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Although the scholarly literature on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict continues to expand and even flourish, few writers have critically addressed the legal and bureaucratic character of Israeli authority and the extent of its impact on Palestinians since 1948. Oren Yiftachal's Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine does precisely this and much more. His work focuses judiciously on territorial politics and the enduring forms of manufactured separation and segregation between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, so critical to Israeli rule. However, unlike most other recent works on this conflict, Ethnocracy goes further and effectively writes colonialism back into an analysis of the Jewish state. Yiftachel draws from a range of sources to underline his case, including documents of Israeli planning circles, human-rights reports, and a diverse set of theoretical sources from the realm of radical geography. He thoroughly details the centrality of land and territory to the formation of identity and social difference in this contested region.
Crucial to Yiftachel's analysis is the notion of "ethnocracy," which he spells out in the introductory chapters. He defines an ethnocracy as a regime that "facilitates the expansion, ethnicization, and control of a dominant ethnic nation . . . over contested territory and polity" (p. 11). In the context of a comparative analysis of such regimes in Chapter 2, he refers to Israel and other states in this category as possessing certain democratic features while at the same time being constrained by the fact that rights flow not primarily from citizenship but also from one's ethnic, religious, or racial assignment. In the case of the Jewish state, all three of these forms of identity are relevant in establishing a strict and often severe hierarchy of what he refers to as "ethnoclasses." Those exclusions are built...