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Reviewed by:
  • State Practices and Zionist Images: Shaping Economic Development in Arab Towns in Israel
  • Paul Rivlin
State Practices and Zionist Images: Shaping Economic Development in Arab Towns in Israel, by David A. Wesley. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008. 256 pp. $34.95.

This is a book of major importance by an Israeli anthropologist. It analyzes the relations between Jewish and Arab towns in the Galilee during the period 1992-1997 when an industrial area close to Nazareth called Zipporit was being developed. It also examines the role of central and local government bureaucracies in the planning process. Israeli bureaucracy is formidable in its ability to block development, but where the Arab minority is concerned there are additional factors at work.

The purpose of the Ministry of Trade and Industry in developing the industrial park was to further its strategic aim of industrializing the region. At the same time, the government and the Jewish Agency had begun a program to [End Page 159] increase the Jewish population of the region by creating new settlements in the hills. These new settlements would help prevent Arab towns from spreading as their population grew.

Wesley shows how these policies were implemented in such a way that the Jewish population benefited and the Arabs did not. He dwells on the reasons for this difference: not only current needs but also ingrained biases, the most important of which was the notion that Israel's Arabs had "traditional values" that held back their economic and social development. The idea that these traditional (i.e., primitive) values existed was due to the way in which (Jewish) Israelis viewed the Arabs more than any objective reality.

Despite this, Wesley shows that Arab participation in the development process has increased from near passivity to a willingness to make demands. These have not all been rejected, and planners have become much more willing to involve Arab local authorities in regional development. He explores the mind-set of Jews and Arabs alike and shows the dangers in the way they think about each other. Wesley notes that the Arabs of Israel feel under siege especially with regard to land use and land ownership. It should also be noted that the Jewish majority feels under siege as a result of regional hostility towards Israel.

The book begins with an analysis of the territorial dimensions of the issue in the Galilee, providing details of the population by sub-region as well as the location of settlements and how the region is administered. This is followed by an examination of urbanization trends, local authority budgets, income levels by settlement, and economic development patterns. A chapter is devoted to the history of the Zipporit industrial area and its legal status. The key issues of land, territory, and jurisdiction are then looked at, the main one being the loss of Arab land. There is then a chapter on the image of Arab traditionalism that is of a significance beyond this book. Wesley suggests that the authorities subscribe to two contradictory ideas about the Arabs: the first is that they are primitive and thus cannot develop economically and the second is that they are a threat to the country's Zionist identity. They cannot be both, which suggests that both concepts are wrong. He shows that when conditions permit, Arab landowners seek to develop their land for industrial development and try to market it. They did not, and perhaps still do not, operate on a level playing field, and that is why they manifest what the authorities call traditionalism. There are two chapters on developments beyond Zipporit, in the Galilee as a whole.

Wesley concludes that "[g]overnment programs and policies, distinguishing between Jew and Arab even as they proclaim integration, have shaped the manner in which the Arab locality is connected to industrial activity and local economic development" (p. 195). [End Page 160]

Emmanuel Marx, the leading Israeli anthropologist, who supervised the dissertation on which this book is based, wrote in his forward to the book that the author, appalled by the systematic discriminatory results of state practices, takes a moral stand, but allows the reader to draw his own conclusions. He also suggests...

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