This is an intriguing and interesting book. Its interest is inherent in the subject matter: how two contemporary democracies deal with the status and rights of conspicuous minorities. The intriguing aspects revolve around the author's thesis—that is, that membership in a democracy is inherently exclusionary, and national/ethnic/racial exclusion is a tacit requirement for successful democratic regimes.

This argument, of course, contradicts the central thrust of democratic theory that all human beings are inherently worthy of equal treatment and respect. Rebecca Kook argues that while citizenship in a democratic society is usually attainable by universal criteria, membership in such nations—the ability to participate in the full array of rights and benefits—is available only to certain citizens of the polity (p. 5). The reason that democracies promote particularistic collective national identities is to maintain stability.

Stability, in turn, requires a democracy to promote a shared national identity to facilitate collective action. Without such a national identity, the state would be unable to mobilize its citizens in times of peril and to overcome their free-rider, self-serving propensities in times of normalcy. A distinct national identity is also essential in any democracy, Kook argues, to provide the basis for the distribution of public goods and services. How else are limits and boundaries to be imposed on the otherwise universalistic values of democratic theories? As a result, each democracy uses a variety of symbolic methods to create and inculcate a distinct national identity, to define the people who are really entitled to full participatory membership.

Within this theoretical framework, Kook provides a clear, concise account of the exclusion of African Americans from membership in the United States and Palestinians from membership in Israel. Although blacks were legally granted citizenship in the wake of the U.S. Civil War (1861–65), they were excluded from the public goods and benefits enjoyed by white Americans for more than a century. The civil rights movement was successful, Kook argues, not primarily for the moral values embedded in democratic theory. Rather, African Americans were granted membership in American society because of the increased economic integration of the country, the increased importance of the black vote in the western and northern states, the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union for support in nonwhite Third World countries, and the willingness of African Americans to disrupt the established order to end their exclusion. The need to preserve, and perhaps advance, basic institutions convinced American economic and political elites to accord African Americans full membership.

In Israel, Palestinians were excluded from the emerging national identity by the Zionists seeking to recreate a Jewish state in the ancient homeland. After a dispersion that had lasted almost 2,000 years, Jews had to learn to think of themselves as a distinct people entitled to their own place in the international system. The drive to create a strong national identity was reinforced by the need to husband scarce resources to integrate waves of Jewish immigrants from disparate cultures, to develop the country, and, most of all, to defend the new nation from surrounding Arab forces. Thus, while Palestinian Israelis are legally entitled to all the rights of citizenship, they plainly do not enjoy full participatory membership in Israeli society.

As with any work of this size, especially one developed from a dissertation, important questions remain. To what extent does the legal basis of citizenship in each democracy facilitate or burden membership in its society? In the United States, citizenship has always been premised on individualistic criteria. In Israel, citizenship for Jews is based on that ethnic or national identity; only for the 20 percent of the population who are not Jewish do other, individualistic criteria apply. (The same issues are raised in other “ethnic” democracies such as Germany.) Was it therefore easier to incorporate African Americans? Who can forget how civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., or political leaders such as President Lyndon B. Johnson used the individualist/universalistic symbols of American citizenship? In contrast, all the national symbols of Israeli society are deliberately based on Jewish traditions. Will the desire to preserve the Jewish state—including most recently Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan for the Gaza Strip—prove an insuperable obstacle for a more inclusive polity?

However, those same particularistic ethnic and national symbols have made it easier for Israeli leaders to mobilize support in times of crisis, while American leaders are always struggling to create a sense of common, shared membership. Finally, to what extent is the exclusionary nature of membership in Israeli democracy related to the fact that the country has never been accepted by the bulk of the Arab world? The legitimacy of the United States, Kook's other case study, has not been in doubt for more two centuries. Do those existential facts reduce the utility of any comparison of these particular democracies?

Yet those questions emerge because Kook decided to make the comparison. None is meant to detract from the important contribution that Kook has made to the burgeoning dialogue on the nature of citizenship in general and the character it has taken in the United States and Israel.