instead, theJewish state re-introduces Palestinians as ‘Arabs’ – an element marginalto Zionist history, now canonized as the underlying narrative of stateideology (Rabinowitz 1993). ‘The Arab minority’, once recognized byIsrael and Israelis, was treated as if it surfaced out of nowhere. Its historywas truncated, its spatial continuity with Palestinians and Arabs inadjacent territories arrested. Its entrapment as a �gment of the Israelipresence was complete.

It is little wonder that Israeli writers in the 1970s and 1980s, whofocused on mental and cultural characterization of the Palestiniancitizens of Israel (for example, Landau 1969; 1971), their perceived‘orientation’ (read: loyalty) towards the state (that is, Rekhes 1976) ortheir ‘identity’ (Smooha 1988; 1989), did it in a strikingly ahistoricmanner. These works and many others were almost totally synchronic,and almost all of them overlook the analytical pertinence of the conti-guity of Palestinian across international borders.

Smooha’s ethnic democracy is, in many ways, a direct continuation ofthe ‘Jewish democratic state’ conundrum, and of the dehistoricizingnature of earlier studies of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Ethno-terri-torial projects such as Israel can claim to be democratic using one of twooptions. One is a technical and rather restrictive de�nition of democracyas a system in which all subjects are granted the right to vote and to bevoted. Smooha, to his credit, rightly discards this simplistic argument.The option that he selects is to sidestep the historical and personal impli-cations of disenfranchisement, dispossession and dismembermentexperienced by the Palestinians who had previously inhabited the terri-tory, and whose offspring are now trapped in the collective time andspace of the new state. Smooha’s recognition of the positive diachronicchanges in access into Israeli life that Palestinians have graduallyachieved, does not break the synchronic mould that colours his analysis.The consequences of 1948 fail to be incorporated analytically into hispostulations and defences of the term ‘ethnic democracy’.

Yiftachel, like Peled (1992) and others, does not accept Smooha’srather optimistic view of ethnic democracy as a viable description and

80 Dan Rabinowitz

desirable solution. Rightly acknowledging extended ethnic protestamong Palestinians in Israel as an indication that the current situation isneither stable nor sustainable, Yiftachel looks at potential trajectoriesalong which this protest is likely to develop. Discarding both Gurr’s(1993) notion of the emergence of an ethno-class and Smith’s (1992)ethno-nationalism (Yiftachel 1997b, pp. 93–4), Yiftachel then proceedsto highlight the relevance of Hechter and Levi’s (1979) and Kofman’s(1985) notion of ethno-regionalism. He argues that since the options ofirredentism and separatism bear intolerable costs (Yiftachel 1997b, p.106), the Palestinian citizens of Israel are likely to consolidate a regionalidentity, particularly in Galilee, and to deploy their strife for ethnicidentity and for an equal share of state resources through this medium.

Ethno-regionalism must not be summarily negated. It is an optionwhich, given the right political circumstances, may prove viable.4 Thisnotwithstanding, Yiftachel’s discussion of it, while not necessarilyimplying a static situation, remains de�cient as it overlooks the continu-ity of the Palestinian presence across Israel’s borders. The three mainconcentrations of Palestinians within Israel – Lower Galilee, TheTriangle and the North-Eastern part of the Negev – are geographicallyproximate, economically associated and culturally contiguous with threerespective metropolitan centres of the Palestinian West Bank: Jenin andits rural hinterland, The Nablus Kalkilia Tul-Karim triangle and Hebron.Yiftachel’s ethno-regional suggestion treats Israel as a composite and,even more signi�cantly, discrete territory, with borders that are cultur-ally and politically impermeable.

This oversight has salient implications for the thesis. Ethno-regional-ism in any of the overwhelming Palestinian regions within Israel musttake into account the Palestinian presence on the other side of Israel’sgreen line. And it is here, I suggest, that the trapped nature of the com-munity is likely to hinder a fully �edged ethno-regional assertion.

The discourse of transnationalism in anthropology, with its emphasison border zones and interstitial areas, transmigration and other types ofethnoscapes, encourages a fresh look at ethno-regionalism too. Ra’ifZraik’s powerful statement, that highlights ethno-regions as potentialsuffocation sites – as graves rather than starting points – suggests, ratherlike Ghanem (1998), that the protest is likely to shift towards rede�nitionof the entire public space engendered by the state and, not less import-antly, across its border into transnational, deterritorialized ethnoscapes.

Conclusion: the Palestinian trapped minority and a citique of theOslo-Wye process

The Oslo-Wye process of reconciliation between Israel and the Pales-tinians (I deliberately refrain from labelling it ‘the peace process’),hinges on the assumption that a division of the territory between the

The Palestinian citizens of Israel 81

states of Israel and Palestine is viable since the national aspirations ofthe Palestinians can be satis�ed by a state in the West Bank and Gaza.It is assumed that the current residents of these territories, together withthose who were forced to leave them to become exiles in the Arab worldand overseas and who might want to return, will be the citizenry of thenew state. Palestinians living elsewhere, according to this vision, areexpected to merge somehow into their current host societies.

The analysis of the Palestinian citizens of Israel and, for that matter,of the Palestinians in Jordan as trapped minorities, challenges the sup-position of stability inherent in the Oslo-Wye process. The intricaterelationships that link Palestinian communities in the West Bank and inGaza to those in Israel, Jordan and elsewhere would not be likely to dis-appear simply because a third state was established. Any settlement thatfails to recognize the solidarity, unity and shared fate that so many Pales-tinians still experience, is doomed to be inherently unstable.

This renders the notions of ethnic democracy and ethno-regionalismwanting as bases for an agreement that will breed stability. The analysisof Palestinians on either side of an Oslo-Wye style Palestinian state as atrapped minority suggests that the ethnic minority which Smooha advo-cates will exacerbate their deprivation in terms of collective identity andthe rights that it engenders. Likewise, viable ethno-regional identitiescannot develop on one side of the future Israeli-Palestinian border,whatever political arrangement is �nally worked out between Israel andPalestine.

Acknowledgements

I �rst made public use of the term ‘trapped minority’ in 1996, at a con-ference organized by the Centre for Peace Studies (Givat Haviva) inZikhron Yaacov.

Papers concerning the idiom and its uses were subsequently given atARENA, forum for the study of collective identities (Oslo, September1997); The 22 Conference of History, Zalman Shazar Center (Jerusalem,April 1998); Humphery Institute Seminar, Ben-Gurion University(Beer-Sheva, May 1998); Panel on Nationality and Democracy. TheInternational Conference on Multicultural Democracy, Bar-Ilan Uni-versity (Ramat-Gan, June 1998); 5th MESS – Mediterranean StudiesSeminar (Piran, September 1998).

I am indebted to the organizers and participants of all these events fortheir interest, insight and suggestions. Full responsibility for the formand content of this article remains mine.

Notes

1. This wording is, of course, a simpli�cation. Israel’s borders are yet to be de�ned, soin effect one cannot talk of ‘a territory’ known or recognized as Israel. Aware of this

82 Dan Rabinowitz

ambiguity, I nevertheless use this term for the sake of brevity. Likewise, the term Falastinused by the Palestinians does not denote a speci�cally delineated territory, but a general-ized term.2. Schweid (1985) actually uses the term ‘Jewish democracy’ for Israel.3. Baruch Kimmerling (1999, p. 339) insists that out of four necessary conditionsneeded for a regime to be classi�ed as a democracy, Israel ful�ls only one: periodic freeelections capable of changing ruling parties and élites.4. Take, for example, the suggestion of having an electoral system to the Knesset thatwill include a regional element, that is, in which a proportion of the seats will be contestedin geographical constituencies. The overwhelming residential segregation typifying Israel,and the concentration of the Palestinian citizens in three main areas will not necessarilyincrease the number of Palestinian politicians actually elected. It will no doubt enhance,however, the sense of regional awareness and solidarity implied in the ethno-regionalismthesis.

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DAN RABINOWITZ, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociologyand Anthropology, Hebrew University, Israel is currently Guest-Lecturerat Tel-Aviv University, Israel.ADDRESS: Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel-Aviv Uni-versity, Ramat-Aviv, Tel-Aviv 69 978, Israel. email: msdan@post.huji.ac.il

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