Israelis and Palestinians: Why Do They Fight? Can They Stop?

Wasserstein, Bernard. Israelis and Palestinians: Why Do They Fight? Can They Stop? New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. 226 pp.

This book is a dispassionate and reasoned analysis of a topic that arouses tremendous passions and, all too often, little reason. The author is a historian, who has adopted methodologies from social scientific disciplines, including demography, human ecology, geography, and political science that he meshes together in a cogent, coherent, and highly readable discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Wasserstein provides us with a perspective on what he terms the "underlying forces that, like shifting tectonic plates, are propelling Israeli-Palestinian relations closer and faster towards rapprochement than may appear at first sight from recent terrible events." (p. 4)

The "terrible events" in question are the violence associated with the second intifada that has led to the death of thousands of Palestinian and Israeli civilians. Given the author's focus on "underlying forces," however, his narrative sometimes makes these events appear as if they were exogenous to the decisive structural factors. This is a problem of a methodology that tells us what choices are rational in material terms, but does not give us a rich enough account of the mentalities of the agents involved.

Focusing on economy, ecology, and demography provides many theoretical reasons why the Israelis and Palestinians have a mutual, although not necessarily homologous interest in peace. Why then, indeed, as the subtitle asks in somewhat rhetorical way, do they fight? This reviewer believes it is essential to give far more emphasis to the importance of beliefs both in the sense of the three ancient faiths associated with the Land, as well as in the modern secularized form of nationalism.

This book contains chapters, respectively on the topics of People, Society, Environment, Territory, and the Dynamics of Political Change. However, there is the notable absence of a chapter or chapters on culture, ideology, and/or religion.

The first chapter does include some discussion of ideology and is strongest in its account of Zionist settlement in pre-independence Palestine and the development of sabra political culture. However, absent is in-depth discussion of the refugee problems. These problems are multiple and complex, yet essential to a better understanding of this conflict. On the Palestinian side it was the violent displacement of Palestinian Arabs in 1948 that led over the ensuing decades to the development and formation of Palestinian national identity as it is now, an identity formed in conflict with the Israeli-Jewish "other." On the Jewish side there is no discussion at all of the Sephardic Jewish refugees who came to Israel en masse after independence, in some cases virtually the entire Jewish population of ancient centers of Judaism relocated as a matter of survival (ex. Yemen. Iraq, Iran). These groups had no Zionist tradition to speak of before 1948, yet have provided mass support for the right wing revisionist Zionism of the Likud party in the years since. There is some discussion of their integration into Israeli society and the tensions between working class Sephardim and the more affluent Ashkenazim, but the formation of a distinctive ideological understanding of Israeli identity among the Sephardim is lacking. Similarly, the interrelated rise of religious Zionism, increasingly competing with the secular Zionist ideologies of Likud and the Israeli Left, is not factored into the analysis.

Returning again to the Palestinian side of the equation, there is scant discussion of ideological dynamics within the nationalist movement. Especially needed here is an account of the generational shift since the 1960s and '70s from the hegemony of secular nationalist (and to a lesser degree, socialist) ideology associated with the PLO/Fatah movement to the rise of Islamic ideology. In the past, the militant wing of the Palestinian movement was articulated as Marxist-Leninist anti-colonialism. While the colonialist aspect of Zionism is still denounced, the militant wing is now dominated by Islamic radicalism. Of course, this reflects parallel shifts throughout the Muslim and Arab world since the end of the Cold War, but this only underscores the need to attend to the relationship between these broader trends and the local expression of these ideas in Palestinian society. Given the authors demographic emphasis it would also be valuable to look at the apparent decline of Christianity as the religion of a portion of the Palestinian population. Palestinian Christians share nationalism and strong opposition to the post-1967 Occupation with Palestinian Muslims, but their numbers appear to be in relative (but not absolute) decline and it would be of great interest to read something of how they perceive their own relationship to the ideologies of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

The author does comment at the outset of the book that each of the parties to this conflict views itself as "a victim nation and draws from itself a solipsistic self-righteousness that is used to justify ruthless means." (p. 1) Wasserstein's book counters these ideologies of victimization with a set of reasons for conflict resolution that include the economic dependence of Palestinians on Israel, the mutual need to address pressing problems of water scarcity and environmental degradation, as well as the demographic forces that favor the Palestinians and are impressing upon many Israeli leaders the need to make a peace with security in the near future, if at all possible. Yet none of these rationales speak directly to the national, and increasingly religious, ideological identities that typify political discourse in the region.