Clive Jones and Emma C. Murphy have put together a thin, concise and well-researched book on Israeli society. Given its size, you shouldn’t expect an extensive or terribly thorough account. Still, they’ve managed to pack a lot into five chapters (and an epilogue), covering the history and character of Israel’s state formation, the reinforcement of various ethnic and social stratifications, the transformations of the state’s internal relations, and its adaptations to a changing global political economy.
For the most part, the summaries in “Israel: Challenges to Identity, Democracy and the State” are excellent, touching on the most relevant aspects of whatever is being described. Their greatest strength is in their coverage of Israel’s state formation, its particular form of state intervention known as mamlachtiyut (or statism) which helped cement Israel’s precarious post-independence socio-economic relations but also further entrenched the concentration of power for some and the marginalization of others.
Some sections, however, lack nuance, such as their economic review. For the most part, this is a very bland, state-based economic analysis that seems to suspend -- for a chapter -- the interplay of intra-Israeli social groups. It might as well be a review of the Jewish economy, as the many economic differences between Israel’s Jewish and Palestinian populations are not covered. But even intra-Jewish differences are not exposed. At one point, they emphasize Israel’s investments in education and hi-tech industries, but they fail to mention the differential inputs certain communities have received, including the different education systems for citizen Palestinians and religious Orthodox Jews. Reading this, I got the sense that the same set of indicators could be applied to any state economy, without regard for distributional factors.
The main arguments of this book are based on the transformations that have occurred in Israel since the 1970s, but these are firmly grounded in historical context. They locate a range of changes in the Israeli political and social fields in the context of a disintegration of this statist form of elite leadership, events such as the historic shift from Labor to Likud, and the proliferation of extra-parliamentary organizations such as Gush Emunim and Peace Now. In the process, a wealth of good information is provided considering the short length of the book.
They claim that identity is the “most pressing security dilemma”. But is it? Like many commentators, they mark 1967 as the moment when everything changed, calling it a “watershed” in Israel’s democratic development. They claim that Israel will solve its territorial problems once it solves its identity problems. But I’m not entirely convinced.
No doubt we have seen a rising confrontation in Israel between those seeking “land for peace” and those seeking land for “Greater Israel”, but Israel’s historic identity is rooted in the twinning of settlement and security. Land has always held a place in Israel’s conception of security. In their own account of Israel’s increasing integration with the world economy, they claim that Israel “remains conditioned by a hierarchical foreign policy decision-making structure, biased towards the politics, if not the cult, of national security”.
This issue of land and war, settlement and security, begs a number of questions about whether Israel’s social fragmentation is really at the heart of its territorial problems (read: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict). This twinning of territory and security may be a binding feature of Israeli identity. If so, solving its internal identity problems may help develop national unity, but it is unlikely to mediate the political and territorial concerns at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But Jones and Murphy’s book is still a welcome contribution. While I have read books on Israeli sociology that I have found more thorough or theoretically appealing, they don’t even approach the concise, clear prose of “Israel: Challenges to Identity, Democracy and the State”. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in a quick, fruitful read on “who” Israel is today, how it came to be so, and where it might be heading.
Review of Israel: Challenges to Identity, Democracy and the State by Clive Jones and Emma C. Murphy