Coffins on Our Shoulders analyzes the emergence among Palestinian citizens of Israel of a new sociological generation labeled by the authors as the “Stand-Tall Generation.” The representatives and leaders of this generation, many of whom are women, have “unmitigated determination, confidence, and a sense of entitlement the like of which had only seldom been articulated previously by Palestinians addressing the Israeli mainstream” (pp. 2–3). Members of the Stand-Tall Generation were born in Israel in the last quarter of the 20th century and “made their political debut following the general elections of 1999 and came of political age with the tumultuous events in the Occupied Territories and inside Israel in October 2000” (p. 3).

Although Abu-Baker and Rabinowitz recognize that no one generation is uniform, they emphasize the continuity between the generations and that members of the Stand-Tall Generation echo the demands of their forebears to change the character and formal definition of Israel from “the state of the Jewish people” to “the state of all its citizens” (p. 3). They argue that members of this generation are disillusioned with the prospect of ever becoming equal citizens in Israel and are no longer interested in being “marginal hangers-on of the Zionist project” (p. 3). In addition, they downplay Israel as a focus of identity and stress their Palestinian consciousness (p. 12). Within this context and through an examination of the demands of the Stand-Tall Generation, the authors present the limits of Israel's “ethnic democracy.”

The first part of the book, chapters 1 through 3, is a sociohistorical analysis of the Palestinian citizens of Israel that demonstrates that the Stand-Tall Generation was preceded by two earlier ones. The first of these, whose story is presented in chapters 1 and 2, is “the generation of survivors—Palestinians who, in the aftermath of the dramatic war of 1948, found themselves trapped in a state they never wanted let alone invited” (p. 13). The second, described mainly in chapter 3, is the generation that has spearheaded the Palestinians' civil struggle inside Israel since the 1970s. The book historicizes this struggle and illustrates how the Israeli state “attempted to control the community's intellectual energy and political awareness in a futile effort to cultivate docile, depoliticized, submissive subjects” (p. 13). One aspect of this system of control and domination relates to naming, in which the state successfully subsumed the Palestinians under the label “Israel's Arab” or “Israeli Arabs” (p. 13). Another entailed techniques that were designed to “control, isolate and incarcerate the Palestinians in Israel in both time and space …” (p. 13).

The second part of the book, chapters 4 through 6, “sketches the profile of the Stand-Tall Generation in light of recent events and uses this historical perspective to offer a different vision for Israel's future” (p. 13). The authors argue that Israel's main dilemma concerning its Palestinian citizens is whether to include or control them. This dilemma is illustrated by the authors in their thorough analysis of two diametrically opposed documents. The first is an unsolicited report about the Palestinian citizens of Israel, presented to Prime Minister Ehud Barak in November 2000 by twenty-six Jewish and Palestinian researchers from various Israeli academic institutions. This report advocates “the replacement of the current Israeli system of control with a strategy of accommodation and cooperation …” (p. 14). The second document is a summary of a year-long seminar sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Center of Herziliya in 2000. This report frames the relationship between the Palestinian minority and the Jewish majority primarily as a demographic struggle, “then goes on to detail the means by which hegemony can be perpetrated” (p. 14).

One of the major contributions of Coffins on Our Shoulders, in addition to its use of the concept of generation as a unit of analysis, is the way it weaves the personal narratives of the two authors with academic research to illustrate the different politics of location of their two positions. As the two authors were born in 1955, the book details how Khawla's maternal and paternal family moved to Haifa from Yaʿabad, a village near Jenin in the West Bank, in the early 1920s—precisely when Dan's maternal family arrived from the Ukraine. Then came the 1948 war and the subsequent establishment of Israel, which sent the two families on “diametrically opposed trajectories” (p. 15). The Abu-Shamlas and the Abu-Bakers were displaced, and they lost most of what they had. In contrast, the Rabinowitzes became “integral to the professional and social echelons of the Israeli state that had some of the fastest and most consistent growth rates in modern history” (p. 15). The authors affirm that they decided to include the personal narratives in order to present a “bifurcated account of divergent histories reflecting the dynamics of the personal and the political in a war zone, a version of how identities and destinies in Palestine and Israel were shaped before and in our time” (p. 16).

Coffins on Our Shoulders could benefit from more details about interviewee sampling and more context-specific analysis of changing Israeli state policies toward Palestinians in Israel since 1948, as well as urbanization processes and the expansion of civil organizations that allowed the Stand-Tall Generation to distinguish itself from the previous two generations. The same applies to Abu-Baker and Rabinowitz's gender analysis, where more attention to the first two generations of Palestinian women in Israel, as well as the development of the Palestinian women's movement before and in the aftermath of the 1948 war, could provide for more understanding of the reasons behind the strong presence of women activists among the Stand-Tall Generation. Within this context, the authors need to go beyond presenting Israeli–Jewish culture and values as the point of reference and the struggle of Palestinian women in Israel as merely a tension between tradition and modernity. Finally, the book could benefit from more generational analysis of the Palestinian national movement as well as the connections among masculinity, militarism, and ethnonationalism in Israeli state politics.