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Nov 2, 2017 - Israel and Its Palestinian Citizens: Ethnic Privileges in the. Jewish State .... Vietnam War to his support for the environment and human security ...
Recent Books

Israel and Its Palestinian Citizens: Ethnic Privileges in the Jewish State, edited by Nadim N. Rouhana, assisted by Sahar S. Huneidi. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 462 pages. $99.99 cloth, $34.99 paper, $28.00 e-book. REVIEWED BY MAZEN MASRI

A new book on the topic of Palestinian citizens of Israel gets published every few years. Many of these regurgitate old and discredited theories developed by the Israeli establishment and academia about “modernization,” “majorityminority relations,” “Israelization,” or “radicalization,” and few manage to challenge the official narrative. In Israel and Its Palestinian Citizens: Ethnic Privileges in the Jewish State, Nadim N. Rouhana, one of the leading figures in challenging the dominant (Israeli) ways of thinking about Palestinians in Israel, brings together an impressive range of scholars to produce a volume that critically approaches the topic from various disciplinary perspectives, which include history, political psychology, law, geography, surveillance, and political, economic, and social movement theory. Israel and Its Palestinian Citizens tackles one of the more puzzling issues about Palestinians in Israel and, by extension, the nature of the Israeli regime: Palestinians are considered citizens with nominally equal rights, and at the same time they are subordinated legally, politically, and economically by the regime that granted their citizenship. To tackle this question, the book is framed in terms of ethnic privileges, which “extend to all areas of political, legal, constitutional, urban, and economic power structures” (p. 5). These privileges do not arise from nowhere, but are inherently related to settler colonialism, or as Rouhana puts it in the introduction: “The substance of the Arabs’ citizenship rights are emptied not by simple discriminatory policies that can be remedied, but by the settler-colonial structure from which these policies are derived” (p. 7). The chapters in the volume adhere largely to the ethnic privilege framework discussed in the introduction, though the discussion of settler colonialism is not uniform. Some chapters

Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. XLVII, No. 3 (Spring 2018), p. 110, ISSN: 0377-919X; electronic ISSN: 1533-8614. © 2018 by the Institute for Palestine Studies. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2018.47.3.110.

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do not even mention it, others allude to it in passing, and some, like the chapter on surveillance by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, the chapter on law by Nimer Sultany, and the chapter on memory and history by Rouhana and Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, provide a more sophisticated analysis informed by theories of settler colonialism. Nevertheless, the book is coherent and each chapter provides a piece of the puzzle that contributes to the big picture. At times the chapters seem to be in conversation with each other, providing different perspectives on the same issue. For example, in his chapter on the equality discourse of the Israeli governments in the first decade of the state, Hillel Cohen seems to take official statements about commitment to equality at face value, despite the environment that prevailed then, while Ian S. Lustick and Matthew Berkman take a more critical stance that highlights continuity with the Zionist movement’s past practice of audience-specific messaging and tactics of dissimulation. While most of the chapters provide a good overview of ethnic privilege and its dynamics, and how it developed and changed over the years, some provide novel contributions to the existing body of research. But the main contribution of this volume as a whole is in the diversity of areas covered: it goes beyond the classic issues discussed in the context of the Palestinians in Israel, such as land policy, to cover new areas such as economic development, education, and surveillance. Having a chapter dedicated to social movements and resistance (written by Ahmad H. Sa‘di) helps complete the picture by showing that this group, despite the tremendous challenges, was not a passive community even if the relative success of the struggle is debatable. This diversity of topics and the balance between the breadth of scope and the depth of analysis makes the volume ideal for use in postgraduate teaching. Another important contribution of this volume is that its authors discuss matters, trends, and policies relevant beyond the Palestinians in Israel. The analyses they provide elucidate Israeli policies in general with respect to other segments of the Palestinian people. Indeed, they are helpful for discerning the nature of the Israeli regime and Zionist ideology. The chapter by Lustick and Berkman on Israel’s double discourse—one discourse for external consumption to satisfy foreign nations and audiences, and another, which reflects the material policies adopted—is relevant for understanding current Israeli policies toward Palestinians in general and Israel’s approach to the negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Similarly, Sultany’s analysis of the Supreme Court of Israel and the different techniques used to create the impression of objective engagement while at the same time upholding the status quo applies to the court’s attitude toward the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Yosef Jabareen’s discussion of territorial and demographic dominance can also inform studies about Israeli policies in the West Bank. Israel and Its Palestinian Citizens is a welcome contribution to the literature about the Palestinians in Israel. Its focus on the foundational underpinnings of ethnic privilege means that it will be relevant for years to come, as these foundational underpinnings are not likely to change anytime soon. Mazen Masri, senior lecturer at City University of London, is the author of The Dynamics of Exclusionary Constitutionalism: Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2017).

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Palestine’s Horizon: Toward a Just Peace, by Richard Falk. London: Pluto Press, 2017. 196 pages. $99.00 cloth, $21.00 paper, $21.00 e-book. REVIEWED BY ARDI IMSEIS

In Representations of the Intellectual, Edward W. Said observed that “despite the abuse and vilification” that proPalestinian advocates invite for themselves, “the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual.”* Few public intellectuals have devoted themselves so fully to this ideal as Richard Falk. From his opposition to the Vietnam War to his support for the environment and human security, no progressive movement of global consequence has gone untouched by the Albert G. Milbank Professor, Emeritus, of International Law and Practice at Princeton. For those engaged with the question of Palestine through the lens of international law, Falk’s presence in both the literature and praxis has loomed larger and longer than most, from his work on the MacBride Commission following the Sabra and Shatila massacre (1982) to his role as United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967 (a post he held 2008–14). It is against this great corpus of work as a scholar/practitioner/activist that Falk’s Palestine’s Horizon: Toward a Just Peace must be read. Palestine’s Horizon is a general meditation on where the Palestinian struggle for dignity and justice stands in 2017, a century following the Balfour Declaration, seventy years after the UN partition of Palestine, and fifty years following Israel’s occupation of its remnants in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The book is divided into four parts. In part 1, Falk interprets the above anniversaries to provide a “helpful perspective on the present,” and argues that the following four features are salient: (1) the collapse of the Oslo process and the resulting widespread disillusionment with the two-state paradigm; (2) the persistence of a “dual reality” in which Palestinian suffering is correlative with increased Israeli encroachment on Palestinian rights; (3) the growth in global solidarity with Palestine, epitomized by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, resulting in Israeli efforts to equate that movement with a new form of anti-Semitism; and (4) the overshadowing of Palestine’s cause by other acute regional crises in Syria and Yemen (pp. 5–6). The result, according to Falk, is that “we are now experiencing both a post-diplomatic mood of frustration and an emerging pre-diplomatic mood of expectation,” the success of which will ultimately depend on an unlikely dramatic shift in both the U.S. and European positions (p. 9). Part 2 focuses on the gradual shift toward nonviolent strategies to achieving Palestinian rights, and the resulting “war of legitimacy.” Falk identifies BDS as both “a legally and morally appropriate means to carry on the struggle for Palestinian rights,” and a principal component of

*

Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Pantheon, 1994), p. 101.

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the “soft power” required to compel changes in Israeli behavior. Likewise, Falk points to the Palestine’s recent diplomatic successes, including gaining recognition as a non-member observer state at the UN and its accession to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, as important elements of the legitimacy war. In his view, this strategic use of the law—increasingly referred to as “lawfare” by proponents and opponents alike—has become a “major dimension of the current phase of the Palestinian national movement [and] has a positive role to play” (pp. 92–93). Part 3 expounds on the false conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism among some commentators, including in reference to the work of the UN and the academy. As to the UN, Falk argues that it was an historical mistake for the UN General Assembly to have equated Zionism with racism in 1975, if only because doing so shifted the focus of inquiry toward the legitimacy of Israel’s ideological foundations, as opposed to its concrete and continuing actions under law. One result has been to obscure “real grievances of Palestinians . . . behind a smokescreen of a false debate about whether or not deep criticisms of Israel were anti-Semitic” (p. 113). In his view, “it is not Zionism as an ideology that should be evaluated as racist or not, despite its ethnic exclusivity, but Israel as a state subject to international law” (pp. 109–10). From there, Falk reflects on increasing efforts “to stifle criticism of Israel by inappropriately deploying this charge of anti-Semitism” (p. 115). Finally, part 4 is devoted to a short discussion of Said’s emancipatory ideas behind the Palestinian liberation struggle juxtaposed against current overwhelming material odds. Falk draws upon Said’s critique of Oslo to address how “the Palestinians are waging and winning a legitimacy war for control of the heights of international morality and international law, for the public perception of justice and right” (p. 137). In a cri de coeur, Falk urges his readers to “not be misled by accepting the (mis)guidance of self-proclaimed realists who continue to shape the policies of government, proclaiming that the achievement of justice and genuine peace is unattainable for the Palestinians, indeed for the entire peoples of the Middle East” (p. 141). Palestine’s Horizon is a thoughtful and timely monograph on where the struggle for Palestinian and, by extension, Israeli liberation is today. As ever, it is a movement that must be guided as much, if not more, by the metaphysical realm of principle, morality, and justice as by the physical realms of politics, capital, and force. For anyone who cares to explore a deeper and more critical analysis of the contemporary history and geopolitics of Palestine/Israel, as explained through the relationship between hard and soft power in global politics, this is a book that should be consulted. Ardi Imseis, University of Cambridge PhD candidate and former UNRWA legal counsel (2002–14), is editor in chief of the Palestine Yearbook of International Law (Leiden: Brill).

Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean: A Social History, by Beshara B. Doumani. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 370 pages. $87.99 cloth, $29.99 paper, $24.00 e-book. REVIEWED BY STEVE TAMARI

In Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean: A Social History, Beshara B. Doumani breaks new ground in legal, women’s, and regional political economies’ histories by bringing a quarter century of work among the shari‘a court registers of Ottoman Bilad al-Sham to bear on the history of the family between the 1660s and the 1880s.

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Doumani focuses on the family waqf (waqf ahli) or endowment, “the most expressive, legitimate, and historically enduring of all the religiously sanctioned legal instruments available for use in structuring and regulating long-term property relations between kin, and between the self and God” (p. 103). Family waqfs became the dominant form of endowment among the new urban propertied classes of Ottoman cities, beginning in the late seventeenth century and continuing until Ottoman reforms transformed legal practices in the Arab provinces in the 1880s. Family trusts were significant because they prescribed rules for the devolution of property, which shaped families and their wealth into the future. On the basis of a mother lode of documentation—up to 15,000 records—covering 150 years, Doumani compares the devolution strategies of family waqf founders in Tripoli, Lebanon, and Nablus, Palestine, during two periods (1660–1730 and 1800–1880). The result is so dramatic that Doumani ends up rethinking many assumptions about society, religion, and political economy in this period and place. The gendered nature of property devolution is so different in these two towns separated by only 250 kilometers that they would otherwise appear to be worlds apart. In Tripoli, women were founders and beneficiaries of family waqfs; in Nablus, they were absent as founders and usually excluded as beneficiaries. In Tripoli, almost 100 percent of family waqfs either gave all children equal shares regardless of gender or, following Qur’anic principles, allowed all children to inherit, with males getting twice the shares of females. In Nablus, the figure for those patterns was less than 50 percent, with the remainder either excluding the progeny of daughters and the female progeny of sons or excluding daughters and their progeny altogether (pp. 195–96). In Tripoli, half of family waqf endowers were women; in Nablus, the percentage was as low as zero by the mid-nineteenth century (p. 140). Doumani provides two explanations for this divergence. The first shows that the differently structured economies of these cities produced the variances in property devolution. During these centuries, Tripoli saw the rise of a middle class whose wealth came from privately owned urban mulberry orchards, which produced silkworms for a burgeoning silk trade. The orchards were funded and worked through “co-cultivation contracts,” in which owners of land and trees (which could be owned separately from the land) shared the income generated with specialized farmers. The urban locale and the history of women as laborers associated with sericulture led to a large middle class favoring conjugal (rather than agnatic) family units with women as both founders and beneficiaries of waqfs. Concurrently, a different pattern unfolded in Nablus. There, “commercial family firms” dominated agricultural production through moneylending to peasants who enjoyed usufruct rights to government-owned dry farming lands. In place of co-cultivation contracts, the Nablus political economy depended on male-dominated, patron-client relationships between elite merchants of the city and rural headmen in the hinterland. Women were effectively excluded from the economic life of the city (p. 227).

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Second, Doumani supplements this materialist explanation by historicizing the encounter between “kin and court.” Waqf endowers exhibited remarkable agency in constituting and shaping their families into the future. Each of seven chapters opens with a detailed microstudy— beginning with the story of Maryam ‘Anklis in Tripoli in 1840, whose voice is transmitted directly in the records and who produced a hybrid document that disrupted legal norms—which reveals the particulars of an individual endower’s legal strategy. At the same time, Doumani emphasizes that those who went to court had to conform to the boundaries set by the shari‘a. “The encounter between kin and court was a mutually constitutive one. . . . By routinely resorting to the shari‘a court to perform legally sophisticated property devolution practices . . . kin defined the role of the court as a social institution and thus shaped the archives. At the same time, in order to perform in the court, kin were required to compress complex and messy family circumstances into a limited number of available legal channels, which were further bound by rules of presentation and evidence” (p. 35). Doumani’s findings challenge key assumptions about gender in Ottoman Arab societies, the significance of the shari‘a courts, and the dynamics of class formation in provincial cities like Tripoli and Nablus. Contrasting the active economic role of women in Tripoli with the economic absence of their counterparts in Nablus, this work puts a premium on divergent political economies (and not simply the law or women’s agency) in shaping the prospects for women’s economic engagement. Second, the law and actual encounters in the courts show that neither was static and, given the opportunity as in Tripoli, women and those who would protect their interests could use them to their advantage. Finally, Doumani’s illumination of the deep economic and social divide between two Ottoman-era Arab towns of Bilad al-Sham, both dependent on returns from agriculture, challenges scholars to reconsider the degree to which localism in its eighteenthcentury heyday actually ran even deeper than once assumed. Each chapter of Family Life weaves the discursive, microanalysis of the endowers’ strategizing, the action in the court, and the drama between family members with an empirically grounded macroanalysis of the significance of property devolution in the transformations of political economy, and in legal and religious institutions. In the process, Doumani not only further lays to rest the tired binaries of modern/premodern, East/West, and religious/secular; he opens new fields of inquiry with which to explore the dynamism of the social history of early modern Bilad al-Sham. Steve Tamari is professor of Middle East and Islamic history at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. His research and writing focus on ethnic and regional identity in Ottoman Bilad al-Sham.

Balfour’s Shadow: A Century of British Support for Zionism and Israel, by David Cronin. London: Pluto Press, 2017. 240 pages. $99.00 cloth, $24.00 paper, $24.00 e-book. REVIEWED BY M. T. SAMUEL

On 2 November 2017, Palestinians marked the one hundredth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, the official statement of policy granting British support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” A day prior, in an opinion piece for The Guardian, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas argued that the British government

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ought to apologize for the declaration, pointing to the catastrophic events to which it led. In his timely Balfour’s Shadow: A Century of British Support for Zionism and Israel, journalist David Cronin demonstrates not only how brutal and racist were the policies pursued by Britain to, in the words of the declaration, “facilitate the achievement” of Zionist objectives in Palestine, but also how these policies continued even after the establishment of Israel. Balfour’s Shadow is Cronin’s second book in the field of Palestine studies. In his first, Europe’s Alliance with Israel: Aiding the Occupation (Pluto, 2010), he argues that the European Union has consistently used its influence to accommodate Israel’s occupation rather than to lessen Palestinian suffering. Now, through a meticulous analysis of British archival sources, Cronin presents an insightful chronological account of British support for Zionism and Israel in the past century. The book begins with an examination of the historical circumstances that gave rise to the Balfour Declaration, namely the common perception at the time that the interests of British imperialism and Jewish Zionism aligned. Cronin then moves to the British Mandate in Palestine and shows how government policies there were specifically designed to promote Zionist colonization. He begins with the usual suspects: laws that permitted large-scale land acquisitions; immigration policies that “chimed with the Zionist movement’s own wishes” (p. 24); and the appointment of a Zionist, Herbert Samuel, as the first high commissioner for Palestine. Additionally, Cronin shows that these elements were part of an overarching policy of support that have continued throughout subsequent decades. In his most important contribution, Cronin demonstrates how the British government ensured Zionist military superiority over Palestine’s Arabs during the Mandate and how it continued to strengthen Israel militarily after the establishment of the state. Cronin’s thorough analysis of this aspect of British support for Zionism is also what differentiates Balfour’s Shadow from other books that examine the historical ramifications of the Balfour Declaration, which often provide a broader overview of the declaration’s legacies. The book reveals that from the early years of the Mandate, Britain recognized that arming the Zionists was imperative for suppressing Arab resistance to the colonization of Palestine. In a communication to Secretary of State for the Colonies Sidney Webb after the 1929 riots, High Commissioner John Chancellor recognized that a “new population [was] being introduced” to Palestine, a fact that was “resented by the indigenous population.” To combat this “resentment,” he asserted, Britain should arm the Zionists (p. 29). This recommendation was followed by the government’s tacit approval of Zionist arms smuggling, evident in, for example, “Britain’s failure to carry out any arrests” after barrels stocked with guns and ammunition were discovered at the Jaffa port in 1935 (p. 40). At the same time, Britain provided the Zionists with military, paramilitary, and police training as it recruited them by the thousands to serve in these organizations. It was the British who taught the

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Zionists the tactics to suppress the resistance of Palestine’s indigenous population. Extrajudicial killings, house demolitions, curfews, administrative detentions, deportations, censorship of the press were practices the Zionists learned firsthand from the British. By the end of the 1930s, Britain estimated that the Zionists “could probably muster some 50,000 trained men” ready to fight Palestine’s Arabs (p. 53). This training was soon to be used by the Zionists to inflict a devastating blow on the Palestinians during the Nakba. As Cronin fittingly points out, “Britain was [indeed] the midwife of that mass expulsion” (p. 78). Cronin demonstrates that Britain continued to bolster Israel’s military capabilities after the state was established and has continued to do so since. The British routinely supplied the Israelis with colossal quantities of arms, ensuring that the new state’s military was “stronger and better equipped than any which the Arab states together could put into the field” (p. 81). In later years, Britain supported the state’s nuclear program by facilitating Israel’s acquisition of “heavy water [that] is used in certain types of nuclear reactors,” undertaking joint research with “Israel’s nuclear industry,” and refusing to support “Arab calls for a study on Israel’s nuclear capabilities” at a United Nations General Assembly meeting (pp. 94, 106, 109). Cronin’s important book establishes that the Balfour Declaration indeed still casts a shadow over British foreign policy in matters concerning Israel. It is, therefore, no wonder that Prime Minister Theresa May felt compelled to rebuff Abbas’s request for an apology in a speech she gave during a gala dinner to celebrate the declaration’s centenary, saying, “When some people suggest we should apologize for this letter, I say absolutely not.” M. T. Samuel is a PhD candidate in the Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies Department at Emory University focusing on human rights and the legal and political history of Palestine and Israel. He holds a JD from Boston College Law School.

Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror, by Gary Fields. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. 424 pages. $85.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. E-book available. REVIEWED BY NAYROUZ ABU HATOUM

Growing up in Nazareth, I witnessed many families, including my own, struggle to find land to purchase for the purpose of building homes. My paternal family had agricultural property, which the Israeli state did not confiscate, while my mother’s family lost everything in 1948. I remember my grandmother repeating a sentence throughout her life: “Never sell your lands.” The daily lives of people in Nazareth and the neighboring villages were confined to a large extent by the horizontal and vertical landscape in which the State of Israel restricted or permitted them to expand. During my research on the visuals of the Palestinian landscape, my interlocutors articulated repeatedly how every uninhabited parcel in the West Bank was prone to confiscation by the Israeli military. Land loss, collapsing spaces, and shrinking landscapes are at the heart of the Palestinian narrative and experience. Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror traces this story through an exploration of the history of land as property in sixteenth-century England; colonial land theft in North America; and Zionist nationalism in Europe, which led to the colonization of Palestine. The author utilizes a historical-comparative methodology to produce

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a trajectory of today’s Palestinian loss since the time of legal land reforms in England. In this book, the story of the Palestinian landscape becomes a mirror onto which other histories are projected. Enclosure is situated at the intersection of scholarship on the history of colonialism with scholarship on the history of law and the history of Palestine. The book’s theoretical lens is inspired by Edward Said’s notion of “imaginative geographies,” in which the landscape had to be reinvented as an extension of those in power so that colonization, expulsion, and settlements could take place. To enclose, seize lands, and dispossess people, sixteenth-century English lawmakers—followed by early European colonizers in North America, early Zionist thinkers, and successive Israeli governments—used three instruments that Gary Fields refers to as “technologies of force.” The first instrument is the use of cartography. Maps are instruments of power-knowledge and through their visual force they produce realities on the material landscape. The second instrument is law, which, through a historicalcomparative reading, is understood as intrinsic to colonization, land theft, enclosure, and dispossession. Law proceeds, but also reproduces, conquest and colonial expansion. In other words, historically, often colonial jurisdiction was utilized to justify colonial expansions, slavery, or genocide prior to conquests. The third instrument is architecture. The ruling power utilizes architecture to manufacture and engineer the landscape for the service of seizure and enclosure. The landscape is a product of dominance, while simultaneously being an instrument of domination. Fields locates the land and colonial law at the heart of the Euro-American and Zionist colonial projects, yet erases the ways in which regimes of racial regulations and jurisdiction were intrinsic to colonial domination. Slave labor was crucial to land cultivation and settlement in North America; and the racialization of Palestinian Arabs as inferior to Ashkenazi Jews was an essential step in transforming Palestinians from landowners to cheap laborers in the Israeli economic structure. The book is divided into three parts along temporal and historical lines. Part 1 explores the history of the transformation of common agricultural lands into private property in sixteenthcentury England through the process of enclosure, the ideology of which was justified by improvements to what had been deemed wasteland. As a result, common land rights were subjected to fragmentation and enclosure in the name of the maximization of farm profit. This imagined geography was entrenched in legal, cartographic, and material mechanisms, which created the modern property apparatus of the English landscape. Part 2 explores the history of colonial encounters between European settlers and the indigenous peoples in North America through the lens of the conquest and appropriation of their lands: lands which were unencumbered by fixed boundaries and the material or legal regimes of enclosure. Lands

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were elemental to indigenous livelihoods and cosmologies; they were inhabited and farmed but not possessed. Using maps, property law, and construction of settlements, European settlers imposed enclosure systems, and displaced and dispossessed native communities, which contributed to massive genocide. The imagined geography of the landscape used in England migrated to the Americas, thus imprinting a colonial grid that is today intrinsic to the modern American landscape. Part 3 explores the history of land in Palestine during Ottoman rule and continuing through the early years of the Israeli state. Palestinians relied primarily on cultivation for their livelihood. Ottoman laws enabled farmers to have legal rights as long as they fulfilled their fiscal obligation (taxes). To spread the risks of subsistence farming, villagers established a unique system of communal tenure. In 1858, Ottoman land reforms were created that enabled Palestinians to possess the properties they cultivated, thereby enhancing agricultural improvements while maximizing taxation. Properties that were not tended were classified as mawat (dead), a procedure which was instrumental in Israeli colonial expansion and land expropriation in Palestine. Enabled by British Mandate-era laws, which helped weaken the status of public spaces, Jewish settlers seized Palestinian lands prior to the establishment of the Israeli state. The early Zionist movement created an imagined geography that corresponded with a Jewish-Hebrew cultural and religious paradigm, where God gifted the land to the Jewish people for redemption. Prior to the establishment of Israel, this vision gained a modernist shift onto which nationalist and modernist imagination was projected, and which made the enclosure of Palestinian spaces possible. Eventually, the State of Israel seized control of more than 90 percent of historic Palestine by imposing militarized territorial dominance, perpetuating land confiscation through modifying Ottoman and British land codes, mastering cartography as well as the art of demarcating lines and boundaries, constructing settlements, and designating lands as natural green zones. Nayrouz Abu Hatoum is a visiting scholar at the City Institute at York University, Toronto. Her work has been published in Queering Urban Justice: Queer of Colour Formations in Toronto (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018 ), Visual Anthropology Review (2017), and Min Fami: Arab Feminist Reflections on Identity, Space, and Resistance (Toronto: Inanna Publications, 2014).

Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World, by Maha Nassar. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. 288 pages. $85.00 cloth, $25.95 paper, e-book available. REVIEWED BY MUSTAFA KABHA

Maha Nassar’s book discusses the relationship in the mid-1900s between Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel, whom she claims were doubly erased by the Israeli state and the Arab world, and the surrounding Arab expanse through an examination of poetry and other texts of Palestinian intellectuals of the time. Describing decades of intense geographical, political, and cultural isolation resulting from the creation of the State of Israel, Palestinians living within the 1948 Green Line were denied contact with other Arabs as well as their writings outside of Israel. Nassar, in her introduction, refers to the identity dilemma Palestinian citizens of Israel faced. She illustrates this by telling the story of Palestinian poet and journalist Rashid Husayn, who, as part of an official Israeli delegation, attended the Seventh World Festival of Youth and Students in

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Vienna in July 1959. Nassar explains it was Husayn’s first trip overseas. After years of physical and cultural separation from Palestinians outside the Green Line, and other Arabs, he was eager to finally meet up with “some of the thirteen hundred delegates from Arab countries,” but was disappointed that he was rejected by some because of his participation in the Israeli delegation (p. 1). Nassar describes the scene: “Attending the festival was also fraught with dilemmas. Husayn and his fellow Palestinians were going as part of a formal Jewish-Arab delegation that Israeli government officials hoped would reinforce their portrayal of Israel as a beacon of progressive democracy, complete with a content Arab minority accorded their full rights. Yet many of those same Palestinians were at the forefront of an ongoing struggle against the state, in particular, its harsh military government that controlled their movement, confiscated their land, restricted their political expression, and hindered their economic development” (p. 1). Representatives of various Arab countries held differing views about Arab citizens of Israel including Husayn, the “lost brother.” While many were interested in learning about expressions of anti-colonial solidarity taking place within Israel, and the Algerians welcomed him with obvious conviviality, the Lebanese delegation offered Husayn a lukewarm reception. They accused the Arab members of the Israeli delegation of being traitors to the Palestinian cause and the Arab world. After his return, Husayn published an open letter “to my brothers in Lebanon,” in which he vented his anger at the behavior of the Lebanese representatives (p. 2). He also criticized the wider contemporary trend in the Arab world that grossly misunderstood the reality facing the Palestinian Arab population of Israel, who found themselves the target of denigrating discourse and whose efforts to break through the state of solitude imposed upon them were blatantly disregarded. This story demonstrates this state of solitude in two spheres: internal (in relation to the Jewish majority and the state organs) and external (in relation to the surrounding Arab expanse). Nassar focuses on these two areas and on the manner in which Israel’s Palestinian Arab minority coped with them as reflected in the writings of intellectuals within this society. On her work with the chosen texts she writes: “In accounting for the worldliness of these texts, I also attend to the backgrounds of the authors that produced them. Most of the figures I discuss in this book functioned in society as Gramscian ‘organic intellectuals,’ who came from working-class backgrounds and/or were deeply invested in improving the lives of the working class and peasants (who were the majority of the Palestinians in Israel at this time)” (p. 10). Despite the problems inherent in clearly determining who is an “organic intellectual” according to Gramsci, Nassar managed to choose figures who met the conditions she set herself. Perhaps a more convincing explanation is necessary to understand why she focused mainly on those with

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left-wing leanings from working-class and peasant backgrounds. The same can be said for the inclusion of the cover photographs, which feature the poets Hanna Naqqara, ‘Abd al-Karim Karmi, better known as Abu Salma, and Mahmoud Darwish, as well as Samih al-Qasim, and the Iraqi poet Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri. The photographs convey the importance of poetry in preserving cultural contact with “outside Arabs,” but they also may insinuate that those who maintained these relationship were strictly Communists. The author was aware of this, as evident in the contents of the book, but she would have done well to attend to this matter in her choice of photographs as well. Nassar chooses to tell her story through narratives available to those intellectuals impacted by the situation of Arabs in Israel after the 1948 war and the consequent Nakba. Indeed, not all could be included in the category of “organic intellectuals” as defined by Gramsci, but if they were not such before the Nakba they earned this designation in its aftermath. One example is the description of a debate between attorney Ilyas Kusa of Haifa and Middle East scholar Michael Assaf, chief editor of the establishment-run Arabic daily, Al-yawm (pp. 46–47). The author’s account of the discourse between the attorney and the editor in the pages of the newspaper well illustrates the major change in the balance of power between the two narratives before and after the Nakba. Assaf’s words in the Histadrut bulletin Haqiqat al-‘amr (The truth of the matter) exhorted the Arab majority to accept the Jewish minority and commended Zionist activities which, he wrote, would only benefit both sides. His tone changed considerably after the war and the Nakba of 1948, taking on a victorious note: his words threatened the Arabs who remained and were consequently transformed into a minority in their own land, while emphasizing their need to accept the new situation. In contrast, Kusa, who before the Nakba had occupied the role of a “traditional intellectual” representing the Palestinian elite, now received the role of “organic intellectual” representing a beaten and terrified minority attempting to grope its way through the darkness and destruction and to formulate new ways to subsist, overshadowed by the traumatic change undergone by those who had remained. Nassar did well to utilize journalistic discourse, an excellent tool for exploring contemporary changes and processes, as a source for reconstructing the spirit of the times. She should indeed have focused more on the government’s censure of the newspapers, as well as on the self-criticism employed by the editors and writers in order to convey their messages without ending up on the censor’s desk. These comments do nothing to detract from the thorough work and fascinating presentation evident in this eloquent and articulate book, nor from its accurate analysis of both text and context. Mustafa Kabha is associate professor of history at the Open University of Israel. He has published numerous books and articles in Arabic, and his publications in English include The Palestinian People: Seeking Sovereignty and State (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2013) and The Palestinian Press as Shaper of Public Opinion, 1929–1939: Writing Up a Storm (Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2007).

Spring 2018

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