Review of Shir Hever

NOVANEWS

My review of Shir Hever’s The Political Economy of Israel’s Occu­pa­tion is up at the Middle East Report:

There is a latter-day tendency to see the 44-year Israeli occu­pa­tion of the Pales­tin­ian ter­ri­to­ries as the organic outward growth of the Zionist idea — as though the aspi­ra­tion to hold the entirety of the land, embedded in Labor Zionist doctrine, was in fact a certainty, simply waiting for time to catch up. With the occu­pa­tion deepened since the 1993 Oslo accord, and the remainder of the Pales­tin­ian populace crowded into a scat­ter­ing of ban­tus­tans in the West Bank and one big one in Gaza, one can under­stand the diffusion of this way of thinking. It appears that the Zionist drive to dominion has neared completion.

Debate about the begin­nings of the Israeli state is rea­son­ably settled in his­to­ri­og­ra­phy if not yet in the broader public realm. The general tra­jec­tory of Israeli history, its grounding in exclu­sion­ary settler-colonialism, quite unlike the inclu­sion­ary, plantation-style variety in South Africa, emerged from trends set in motion and likely crys­tal­lized by the early twentieth century. On the occu­pa­tion, however, con­tro­versy still rages. Liberals and realists, glancing hopefully at a “peace process” that has been underway for one third of Israel’s existence, cast the post-1967 occu­pa­tion as evanes­cent and extractable, rather than tightly woven into the warp and weft of Israeli political economy and culture.

Radicals depict the occu­pa­tion as emanating from long-standing ten­den­cies among Jewish settlers, always eager to relax internal social tension by further theft from the indige­nous pop­u­la­tion. Similarly, critics of Israeli settler-colonialism have long split along the his­tor­i­cal fault line marked by the year 1967. For some, the founding of the state of Israel was bloody but legit­i­mate, and the irre­den­tism in the Occupied Ter­ri­to­ries is a horrible deviation from the Zionist project. For others, perhaps growing in number as the occu­pa­tion persists, the process of Israeli state formation was, in its origins, sin.

Attitudes are well estab­lished. Yet actual expla­na­tions of the occupation’s endurance have been thin. Shir Hever’s The Political Economy of the Occu­pa­tion is an effort to supply one that goes beyond partial or flawed theories and dominant obfus­ca­tions. Hever is first concerned to total the macro-economic costs and benefits of the occu­pa­tion.

He warns that aggregate numbers can conceal dis­par­i­ties of economic power and privilege in a blur of averages, but he uses them to paint a rough-and-ready picture of the rela­tion­ship between the Pales­tin­ian and Israeli “sectors,” as well as the ways in which labor and capital, demand and tariffs, coil, braid and meld, making talk of Pales­tin­ian this or Jewish that not merely muddying but mis­lead­ing. Many of the relevant sta­tis­tics are buried or delib­er­ately made inac­ces­si­ble by the Israeli gov­ern­ment. Nev­er­the­less, Hever arrives at a cautious estimate of “income” drawn from the occu­pa­tion: about 39 billion shekels during the period 1970–2008. He also cal­cu­lates outflows of 104 billion shekels in the form of subsidies to the settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, and 316 billion shekels in “security costs,” the currency expended to protect the settlers and subdue the restive Palestinians.