ZIONISM KKOM 1HE STANDPOINT OK ITS VICTIMS 105 theaters, cultural centers; most Arab villages, according to the Arab mayor of Nazareth, who speaks with the unique author­ ity of a non-Jew in Israel, lack electricity, telephone communi­ cations, health centers; none has any sew'age systems, except Nazareth itself, which is only partly serviced by one; none has paved roads or streets. For whereas the Jew is entitled to the maximum, the non-Jew is given a bare minimum. Out of a total work force of 80,000 A ra b workers, 60,000 work in Jewish enterprises. “ These workers regard their town and villages as nothing but places of residence. Their only prosperous 'indus­ try’ is the creation and supply of manpower.'’411 Manpower without political significance, without a territorial base, with­ out cultural continuity; for the non-Jew in Israel, if he dared to remain after the Jewish state appeared in 1948, there was only the meager subsistence of being there, almost powerless except to reproduce himself and his misery more or less endlessly. Until 1966, the Arab citizens of Israel were ruled by a military government exclusively in existence to control, bend, manipulate, terrorize, tamper with every facet of A ra b life from birth virtually to death. After 1966, the situation is scarcely better, as an unstoppable scries of popular riots and demonstrations testify; the Emergency Defense Regulations w-ere used to expropriate thousands of acres of A ra b lands, either by declaring Arab property to be in a security zone or by ruling lands to be absentee property {even if, in many cases, the absentees were present— a legal fiction o f Kafkaesque subtlety). A n y Palestinian can tell you the meaning of the Absentee's Property Law of 1950, the Land Acquisition Law of 1953, the Law for the Requisitioning of Property in Time of Emergency (1949), the Prescription Law of 1958, Moreover, Arabs were and are forbidden to travel freely, or to lease land from Jews, or ever to speak, agitate, be educated freely. There were instances when curfews were suddenly imposed on villages and then, when it was manifestly impossible for the working people to know of the curfew, the “ guilty" peasants were summarily shot; the most wantonly brutal episode took place at Kafr Kassim in October 1956, during w'hich 49 unarmed peasants were shot by the frontier guard, a purticu-