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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 March 2021
The history of Israel's relationship with its Palestinian-Arab minority during the founding decades, from 1948 to 1968, is often portrayed as a story of formal citizenship that concealed large-scale, state-sanctioned oppression under military rule. This article excavates an untold history of employment affirmative action for Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel during these two decades which does not fit neatly into this story. Drawing on original archival research, it reveals that, during Israel's founding decades, officials adopted hiring quotas for unskilled Arab workers and for educated Arabs; requirements and incentives for hiring Arabs in government offices, Jewish businesses, and organizations; earmarked jobs and established vocational training courses for the Arab population. It demonstrates that interests in safeguarding Jewish control and economic stability aligned with egalitarian aspirations, and motivated state officials to adopt measures that promoted the inclusion of the Arab population in the workforce, albeit on unequal terms. Furthermore, these measures were part of a transformation of the state's attitude towards Arab citizens, from strict military control to a regime of “hierarchical inclusion” entailing gradual integration into the Israeli economy — mostly though its lower tiers and with a second-class status. Tracing the use of these mechanisms, not then called affirmative action but recognizable as such today, to this period of subjected population management, complicates our understanding of both this chapter in Israel's history and of affirmative action more broadly.
1. See notes 7–12, describing common trends in the historiographical literature on this period.
2. Like everything else concerning the Israel–Palestine conflict, the terms used to describe the Arabic-speaking population of Israel (as opposed to Palestinian residents of the occupied territories) are contested. Although today the term “Palestinian-Arabs” is more common, in this article I use the terms “Arabs,” “Arab population,” or “Arab minority” for consistency with the terms used in the historical sources that this article reviews. The Arab minority in Israel consists of different groups: Muslims, Christian, Bedouin, and Druze, but the focus of this article is state policy, which, in this context, for the most part and unless I note differently, did not distinguish among these groups.
3. See notes 147–49.
4. Literature and reports describing employment trends of the Arab population confirm that during the second decade of Israel's statehood, there was a massive integration of Arab workers into the national economy. See Ben-Porath, Yoram, The Arab Labor Force in Israel (Jerusalem: Maurice Falk Institute for Economic Research in Israel, 1966), 59–62Google Scholar.
5. Government Corporations Law (Amendment no. 6) (Appointments), 5753-1993, SH 1417, 92 (Isr.); and Civil Service Law (Appointments), 5719-1959, SH No. 279, p. 86 ss. 15A (Isr.). For the litigation that enforced it, see HCJ 453/94 Israel Women's Network v. Government of Israel 48(5) PD 501 (1994) (Isr.). For literature describing affirmative action as a post-1990 development, see, for example, Amnon Rubinstein and Barak Medina, The Constitutional Law of the State of Israel, 6th ed. [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Shocken Press, 2005): 435–63. Other scholars trace the origins of affirmative action in Israel to HCJ 528/88 Avitan v. Israel Lands Council, 43(4) PD 297 (1989) (Isr.). In that case, the court did not explicitly acknowledge the doctrine of affirmative action, but did support its rationales.
6. For a review of the historiographical debate over Israel's approach to the Arab minority in the first two decades, see notes 7–12.
7. See, for example, Aluf Hareven, One Look Back and One Forward: Is it Really Equal and Full Citizenship? [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Sikkuy, 1996). Hareven writes, “[f]rom the instatement of Israel, it has held a tension between two elements: between its definition as the state of the Jewish nation and its definition as a democratic state.”
8. See, for example, Elie Rekhess, “Initial Israeli Policy Guidelines Towards the Arab Minority, 1948–1949,” in New Perspectives on Israeli History, ed. Laurence J. Silberstein (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 103–23. Rekhess outlines an ambivalent relationship that “moved forth and back between two opposite poles. On the one hand a liberal, democratic and moral approach, and on the other a security-oriented approach.” See also Alisa Rubin Peled, “The Other Side of 1948: The Forgotten Benevolence of Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit and the Ministry of Minority Affairs,” Israel Affairs 8 (2002): 84–103.
9. For a groundbreaking account of this paradox, see Shira Robinson, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel's Liberal Settler State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 198. She observes that “Israel's essential Paradox has pivoted around its attempt to pursue the Jewish conquest of land and labor while extending individual political rights to the Arabs of Palestine who remained after 1948.”
10. Robinson, Citizen Strangers, 3. She frames her intervention as explaining how the state kept the Arab population loyal to the state, but not too loyal, “as citizens of a formally liberal state and subjects of a colonial regime.” See also Hillel Cohen, Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948–1967 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011). Cohen reveals the system of collaborators established by Israel in Arab communities after 1948, which was crucial for maintaining the social order.
11. Yair Bäuml, A Blue and White Shadow: The Israeli Establishment's Policy and Actions Among its Arab Citizens: The Formative Years, 1958–1968 [in Hebrew] (Haifa: Pardes, 2007), 313 (state policies were meant “knowingly and deliberately to serve the subordination of the Arab economy to the Jewish one and minimize its political and social independence”); and Yair Bäuml, “The Subjugation of the Arab Economy in Israel to the Jewish Sector, 1958–1967” [in Hebrew], Hamizrach Hehadash 48 (2009): 103–31.
12. Ian Lustick, Arabs in the Jewish State: Israel's Control of a National Minority (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), 66. Drawing on Lustick's work, Ilan Saban has argued that “the legal system in this period acted as the efficient servant of this [control] framework.” Ilan Saban, “Theorizing and Tracing the Legal Dimensions of a Control Framework: Law and the Arab-Palestinian Minority in Israel's First Three Decades (1948-1978),” Emory International Law Review 25 (2011): 301–78. Saban describes how the majoritarian system, the weakness of individual rights, the High Court of Israel, and other parts of the legal system sustained the era's control framework.
13. Building on the work of William Novak, I identify how actors typically understood as acting outside the state, such as party officials and trade officials, were in fact fulfilling vital state functions. In addition to state officials, I also consider party officials, labor unions, and other organizations, as state actors. See William Novak, “The Pluralist State: The Convergence of Public and Private Power in America,” in American Public Life and the Historical Imagination, ed. W. Gamber, M. Grossberg, and H. Hartog (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 27–48.
14. Lustick, Arabs in the Jewish State, 80.
15. Lustick describes the 5-year policy plans but dismisses them by pointing to the different ways in which the Arab sector “still” lags behind. Elsewhere, he identifies that Israeli officials used payoffs to coopt Arab elites to perform different services (providing information, but also votes). See Lustick, Arabs in the Jewish State, 80, 191. See also Bäuml, The Subjugation of the Arab Economy, 12. Bäuml concludes that the 5-year plans were part of a large-scale plan to subordinate the Arab economy to the Jewish one, by, among other methods, the material modernization of the Arab sector through enhancing the consumption of products that Arabs purchased in the Jewish market. See also Sabri Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1969), 163–69; and Zeev Rosenhek, “The Political Dynamics of a Segmented Labour Market: Palestinian Citizens, Palestinians from the Occupied Territories and Migrant Workers in Israel,” Acta Sociologica 46 (2003): 231–49, 236–37. Michael Shalev, “Jewish Organized Labor and the Palestinians: A Study of State/Society Relations in Israel,” in The Israeli State and Society: Boundaries and Frontiers, ed. Baruch Kimmerling (Albany, NY: SUNY Press 1988), 93–134.
16. Zeev Rosenhek, “The Exclusionary Logic of the Welfare State: Palestinian Citizens in the Israeli Welfare State,” International Sociology 14 (1999): 237–38.
17. Explaining the methods employed to incorporate the Arab population into the secondary labor force, these scholars tend to describe the relaxation of military restrictions on movement as the main tool that enabled the “natural” flow of Arab workers into the national workforce. Their focus is on large-scale measures that prevented the integration of the Arab population into the primary workforce and directed them to the secondary workforce, rather than on the affirmative measures seeking to integrate them that I describe in this article. See Rosenhek, “The Excluionary Logic”; and Michael Shalev, Labour and the Political Economy in Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 50. N. Lewin-Epstein and M. Semyonov, The Arab Minority in Israel's Economy: Patterns of Ethnic Inequality (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), 58–61.
18. On the normativity of legal history, see Robert Gordon, Taming the Past: Essays on Law in History and History in Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 8, 303.
19. See Michel Rosenfeld, Affirmative Action and Justice: A Philosophical and Constitutional Inquiry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 2. Rosenfeld reviews the theoretical and legal debates over affirmative action and writes that “the contemporary moral debate over affirmative action is, at least in the United States, an intramural debate among parties of equality.” Owen Fiss calls affirmative action “a form of compensation for past wrongs.” Owen M. Fiss, “Groups and the Equal Protection Clause,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 5 (1976): 107–77, at 151. See also Cass R. Sunstein, “Three Civil Rights Fallacies,” California Law Review 79 (1991): 751–74, at 770. In Israel, the Supreme Court even titled affirmative action “corrective preference” (ha'adafa metakent) and explained that it “derives from the principle of equality, and its essence lies in establishing a legal policy for achieving equality as a resultant social norm. . . . Correcting the injustices of the past and achieving actual equality can, therefore, only be done by giving preferential treatment to members of the weak group.” See HCJ 453/94 Israel Women's Network v. Government of Israel 48(5) P.D. 501, para. 16 (1994) (Isr.).
20. Here I draw on the work of Karen Tani and James Sparrow, showing how rights can serve as a state-building tool and a way to win loyalty from citizens. See Karen M. Tani, States of Dependency: Welfare, Rights, and American Governance, 1935–1972 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); and James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). I also draw more generally on the work of Karen Tani and Sophia Lee, studying administrative constitutionalism. They both show how rights, equal protection, and antidiscrimination law are operating under different logics when interpreted and implemented by administrative agencies rather than by the courts. See Sophia Z. Lee, “Race, Sex, and Rulemaking,” Virginia Law Review 96 (2010): 799–886; and Karen M. Tani, “Administrative Equal Protection: Federalism, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Rights of the Poor,” Cornell Law Review 100 (2014): 825–99. I believe that this history is of interest to constitutional historians, scholars, and lawyers outside Israel who are examining the history, theory, and practice of affirmative action. Furthermore, it opens an avenue for the future comparative study of affirmative action in less-familiar—colonial, imperial, or developmentalist—historical contexts. My framework for understanding affirmative action in this way builds on the work of others who study the proliferation of methods from colonial to civilian settings. See Yael Berda, “Managing Dangerous Populations: Colonial Legacies of Security and Surveillance,” Sociological Forum 28 (2013): 627–30. See also Amy C. Offner, Sorting Out the Mixed Economy: The Rise and Fall of Welfare and Developmental States in the Americas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).
21. This culminated in the 2018 enactment of the Basic Law: Israel – The Nation-State Of The Jewish People (Isr.), https://knesset.gov.il/laws/special/eng/BasicLawNationState.pdf (accessed December 15, 2019). Some scholars locate this escalation in a larger process of “democratic decay.” For a review of the implications of this trend on the Arab minority, see Yaniv Roznai, “Israel: A Crisis of Liberal Democracy?” in Constitutional Democracy in Crisis? ed. Mark A. Graber, Sanford Levinson, and Mark Tushnet (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 355–76.
22. Although appropriate representation requirements were enacted in 2000, it was only in 2007 that the government started taking operative affirmative steps, beyond those required by law, to promote the representation of the Arab minority. These steps included setting quotas and timetables for promoting representation, earmarking an increasing number of new positions for the Arab population, and establishing special training programs for minorities. And indeed, the number of Arabs in the civil service grew between 2007 and 2015 by 88%, and their representation grew from 6.17% to 10.6%. See Abraham Fund Report (2017). Further, on December 30, 2015, the government adopted Resolution 922, a 5-year plan to invest NIS 15 billion to promote the economic integration of the Arab sector. Government Resolution 922: Five Year Plan for the Economic Inclusion of the Arab Society (December 30, 2015).
23. See, for example, Merav Arlozorov, “Bibi is Good for the Arabs (but his actions are frustrating),” The Marker, May 26, 2018, https://www.themarker.com/markerweek/.premium-1.6114889 (accessed December 15, 2019); and Amnon Beeri-Sulitzeanu, “It's Not Just the Economy, Stupid,” Ha'aretz, January 28, 2011, https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/it-s-not-just-the-economy-stupid-1.339690 (accessed December 15, 2019).
24. For useful insights into the development of the labor market in Palestine in the decades before the inception of the state, see Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 58–68; and Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 199.
25. Lockman, 30–31.
26. See notes 147–49.
27. Hillel Cohen, The Present Absentee: Palestinian Refugees in Israel Since 1948 (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2000), 7, 21–25. For an extensive account of Israel's exclusionary citizenship laws, see Robinson, Citizen Strangers.
28. Nir Kedar, “A Civilian Commander in Chief: Ben-Gurion's Mamlakhtiyut, the Army and the Law,” Israel Affairs 14 (2008): 202–17.
29. The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel [in Hebrew], Official Gazette 1, 5708-1948, paras. 4, 8 (1948).
30. Oren Yiftachel, Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 131; Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar, “The Jewish State and the Arab Possessor, 1948–1967,” in The History of Law in a Multi-Cultural Society: Israel 1917–1967, ed. Ron Harris, Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar, Pnina Lahav, and Assaf Likhovski (Aldershot, United Kingdom; Burlington, VT: Ashgate/Dartmouth 2002), 311–82. For a description of budgetary discrimination, see David Kretzmer, The Legal Status of the Arabs in Israel (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990), 107; and Sammy Smooha, “Existing and Alternative Policy Towards the Arabs in Israel,” Ethnic & Racial Studies 5 (1982): 71–98. For an account of the military regime, see Sarah Ozacky-Lazar, “The Military Government as a Mechanism of Controlling Arab Citizens: The First Decade, 1948–1958” [in Hebrew], Hamizrah Hehadash 43 (2002): 103–32.
31. Alina Korn, “Military Government, Political Control and Crime: The Case of Israeli Arabs,” Crime, Law and Social Change 34 (2000): 159–82. The military rule was legally based on enclosure orders issued under Regulation 125 of the Defense Regulations (State of Emergency) 1945, which are “leftover” regulations from the British Mandate for Palestine. Nachum Gross, “Israel's Economy,” in The First Decade: 1948–1958 [in Hebrew], ed. Zvi Zameret and Hanna Yablonka (Jerusalem: Yad-Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, 1998), 137, 147–50. See also Yael Berda's comparative work on the permit system in Israel and other postcolonial countries, showing how when direct violence proved ineffective, colonial regimes developed sophisticated forms of control through documentation and surveillance, such as traveling passes, distinctive zones, and permit regimes. Yael Berda, “Managing Dangerous Populations: From Colonial Emergency Laws to Anti Terror Laws in Israel and India” [in Hebrew], Theory and Criticism 44 (2015): 97–126; and Berda, “Managing Dangerous Populations.”
32. See note 24.
33. “The Minorities Ministry is Working to Promise Equal Rights” [in Hebrew], Al HaMishmar, November 10, 1948, 1.
34. “The Ministry of Minorities Affairs is Organizing the Life of the Arabs” [in Hebrew], Al HaMishmar, July 20, 1948, 3.
35. A General Review of the Minority Office, its Organization, Mission and Actions [in Hebrew] (December 20, 1948) (ISA-307/37-G), 3.
36. The Activities of the Ministry of Minorities Affairs in Jaffa, HaTzofe [in Hebrew], September 14, 1948, 4 (“employ minorities in agriculture and other manual labor”). For a survey of the ministry's activities in the Arab sector, see Report of the Ministry [in Hebrew] (September 29, 1949) (ISA-307/37-G).
37. Ibid.; “Unemployment of Workers in Jaffa was Minimized” [in Hebrew], Al HaMishmar, September 14, 1948, 1.
38. Rubin Peled, “The Other Side of 1948,” 95 (citing from the Coalition transcripts 1949–Sephardim [in Hebrew] [March 2, 1949] [Ben Gurion Archives, 1602093], 6).
39. Uzi Benziman and Atallah Mansour, Subtenants: The Arabs of Israel, their Statues and the Policy toward Them [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Keter Publishers, 1992), 61. They suggest that the dissolution of the Office of Minority Affairs marked the “security considerations’ victory over the liberal considerations.”
40. I. Kretzer, Ministry of Labor, Department of the Arab Village, Operations of the Ministry of Labor in the Arab Sector [in Hebrew] (July 5, 1951) (ISA-2402/02-mfa), 1. There were also efforts to reinstate former clerks who had previously served under the British Mandate for Palestine. “The Appointment of Non-Jewish Former Clerks to Governmental Positions (March 27, 1950)” [in Hebrew], in Arabs’ Employment in Different Occupations (ISA-61393/13-GL), 12.
41. See the different reports in Public [relief] Work for Arab Refugees (Jan. 1951–Oct. 195, 3) (ISA-17108/5-GL). Other examples include, employing Arab workers in agriculture or as port workers. See “500 Arab Laborers to Lod – to Fruit Picking” [in Hebrew], HaMashkif, December 9, 1948.
42. Shoshana Maryoma-Marom, “Relief Work as a Component of Social-Employment Policy in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s” (unpublished PhD diss., 2007).
43. Bäuml, A Blue and White Shadow, 14.
44. On the easing of military rule, see Ozacky-Lazar, “The Military Government as a Mechanism of Controlling Arab Citizens” [in Hebrew]. For an explanation of the economic development, see Yair Aharoni, Structure and Conduct in Israeli Industry (Tel-Aviv: The Israel Institute of Business Research and Gomeh Publications, 1976), 361, 392.
45. The committee's first chair was Mordechai Namir, who was the minister of labor, and its second and last chair, from 1960 to 1968, was Abba Hushi, who was the mayor of Haifa.
46. Mapai Committee for Arab Affairs, Transcript [in Hebrew] (January 30, 1958), 5–10 (LMA-27-1957-213). See Nadim N. Rouhana and Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, “Memory and the Return of History in a Settler-Colonial Context: The Case of the Palestinians in Israel,” in Israel and Its Palestinian Citizens: Ethnic Privileges in the Jewish State, ed. Nadim N. Rouhana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 400.
47. Mapai Committee for Arab Affairs, Transcript [in Hebrew] (January 30, 1958), 5–10 (LMA-27-1957-213).
48. Mapai Action Plan for the Arab Population (1960) [in Hebrew], 1 (LMA-2-7-1960-116).
49. Office of the Prime Minister's Advisor for Arab Affairs, Recommendations re: the Arab Minority in Israel [in Hebrew] (September 1959) (LMA-2-926-1959-18); and Mapai Action Plan for the Arab Population (1960), 2–3. This document states that joint corporations and enterprises for Arabs and Jews should be established, and that all existing organizations and institutions should be open to Arabs.
50. Conclusions of the Labor Committee on Unemployment in the Arab Sector [in Hebrew] (1968) (ISA-17021/13-GL), app.
51. Report by the Arab Department in the Labor Office [in Hebrew] (September 1961) (ISA-61357/12-GL), 1 (on employing the unemployed); Knesset Labor Committee, Transcript [in Hebrew] (April 3, 1967) (ISA-166/4-K), 3 (reporting that there were almost 3,000 young Arabs working in work relief programs); and Labor Committee Transcript, No. 91 [in Hebrew] (March 8, 1967) (ISA-17021/13-GL) (explaining the distribution of government paid work days).
52. Office of the Prime Minister, Unemployment in the Arab Sector [in Hebrew] (August 21, 1966) (ISA-17021/13-GL), 3.
53. See, for example, Report by the Arab Department in the Labor Office, 2 (opening training classes for sewing and other professions); and Knesset Labor Committee, Transcript No. 91, 7 (March 8, 1967). The transcript records “[a] couple of words on professional training. From 1955 until today [1967], eleven classes graduated carpentry, framing, electricity courses. Three hundred people took these classes. Two hundred and fifty more are taking classes in mechanics.”
54. Knesset Transcript (hereafter DK) August 7, 1963, 2646 (Isr.) [in Hebrew].
55. According to an August 6, 1966 survey, the unemployment rate in the Arab sector was 7% whereas in the Jewish sector it was 4.5% Office of the Prime Minister, Unemployment in the Arab Sector, 1.
56. The Plan for Industrializing Arab Areas [in Hebrew] (ISA-13963/19), 2. As part of the industrializing plan, factories committed to opening branches in Arab towns and to employing Arab workers.
57. Ibid.
58. Labor Committee Transcript 91 (March 8, 1967), app. The report specifies the numbers of Arabs who were employed in Jewish-owned business, noting, for example, that there were 6,500 breadwinners in Nazareth, of whom 408 worked for the state. Many others worked in neighboring municipalities. For example, the Voltex factory in Afula employed 37 Arab women from Nazareth, the kibbutzim employed approximately 100 Arab workers, and in Haifa there were an additional 1,750 Arab workers.
59. Report to the Minister of Labor, Reconsiderations for Increasing Employment Rates in Arab Villages by Establishing Factories [in Hebrew] (January 5, 1967) (ISA-13963/19-GL).
60. Sarah Ozacky-Lazar, “From a Hebrew Trade Union to an Israeli One: The Integration of Arabs in the Histadrut, 1948–1966,” Studies in Israel's Revival 10 (2000): 381–419; and Shalev, “Jewish Organized Labor and the Palestinians.”
61. Ozacky-Lazar, “From a Hebrew Trade Union to an Israeli One,” 415–19.
62. “Namir's Speech in the Va'ad HaPoel General Assembly (May 7, 1953)” [in Hebrew], in The Histadrut and the Arab Worker (1953), 20.
63. Ozacky-Lazar, “From a Hebrew Trade Union to an Israeli One,” 404; and Arab Life in Israel [in Hebrew] (April 1959) (ISA-2129/8-GL), 2. This document reports that “[o]f the estimated 23,000 to 25,000 employed Arabs in Israel, about 13,000 so far have joined Histadrut trade unions. The decision on full membership was the pick of a process of integration which has raised the living standard of all of Israel's Arab citizens.”
64. Department of Arab Worker Affairs, A Collection of Reports, The Histadrut [in Hebrew], 1 (November 1954) (ISA-17098-21-GL). The reports state that “with the decision to open the gates of the professional organizations to the Arab worker, the Arab department was charged with the mission to enhance its efforts to promote cooperation and integration.” For a report on the different actions taken by the Arab Department of the Histadrut with respect to recruiting Arab workers, see Meir Reuveni, “They Are Growing Out Their Minority Complex [in Hebrew],” LaMerhav, January 31, 1960, 4–5.
65. “The Histadrut, with Government counterargument and support, has been active in finding employment for Arabs and guaranteeing them fair wages and decent conditions of labor.” Arab Life in Israel, 2.
66. See Ozacky-Lazar, “From a Hebrew Trade Union to an Israeli One,” 405–6, citing from Sharif Mamlok, The 9th Histadrut Council, The Histadrut 42–43 (Feb. 1960); and The Arab Department of the Histadrut [in Hebrew] (December 20, 1961) (LMA).
67. The 10th Histadrut Council [in Hebrew], The Histadrut (January 1966) (LMA), 637.
68. Shalev, “Jewish Organized Labor and the Palestinians,” 112.
69. A Review on the Non-Jewish Civil Servants [in Hebrew] (September 9, 1957) (ISA-47242/3-GL), 1–3.
70. Mapai Committee for Arab Affairs [in Hebrew] (January 30, 1958) (LMA-27-1957-213), 8.
71. “Jobs for the Intelligentsia Among the Minorities” [in Hebrew], Ha'aretz, March 26, 1958 (ISA-17036/19-G).
72. “Offices will Design Jobs for Educated Arabs” [in Hebrew], Ma'ariv, January 10, 1962, 9.
73. “25 Educated Arabs and Druze to be Hired by the Ministry of Finance” [in Hebrew], Davar, June 28, 1961, 3.
74. Ministry of Labor, Monthly Report: The Ministry's Actions Regarding Minority Issues [in Hebrew] (August 1961) (ISA-61357/12-GL), 2; and Ministry of Labor, Monthly Report: The Ministry's Actions Regarding Minority Issues [in Hebrew] (September 1961) (ISA-61357/12-GL), 2.
75. Letter from Moshe Piamenta to the Advisor for Arab Affairs (June 28, 1959) (ISA-17036/19-GL); and “Educated Arabs to be Integrated to Governmental Offices” [in Hebrew], Davar, January 12, 1966, 6 (“Tens of educated Arabs and Druze from minority villages . . . will soon be integrated to governmental offices and the Histadrut in the north”).
76. Letter to the Advisor of Arab Affairs from Nisim Tokotely, “The Employment of Educated Arabs and the Civil Service Exams” [in Hebrew] (May 2, 1967) (ISA-17036/20-GL).
77. Guy Lurie, “Appointing Arab Judges to the Courts in Israel, 1948–1969,” Israel Studies Review 34 (2019): 44.
78. Ibid., 58. The letter was sent at a time when Justice Landau, to whom Judge Azulai's letter was addressed, sat on the Judicial Selection Committee. In the letter, Azulai writes: “Finally one must begin and reach out to this public of lawyers, and help its advancement. I am sure, or at least hope, that not an insignificant number of them will succeed and acquire the knowledge necessary to achieve and stand on the appropriate quality level of a judge in Israel.”
79. Mapai Action Plan for the Arab Population [in Hebrew] (1960), 2.
80. “An Action to Attain Employment for Educated Arabs” [in Hebrew], LaMerhav, March 14, 1962, 6.
81. DK April 7, 1959, 1932, 1936 (Isr.) [in Hebrew].
82. Letter from the Office of the Advisor of Arab Affairs to the Office of the Prime Minister [in Hebrew] (July 7, 1964) (ISA-17036/20-GL).
83. Civil Service Commission, A Survey of the Non-Jewish Civil Servants [in Hebrew] (September 9, 1957) (ISA-47424/3-GL), 2; Advisor of Arab Affairs, A Survey on Educated Arabs for the Prime Minister's Office (October 13, 1964) (ISA-17036/20-GL); and Ministry of Labor, Monthly Report of the Office for Arab Affairs [in Hebrew] (July 1961) (ISA-61357/12-GL), 1.
84. Civil Service Commission, A Survey of the Non-Jewish Civil Servants, 2. See also A. Agasy, A Letter to the Advisor for Arab Affairs [in Hebrew] (July 20, 1961) (ISA-17036-GL) (reporting that an arrangement was made to employ 20 Arab nurses in public health clinics, and that a month-long Hebrew course will be subsidized to prepare them).
85. Ibid.
86. Office of the Advisor of Arab Affairs, Employment of Educated Arabs and the Civil Service Exams [in Hebrew] (May 2, 1967) (ISA-17036/20-GL).
87. Civil Service Commission, A Survey of the Non-Jewish Civil Servants, 2.
88. Ibid., 1.
89. Bäuml, A Blue and White Shadow, 302.
90. Yigal Losin, “73 Outraged Youngsters” [in Hebrew], Maariv, June 26, 1959, 5.
91. Letter from A. Oren, the Speaker of the Ministry of Education and Culture to Boneh Tirush [in Hebrew] (January 8, 1965) (ISA-1404/6-GL). The Seker examination was a national examination used for eighth-grade pupils between 1958 and 1972. Those passing the examination were eligible for high school tuition subsidies from the Ministry of Education. Majid Al-Haj, Education, Empowerment, and Control: The Case of the Arabs in Israel (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995), 86–87. It is not exactly clear what a “B-norm” means in this context, but it appears to refer to some kind of preferential treatment with regard to high school students’ tuition. Email from Shlomit Amichai, former CEO of the Ministry of Education, to author (August 17, 2018) (on file with author). Amichai confirms that a “positive factor” was instated to favor Arab students.
92. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Arab Life in Israel (April 1958) (ISA-47424/3-GL), 3 (“[T]hree of the 12 Arab students now studying in the Technion . . . have been granted scholarships to enable them to continue their studies”); and “Stipends for Arab Students” [in Hebrew], Davar, January 31, 1967, 6.
93. Office of the Prime Minister, Arab and Druze Students in the University [in Hebrew] (May 10, 1954) (ISA-1404/6-GL) (citing Levi Eshkol in a speech from October 21, 1963).
94. Lustick, Arabs in the Jewish State, 24.
95. Committee of Arab Affairs, The Party's Policy Directions Toward the Arab Population (May 27, 1960) (LMA-27-1960-116), 1.
96. Ibid., 1.
97. Committee for Arab Affairs, Transcript [in Hebrew] (August 11, 1960) (LMA-27-1960-116), 4.
98. Ibid., 5.
99. Ibid., 6–10.
100. Committee for Arab Affairs, Transcript [in Hebrew] (February 1, 1962) (LMA-27-1960-116 ), 2.
101. Committee for Drafting the Line of Policy Regarding the Education and Culture of Minorities Appointed by the Ministry of Education, Policy Report [in Hebrew] (May 30, 1958) (ISA-17015/10-GL), 2.
102. Ibid., 2.
103. Ibid., 10.
104. As part of the first 5-year plan, funds were allocated to Arab municipalities with the purpose of improving educational conditions, including training Arab teachers. See Yoel Dar, “The Arab Education” [in Hebrew], Davar, March 1, 1967, 3. For a review of the different programs and policies that were meant to improve and benefit the Arab education system, but not to integrate it with the Jewish one, see Nasreen Hadad Haj-Yahia and Arik Rudinsky, “The Arab Education System in Israel: A Review and Future Challenges” [in Hebrew], 19 Ha'sadeh (2018), 21.
105. See notes 7–12.
106. Mapai Committee for Arab Affairs, Transcript [in Hebrew] (January 30, 1958) (LMA-27-1957-213), 1–2.
107. Ibid., 3.
108. Ibid.
109. Ibid., 6.
110. Mapai Committee for Arab Affairs, Transcript [in Hebrew] (March 19, 1964) (LMA-27-1960-116), 8.
111. Office of the Prime Minister's Advisor for Arab Affairs, A Report on the Israeli Arabs in the First Five Years [in Hebrew] (1953) (ISA-13925/19-GL), 4.
112. Report by the Committee for Examining Ways of Integrating the Arab Population in the Economy and Labor Systems [in Hebrew] (1961) (ISA-17004/22-GL), 6.
113. Ibid., 5; and Bäuml, A Blue and White Shadow, 41.
114. Office of the Prime Minister's Advisor for Arab Affairs, Recommendations re: the Arab Minority in Israel, 15.
115. See, for example, Office of the Prime Minister's Advisor for Arab Affairs, Unemployment in Nazareth and the Area [in Hebrew] (March 3, 1967) (ISA-17021/13-GL).
116. Bäuml, A Blue and White Shadow, 121.
117. See Ozacky-Lazar, “From a Hebrew Trade Union to an Israeli One,” 392.
118. Mapai Committee for Arab Affairs, The Youth Committee, Transcript (November 28, 1962) (ISA-17004/22-GL), 2. Although TV broadcasts only began in Israel in 1966, broadcasts from neighboring Arab states, and primarily Egypt, became available in the early 1960s at some Arab coffee shops. This, Dana Winkler describes, became a security concern for Israeli officials at the time. See Dana Winkler, “‘Doing Israeli Television’: Discussions Toward Establishing Israel's Television, 1948–1968,” Kesher 34 (2006): 134.
119. Office of the Prime Minister's Advisor for Arab Affairs, Recommendations re: the Arab Minority in Israel, 6 (“The State's policy in the past ten years was to promote the separation and balkanization of the Arab population to its sub-communities and areas and to consolidate their interests around these divisions”); Lustick, Arabs in the Jewish State, 98; and Robinson, Citizen Strangers, 56.
120. Lustick, Arabs in the Jewish State, 82–150. Lustick identifies this line of policy as segmentation.
121. Mapai Committee for Arab Affairs, Transcript [in Hebrew] (January 30, 1958), 4.
122. Lustick, Arabs in the Jewish State, 82–150.
123. Rosenhek, “The Political Dynamics of a Segmented Labour Market,” 235.
124. See, for example, Office of the Prime Minister's Advisor for Arab Affairs, Recommendations re: the Arab Minority in Israel (September 1959), 3.
125. Bäuml, A Blue and White Shadow, 133.
126. Office of the Prime Minister's Advisor for Arab Affairs, Recommendations re: the Arab Minority in Israel, 18.
127. Ibid., 19. See also Moshe Sharett's comments, Mapai Committee for Arab Affairs, Transcript [in Hebrew] (March 17, 1960) (ISA-13909-8-GL), 5.
128. Bäuml, A Blue and White Shadow, 42.
129. Office of the Prime Minister's Advisor for Arab Affairs, Recommendations re: the Arab Minority in Israel, 3; Transcript of Government Meeting (November 15, 1953), 15 (“[I]t is not good to oppress a minority, it is not good when the minority's economic state is bad, but it is even worse when the minority is well-off and getting wealthier because of the majority”).
130. Mapai Committee for Arab Affairs, Transcript (January 30, 1958), 1–2.
131. A Meeting of Mapai's Board (Mazkeerut), Transcript [in Hebrew] (February 12, 1960) (ISA-13909-8-GL), 21.
132. Ibid, 3.
133. Ron Harris, “State Identity, Territorial Integrity and Party Banning: The Case of a Pan-Arab Political Party in Israel,” Socio-Legal Review 4 (2008): 19–65, at 32–36.
134. Lustick has described a similar strategy of “cooptation of the Arab elite,” by which Israeli officials paid Arab elites to provide information and votes. Yet, distinct from the affirmative action measures this article is describing, cooptation efforts targeted individual traditionalist and nontraditional Arab leaders. Lustick, Arabs in the Jewish State, 80.
135. Office of the Prime Minister's Advisor for Arab Affairs, Recommendations re: the Arab Minority in Israel, 11.
136. Mapai's Youth Committee, Transcript (November 11, 1962) (ISA-17004/22-GL), 4.
137. “Arab Representatives Welcome the Minister of Interior,” Ha'aretz (September 7, 1948), 4. For a review of the egalitarian ideologies motivating Israeli officials during the first 2 years of Israel's statehood, see Rekhess, “Initial Israeli Policy Guidelines Towards the Arab Minority, 1948–1949,” 103–23.
138. Yitzhak Ben Zvi, “On the Problem of National Minorities,” Davar [in Hebrew], September 2, 1949, 2.
139. Yitzhak Ben Zvi, “The Problems of the Majority in Israel,” Davar [in Hebrew], November 25, 1949, 2.
140. DK (April 7, 1959) 1932, 1936 (Isr.) [in Hebrew].
141. A Meeting of Mapai's Board (Mazkeerut), Transcript (February 12, 1960), 21.
142. See, for example, A. Bejer, “The Arab Worker is Inseparable from the Worker Population” [in Hebrew], Davar, July 28, 1963, 6. Bejer writes, “[t]he Histadrut honestly sees the Arab laborer as an inseparable part of the workers’ population of Israel, and it is determined to advance the Arab worker.”
143. Mapai Committee for Arab Affairs, Transcript [in Hebrew] (May 4, 1962) (LMA-27-1960-116), 5. The last part of the quote literally translates to “if equality, then equality.”
144. Or Committee Report (2003). The report finds that Arab citizens have been systematically discriminated against.
145. See Arik Rudnitzky, “The Contemporary Historiographical Debate in Israel on Government Policies on Arabs in Israel During the Military Administration Period (1948–1966),” Israel Studies 19 (2014): 24–47. Rudinsky distinguishes between two historiographical streams in the study of Israel's approach toward the Arab minority: The first (dominant) stream adopted a retrospective perspective and used knowledge of the ultimate consequences of the historical process to review the past; while the second “responsive” approach, focused on the process of policymaking. This article can be categorized as part of the pater approach.
146. The theoretical framework of “preservation through transformation” allows for a better understanding of the different ways in which legal systems enforce social stratification as they evolve. See Reva Siegel, “Why Equal Protection No Longer Protects: The Evolving Forms of Status Enforcing State Action,” Stanford Law Review 49 (1997): 1111.
147. Office of the Prime Minister's Advisor for Arab Affairs, A Report on the Israeli Arabs in the First Five Years, 5–6. The report states that in 1951, there were 173,000 Arabs in Israel, out of which 7,000 Arabs lived in Haifa and 5,000 lived in Jaffa. The rest mostly lived in Arab villages with some living in separate towns.
148. For a comprehensive account of this relationship, see Yishai Blank, “Brown in Jerusalem: A Comparative Look on Race and Ethnicity in Public Schools,” Urban Lawyer 38 (2006): 429–34.
149. Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948, 189–96.
150. Ben-Porath, The Arab Labor Force in Israel, 54–55.
151. Shalev, “Jewish Organized Labor and the Palestinians,” 106.
152. Ibid., 55.
153. Bäuml, “The Subjugation of the Arab Economy.”
154. Bäuml, A Blue and White Shadow, 118.
155. Elyaho Ben-Amaram, The Arab Population in Israel – A Demographic Survey [in Hebrew] (1965) (ISA-13963/19-GL), 23. Bäuml, A Blue and White Shadow, 162.
156. Ben-Porath, The Arab Labor Force in Israel, 59–62.
157. Mapai Committee for Arab Affairs, Transcript [in Hebrew] (undated, but circa early 1960s) (ISA-13909-8-GL), 3.
158. Ben-Porath, The Arab Labor Force in Israel, 27, 162; and Bäuml, A Blue and White Shadow, 166. Bäuml writes that “the main field in which Arabs were absorbed was in construction of Jewish building sites.” See also Rosenhek, “The Political Dynamics of a Segmented Labour Market,” 237–38; and Shalev, Labour and the Political Economy in Israel, 53.
159. Bäuml, A Blue and White Shadow, 165–66; and Elyaho Ben-Amaram, The Arab Population in Israel – A Demographic Survey (1965). The survey reports that 90% of the Arab workers in 1965 were concentrated in construction, agriculture, industry, and services.
160. Ben-Porath, The Arab Labor Force in Israel, 53.
161. See notes 16–17.
162. Lustick, Arabs in the Jewish State, 161. For a detailed account of the distribution of labor in 1963, see DK (August 7, 1963), 2624, 2642-45 (Isr.) [in Hebrew]. These numbers do not include Arab teachers, who were also state employees, but whose training and employment were segregated. When teachers are included, the percentage of Arabs employed in the public sector spikes to 7.3% in 1961.
163. Bäuml, A Blue and White Shadow, 302. Advisor for Arab Affairs, A Survey on Educated Arabs [in Hebrew] (October 13, 1964) (ISA-17036/20).
164. See also Arnon Yehuda Degani, “The Decline and Fall of the Israeli Military Government, 1948–1966: A Case of Settler-Colonial Consolidation?” Settler Colonial Studies 5 (2015): 84–99. Degani identifies the decline of the military regime as a transformation from colonial to settler-colonial Zionist policies.
165. Hassan Jabareen, “Hobbesian Citizenship: How the Palestinians Became a Minority in Israel,” in Multiculturalism and Minority Rights in the Arab World, ed. Will Kymlicka and Eva Pfostl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 189–218.
166. See note 170. John David Skrentny, The Ironies of Affirmative Action: Politics, Culture, and Justice in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 145–76.
167. Ibid., 68, 111–44.
168. “Wharton School professor Herbert Northrup argued [in 1958] ‘The more educated, the more experienced and more integrated the Negro labor force becomes, the less tension and the fewer problems we'll have in this country.’” Paul Frymer and John D. Skrentny, “The Rise of Instrumental Affirmative Action: Law and the New Significance of Race in America,” Connecticut Law Review 36 (2003): 677–723, at 704.
169. Ibid.; and Skrentny, The Ironies of Affirmative Action, 67–110.
170. See Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971). An important decisions regarding affirmative action, when the egalitarian case for affirmative action became dominant.
171. For the transformation from remedial justice to diversity justifications of affirmative action, see Richard A. Posner, “The Bakke Case and the Future of ‘Affirmative Action,’” California Law Review 67 (1979): 171–89, at 178–80. For the later transformation in the meaning of diversity from an egalitarian rationale to a utilitarian one, see Ofra Bloch, “Diversity Gone Wrong: A Historical Inquiry into the Evolving Meaning of Diversity from Bakke to Fisher,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 20 (2017): 1145–210.
172. Nancy Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age,” New Left Review 212 (1995): 68–93, 95.
173. See note 20. For example, Karen Tani explains in the context of the United States that “[i]n the 1940s, as the nation straddled depression and war, the federal government assumed new responsibilities, such as wartime production and price controls, and offered a large-scale draft and the first-ever income tax on non wealthy Americans. The result, by the second half of the 1940s, was an embrace of rights language—which was now tightly tied to the concept of national citizenship. . . .” Tani, States of Dependency, 22–23. Sparrow describes that “[f]rom the very beginning, then, the liberal ideals of freedom and rights championed by Roosevelt and his war administrators were predicated on the greater obligation to meet the requirements of national belonging.” Sparrow, Warfare State, 4.
174. Skrentny, The Ironies of Affirmative Action. Philip F. Rubio, A History of Affirmative Action, 1619–2000 (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 34. He writes that “[t]he programs known collectively as Reconstruction (1865–77) were actually conceptualized during the Civil War (1861–65) and represented a fusion of elements in much the same way that affirmative action operates today.”
175. Examples are varied and can include different colonial and postcolonial contexts. A good example of a study starting to recover the colonial origins of affirmative action is Steven Ratuva's book, in which he not only provides a comparative account of affirmative action policies in Fiji, Malaysia, and South Africa, but also traces their antecedents to colonial periods. Ratuva, Steven, Politics of Preferential Development: Trans-Global Study of Affirmative Action and Ethnic Conflict in Fiji, Malaysia and South Africa (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2013)Google Scholar. More generally, for the study of the proliferation of methods used by modern states that developed in the colonies to manage civilian populations, see note 20.
176. Galanter, Marc, Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 31Google Scholar. This was known as the “Poona Pact.”
177. Gail Omvedt, “Caste, Race and Sociologists,” The Hindu, October 18, 2001, https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-miscellaneous/tp-others/caste-race-and-sociologists-i/article27982608.ece (accessed December 15, 2019). She writes the “façade of a generous patron of Dalits while continuing to deprive them of mass-level education and access to resources.”