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The book will be published in June and is currently available for pre-order.
The military governance was established during war and operated within the framework of the army, but it promoted political and ideological goals. In July 1948, the day after the occupation of Lod and Ramla and the eve of the occupation of Nazareth, David Ben-Gurion established a body designed to control the Palestinians who remained in the territory of the State of Israel. Its main goals were threefold: to facilitate the transfer of Palestinian lands to Jewish hands; to exclude Palestinians from the labor market and to prevent them from organizing on a nationwide basis. The military governance promoted these goals through a bureaucratic mechanism that prevented them from leaving their homes without the governor’s permission. This mechanism effectively allowed the government to determine who would work and who would be unemployed, who would receive an education, and who would receive medical care.
The military governance was controversial in the Israeli political system, but the strength of opposition to its existence was sometimes conditioned by the partisan and ideological interests of the opponents, on the left and right: Mapam, which opposed it from the left, did not object to the annexation of expropriated lands to the kibbutz; the Herut movement, which for some time opposed it from the right, did not see anything wrong with excluding Arabs from the labor market or preventing them from organizing. Only Maki, the less influential communist party, consistently opposed its existence.
Jewish or Democratic describes the factors that shaped the political system's attitude toward the military governance, tracks the changing intensity of the debate surrounding it, explains the turn in attitude toward it following the massacre in Kafr Qassem in October 1956, and also the intensification of protests against it in the first half of the 1960s. The book seeks, among other things, to answer the question of whether Levi Eshkol's government's decision to abolish the military governance in December 1966 stemmed from the opposition's struggle, or from the recognition that the military governance had achieved its goals.