REGIMEN ESPECIAL

The first commonly encountered feature of sociological analyses of Palestinian Christians in Israel is the frequent reference to their distinctive social and cultural attitudes and orientations relative to the rest of the minority. Described as being “modern”, “westernised”, “liberal”, “progressive” and “secular”, Palestinian Christians have been identified in several studies as being closer to, and more compatible with, mainstream Israeli Jewish society than the remainder of the Palestinian Arab minority, whether Muslim or Druze, which is described as remaining, on the whole, more “backward”, traditional, conservative and patriarchal in nature.4

This description of Palestinian Christians became popular in connection with the crude assumptions of the modernisation thesis. The modernisation thesis, which dominated

4

Smooha (1978; 1989: 49, 89). Ashkenazi (1988: 10) refers to Palestinian Christians as “completely bourgeois”.  

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the Israeli academic scene until the late 1960s and which continues to exert an important (but decreased) level of influence on Israeli scholarship today, is a discourse which centralises various cultural, social and psychological characteristics of the Palestinian Arab minority and presents them as instinctive and primordial group tendencies which are conceived of as measures of that group’s ability (or inability) to adapt to and integrate within “modern” Israeli society.5 Within this analysis, particular aspects of collective identity are singled out and connected to what are presented as being either positive or negative political and cultural attributes of the group in question. In particular, “modern” attitudes are equated with the presence of certain socio-economic features (such as high levels of education, professional qualification, personal wealth; urban residential patterns; a low fertility rate, low child mortality rates; smaller nuclear families; older marrying age; and increased contacts with Jews, etc.6). Situated within this logic of the anticipated social transformation of the Palestinian Arab minority, Palestinian Christians were frequently held up to be on the vanguard of this transformation.

However, despite the decline of the modernisation thesis, the notion that Palestinian Christians are more “modern” and, as a result, more akin to the values and culture of mainstream Israeli society remains popular. This is underscored by analyses which suggest that the alleged modernity of Palestinian Christians predates and, as such, is largely independent of the state’s modernisation efforts with regards to the remainder of the Palestinian Arab minority. Citing as evidence of this the central role of a “Western”- affiliated church school system, the Palestinian Christians are not only held up to be, by themselves, free-floating vectors of modernisation, but by virtue of their modern outlook, they are understood to preserve a degree of self-sufficiency and innovation which protects them from the worst excesses of the state’s policy towards the Palestinian Arab minority.

Tsimhoni, for example, refers to the “Western open lifestyle” of Palestinian Christians, their more liberal dress code and their more frequent social contacts with Jews as being both a source of hope for future Jewish-Arab reconciliation and indicative of their higher tendency towards “integration” and “Israelisation”.7

5

Major proponents of the modernisation thesis include: Zarhi & Achiezra (1966) and Avineri (1972). For a critical perspective, see: Nakhleh (1977); Zureik (1977); Smooha (1978: 30-32, 120-122); Oppenheimer (1985: 261-262).  

6 _{See, for example, Landau (1969: 16, 206 and 1993: 18, 28-29); Rosenfeld (1968; 1978); Stendel (1973)}  7 _{Tsimhoni (2002: 132)} 

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Due to their Western and higher education than that of the Muslims, their prominence in the white-collar professions and their forming a largely urban middle class group, they have been amalgamated within Israeli society to a greater extent than the Muslims.8

This concept of Israelisation has been more generally used to describe the process of “internationalisation of Israeli identity in Arabs” whereby the social, cultural and political identity of Palestinian Arabs is understood to have undergone sufficient change so as to make it compatible with their new status both as a minority and as Israeli Arab citizens of the state. This one-sided process of social adjustment is said to result in increased levels of opportunity, personal contentment and acceptance for Palestinian Arabs as well as improved mutual understanding and coexistence between Jews and Arabs in society.9

Given the perceived proximity between Palestinian Christians and Israeli Jews in cultural and social terms, and the implied higher expectation of Palestinian Christian compatibility with Israeli Jewish society, it would be anticipated that this factor would diminish the necessity of control over this community and improve the relationship between them and the state. However, given the structural limits of integration within Israel, as described in Chapter One, this assumption is problematic. Critical anthropologist Amalia Sa’ar suggests instead a more complex and layered understanding of Palestinian Christian identity which challenges this assumption of Palestinian Christian difference and state preference. Sa’ar studied the identity of Palestinian Christians in the mixed city of Haifa and observed that while Palestinian Christians are “largely urban and better situated economically” their real identity is a shifting combination of seemingly contradictory tendencies towards Palestinian self-identification on a national level and Christian Arab self- identification on a social and cultural level which vary according to particular circumstances and needs and which, together, make up the complex arsenal of Palestinian Christian survival strategies in Israel. This latter tendency, which she describes as Christian ethnocentric behaviour, is “socially reproductive” in that “it complies with the state’s policy toward the Palestinian minority” of “control, fragmentation and class discrimination”.10

By adopting a social-reproductive orientation – emphasising Christian cultural distinctiveness and drawing on the personal benefits that accompany political conformism – many Christians cultivate the hope (or the illusion) that they will be able to escape the class and civil subordination that they face as Palestinians in Israel. 11

       8 _{Tsimhoni (2002: 149)}  9 _{Rouhana (1997: 116-120)}  10 _{Sa’ar (1998: 216)}  11 _{Sa’ar (1998: 216)}  73   

Notwithstanding this, Sa’ar argues that the parallel tendency of Palestinian Christians to emphasise their national identity above and beyond their religious identity represents the dominant tendency of the two. This national affiliation represents Palestinian Christians’ “oppositional behaviour” to the state, thus pushing them further away from the Israeli Jewish social orbit. That such system-supportive and oppositional behaviour is understood by Sa’ar to co-exist even on the individual level of Palestinian Christian identity challenges the assumption that a “modern” outlook necessarily renders Palestinian Christians natural allies of the state and instead suggests a more complex relationship between the state and its Palestinian Christian citizens.