This book review was originally published in DAWN in August 2014.
NOW that Israel and Palestine have announced an indefinite ceasefire, it is important to remember that the root cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not Hamas, the blockade of Gaza, or even the Occupation. Rather, it is the Nakba — Arabic for “catastrophe” — which is how Palestinians refer to the formation of Israel in 1948, an event accompanied by the dispossession of approximately 750,000 Palestinians.
Though Israel was forced by international human rights norms to grant citizenship to those Palestinians who remained within its borders, these citizens remain subject to a host of discriminatory laws. For example, the “Law of Return to Zion” allows anyone of Jewish origin to immigrate to Israel, regardless of whether his or her family ever lived in Palestine. In contrast, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who marries a Palestinian from the Occupied West Bank cannot reside with his or her spouse inside Israel. These discriminatory laws belie the claim often made by Israel’s supporters that the country is “the only democracy in the Middle East.”
It is this claim that Shira Robinson debunks in her book, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State. An associate professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University, Robinson examines Israel’s history from its founding in 1948 till 1967. She argues that Israel is a liberal settler state, “a modern colonial polity whose procedural democracy was established by forcibly removing most of the indigenous majority from within its borders and then extending to those who remained a discrete set of individual rights and duties that only the settler community could determine. Jewish settler leaders seized the rights to the state, granting the new found Arab minority only a handful of rights within it.”
Israel is simultaneously a formally liberal state and a colonial entity. This structural contradiction arises in part because in order to gain recognition of its sovereignty, Israel was forced by post-World War II international norms to formally extend citizenship rights to the Palestinian minority within its borders. Continue reading Review: Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State by Shira Robinson