Beyond Post-Zionism

Jacob Metzer, The Divided Economy of Mandatory Palestine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 275 pages. Deborah S. Bernstein, Constructing Boundaries: Jewish and Arab Workers in Mandatory Palestine, Albany: SUNY Press, 2000, 227 pages.

A New Synthesis

The two studies under review here make an important contribution not only to the research on Palestine during the British Mandate period (1918-1948), but also to a more general issue—the study of ethnic and national relations. This topic is, as is well known, a "hot" issue in contemporary scholarship, in which the relationships between Palestinian-Arabs and Zionist-Jews in Israel/Palestine hold a rather central place. In the last two decades, research on the history of Israel/Palestine has been influenced by "critical" and post-Zionist schools that are based on theories of post-modernism (with an added emphasis on the "other"), as well as on theories of colonialism and post-colonialism. Both Metzer and Bernstein are well aware of these approaches and, in many respects, are informed by the Post-Zionist and "critical" schools, but are not bound by them. In contrast to previous reactions to the Post-Zionist revolution—which were characterized by wholehearted denial or acceptance of its premises and interpretation—the studies by Metzer and Bernstein signify a new perspective of Israel/Palestine history—a synthesis, that takes us beyond Post-Zionism. A fundamental trait of both studies is their inductive approach. While much contemporary research is based on a deductive and relativistic approaches that lead to the results apparently expected and desired, the inductive approach of the two authors reviewed here is characterized by a devotion to testing theoretical hypotheses with data assiduously collected.

Metzer and Bernstein have produced complementary studies. Metzer deals with Mandatory Palestine's economy and society in both the Arab and Jewish sectors from the perspective of macro-economics. Bernstein concentrates on a single test-case for Arab-Jewish relations in the labor market, analyzing labor relations in one geographical, social, and economic location—the city of Haifa. Together, they offer a unique perspective of the Mandatory period—one that is a bird's-eye view of the overall picture as well as a look at the local and particular.

A Dual Economy

Metzer's The Divided Economy of Mandatory Palestine is based upon more than twenty-five years of research on the economic history of Mandatory Palestine and the territories that Israel captured in the 1967 War.¹ A significant portion of The Divided Economy—its quantitative data foundation—has been constructed in a previous study, conducted jointly with Oded Kaplan.² It should be emphasized, however, that, in The Divided Economy, Metzer takes his previous studies on this issue many steps ahead, adds to them a wealth of new material, and produces a new and fresh composition. The book contains seven chapters and two appendices. The first chapter presents an overview of Palestine's economic structure and functioning during the Mandate period; the second chapter deals with the country's Jewish and Arab populations demographically and according to their development of human capital; and the third analyzes immigration patterns to Palestine (especially in the Jewish sector, which was comprised mainly of immigrants) according to the age and family composition of the immigrants, their educational levels and motives for immigrating. The fourth chapter—the longest in the book—surveys land, capital, and labor production resources in a divided economy. Among the topics dealt with in this chapter are land tenure in Palestine, land sales and their influence on the uprooting of Arab tenant farmers, capital formation and financial markets, and the size and characteristics of the labor force and the labor market. The fifth chapter deals with production and trade, and addresses domestic industrial production and employment, and external and bilateral trade in the Jewish and Arab sectors. Chapter six discusses the public sectors; that is, the government and public bodies in the Yishuv. The concluding chapter compares the economic patterns and performances in Israel and the territories occupied by it after...