Not Just a Soccer Game: Colonialism and Conflict among Palestinians in Israel

4 Anatomy of the State: Modernity and Structure

112 4 Anatomy of the State Modernity and Structure History, Nature, and Policies of the State This chapter will discuss the history and the policies of the Israeli state toward its Arab Palestinian citizens in order to evaluate claims about the 1981 event being embedded in the larger context of state policies made by members of the Palestinian Arab community in Kafr Yassif. The people I interviewed considered the attack on Kafr Yassif as only one example of a long-standing Israeli state policy that aims at undermining the Palestinian Arab community and dividing it and impeding any indigenous attempt at unity to make it easier to control the Palestinian Arab citizens. Thus, the discussion in this chapter can help make sense of observations made by community members about the role of the state and will also help in contextualizing the state authorities’ behavior in the incident. This discussion will also help examine the central argument I make in this book: that the state is the most important factor in studying issues of racism and sectarian violence, influenced by the political thought of Ibn Khaldoun, who centuries ago argued that the analysis of any society must focus on the political structure under which it lives. In his view, the origin and nature of the state shape a state’s treatment of its subjects. The state, as an analytical unit, and especially as a causal factor, has been largely marginalized in the field of ethnic conflict and resolution. Instead, there has been much more focus on either the effects of globalization , thereby letting the state off the hook, or the communities involved, that is, their mind-set, religion, culture, and identity. In my view, such Anatomy of the State • 113 analyses also implicitly provide the state with tools to control communities through information about potential fissures and can be placed in a longer tradition of knowledge gathering in the service of colonial interventions. In my view, some studies in this field use a problematic approach that exhibits the conscious or unconscious patronizing and parochial predispositions of some scholars. To think that it is only culture or group identity that causes conflict is to say that the absence of violence can only be where there are more tolerant and flexible cultures and identities. Against such a cultural approach, I argue that, as Mahmood Mamdani rightly suggests, within the post-9/11 debates on “Islamic terrorism” and violence, “culture talk” does not provide a deeper understanding of such events but rather obscures the historical, political, and economic causes of violence. Instead of focusing on “culture” in its common definition associated with worldview or religion, it is more productive to look at the state—its nature, origin, development, and structure, which may create and reinforce racism, intergroup conflicts, and violence. It is true that people have their own agency, but people are free to act within the limits of the structure within which they live. The nation-state as a political organizing structure has often been imposed on populations through the dynamics and development of modernity in Europe, colonial and neocolonial dictates, and anticolonial resistance, which ended up producing and developing the present-day state system prevalent around the world. Only a critical view of the nation-state, which is a product of Western theories and actions of nationalism, colonialism, and race-based theories of inclusion and exclusion or marginalization and domination, can help shed light on intergroup conflicts, violence, and racism in colonizing, colonized, and postcolonial contexts. The theoretical framework I outline in this chapter also draws on Ian Lustick’s argument about Israeli policies toward its Palestinian Arabs citizens (policies of segregation, co-optation, and control, as mentioned in chapter 1), an argument that I expand on to include other mechanisms of control, such as espousing inter- and intragroup conflict and violence among the Palestinian Arab community in Israel. Israel’s policy toward its Arab Palestinian citizens is understudied and undertheorized, and thus this work aims to make a contribution to research this area. This topic is useful to develop the academic study of state and society in Israel, 114 • Not Just a Soccer Game and also in general beyond the Middle East in order to contribute to the larger field of state-society relations and questions of democracy in an ethnic and religious state. Israel as a self-described Jewish and democratic state (often touted as the only democracy...