Israel in Comparative Perspective: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom (review)

136 SHOFAR Spring 1997 Vol. 15, No.3 a nation take responsibility for its own history? In Argentina, a military regime that did not call itself antisemitic countenanced antisemitic atrocities that were carried out on an industrial scale over a period of many years; more recently, under democracy, the Israeli Embassy and the principal Jewish institution in the country were both destroyed by terrorists with heavy loss ofhuman life, without the government moving to apprehend the perpetrators. One ofthe sadder echoes of the July 1994 explosion in which the AMIA was wrecked was the comment by well-wishers that not only Jews, but innocent people were alS? killed. Perhaps what is needed is a new definition of antisemitism. Judith Laikin Elkin University ofMichigan Israel in Comparative Perspective: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom, edited by Michael N. Barnett. Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1996. 288 pp. $59.50 (c); $19.95 (P). "Neither East nor West, developed nor undeveloped, capitalist nor socialist, Third World nor First World, ... Because Israel is unique in many dimensions, it slips through the cracks of social science inquiry into historical peculiarity" (p. 3). This is the "conventional wisdom" challenged by editor Michael Barnett. He introduces the volume as a sarnple ofworks by scholars who disagree with this conventional wisdom ofIsrael's historical uniqueness; instead, they normalize the Israeli case by employing comparative perspectives and social science categories derived from other regions and periods. Subsequent to the introduction, four chapters cover Israel's international politics followed by another four which cover its domestic politics. The concluding chapter by Yehezkel Dror discusses multiple subjective readings of Israel on the unique-normal continuum. These multiple interpretations might help the readers to understand, and perhaps to reassess, their own perceptions ofIsrael's position on the continuum. Israel's international politics is covered by: Shibley Telhami on Israel's foreign policy (chapter 2); Gabriel Sheffer on Israel's relations with the Jewish Diaspora (chapter 3); Mark Tessler and Ina Warriner on the connection between gender and attitudes towards war and peace in Israel and Egypt (chapter 4); and Michael Barnett on Israel's economic development in the context of an East Asian state (chapter 5). Israel's domestic politics is covered by: Ian Lustick on Jerusalem (chapter 6); Joel Migdal on state formation and society formation (chapter 7); Rebecca Kook on the politics ofnational identity and Israeli Arabs (chapter 8); and Gershon Shafir on Zionist settlement as a colonial enterprise (chapter 9). Barnett opens the volume by claiming that the cross-national behavioral literature, in its ambition to generalize through statistical and variable-based research, frequently presents the Israeli case as complex and unique because it deviates from the comparative Book Reviews . 137 categories ofthat literature. Alternatively, he sets the epistemological tone ofthe volume as that ofcontextual and historically derived theories that are based on the experiences of other regions and periods. He argues that these theories are suitable to the Israeli case and witness its normality. This approach provides the readers with a number oftheories that were recently applied to Israel (some ofthe authors published earlier works in the area) and highlighted its similarity to other cases. Good examples of such theories can be found in the intriguing comparisons ofIsrael employed by each ofthe following three authors. Barnett applies the institutionalist and post-dependency theories to reinterpret Israel's political economy in the international economic context, and he fmds that Israel has much in common with East Asian states. Lustick's hegemonic analysis demonstrates that Jerusalem can be compared to other cases of contested territories. And Shafir's class-based colonial model shows how Zionist settlement policies in different periods resemble European colonial projects. Two sound theoretical applications in the book,· by Migdal and Kook, interestingly complement each other. Migdal examines the tension between two defmitions of society in Israel-particularistic-ethnic versus universalistic-civic. Kook examines the tension between the conceptions ofnational identity through etlmicity which excludes Israeli Arabs, and civic identity with which they feel comfortable. Ofspecial interest is Sheffer's study, which employs a theory on the power distribution in trans-state political systems in order to reinterpret Israel-Diaspora relations in the· context of global politics...