The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel

THE FORGOTTEN PALESTINIANS: A HISTORY OF THE PALESTINIANS IN ISRAEL Ilan Pappee New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011 (320 pages, illustrations, bibliography, index, appendix, map) $30.00 (cloth)Reviewed by Ryvka BarnardAnyone preparing a reading list or syllabus on Palestinian history will note the silence in the English-language literature about the years directly following the nakba. There is an overwhelming amount of historical writing about 1948, after which there is a gap until accounts of the 1960s, when Palestinians resurface in the historiography with the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Even then, much of what is available focuses on Palestinian organizing and politics outside of historic Palestine, or only in the territories newly occupied by Israel in 1967, with very little about Palestinians inside Israel. Ilan Pappe's The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel addresses this gap in a comprehensive and engaging way. While several sociological and political science texts cover the same time period, Pappe's new work is notable as the first narrative social history of this particular segment of Palestinians.Pappe uses 1947 as a starting point to present a chronological history from the perspective of those Palestinians who remained and those few who returned and managed to stay in Israel after the nakba. The first two chapters look at the first decade and a half of the state of Israel, during which Palestinians remaining inside lived under Israeli military rule. The second two chapters address the official lifting of military rule (what Pappe calls "military rule by other means") and the years leading up to the first intifada in 1987 (94). The last three chapters plus the epilogue cover more recent years and focus largely on the histories and developments of Palestinian political parties in Israel, most notably al-Tajammu' (National Democratic Assembly), the party of the now-exiled Azmi Bishara, as well as a handful of NGOs including Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which works to document and challenge the discriminatory laws afflicting Palestinians in Israel.Activists and scholars of Palestinian history commonly recall several important events as defining moments very much tied to this particular population: the nakba, the Kafr Qasim massacre in 1956, the Land Day demonstrations in 1976, and the protests in 2000 at the beginning of the second intifada, during which Israeli forces killed thirteen Palestinians. Certainly these events also punctuate the timeline of Pappe's book, but his invaluable addition is an in-depth account of the context for these events, so we see them as points in a long and rich history, rather than as singular aberrations, desperate and occasional outbursts in response to an overwhelming Israeli oppression. At the same time, Pappe certainly does not downplay the ways in which Palestinians in Israel have been targeted, manipulated, ignored, oppressed, and often brutalized. He does not mince words describing those who for many decades considered Palestinians in Israel traitors, nor does he gloss over the individual examples of Palestinian collusion and collaboration in order to present a romantic picture of simple resistance. Instead he presents a well-rounded and comprehensive history, connecting moments of resistance to both the multiple forms of organizing that preceded them and the events and shifting politics in Israel to which they were adapting and responding. Most importantly, he foregrounds the history of Palestinians in Israel while situating their narrative in the context of Palestinian and regional politics.Pappe writes using much of his own research, while also thoroughly incorporating the sociological work of several notable Palestinian scholars such as Elia Zureik, Nadim Rouhana, As'ad Ghanem, and Sabri Jiryis. Their studies stand in direct contrast to those produced by the many Israeli sociologists and anthropologists who, much like their politician counterparts, refer to Palestinians in Israel as "Arab Israelis" and portray the Palestinians in Israel as the ungrateful beneficiaries of Israeli democracy, or the stubborn national minority with terrorist leanings, who refuse to allow themselves to develop. …