There are multiple classes of “average Arabs” – rural Arab (Palestinian) peasants; urban dwellers; Bedouin; and Arab Jews. I’m going to at least cover non-Jewish rural peasantry now; will try to come back to urban dwellers and Bedouin in another reply. I put Arab Jews in this category because 80% of Israel’s Jewish population are Mizrahim (Jews from the Middle East); however the majority of them arrived in the 1950s after the state was founded. While there is an interesting answer to write there about how Palestinian, Yemeni, and other Arab Ottoman Jewry found their life changed from pre- and post-statehood, it’s really out of my wheelhouse, and other flairs on this sub could better answer that.

By the 1940s, rural peasantry had already had their lives changed quite a bit. The Ottoman land tenure had reorganized and enclosed common musha’a land to mixed reception—some peasants benefited from gaining new private property, but often the land was reclassified as either state wasteland or to large absentee landowners. Those absentee landowners had been selling tracts to Jewish settlers for a few decades by the 1930s, although the by the 1940s British Mandatory government was nervous about the impacts of this and increased Jewish immigration on political stability, particularly during/after the Arab Revolt. The Peel Commission of 1937 called for the curbing of land sales, to mixed results. The British Mandate had also embarked on a huge number of infrastructural development projects – building new inter-city roads, expanding the railroad, mandatory town planning efforts including for small rural cities and villages, irrigation works – as well as agricultural technology training and extension schools, rural loan offices, and other rural political institutions targeted specifically at the Arab population. Many of these rural development efforts were less than successful – both industrial infrastructure and rural development sites were major targets for guerrilla attacks during the Arab revolt.

These land changes from the Ottoman and British resulted in what has been termed a “semi proletariatization” of the fellahin (peasant class): they still farmed, but also migrated to cities for supplementary work or sold their wage labor. While for the first decades of Zionist settlement Arab peasants were working as day laborers on Zionist agricultural farms, the Revolt and “Hebrew labor” organizing by Labor Zionists put many of them out of work, and landless and unemployed, many of them moved to the cities in search of work. Palestinian nationalism By the 1940s the fellahin (peasant class) was therefore in a tough spot, politically and economically. Some joined in class struggle with more urban based nationalist and/or Communist movements. In general as Salim Tamari and other social historians have contended, by the end of the British madnate and eve of war the fellahin “can no longer be characterised as a peasant society- that is, a society subsisting mainly on agriculture. The Arab rural sector in Israel was progressively incorporated into the Jewish economy and its peasants began to relate to it mainly as wage-workers.” (Tamari 1982, 180)

After 1949: The new Palestinian citizens of Israel

After 1949, an average Arab within Israel would find her life different depending on where she lived. Shira Robinson describes the post-war geographic distribution of Arabs within what was now Israel:

“When all was said and done—after Israel had conquered the Central Galilee against the Arab Liberation Army in late October 1948; wrested the Naqab, or Negev, desert from Egyptian control in January 1949; and annexed the Little Triangle, a narrow sliver of Jordanian territory that hugged its new armistice line to the east, in May—Palestinians inhabited only one hundred villages, one town (Nazareth), and fragments of five cities: Haifa, Ramla, Lydd (Hebraicized as Lod), Acre (‘Akka in Arabic, Akko in Hebrew), and Jaffa.” (2013, 30)

(Note she leaves Jerusalem out here because East Jerusalem was under Jordanian rule, and West Jerusalem city was entirely cleansed of its Palestinian population; a few of those 100 villages were in the western hinterlands of Jerusalem.) Most of the rural population was in the Galilee (in the north) and the Triangle (the center inland along the coastal plain) .

So for those Palestinians living within the new state borders, after 1949 they found neighboring villages or even their own depopulated. Those whose villages were depopulated became internally displaced people (IDP) and were pushed from rural areas to the cities or from small villages to larger ones. Some remained in their homes but have had physical destruction to infrastructure or farm land from military fighting, or were cut off from family members and other social and economic relations that were now within the West Bank or Gaza Strip. Politically, Palestinians within Israel were often doubly marginalized, both within Israeli society and from the larger Arab world.

Kimmerling and Migdal estimate that 15% of Palestinians within Israel were IDPs, and new state laws such as the 1950 Absentee Property Owner Act allowed the seizure of “abandoned” land by the state and in 1953 allowed it to be officially transferred to the state in deed. Additionally Israel continued expelling Palestinians to refugee camps for a few years after the war. Israel did not pass its citizenship laws until 1950 (the Law of Return) and 1952 (the Nationality Law). The Law of Return opened the possibility for citizenship for any Jewish person in the world; the Nationality Law declared that Arabs had to: have previously held Palestinian nationality under the British Mandate; be registered residents in Israel since 1949 and still registered and physically present in Israel in 1952 when the law went into effect; and had been physically present in Israel throughout that time “legally.” So Palestinians who had fled or been expelled during the war but had “illegally” crossed back over the border to their homes from 1949-1952 were ineligible for citizenship; some became permanent residents while others were deported. Those who were citizens were subject to martial law until 1966, which included curfews, movement and employment restrictions.

I will try to return to this to get to the 1970s-1990s!

Sources

El-Eini, Roza I.M. 2006. Mandated Landscape: British Imperial Rule in Palestine, 1929-1948. London: Routledge.

Kimmerling, Baruch, and Joel S. Migdal. 2003. The Palestinian People: A History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Robinson, Shira. 2013. Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Rouhana, Nadim N., ed. 2017. Israel and its Palestinian Citizens: Ethnic Privileges in the Jewish State. Cambridge University Press.

Tamari, Salim. 1982. “Factionalism and Class Formation in Recent Palestinian History.” In Studies in the Economic and Social History of Palestine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Roger Owen. MacMillan Press.