Mechanisms of governmentality and constructing hollow citizenship: Arab Palestinians in Israel

Israel has managed to fragment the Palestinian people and to convince most countries involved in promoting Israeli-Palestinian peace that a comprehensive solution of the Palestinian problem is neither feasible nor appropriate. The various Palestinian communities, which were dispersed and forced to live in various localities, due to Israel’s creation and ongoing policies, are asked to accept different solutions, including partial statehood in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, settling some of the refugees in these areas, and maintaining the current marginalized status of Palestinian citizens who live in Israel. Despite various forms of Palestinian resistance to such a strategy, it seems that the political developments of the last two decades demonstrate that Israel has managed to impose this approach as the most “realistic” one for the near future. Israel has used various means to achieve this state of affairs. Part of its effort was directed toward convincing the Palestinians that they have no choice but to accept what is offered to them by the Jewish state. Within this effort, Israel has sought to alter the geography, topography, and demography of Palestine. In areas under its sovereignty, whether recognized or not, the Israeli state has sought to reshape the consciousness of the Palestinian inhabitants. This process started before 1948 and took new forms after the establishment of the state. This chapter explores Israel’s efforts to contain and subjugate those Palestinians who remained within its borders. Although this topic has already been addressed by several scholars, this chapter claims that it is necessary to analyze this question anew and explore a longer period of time in state-minority relations in order to identify particular state practices that reflect the complexity of Israeli mentalities of rule (Zureik 1979). In this chapter, I claim that understanding recent programmatic, legal, and judicial policies and practices of the state toward the indigenous Arab minority necessitates examining the initial framing of the relationship between the state and the minority.