H-Genocide Book Review (April, 2006) Dan Rabinowitz and Khawla Abu-Baker _Coffins on our shoulders: The Experience of the Palestinian Citizens of Isra

H-Genocide Book Review (April, 2006)


Dan Rabinowitz and Khawla Abu-Baker _Coffins on our shoulders: The Experience of the Palestinian Citizens of Israel_ London, University of California Press, 2005. xi+ 221pp. Notes, references, index. $50.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-520-24441-9; $19.95 (paper), ISBN 0-520-24557-1.


Reviewed for H-Genocide by: Samuel Jacob Kuruvilla, Department of Politics, University of Exeter.

Israel as a liberal democracy in the 21st century: miles to go

A fascinating work in which Jewish Israeli anthropologist Dan Rabinowitz and Palestinian Israeli social worker Khawla Abu-Baker try to analyse the state of Palestinian-Israeli relations through the medium of their own family histories and experiences, within and without Israel. What they have done is to highlight the discriminatory attitude by which the Israeli state has managed to sideline hundreds of thousands of its citizens, solely on the basis of their culture and ethnicity. In the process, the state has created an exclusionist society in which any non-Jewish, non-Westerner is treated with suspicion as the ‘other’. While many Palestinian residents of Israel have been able to participate in the fruits of modernization and globalisation (albeit, under restrictions and with limitations), they have also been subjected to an alarming degree of covert and overt racism. This racism is often cloaked in the minutiae of security detail that the Israel as an ethno-nationalistic unit has cloaked itself with to ensure that the Palestinian minority within Israel remains a minority as such with all the drawbacks (social, political and economic) usually associated with cultural minorities in the Western and proto-Western world.


The plot followed by the two Authors is both cunning and highly original as they seek to place their own familial and personal experiences within the spaces created by the state for their respective communities, both Ashkenazi Jewish and Israeli Arab. The two Authors realised as they pursued their research that they had been born within a few weeks of each other in the then Palestinian port city of Haifa. The book thus combines two stories, one a narrative of the Palestinian citizens of Israel and the other a personal story of two families, one Jewish Israeli and the other Palestinian Arab. This book, in particular, deals with majority- minority relations in Israel. It has also been an opportunity for the two Authors to reflect on their own ethnicity and personality in juxtaposition to each other. In doing so they also cast reflections on the literally millions of other Israeli Jews and Arabs scattered around Israel and the world. It’s no wonder that Israeli State Television made a documentary on the book, as what the Authors have done is to tell the everyday story of an average Israeli-born Jew and his Palestinian (born in Israel!) counterpart.


We have the perennial Jew-Arab cultural dichotomy here, though it’s been presented in a very sensitive manner by the two Authors. There is little doubt that this is an exceptional book. The dedication of the book should be particularly controversial for the majority of Israelis as it dedicates the book to both the Jewish as well as Palestinian members of the Holocaust and ‘Nakba’ respectively. The Authors are thereby acknowledging that the Palestinian Holocaust or ‘Nakba’ has equal status (theoretically, if not practically) with the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews. This book calls into question Israel’s claim to be a liberal democracy, while at the same time curtailing the human rights and privileges of the largest religio-cultural minority in the state.


This book is essentially about that generation of Palestinian people that came of age during the later part of the twentieth century (well after 1967), the generation embodied by the batch of 2000 graduation ceremony at Mar Elias School in the Galilee, so potently depicted in the introductory chapter of the book. They are the so-called Israeli Arabs or Arabs resident in the state of Israel as they like to be known among themselves. These Palestinians who went on to study in Israeli universities found themselves forced to don aggressive stands as the need to stand up for their rights dawned on them. They found themselves in the vanguard of protest movements and the like as they showed that they were not willing to sit down and be acquiescent (like their parents) as far as their rights as human beings were concerned. Doing so, they found themselves (especially, the women students) subject to various stereotypes, racial, cultural and otherwise. They found themselves been presented in the Israeli mainstream media in hardly the right attitudes they were comfortable with.


The book deals particularly with the deaths of the 13 Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel, who were shot dead as part of the Israeli clampdown on internal Palestinian demonstrations following the start of the al-Aqsa Intifada in the West Bank and Jerusalem. It also takes into consideration the Orr Commission report (submitted in September 2003) as well as the so-called Herzliya Report (of the year 2000) that follows the yearly Herzliya Conference on the Jewish future of the state of Israel. The two reports basically analyse the main issue namely, the state and future status of the Palestinian minority within Israel. The Authors contrast the differing recommendations of either report and try to develop recommendations of their own as regards how the Palestinian minority within Israel can be made to feel part of the nation as valued citizens of the state. One of the aims of this book is to bring to light much of the media-fed public discourse on the role of the Palestinian minority within Israel and to critique the stereotypes faced by Palestinians within Israel and in the Western world as such.


The book ends with a description of the National Football Association cup in 2004 when a Palestinian team, B’nei Sakhnin, managed to reach the finals and defeated their Haifa rivals to get the cup. It was the first time ever that a team from a poor Galilean Arab town had managed to reach the finals of the NFA. There, they found themselves facing Hapoel Haifa, in a competition that they were able to win, thereby securing the Cup for themselves and the accolades of the entire Israeli nation, led by the President. At the time, it was felt that this symbolic opportunity should be seized by the both Israelis as well as Palestinians to affect a form of reconciliation between the two estranged communities. Unfortunately this has not taken place. The book reflects on the cultural vacuum that separates the two people. This book is written in an emotional style that serves to create empathy in the listener, provided that he or she is sensitive to the issues at hand. The eruptions of the so-called Intifada al-Aqsa along with its concomitant protests within Israel by the Palestinian community serve to rivet the attention of both Authors as they strive to analyse the reasons why the Palestinian community within Israel should burst out in protests.


The ultimate victory of this book lies in its ability to merge the personal and the political into a coherent single that appeals to a varied reading public not necessarily proficient with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The books makes maximum impact as it combines social-science research with an ‘auto-biographic intensity’ of personal descriptions. This is an eminently readable and interesting book, its political sociology made easy. It’s the multidisciplinary of analysis that holds us to this book. By dealing with the events of October 2000 within Israel, this book courageously lays out a plan of action that should be followed by the state should they have any sincere ideas of integrating the Arab minority within Israel into the national mainstream.