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chapter five
from Arabs by Jewish settlers, the distorted socio-economic development
of Palestinians, their dependence on the Jewish economic sector and the
general irrelevance of Arab needs in the mindset of Zionist policy-makers.
Rather disappointingly, however, Lustick concludes that any fundamental
change in the existing relationship between Arabs and Jews will come
from a Jewish leadership committed to its development. Though recognizing an inherent tension and imbalance between Israel’s “liberal and
Zionist ideological commitments;” and having spent the majority of the
book laying out the racial exclusivity of the Zionist policy-making that
guides the structural, institutional and programmatic developments
within the state and the multifaceted system of control of Arabs it creates,
Lustick nevertheless concludes that a dedicated Jewish leadership can
guide the “transformation of Israel toward a consociational or pluralist
society” (Lustick 1980, 271). In the words of Zureik, whose review of
Lustick’s book was nevertheless overall positive,
… it is not clear … what makes Lustick believe that a pluralist framework
which has had little success in resolving the basic problems of other racially
and socio-economically bound societies will succeed in a more ideologically
rigid settler regime, such as Israel (Zureik 1981, 91).
Taken together, the work of Jiryis (1976), Zureik (1979) and Lustick (1980)
inspired and paved an academic space for numerous important, useful
and critical conceptualizations of the features, dynamics and constrains
of Arab citizenship in a Jewish state. Today, this scholarship has been
developed and compiled mainly by Arab academics, intellectuals, political
representatives, urban planners, researchers, social justice community
activists and civil society organizations in Israel, but also by Jewish-Israeli
and Western sources.
In a recent publication, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the
Palestinians in Israel (2011), Ilan Pappé works from the publications of
Rouhana and Ghanem to outline the changing historical realities of the
Palestinians in Israel from 1947 to 2010.20 Along the way, Pappé also points
20 In fact in 2011 alone there have been three major critical publications on the situation
of Palestinian citizens in Israel. The first, published in March 2011, is the aforementioned
Arab Minority Nationalism in Israel: The Politics of Indigeneity by Amal Jamal. This book
looks at the changing social, political and legal status of the Palestinian citizens of Israel
from the establishment of Israel in 1948 to present time. Jamal places Arabs in Israel alongside indigenous communities in other countries and points to shared mechanisms of marginalization and tools of exploitation and disenfranchisement employed by consecutive
Israeli governments. From this, and with extensive use of the discourse on civil society
organizing, social movements and indigenous collective action, Jamal attempts to
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