10 introduction control of the newly immigrated Jewish population.15 This expropriation of large amounts of Palestinian land continued into the 1970’s, and beyond, long after the official end of the Military Administration in 1966. All in all, the period of military rule reinforced both social and geographical fragmentation within the Palestinian-Arab population, as well as between the Arab and Jewish sectors of Israeli society. Though a multifaceted system of control and surveillance of Arab citizens remained in place well after the end of the Military Government, it began to function more discreetly by the end of the 1960s. Accordingly, arenas of activity and engagement within Israeli society that were previously closed off to Palestinian citizens gradually began to emerge. Having effectively contained, isolated, and subordinated the Arab community to a hegemonic Zionist consensus of Jewish dominance, Israeli institutions began to include spaces for Arab participation. And so, by the early 1970s, a new and bolder Arab leadership began to develop in Israel. The massive land confiscations in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s became a sharp symbol of the violations of Palestinian rights by the Israeli state, and, on March 30, 1976, Palestinians united to participate in the first-ever national general strike since 1948. This mass action was in response to a new wave of ­government-approved expropriation of Palestinian-owned land in Galilee; including a plan of expropriation that would affect around 20,000 dunums of land (or 5,000 acres) between the Arab towns of Sakhnin and Arrabah.16 15 Chapter Four elaborates on the importance of demographics in daily Israeli policy and decision-making, but here it is important to point out that preferential treatment of the Jewish population was controversial for Arab and even some Western observers even before the inception of the State of Israel, given that the Jews were a minority as compared to the indigenous Palestinian population. A report on November 11, 1947 prepared by SubCommittee Two, an Ad Hoc Collective set up by the United Nations General Assembly and tasked with studying alternative proposals to partition, explains that by December 31, 1946, Jews comprised only one-third of the population of Palestine, which held some 608,000 Jews and 1,237,000 Arabs. The report also goes on to show that even within the area designated for a Jewish state under the Partition Plan of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, the population consisted of around 500,000 Jews and 509,700 Arabs. When examining the demographic reality of the area of Beer el-Sabi’ (Be’er Sheva) proposed for a future Jewish state, the authors of the report comment that “It is surprising that the majority of an international committee such as the [UN] Special Committee [on Palestine] should have recommended the transfer of a completely Arab territory and population to the control of the Jews, who form less than 1 percent of the population, against the wishes and interests of the Arabs, who form 99 percent of the population” (see United Nations General Assembly Ad Hoc Committee 2005a, 675–677). For a demographic and geographical breakdown of the whereabouts of the Palestinian population, from the period until 1918 to June 1967, see also Hagopian and Zahlan (1974, 32–73). 16 A dunum (or, alternatively, donum or dunam) is unit of land area commonly used in the Middle East, mainly in countries that were formerly part of the Ottoman Empire. One (metric) dunum equals 0.247 acres.