The Koenig report and Israeli policy towards the Palestinian minority, 1965-1976: old wine in new bottles.

• Author: Sa'di, Ahmad H.

INTRODUCTION

THE KOENIG REPORT (l) IS FREQUENTLY referred to as a major turning point in the relationship between the Israeli State and the Palestinian minority. This Report, leaked to the Israeli newspaper Al-Hamishmar and published on 7 September 1976, is the first publicly available document, which shows that the policies of discrimination and containment to which the Palestinian-citizens have been subjected since 1948, reflect planning and deliberations at the policy-making circles. Its publication exposed the policy options that Israeli policy makers were considering prior to the Land Day, as its first (main) section was finalized on 1 March--one month before the Land Day's events.

The Koenig Report--named after its main author Israel Koenig, then the North District Commissioner--is comprised of a peculiar reading of the status of Palestinians in Israel and recommendations regarding the State's policy towards the minority. It intended to provide the Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin with an array of policy options. The racist language of the Report and its draconian suggestions caused wide-ranging indignation by Palestinians. (2) However, State officials dismissed this reaction as unwarranted. They maintained that the Report represented the opinion of its author(s), and did not represent an official policy nor did it reflect the mode of thinking in decision-making circles. The debates that followed the Report's publication have mostly centered on the limits of freedom of expression (and racism) that civil servants ought to observe, instead of dealing with the premises of the State policy towards the minority.

The focus on the style of the Report instead of on its content reflected a widely held belief regarding Israeli policy towards the Palestinians. Most scholars and Israeli-Jewish politicians have tended to attribute to the Israeli leaders a tactic of "wait and see" in the first decade after 1948, and a policy of contingency thereafter. (3) After all, between 1948 and 1967 Israeli governments had dedicated three meetings to discuss Arabs' affairs, and between 1967 and 1990 they held few such meetings, which mostly ended without operational decisions. (4)

Moreover, Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister, showed little interest in the Palestinian minority and delegated the responsibility for its affairs to MAPAI's (a Hebrew abbreviation of The Workers' Party of the Land of Israel) functionaries in the party and the Histadrut. (5) Even researchers who did identify certain principles that guided the official policy towards the Palestinian minority (and occasionally in an insightful manner) have done so largely on the basis of observations, analysis of data and announcements of politicians as well as by comparing the Israeli regime with a comparable situation, primarily, Apartheid South Africa. (6) Yet they have not presented official documents that validate their arguments. I am not arguing that social sciences should primarily use hermeneutic research methods and be engaged in the analysis of texts; rather, I maintain that the study of official documents could be helpful in shedding light on understudied social and political issues and might disprove some firmly held hypotheses.

My proposition in this article is that the Koenig Report does not represent a fundamental shift in Israeli policy towards the minority, nor does it signal a new phase where policy makers have moved towards a more comprehensive and calculated policies in dealing with the Palestinian minority. Rather, I shall attempt to demonstrate that this Report is part and parcel of the prevalent discourse regarding the minority in bureaucratic and policy-making circles. This postulate is firmly supported by a declassified document from the Labor Party Archive (at Beit Berl)--the Tolidano Testimony--which will be summarized and discussed, as well as by supplementary secondary sources. However, before going any further in outlying and discussing the available documentation and data, I will briefly summarize the Report's main recommendations.

KOENIG'S RECOMMENDATIONS

The underlying premise of the Report's recommendations is how to contain the minority through coercive measures. It consists of policy proposals in five areas: demography and national sentiments, political leadership, economy and employment, education, and law enforcement. The first section on demography and nationalism is overshadowed by the fear that the Palestinians would in the near future comprise a majority of the population in the Northern District, thus endangering Israeli sovereignty over the Galilee, particularly the parts of this region that were designated to the Palestinian Arab State according to the 1947 U.N. partition resolution. The recommendations included the expansion and deepening of Jewish settlements in Palestinian populated areas, and at the same time, the exploration of ways to dilute the concentrations of Palestinian population; the introduction of a policy of reward and punishment towards leaders and settlements that express hostility towards the state and Zionism; and the establishment of an Arab political party that would raise the banner of integration instead of Palestinian nationalism.

Section two on leadership includes tactics that should be pursued to create a new brand of leadership, a leadership of collaborators who are fundamentally different from both the "dignitaries" on the one hand and the Communists and the nationalists on the other. RAKAH (the Communist party) leaders should be...