The Arab leadership in Israel: Ascendance and fragmentation

Journal of Palestine Studies

Volumn 35, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 6-22

  Jamal, Amal ^a  

^a TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY   (Israel)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

LEADERSHIP; PARTY POLITICS; POLITICAL CHANGE;

ASIA; EURASIA; ISRAEL; MIDDLE EAST;

EID: 33645157443     PISSN: 0377919X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/jps.2006.35.2.6     Document Type: Article

References (50)

1. In contrast to some treatments of the "second generation" of Arab leaders (e.g., that of Danny Rabinowitz and Khawla Abu-Baker, who present them as being part of a "shahok" generation that has lost its ability to lead as a result of their struggle with Israeli authorities; see their book The Stand Tall Generation [Jerusalem: Keter, 2002]), I contend that the dominant Arab leadership today belongs to the second generation of active and vibrant leaders.
2. See for example, Mattei Dogan and John Higley, eds., Elites, Crises, and the Origins of Regimes (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998)
3. John Higley and Richard Gunther, eds., Elites and Democratic Consolidation in Latin America and Southern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992);
4. and John Higley, John Pakulski, and W. Wesolowski, eds., Postcommunist Elites and Democracy in Eastern Europe (London: Macmillan, 1998).
5. John Higley and Gyoergy Lengyel, eds., Elites after State Socialism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), p. 2.
6. David Kretzmer, The Legal Status of the Arabs in Israel (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990).
7. Ian Lustick, Arabs in the Jewish State: Israel's Control of a National Minority (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980).
8. For changes in the electoral laws introduced in May 2002 and in the citizenship law introduced in 2003, see Amal Jamal, "Citizenship as Resistance: Arab Politics in Israel Revisited" in Nimer Sultani, ed., Israel and the Palestinian Minority 2004: Mada's Third Annual Political Monitoring Report (Haifa: Mada al-Carmel, 2005).
9. One example was the persecution of the leaders of the nationalist al-Ard movement in the 1950s and 1960s and the banning of the movement in 1965.
10. The 1984 attempt to prevent the Progressive List for Peace (PLP), seen as the continuation of al-Ard, from running failed and even led to the amendment of Article 7 in the Basic Law of the Knesset, which had made illegal any attempt to challenge the assertion that Israel is the state of the Jewish people. See Yoav Peled, "Ethnic Democracy and the Legal Construction of Citizenship: Arab Citizen of the Jewish State," American Political Science Review 86, no. 2 (1992), pp. 432-43.
11. A 2003 attempt by several Zionist parties supported by the state attorney general to prevent certain Arab leaders and parties from running for the Knesset was blocked by the Israeli High Court; see High Court Verdict, Central Elections Committee v. MK Ahmad Tibi and MK Azmi Bshara, 11280/02 47(4), 1 P. 22.
12. Dan Shiftan, "Zihotam Ha-Hadasha Shil Havri Ha-Knesset Ha-A'ravim" [The New Identity of the Arab Knesset Members], Tkhelet 13 (2002), pp. 23-49.
13. Bayan Nuwayhid al-Hout, Al-qiyadat wa al-mu'assasat al-siyasiyya fi Filastin, 1917-1948 [The Political Leadership and Institutions in Palestine, 1917-1948], 3rd ed. (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1986);
14. Issa Khalaf, Politics in Palestine: Arab Factionalism and Social Disintegration, 1939-1948 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).
15. Ian Lustick has amply demonstrated that coopting leaders was one of the main pillars of the Israeli control system. See Lustick, Arabs in the Jewish State.
16. Elia Zureik, The Palestinians in Israel: A Study in Internal Colonialism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979);
17. As'ad Ghanem, The Palestinian-Arab Minority in Israel, 1948-2000 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001);
18. Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled, Being Israeli: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
19. The party, originally an Arab-Jewish party since its inception in the 1920s, split into two in 1943 as the Zionist-Palestinian conflict intensified, but merged after the 1948 war.
20. Sabri Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), pp. 185-96;
21. Lustick, Arabs in the Jewish State, pp. 125-29.
22. Ilana Kaufman, Arab National Communism in the Jewish State (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997).
23. Aziz Haider, On the Margins: The Arab Population in the Israeli Economy (London: Hurst and Co., 1995).
24. Majid al-Haj, Education, Empowerment, and Control: The Case of Arabs in Israel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
25. Kaufman, Arab National Communism.
26. Among the very active national and Islamist forces that do not enter the Knesset are the Sons of the Village movement and the Shaykh Ra'id Salah faction of the Islamic movement.
27. On the initial years of the Follow-up Committee, see Ghanem, The Palestinian-Arab Minority.
28. See also Majid al-Haj and Henry Rosenfeld, Arab Local Government in Israel (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990).
29. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the Postsocialist Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997).
30. For details on each, see the following sites: www.arabhra.org; www.assoc40.org; www.adalah.org; www.mosawa.org; www.mada-research.org; www.ilamcenter.org; and www.al-aqsa.org.
31. Martin Chemers and Roya Ayman, eds., Leadership Theory and Research: Perspectives and Directions (San Diego: Academic Press, 1993).
32. See Amal Jamal, "On the Morality of Arab Collective Rights in Israel," Adalah's Newsletter 11 (2005), online at www.adalah.org, and "The Ambiguities of Minority Patriotism: On the Love for Homeland versus State among Palestinian Citizens of Israel," Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 10, no. 3 (Autumn 2004), pp. 433-71.
33. On the meaning of habitus, see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
34. Halim Barakat, The Arab World: Society, Culture, and State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
35. On the salience of personal politics in Arab politics, see Khaldun Hassan al-Naqib, The Authoritarian State in the Arab East: Comparative Structural Study (Beirut: Markiz darasat al-wihda al-'Arabiya, 1991).
36. Hisham Sharabi, Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Change in Arab Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
37. Halim Barakat, Arab Society in the Twentieth Century: A Study of Conditions and Relationships (Beirut: Markiz dirasat al-wihda al-'Arabiya, 2000).
38. For a critique of dichotomous modes of analyzing Arab society, see Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 3-41.
39. This phenomenon can also be seen in the Palestinian Authority. See Amal Jamal, The Palestinian National Movement: Politics of Contention, 1967-2005 (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005).
40. Diana Mutz, Impersonal Influence: How Perception of Mass Collectives Affect Political Attitudes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
41. See the treatment of personified politics in the Palestinian political culture in Bassem Ezbeidi, Palestinian Political Culture (Ramallah: Muwatin, 2002).
42. For a discussion of Arab patriarchy, see Deniz Kandiyoti, ed., Women, Islam, and the State (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
43. For data on education in Arab society, see "The Arab Population of Israel 2003," Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, Statisti-lite no. 50, available online at www.cbs.gov.il.
44. Lisa Hajjar, "Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Arab Women, Liberal Feminism and the Israeli State," MERIP Report, July 1998, online at www.merip.org.
45. Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh, Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002);
46. Hanna Herzog, "The Status of Women in Israel: A Fifty Years Perspective," in S. A. Cohen and M. Shien, eds., Israel Culture, Religion and Society 1948-1998 (Capetown: Jewish Publications, 2000), pp. 53-74.
47. Noah Lewin-Epstein, Majid al-Haj, and Moshe Semyonov, The Arabs in Israel in the Labor Market (Jerusalem: Floersheimer Institute for Policy Research, 1994).
48. See "The Statement by the Working Group on the Status of Palestinian Women Citizens of Israel to the Committee for Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women on the Third Periodic Report from the Government of Israel," Adalah's Newsletter, 15 July 2005, online at www.adalah.org.
49. Nitza Berkovitch, "Motherhood as a National Mission: The Construction of Womanhood in the Legal Discourse in Israel," Woman's Studies International Forum 20, no. 5-6 (1997), pp. 605-19.
50. Hanna Herzog, "Why So Few? The Political Culture of Gender in Israel," International Review of Women and Leadership 2, no. 1 (1996), pp. 1-18.