The Palestinian–Arab Minority in Israel, 1948–2000: A Political Study. By As'ad Ghanem. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. 238p. $62.50 cloth, $20.95 paper.

Abstract

This study, a volume in the SUNY Israel Studies series, represents a new stage of maturity in academic research on Israel's Arab minority: a serious and scholarly (if rather severe) overview from within that community. Ghanem, a lecturer at Israel's University of Haifa, has, within a few short years, emerged as a leading academic analyst of Israeli Arab political issues, and the book at hand will cement his reputation. It combines an insider's feel for his subject with a critical, but reasonably restrained and balanced, presentation of a topic that has too often generated apologetics or polemics. Ghanem does not focus on the history or substance of relations between the Jewish majority and Arab citizens of Israel, or on official policies and practices. On these issues he briefly redraws the picture sketched by previous studies, most of them by Israeli Jewish scholars: Israeli Arabs/Palestinians (the latter designation is increasingly preferred) have formal rights of citizenship, but are in fact second-class citizens both in law (given legal expressions of the Jewishness of the state) and, even more, in practice. While they have made great absolute progress by most measures in the half-century of Israeli statehood, a huge gap between the two communities remains. Furthermore, they are doubly marginalized, first, as Israelis and, second, as part of the broader Palestinian Arab community in which their position is also problematic.