The Palestinian citizens of Israel, the concept of trapped minority and the discourse of transnationalism in anthropology

Dan Rabinowitz Abstract

Elastic, adaptable and vibrant, minorities often stretch across state borders in ways traditional concepts of states and nations fail to acknowledge, let alone theorize. The discourse of transnationalism helps to dislodge the study of minorities from the analytical straight-jacket of the state. The concept of trapped minority, developed herein from an analysis of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, adds to this debate. A trapped minority is a segment of a larger group spread across at least two states. Citizens of a state hegemonized by others, its members are alienated from political power. Unable to in uence the de nition of public goods or enjoy them, its members are at the same time marginal within their mother nation abroad. My use of the concept of trapped minority offers a critique of Smoohas rationalized concept ethnic democracy (1990) and of Yiftachels ethno-regionalism (1999a, after Hechter and Levi 1979), a critique that helps to re-frame and critique the Oslo-Wye process of Israel-Palestinian reconciliation and is relevant to similar situations elsewhere. Keywords: Minorities; nationalism; transnationalism; Palestinians; Israel.

Introduction The concept of the nation-state, long taken for granted as an inherent segment of human reality in the modern era, is one of the more durable contributions of modernism to human history. It hinges on a nonproblematized division of the globe into a series of idealized ultimate territories, each ostensibly forming a coherent, homogeneous and representative entity. Within each territory, a perfect t is implied between territory (a bounded stretch with recognized borders), the people living in it (society), their culture and, above all, the state: a superstructure
Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 24 No. 1 January 2001 pp. 6485 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd ISSN 0141-9870 print/1466-4356 online DOI: 10.1080/0141987002000655 2

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of regulating mechanisms, offering members focuses for loyalty and identi cation. The construct of the nation-state thus emerges as composite and rationalized. This unproblematic notion of the state serves as an umbrella for ideological and political etatist clichs, the theoretical weakness of which becomes apparent with the (re)surfacing of political, economic, genderrelated and other types of minorities and hybrids. This etatism is particularly predatory regarding ethnic and national minorities. Often perceived by regimes as capable and willing to overthrow the states ideological and coercive supremacy, such minorities become ideological and political targets. In their strife to marginalize them, state regimes tend to isolate them as anomalies more or less tolerable distracting noises 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 recently recognized a growing variety of phenomena that, while taking place outside the state, are nevertheless more central to the human experience than hitherto assumed. The discourse of transnationalism, while not necessarily intended to write against the state, does dislodge the debates of ethnicity, nationalism and minorities from its analytical straightjacket. The dynamic nature of the discourse of transnationalism in a globalizing world encourages new ways of conceptualizing minorities and their relations to the states and regions in which they coexist. Minorities must not be seen in terms of a simplistic arithmetic equation whereby one collective 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 the nations that begot them. Their predicaments beg for historical contextualization. This need in historicization is the starting point for my depiction of certain types of ethnic and national minorities as trapped minorities. The label assumes a mother nation which stretches across two states or more. Segments of this mother nation may nd themselves entrapped as minorities 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 dimensions: old homeland minorities are often overtaken by newly established states that sever the minorities ties with their mother nations abroad. Awareness of the entrapped nature of a minority can fruitfully historicize it, thus rede ning the minority, the host state, and the relationships of 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. Minorities such as the Palestinian citizens of Israel, on whose case I mainly draw here, harbour obvious claims to rights, including rights in land. Nevertheless, they are consistently excluded from most political processes that determine land use, development and well-being in their very homeland. This paradox, which cannot be explained by conventional liberal-democratic theories of the western state, gains lucidity through the concept of trapped minority. This article begins with the testimony of a Palestinian intellectual about the dynamics that exclude the Palestinian citizens of Israel from control over the physical environment. A brief review of social scienti c studies of the Palestinian citizens of Israel follows, highlighting the overreliance on the state as a unit of analysis. The discourse of transnationalism is then presented as an alternative, and the concept of trapped minority elaborated. The insight instigated by the idiom trapped minority that once collaborated with the subjective views of members of the minority itself, exposes the weaknesses of concepts such as Smoohas ethnic democracy (1990), the oxymoronic term a Jewish democratic state and the territorial aspect of ethnoregionalism as suggested by Yiftachel (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 Palestinian citizens of Israel of being alienated from public space within their homeland: in other words, from most of Israels land mass. Public spaces within Palestinian settlements, and certainly beyond their municipal limits, are perceived by Palestinian citizens of Israel as having been totally appropriated by the state. Even the poor repair of sidewalks in Nazareth a Palestinian town run by Palestinian elected politicians is for Zraik (ibid) a direct manifestation of the marginal status of Palestinians in the Jewish dominated state and its aggressive mechanisms of exclusion and control. The war which the Palestinians lost to Israel in 1948 practically erased their old metropoli as focuses of belonging and identity. Palestinian urban centres such as Jaffa, Ramla, Lid, Jerusalem, Bir-Saba and their rural hinterlands shrank or disappeared under the rapidly expanding Jewish Israeli strongholds, now inhabited by newly arrived Jewish immigrants from abroad. The Palestinians were largely left with isolated and fragmented villages. The 1950s saw many of those villages lose vast portions of cultivated land and pasture to the Jewish state, mainly through 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. Palestinians are acutely aware of belonging to a house, a village, or a neighbourhood. Alienated from continuous control over the physical environment, however, they cannot maintain a wider horizon for their collective being. The building materials of our lives, Zraik told a group of environmentalists in Tel-Aviv in mid 1999, are reduced to the individual memories of our private experiences. The result is a uni-dimensional person. Palestinians in northern Israel can locate and relocate only within a small triangle that includes parts of Acre, Nazareth and Haifa. The rest of the country, while formally accessible to all, is effectively out of bounds for them. They have little hope of residence, employment or ownership let alone of asserting their collective will and destiny outside their home villages. In Zraiks words to the group of environmentalists in 1999: In 50 years nobody made an attempt to start a Palestinian neighborhood in Haifa. The end result is suffocation. We can build homes within our villages, but they are also graves. There is no space beyond the village we can move within. This may have been the reality when my grandfather was a young man, before the state of Israel was established. But had I been the product of a normal history, I would have become part of a national Palestinian project with cities I could migrate to. At present this is an option completely absent from my life. This sense of suffocation produces in turn a feeling of being stuck in time. The day-to-day economic reality and the limits of Palestinians political power within the state of Israel and outside it limit their perceptions of a future. To quote further from Zraiks 1999 talk to the environmentalists: You live for mere survival. You are a slave to the tyranny of the present, and are, essentially, given to consumerism. You have no sense of past to lean against, and no con dence in any kind of future. You become a creature with no integrity, with no consistency between utterance and action. Someone like that cannot exert any impact on the landscape. We Palestinian citizens of Israel make no claim for public space within the state of which we are supposedly rightful and equal citizens. We retreat into indifference. The Israelis design, develop and revitalize the land according to their needs and interests. This intensity makes us lose any sense of a homeland awaiting us. The experiences which trigger these emotions of deprivation and confinement among Palestinians of Zraiks 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 for new conceptualizations of the experience of minorities in states such as Israel, who insist on being even-handed, uninterested liberal democracy. The Palestinian citizens of Israel: a brief epistemology The territory known as Israel1 is recognized by the Palestinians as Falastin, their own ancestral homeland. Five to seven million Palestinians scattered between Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza (now occupied in part by the newly founded Palestinian Authority) the Gulf countries and western countries regard themselves as natives of the land. The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 on approximately 60 per cent of the entire disputed territory spelt national calamity for the Palestinians. The majority of the 800,000 Palestinians who had lived prior to 1948 in the areas now included in the state of Israel were expelled or ed. Most of them became refugees in adjacent Arab countries. Only some 160,000 remained, mostly villagers in the more remote regions. The educated urban middle class disappeared almost completely from the area that was now included under Israeli jurisdiction. The early 1950s saw a considerable number of refugees return to Israel. Some re-entered legally, as part of family reuni cation schemes approved by the Israeli government. Others crossed the borders clandestinely. The number of Palestinian citizens in Israel doubled by the late 1950s, and is currently approximately 850,000. This gure represents about 18 per cent of the population of Israel, and a similar proportion of the entire, scattered Palestinian people. Political scientists, sociologists, geographers and anthropologists writing about Israel have produced a substantial body of research which either focuses on or takes considerable account of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Elia Zureiks (1979) study takes the marginal status of the Palestinians within Israel as the de ning feature of what he typi es as a colonial settler-state. Gershon Sha r (1989) in his analysis of land and labour within Zionism, while stressing the speci c circumstances of the Jewish national movement, nevertheless adheres to the colonial paradigm. So do, by and large, Michael Shalevs (1992) study of Israels split economy and Lev Greenbergs (1991) analysis of the Labour movement. Ian Lustick (1980) investigates the structural and institutional features designed 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 Israels supreme

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court judges in their occasional capacity over the years as chairmen of the central elections committees. Peled convincingly contrasts the restrictions made on Palestinian candidates and parties with the virtually free access of Jewish Israelis to the republican core of political life and the common good. His conclusion is that Israel, including Israeli liberalism, offers its Palestinian citizens no more than a nominal and weakened form of citizenship. This buttresses his typi cation of Israel as ethnic republic a view supported to an extent by works such as Rabinowitz (1997), Rouhana (1997) and Ghanem (1998). Sami Smoohas characterization of Israel as ethnic democracy (1990, p. 391) has gained considerable attention in recent years. Smooha, who acknowledges the political dominance of Jews in Israel, nevertheless prefers 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 the Palestinian citizens rights and limited accessibility to power and resources. While the adjective ethnic denotes the dominance of one hegemonic ethnos over another, the basic liberal idea of individual freedoms is suf cient for Smooha to depict the overall structure of Israel as democratic. Smoohas work attracted considerable criticism and debate. Paramount here is Oren Yiftachels critique (1997a), which, like Asad Ghanem (1998) identifies the inherent contradiction between Israels pretence to be a Western-style, liberal democracy, and its practices towards the Palestinian citizens in terms of their collective rights. Yiftachel, adamant that Israel cannot qualify as a democracy, prefers the term ethnocracy. A feature common to all these orientations, including Smoohas and his critics, is that they all take the Palestinian citizens of Israel as a case from which to generalize about the nature of the state. The state thus remains the primary unit of analysis. The subjective view of the minorities is secondary more a tool with which to think and analyse than a focus of attention in its own right. This tendency is not anomalous. The convergence of the idea of the state with the notion of nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe and across the globe throughout the twentieth century has made the nationstate into an all-pervasive feature. It colours our interpretation of social phenomena to the extent that we often nd it dif cult to make social analysis in stateless situations. But overviews of states, alas, are incomplete. There are central elements of meaning that macro analyses misrecognize. This point becomes particularly relevant in an era of globalization and transnationalism, in which the weight of states in the daily experience of an ever-increasing proportion of human beings is reduced, while the signi cance of sub- or supra-state dynamics is on the increase (Appadurai 1996).

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The discourse of transnationalism Globalization theory has emerged in the last two decades as a critique of classical hegemonic representations of history (Kearney 1995). In traditional historiography time tended to be linear, consistently advancing in a positive progression towards modernization, development and growth. The notion of such natural chronology came in tandem with a dichotomous division of global space into an advanced developed centre in Europe, European North America and Australia versus a yet-to-bedeveloped periphery. The two world spaces were perceived to be connected in asymmetric lines of communication and administration. One, as it were, was running the other. Wallersteins (1974) The Modern World System and Harveys (1989) The Condition of Post-Modernity have since demonstrated that the worlds economy and its derivatives in the realms of culture and identity have always been more integrated than had been assumed. Eric Wolfs (1982) critique of classical anthropology in Europe and the People Without History built on Wallersteins and Franks (1967) assertions, and paved the road to a series of anthropological studies that demonstrate how the local and the global, the developed, and the yet to be developed, constantly invade and impact each other. Space was realized as more uid, boundaries as less rigid and durable. Decolonization since the 1950s and the transformations into nationstates of groups hitherto perceived as living fossils to drive the metaphor of stasis to its absurd extremity led once again to reconsiderations of theory and global perceptions, with more emphasis than before on interconnectedness and interdependence of societies and cultures. The simple notion of space and culture as bounded, nite and discrete is seriously questioned. Unlike space, time is more dif cult to be perceived as non-teleological: progression towards entropy and de-development are, after all, much harder to envisage. Still, peripheries can collapse and implode into the centre through immigration (Rouse 1991), electronic media (Sreberny-Mohhammadi 1991), tourism (McCannel 1989) and imagination (Appadurai 1991). History can be and is being written from the periphery (Wolf 1982), using hitherto concealed categories and classi cations. Culture, social structure and identity are no longer understandable solely in terms of speci c places and the ethnographic present at which Western ethnographers happened to stumble on them. Rather, much of the human experience is appreciated as taking place in what Appadurai (1991) has aptly termed ethnoscapes between the boundaries rather than within the spaces each of them con nes. The March 1999 issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies (vol. 22, no. 2) productively identi es the realm of migration and diaspora as a main arena for studies of transnationalism. The issue uses the ever-increasing

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ubiquity of individual and collective movement to ne-tune the empirical, analytical, and theoretical tools with which sociologists deal with relocation and its consequences. Anthropology, with its traditional emphasis on the local, the unique, and the systems of signi cations and meanings that move people, takes a somewhat different trajectory. Willing to use transnationalism as an umbrella for a wider variety of phenomena (perhaps, as Portes, Guarnizo and Landolt (1999) imply, at the expense of analytical lucidity and clarity of terms), anthropology shifts the discussion to meaning and signi cation. If, as Appadurai suggests, more people than ever before experience life primarily in ethnoscapes, then the consciousnesses and imaginations that this new deterritorialized reality begets is a fascinating departure from the old place-related concept of identity that anthropology was so familiar with. The result is thus a transnational discourse that is at once speci c theoretically and inclusive phenomenologically. Whereas globalization looks at global processes, transnationalism within anthropology, which could equally have been termed transstatism or post-nationalism (Kearney 1995), looks at more concrete and local contexts. Whereas globalization deals with the impersonal and the universal, transnationalism looks at the political and the ideological. This is signi cant when one is searching for a theoretically argued alternative to the analytical straight-jacket of the state. Fredrik Barths (1969) preoccupation with the extent to which cultures can be said to have borders is now replaced by a preoccupation with the extent 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 identify the border zone as a productive unit of analysis. They show that border areas can no longer be assumed to be marginal, and that the universal mainstream of the human experience, while de ned by and in the metropolis, does not take place exclusively in them. The new perspective from the margins represents experiences shared by an in nitely larger proportion of humanity than hitherto recognized. The borderland, an interstitial zone where at least two territorial and demographic segments blur into each other, emerges as a viable alternative to rigid de 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 of the state (Herzfeld 1992), ethnic groups within it and on its margins, (Kapferer 1988), and the relationships between them and the dominant majority (Rabinowitz 1997). This emancipates minorities from the dubious status of ethnic clamour in an otherwise tranquil clockwork operation of the nation-state. Old myths of the state are vigorously problematized, giving way to the realization that the narratives of nationalism, 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 former margins minorities, border areas, diasporas, the exiled and displaced, the imploding army of migrant labourers that are centred now. Their histories 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 the Balkans, from the Slavonic nations to Muslim Central Asia, is rapidly reshaping. With minorities repeatedly peeping from beneath the bursting seams of states, no wonder that epistemological attention to nationalism, ethnicity, secessionism, separatism, irredentism, as well as to their antonym accommodation and con ict regulation, is growing steadily. A rst step in a typology of minorities is the elementary distinction between indigenous minorities groups who live in territories which they perceive as their primordial homelands, and who are sometimes also referred to as homeland minorities and immigrant or exiled ones. Immigrant and exiled minorities are of less pertinence in the present context, so I leave them for another occasion. Within indigenous minorities, Manuel and Posluns (1974) have identied the category of Fourth World: politically weak and economically marginal groups that constantly experience powerful nations surrounding and overtaking them to usurp their rights. Examples include the Inuit in 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). Here again, the concept of Fourth World, which deals with groups of limited size and political volume, is not suf ciently applicable to most minority situations. Going back to larger homeland minorities, we discover that most writers implicitly refer to an ideal type of situation, whereby entire ethnic groups live within a state hegemonized by others. Smith (1992) is satised to identify such groups as culturally distinct and united by a belief in a common past. Yiftachel (1997b) applies this terminology to the Palestinian citizens of Israel unquestionably. Ghanem (1998, p. 430) uses ethnic nationality for both Jews and Palestinians inside Israel, whereas others often use national minority. Signi cantly, these terms tend not to problematize the spacial layout and distribution of the group within and across state borders. Examples of this phenomenon, which I prefer to label national minority, include Bretons (and others) in France, Welsh and Scots in Great Britain, the Ibo of Nigeria, various minorities in the conglomerate of China and many more. A state can have one or more national minorities within its borders. Some states refuse to recognize national

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minorities; others may be willing to acknowledge them, at least nominally; others still are happy to grant minorities various degrees of collective rights. As indicated earlier, implicit in the de nition of national minority is the assumption that the entire group is present within the hosting state. Most cases of indigenous minorities are, however, more complicated than this, with members spread across two or more states. This, of course, has far-reaching implications for the group itself, for the relationship with its host state(s) and, as I shall demonstrate later, for the development and growth of ideology and institutions within the hosting hegemonic group. This is where the concept of trapped minority becomes of analytical help. Entrapment is a dramatic development. A space initially perceived to be safe is subject to sudden external interference leading to con nement: a door is closed, a fence erected, a wall cemented. The space becomes a dangerous enclosure, the subject is suddenly incarcerated. Most homeland minorities are trapped in two distinct but complementary dimensions. The rst is historical, pertaining to the sequence of undesirable events that brought about their current predicament as a minority within an alien state. The second denotes entrapment between contemporary entities, and in particular between their host state and their mother nation. Let me use the case of Palestinians within Israel as an illustration. The Palestinians who remained within the con nes of the newly established state of Israel following the war of 1948 found their homeland drastically transformed, falling under the control of Zionist Israel. The Palestinians in it, who were soon granted formal citizenship including the right to vote and be elected, were now at the political, economic and administrative mercy of a regime they never chose. Relations with the mainstream of their people the vast majority of Palestinians living outside the borders and control of Israel were almost completely severed. Let me identify ve elements which characterize the predicament of trapped minorities. The rst is that the process of disastrous entrapment usually begins at the very historical juncture which the dominant majority associates with victory, redemption and the joyful dawning of a new age. This diametrically opposed historicization catapults the trapped minority into fundamental descent vis--vis the canonic narrative 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 a tragic situation, whereby my country is at war with my people. The second element of entrapment is the sense of being marginal twice over, within two political entities. The dominant group that hegemonizes the new state that entraps the minority tends to treat its members as less than 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 Palestinians. They tend to misrecognize the rights of Palestinians as natives, and overlook the tragedy that befell them when the state of Israel was established. At the same time, however, and unlike Fourth World groups and simple national minorities, trapped minorities may nd that their credentials within their mother nations are devalued. Their residence, acculturation and formal citizenship in a state dominated by an alien hegemony implicates them. Thus, the Palestinian citizens of Israel, labelled Arabs or Palestinians by Israelis, are equally suspect for Palestinians and Arabs abroad due to their citizenship of and general association with Israel. Seen from the Arab world, the Palestinian citizens of Israel emerge as an ambiguous and problematic element whose status in the national arena is yet to be determined, and whose very loyalty to the Palestinian nation might still be suspect. Israels willingness, where it exists, to integrate its Palestinian citizens into economic, political and social life, might in fact further reduce their chances of clarifying their credentials in the eyes of Palestinians generally. In the 1960s and 1970s, for example, the Palestinian citizens of Israel were treated by the exiled Palestinian leadership as a self-seeking, spoilt collective, collaborating with the Zionist occupation of the homeland. Paradoxically, the very contingent of Palestinians that managed to remain in situ in the homeland found itself physically disconnected and morally excommunicated from the centre of gravity of national crystallization. Trapped in this dual marginality and held between these two centres of political gravity, the Palestinian citizens of Israel are painfully aware of two con icting national narratives, and experience with their lives and property two systems of legitimization Trapped minorities can be expected to struggle with the memory of the traumatic event or process that had the homeland taken over by a foreign power. The memory is often vivid, leaning on personal experiences, enmeshed in close familial history. The double bind in which they live, however, may arrest the development of a coherent version of history as a collective experience. In the case of the Palestinians, the de ning historic moment is, of course, the disastrous loss of life, limb, property and rights during the 1948 hostilities, an event subsumed under the powerful term al-naqbah the disaster. And while memories of personal and local tragedies are rife, a vocabulary that conceptualizes and memorializes the disaster seldom develops. Raif Zraik sees a connection between this diminished sense of collective history and the loss, on behalf of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, of a vision of a homeland awaiting. As he put it in mid 1999: People with no dream and vision cannot preserve a memory, and thus we 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 a nuisance disturbing landmarks commemorating our defeat. We keep suppressing them. We suppress our history. A similar sensitivity to the politics of memory is found in Azmi Bisharas argument about the need of Palestinian citizens of Israel in formal acknowledgement by the state of their loss in 1948. In his words: The Israeli public space knows only one collective memory, a castrated memory the sole purpose of which is to push away the sense of exile and alienation [of the Jews, D. R.]. The Jewish Other exorcised the wholly Other, the native, the Other of the place[. . .]. History itself will prove [. . .] that if the victim is to forgive he must be acknowledged as the victim. This is the difference between a historic compromise and a cease re (Bishara 1992, p. 6). The salience of this issue becomes obvious when one looks at negotiations of the place of Palestinian suffering in formal articulations of collective memory in Israel. Should the heavy price paid in 1948 by the families of people who are today Palestinian citizens of Israel be perceived merely as the punishment that members of the losing side in war can expect? Or, alternatively, should the argument be made that Palestinians are the group of citizens of Israel who paid the highest possible price for the establishment of the state? The point is by no means trivial. Jewish Israeli public discourse habitually 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 of Zionism is a revolutionary concept for the majority of mainstream Israelis. 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 have yet to claim their rightful share in the pantheon of Israels public memory. The debate into the place of the Palestinian nakbah in the commemoration of Israels ftieth anniversary, was initiated by liberal Israelis, and proceeded to take place primarily among them. The voice and vision of the Palestinian community within Israel regarding this highly sensitive issue has still to crystallize and make its full appearance in Israeli public life. Third, members of a trapped minority, while sensing solidarity with their mother nation, are likely to feel excluded from the thrust of national revival if and when it does commence abroad. This happened to the Palestinian citizens of Israel as the Palestinian national movement began 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 protest against the seizure and expropriation of Palestinian rural land by Israeli state agencies (see Yiftachel 1999b). First commemorated on 30 March 1976 with a mass rally in Sakhnin, in which six Palestinian demonstrators were shot dead by police, this date evolved in the 1980s into a focal point of protest for the Palestinian citizens of Israel. The strategic choice that faced them in the years that followed, however, related to the contents best injected in the annual event. Was it to be conducted as a civil protest staged by citizens who feel disenfranchised by the state? Or, alternatively, should it be fused into the general struggle of the Palestinian nation against Israel?. While the two are by no means mutually exclusive, their articulations in terms of context, discourse, practice and leadership are quite distinct. In the rst few years Land Day oscillated between a mild civil demonstration, a slightly more bitter protest with accentuated national connotations, and an event exemplifying pan-Palestinian solidarity. These variations notwithstanding, the event found little space in the crystallizing national calendar of Palestinians abroad. The occasion was gradually reduced to local contexts, its form determined by the speci c political circumstances prevailing at the time and place of each performance. The development of an overarching syntax of signi cation was arrested. A similar dynamic, incidentally, can be highlighted in the indecisive stance of Palestinian citizens of Israel vis--vis the Intifada (19881992) and to a large extent in their stance in relation to the Oslo-Wye plantation process (19931998). The linkage between, on the one hand, personal, familial and local solidarity and, on the other, mainstream national consciousness, while often attempted (cf. Rabinowitz 1994), remains fragmented. It was only during the tumultuous events of October 2000 that the Palestinian citizens of Israel found the unity and resolve to join the protest of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, and take a confrontational, and often violent, stance against the state of Israel. Fourth, a trapped minority is likely to remain non-assimilating. This may be due to a subjective choice, may result from a dictum made by the hegemonic group, or could be a combination of the two. Signi cantly, its non-assimilation tends to be perceived as permanent, acculturation notwithstanding. Thus the Palestinian citizens of Israel, while all the time acquiring more of the values and symbols of Jewish Israel and gaining further access to and in uence upon its political arena, neither want nor are invited to assimilate. The result is a cultural limbo unlike that which befalls diasporic minorities, and different also from that which characterizes wholesome national minorities. Torn between the culture of its mother nation and its host state, members of a trapped minority have difficulty in participating 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 of national identity. A fth, related point, is that being at the cross re between at least two nations, the relationship between a trapped minority and their host state is inevitably in uenced, sometimes determined, by the liaison between the two nations. Naturally, the more tense and hostile this relationship, the more likely it is that the host state will regard the trapped minoritys quest to maintain a separate national cohesion and identity as dangerously out of line. Smooha (1989) has shown that this is very much the case with Israels view of its Palestinian minority, a point reiterated by Benziman 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 offer members of the trapped minority a viable option of full incorporation. Israel, for one, clearly refrains from offering its Palestinian citizens such incorporation. Instead, it prefers to hide behind a veil of legalistic, formal declarative assertions that claim indifference to national af liation and an even-handed, rational treatment of all citizens (cf. Herzfeld 1992). Likewise, and not less tragically, the Palestinian mother nation is incapable of proposing the Palestinian citizens of Israel a meaningful alliance, not even in a future Palestinian state (assuming that a genuinely independent Palestine state will materialize). As a result of this impasse, neither host state nor mother nation is in a position to demand the unconditional loyalty of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. In fact, neither has so far seriously considered demanding that the community sever all ties with the other, even when at times the other was perceived as the ultimate enemy. Finally, and following from the previous ve characteristics, members of trapped minorities are likely to display chronic ideological and political internal divisions, and to experience dif culties in forging a united front both inside and outside the state. These divisions are related to the tension and confusion associated with their structural position between host state and mother nation. Thus, the divisions which have plagued the Palestinian citizens of Israel since the 1950s can no longer be seen solely in terms of the Machiavellian system of control employed by the state and acted out by manipulative political parties, state agencies and locally co-opted leaders (cf. Lustick 1980). Neither, of course, can this disunity be attributed to an inherent cultural failure on the part of the Palestinians themselves, as some Israeli orientalists are still prepared to imply. It is the dif culty of articulating a historic or at least strategic vision, stemming from their dichotomous entrapment, that works against their chances of political unity. Instances of trapped minorities, a concept which, like Barths (1969) ethnic boundaries, is not dependent on a restrictive de nition of territory or cultural af liation, have recently become more numerous and obvious.

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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 now trapped in the newly established independent states that have replaced the federation, such as Kossovar Albanians within Serbia; Muslims in various parts of the Balkan, notably Turks in the north east of Bulgaria and Pomaks across the border between Bulgaria and Greece; Russians in the Baltics, the Caucas and Trans-Caucas who, after the demise of the Soviet Empire have found themselves entrapped between their familial roots in the newly independent non-Russian republics and their ancient national af nity with Russia; Armenians in Azerbeijan, Ukrainians in Siberia or Kazakhs in Uzbekistan; There were Hungarians in post World War I Slovakia and Romania; Sudeten Germans between the wars and after 1945; Catholics in (British) Northern Ireland; Protestants in a future united Ireland; a variety of groups in Africa and South-East Asia following 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 minorities imply eternal passivity? Is the situation of a trapped minority inherently static? My answer is negative on both counts. Being a trapped minority is undoubtedly a predicament, an undesirable situation imposed on the minority against its will. Being smaller, poorer and often less organized than the host state, the opportunities for trapped minorities to change their situation are few. This does not mean, however, that the predicament is nite. Entrapment may be powerful, but it is also a dialectic situation in which change is an indispensable possibility, subject to structure as well as agency. Responsibility for change lies partially with the trapped ones, who indeed often become active political agents seeking change. This is the case, in my example, with leading radical public gures and political movements within the Palestinian community inside Israel. Considerable weight is still given to the larger powers at play, namely the host state and the mother nation, and is dependent on the relationship between the two. Signi cantly, the nature and disposition of a trapped minority carries weight in the quest of the majority to forge its own identity, particularly when its nation-state is relatively young. Human collectives often de ne themselves through perceptions of ultimate Others. Thus, while existence of a simple national minority is often used by the majority as a backdrop against which the blueprints of identity become inscribed, the presence of a trapped minority makes the process more complex. A trapped minority is, by de nition, not easily contained: it spreads across borders into other territories, adjacent or abroad, forging pacts with enemies and strangers. Racist discourse repeatedly refers to minorities, especially those with real or imagined af liation abroad, as tips of dangerous icebergs, ominous protrusions of external threats into the nations corpus. The metaphor of

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aliens as agents of disease a foreign entity that invades the body nation, threatening to destroy it from within often surfaces in rhetoric that re ects the majoritys darkest xenophobic fear and hatred. Being a trapped minority thus emerges as not merely complicated and confusing, but also as potentially dangerous. The presence of people af liated with external, transnational collectives can push even a powerful majority to adopt a defensive self-image replete with weakness and vulnerability. Recent history provides more than enough examples of the violence that may erupt once a nation combines deep-seated fear of the constructed Other with military might. The horrible example in 1999 of Kossovar Albanians, trapped as they were in the history and the geography 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 throws into relief a number of de ciencies in current conceptualizations of minorities and their predicaments. A brief discussion of these shortcomings in relation to Israel/Palestine demonstrates the theoretical relevance of this critique for other deeply divided countries and states. Mainstream Jewish Israel fondly wants to believe that Israel is a Jewish democratic state.2 This line of thought, so dominant within most contemporary Zionist political movements and parties, is prevalent among many Israeli scholars writing from liberal and neo-liberal perspectives (prominent examples include Eisenstadt 1967, 1985; Avineri 1981). It is premised on the forgiving claim, most explicitly made by Horowitz and Lissak (1989) that Israel is essentially a liberal democracy overburdened by external and internal security and social pressures which force it to temporarily forgo some liberal tenets. Such aws, the argument goes, are by no means structural. Given time and reasonable progress in Israels relations with the Arabs, these anomalies will disappear (cf. Neuberger 1998; Gavison 1999). One line of critique is that the term Jewish democratic is a contradiction in terms. Once assigned with a restrictive ethnic adjective (in this case Jewish), a state can no longer claim to be inclusive of and evenhanded towards all its citizens. Rather, the term exposes the real nature of the state: an exclusive ethno-territorial project which serves the hegemonic group at the expense of others. A state cannot purport to be democratic, complete with total sovereignty of the rule of law and equal citizenship and civil rights, while its symbols, power structure and resource allocation remain safely Jewish.3 Historicizing the Palestinian citizens of Israel as a trapped minority offers a different angle of critique here. The state of Israel came into being as an instant package deal combining the saving of the Jews as individuals, the nationalist aspirations of political Zionism and the transformation of

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the Jewish religion into a de ning aspect of a new state. This convergence was powerful enough to displace the Palestinian collective from the physical terrain, and to have its rights, historic subjectivity and memory erased from Zionist cognition. Pre-state Zionism easily identi ed the Palestinians as a military force to be reckoned with, and continued to do so throughout the 1948 war and in many ways into the rst decade of the state. Hence, for example, the military governorate that was imposed on Palestinian towns and villages from 1948 to 1966. Palestinians as a civilian population, however, and, more explicitly, as rightful citizens within a democratic state, were hardly acknowledged. A Jewish democratic state is thus a concept that hinges on dehistoricizing Palestinians and the presence of a Palestinian people. Instead, the Jewish state re-introduces Palestinians as Arabs an element marginal to Zionist history, now canonized as the underlying narrative of state ideology (Rabinowitz 1993). The Arab minority, once recognized by Israel and Israelis, was treated as if it surfaced out of nowhere. Its history was truncated, its spatial continuity with Palestinians and Arabs in adjacent territories arrested. Its entrapment as a gment of the Israeli presence was complete. It is little wonder that Israeli writers in the 1970s and 1980s, who focused on mental and cultural characterization of the Palestinian citizens of Israel (for example, Landau 1969; 1971), their perceived orientation (read: loyalty) towards the state (that is, Rekhes 1976) or their identity (Smooha 1988; 1989), did it in a strikingly ahistoric manner. These works and many others were almost totally synchronic, and almost all of them overlook the analytical pertinence of the contiguity of Palestinian across international borders. Smoohas ethnic democracy is, in many ways, a direct continuation of the Jewish democratic state conundrum, and of the dehistoricizing nature of earlier studies of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Ethno-territorial projects such as Israel can claim to be democratic using one of two options. One is a technical and rather restrictive de nition of democracy as a system in which all subjects are granted the right to vote and to be voted. Smooha, to his credit, rightly discards this simplistic argument. The option that he selects is to sidestep the historical and personal implications of disenfranchisement, dispossession and dismemberment experienced by the Palestinians who had previously inhabited the territory, and whose offspring are now trapped in the collective time and space of the new state. Smoohas recognition of the positive diachronic changes in access into Israeli life that Palestinians have gradually achieved, does not break the synchronic mould that colours his analysis. The consequences of 1948 fail to be incorporated analytically into his postulations and defences of the term ethnic democracy. Yiftachel, like Peled (1992) and others, does not accept Smoohas rather optimistic view of ethnic democracy as a viable description and

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desirable solution. Rightly acknowledging extended ethnic protest among Palestinians in Israel as an indication that the current situation is neither stable nor sustainable, Yiftachel looks at potential trajectories along which this protest is likely to develop. Discarding both Gurrs (1993) notion of the emergence of an ethno-class and Smiths (1992) ethno-nationalism (Yiftachel 1997b, pp. 934), Yiftachel then proceeds to highlight the relevance of Hechter and Levis (1979) and Kofmans (1985) notion of ethno-regionalism. He argues that since the options of irredentism and separatism bear intolerable costs (Yiftachel 1997b, p. 106), the Palestinian citizens of Israel are likely to consolidate a regional identity, particularly in Galilee, and to deploy their strife for ethnic identity and for an equal share of state resources through this medium. Ethno-regionalism must not be summarily negated. It is an option which, given the right political circumstances, may prove viable.4 This notwithstanding, Yiftachels discussion of it, while not necessarily implying a static situation, remains de cient as it overlooks the continuity of the Palestinian presence across Israels borders. The three main concentrations of Palestinians within Israel Lower Galilee, The Triangle and the North-Eastern part of the Negev are geographically proximate, economically associated and culturally contiguous with three respective metropolitan centres of the Palestinian West Bank: Jenin and its rural hinterland, The Nablus Kalkilia Tul-Karim triangle and Hebron. Yiftachels ethno-regional suggestion treats Israel as a composite and, even more signi cantly, discrete territory, with borders that are culturally and politically impermeable. This oversight has salient implications for the thesis. Ethno-regionalism in any of the overwhelming Palestinian regions within Israel must take into account the Palestinian presence on the other side of Israels green line. And it is here, I suggest, that the trapped nature of the community is likely to hinder a fully edged ethno-regional assertion. The discourse of transnationalism in anthropology, with its emphasis on border zones and interstitial areas, transmigration and other types of ethnoscapes, encourages a fresh look at ethno-regionalism too. Raif Zraiks powerful statement, that highlights ethno-regions as potential suffocation sites as graves rather than starting points suggests, rather like Ghanem (1998), that the protest is likely to shift towards rede nition of the entire public space engendered by the state and, not less importantly, across its border into transnational, deterritorialized ethnoscapes. Conclusion: the Palestinian trapped minority and a citique of the Oslo-Wye process The Oslo-Wye process of reconciliation between Israel and the Palestinians (I deliberately refrain from labelling it the peace process), hinges on the assumption that a division of the territory between the

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states of Israel and Palestine is viable since the national aspirations of the 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 with those who were forced to leave them to become exiles in the Arab world and overseas and who might want to return, will be the citizenry of the new state. Palestinians living elsewhere, according to this vision, are expected 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 supposition of stability inherent in the Oslo-Wye process. The intricate relationships that link Palestinian communities in the West Bank and in Gaza to those in Israel, Jordan and elsewhere would not be likely to disappear simply because a third state was established. Any settlement that fails to recognize the solidarity, unity and shared fate that so many Palestinians still experience, is doomed to be inherently unstable. This renders the notions of ethnic democracy and ethno-regionalism wanting as bases for an agreement that will breed stability. The analysis of Palestinians on either side of an Oslo-Wye style Palestinian state as a trapped minority suggests that the ethnic minority which Smooha advocates will exacerbate their deprivation in terms of collective identity and the rights that it engenders. Likewise, viable ethno-regional identities cannot develop on one side of the future Israeli-Palestinian border, whatever political arrangement is nally worked out between Israel and Palestine. Acknowledgements I rst made public use of the term trapped minority in 1996, at a conference organized by the Centre for Peace Studies (Givat Haviva) in Zikhron Yaacov. Papers concerning the idiom and its uses were subsequently given at ARENA, forum for the study of collective identities (Oslo, September 1997); 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. The International Conference on Multicultural Democracy, Bar-Ilan University (Ramat-Gan, June 1998); 5th MESS Mediterranean Studies Seminar (Piran, September 1998). I am indebted to the organizers and participants of all these events for their interest, insight and suggestions. Full responsibility for the form and content of this article remains mine. Notes
1. This wording is, of course, a simpli cation. Israels borders are yet to be de ned, so in effect one cannot talk of a territory known or recognized as Israel. Aware of this

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

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