The history of Israel's relationship with its Arab minority during the country's founding decades, from 1948 to 1968, is often portrayed as a story of formal citizenship that concealed large-scale, state-sanctioned oppression in the form of military rule, land expropriation, and discrimination.Footnote 1 This article excavates an untold history of these two decades, a history of employment affirmative action targeting Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel,Footnote 2 which does not fit neatly into this story. Drawing on heretofore overlooked archival sources from Israel's State Archives (ISA), the Knesset Archive, the Labor Movement Archive (LMA), and the Historical Jewish Press, this article reveals that during Israel's founding decades, Israeli officials adopted minimum quotas for employing unskilled Arab workers in manual labor jobs; quotas for hiring educated Arabs in the civil service; requirements and incentives for hiring Arabs in government offices, Jewish organizations, and businesses; and earmarked jobs and established vocational training courses for the Arab population. Tracing the use of these mechanisms, not then called “affirmative action” but recognized as such today, to this period of control over a subjected population, complicates our understanding of both this chapter in Israel's history and of affirmative action more broadly.
Starting in the late 1950s, Israeli policy makers, motivated by a host of interests, adopted measures to promote the integration of Arab workers into the civil service and other predominantly Jewish institutions and businesses. Based on these findings, I propose a two-stage periodization of Israel's treatment of its Arab citizens during the first two decades of statehood: first, strict military control and exclusion, followed by, starting in 1957, a regime of “hierarchical inclusion”: gradual integration of the majority of Arabs as second-class subjects into the lower tiers of the Israeli economy, with only a minority integrated into higher tiers. Although these measures were not a coherent policy initiative, they nevertheless constituted a significant, yet overlooked, element of this transformation and of the state's approach toward the Arab population.
The article proceeds in three stages. First, it describes the different mechanisms that Israeli officials used to promote the inclusion of the Arab population into the national workplace. Although Israel never had a formal Jim Crow-like regime, Jews and Arabs were residentially, educationally and economically segregated after the 1948 War.Footnote 3 This separatist structure was mostly kept in place during the first decade of statehood, in which the military regime imposed limitations on the movement of Arabs within Israel and made employment outside the villages in which they lived very difficult. However, with the weakening of military restrictions in 1957 and the economic prosperity of those years, these measures were replaced by efforts to integrate Arabs into the national workforce across the civil service, private companies, and public entities. These policies included hiring quotas, earmarked jobs, vocational training, some preferential treatment in hiring, and stipends and accommodations for Arab university students, as well as requirements and incentives for hiring Arabs in private businesses and governmental offices. This description is supplemented by a survey of the “road not taken” of educational integration.
Second, this article uncovers the varied motivations of historical actors in adopting affirmative action measures. The two most dominant motivations were instrumental concerns about the security and stability of the young Jewish state and its economy. These were augmented by instrumental concerns about international legitimation and a desire to garner Arab votes, as well as by egalitarian motivations based on liberal or socialist ideologies. This multiple, and sometimes conflicting, host of interests and commitments led policy makers to adopt this set of techniques of employment inclusion, aimed sometimes at furthering and sometimes at countering Jewish domination.
Third, the article evaluates the effects of these measures. With more than 50% of Arab workers joining the “Jewish Sector” during the second decade,Footnote 4 affirmative action did improve their material conditions and economic integration. However, integration was limited to “hierarchical inclusion,” entailing that Arabs increasingly worked for and with Jews, rather than in their villages, but typically held low-paying, unskilled jobs. Only a small number of qualified Arabs were integrated into better-paying managerial and professional roles and into higher education.
This article, the first to focus on this topic and to provide a detailed description and analysis of these measures, adds an empirical contribution to the literature on the history, and legal history, of the relationship between the Israeli state and its Arab citizens. Legal scholars have neglected this important history, instead dating the beginning of Israel's affirmative action efforts to the 1990s, when appropriate representation requirements were formally adopted by the legislature and later affirmed and expanded by the Supreme Court.Footnote 5 Similarly, historians have thoroughly studied and debated the state's approach toward the Arab minority in its first decades, but have largely overlooked the measures described in this article and their significance.Footnote 6 More concretely, the historiographical debate on Israel's approach to the Arab population during its founding decades focuses on Israel's dual approach toward its Arab minority, debating the balance between its liberal and democratic commitments, on the one hand, and the state's Zionist, nationalist, or colonialist nature and its security concerns, on the other.Footnote 7 Some historians have seen Israel's early liberal commitments to the Arab population as a source of democratic legitimation,Footnote 8 but most have framed their work as the critical exposure of past wrongs. They often depict formal citizenship as concealing a colonial regime of Jewish domination,Footnote 9 and seek to explain how different social, political, economic, and legal mechanisms were used to sustain Jewish domination and control.Footnote 10 Although some have treated the state's policy as a well-orchestrated plan to sustain the subordination of the Arab population,Footnote 11 Ian Lustick, in his seminal book, proposed the structural framework of “control” to explain the stability of the Israeli regime and pointed to three sociopolitical mechanisms that played a role in keeping the Arab minority docile: the separation of the Arab and Jewish populations, the cultivation of Arab dependency, and the cooptation of the Arab elite.Footnote 12
The dominant narrative of control that details how the nation's first twenty years were marked by policies that secured Arabs’ subordinated position is insufficiently nuanced. The picture that emerges from the history this article tells is not of a contest between two approaches, but rather of a changing, multivocal, porous, and internally contradictory state.Footnote 13 Focused as they are on the stability of the regime over time and on recognizable tools of oppression, scholars have largely missed the state's deployment of affirmative action.Footnote 14 The few measures that have received scholarly attention were either dismissed as unrepresentative outliers, or been identified as efforts of cooptation of power brokers within Arab communities.Footnote 15 Yet, this article shows that the described measures did not solely target specific individual elites in order to gain their loyalty and cooperation, but rather worked more broadly to promote employment inclusion of different segments of the Arab workforce for a host of reasons and motivations.
By tracing changes in the state's employment policies over time and demonstrating the prevalence of affirmative action measures during the second decade, the article seeks to revise understanding of Israel's two decades of military control, often described as a monolithic block, into a more fragmented structure: a decade of military control and segregation followed by a second decade of subtler and more stable form of economic subordination. Doing so ties the argument to historical sociology literature on the history of Israel's labor market. This scholarship has described the Arab workers’ incorporation into Israel's segmented labor market in those years “as temporary and casual laborers in jobs characterized by low wages, poor work conditions, frequent violations of workers’ rights, and high occupational insecurity.''Footnote 16 I seek to modify this framework through the concept of “hierarchical inclusion,” which captures how a minority of the Arab population was actively integrated into the primary workforce and into higher education.Footnote 17
Finally, by employing the conceptual framework of affirmative action, the article argues that these measures are distinct from familiar measures understood to have coopted Arabs elites; in fact, these measures targeted varied segments of the Arab population and together amounted to an important part of Israel's policy in those years, the effects of which were indeterminate and plastic.Footnote 18 Affirmative action, however, is a loaded term. In contemporary political and scholarly debates over affirmative action, it is often associated with egalitarian commitments to redistribution and remedying past wrongs.Footnote 19 In contrast, for the purpose of this article, I define affirmative action not by its motivating rationale, but rather by the use of a specific set of techniques deployed today in Israel and other countries, commonly recognized as affirmative action: hiring quotas, marked tenders, and other forms of preferential treatment meant to promote the inclusion of disadvantaged groups into the workforce or higher education. This definition is intuitive and controversial at the same time, and, as such, I suggest that it creates a space to re-examine common assumptions about this tool and its contingent relationship to equality. It provides a framework for examining how affirmative action operates outside of its familiar historical context of struggles for equal citizenship, and demonstrates how affirmative action can serve more as a set of administrative tools encompassing a managerial form and logic rather than as measures with inherent egalitarian meaning.Footnote 20
The story I tell here is also of interest to those who study the contemporary relationship between Israel's Jewish majority and the Arab minority. In recent years, Israel's government has adopted nationalist policies and legislation, marginalizing the Arab minority and undermining its political rights and symbolic status.Footnote 21 However, much as in the past, the very same government has adopted large-scale employment affirmative action measures, including quotas, earmarked positions, and business incentivizing, for hiring Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel and promoting their inclusion in the national economy.Footnote 22 Tracing the roots of these affirmative action practices to the state's founding decades allows a new and more nuanced perspective on what is often mistakenly considered an unprecedented, bipolar era of economic inclusion and sociopolitical exclusion in Israel's approach to its Arab minority.Footnote 23
The Mechanisms: from Fighting Acute Unemployment to Promoting Employment Inclusion
In the decades before the inception of the state of Israel, the Arab and Jewish economies in Palestine were largely separated from one another. The inherent contradictions between the Labor-Zionist movement's national ideology and its socialist agenda created controversies over its approach to Arab workers beginning in the early twentieth century, with the first waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine. Yet, over time, the ideals of “Hebrew labor” (Avoda Ivrit) and the “conquest of labor” (Kibush Haavuda)—envisioning the establishment of a superior and independent Jewish economy, relying solely on Jewish labor accomplished by replacing Arab workers with Jewish workers—gained priority.Footnote 24 These ideals, developed by leaders of the second wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine (1904–14), Zachary Lockman explains, have come to occupy a central place in Labor-Zionist ideology and practice, and played an important role in promoting the Jewish establishment's strategies of exclusion and marginalization of Arab workers, both before and after the inception of the state.Footnote 25
The limited cases of economic cooperation between Jews and Arabs that predated the inception of the Israeli state were mostly dissolved with the outbreak of violence following the United Nations Partition Plan in November 1947, and with the inception of the state, Arabs and Jews were largely segregated residentially, educationally, and economically.Footnote 26 The approximately 160,000 Arabs who remained in the new country, comprising approximately 15% of Israel's population, were defeated and leaderless. Some had been uprooted from their villages, becoming “internal refugees,” while Arab refugees outside the borders of the state were prevented from returning to the homes they left or had been forced to leave in 1948.Footnote 27
David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister (1948–53; 1955–63), established the principle of mamlakhtiyut, a term that referred to, among other things, a form of civic affinity, and an obligation to ensure equality before the law for all citizens.Footnote 28 Indeed, in its proclamation of independence, Israel formally appealed to its Arab inhabitants to “preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.”Footnote 29 Shortly thereafter, Israel granted the Arab population—who would come to be known as “Israeli Arabs”—voting rights and formal citizenship. At the same time, Israel enacted massive land expropriation policies and placed Arab villages, towns, and cities under military control.Footnote 30 Military rule was explicitly put in place not only to secure the new state, but also to exert control over the Arab population and its movements. The military permit system restricted the movement of the Arab population, confined them to segregated areas of residence, limited their ability to work outside their villages, and left many of them unemployed for long periods of time.Footnote 31
It is against this background of formal citizenship and state-sanctioned oppression that this section details the early history of Israel's affirmative action. It shows how, in the first decade, while segregating the Arab population, the state in some episodes fought acute unemployment of the Arab sector. In the second, however, officials adopted mechanisms commonly recognized today as affirmative action to integrate Arabs into the national workforce. The Hebrew word that primary sources commonly use to describe these integrative efforts is shiluv. Although this word literally means “integration,” in practice it referred to two distinct types of economic intervention. The first type involved efforts to fight unemployment by incorporating Arab workers as blue-collar laborers in the national workforce, especially through work relief programs (Avoda Yezuma), but not into Jewish workplaces. The second type, adopted in the wake of the economic prosperity of the late 1950s and early 1960s and with the weakening of military rule, sought to integrate the Arab population, especially educated Arabs, into the public sector and other predominantly Jewish institutions and businesses through the use of quotas, earmarked job openings, job training, and preferential treatment.
During Israel's first decade, until 1957, the military regime protected not only the security of the state, but also the ideals of “Hebrew labor” and the “conquest of labor,” adhering to the then-central Socialist-Zionist ideology aimed at establishing an independent and superior Jewish economy.Footnote 32 Yet, at the same time the state also made efforts to fight acute unemployment in the Arab sector. The Ministry of Minority Affairs, which the Provisional Government established on May 15, 1948, undertook the earliest efforts. Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit, an Arab-speaking Jew born in Israel to a Moroccan-family, became the first and only minister of minority affairs. Sheetrit conceived of his ministry's role as “promising the Arabs who live among us equal rights, allow them a dignified existence, and promote their cultural and economic rehabilitation.”Footnote 33 In its brief, 14-month existence, the ministry was charged with the authority to “investigate the social and economic problems” of the Arab population and to “initiate structural actions in these areas.”Footnote 34 It promoted policies aimed at the economic rehabilitation of the Arab sector and the reconstruction of government services that would allow the Arab population to reestablish a “normal life” in the aftermath of the 1948 War.Footnote 35 It secured loans for Arab farmers, sent agriculture instructors to Arab villages to train the residents, and worked to integrate Arab workers “into the productive work cycle,” mainly in agriculture and other manual labor.Footnote 36 Examples include the establishment of voluntary “employment camps” where Arabs worked and sometimes lived, as well as employment centers in Arab villages to direct local Arab job seekers to available jobs, mostly in the agricultural sector.Footnote 37
In June 1949, Ben-Gurion dissolved the Ministry of Minority Affairs, and instead he appointed an advisor for Arab affairs to the Prime Minister (“the Advisor”) to advise on policy matters relating to the Arab population and coordinate the work of the various bodies involved with the Arab minority in each office. According to Ben-Gurion, the official reason for closing the ministry was that “. . . there is no need for it. The Arabs will not be a minority; rather they will be citizens.”Footnote 38 Some scholars have seen the dissolution of the office as evidence of the domination of the “security approach” to the Arab minority over Israel's liberal commitments.Footnote 39 However, an alternate interpretation is that nothing was resolved or decided in 1949, and there was not a consolidation of any one approach. Instead, at this moment, a multitude of interests, commitments, and approaches coexisted. While the state exerted military and land expropriation policies to promote certain goals, it simultaneously pursued affirmative action measures, sometimes to further those very same goals.
The first decade saw sporadic attempts to battle unemployment in the Arab population. These efforts, a 1951 report by the Ministry of Labor reported, included “placing Arabs in governmental jobs . . . allocating special budgets to create jobs, and designating special jobs, such as olive picking and other agricultural jobs to the Arab sector, as well as promoting their integration into governmental positions in forestry, trains, and transportation.”Footnote 40 Similarly, the minister of labor designated work relief programs for the Arab population, setting minimum quotas of Arab workers to be employed in different projects, and allocating a minimum number of paid work days to which they were entitled.Footnote 41 These jobs were mostly manual, low-paying, and part-time, and were meant to fight acute unemployment and provide a basic standard of living, but not integration into the Jewish workplace.Footnote 42
After the 1956 Sinai War and the Kafr Qasim massacre, however, when both the state and its Arab population came to realize that the “other side” was not going anywhere, labor policies began to change.Footnote 43 Officials turned toward adopting longer-term policies and more robust action plans for the Arab population. The gradual easing of military rule, the robust economic growth of the late 1950s, and the sharp decrease in Jewish unemployment starting in 1957 enabled the state to put in place various affirmative action measures to integrate Arab workers into the Jewish workforce.Footnote 44
In 1957, Mapai, Israel's governing party from its establishment until 1977, formed the Committee for Arab Affairs.Footnote 45 Although this committee did not have any official state mandate, it did play a dominant role in shaping government policy. This quasi-official committee discussed the so-called “problems of the Arab minority,” designed policies to address these problems, and made policy recommendations to Mapai. The recommendations were adopted and then implemented, albeit often incompletely, by the government. In 1958, the Committee for Arab Affairs declared that neither deportation nor assimilation of the Arab population, both of which remained on the table during the state's first years, were feasible options, and that the time had come for the government to adopt a liberal approach embracing the partial integration of the Arab minority.Footnote 46 Addressing concerns regarding the development of an independent Arab economy, Mapai's first action plan in 1958 sought to “bring as many Israeli Arabs as possible into positive circles of development and production” and to develop the “economic cooperation between the Arab and Jewish sectors.”Footnote 47 Subsequently, Mapai aimed to “bring gradual integration of the Arab population in [the] social, cultural and economic life of the state, through optimal and complete equality of rights and obligations of all Israeli citizens (without ignoring, not for a minute, security problems).”Footnote 48 Similarly, the advisor for Arab affairs’ 1959 policy guidelines suggested that Arabs should be integrated into the Israeli economy, and that educated Arabs should be integrated into the public sector, even if it entailed creating new positions.Footnote 49 These efforts included two types of measures. The first aimed to integrate the general Arab population into mostly blue-collar, unskilled jobs in Jewish-owned businesses in mixed cities and in the public sector. The second, even more similar to the affirmative action policies adopted today, was meant to integrate educated Arabs into the civil service.
A 1967 report by the Knesset Labor Committee noted that “more was being done to treat the problem of unemployment in the Arab sector than in the Jewish one.”Footnote 50 Although the accuracy of this statement is doubtful, the state did undertake several proactive efforts to integrate unskilled Arab laborers into the national workforce. First, the Ministry of Labor continued to set minimum quotas for Arab employment in public works projects, sometimes in a higher percentage than their corresponding proportion of the general population.Footnote 51 For example, in 1966, the ministry proposed setting quotas of approximately 2,000–3,000 jobs for Arabs in cities with mixed populations.Footnote 52
A second measure for fighting unemployment in the Arab sector and promoting integration into Jewish-owned business was the establishment of state-funded vocational training courses. These courses trained Arabs in skilled occupations that were in high demand at the time, including specialized sewing, machine operation, carpentry, and teaching.Footnote 53 While Arab teachers were employed within the segregated Arab education system, other courses were designed to enable Arab workers to participate in the general workforce in mixed and Jewish cities. For example, in 1963, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion reported
[T]he government efforts to provide the Arab and Druze youth with professions, through professional schools and vocational trainings provided by the ministry of Employment were fruitful already. . . Thousands of young Arabs were integrated into professional jobs in industrial factories, starting in large factories, such as refineries, the Dead Sea factories and others, as well as smaller workshops and cooperatives. These workers enjoy fair working conditions, equal to their Jewish peers. The government will broaden the professional trainings of Arabs and Druze.Footnote 54
After the recession of 1965–66, in a few cases, the state pursued industrialization of Arab areas as a third measure for increasing Arab employment.Footnote 55 A 1967 policy plan explained the goal of building state- or Jewish-owned factories in or near Arab population centers that would employ both Jews and Arabs.Footnote 56 For example, the Kristal soft drink plant committed to employing approximately 125 workers as part of its scheduled reopening. A carpet factory was recruited to open a branch in Nazareth, committing to employ 100–200 Arab workers.Footnote 57 Other Arab workers from Nazareth were employed in Haifa, Afula, and other neighboring Jewish or mixed municipalities, mostly in Jewish-owned businesses.Footnote 58 In addition, government committees and officials endeavored to convince business owners to employ more Arabs.Footnote 59
Attempted recruitment of Arabs into the Histadrut, a Jewish-Zionist worker's organization and national centralized labor union, constituted another approach for integrating Arab workers into the national workforce.Footnote 60 The Histadrut, founded in 1920, owned a number of enterprises and, for a time, became the largest employer in the country. The clash between the organization's Zionist aspirations and its socialist agenda created controversies over its approach to Arab workers even before the birth of the state. As Sarah Ozacky-Lazar notes, during the first two decades of Israel's statehood, the Histadrut gradually included Arab workers, while adhering to its Zionist agenda.Footnote 61 In 1953, the organization decided to allow Arabs to become members of its affiliated professional unions. The leaders of the Histadrut at the time understood this to be “a step in the direction of full and fast integration of the general Arab sector [yishuv] into Israel's general population, on the basis of complete equality of rights and duties.”Footnote 62 However, only in 1959 did the Histadrut's assembly decide to admit Arab workers as full and equal members of the organization.Footnote 63 Although the integration of Arab workers into the Histadrut was far from smooth, it is noteworthy that proactive efforts were made to promote the process.Footnote 64 Furthermore, as the owner and operator of a number of enterprises, the Histadrut became a central force in promoting the integration of the Arab population into the workforce, endeavoring to assure them equal pay and social benefits.Footnote 65 For example, the organization made concrete efforts to integrate Arab workers into its economic enterprises such as Tnuva, Israel's largest dairy company, and to increase Arab representation in the Histadrut's elected bodies.Footnote 66 Finally, in 1966, the Histadrut council voted to eliminate the word “Hebrew” from its title in order to symbolically include all workers in Israel.Footnote 67
Michael Shalev refers to some of the Histadrut's efforts to incorporate Arab workers—such as providing travel permits and directing a pool of “patronage jobs at its disposal to young Arab ‘keymen’ on the rise in their communities”—as efforts of “cooptation and persuasion” directed at serving the interests of the state, as well as strengthening the position of Mapai in Arab communities.Footnote 68 Yet, by describing the Histadrut's efforts as one part of a robust continuum of affirmative action measures employed by different state actors in those years, I suggest that although cooptation and fostering loyalty can explain some of these efforts, they certainty cannot account for the multiple techniques aimed at integrating different segments of the Arab population.
These measures to integrate blue-collar workers were supplemented by efforts to integrate educated Arabs into the civil service. A 1957 survey conducted by the Civil Service Commission on non-Jewish civil service employees found that, whereas non-Jews accounted for 10.7% of the population, they held only 3.5% of civil service positions. Of these, most were low-level positions. However, the commission also reported that “special efforts” were being made by different offices to appoint more Arabs.Footnote 69 This involved direct affirmative action measures to integrate educated Arabs, meaning mainly high school graduates, into the public sector. First, in 1958, the Committee for Arab Affairs decided that the government, the Histadrut, and other public institutions should “employ, in the very near future, 100 educated Arabs,” while also asking for “permanent quotas for each office and [ensuring that] this will be done in three to four months.”Footnote 70 A news report later that year stated that the government had been able to arrange for seventy Arab high school and college graduates to be employed in the administration and other professions.Footnote 71 Similarly, in 1962, the Prime Minster's Office required different governmental offices, along with public and private institutions, to earmark a few positions for educated Arabs.Footnote 72 In 1961, the Ministry of Finance published an advertisement—written in Arabic—for non-Jewish high school graduates to apply for certain jobs at the ministry. It then hired twenty-five Arabs. The Ministry of Education published a similar request.Footnote 73 Later that year, the Ministry of Finance published another advertisement for thirty positions earmarked for educated Arabs throughout the country, which a month later it reported having filled.Footnote 74 Suggestions were also made to make proactive efforts to employ educated Arabs and to allocate a “minimum percentage of public sector employment” to Arabs.Footnote 75
A similar measure entailed using preferential hiring practices for Arab candidates and workers. For example, in a letter from 1967, the Office of the Advisor for Arab Affairs in Haifa suggested that the city's governmental offices should allow educated Arabs who did not pass the mandatory examination to retake the examination a year or more into the job. The office explained that major efforts were being made to train and integrate these workers and that, despite their failures in the examinations, they were doing well on the job.Footnote 76 Another example concerned the judiciary. Guy Lurie portrays the events leading to the appointment of three Arab judges between 1968 and 1969, doubling the total of three Arab judges serving in Israel's courtrooms in the 20 years before 1968.Footnote 77 Most relevantly, he describes a letter written in 1967 by the then-president of the District Court of Haifa, Ya'acov Azulai, to Supreme Court Justice Moshe Landau, regarding the lack of Arab judges. In the letter, Azulai asserts the necessity to appoint Arab judges, which he says should be given priority over consideration of merit. According to Lurie, officials in the judiciary were concerned with the lack of Arab judges on the bench and were willing to ease merit-based requirements for Arab candidates in order to promote their appointment.Footnote 78
Second, and equally important, was the pressure government officials and committees placed on various public and private sector entities to employ a certain number of educated Arabs in specific offices or industries. For example, the 1962 5-year plan by the Arab Affairs Committee demanded that “the Civil Service Commission will ensure the employment of Arab engineers, doctors, lawyers, clerks, and laborers in all fields of work: industry, commerce, government, municipal, private and join services, with no discrimination and with special and directed attention to solving the urgent problem of employment for high school and higher-education [Arab] graduates as well as liberal professions.”Footnote 79 The following year, a newspaper article reported that “the Advisor for Arab Affairs reached out to tens of [Jewish-owned] industrial factories, commercial companies, and public and private institutions, requesting [that] they seek out educated Arabs [to fill] different clerical and administrative positions… Many of the managers they approached expressed their willingness to employ educated Arabs in their factories.”Footnote 80 In another instance, during a Knesset discussion about the unemployment of educated Arabs, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion stated: “I approached different offices that are able to employ educated Arabs. . . [It is] what the government can and should do: I believe it will be done. I gave the order to the representatives of the different offices to vigorously approach this, so in each government office a few suitable educated Arabs will be employed.”Footnote 81
Third, training courses also served to increase the integration of educated Arabs into the public and private sectors. In a 1964 letter from the advisor to the Office of the Prime Minister, the advisor explained that, although much of the educated Arab population was already employed by the government, many were not hired to fill the positions they were interested in. The solutions, the advisor explained, were twofold: “A) Opening special professional courses for young Arab and Druze which will train them to serve in different positions in the government and elsewhere. B) Raise the level of education in Arab villages.”Footnote 82 These training courses provided full professional training in social work, accounting, nursing, teaching, and clerical work.Footnote 83 Other initiatives included establishing Hebrew language courses and vocational training courses to prepare Arabs for jobs in the public sector.Footnote 84 Special courses were also opened to prepare Arabs for Israel's civil service examinations.Footnote 85 In another report, the advisor noted that educated Arabs who managed to obtain government jobs often failed the civil service examination, and would be allowed to take the examination after 1 or 2 years on the job, thus providing them time to prepare by becoming more fluent in Hebrew and better integrated into society.Footnote 86
Efforts to increase the number of Arabs receiving higher education and training opportunities for skilled professions are also noteworthy. In 1958, the Ministry of Health sought to reach a “significant percentage” of Arab women studying nursing and to recruit Arab women for nursing positions.Footnote 87 The Ministry of Education distributed stipends to Arab students and established teacher training centers for Arabs.Footnote 88 More generally, in terms of higher education, the percentage of Arabs among all students rose from 0.6% (forty-six students) in 1957 to 1.7% (607 students) in 1970.Footnote 89 Although this increase can largely be attributed both to natural population growth and to an increase in Arabs graduating from high school, universities also made efforts to integrate Arab students into higher education. According to a 1959 news article, the Hebrew University gave some “positive discrimination [aflia letova] in their [the Arabs’] favor. Not just in housing. But also in admissions and the distribution of stipends. Six years ago, there were very few of them and the Ministry of Education wanted to encourage them. Special assistance funds were established.”Footnote 90 Likewise, in 1965, a Ministry of Education official explained that at the Technion (the Israel Institute of Technology) “Arab students experienced ‘positive discrimination’ [aflia letova], similar to that experienced by [Jewish] pupils from Mizrahi countries. This [positive] discrimination involves receiving special stipends from special funds designated for students of this type only, and in the policy of B-norm in the annual Seker exam.”Footnote 91 The state, Histadrut, and private organizations also distributed grants, stipends, and loans to some Arab students for academic pursuits.Footnote 92 Even more significant was Prime Minister Levi Eshkol's 1963 declaration of his commitment to integrating educated Arabs into the public sector. He announced that his government would create a fund to help Arab students in need complete their studies.Footnote 93
By contrast, the Israeli government's attempt at decreasing deep educational disparities between the Jewish and Arab population—that predated the creation of Israel—were non-integrative.Footnote 94 The Committee for Arab Affairs’ 1960 plan proposed to establish integrated elementary schools in cities with a mixed population of Jews and Arabs. At this time, the committee was chaired by Abba Hushi, who was also the mayor of Haifa, one of the largest mixed cites. The proposal also called for integrating all high schools, both academic and professional, as well as teacher training seminars.Footnote 95 These schools were to be “Israeli,” which, according to Hushi, meant that they would be mainly Jewish schools with some accommodations for the study of Arabic language, literature, and religion during designated hours.Footnote 96 Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit added that this solution would encourage the Jewish children to learn Arabic, Arab culture, and Arab history, and would enable children to grow up together.Footnote 97 Even Moshe Dayan, the prior chief of the military and the Ministry of Agriculture, stated that Israel was “not a binational state,” but accepted the proposal.Footnote 98Another committee member opposed this proposal and raised Israel's fundamental commitment to allow Arabs to have Arab-speaking schools, as well as the possible objections from Jewish parents.Footnote 99 When the committee revisited this proposal in 1962, Advisor for Arab Affairs Uri Lubrani stated that the routine of separation would be very hard to break. Instead, he suggested that “maximal integration of Arab and Jewish schools should be achieved – where possible.”Footnote 100 Yet even this more practical version of an integrative policy was never adopted.
Eventually, a separatist approach overcame the others. The Committee for Arab Education explained this position, according to which, “the natural place for the Arab students is in Arab-speaking schools,” although the government “should not object to Arab children learning in Hebrew schools.” An exception was made for professional training schools, which more directly led to economic integration.Footnote 101 This separatist logic, the report detailed in a following section, was not understood to be in opposition to “the ideal of integrating the Arab population into the life of the state, by giving them the opportunity and ability to live and earn in mixed cities and pure Arab regions. Their education should be directed at professions that might make it easier for them to economically integrate into the state.”Footnote 102 Furthermore, it continued, “feelings of equality and good relations between the two nations should be encouraged, yet social intimacy should be avoided as it might lead to unwelcome developments, such as mixed marriages.”Footnote 103 Instead, efforts related to education concentrated on improving and alleviating inequality in schools’ physical conditions and educational offerings, and on raising enrollment levels. The measures adopted included building more Arabic-speaking schools, and more classrooms in Arab villages and in Arab neighborhoods in mixed cities.Footnote 104 The integration of the Arab population to “the life of the state” was, as this section demonstrates, economic, not educational, residential, or social.
The Five Motivations that Led Israeli Policymakers to Adopt Employment Affirmative Action Measures
Policies adopted by Israeli officials during the first and especially during the second decade of statehood that are recognizable today as affirmative action, were not necessarily motivated by egalitarianism, but instead by multiple and often contradictory motives. Of course, the officials’ motivations and their justifications may not have aligned. Yet because the source material reflects internal, private deliberations, it suggests that these officials were likely speaking rather candidly. These discussions therefore offer a unique opportunity to learn about the conflicting rationales that motivated Israeli officials during the founding decades of the state.
Internal governmental reports and discussions of policies reveal four types of instrumental rationales for adopting affirmative action measures: ensuring security and social order, advancing economic growth, gaining international legitimacy, and garnering the Arab vote. Also discernible is a fifth type of motivation, revolving around reaching egalitarian ideological goals. Concerns for the security of the young Jewish state and the stability of the regime, as well as aspirations for national economic growth, were the most dominant justifications raised in discussions about affirmative action. Often, however, the same measure was motivated by mixed rationales. Although egalitarian sentiments were expressed in many cases, they rarely stood as an independent motivation for promoting employment affirmative action.
Security
It is well documented that security concerns and a perceived need to maintain stability played a major role in the state's approach to the Arab minority during its first two decades.Footnote 105 It is less known, however, that security considerations were behind officials’ decisions not only to enact oppressive measures, but also to adopt inclusionary measures. These security-oriented rationales were especially dominant during the first decade, when the status of the Arab minority as citizens was most fragile and unstable. Reducing unemployment and raising the material status of the Arab minority was a way of managing the crisis and the hostile population, preventing political turmoil, and, more generally, maintaining public order and the stability of the newly established Jewish regime. Policy makers acted under the assumption that the Arab population was a security threat, and that steps for improving their material conditions needed to be taken in order to prevent any escalation of the conflict.
Reuven Bareket, the architect of Mapai's first 1958 action plan, articulated the security approach clearly. The Arab population, he explained, had connections to hostile foreign populations from Arab countries, and “the majority of the Arab sector is hostile to the state.”Footnote 106 He then presented three possible approaches for dealing with this situation: “displacement, assimilation or liberalism.” Bareket acknowledged that there would be no displacement, and exhorted that hopes for assimilation should also be abandoned.Footnote 107 Consequently, he argued that the state must “deal with the Arab minority with a liberal line of policy.” Furthermore, in order to fight dangerous separatist trends in Arab society, he declared that, “the goal should be integration—not complete, but more or less acceptable—of the Arab sector in all aspects of life.”Footnote 108 Making the case for promoting employment integration, Bareket explained that, “if we create cooperation between ten Jews and ten Arabs, these ten Arabs then become a cell of resistance to irredentist activity.”Footnote 109 Bareket further argued that, “the more the economic interests of the Arab sector are tied to and aligned with those of the state, the more its responsibility for the security of the state will grow.”Footnote 110
Israeli officials on the Mapai Committee for Arab Affairs believed that an Arab population that was increasingly integrated into the national labor force would be less susceptible to identifying with rival Arab states. This would therefore make them more loyal, and render the state less vulnerable to incitement and takeover by hostile forces within and outside Israel's borders.Footnote 111 For example, a 1961 report by the Government Committee for Problems of Employment and Professional Training of Arab Youth recommended implementing a set of affirmative action measures, including prioritizing opening employment centers in Arab towns and integrating Arab youth into previously Jewish professional training courses, which “could dissolve the bitterness of the Arabs” and “distance Arab youth from the devastating effects of underground organizations.”Footnote 112 Its authors feared that poor conditions could become a “source of hatred.”Footnote 113 Similarly, in a policy plan that was largely adopted by the government, the advisor for Arab affairs explained that the state must integrate the Arab minority, to “decrease as much as possible the formulation of an independent dangerous sector . . . . [T]his will not make them loyal citizens, but with time, it will decrease open animosity and its explicit manifestation.”Footnote 114 Rising unemployment was also considered dangerous, as it created negative attitudes toward the state.Footnote 115 Aharon Beker, Chairman of the Histadrut from 1961 to 1969, articulated this view clearly, arguing that the state had to integrate the Arab worker into the national economy, “so he would bear responsibility to ensure and promote its security.”Footnote 116
Others advocated employment affirmative action as a way to promote security and order by fostering loyalty, not via simple material relief, but through the cultivation of a kind of partnership between the Arabs and the state, or at least the appearance of one. For example, an official in the Histadrut explained that “in order to prevent the danger that the minorities left in the state will come to hate it and fight it, [the state] must do everything in order to integrate them, in a way of constrictive organic integration, on the basis of equal rights and duties… [O]nly such a regime can bring a minimal chance for moral change in the Arabs’ views about themselves and us, and only it can open a crack for a relationship of true peace and mutual benefit.”Footnote 117 Moshe Sharett, who was prime minister from 1954 to 1955, between Ben-Gurion's two terms, articulated the same logic. Sharett acknowledged that the Arabs’ situation “is difficult” because they “feel themselves to be residents of Israel,” their birthplace. Yet “they are nationally connected to Arab nations outside of Israel.” Therefore, Israel faced a choice: “allow external influences to take over, or must we strengthen our ties with them?” Sharett believed that education, “equality and understanding” would allow Arabs to “grow closer to us” and push them away, for instance, from the allure of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.Footnote 118
In contrast to the articulated goal of cultivating loyalty by bringing the two communities closer together, another method for enhancing the state's security was to try to prevent the political consolidation of the Arab minority into one national Arab movement by creating divisions between the community's different ethnic groups: Muslims, Druze, Bedouin, and Christians.Footnote 119 One common method used to achieve this goal was breaking up the territorial continuity of Arab communities by building Jewish settlements among them.Footnote 120 Another method involved granting preferential treatment to some subsectors within the Arab population in order to cultivate independent and conflicting interests in each community. As Reuven Bareket explained, in order to secure Israel, it must “cultivate within each sector [within the Arab population] its own sectorial interests, by positive discrimination (aflia letova) and preferential treatment.”Footnote 121 The most prominent illustration of this approach can be seen with respect to the Druze community, whose members enjoyed a somewhat favorable status.Footnote 122
Economy
Another leading rationale for adopting employment affirmative action for the Arab community at that time was the health and prosperity of the national economy. In the first decade, officials working to promote the full employment of Jewish immigrants were concerned with competition between Jewish and Arab workers, and therefore worked to exclude Arabs from the national workforce.Footnote 123 However, with the economic prosperity of the late 1950s, and when unemployment among Jewish works was very low, the complete segregation of Arabs from the labor market was no longer an attractive option for the Israeli establishment. Officials interested in the development and flourishing of the state's economy realized that unemployment and the underdevelopment of certain sectors could become unmanageable and would hold back the entire economy.Footnote 124 An additional factor, albeit one less openly discussed, was that the integration of Arab workers into the workforce, especially in the production and construction sectors, could provide cheap labor to support the development of the state's infrastructure.Footnote 125
The economic rationales for taking affirmative action measures were not only these familiar utilitarian ones. Israeli policy makers also began to take an interest in integrating the Arab population into the national economy in order to dismantle the independent Arab economy that predated the establishment of Israel. In 1959 the prime minister's advisor for Arab affairs contended that the integration of Arabs into the state's economy was necessary “in order to prevent the creation of an independent Arab economy that would strengthen Arab autonomy.”Footnote 126 Integration, it was further explained, would prevent future competition between the Arab and Jewish economies.Footnote 127 Furthermore, during the second decade of statehood, there was a growing belief among government officials that the Arab sector had accumulated significant wealth. Therefore, policy makers thought that development, integration, and cooperation would promote consumerism in the Arab sector, which would, in turn, lead to the transfer of funds “back” to the state.Footnote 128 For example, the prime minister's advisor for Arab affairs wrote that any attempt to circulate funds accumulated in the Arab sector back into the state's economy must include modernization to support Arab consumption.Footnote 129
International Legitimacy
A third type of motivation for affirmative action involved external considerations, mainly improving the perception of Israel in the eyes of the international community. Israel's democratic and moral commitments to equality were sometimes articulated by Israeli officials as an independent rationale for adopting affirmative action measures. However, these commitments were also often mentioned as a way to bolster international legitimacy, as the international community became increasingly concerned with anti-Arab discrimination over the first two decades. In 1958, advocating for a series of affirmative steps, the chair of Mapai's Committee for Arab Affairs noted that “not only non-Jewish public opinion has become interested in the Arab problem in Israel, but also certain circles of the global Jewish community . . . . They are starting to show concern and dissatisfaction with the way we are handling this problem.”Footnote 130 Particularly noteworthy is Ben-Gurion's 1960 explanation of the inherently contradictory poles of the Arab problem. The first, he explained, “is the character [the state] needs to present to the world—a principle of equal rights and democracy. The second aspect is the security of the state. . . .” This contradiction, he explained, “can be minimized by taking the right policy.”Footnote 131 Ben-Gurion then listed a series of integrative measures that could minimize this contradiction, including the integration of Arabs into Mapai itself, the government, the workforce, and even the Jewish kibbutzim and villages.Footnote 132
The Arab Vote
During the first decade of Israel's statehood, the Arab population's main avenues for political activity were threefold: satellite Arab parties affiliated with Mapai, Mapam (The United Workers Party), and Maki (the Israeli Communist Party). In 1959, El-Ard, a pan-Arab national movement, was formed by a group of Arab intellectuals with the aspiration of bringing equality to all inhabitants of Israel and finding a fair solution to the Palestinian problem. Although eventually blocked from competing in the national elections, El-Ard, like Mapam and Maki, adhered to egalitarian ideologies and criticized Mapai for its approach toward the Arab minority and the prolonged military regime.Footnote 133 At this point, Mapai started using affirmative action measures in its fight over the Arab vote.Footnote 134 For example, the advisor for Arab affairs explained that parties other than Mapai were buying the Arab vote or providing other benefits in exchange for it. Mapai, the advisor asserted, was losing the Arab vote. Therefore, he recommended that the party should “gradually integrate Arabs within its fold.”Footnote 135 Similarly, in the discussion regarding the integration of Arabs into a youth leaders’ seminar in 1962, one official explained that, without integration, the party would be abandoning the youth, who would soon become voters, to the devastating influences of Maki and Mapam.Footnote 136
Egalitarian Aspirations
Although there was no unified egalitarian ideology supporting affirmative action, egalitarian motivations were nonetheless significant during the first and second decade. Liberal and socialist morality led officials to pursue more egalitarian policies and, in some cases, to support affirmative action measures. Some of the universal moral arguments were rooted in liberal aspirations for equal citizenship. As early as September 1948, Israel's first minister of the interior promised the Arab minority that there will be “a single constitution for all inhabitants of Israel. The Jews have suffered too much to allow themselves to deal unjustly with Israel's Arab citizens.”Footnote 137 Yizhak Ben Zvi, Israel's second president, advocated for the inclusion of the Arab minority into society. In a similar vein, he explained that especially after what the Jews had suffered, they must get used to being just rulers.Footnote 138 In another instance, Ben Zvi declared that the idea of removing the Arabs from Israel “is in opposition to the entire democratic and Jewish character of our state,” and that the only option was to work for the integration of “Muslims, Christians, and Druze as citizens with equal rights and as communities with equal rights in the state.”Footnote 139 In 1959, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion explained that the state “should help the Arab intelligentsia adapt to the national economy and governmental and private clerkship . . . not because . . . it will bring peace with our neighbors . . . but because they are citizens of Israel and they deserve the same entitlements as any other Israeli citizen.”Footnote 140 In 1960, he further explained that there is “antisemitism” in Israel against Arabs, and in order to denunciate it, there is a need “to welcome Arabs to the party, to the Histadrut, to the Kibbutzim—as members and as employees. And not just on election night, we need to welcome them [the Arabs] in all governmental offices, with only one or two exceptions, to welcome them to all businesses, to all institutions, Arab teachers should teach in Hebrew schools and Hebrew teachers should teach in Arab schools.”Footnote 141 In other instances, arguments made mostly by Mapam members emphasized the socialist commitments of fairness and equality for members of the working class.Footnote 142
Reflecting on the coexistence of these contradictory motivations and their manifestation in conflicting policies of economic inclusion and social exclusion, in 1962 Moshe Dayan said that “when it comes to security we cannot allow full equal rights, but in other fields of life, probably not education and such, but in the economic field—they are equal to Jews. But between this formula and its formation in real life, the gap is huge . . . for this, we need to take from one and give to the other. Because equality means equality.”Footnote 143
Effects: From Exclusion to Hierarchical Inclusion
Thus far, this article has demonstrated that the state employed different mechanisms seeking to promote the inclusion of the Arab population into the national workforce during Israel's first and especially second decade, for various and sometime contradictory reasons. This section tries to assess the effects of these mechanisms on inequality between the Arab minority and the Jewish majority during those years. Given the overall stability and persistence of the control framework over the Arab population during the state's first two decades, and in light of the sustained subordination of the Arab minority, it would seem that affirmative action measures simply served the regime,Footnote 144 or at the very least, that these measures did not disrupt the oppressive regime that clearly persisted long thereafter.Footnote 145 Although some elements of this explanation ring true, a more nuanced understanding is that these mechanisms did not simply threaten or sustain the status quo.Footnote 146 Instead, they were part of a wider transformation, from complete workforce segregation and strict military rule in the first decade of statehood, to a more integrated economic subordination during the second.
With the inception of the state and after the end of the 1948 War, Arabs and Jews in Israel were largely segregated in every aspect of life: residential, educational, and employment. More than 90% of the Arab population lived in separate villages or towns.Footnote 147 The schools, which were completely segregated during the British Mandate over Palestine, remained that way after 1948. This segregation was not imposed by a formal Jim Crow-like regime, but instead was a reflection of separate areas of residency as well as a result of recurring decisions by state officials to facilitate Arab-speaking schools for the Arab population.Footnote 148 Pursuing the Zionist ideal of Hebrew Labor, prior to the establishment of the state, the Arab and Jewish labor markets were also largely separated. Although there were some cases of cooperation between Arabs and Jews during the British Mandate, these mostly dissolved with the outbreak of violence following the United Nations Partition Plan in November 1947.Footnote 149
This separatist structure persisted until 1957. Until then, Yoram Ben-Porath noted, high rates of unemployment in the Jewish sector, caused mainly by the influx of Jewish immigrants in the early 1950s, led the Israeli government to continue protecting the Zionist ideal of “Hebrew Labor” and limiting the ability of Arabs to work outside their villages and compete with Jewish immigrants striving for jobs. This was mainly done by the military's permit system.Footnote 150 Michael Shalev adds that “[n]ot only was the political constellation at the elite level in support of binational class solidarity rather feeble; but on the ground, in the labor market arena, there were powerful forces in the first decade of sovereignty favoring . . . [the] strategy of Arab exclusion.”Footnote 151 And indeed, as this article showed, measures adopted during the first decade mostly sought to fight acute Arab unemployment and integrate Arabs into the workforce, but were generally not directed at integrating them into predominantly Jewish institutions and businesses or the civil service.
Yet, starting in 1957, although educational and residential segregation continued, the state began to move away from the separatist structure of the labor market. Scholars show how, with the economic prosperity and high rate of employment in the Jewish sector, the limitations on movement and the enforcement of employment segregation by the military were significantly eased in those years.Footnote 152 Various affirmative action measures to integrate Arab workers into the national workforce, and specifically into the civil service and Jewish-run institutions and businesses, were important policies toward this same goal.
A massive integration of Arab workers into the national economy appears to have occurred in the second decade of Israel's statehood.Footnote 153 Between 1959 and 1968, the number of Arabs working for state or Jewish-owned industries, rather than in Arab villages, increased from 48,000 to 82,800.Footnote 154 Although in 1959, 20% of Arab workers were employed outside their villages, in 1966, 50% of Arabs were employed outside their villages, mostly in Jewish-owned business, kibbutzim and other Jewish municipalities, and the civil service.Footnote 155 Ben-Porath emphasized the rapid nature of this change in the mobility and integration of Arab workers into the Jewish sector.Footnote 156 The second decade witnessed the convergence of what had previously been two separate economies: one Arab, mainly agricultural, and confined to Arab villages, and the other Jewish and diverse. Eventually, half of the Arab workers would be employed by Jewish-owned businesses and by the state, mostly without changing their place of residency.
However, this integration was not equally distributed along the socioeconomic ladder. In Haifa, Abba Hushi explained, in the early 1960s, Arabs living outside the city commuted in for work and “took over entire professions” such as gardening, construction, repair, welding, and refineries. He estimated that “900 Arab women work in household jobs.” But “Arab high school graduates” found that the labor “market is closed.” Thus, he argued: “[W]e need a transition . . . We need to open the market to Arab workers. We need not just to open it, but to create active equality. We need to work so they would be employed by Solel-Boneh [at the time the largest construction company] for example. Solel-Boneh employs many [Arab] laborers, but not one clerk (Pakid), maybe one or two.”Footnote 157
However, Hushi's hopes went mostly unrealized. The majority of Arabs who started working for Jewish employers or for the state during the second decade were employed in what scholars called the secondary labor force of unskilled manual jobs, mainly in construction.Footnote 158 Approximately 57% of the Arabs who entered the national workforce were employed in agriculture, construction, and other unskilled jobs, compared with only 12% of Jewish workers employed in those occupations during that period. Between 1959 and 1968, the percentage of Arabs employed in commerce and the service industry, such as in Jewish-owned hotels and restaurants, increased by 43%, the percentage of Arabs working in construction increased by 77%, and the percentage of Arabs employed in clerical jobs increased 11%.Footnote 159 Arab workers in the Jewish sector were usually paid less than Jewish workers, albeit still earning more than they would have in the Arab sector.Footnote 160 This shows that although Arabs and Jews started joining integrated workplaces, they held largely different occupations.
Scholars described this process as a formation of a segmented labor force.Footnote 161 Yet I argue that this labor force was not completely segmented. Rather it is better characterized as having had hierarchical inclusion, in which the majority was incorporated into the secondary labor force, while a minority was actively integrated into the primary labor force. The percentage of Arabs employed in clerical and related jobs in the civil service increased from approximately 2.3% in 1958 to 2.6% in 1964 and approximately 3.6% in 1969, a notable increase, yet still far lower than their proportion of the population (11.4% in 1961 and 14.1% in 1967).Footnote 162 Similarly, the percentage of Arab university students rose from 0.6% (46 students) in 1957 to 1.7% (607 students) in 1970, but this was still minimal in comparison with their proportion of the population. Furthermore, many of them dropped out before obtaining a degree.Footnote 163
Thus, affirmative action measures did lead to greater inclusion of the Arab population in the national economy, and this should not be taken for granted. These measures contributed to creating a new economic reality, in which Arabs who were either unemployed or worked in agricultural jobs in Arab villages increasingly worked for and with Jews in hotels, factories, hospitals, construction projects, and other enterprises. However, this was a case of hierarchical inclusion, in which Arabs mostly worked for Jews in low-paying and low-skilled jobs. Although their integration into the higher tiers of the civil service, higher education, and better-paying jobs was a considerable improvement from the past, their representation nonetheless remained far from being equal. By benefiting the Arab population and promoting its inclusion, albeit on unequal terms, affirmative action measures took part in advancing the transformation that occurred in those years in Israel's control over the Arab population: from overt military oppression, to a more covert and more stable economic subordination, in which the majority of Arab workers are incorporated into a secondary labor force and only a minority are incorporated into the primary labor force.Footnote 164
Conclusion
Hassan Jabareen, a Palestinian-Israeli scholar and lawyer, described the status of the Arab minority in Israel's founding decades as “colonial citizenship,” under which a regime of control and hierarchy is sustained despite the existence of the right to vote.Footnote 165 This article adds to and complicates this picture in three important ways. First, it reveals that, even as they imposed a regime of military control, Israeli officials also adopted measures, today recognized as affirmative action, to promote the inclusion of the Arab population into the state workforce. Analyzing the discourse surrounding these policies, the second contribution this article makes is to show that policy makers employing these measures were motivated by conflicting interests and ideologies, some of which align with equality and some of which are in opposition to it. Third, this article demonstrates how these measures promoted the integration of the Arab population into predominantly Jewish institutions and businesses and into civil service jobs. However, these measures were systematically limited to hierarchical inclusion.
More broadly, it argues that Israel's approach toward the Arab minority in its first two decades of statehood, cannot be described in monolithic, binary, or even paradoxical terms. Instead, different measures were employed to advance multiple and coexisting interests, commitments, and approaches. At the same time that the military regime and land expropriation policies were enacted to consolidate Jewish dominance, affirmative action practices were also employed, motivated by the desire both to safeguard Jewish supremacy, on the one hand, and to fulfill egalitarian commitments, on the other. Just as important, this article also suggests that Jewish dominance and control over Arab citizens was not constant. Alongside other processes that began in 1957, affirmative action measures advanced a transformation of the regime from complete segregation and oppression imposed by military force in the first decade, to a more integrated and more stable form of economic subordination in the second.
Stepping outside Israel's local history, this account can also solicit interesting questions regarding the nature of affirmative action and its relationship with equality. The debate over the legitimacy of affirmative action continues to this day around the globe. However, both its advocates and opponents, this article suggests, have been limited by fixed and abstract conceptions of affirmative action. These conceptions are based on a form and meaning that affirmative action assumed in a specific dominant historical context of the 1970s and 1980s United States.Footnote 166 By studying a different historical context, in which the same policy makers pursued both overt state-sanctioned oppression and workplace integration, this article de-familiarizes affirmative action. It challenges some of the common assumptions and expectations regarding the relationship of affirmative action to egalitarian meanings shared by both its proponents and its critics.
Some historical studies have already weakened the strong identification between egalitarian commitments and the practice of affirmative action in the United States, showing how the justifications and motivations for pursuing affirmative action have changed over time. Most notably, in his book The Ironies of Affirmative Action, John David Skrentny revealed that affirmative action was not always closely identified with an egalitarian ideology. Tracing the antecedents of affirmative action in the United States, he found that in the 1960s, affirmative action was infused with the logic of “administrative pragmatism,” motivated by instrumental elitist interests, and advocated for as an effective tool for social control.Footnote 167 Skrentny and Paul Frymer have shown how, in the aftermath of the urban riots of the 1960s, the Johnson Administration and business elites advocated for affirmative action measures, such as race-conscious hiring, preferential treatment, and even employment quotas, “not to remedy past and present discrimination, but to buy urban peace.”Footnote 168 Affirmative action, they suggest, was understood as a tool to “mitigate the crisis [and] help to maintain control and order.”Footnote 169 It was only later, during the 1970s, when courts became involved in controversies over affirmative action, that affirmative action practices became so closely identified with the ideals of racial justice.Footnote 170 Similarly, others have documented how affirmative action was later de-coupled from its egalitarian meanings and became justified by diversity rationales, as well as the more recent turn to the business case for affirmative action.Footnote 171
Adding to this literature, which shows how affirmative action policies departed from assumed egalitarian aspirations and discourse, this article further calls into question the logic and function of affirmative action. Nancy Fraser has argued that affirmative action only reproduces existing inequalities. She explains that because affirmative action “[l]eav[es] intact the deep structures that generate racial disadvantage, it must make surface reallocations again and again” and thus “underline[s] racial differentiation.”Footnote 172 Yet the critique that this historical account suggests is less deterministic. Building on the work of others who show how rights can serve as a state-building tool and a way to win loyalty from citizens,Footnote 173 this article demonstrates the managerial function that affirmative action measures can play, and undermines the assumed link between workforce inclusion and equality. It highlights the dual nature of affirmative action as both an egalitarian tool and an administrative tool used for effectively managing subordinated minorities and advancing social and economic control and order: wining their loyalty or, at the very least, keeping them docile and regulating their working life. Thus, it raises questions about the context and terms in which affirmative action can achieve more than hierarchical forms of inclusion.
Finally, this article suggests a new approach for the global study of affirmative action. De-coupling affirmative action techniques from their rationales allows scholars to trace their history and present use beyond the familiar historical context of struggles for equal citizenship. A few studies have applied similar approaches to the history of affirmative action in the United States in the early 1960s, and even further back, to its antecedents in the Reconstruction Era in the 1860s and 1870s.Footnote 174 More broadly, this approach can be applied to study the colonial, postcolonial, and developmentalist roots of affirmative action.Footnote 175 One especially illuminating example is the early use of affirmative action measures targeting the Dalits in India. Marc Galanter traces the origins of India's affirmative action program, known as the “reservation system,” all the way back to British rule in India, when, already in 1932, seats in the general elections were reserved for members of “depressed classes.”Footnote 176 This history, scholars argue, shows that the reservation system was not instituted on the basis of the Indian Constitution, but rather on elitist interests to maintain control and oppression.Footnote 177 Although beyond the scope of this article, much like the Indian example, the Israeli case can benefit from future study of affirmative action techniques in Palestine during the British Mandate. Such inquires can shed new light on the origins and global history of what we now call affirmative action policies, broadening the inquiry into the nature and potential of this tool and its contingent relationship to equality.
