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ix FOREWORD FOREWORD Lila Abu-Lughod In 1948 when Palestinians found that, as Honaida Ghanim puts it so well, a border had brutally crossed them, they could never have imagined how profoundly their lives would diverge. The new border known as the Green Line separated the minority who managed to remain in villages and cities within the new State of Israel from the rest of the territory that had been the home of Palestinians, and from the broader Arab region that would now house the majority who were made homeless refugees. News about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict always seems to be about those outside “the green line.” About those in the camps in Lebanon. About the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, the territories occupied by Israel in 1967. In his sad meditation on the relentless expropriation and paving over of the hills and valleys of the beautiful countryside that illegal Israeli settlement-building after the occupation of the West Bank entailed, the writer Raja Shehadeh describes not just the destruction and danger that have confined him and made his beloved country walks from Ramallah nearly impossible, but also his crushed idealism. As a young man he had thought he could use the law to halt the redrawing of borders. Over time, he has come to feel that this cannot be done. The facts are on the ground now. With the 1991 Oslo Accords that, in Shehadeh’s view (shared by many others), undermined any capacity of the Palestinians to halt the settlements and curtail Israeli control over the rest of Palestine, he began to understand better his fellow Palestinians who grew up within the “green line.” In his haunting book, Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape (Scribner, 2007), he describes the naive optimism of a new arrival to Ramallah who has come in with the PLO to set up the Palestine National Authority. When he takes her for a country walk near the Dead Sea, a walk that reveals Jewish settlements dominating the hilltops and highways carving up Palestinian land but forbidden to Palestinians, she seems unable to grasp the significance of what she is seeing. He finds himself for the first time identifying with the Palestinians he had disdained—those who had lived under Israeli military rule from 1948–1966 and who now live as uneasy citizens within a nationstate defined by its Jewishness, and thus their non-belonging. He writes: ix x FOREWORD For the first time, I felt like those Palestinians who stayed in Israel in 1948 must have felt when they argued with us after the 1967 war. They would tell us: “You don’t know a thing about Israel. We can tell you what is coming: land expropriations, biased zoning that will strangle your towns and unfair taxation that will impoverish you.” And we would look with condescension at them and think they had lived for so long under Israel that they had become colonized, unable to think beyond their narrow claustrophobic reality. They probably think Israel is the whole world, we would comfort ourselves. Not only have their lands been colonized but their minds as well. (Shehadeh, 2007: 109) This is a book about the complex lives of these Palestinians whose experiences differed from those who fled, whether to Beirut or to other parts of Palestine outside the Green Line in a series of internal displacements that no one imagined would end up being so permanent. It is also a book by a remarkable new generation of women scholars who are all Palestinian citizens of Israel and have turned their attention to the situation of this community —its social dynamics, its politics, its history, and its culture. Most are products of Israeli universities, part of that minority of Arabs who managed to get admitted to such institutions. None hold full academic appointments in Israeli universities, as reflects the general situation of the Palestinian citizens of Israel who indeed face systematic discrimination in employment. Many have left the country for opportunities to study or to teach, some thinking that they might return, others knowing they can’t if they want some level of personal freedom, decent lives for their children, or satisfying careers based on merit, as Ibtisam Ibrahim’s interviews with highly educated émigré women indicate. They are different from Palestinians who grew up in the diaspora, or even in the West Bank and Gaza, not only in the obvious ways such as fluency in both Arabic and Hebrew, and a...

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