Starred Review. 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.)
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