This book by As’ad Ghanem and Mohanad Mustafa deals with the Palestinian community in Israel, a large group of citizens (about 20% of the country’s population) with historically problematic relations with the Jewish state. Ghanem (University of Haifa) and Mustafa (Beit Berl College) are both Palestinian professors in Israeli institutions of higher learning and have close familiarity with and significant publication records on the issue.
Importantly, this volume places the complicated internal Palestinian issue—the status of the Palestinians within Israel (to distinguish from the status of the Palestinians in the territories occupied since 1967)—within a broader theoretical and analytical framework. The conceptualization they chose to employ is Michael Oakeshott’s “politics of faith.” For Ghanem and Mustafa the politics of faith is about the desire to achieve the collective goals of the community through human efforts—political institutions and effective leadership. They view the potential success of the Palestinian minority within Israel as determined by three factors: demography and territoriality, the level of cohesion within the minority, and the performance of the leadership. Although conceptualizing the internal Israeli conflict in “faith” terms is quite creative, it might have been more effective, analytically speaking, to conceptualize it in terms of majority–minority relations in a society characterized by deep multidimensional divisions.
In at least parts of the book, the authors seem to be overly optimistic in assessing the actual power of the Palestinian community within Israel. Thus, they argue that “the demographic and social transformation of the Palestinians in Israel have bolstered their self-confidence” and mention in this context “the desire and ability to create a separate [Palestinian] economy” (p. 27). Yet, there is little evidence that the fundamental politics of the country in terms of Arab–Jewish relations has actually changed. In fact, the long rule of the Israeli Right under Benjamin Netanyahu and its ability to pass legislation interpreted as anti-minority—for example, the July 2018 Nation-State Law—are indications that ethnonational equality in Israel remains unachievable at this stage of the historical process.
Perhaps the strongest part of this book is its explanation of the reasons for the intensification of political activity by Palestinians in Israel over the last quarter-century or so. Traditionally, the international community (including the United States) and the regional powers (particularly Egypt, Jordan, and Israel) have focused on Israel’s “external Palestinian problem”; that is, finding a negotiated solution for the territories occupied by Israel during the 1967 war, including the political status of their Palestinian population. Yet, the “internal Palestinian problem,” the status of Arabs residing in Israel and having Israeli citizenship, has been completely ignored. What might be called the blind spot of the diplomatic process around the Palestinian issue was evident in the Oslo Accords. Whereas the PLO and Israel agreed to mutually recognize each other and moved toward what looked like a possible solution to the status of the occupied territories and their Palestinian residents, the future status of the growing Palestinian population was not discussed before or after Oslo. Ghanem and Mustafa justifiably view this omission as key to interpreting the political activity of Palestinians in Israel in the post-Oslo era until today.
In general, the authors’ outlook on the nature of the Israeli regime is quite accurate: “The state seeks to maintain its Jewish identity and character through segregation achieved through statutory and political means” (p. 10). As other scholars have argued, there are serious tensions between the country’s “Jewishness” and democracy, and between “ethnocracy” (Oren Yiftachel, Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine, 2006) and “hegemony” (Peleg, Democratizing the Hegemonic State: Political Transformation in the Age of Identity, 2007). Yet, in reviewing different models that might be applicable to the Israeli case, the authors are far from clear as to which they believe fits this particular case.
After an extensive introduction that offers useful historical background (mostly for non-experts) and simultaneously adduces a somewhat unclear and underdeveloped analytical framework, the authors dedicate six chapters to issues that they believe substantiate the post-Oslo “politics of faith” among Palestinians in Israel.
Chapter 1 deals with the political aspirations of the Palestinian minority as a challenger to the country’s “hegemonic ethnocracy,” recognizing the diversity of opinions (from “integration” to the state of full autonomy). The chapter notes, correctly, that although a vast majority of Palestinians in Israel recognize the state’s right to exist and accept their status as Israeli citizens (p. 34), there has been a decline in the number of Palestinians who see themselves as Israeli without a Palestinian component as well (p. 35). Moreover, although Palestinians are satisfied with their level of individual advancement, they are dissatisfied with the progress made by their group (p. 39). Importantly, the chapter notes the rise of a new generation of Palestinian intellectuals who promote the discourse of indigenousness.
Chapter 2 deals with political leadership among the Palestinians in Israel, noting that the new leaders are better educated, more eloquent, and charismatic than earlier ones, and deploy sophisticated tactics and strategies (p. 59). Yet, there is no attempt to assess the positions of the leadership versus that of the general Arab public. Chapter 3 is about Palestinian civil society, noting that there are thousands of Palestinian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Israel (2,200 in 2004). Yet, the authors recognize that Palestinian NGOs have not yet created an organized civil society that is legitimate and able to empower the minority (p. 96). Chapter 4 deals with Islamic activism in Israel, emphasizing the differences between various branches of the Islamic movement, particularly between the extraparliamentary branch that refuses to participate in the elections to the Knesset (viewing Israeli politics as a foreign environment, p. 118) and the more moderate branch that is working within the Israeli political system. Chapter 5 deals with the all-important “Future Vision” document, a 2006 manifesto published by a group of Palestinian politicians and intellectuals that has generated great national and international interest among Palestinians in Israel, Israel’s Jewish majority, and beyond. The authors view “Future Vision” as a major step toward the “organization of the Palestinians in Israel as a national group with united goals” (p. 146). Chapter 6 deals with the establishment of the Joint List of Arab Parties in the 2015 Knesset elections, a list that included the Left, the communists, the nationalists, and some Islamists. The authors provide the historical, intellectual, and political context for this move. Although they view the establishment of the Joint Arab List as an important political event, they opine that it is merely “the start of the process of change and not its end” (p. 168), arguing that both the State of Israel and the Palestinian national movement need to seek a “fair historical solution that deals with the impact of the [1948] Nakba and not the [1967] occupation” (p. 168).
The concluding chapter to this useful, accessible book deals with the future of the Palestinians in Israel, lamenting that, in the post-Oslo era, “the question of the Palestinian minority remained marginalized” (p. 169) and “Israel’s ethnicization policies have intensified” (p. 170); both assertions are supported by other scholars. Realistically, the authors view the minority as having a complex identity as both Palestinian and Israeli and a unique Palestinian identity at that. They correctly argue that “the Palestinians in Israel must invest special effort in changing the Jews’ attitude toward them and their demands” (p. 172). Although this is sound advice, the domination of Israeli politics by the Right is not promising. Nevertheless, this book is a significant contribution to the academic and political debate on intercommunal relationships in Israel and could shed light on politics in other deeply divided societies.
