From anti-discrimination to national restitution: a struggle over the definition of justice in Galilean land disputes

This communication deals with Israeli mobilizations towards the recognition of the historic injustice allegedly undergone by the Palestinians population following the 1948 conflict. The Israeli Arab claim is that this war paved the way for a massive land dispossession the Palestinians. My PhD was about a settlement program implemented in Galilee in the late 1970s on lands that, prior to 1948, belonged to Palestinian villages. In the frame of this program, 28 residential villages (called mitzpim) were created. 30 years after their creation, those settlements are beautiful, quiet and expensive suburbs of the Haïfa metropolis. Though they were created in a so-called “judaization” policy, middle-class families from the Arab sector have tried (until now unsuccessfully) to buy land and houses therein. The political struggle of those rejected families sometimes takes the appearance of a bottom-up struggle for historical justice – a struggle in which ideals of justice are negotiated by the different actors. This communication would present how the integration of Arab families in Galilean Jewish settlement (the “desegregation” of the mitzpim) has been displayed either as an individual right (the right of a given Arab family to purchase a piece of state land) or as the reparation of an injustice suffered by a national group (the right of the Arab minority to live on a land that used to be the property of their national group). Above the families, the meaning of this struggle have indeed been reshaped by various actors – Jewish, Arab or “binational” NGOs – sometimes also according to the audience (Arab public, Jews from the mitzpim, broader Jewish-Israeli public or judicial arenas). Empirical elements come from a two-years PhD field research in the Galilee (2006-2008) based on (75) semi-directive interviews conducted in Hebrew and numerous observations in the mitzpim.