88 chapter two American academic Ian Lustick outlines how, after 1948, the Zionist agencies that worked to colonize Palestine in the pre-state period were bestowed a central role and statutory status after the establishment of the new state. With the emergence of Israel as a sovereign state, a kind of ‘division of labour’ was arranged: the Jewish Agency remained the principal organization responsible for encouraging Jewish immigration and integrating new immigrants into Israeli society; the JNF continued to obtain land and lease it to Jewish settlements in cooperation with institutions of the Israeli government, including the ILA and the Ministry of Agriculture; as the the second largest employer after the Israeli government and the official representative of all Israeli workers in the country, the Histadrut, a Jewish trade union, continued its attempts to improve the circumstances of the Jewish working class; and the Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary organization formed and sustained by the Histadrut, became the foundation of the IDF which today is the armed forces and the largest and principal institution in the Israeli government (Lustick 1980, 95).92 The broad ideological objective of maintaining Israel’s Jewish character continues to manifest in these institutions that actively advocate Jewish domination in Mandate Palestine, mass Jewish immigration, growth of Jewish land ownership, and other Zionist goals (Lustick 1980, 89). It is important to appreciate the devastating effect of the autonomous existence of these national Zionist institutions on the Arab population. Palestinian NGOs do not have access to the organizational, financial and administrative resources of these public and national institutions. Thus they have limited abilities to impose significant changes on the racially hierarchical Israeli system. Moreover, despite being quasi-governmental organizations, the constituency of these Zionist agencies is not the entirety of Israel’s citizenry, but rather a transnational collective: the Jewish people. As a result, the officially recognized organizations, institutions, state holidays, symbols, and figures are exclusively Zionist and Jewish (Ghanem 1998, 432). In addition, as mentioned above, while Arabic is also an officially recognized language, the Hebrew language is dominant in all official principle that Jewish labour shall be employed.” That the World Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency are key participants in the Admissions Committees mentioned above also illustrates the level to which Palestinian citizens and residents will be denied access to the land (see Halabi 2004, 3–4). 92 Lustick’s contribution to the study of Arabs in Israel is more closely examined in Chapter Five where it is placed alongside other scholarly contributions on this subject, and again in Chapter Six.