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Chapter 3 Confronting a Land with People It was hardly inevitable that the Druze would carve out a distinctive path toward citizenship, separate from their fellow Arabs, in the new state of Israel . The Druze had long exhibited particularistic tendencies, but there was no “natural” alliance between the Zionists and the Druze. It is true that the Druze did not, by and large, join in either the Arab Revolt of the late 1930s or the 1948 war, and some sought alliance with the Zionists as early as the 1930s. But Druze behavior did not, on the whole, differ markedly from that of many other rural Arabs to whom the language of nationalism was still alien as were its urban, educated adherents. Most rural Arabs were residents of Palestine but not Palestinians: unmoved by the nationalists’ appeals, they were at most passive supporters of the cause who ultimately cared less about who ruled than about being able to plant their crops and tend their fields. Despite earlier Zionist efforts to exploit communal cleavages among Arabs, the State of Israel did not, in its first decade, systematically draw distinctions between Druze and other Arabs when it came to substantive policy. As Arabs, all ran afoul of the Zionist vision, all fell victim to the young state’s priorities and prejudices, and all remained suspect from a security perspective . They shared common grievances—the expropriation of land, subjection to military rule, rigidly enforced restrictions on travel, societal penetration by the General Security Services (GSS),1 exclusion from the giant labor federation (the Histadrut), and unequal access to water resources. Some Druze villages , notably the two on Mount Carmel above H  aifa, were spared the worst of these oppressive measures. But, for the most part, Christians, Muslims, and Druze occupied the same (Arab) social space in the Jewish state, and all had much about which to be resentful during Israel’s early years. Jews and Arabs under the Mandate The early Zionist settlers lived more or less—at times, much less—in peace with their Arab, largely Muslim, neighbors. They typically founded their settlements in uninhabited and swampy areas; they depended heavily on Arab labor; and their numbers remained small. But, with the second great wave of Jewish immigration shortly after the turn of the century, Zionist-Arab tension intensified. Mostly from Eastern Europe and Russia, the new arrivals came in larger numbers and with a more ambitious vision. Driven by nationalist ideals, they developed a flourishing agricultural economy and incipient industry while refusing to hire low-wage Arab workers.2 In the late 1920s and 1930s, Jewish immigration skyrocketed, presenting the Arab inhabitants of Palestine with a multidimensional threat. The Zionist pioneers and European refugees were often skilled laborers and had access to foreign capital. They threatened the almost uniformly Arab character that Palestine had retained through the centuries. And, as Jewish individuals and agencies bought large swaths of Arab-owned land and evicted the current tenants, they embittered displaced Arabs and fed the emerging nationalist movement. Arabs sought to stanch the Jewish inflow, in part by periodically threatening the public order, but they were never successful for very long. British restrictions on Jewish immigration , imposed in response to the violence, were either evaded or eventually rescinded. To Zionist leaders, the Arabs of Palestine were an obstacle, regardless of religion . Zionist propaganda regularly described their enterprise as settling a people without a land in a land without a people, and many Jewish immigrants were surprised to discover that Palestine was not nearly as empty as they had been led to believe.3 But leading Zionist thinkers recognized early on that the most desirable areas of Palestine were teeming with human life, and they understood that territorial conflict was inevitable, that it would have a zero-sum character, and that a negotiated solution would be impossible. David Ben-Gurion warned the governing body of the prestate Jewish community (the yishuv) in 1919, “Everybody sees a difficulty in the question of relations between Arabs and Jews. But not everybody sees that there is no solution to this question. . . . We, as a nation, want this country to be ours; the Arabs, as a nation, want this country to be theirs.” And the revisionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky similarly concluded that “the tragedy lies in the fact that there is a collision here between two truths. . . . TheArab is culturally backward, but his instinctive patriotism is just as pure and noble as our own; it...

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