Title: ha-ʻAśor she-bo noldu "ʻArviye Yiśraʼel"
Description: The abolition of the military government at the end of 1966 and the results of the military campaign of 1967 sealed a chapter in the history of relations between the state and its Arab-Palestinian citizens and opened a new chapter. These events definitively closed the gates of possibility for the complete solution of the "Arab-Israeli question", and from the state's point of view they exacerbated the dilemma that had already been created with the 1948 fighting between its strategic purposes and the reality of the presence of the Arab-Palestinian minority in its territory. The establishment of the minority in Israel became an existing fact, while the state's ability to continue marking the differences of the minority through the iron wall erected by the military government, which existed for almost two decades, became impossible. In an attempt to deal with the gap between the ideal and reality, and in the absence of other strategic alternatives, Israel strove to continue establishing the status of the Arab-Palestinian population as a kind of enclave present in the Israeli space, but also different from it in various values. Doron Mazza's book examines the manner in which Israeli policy was implemented through the analysis of the field of political-institutional discourse. This is about the way in which the minority is talked about through conceptual systems, linguistic definitions and terms such as "Israeli Arabs", "integration", "fifth brother-in-law", "loyalty" and more, which turned the language into a policy tool for everything and anything and set rivets for the future as well. The construction of the discourse was aided by the networks of Arab affairs experts who developed the knowledge about the minority, through which they shaped the discourse, disseminated it and gave it an interpretation in the public sphere, especially among the policy makers. In this process, the adviser on Arab affairs in the Prime Minister's office, "The Philosopher King", Shmuel Tolidano, stood out, who knew how to use Orientalist studies in the Israeli academy and became the beating core of the network of experts on the "Arab-Israeli" issue. Matza's book connects matters of discourse, knowledge, language, policy and experts. Its importance is that it provides a glimpse not only of how the policy was shaped through the discourse mechanisms, but also of the internal logic behind it. In this sense, Matza's book helps in deciphering the dynamics that characterize the state's relations with the minority up until now.
Subjects: Arab-Israeli conflict, Palestinian Arabs, Ethnic identity
Places: Israel