However, this was very limited progress in comparison with the Jewish society – a disparity which mainstream Israeli sociologists pinned on the nature of the Arab minority and which critical sociologists later on would blame on Israel’s discriminatory policies. Like colonialist powers before them, the Israeli politicians and officials expected that this limited modernization would satisfy the Palestinian minority, but it did not. The undeniable improvement in the community’s standard of living was judged by the Palestinians not according to past realities, but according to how they fared in comparison to the Jewish members of the society, and that exercise ended in great dismay and outrage. Not all of the complex realities of the Palestinian society can or should be attributed to Israeli policy. This was a society in a Middle East that was transforming slowly and dialectically from the old world of Ottoman rule and traditional values into an age of nationalism and global capitalism. And, as elsewhere in the Middle East, old social patterns still affected life, even in places where brutal modern policies from above were trying to eradicate them, as was case in Ataturk’s Turkey and in the Shah’s Iran.
Ilan Pappe, The Forgotten Palestinians
