The last municipal elections in Nazareth during the Mandate period were held in 1946, with limited voting rights and contested results. Soon after the city was occupied in 1948, residents and public figures led by MAKI (Communist Party of Israel) and its affiliated union demanded new municipal elections. The Israeli Military Government (MG) acted to prevent new elections, believing that any election would be won by Communists, whom it viewed as dangerous to the state image and to its plans for Judaizing the Galilee. In 1954, due to increasing public pressure to replace the ineffectual municipality leadership, elections were held in the city. Drawing on an array of sources, state archives, MAKI archives, and Arabic newspapers of the period I will show that the municipality of Nazareth exemplifies the unique interplays of Israeli democratic procedures and colonial technologies. Hence, it offers a rich arena of exploration of the interaction between political and economic realities, state control mechanisms and local reactions. While the Israeli state and the MG did all they could to make sure that the municipal council would suppress expressions of nationalism and dissent, the Palestinian residents’ used council politics to affirm their identifications and express their citizenship. In the 1954 elections the MG’s methods included the creation of sectarian-based parties, complete with candidate lists, and their campaigns. Despite the MG’s best efforts, MAKI still gained a significant portion of the votes. The MG then moved to form an “anti-Communist coalition” in the municipality, through exerting strong pressure on all other parties. During the struggle over the municipal council, MAKI and its supporters viewed the municipality not only as the chief representative body of the residents on local issues, but also as a body that carried national importance, in that it was expected to protect the Arabness of the city and represent the Palestinian national aspirations of its residents. For the MG, and the government it represented, the municipality of Nazareth became a threat, a body that was to be penetrated, managed and controlled. The struggle over the municipality continued until the end of the MG years, which saw opportunities for new Arab political expression but also the reproduction of sectarian politics that were born or cultivated during that time.

Postcolonial historians tend to overemphasis the impact of colonial rule on people’s identity, that is, the tendency to see colonial power as the central point from which identity emanates. On the other hand, the excessive insistence in nationalist historiographies on the continuity of a coherent national identity resistible to the colonial influence paradoxically downplays the capacity of the colonial system to transform people’s identity and consciousness. It is certainly the case of Palestinians citizens of Israel under the Military Government, an unmistakably colonial structure, which was, on the one hand, a remarkably short period, and on the other, a formative one. The question then becomes how do we discuss the contours of Palestinian identity during this period without sinking into the cult of mystifying colonial impact or an essentialized national identity? Perhaps one way of looking at identity in this context is to see it as practice, that is, a tactical way of survival, a strategic identity captured in a game that involves affirmation and rejection, collaboration and resistance. This allows us to see how the MG serves as a theatre, a spatial stage in which multiple identities are practiced through invisible, yet elaborate, forms of agency. That is to see how Palestinians under the MG managed to create an alternative space of identity- a third space, an in-between position of practice, negotiation and intimacy- where they could insert, mix, and celebrate their social and cultural practices into an imposed Israeli identity. Studies devoted to the MG period are primarily concerned with the hegemonic structures of the state and its policies towards the Palestinian minority, while less attention is paid to the people themselves, their intellectual life and cultural activity. Drawing on a wide range of primary resources from the period in question, notably local Arabic press, literary works, diaries, biographies, wedding songs, Friday ceremonies and oral interviews, I aim to show how the new space of domination created by the MG, the political and military demarcation of the border and the new spatial arrangement of social life, influenced the ways in which Palestinians in Israel came to practice their identity and perceive themselves in relation to the new state of Israel and the other Palestinians. I am especially interested in aspects of cultural intimacy, that is, those internal aspects of identity that provide people with defiant confidence in the face of external confusion and embarrassment.

Colonial regimes utilize an arsenal of tried and tested policies to pursue their goals of disownment, exploitation and segregation. Colonial legal systems often fragment the native society and hamper its ability to coalesce around a popular anti-colonial movement. At other instances, colonial regimes subdue native society using secret police and blunt military force which in turn monitor, threaten and physically harm the natives. Nevertheless, colonialism is never a project divorced of material constraints and colonial governments are never omnipotent and frequently tenuous. Historians of colonized countries often stress a varying degree of agency that the colonized apply when struggling to mitigate their difficult political and material conditions. The core of my argument is that the margin of agency that Palestinians possessed under the colonial system of the Israeli Military Government (MG) between the years 1948-1966, was in fact an integral part of the very apparatus that controlled them. Academic studies, memoirs, and novels concerning this time period present the MG as a lot of “nine to five” military clerks, who were supplemented by military units, but could still not be at all places and at all times. Under these conditions the Israeli State was certainly not capable of effectively pursuing some of its declared and undeclared objectives such as the levying of taxes, prevention of subversion and the limitation of Palestinian movement within and beyond Israeli borders. To be sure, life under military rule meant being subject to an authoritative and arbitrary regime yet not an all powerful one. Drawing upon archival documents, oral interviews, and the Arabic and Hebrew language press, I point to a high level of awareness among Jewish society concerning its inability to coerce the native and refugee population to do its bidding. I propose that the smuggling of people and merchandise, the unauthorized movement between quarantined districts, the tilling of sequestered land, tax evasion, non-cooperation, and political subversion - all contributed to the formation the ‘arvi yisraeli, or the Israeli Arab, as a lawless, unruly, tribal and primitive subject who could be governed only through authoritative methods. The paper then proposes to situate the behavior of Palestinian citizens of Israel across a spectrum that is not appreciated though the binary model of collaboration and resistance. Finally, I will claim that the Palestinian citizens of Israel, in some form or another, came to internalize this subjectivity created through the colonial nexus, thus suggesting its efficacy.