Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel's Liberal Settler State

Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures

by Shira Robinson

Following the 1948 war and the creation of the state of Israel, Palestinian Arabs comprised just fifteen percent of the population but held a much larger portion of its territory. Offered immediate suffrage rights and, in time, citizenship status, they nonetheless found their movement, employment, and civil rights restricted by a draconian military government put in place to facilitate the colonization of their lands. Citizen Strangers traces how Jewish leaders struggled to advance their historic settler project while forced by new international human rights norms to share political power with the very people they sought to uproot. For the next two decades Palestinians held a paradoxical status in Israel, as citizens of a formally liberal state and subjects of a colonial regime. Neither the state campaign to reduce the size of the Palestinian population nor the formulation of citizenship as a tool of collective exclusion could resolve the government's fundamental how to bind indigenous Arab voters to the state while denying them access to its resources. More confounding was the tension between the opposing aspirations of Palestinian political activists. Was it the end of Jewish privilege they were after, or national independence along with the rest of their compatriots in exile? As Shira Robinson shows, these tensions in the state's foundation―between privilege and equality, separatism and inclusion―continue to haunt Israeli society today.

Genres: History, Middle East, Nonfiction, Politics, Israel, Religion

350 pages, Paperback

First published September 25, 2013

Reviews

[Muhammed Nijim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a well-argued and informative book. The author discusses the liberal conundrum that the Jewish state of Israel goes through while having some Arab population within its de facto borders. The two main themes that her main argument revolves around are sovereignty and citizenship. The author gives a detailed account of Palestinians suffering post-1948 Nakba events, and the military rule imposed upon them until 1966. They were forced to forgo their past, bury their memories, and disregard their dispossession and erasure from the land. Palestinian Arabs were forced by the military apparatuses to participate in most Independent Day commemoration events. The author states that both are simply acting in a charade to gain different interests: the Israeli state seeking international legitimacy and more identification as a liberal state, and Palestinians seeking their rights within the Jewish state. While Palestinian gain citizenship rights, they are still looked at as Arabs and less privileged than Israeli Jews. Israel will never become liberal as long as it introduces itself as a Jewish state that excludes Arabs who can never be Jewish. Racialization is rooted in the very laws of the Israeli state.

[Danilo Lipisk · Rating 5 out of 5]

page 156

"Still, most of the Jewish public knew little about the brutality of the military
regime or the devastating economic strangulation of Palestinian communities
resulting from the confiscation of their lands, the effective color bar it
imposed on their wages, their crop prices, and their access to the labor market
and higher education. These blinders extended to sections of Tel Aviv’s bohemian
intellectual circles, just a few kilometers from the Little Triangle, who
knew nothing about the nightly curfew imposed there. In September 1955, the
Jerusalem Post reported that Israeli Jews knew more about Saigon and Rangoon
than Nazareth, the only all-Arab city that remained after 1948."

Little has changed since the first decade of the creation of the State of Israel until today.

A state that sought liberalism and progressivism at its creation, but ultimately dedicated this only to a portion of the population based on ethnic-religious criteria.

As this work by Shira Robinson shows, the leadership of the Zionist movement wanted to create a democratic, liberal, progressive Jewish state, but did not want to invite the population that escaped the expulsions of 1948/49 to be part of this state. On the contrary, it controlled and limited the rights of citizens of Palestinian origin.

The image of the "foreigner" in the country dates back to this time. As Shira writes on page 151 -
"the Jewish public [...] joined, rather than replaced, the generalized representations of Palestinians as revenge-seeking infiltrators, kuffiyya-masked marauders, and trespassing squatters. This coexistence—of the loyal, grateful, and progressive Arab alongside the hostile, menacing, and intransigent one—came to embody the construction of the “Israeli-Arab.” If one part of him was tied to the state and its future, the other was a reminder of his potential to slip back into his true essence— a rationale for why they would always be kept at arm’s length"

As we can see in this book, the little progress made with regard to the Palestinian population that managed to remain within the borders of the new state was more an attempt to respond to external pressures and the need to create a positive image internationally. However, internally, this liberality was selective and coexisted with a restrictive and exclusionary policy. The main goal was to marginalize this segment of the population of the state.

it’s not apartheid, but it’s something close to it. Segregation, emergency laws, forced land confiscation, injustices (such as the 1956 Kfar Qasem massacre in which the perpetrators received paltry “sentences”), a deficient educational system for what was left of Palestinian society, among other examples.

Looking at the present after reading from this book, we see that the future will continue to repeat the past. The problem is much more deep-rooted than it appears to be within Israeli society.

[Kabir · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent scholarly work

[Ann Rudnicki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, comprehensive book on the Palestinian 48's--a population too often overlooked/ignored by those advocating for or teaching about Palestinian rights.

[nika · Rating 5 out of 5]

an incredibly important and profound book that everyone should read at least once in their lives