ABSTRACT

This chapter deals with recent changes in the political thought and discourse of the Arab-Palestinian community in Israel. It sheds light on the reframing of Arab political thinking, claiming that Arab political thought has undergone a serious transformation since the early 1990s, when it began directly tackling the challenges of Israeli citizenship, its deep tension with Palestinian national affiliation, the consequences of the Palestinian Nakba and Arab-Palestinian indigenous rights in Israel. Arab political thought in Israel reflects a gradual engagement with the self-perception of the Palestinian minority as an indigenous population, whose relationship with its surroundings is to be defined by its mere indigeneity. The changes in Arab political thought were not sudden. They developed gradually and were based on ideas and perceptions that were indirectly or ambiguously raised by Arab-Palestinian leaders in the past. However, the changes in Arab political thought reached a special peak in the 1990s with the emergence of the political writings of leading intellectuals among the Arab-Palestinian community in Israel. This chapter focuses attention on the political thought of the most prominent intellectual in this community, namely Azmi Bishara. The first and most important reason to focus on the political thought of Bishara is the fact that he has been undisputedly the most influential and fruitful political and cultural thinker in the Arab-Palestinian community in Israel in the last several decades. Bishara may not have been the most influential politician within his own community, but he has been undoubtedly the most influential intellectual. Another reason to examine Bishara's intellectual journey is the fact that his personal story and his clash with the Israeli political and legal system are a microcosm of the developing story of the entire Arab-Palestinian political and intellectual leadership in Israel. Another reason has to do with the fact that his political thinking and the tensions within it – between the civil and the national, the universal and the particular, and the local and the global – mirror the tensions between the trends of thought within the entire Arab-Palestinian population in Israel. Another reason justifying the choice of Bishara in this context is the fact that his personal story reflects not only the story of Arab-Palestinian leaders in Israel, but the story of the entire Arab-Palestinian community in Israel, especially when it comes to the delegitimization of his thought, the demonization of his personality and the criminalization of his national struggle for equality. The accusations of betrayal and “co-operation with the enemy” directed at Bishara, and his forced exile as a result, mirror the treatment of the entire Arab-Palestinian community by the Israeli political system, as a “fifth column,” and the pressures on it to take clear sides between its Palestinian national affiliation and Israeli civil identity. Bishara's political thought deals with this tension and the ways to reconcile it, despite or because of the broader Israeli– Palestinian conflict.