Israeli writer Cohen (Army of Shadows
) makes extensive use of the thousands of recently declassified Israeli government and police files to argue that Israel has attempted, from its earliest days, to control and co-opt the lives of its Palestinian citizens (roughly 20% of the population) and has utilized classic tools of social control—informants, censorship, offers of reward and threats of punishment—to neutralize a potentially “seditious” faction and to turn the community “from members of the imagined Palestinian community/nation... into members of Israeli civil society.” He explores how deeply Israel infiltrated Palestinian communities, political groups and refugee camps to secure informants and create a veritable “collaborator class” to “ensure a maximal control over the political and social behavior of Israel’s Arab population.” Stressing that the behavior of both sides is typical of national majority-minority relationships everywhere, he shows the extent to which Israel has treated its Arab citizens as one-dimensional characters open to manipulation, and shrewdly observes that the irony for Israel is that because the state couldn’t offer non-Jewish citizens “a real path to participation... the state actually reinforced Arab identity among its Arab citizens.” (Jan.)
