ISRAEL: SETTLER OR PLURALIST SOCIETY?: Ian Lustick. Arabs in the Jewish State: Israel's Control of a National Minority

Abstract

Why and how is it, Ian Lustick asks in Arabs in the Jewish State, that Israel's indigenous Palestinian population, numbering slightly more than half a million people, remained in the face of adverse policies affecting their status as a subordinate minority? This question is of special significance since Israel continues to be explicitly guided by a Zionist political culture whose ideological underpinnings are premised, among other things, on such principles as the ingathering of the exiles, redemption of the land, the Law of Return and Judaization of the Galilee all of which result either implicitly or explicitly in the alienation of the Palestinians from their historical homeland. Specifically, Lustick enquires into the reasons why the apparent Palestinian discontent manifested in the mass media, in political discourse, in sporadic violence, and in personal accounts gathered by him has not been translated into a sustained political action which would pose a serious threat to Zionist hegemony. The explicit purpose behind Lustick's book, which is an up-dated version of the author's Ph.D. thesis submitted to the Department of Political Science at Berkeley, is to explain the intricacies of the control system devised by the Zionist regime to ensure a quiescent Palestinian population. In tackling the various theoretical frameworks used to analyze settler societies (a term not applied by Lustick to Israel, which he prefers to label as a pluralist society), and all these societies entail in terms of understanding the consequences of patterns of contact between a colonizing group and an indigenous population, Lustick dismisses classical Marxist class analysis as tedious rather than interesting and refers to certain formulations of the internal colonialism model as having become too weighted down with historical and rhetorical freight to be of any value. Yet he later recants his passing dismissal of the internal colonialism model and, in reference to this reviewer's work on the Palestinians in Israel, notes that such an approach is legitimate and promising. Lustick provides ample evidence, familiar by now to researchers on the Palestine issue, in which he demonstrates the extent of Arab land dispos-