Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948–1967

Introduction

1 In 1949, when Israel signed armistice agreements with its Arab neighbors at the end of the war in which it was born, the Jewish state found itself with an unwelcome 156,000 Arabs, approximately 15 percent of the new country’s population. At the same time, these Arabs found that they were citizens of a state whose creation they had largely opposed and against which the Arab world had launched a war just two years earlier. The Israeli authorities, lacking any experience of governance and with contradictory traditions about relations with non-Jews, faced a presumptively hostile national minority within their new polity. The Palestinian citizens, on their part, had to find ways to live under the new masters. The Arabs in Israel faced circumstances entirely different from those they had previously known. Instead of being a majority, as they had been in Mandatory Palestine, they became a minority as a result of the uprooting of some seven hundred thousand who became refugees. The country’s landscape had also metamorphosed before their eyes. Many of the Arab villages they were accustomed to seeing on their travels through the country were in ruins, and Jewish towns were built in their place to house the hundreds of thousands of Jews who flowed into the country from Europe and the Islamic world. Cities that had served as political, economic, and social centers were emptied almost entirely of their Arab inhabitants. Hebrew became the language of the institutions of government. The Arabs’ sense of being a marginal Introduction I n t r o d u c t i o n 2 minority was reinforced by the restrictions imposed on them. Most Arab villages, towns, and cities were placed under military rule, and their fates— personal and collective—were determined by Israeli security authorities, whose principal concern was the security of the Jewish state. The establishment of the state of Israel against the will of the Palestinian Arabs, and their and the neighboring Arab countries’ defeat in a war they had instigated against the new state, created an atmosphere of enmity and mistrust between the state and its Arab citizens. The Israeli authorities viewed the Arab population as hostile and potentially seditious. Israeli decision makers’ anxiety was exacerbated when leaders of the Arab states declared time and again that they intended to destroy the Jewish state. Sometimes, Israeli leaders exaggerated the Arab threat for political reasons. Israel’s leaders were inclined to portray Israel’s Arab citizens as a potential fifth column. In retrospect, it is possible to state that Israel’s Arab population presented no real danger to Israel’s security. At that time, there was no way to be certain. To prevent hostile activity and to establish their firm political control over the country’s Arab populace, Israeli security forces quickly created networks of informers and collaborators in the Arab community. It was an extremely effective policy that operated on three levels: tactical, political, and in relation to consciousness and identity. On the tactical level, security officials worked with Arab collaborators to prevent Arab citizens of Israel from joining the intelligence and military efforts of the Arab countries. Collaborators carried out a variety of missions to this end; among other things, they tracked belligerent underground cells, reported on Arabs who maintained contact with Arab intelligence organizations ,andsuppliedinformationoninfiltratorsandsmugglerswhocrossedthe border. Some collaborators were sent out to the frontiers to recruit informers among their acquaintances in refugee camps in the West Bank (then part of the Kingdom of Jordan), in Lebanon, and in the Gaza Strip (which was under Egyptian rule). The activities of the collaborators also related to a second level of policy operation: an attempt to ensure maximal control over the political and social behavior of Israel’s Arab population. To this end, collaborators were pressed to provide information about the political leanings of prominent people in their villages and about the interrelationships among them and their families. They were also planted in political groups to collect information about activities and plans. Israeli security agencies were also involved in the appointment of mukhtars (village representatives who dealt with the authorities), who served as mediators between the inhabitants and the regime 2 3 I n t r o d u c t i o n during the period before elected village councils and mayors were instituted. Even after this change, the security agencies continued to intervene in Arab local politics; for instance...