In this book, Erez Tzfadia, a geographer specializing in public policy, and Haim Yacobi, an architect working on political science, come together to discuss Israel's production of space since its founding in 1948. In the last few years, many social scientists have sought a model that explains the internal ethnoclass divisions and stratification within Israeli society, including the Arab–Israeli community. Rethinking Israeli Space is an interdisciplinary study that seeks to offer a new analytical model of public space based on an examination of the production of Israeli peripheries and relying on postcolonial theory. The authors’ argument is fairly straightforward: Israel is a country divided and stratified by ethnicity and class, and this characteristic has been reinforced by spatial policies. Through a variety of case studies, they aim to show how peripheries have been produced and identities formed in these spaces. They also aim to provide a brief historical overview of the transformations that occurred in the last few decades following the succession of sociopolitical models from modernism to multiculturalism via neoliberalism, adopted in relation to the production of peripheries and identities.

Tzfadia and Yacobi do not hide their opinions in regard to the spatial policies of the State of Israel. In their view, Israeli policymakers clearly implemented a colonial project based on ethnonationalism that evolved to embed newer practices such as neoliberalism and multiculturalism. The authors certainly deserve credit for openly discussing such a complex and contested topic. However, they prove less bold when making reference to the Palestinian refugees. The latter do not constitute a major issue in this book, which signals that some events and definitions are still taboo in Israeli academia.

In the first chapter, the authors discuss the establishment of twenty-eight small towns between 1949 and 1963 in remote regions of the Negev and of the Galilee. These newly created towns were supposed to accommodate Jewish immigrants from Arab countries—who came to be known as “Mizrahim”—and to provide them with an Israeli identity. The authors argue that this project failed, as did the assimilation of Mizrahim, creating a sort of gray area, or “trapped identity,” as they call it (p. 9). Relying on a postcolonial approach, they show convincingly how an immigrant–settler society—the Ashkenazi Israeli founders—tried to make the Mizrahim vital members on the frontier of the new nation (p. 17). The Mizrahim were too culturally close to the indigenous Palestinians, however, and this created a major problem for the dominant Ashkenazi Jews. Some Mizrahim were assimilated and de-Arabized, while others began to channel their frustrations through extreme political parties and associations. In the second chapter, Tzfadia and Yacobi follow up on the previous discussion by focusing on the city of Netivot. They argue with convincing evidence that despite the Israeli government's efforts, it failed to replace a Mizrahi landscape with an Israeli one. The authors also demonstrate the necessity of understanding the production of space not only on the basis of policies but also by looking bottom-up at the reaction of the recipients of those policies.

In Chapter 3, Tzfadia and Yacobi look at the mixed city of Lod in terms of the arrival of a large number of Russian immigrants—Jewish and Christian—in the 1990s. The authors’ major achievement in this short chapter is to show how the private sector promotes national interests and how the market, supposedly free, is in fact defined by ethnonational affiliation. Newly arrived Russians promptly became part of the dominant nation (ethnos), denying any rights to the Palestinians who were perceived as a minority with no rights (ethnicos). Looking at newspaper advertisements for apartments, the authors found that Palestinians are not able to purchase properties in certain areas of Lod inhabited by Russians, creating a division between “us” and “them” not only in the marketplace but also in the political arena, which is particularly polarized in Lod. In the following chapter, the authors move on to discuss the introduction of foreign workers to replace Palestinians, investigating the effect of global labor migration through a focus on Tel Aviv–Jaffa and Jerusalem. After briefly discussing the relationship between globalization and cities, they observe that migrants tend to concentrate in the Central Bus Station area in Tel Aviv, which has become a sort of zone free from nationalist logic. While the authors show that the municipality of Tel Aviv–Jaffa displayed some liberal attitudes toward migrants (p. 58), they do not investigate the relationship between migrant communities and Israeli residents, leaving unanswered key questions such as the emergence of racism or apartheid against migrant communities. The case of Jerusalem, they argue, is different, as the status of the city as a “national” and religious center does not allow the same degree of globalization as in Tel Aviv. Indeed, what the authors have exposed is that the ethnocratic regime established by Israel is affected by global labor migration, and they conclude this chapter by rhetorically raising the possibility that a new ethnonational class is emerging within Israeli society composed of non-Jewish migrants.

The authors intend Chapter 5 to be the core of the book. Their argument that the union between nation–state and settler elites produces cultural landscapes in the peripheral regions that mirror national and global processes is explicated through the example of Moshav Hatzeva, a frontier settlement in the Arava desert (pp. 66–67). Hatzeva is not a representative Moshav—a rural settlement mainly for Mizrahi immigrants—as it was meant to be a national symbol due to the fact that its settlers originated from among the Ashkenazi Israeli elite. The authors argue that with the abandonment of the cooperative system, Hatzeva was integrated into global, national, and local contexts. For example, labor migrants were imported, radically altering the local context. Thai workers came to replace the sons and daughters of the first Israeli settlers and subsequently prevented the entrance of Palestinian workers into Israeli space. The cultural and economic projects, according to the authors’ research, aim at promoting the ability of elites living in the periphery to create a direct connection with the center of the country through the globalization process. Despite the thorough analysis, the example chosen seems to be a unique case, as there are no other settlements comparable to Hatzeva.

In the last two chapters, the authors discuss the possibility of creating multicultural spaces in a society based on an ethnonational logic. What they have noticed is that multiculturalism and ethnonationalism are still involved in a sort of conflict, and multiculturalism is used more to secure Jewish identity rather than to promote assimilation and a melting pot (p. 102). Through a number of cases, the authors show how multiculturalism has been pursued in recent years in Israel, and they seem to conclude that it is and will be in constant conflict with ethnonationalism due to the very nature of the State of Israel.

In conclusion, Tzfadia and Yacobi follow the line of other scholars arguing that Israeli society is facing acute internal challenges. The model presented to discuss the rethinking of Israeli space seems convincing. Indeed, the postcolonial approach helped them to expose the production of peripheries as inherent to colonial practices. Less convincing is the narrative style used, which is too dense and at times impenetrable, even though it offers an interesting perspective on the production of space in Israel.