Israel & the Arab World

Reprinted from the Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, Summer  2001 (with changes in orthography to HTML standards).
Copyright 2001 by the Middle East Studies Association of North America
Compromising Palestine: A Guide to Final Status Negotiation, by Aharon Klieman. 268 pages, index, maps. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2000. $17.50 ISBN (Paper) 0-231-11789-2

The timing of this book could hardly be better, and yet I doubt that it will help negotiators find an acceptable formula for Palestinian statehood. Klieman’s Compromising Palestine promises a great deal: “This book poses an entirely different set of practical issues: that state’s exact location and boundaries, how large a state, its relations with Israel and Jordan” (p. 8). However, the closest the author gets to fulfill this promise is when he states that “[t]he dividing lines are going to be drawn...somewhere between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River” (p. 163).

Only after reading one-third of the book did I discover that it really is about ‘compromising the West Bank’ rather than ‘compromising Palestine.’ The misuse of the name promotes one of the main themes: the “Israelis are now at the far more advanced stage of arguing over alternative plans of partition. The Palestinian mainstream, by contrast, is still resisting partition...at the preliminary level of principle” (p. 163). Clearly, if Palestine is the West Bank, then the above statement is not far from the truth. However, such terminology promotes the Israeli argument that concessions in Final Status negotiations should start from current positions. The Palestinians argue, by contrast, that only by ignoring the vast concession they have already made by accepting an embryo state, amounting to about one-fifth of mandated Palestine, can one claim that Palestinian insistence on total withdrawal from the West Bank and uprooting of the settlements “contradict[s] the essence and spirit of territorial compromise as give and take” (p. 164). Once this is established, a series of false observations are made, such as: “Witness as well the absence of candid discussion, diversity of opinion, voices reignedly searching for other than ‘all or nothing’ formulas” (p. 234). The orientalists’ perception of a monotonous, stationary, and unanimous Palestinian community is thus reaffirmed.

The first chapter cites five pre-conditions for the success of conflict resolution, declares that the Palestinian-Israeli dispute is ‘ripe,’ and promotes a message of ‘partition inescapability.’ But Klieman ultimately admits that “there is in all honesty no objective logic to partition” (p. 243). Various Israeli versions of partitioning the West Bank are based on arbitrary figures of how much land Israel should annex. Compromising Palestine demonstrates astonishing insensitivity towards Palestinian grievances and aspirations. The Palestinian refugees are looked upon as an economic-related problem the solution of which will require a great deal of money, but Israel’s moral and legal responsibilities are ignored. Furthermore, an explicit parallel is drawn between the Jewish colonial settlements in the West Bank and the Arab villages in the Galilee, between the settlers’ network roads and the Gaza-West Bank passage. Nor is Palestinians’ fear of terrorist attacks by the Jewish settlers considered worth mentioning. Thus, the faces of the real victims of the long conflict remain absent and the Israelis’ monopoly over fear from terrorism is preserved.

In contrast, perhaps, to Klieman’s sincere intentions, I believe that his book harms the peace effort in the Middle East. As Meron Benvenisti explained,[90] if Israeli negotiators “can persuade the Israeli public that they are proposing an adequate compromise, they will be playing into the hands of the extremists, because, when the Palestinians reject this compromise, everyone can then self-righteously argue that the Palestinians, as usual, are adopting an extreme position.”

Nu’man Kanafani
The Royal Agricultural University, Denmark



The Druze Between Palestine and Israel, 1947-49, by Laila Parsons. 210 pages, endnotes, bibliography, index. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. $65.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-312-23107-5

This fine monograph examines the origins of the alliance between the State of Israel and its Druze minority and is a useful contribution to the new historical literature revisiting Israel’s foundational period. Drawing on secondary literature in three languages as well as on materials from Israeli archives, Parsons describes the gradual evolution of the Zionist (later Israeli)-Druze relationship between World War I and the end of the 1948 War.

Most Israelis and Druze have in retrospect presented their alliance as natural and predictable, rooted in their shared status as religious minorities in a Muslim Middle East. Parsons convincingly demonstrates that this vision is a convenient re-reading of the past in light of present political circumstances. Although certain Druze shaykhs, particularly in the vicinity of Haifa, pursued close relations with Jewish neighbors and Zionist leaders as early as the 1930s, most sought to remain neutral in what they perceived as a conflict between Jews and Muslims. The turning point was not persecution at the hands of marauding Muslim gangs during the Arab Revolt of the late 1930s, but the Zionist triumph over the Druze battalion of the Arab Liberation Army in the spring of 1948. For the reader familiar with recent scholarship on the subject, particularly Kais Firros two massive tomes and Yoav Gelber’s articles, this short book will contain few revelations. But it is well-researched, well-written, and largely accurate.

Nevertheless, The Druze Between Palestine and Israel suffers from two weaknesses. First, it relies heavily, like all research to date, on Hebrew-language primary materials. These sources, however, systematically understate both the extent of Druze sympathy for the nationalist cause and the basic similarities between the Druze and their fellow rural Arabs, and they overstate the unity of the Christian and Muslim populations of Mandatory Palestine. Parsons occasionally hints at proto-nationalist activity among the Druze, but this is but a minor theme that is submerged in her larger story. These voices should be brought back to the center of the tale.

Second, Parsons fails to supply adequate motivation for the study, to explain why she has undertaken it and why we should read it. In her introduction, she argues that “this work throws more weight behind the new historians’ rejection of the traditionalist picture of a solitary Israel faced by a monolithic and implacably hostile Arab camp” (p. viii). But even popular historians, such as Howard Sachar, have long presented the Druze as warm to Jews and loyal to the state. Nor is it clear how the conventional wisdom that the alliance between the Jews and the Druze was natural and longstanding squares with the revisionist agenda as Parsons presents it.

Parsons’s book represents solid historical research, but it is short on interpretation. As a result, some of the most important dilemmas are under-explored or not addressed. For example, why did the Druze not cast their lot with other Arabs? Conversely, why did other Arabs, whether rural or urban, not also switch sides when the war appeared to be going Israel’s way? Why did the Druze largely stay on their land, while other Arabs fled? These are critical questions to which this book does not do justice.

Ronald R. Krebs
Columbia University


Fertility Policy in Israel: The Politics of Religion, Gender and Nation, by Jacqueline Portugese. 208 pages, bibliography, index. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998. $59.95 (Cloth) ISBN 0-275-96098-6

Fertility Policy in Israel provides a comprehensive and critical overview of the politics of reproduction and motherhood in Israel. In the introduction, Portugese—a young Canadian social scholar—declares that her goal is “to contribute to the growing field of feminist analyses of reproductive politics.” She defines her research method as policy analysis, that is, the attempt at “finding out what governments do, why they do it and what difference it makes” (p. xi). The book is based on the detailed study of the relevant legislation, governmental documents, academic literature, and interviews with key Israeli experts and decisionmakers.

The historical and contextual backdrop for the study is well documented and clearly presented in the opening chapters. Portugese explains the historic, social, and religious origins of Israeli pro-natalism, starting from the pre-state period to the mid-1990s. Drawing on a critical feminist perspective, she shows how Zionism, demographic competition with the Arabs, the Jewish tradition, and the wish to compensate for the terrible losses of the Holocaust combined to endorse the ideology of patriarchal familism. The doctrine of imperative motherhood permeates both the state institutions and everyday social norms among Israeli Jews, translating into fertility rates twice as high as the European average (about 3 children per woman versus 1.5, respectively).

Portugese then examines specific policies related to family planning (pregnancy counseling and contraceptive use), abortion, and new reproductive technologies. Joining the stance of many Israeli feminists, she reveals the lack of public support and funding for family planning services and limitations of access to abortion, on the one hand, and generous public funding of assisted reproductive services, on the other. Driven by the motherhood imperative and not having full information on the risks of reproductive technologies, thousands of Israeli women undergo long-term, intensive treatments, some of which are painful and hazardous, although success rates are only moderate.

The final chapter looks into the most controversial and politically sensitive issue—fertility policy and Israeli Arabs. The author explains why direct family planning policy in the Moslem sector was never attempted. She further argues that most governmental measures of modernization in the Arab community were aimed mainly at their by-product—the reduction of the Arab fertility rates. Despite her feminist stance, the author sounds rather critical of such policy goals as Arab women’s education and employment, the enforcement of the minimal legal age at marriage, and the promotion of women’s health (for example, the shift from home to hospital birth and prenatal care). Along with fertility reduction, these modernizing activities have led to multiple benefits for the Moslem women of Israel, that manifest in their increased economic activity, lower maternal and infant mortality, and growing life expectancy―compared to other Arab countries of the region.

It seems that, while condemning pro-natalist pressure towards Jewish women, Portugese advocates the benefits of high fertility and traditionalism for the Arab women. This double standard pervades the book, which in my view comprises its main weakness. Although the author tries hard to preserve a ‘neutral observer’ stance in her description of the Arab-Israeli demographic conflict, her sympathies for the former frequently come to the surface. Nonetheless, this book surely makes a significant contribution to the current feminist literature on reproduction, social policy and Middle Eastern politics.

Larissa Remennick
Bar-Ilan University, Israel



Israel in Search of Identity: Reading the Formative Years, by Nissim Rejwan. 188 pages, index. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1999. $59.95 (Cloth) ISBN 0-8130-1664-9

Israel in Search of Identity offers a detailed analysis of Israel’s struggle to define its national identity and political priorities. Rejwan’s reading of Israel’s formative years suggests that the origins of both Zionism and the pan-Arab movement are informed by a restrictive nineteenth-century western European definition of nationality. Rejwan suggests that Israel’s integration into the Middle East lies in understanding the longer history of Muslim-Jewish relations and in appreciating the ethnic diversity of Israel and the Middle East in general.

Part One, “A Problem and Its Roots,” begins with an introductory analysis of the narrow exclusivist Zionist or ‘Pan-Jewish’ claim on Palestine/Israel and compares it to the exclusivist stance of Pan-Arabism. Drawing on Marxist theory, Rejwan questions the validity of ‘nation’ as a definition of a group of people united by a common origin, language, or history. In this part, he examines the concept of ‘nation’ and ‘nationality’ in both Zionist and pan-Arab doctrines, and exposes both doctrines as romantic versions of tribal collectivism. Rejwan rejects the biological or hereditary definition of Zionism as it is echoed in various early proponents of modern Jewish nationalism in Europe. He also considers the debates over ‘Who is a Jew’ and suggests that much of the debate rests on a hopeless confusion of ethnicity and nationality.

Part Two, “Prospects,” suggests that instead of the artificial dichotomy of Arab and Jewish nationalities, a more flexible and pluralist approach should recognize the rich mosaic of cultures, nationalities, languages, and religious groups that make up the Middle East. Israel ought to reconsider the hierarchical privileging of the Ashkenazi (European) and Western (American) elite and open itself to the cultural heritage of its Mizrahi, or Middle Eastern Jewish constituency. This constituency is better equipped to bridge the gap between Israelis and Palestinians inside Israel and between Israel and its Middle Eastern neighbors. The shift to a pluralist, multi-ethnic stance, establishing Israel as an open society, will lead to a greater willingness among Middle Eastern societies to see Israel as an integral part of a pluralist Middle East. “Fundamentally,” argues Rejwan, “there is no opposition between the Jewish tradition and the Muslim-Arab tradition” (p. 98).

Part Three, “Middle Eastern Themes,” points out the relatively recent resurgence of pan-Arabism after World War I as a nationalist movement and explains the ways in which it has occluded the more pluralist, multi-ethnic, and tolerant attitude of Islam toward various Middle Eastern groups. Most Middle Eastern states have adopted an ethnocentric rather than territorial definition of nationalism, leading to the persecution of Copts in Egypt, Armenians in Turkey, and Kurds in Iraq to mention only a few examples. Part Three concludes with a discussion of the cultural debate in Israel between an ‘Oriental’ or ‘Levantine’ and a Western cultural orientation. The author debunks various biases held by Ashkenazi intellectuals against Israel’s Oriental constituency and refutes the notion that Mizrahi (Oriental) Jews are opposed to peaceful relations with Israel’s Arab neighbors.

Rejwan’s balanced criticism of nationalist orientations in Israel as well as in the Middle East, his analysis of the relationship between Islam and Arab nationalism, and, above all, his emphasis on the potential contribution of Middle Eastern Jews to the region promises to add an important dimension to the ongoing debate on Israel’s cultural and political future, as well as to the consideration of prospects for peace in the Middle East.

Esther Fuchs
University of Arizona



The New Israel: Peacemaking and Liberalization, edited by Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled. 278 pages, index. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000. $65.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-8133-3567-1

Shafir and Peled’s The New Israel is a collection of essays that traces the structural evolution of the Jewish economy in Palestine from its socialist origins to the state-directed economic development of Israel’s first three decades to the economic liberalization that began in the mid-1980s and carries through today. The articles demonstrate how the imperatives of Zionist settlement, including colonization and full employment of Jewish immigrants, took precedence over purely economic objectives in the period leading up to 1948 and how the dominant Labor Party, through its control of the government and the quasi-governmental Histadrut, sustained these policies as a means of maintaining political hegemony. Beset, however, by high inflation and low economic growth, the government of Prime Minister Shimon Peres instituted the 1985 stabilization plan, which substantially liberalized the economy, including the all-important capital markets, and severely weakened the Histadrut. As a consequence, so the authors argue, a more assertive and independent business class emerged to fuel the economic growth of the late 1980s and 1990s.

The book succeeds in describing the evolution of the Israeli economy from its dirigist origins to its current state of liberalization. More problematic, however, is the connection the authors draw between economic liberalization and the moderation of Israeli attitudes toward its Arab neighbors. Shafir and Peled claim that a newly assertive business class with an economic stake in regional peace led Israeli leaders to reconceptualize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in economic rather than security terms. But the authors’ focus on the influence of transnationally-minded elites in transforming Israeli foreign policy virtually ignores changes in Israel’s security environment, which were arguably even more important in stimulating the peace process. These changes were occasioned by the defeat of Iraq in the Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet Union which isolated the Palestine Liberation Organization within the Arab world and gave the US a free hand for its peacemaking efforts. Thus, the strategic situation faced by the security-conscious Prime Minister Yitchak Rabin in 1993 was considerably more conducive to a diplomatic reckoning than the situation faced by his predecessors. As subsequent events have demonstrated, however, the desire of Israel’s business elites to shape a more comfortable environment for regional trade and global investment is no substitute for a politically responsive regional environment. The editors clearly ally themselves with the position that economic interests will ultimately prevail over religious and national emotions. Here they follow a long line of Zionist thinkers from Theodor Herzl to Peres, all of whom have seen Israel as central to the prosperity of the entire region. What this ignores is Arab resistance to integration with the robust Israeli economy and the continuing salience of security as a driving factor in foreign policy.

Bernard J. Firestone
Hofstra University



Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, by Israel Shahak. (Pluto Middle Eastern Series) 127 pages, notes, index. Chicago, IL: Pluto Press, 1997. $16.95 (Paper) ISBN 0-7453-0819-8

What is one to make of a book purported to be about Jewish history and Jewish religion whose opening sentence in a foreword written by Gore Vidal presents as fact a slander that President Truman recognized the State of Israel because of a two million dollar cash campaign donation in a suitcase delivered by an unnamed ‘American Zionist?’ And what can one expect when in that same foreword, the great medieval Jewish philosopher and exegete Moses Maimonides is simply identified as “the great Gentile-hating Dr. Maimonides” (p. viii)? And what indeed, can the reader hope to learn in a book whose second foreword, by Edward Said (who recently admitted to hurling stones across Lebanon’s border, aimed at Israelis), has the temerity to suggest that throughout most of Israel’s history “Israeli Jews were assaulting Palestinians” (p. ix)? The answer of course is that one can expect to find a volume filled with accusations and maledictions, half-truths, and outright defamation.

Here is a manuscript that finds in Judaism all that is hateful, that claims that, alone among nations, the State of Israel discriminates against citizens by virtue of their religion, but says nothing of the laws in the countries of Europe that subjected Jews to onerous persecutions and exclusions, culminating of course in the ‘final solution’ that sought to exterminate them in one act of genocide. Indeed, so powerful is his vituperation against the religion into which he was born that Shahak asserts that old Christian opposition to Judaism was “remarkably free from racism,” a declaration that will surely surprise the Church fathers who have recently apologized for that very racism. Shahak’s slim volume also says nothing about the laws of Islamic countries where for generations Jews were relegated to the status of ‘dhimmi,’ so that they would be assured of second class citizenship. He notes nothing about the expulsion of nearly three quarters of a million Jews from the Islamic world after the 1948 establishment of the State of Israel.

Failing to mention the Jews’ long history of persecution, Shahak cannot therefore understand or explain the need for a Jewish state. He fails to see that the state of Israel represented the only means of liberating the Jews from their two-thousand-year-old exile and repeated persecution, and remains today the only certain refuge for Jews (whether from the former Soviet Union, Ethiopia, the Balkans, or anywhere else). From within the security of his own haven in Israel, he forgets how recent and still precarious that security is in the long view of Jewish history.

Shahak scoffs at the idea of the Jews having a Biblical claim to the land, denying the idea of an exile of the Jewish people and their return to their ancient homeland. He uses terms like ‘holy war’—a term whose origins are Islamic rather than Jewish—to describe the political goals of the Jews, citing as evidence the extremist rabbis of Kiryat Arba and Hebron who speak, if at all, for a tiny fringe among the population of settlers. Indeed, throughout this book, Shahak uses the marginal to represent the doctrinal, the extreme to represent the totality of Jewry.

For Shahak, what the rabbis described as the “seventy faces of the Torah,” meaning its multiplicity of viewpoints, is dismissively called “the totalitarian Jewish past,” and “the dead hand of Jewish religion” (p. 20-21). Indeed, it is Shahak’s simplistic notion of a monolithic and extremist Judaism that is evidence of his own narrowness of understanding. The rabbis of the Talmud had a saying: “hafoch ba v'hafoch ba ki kula ba,” which means that the Torah and Jewish sources from which the Jewish tradition emerged should be reviewed endlessly, for in them a multiplicity of points of view and interpretations can be found. Ultimately, Shahak is unable to recognize the complexity of the Jewish heritage. I suggest disposing of this book into the same dustbin as the infamous anti-Jewish tract and fraud, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Samuel Heilman
City University of New York


From Catastrophe to Power: Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel, by Idith Zertal. Translated by Chaim Watzman and Gila Svirsky. 335 pages, index. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998. $29.95 (Cloth) ISBN 0-520-21578-8

Reading Zertal’s compelling and extraordinarily detailed re-enactment of the efforts by the Mossad, a covert Zionist organization, to bring many thousands of displaced Jews to Palestine in the period between the ending of the Second World War and Israel’s Declaration of Independence, carries all the urgency of undergoing that momentous journey over again. If only vicariously for those of a later generation, what Zertal presents is living history, but it is living history with an important proviso. For, under the guidance of this intelligently controversial political commentator, we are soon made to realize that the re-shaping of the journey is only incidentally of our own volition. An important sub-text running through Zertal’s account is that historical interpretation of the events leading to the founding of the State of Israel has been largely pre-determined by the history makers themselves who, even long after their time, carry “a vested interest in the representation of historical events in which they played a part” (p. 3). The coercive propaganda about the era that brought the Jewish state into being stressed the vision and political acumen of David Ben Gurion, a leader who believed that prior to nationhood the Jews had no history (p. 9). Consequently, because it was “not on the Zionist agenda”, little or no individual attention has been given to “the personal fate of all of the Exodus refugees” (p. 254). The negating of Diaspora history and Zionist trepidation to face up to the Holocaust (“a kind of forbidden territory” [p. 273]) are products of Israel’s obsessive, though also understandable, preoccupation with its own image as a Jewish state created out of an ultimately incomprehensible catastrophe. “The Holocaust, its victims, and its survivors,” concludes Zertal, “all played their crucial historical and political roles according to the Zionist script” (p. 274).

Can there be other ways to re-interpret the fate of Holocaust survivors vis-à-vis the emergence of the state of Israel? Zertal’s considered response is that “Zionism’s work of mourning…for the Jewish catastrophe [the Holocaust] still remains to be done” (p. 274), and until that truly happens, an occluded image of the events which led to the foundation of Israel will prevail. Her study hugely enriches our knowledge with its scrupulously researched and authoritative accounts of the clandestine endeavors of Zionist ships, packed with the traumatized survivors of Hitler’s Final Solution, to run the gauntlet of the British navy; of the heroism of Yehuda Artzi, the maverick who had organized the illegal immigration of Jewish refugees out of Italy; of the black market efforts to raise sufficient cash to pay for the ships themselves; of the direct actions adopted by the Irgun and Stern gang whose execution of British soldiers came perilously close to nullifying worldwide sympathy for the plight of the Jews; and of the seemingly demoniac attempts by Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary, to thwart the whole process. Perhaps the one lacuna in Zertal’s otherwise impressive account is that she gives insufficient attention to the startling shift by which the British slipped from being allies to enemies, and to the highly equivocal motives of an emasculated colonial power in blocking Jewish immigration to Palestine. That said, Zertal has written a ground-breaking and powerful study that fully rewards its translation from Hebrew to bring it to the attention of a wider English-speaking readership.

Frank Felsenstein
Yeshiva