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INTRODUCTION
THE KOENIG REPORT1 IS FREQUENTLY referred to as a major turning point in the relationship between the Israeli State and the Palestinian minority. This Report, leaked to the Israeli newspaper Al-Hamishmar and published on 7 September 1976, is the first publicly available document, which shows that the policies of discrimination and containment to which the Palestinian-citizens have been subjected since 1948, reflect planning and deliberations at the policy-making circles. Its publication exposed the policy options that Israeli policy makers were considering prior to the Land Day, as its first (main) section was finalized on 1 March - one month before the Land Day's events.
The Koenig Report - named after its main author Israel Koenig, then the North District Commissioner - is comprised of a peculiar reading of the status of Palestinians in Israel and recommendations regarding the State's policy towards the minority. It intended to provide the Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin with an array of policy options. The racist language of the Report and its draconian suggestions caused wide-ranging indignation by Palestinians.2 However, State officials dismissed this reaction as unwarranted. They maintained that the Report represented the opinion of its author(s), and did not represent an official policy nor did it reflect the mode of thinking in decisionmaking circles. The debates that followed the Report's publication have mostly centered on the limits of freedom of expression (and racism) that civil servants ought to observe, instead of dealing with the premises of the State policy towards the minority.
The focus on the style of the Report instead of on its content reflected a widely held belief regarding Israeli policy towards the Palestinians. Most scholars and Israeli-Jewish politicians have tended to attribute to the Israeli leaders a tactic of "wait and see" in the first decade after 1948, and a policy of contingency thereafter.3 After all, between 1948 and 1967 Israeli governments had dedicated three meetings to discuss Arabs' affairs, and between 1967 and 1990 they held few such meetings, which mostly ended without operational decisions.4
Moreover, Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister, showed little interest in the Palestinian minority and delegated the responsibility for its affairs to MAPAI's (a Hebrew abbreviation of The Workers' Party of the Land of Israel) functionaries in the party and...