Old and New Strategies for Exploiting Structural Change in Palestine/Israel: A Review Essay Open Access

Marx’s observation that men make history, but not under circumstances of their own choosing, is a candidate for the most paraphrased aphorism in contemporary social science.³ It highlights the relationship between “structure” and “agency”—between patterns so stable that they can be treated as constants for relevant time frames and choices and actions made and taken by individuals and intention-guided groups. Structural analysis identifies large circumstances that shape streams or patterns of outcomes, while highlighting the transformative effects of change that may occur at the macro level in the worlds that agency seeks to adjust or protect. A focus on agency, foregrounding the plans, performance, sacrifice, and follies of particular groups or individuals, helps explain both change and continuity in social life by studying how structures can be reinforced, broken, or changed—even if not according to the designs of the agents involved.

What is often missing, however, is the third leg of the analytical triad—strategies. As defined in evolutionary theory, “strategies,” whether calculated or deployed algorithmically, and whether encoded in genes, bureaucratic procedures, institutionalized practices, cultural tropes, shared scripts, or techniques of scholarship, are ways of doing things, ways of behaving, or sequences of moves. They are expressive, analytic, or operational recipes, adopted or discarded by agents, but not agential themselves. They can fade, disappear, and reappear over long periods of time, becoming more prevalent or obscure as changed circumstances incentivize agents to adapt.⁴

To take an example relevant to each of the books reviewed here, consider how Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank (including expanded East Jerusalem) and its domination of the Gaza Strip have shifted structural realities in Palestine. With that structural change has come a transformation in the circumstances, perceptions, and incentives of agents and the attractiveness of strategies popular with agents in earlier periods or in distant settings. Once again, the country is united (problematically and unhappily), as it was before 1948, from the river to the sea. The disappearance of expectations of, plans for, or negotiations about a two-state solution (as a strategy for shaping the future of the country) constitutes, or at least prefigures, a return to the pre-1948 reality of one (nondemocratic) political unit from the river to the sea. This disappearance has had a disruptive effect, not only on the lives of people on the ground, but also on the relevance of much of the work that has been done over recent decades to trace, understand, and forecast developments and opportunities for meliorating conflicts between Jews and Palestinian Arabs.

For nearly three-quarters of a century, debate over the future of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, or between Zionist Jews and Palestinian Arabs, has been associated with various strategies of territorial partition. The attention those strategies received, both from those in favor of partition and from those against it, was based on a presumption that portions of Palestine not within the 1949 Armistice lines, or not within the 1947 United Nations Partition lines, were separated, or at least separable, from the “Jewish state.” Instructively, none of the three books under review considers dividing the country into two states a plausible enough future to warrant serious consideration. By revisiting Palestine before 1948 and/or by treating the entire space of Israel/Palestine as the relevant political arena, each author is seeking to recover, examine, and develop old–new theories and strategies for addressing the structural change that has occurred in his domain of interest. In that sense, each author can himself be seen as a scholarly “agent.”

Empirically, the agents attracting Amal Jamal’s attention, in his 2020 book on the meaning and potential of civil society in Israel, are Palestinian citizens mobilized on behalf of forms of political community open to difference. Although they represent no more than 30% of the Palestinian inhabitants of Israel, their status as Israeli citizens gives them opportunities for political discourse, organization, and action that, in Jamal’s view, make them promising candidates for building a robust civil society within an ethnocratic state. Two circumstances form the structure within which these agents operate. The first is the social fact of Israel as a nonliberal state. It is an ethnocratic polity, a Jewish staatsvolk (a state devoted to and under the control of one dominant national group), encompassing all the people and territory west of the Jordan River, but which systematically excludes, or seeks to exclude, its large Palestinian population from access to resources and from a meaningful role in guiding the state. The second circumstance structuring the mobilization of Palestinian citizens of Israel (and Jamal’s analysis of it) is theoretical. The conceptual and theoretical equipment available for the analysis of civil society presumes a liberal polity that, at least in principle, affirms the positive role of citizen mobilization outside the official realm and mission of the state. Jamal’s strategy for assessing the agential accomplishments and potential of Palestinian civil society organizations in Israel is to show the impossibility of doing so without fundamentally shifting and clarifying the concept of civil society itself. To do this he cannot rely on ideas drawn from Anglo-American political theory traditions that assume a liberal polity and form the basis for most contemporary work on civil society.

Jamal begins by noticing the distinctive challenges faced by Palestinian citizens of Israel as they seek to build and inhabit civil society institutions within a state organized with increasing explicitness as Jewish and operating for Jews, as opposed to presenting itself as a “state of its citizens.” By pointing out dilemmas and tensions afflicting these efforts, including the important contribution made by religious and kinship groups, Jamal highlights deep tensions in various overlapping literatures on civil society. Prevailing assumptions are of an overarching polity in which liberal principles of individual autonomy and freedom to associate outside the state are publicly honored and in which well-educated, secular, and civic-minded elites play the central role in civil society organizations. However, Jamal notes, in much of the world, including Israel, civil society exists in opposition to regimes that deny fundamental liberal principles of individual autonomy, freedom of speech and assembly, and equality of all citizens before the law regardless of ascriptive characteristics. In such settings, social formations and traditional cultural or religious movements may provide the protection, social capital, and leadership that more familiar types of civil society activists and organizations cannot.

Drawing on a wide range of contemporary political theorists, but invoking Aristotle as well, Jamal makes particularly explicit and effective use of Arendtian theory. Using her concept of viva activa to emphasize the philia (civic friendship) and broad community-building potential of conversations, thinking, and public conduct, Jamal advances an attractive basis for including a wider array of associations and groupings within the category of civil society than are often imagined as applicable within the standardly referenced Western liberal democratic order. He does so while distinguishing groups (including, especially, religious movements and kinship-based networks) that promise to tolerate difference from those that do not. By stressing the appropriateness of considering such civil society activity as ontologically prior to the official regime’s conception of the role and meaning of the state, Jamal sets the stage for evaluating Palestinian civil society in Israel as a challenge to a hegemonic regime—a challenge that is defensible on liberal grounds and that defies prevailing norms without being either violent or illegal. Chapter by chapter, the book analyzes the way the “civic” sphere is being reconstituted by Palestinian Israeli citizens, within different contexts—Palestinian society, the Arab world as a whole, Israeli government policy, and so on. Seeing civil society in this way allows the problems besetting these endeavors and the consequences of their partial success to be deftly described, clearly assessed, and sensitively critiqued.

What is innovative about these strategies for mobilizing to transform the Israeli polity is that instead of justifying demands for respect or resources by portraying them as authorized by the official language and mythology of the Jewish–Zionist and “democratic” state, programs are advanced as counter-hegemonic challenges. In line with the “vision” documents issued by various Palestinian civil society leaders and activists in 2006 and 2007, these organizations increasingly advance collective identity claims, often entailing claims of indigeneity, and focus on the Palestinian people as a whole, not only on Palestinian citizens of Israel. While specific programs pursued by different groups vary widely, all agree on avoiding tactics that would ensure violent Israeli government responses.

Jamal’s analytic strategy is to create synergy between the two main tasks he sets out to accomplish. By critically describing transformations in Israel, and in particular among Palestinian citizens of Israel, he creates the need for a deep critique and reconstruction of theories of civil society. With that accomplished, he can identify strategies associated with Gramscian wars of position that can be used to measure the effectiveness and the failings of Palestinian civil society activists. In other words, by treating counterhegemonic politics as a form of mobilization in civil society, he expands the universe of cases for nomothetically inclined political scientists. Simultaneously, he shows how, in this specific case, older strategies directed at enhancing the lives of non-Jews in Israel are being displaced by new ones adopted by Palestinian agents to exploit structural transformation, rather than working within an institutional structure assumed incapable of change.

More explicitly than Jamal, Shlomo Sand also takes the return of the structure of circumstance prevailing before 1948 as a shift that opens up both political and analytical opportunities. His overall objective is to recover strategies for coping with a one-state reality, whether or not they are currently taken seriously now as “solutions.” While Jamal attends to specific Palestinian civil society agents in Israel to assess their effectiveness or illustrate the usefulness of his theoretical framework, Sand organizes his book by focusing on (mostly) historical and (some) contemporary figures as vehicles for exploring and recovering nonpartitionist ideas about what Palestine/the Land of Israel can be if it is both undivided and heavily populated by Arabs and Jews.

Sand highlights the stunning accuracy of so many of the analyses and forecasts of Zionists in the first half of the twentieth century who did not accept a Jewish staatsvolk as the only, or even as a legitimate, objective of the movement. The intellectual power and perspicacity evident in the writings of these men and women is startling. So is the realization, encouraged by Sand, that instead of treating their ideas about binationalism, and about the dangers of fetishizing Jewish statehood, as antiquarian artifacts of naïvely idealistic intellectuals, their work deserves attention for its compelling engagement with precisely the issue dominating contemporary debates over the future of Palestine/Israel, that is, how to cope with a country of mixed multitudes bound together as one unit.

The Bi-National Challenge’s overall argument is that a change in the structure of the problem has transformed the set of strategies available for governing the country and its peoples. That change is a return of Israel/Palestine to its pre-1948 status of one country, with two large collectivities in conflict with one another. This fundamental transformation in the shape of the country, and therefore in the character of the political problem its inhabitants face, was occasioned, in Sand’s Borochovian language, as a consequence of the slow, but irresistible stychic process of Israel’s de facto absorption of the West Bank and Gaza Strip into its domain of state authority.⁵ With the two-state solution and any other picture of the future based on partition reduced to the status of comfortable alibis for protecting a regime of apartheid, thinking from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries about this new–old reality becomes an analytically potent and politically enlightening exercise.

Debates between the beginning of Zionist immigration into Palestine in the mid-1880s and the sharp rise in the country’s Jewish population in the years prior to World War II are particularly poignant. In those decades few Zionists could be confident, and fewer still could talk publicly as if they were confident, that Palestine could be treated as anything but a country that would always have a very large proportion of Arab inhabitants. This meant that “statist Zionists,” such as David Ben-Gurion, found themselves endorsing various schemes for sharing the country with Arabs, including cantonal autonomy and parity, that they later condemned vehemently as “anti-Zionist.” What Sand argues is that long-standing pressures of anti-Semitism on the Jews of Europe, combined with racist American immigration laws enforced after World War I, the Holocaust, and the violence of the 1948 war, changed structural circumstances so that strategies of partition, expulsion, and establishment of a Jewish staatsvolk became dominant among the Jews of Palestine. In recent years, however, with a return to a united Palestine—one holding roughly 7 million Jews and 7 million Arabs—debates are increasingly dominated by visions of the country as including all those living between the river and the sea.

Sand’s recovery effort is rewarded by the variety he finds in the kinds of binationalist ideas advanced across the entire spectrum of the Zionist movement. Sand points out that the founder of maximalist Revisionist Zionism, Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, faced the reality of a large and immovable Palestinian Arab population in the country squarely. While welcoming voluntary Arab emigration, he never entertained dreams of expulsion, but assumed that the liberal society he wanted to build would be binational, even if Jews would achieve majority status and control the state. Right-wing Canaanites, such as Yonatan Ratosh, imagined absorbing Arabs and other Semitic ethnic groups into a powerful Hebraicized nation. Sand also reminds his readers that in 1979–1980, Menachem Begin’s own transitional plan of autonomy for the “Arabs of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza” included the option for them to become Israeli citizens, thereby aligning himself with Jabotinksy’s vision of Jewish political predominance in a liberal state governing a binational society.

Ahad Ha’am’s plan for a Jewish national home in Palestine as a spiritual and cultural center for Jewish life stood in direct contradiction to Jabotinsky’s desire for a sovereign state, but was fully in line with the latter’s acceptance of Arab inhabitants as having equal rights. A number of distinguished intellectuals, committed to prophetic values, and terrified at the prospect of a Jewish nation-state as ferocious and oppressive as most others toward perceived enemies, followed in Ha’am’s footsteps.

Sand describes the sociologist and eugenicist Arthur Ruppin as the third most impactful leader of the Zionist movement after Herzl and Ben-Gurion. His racialism (common among intellectuals in the interwar period) led him to view Arabs as genetically akin to Jews. Although he abandoned the small but explicitly binationalist Brit Shalom organization after the violence of 1929, he opposed Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall insistence on using a pedagogy of violence to teach Arabs that, however just their demands might be, they would have to give up their ambition to rule Palestine.

Hans Kohn, another leader of Brit Shalom and, like Ruppin, a highly placed administrator in key Zionist institutions in Palestine, differed sharply from Ruppin in his vision for the future. While Ruppin failed to suggest any institutional framework that could honor Arab rights while securing Jewish imperatives, Kohn strongly supported what he later termed “civic nationalism,” meaning a polity that accorded central importance to equal citizenship and equal claims to political power, regardless of ethnonational affiliation. Gershom Sholem, also active in Brit Shalom, saw a binational state as the only way to prevent Zionism from descending to chauvinism. He blamed the violence of 1929 on both sides, but abandoned binationalism in the wake of the Holocaust.

The Hebrew University’s first Chancellor, Judah Magnes, favored a binational federation in Palestine, believing that a Jewish state was a recipe for endless violence. His reputation and charisma, along with those of Martin Buber, were so strong that even Ben-Gurion refrained from attacking them. Magnes and Buber, along with Ernst Simon (a veteran of Brit Shalom), founded Ihud in 1942, a binationalist group formed after the dissolution of Brit Shalom and active particularly in developing contacts with Palestinian Arabs open to accommodating a Jewish national home in a federal and democratic Palestine without insisting on Jewish statehood, unlimited Jewish immigration, or a Jewish majority.

In 1946, both Buber and Magnes testified before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in favor of a binational federation. A year later, Simon and Magnes did the same before the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). Hannah Arendt offered her own fierce critiques of statist Zionism and Jewish chauvinism. Arendt’s Zionist commitments were animated by visions of a federal Palestine fitting into a regional and global confederal order. Her motivation was not Ha’am’s concern with saving Judaism from corruption and embarrassment, or the desire for a revived Jewish nation to be a vigorous actor on the world stage, but the imperative to protect Jews from anti-Semitism. In effect, the UNSCOP’s minority report adopted binationalist federalism as a solution to the Palestine problem, but the majority plan was to partition the country. Sand points out, however, that since half the people living in the territories allotted to the Jewish state were Arabs, the Zionist movement’s official and joyous acceptance of the UN plan represented agreement (whether sincere or not) to achieve Zionist objectives within a binational society.

In the final chapters of the book, Sand shows how elements within left-wing socialist-Zionist organizations such as Mapam and Hashomer Hatzair were traditionally open to binationalist ideas. Showing how the one-state reality has manifested itself by the re-entry of binational ideas into Israeli political discourse, he then discusses the painful process by which some traditionally statist Zionists, such as Avraham Burg, Meron Benvenisti, Oren Yiftachel, Peter Beinart, and A. B. Yehoshua, were forced by de facto annexation, fear of constant violence, and distaste for oppressive and increasingly apartheidist policies toward Palestinians to trade old (partitionist) strategies for even older (nonpartitionist) ones. This analysis is complemented by coverage of Palestinian intellectuals such as Edward Said, Sari Nusseibeh, Ghada Karmi, and As’ad Ghanem, who, following the demise of the two-state solution, have taken up variants of the binational idea as strategies for achieving equality within the one-state reality.

Sand is clear that he does not believe binational solutions could have been adopted prior to 1948. Regardless of its historical falsity, the Zionist myth of a revived Jewish nation returning to the land from which it had been exiled was simply too strong, especially in a world in which imperialist power aligned, at least temporarily, with the true crisis faced by European Jewry and the moral and political effects of the Holocaust. Nor, despite occasional expressions of interest by a scattering of Palestinian intellectuals, could any strategy for sharing the country with Zionist Jews gain traction among an Arab population that could not imagine Palestine as other than overwhelmingly Arab and could not believe that the obvious justice of their demands would not carry the day against what they viewed as a blatant act of usurpation.

Without forecasting binational democracy in Israel–Palestine, Sand does express optimism that such an outcome is now possible. His own preferred strategy for moving in this direction is a kind of soft Canaanism that emphasizes the integrity of a Hebrew-speaking Israeli nation living in a country with which it has learned to identify. He notices that those Israelis turning most readily to binationalism are those raised to feel most comfortable with Arabs, meaning, often, those hailing from Jerusalem. Ultimately, however, he puts his trust where his analytic bets are heaviest. Stychic processes and catastrophic events turned the myth of a Jewish staatsvolk into reality. Today, he contends, very different structural circumstances, including a nonpartitionable state and demographic realities that Sand does not believe can be changed by dramatic acts of expulsion, can do the same for binationalism.

Thus, both Jamal and Sand offer arguments whose coherence relies not just on structure and agency, but on structure, agency, and strategy. Jamal emphasizes the agency of Palestinian citizens of Israel and the development of untapped intellectual resources for mounting counterhegemonic civil society strategies to destabilize the structures of ethnocracy. By attending to the ideas and careers of particular agents, Sand draws attention to the once and future relevance of strategies for managing Arab–Jewish cohabitation now that the structure of social and political life in Palestine again encompasses all of the country. Hillel Cohen’s less systematically presented argument is equally reliant on this analytic triangle. In his fascinating meditation on the history of Mizrahi Jewish, Ashkenazi Jewish, and Palestinian Arab relations, Cohen describes continuity and change in strategies used by Mizrahi, Palestinian, and Ashkenazi agents operating within a structure of social and political facts that strongly favor the last.

Cohen’s book is focused primarily on “Mizrahim,” a term now commonly used to describe Israeli Jews whose forebears came to Palestine from Middle Eastern and North African countries.⁶Enemies, A Love Story is considerably longer and more complexly arranged than the other two books reviewed here. Drawing on dozens of obscure episodes in the relations of Mizrahim with Palestinian Arabs and Ashkenazim, Cohen documents how wide and rich is the repertoire of behavioral and attitudinal strategies employed by individual Mizrahi “agents.” Relying mainly on memoranda and messages in archives, contemporaneous scholarly publications, and old newspaper accounts, Cohen collects and tells stories of Mizrahi behavior, by which, since he does not believe the adjective describes some absolutely definable thing, is meant any behavior that is described either by the actor or by an observer (journalist, politician, commentator, etc.) as “Mizrahi.” While emphasizing the regular reappearance of tropes or strategies across time, Cohen collects and organizes his material chronologically: from the Ottoman period, the British mandate, the two decades of “little Israel” (between 1948 and 1967), the following decade of Labor Party dominance, and the years between 1977 and 1995, which he refers to as “From Political Revolution to Political Murder.” His book shows that evidence consistent with a host of contradictory stigmatizations and idealizations of what it means to be Mizrahi can be found in the historical record.

We see, for example, that Ashkenazi founders and historic leaders of the Zionist movement often promoted images of Jews living in the Middle East and North Africa as motivated by the same yearnings for “return” to the Land of Israel that they argued all European and American Jews had, or at least should have had. Yet these same elites also regularly excluded mention of Mizrahi contributions to the upbuilding of the Jewish national home (as was famously the case in the Israeli documentary series Pillar of Fire), portraying them as too conservative by nature and too undisciplined ideologically to be reliable contributors to the Zionist project, and too similar to Arabs and too ready for compromise with them to be trusted with leadership positions. While liturgical traditions and rabbinical judgments bolstered stereotypes of Mizrahim as religiously opposed to recognizing any rights of non-Jews to live in the Land of Israel, the dovish views and pronouncements of leading Mizrahi rabbis and their expressions of personal sympathy and support for Palestinian Arab victims of violence and displacement fostered opposite images of Mizrahi religiosity’s implications for Jewish–Arab relations.

In this vein, Mizrahim have been seen as, and have cast themselves as, a culturally sensitive and caring bridge to Arabs due to shared social mores and to their love and knowledge of Arabic language and music. In accordance with this strategy and posture, Mizrahim have emphasized their close relations with Arabs in Palestine, reflected in the hostility they displayed toward second aliyah (immigration wave) “Muscovites” for committing outrages against Arab friends and neighbors. In Tiberias, in 1948, according to the diary of an Ashkenazi commander, Ashkenazi Palmah officers and soldiers were markedly brutal toward Arabs, while Mizrahi soldiers tried hard to protect them.

But Mizrahim have also been characterized as inherently more likely to display cruelty and intolerance toward Arabs, inclinations attributed to an abiding desire to avenge mistreatment of their forebears in the lands of Islam. Both before and after 1948, Mizrahi immigrants appeared to Palestinians and to Ashkenazi commentators as particularly violent and dangerous, traits used to explain embarrassing “pogroms” inflicted on innocent Arabs by primitive Mizrahim. Mostly avoiding the Haganah, in part because of anger against anti-Mizrahi discrimination by the Histadrut and in part because of opposition to the Haganah’s policy of “havlaga” (restraint), Mizrahim took prominent roles in Irgun attacks against Arabs. After 1948 they were more likely than Ashkenazim to act violently against Palestinian Arabs in defense of the “honor” of Jewish women and figured often as assassins of Jewish moderates (Emil Grunzweig, murdered in 1983 while demonstrating for peace, and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, killed in 1995) or as perpetrators of massacres of Palestinian civilians.

Cohen also shows that Mizrahim proved particularly valuable to Zionist security services because of their ability to act, speak, and appear like Arabs. Indeed, few opportunities for status, advancement, and acceptance in Israeli society were more promising than offers by Ashkenazi recruiters and commanders to pass as Arabs for terrorist purposes (e.g., planting Irgun bombs in Arab markets), to teach Arabic, to engage in espionage, or to serve in “disguised” units (Mista’aravim). At the same time, especially following the integration of tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs from the occupied territories into the Israeli labor force, Mizrahim have tried hard, in their dress, adornments, affect, and demeanor, to distinguish themselves from Arabs in order to avoid being treated like them. Nevertheless, as Cohen shows, Palestinian Arabs have often insisted that Mizrahim, as Arab Jews, are their natural allies against Ashkenazi Zionists who oppress Mizrahim and, though they may declare themselves committed to peace with Arabs, were the real architects of the Nakba. Focusing especially on the Black Panthers, Cohen shows how some Mizrahi groups shared this general view, even as mobilization efforts along these lines were generally unsuccessful.

Ironies, reversals, contradictory patterns of evidence, and misconceptions abound, meaning that contemporaneous interpretations and collective memories are better understood as reflections of the political interests of commentators and of ruling groups than as evidence of the nature of the agents or the reasons particular strategies were deployed. Incidents Cohen retrieves from the historical record show early Sephardic elite condescension toward the vulgarity of poor, unsophisticated, and uncouth immigrants from Eastern Europe, anticipating in reverse the condescension and racism that Ashkenazi socialist-Zionists readily displayed toward Mizrahim. Reports prominent in Israeli newspapers of primordial hatreds driving Mizrahi young men to attack Arab citizens are, upon Cohen’s careful investigation, shown often to be false or misleading—either because reports of similar attacks by Ashkenazim do not reference the ethnicity of the perpetrators or because the issues at stake were economic rather than nationalistic.

Across all of these complicated stories, shifting presentations of self and others, misremembered history, and contradictory stereotypes, two patterns emerge. First, over time most Mizrahim have either de-emphasized or abandoned those versions of what it means to be Mizrahi that highlighted their similarity to Arabs, their affinities for Arab culture, and their openness to compromise and to sharing the country with Arabs. Second, in recent decades this process has featured an extremization that has locked in Mizrahi political support for militantly nationalistic and anti-Arab policies, most clearly expressed by solid Mizrahi support for the Likud, despite its (overwhelmingly) Ashkenazic leadership.

Explaining these patterns is a key objective of the book. Cohen’s argument begins with the key assumption that there is no essential meaning to “Mizrahiness” (Mizrahiut), an assumption warranted not only by widely accepted constructivist theories of social and political identities, but also by the kaleidoscopic array of ways of being or seeming to be Mizrahi that he documents. Regardless of whether Arab, Ashkenazi, and even Mizrahi commentators and analysts have written and talked as if there is an essential, primordial, and immutable key to “being Mizrahi,” and as if it profoundly shapes Mizrahi behavior and attitudes toward Arabs, treating Mizrahiness as a driver of outcomes is in Cohen’s view altogether misguided. Indeed, it is precisely due to the absence of preformed and culturally conditioned determinants of Mizrahiness that Cohen can explain evolving patterns and a distinctive narrowing in the range of strategies deployed in recent decades by Mizrahim. He does this by identifying three structural realities that have incentivized deployment of some strategies by Mizrahim while leading to the de-emphasis or abandonment of others. These are as follows:

1. the historical sequence that brought to Palestine socially mobilized, politically disciplined, psychologically and culturally rebellious, and ideologically committed Eastern European Jews before the arrival of masses of non-socially-mobilized, nonrevolutionary Mizrahi Jews, virtually all integrated within extended families and intact traditional cultural frameworks;

2. the dramatic economic, social, and political inequalities between Arabs and Jews and between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim;

3. the hegemonic status of statist Zionism within the Yishuv (Jews living in Palestine), which effectively ruled out political arrangements to accommodate sharing the land with its native inhabitants.

Cohen explains that the first of these social facts helps account for the dense and successful network of labor, military, commercial, agricultural, industrial, social, cultural, and political organizations built by late nineteenth and early twentieth century European Jewish immigrants into Palestine. Since most of them arrived as individuals bereft of and/or in rebellion against their families and communities in Europe, the only way to satisfy their economic, psychological, and social requirements was by actively participating in collective organizations and Zionist institutions, including the political parties that formed and controlled them. Cohen documents the intense resentment of Mizrahim during the mandate period toward the socialist-Zionist establishment, which controlled both aid organizations and the vast majority of sources of employment and which largely excluded immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa from desperately needed economic support and job opportunities. Accordingly, in the 1950s and early 1960s, when many more immigrants arrived from Arab/Muslim countries, they were substantially less oriented toward or skilled at making organizational and political activities central to their lives. In any case, with decades of work and sacrifice behind them, the veteran Ashkenazi Zionists largely failed to open the doors of the institutions they had built to Mizrahim. More often than not, the leaders, as well as the rank and file of the dominant socialist-Zionist movements, viewed Mizrahi newcomers as primitives, culturally and intellectually incapable of making the kinds of contributions to building a modern society expected of Europeans. Treated with condescension and suspicion, Mizrahi families were typically shunted to transit camps and then to development towns in isolated, dangerous, and economically depressed peripheral areas.

The legacy of this fundamental fact of sequence, of discrimination, and of stigmatization, along with the consequences of the flow of German Jewish capital in the 1930s and of German reparations to (European) survivors of the Holocaust, was profound. Economically, a wide gap opened between the skills, opportunities, and living standards available to Israeli Jews of Ashkenazi background and those of the “communities of the east.” From generation to generation, large numbers of Mizrahim harbored deep and explosive resentment toward the Ashkenazi establishment, including post-1948 Labor Party politicians, professionals, intellectuals, and cultural icons. Once Menachem Begin’s Likud appeared as a potent challenger to this establishment, increasing numbers of Mizrahim turned to the right, in their voting and in their identification with hardline nationalistic policies.

Cohen observes that the gaps between the economic circumstances and the life chances of Jewish and Palestinian inhabitants of the country, combined with the inequality separating Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, also helped drive the latter into bitter confrontations with Arabs in poor mixed cities such as Ramle, Lod, and Acre. This pattern of inequalities, he argues, also helps explain Mizrahi reactions to the post-1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. For although both Ashkenazim and Mizrahim benefited extensively from the looting and seizure of properties owned by Palestinians expelled from and barred from returning to their homes in 1948, the economic impact of the occupation, including the flow of tens of thousands of additional Palestinian workers into Israel, was particularly important for Mizrahim.

In the post-1967 boom in the Israeli economy, Mizrahim were happy to find themselves more able to secure clerical and entrepreneurial positions, including as brokers managing the flow of Arab workers from the occupied territories. Still, they worried intensely about the threat from cheap Palestinian labor. For while the government shielded Israeli farmers, industrialists, and professionals (mainly Ashkenazim) from competition by their Palestinian counterparts in the West Bank and Gaza, its emphasis on securing the quiescence of Palestinian workers by enabling them to find employment inside the green line provided no protection to (mostly) Mizrahi workers. On the other hand, even though Mizrahim were largely absent from early Labor government and Gush Emunim settlements in the territories, they flocked to the large urban settlements in the West Bank promoted by Likud-led governments, where they could find spacious and heavily subsidized apartments. Overall, the structures of inequality that circumscribed the lives of Mizrahim pushed them toward support for the continuation of Israeli rule of the territories, as long as their Palestinian populations were tightly controlled.

Despite the historical and economic circumstances that excluded Mizrahim from positions of power in the Yishuv and in the new state, and that led Mizrahim to complain often that Palestinian Arabs were better off than they were, the question remains of why attempts to implement authentically available strategies for building Mizrahi–Arab alliances so consistently failed. The third structural feature, mentioned above, is the explanation Cohen offers for this failure, and for what he sadly concludes was a profoundly important, though not necessarily permanent, crystallization of a Mizrahi identity anchored in militant nationalism and hostility toward Arabs. By the time there were enough Mizrahi Jews living in Palestine to matter, Ben-Gurion- and Jabotinsky-style statists, firmly committed to realizing the movement’s objectives by founding a “Jewish state” and dominating as much of Palestine as possible, were firmly in control of both the Zionist movement and the Yishuv. That fact more or less doomed strategies of coexistence based on the intellectual and cultural capital of Jewish immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, including their potential to feel comfortable with the prospect of sharing land and political power with Palestinian Arabs. It also meant that, for Mizrahim stigmatized as untrustworthy, weakly committed to Zionism, and unprepared for “modern” life, the most attractive avenue for acceptance by and integration into institutions of the new state was to parlay their language skills, and their ability to pass as Arabs, into (junior) positions within the security services and the apparatus used to surveil and control Arabs. If the Ashkenazi men who largely staffed elite combat units were regularly honored for their success in killing Arabs during official military operations, Mizrahi men, according to Cohen, often turned to violence against Arabs that was not state-sanctioned as a comparable vehicle for expressing their commitment to the Jewish nation.

During the mandate period and the first decades of Israeli statehood, halutzim (pioneers) and stoic warriors were the heroes of Zionism that Ashkenazi men could aspire to model themselves on. Not so Mizrahi men. Ben-Gurion once noted in his diary that “Moroccan immigrants must be taught to sit in chairs, not to attack women, not to steal, to be Jewish and Israeli men.” During the 1948 war, Israeli military censors read the mail of Israeli soldiers. Their reports of Mizrahi men yearning for a return to their homes of origin in North Africa convinced then chief of staff Yigal Yadin to fan flames of anti-Arab hatred among them in order to sharpen their fighting spirit. The irony of Ashkenazi leaders then using Mizrahi violence against Arabs as evidence of their primitiveness is not lost on the reader. In a compelling formulation, Cohen argues that the country’s Ashkenazi leadership defined Israeliness as entailing anti-Arabness. Ineligible for pioneering roles, largely excluded from elite combat units, and more exposed than Ashkenazim to the brutal effects of violent Palestinian resistance, Mizrahim increasingly adopted anti-Arab postures that helped them pass as Israelis able and to demonstrate their willingness to use violence in defense of Jewish interests. Enemies: A Love Story thus explains how hatred of both Ashkenazim and Arabs displaced other strategies available to Mizrahim as they sought to prove love for the country under conditions of severe inequality and stigmatization.

Jamal, Sand, and Cohen share deep disappointments, though no surprise, at the consequences of Zionism in Palestine—structures of power and arrays of hegemonic beliefs and identities that have privileged all Jews over Palestinian Arabs and some Jews over others. They also share an appreciation of structures as circumstances that agents cope with by deploying strategies whose effectiveness varies with slow-moving patterns of structural change. While none of them is confident of a future more attractive than the past or the present, each holds out hope, even if the time frame for its realization must be measured in decades or generations rather than months or years. Their hopes spring, in part, from the inability of anyone to act effectively in Palestine/the Land of Israel without recognizing the one-state reality that de facto annexation has created, a transformation in the structure of the problem that pushes all agents within the matrix of Israeli–Palestinian relations to explore new, or at least unfamiliar, strategies for sharing a space once again filled with both Arabs and Jews. Where the authors differ is on where to look for promising strategies: to Palestinian civil society and Gramscian theory, to castaway versions of binational Zionism, or to suppressed visions of Jews and Arabs as natural co-inhabitants of a Middle Eastern country.

Notes

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