The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon by Bassel F. Salloukh (review)

496 ✭ MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL tary Zionism: Nationalism and the Origins of the Israeli Right (I.B. Tauris, 2006). The value added here is the recognition that Israel’s political right has changed in part due to external factors and forces, such as the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and conquest of the West Bank, the decline of Labor Zionism and the general weakening of the Jewish left, and changing demographics. Indeed, as Shindler correctly notes, beginning in the 1980s, “a plethora of Israeli parties which deeply believed in the ongoing Jewish settlement of the West Bank were elected by an electorate which did not, but regarded it as the price to pay for security and protection” (p. 334). The dominance of the right is, then, as much a story of the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict as it is of other things, and reducing the explanation for it to the settlements (one of the more popular common examples) is incomplete and misleading. Chronicling this history is important. But at the same time, we need more discussion of the contemporary period. The story of the present-day right begins only on page 338, under the heading “Netanyahu and the Transformation of the Likud.” This era is the least-studied in general and so requires more elucidation than any other. In particular, a focus on the younger generation of activists on the nationalist right and the religious right is very much needed. This should include a discussion of the Holocaust, the several wars fought between Israel and the Arab states, and the fedayeen attacks in the 1950s and 1960s.All of these laid the groundwork for the Hamas suicide bombers in the 1990s and Hamas and Hizbullah rockets in the 2000s, which in turn helped drive voters toward the right. Related, Shindler has it right when he concludes that since the 2000s “there has been a dilution of intellectual thought on the right,” partly replaced by a “crude populism” (p. 12). But the emergence of a more tribal version of Jewish nationalism, one that is far more intolerant — I would go so far as to say totalitarian — than the kind of rightwing Zionism that Jabotinsky and even Menachem Begin spoke of should also be part of the analysis. Indeed, the Jabotinskyite liberals were mostly expelled from the Likud in the 2010s via party primaries. A study of the changing preferences among the electorate, particular of centrist voters, then, is necessary, as well. Where Shindler sees the Netanyahu-Likud victory in the 2015 election, for example, as having “reversed the political fragmentation of the Right” (p. 365), I would argue it is a result of a fearful and skeptical electorate that simply perceives the Likud as the least worst option, while other votes that might have gone to both Likud and the far right have migrated to the centrist parties,Yesh ‘Atid (There Is a Future ) and Kulanu (All of Us).1 It is not, then, about the political right itself but also about how Israeli voters perceive their options. Despite these gaps, Colin Shindler has done an admirable job of setting out the history of the political right over time. I highly recommend The Rise of the Israeli Right for those who want to understand both contemporary Israel in general and right-wing Zionism in particular. Brent E. Sasley, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Texas at Arlington LEBANON The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon, by Bassel F. Salloukh, Rabie Barakat, Jinan S. Al-Habbal, Lara W. Khattab , and Shoghig Mikaelian. London: Pluto Press, 2015. 240 pages. $90 cloth; $33 paper. Reviewed by Hicham Bou Nassif Bassel F. Salloukh et al. have published an ambitious book covering several aspects of Lebanon’s identity politics, ranging from political economy to civil society and media discourse to civil-military relations. The premise of the book’s approach to sectarian entrepreneurship is instrumentalist: Lebanon ’s power elite manipulates sectarian politics and fears in order to maintain itself 1. Brent E. Sasley, “Israel’s Right Turn,” Foreign Affairs, March 24, 2015, www.foreignaffairs. com/articles/israel/2015-03-24/israels-right-turn. MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL ✭ 497 in power while the Lebanese remain divided into mutually...