Arab-Israeli relations belong to a category of cases of multilayered conflicts. At the domestic level, state–minority relations take place in a context of a Jewish-dominated state, which casts itself as an expression of Jewish national self-determination. The native Palestinian Arab minority (approximately 20% of the population) is positioned outside the social boundaries of the state-owning nation and is therefore structurally disadvantaged. At the same time, this relationship is situated in a regional environment in which the Israeli state has been involved in a prolonged conflict with neighboring Arab states that possess ethnolinguistic kinship ties with the domestically disadvantaged minority. Although frequently treated as sui generis, this tension-laden triangular relationship resembles what Rogers Brubaker has labeled the “triadic relational nexus” in post-communist Europe (and elsewhere), which includes a nationalizing state, national homeland minorities, and a kin-state of the national minority (Rogers Brubaker, “National Minorities, Nationalizing States, and External National Homelands in the New Europe,” Daedalus 124[2], 1995). This triangular relationship has generated a good deal of disciplinary scholarship. In the Israeli-Arab case, the focus has tended to be on one of the levels. Consequently, scholars looking at state-minority relations in Israel tend to ignore the regional context even though the external indisputably influences the domestic. Likewise, scholars analyzing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict tend to overlook the complexities added by the minority inside Israel’s borders.

Three recent books address different levels of this complex relationship. Amal Jamal’s Reconstructing the Civic analyzes the civic activism of the Palestinian Arab minority in Israel, for which he uses the acronym PCI (Palestinian Community in Israel). His book explicitly engages with the impact of the civic activism in neighboring Arab countries as a source of inspiration for Arabs inside Israel. Guy Ben-Porat and Fanny Yuval’s Policing Citizens shifts the lens to the state—specifically to its policing apparatus—explaining how the Israeli state uses its “monopoly over legitimate violence” as a means to entrench the structures of social hierarchy, in turn generating a sense of exclusion among the subalterns (p. 2). Their book situates the Arab minority alongside other “others” in Israeli society. These two books complement each other quite well: the latter explains how exclusionary citizenship is sustained, and the former analyzes how the minority mobilizes against the structures of subordination. Jeremy Pressman’s The Sword Is Not Enough is an outlier in this context. It is strictly an international relations book that evaluates the common belief that force is the most effective foreign-policy instrument available to the warring sides in the regional conflict. Its ends are not to generate new information or theory, but to “affect the meaning of the conflict in people’s minds” (p. 6).

In a well-researched and informed study, Jamal provides a comprehensive overview of the development of PCI civil society organizations (CSOs). The book’s stated purpose is to identify the patterns, objectives, and causes of PCI civic activism. Jamal demonstrates that recent decades have witnessed an expansive growth in the number of CSOs, operating in multiple spheres. Although far from homogenous, this activism is generally said to target an inclusive civic sphere in an ethnically Jewish state while protecting the minority’s Palestinian identity and providing for the needs of the minority.

Jamal further argues that three environmental conditions affect the minority’s civil society activism: Israel’s ethnocratic regime, exclusionary state policy toward the indigenous minority’s civic activism, and a hegemonic cultural environment in Israel that is not open to basic civic values—hence detrimental to the interests, identity, and needs of the PCI. In addition, he posits that regional Arab political culture in general has been influential “as the cultural values salient in Arab society are the same values that dominate the political imagination and major patterns of behavior among the PCI’s civil and political elite” (p. 73).

Taking a Gramscian perspective, Jamal prefers to conceptualize the PCI as a subaltern homeland minority, claiming that such groups’ mobilization ought to be conceived of in terms of the minority’s positionality in asymmetric power relations, structured along hierarchical ethnic lines—that is, exclusionary ethnic states. Riding on a wave of a sharp increase in levels of postsecondary education, new Palestinian elites in Israel have been increasingly challenging the structures that underpin their subordination, and “many demand official recognition as an indigenous people entitled to collective rights, which by their account should be interpreted in terms of self-governance” (p. 128).

It is against this acknowledgement that the internal inconsistency in Jamal’s analysis becomes apparent. On the one hand, Jamal’s core argument is that PCI civil society organizations aim to promote a civic culture, rejecting the notion that those at their forefront deal with ethnic empowerment (p. 66). At the same time, almost all of the activism discussed deals with promoting particularistic rights as a national minority. The Future Vision document, published by the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel, which is considered the most authoritative document representing the collective vision of the new elites (pp. 67-68), is a case in point. The document places an accent on the minority’s “inseparable” national ties with Palestinians and Arabs outside Israel and makes demands in the name of its indigeneity. These include institutional arrangements based on group distinctiveness, including extensive autonomy for the minority, proportional allocation of material resources based on group size, and veto right for PCI representatives on decisions that affect this population. In short, rather than demand a shared civic space, the focus of activism has been on creating institutions typical of a society deeply divided along ethnonational lines.

It should not be surprising that PCI activism would be oriented toward ethnic empowerment, given the deep ethnonational divisions and Jewish domination that characterize Israel. It is what we would expect from any discriminated-against minority. Yet, Jamal seems to attach a negative moral evaluation to ethnocentric ends a priori, thereby leading him to eschew the characterization of PCI civil society as ethnic. As evidence of a lack of ethnocentrism, Jamal notes that many of the pertinent NGOs are open to any individual who shares their values. However, by this logic, the presence of Arab government ministers and supreme court judges would invalidate Israel’s characterization as an ethnic state in the first place—something that Jamal (like most analysts) rejects.

Despite this quibble, there is little doubt that this book makes an important contribution. Jamal does an admirable job of analyzing the rise of PCI CSOs, showing their origins and situating the topic in the broader literature on counter-hegemonic civil society.

If Jamal’s focus is on minority mobilization, Ben-Porat and Yuval approach state-minority relations by investigating how policing by the state reinforces stratified citizenship and how this, in turn, shapes the perceptions by minorities of the police and—more broadly—their sense of belonging. According to these scholars, there are two ways in which the police sustain hierarchies. The first is by “over-policing” the minority, whereby excess force is justified in the name of maintaining order. The second is “under-policing,” when minority-inhabited areas are exposed to excessive crime yet neglected by the police because members of the dominant community are not threatened. This dynamic, in turn, influences the attitude of minorities toward—and their expectation of—the police.

The perceptions of the police among four subaltern groups in Israel are examined, including the Arab minority, Jews of Ethiopian descent, ultra-Orthodox Jews (Haredim), and recent Russian-speaking immigrants from the former Soviet Union (FSU). Each of the subaltern groups is analyzed in a separate chapter. For this reason, this well-written book deviates from Jamal’s conceptualization of differentiated citizenship rights in Israel in dichotomous terms (along the Jewish-Arab divide). Moving away from the bifurcated model, Ben-Porat and Yuval identify multiple levels of citizenship and belonging among subgroups, thereby recognizing internal hierarchies within the Jewish majority in Israel.

The findings of this compelling book rely on original surveys and focus groups, as well as considerable secondary sources—primarily publications by community leaders. Because each community is studied using the same method, the findings can be compared with ease, and inferences can be drawn. Trust in the police is lowest among the ultra-Orthodox Jews, who are most likely to strongly disagree with the statement “the police protect the values that are important to me” and are also most likely to claim being “over-policed.” Arabs, followed closely by Jews of Ethiopian descent, are most likely to disagree with the statement that “the police treat people fairly.” Values of indicators of perceptions of “under-policing” vary amongst the various sub-groups.

Ben-Porat and Yuval conclude that “the ‘order’ police enforce, everywhere, is a particular order that delineates and reinforces boundaries and hierarchies of a particular regime” (p. 194). The relationship to sentiments of belonging, however, seems to be more complex. For example, even though the ultra-Orthodox perceive the greatest extent of over-policing of their communities and express the lowest levels of trust in the police among all the surveyed communities, they nonetheless possess a greater sense of belonging than the Arab minority. And Jews of Ethiopian descent claim almost as much pride in their Israeli-ness as Israeli Jews—who do not belong to any of the subaltern groups—and considerably more than the Arabs and ultra-Orthodox, despite claiming to experience the highest rate of discriminatory behavior by the police. The only exception are immigrants from the FSU, who exhibit the most positive overall relationship with the police and are also the most likely to express a positive sense of belonging to the state. Otherwise, the correlation between belonging and police-minority relations is not neat, even if—as the authors aptly observe—the significance of the police “in creation and maintenance of social hierarchies cannot be overstated” (p. 213).

The purpose of The Sword Is Not Enough is to debunk the widespread perception among Israelis and Arabs that military force (or violence, in the case of the Palestinians) is the most effective foreign policy tool to achieve one’s objective in the conflict. The flip side of this common belief is that diplomatic negotiations and “concessions signal weakness and invite the other side to take advantage” (p. 143), and they are therefore eschewed. The third prong of Pressman’s argument is that as a consequence of these perceptions, diplomatic opportunities for resolving the conflict have been missed, in turn unintentionally leading to greater insecurity—the very outcome that the sides are seeking to avoid.

Each facet of this three-pronged argument receives a separate chapter. Each lays the theoretical foundations, followed by an impressive array of historical examples from 1948 to the present. Also present are examples that deviate from the argument, because Pressman aptly acknowledges instances where actors occasionally managed to get their adversary to change its behavior through force and instances of willingness to compromise for the sake of peace.

Pressman’s breadth of knowledge is impressive. However, the book neither presents new empirical data nor tries to generate new theoretical insights. Indeed, most experts will be familiar with the historical information, and international relations scholars will be well acquainted with the underlying theoretical premises. The presentation of the material is accessible and sometimes discursive. Although Pressman does not say so explicitly, it seems that his target audience consists of students and educated laypersons (although, lest it be misunderstood, the book is scholarly). The text is certainly one that can be used in an upper-level course to generate discussion on this important topic.

One difficulty is the binary foreign-policy options presented by Pressman: either military force or diplomacy. A third option utilized by both sides over the past two decades has been unilateralism. This option is only briefly discussed, either as a reaction to military force (for example, Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon and Gaza in response to Hezbollah and Hamas violence) or as a missed diplomatic opportunity. Yet, nonviolent unilateral action can also be interpreted as an active policy tool available to actors who believe that both military force and bilateral negotiations do not work. Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza can be understood this way, as Pressman himself acknowledges, writing that “the most compelling explanation for Sharon’s unilateralism was his belief that bilateral diplomacy (e.g., the Camp David Summit of 2000) and military options had failed” (p. 156). The long-term strategic objectives of the actors (rather than short-term tactical maneuvering) are highly consequential in this context. Historically, the majority of the most senior personnel in Israel’s security establishment have insisted that there is no military solution to the conflict. Yet, there is also a belief that the maximum one side can give does not meet the minimum the other side can accept. Pressman assumes that the sides’ interests can be identified from the outside in terms of desire for security, independence, and survival. However, evaluating means without identifying context-specific ends detracts from the persuasiveness of the argument.

These three books were published prior to the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza conflict in May 2021, which has spilled into intracommunal violence inside Israel. The domestic riots have also exposed the consequences of inadequate policing policies inside Israel. Rampant violent crime among the Arabs, resulting from severe under-policing, lent itself to anti-Jewish violence in mixed cities during the conflict. The Israel-Gaza conflict has further highlighted the national sensibilities of the Arabs in Israel as members of the Palestinian people. Taken together, the three books shed light on such developments, demonstrating the inadequacy of current policy approaches. Real-life events, therefore, underscore the authors’ arguments.