Being Israeli

Gershon Shafir is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. His publications include Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (1989, 1996) and Immigrants and Nationalists (1995). He is the editor of The Citizenship Debates (1998). Yoav Peled is lecturer in the Department of Political Science, Tel Aviv University. His book, Class and Ethnicity in the Pale: The Political Economy of Jewish Workers' Nationalism in Late Imperial Russia, was published in 1989 and he edited Ethnic Challenges to the Modern Nation-State (2000). Both authors have co-edited The New Israel: Peacemaking and Liberalization (2000).

'There have been innumerable attempts to map that complexity and to produce a comprehensive analysis of Israeli society. Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled's Being Israeli may well be the most sophisticated so far, and perhaps the most challenging.' New Statesman

• 1. Introduction; Part I. Fragmented Citizenship in a Colonial Frontier Society: 2. The virtues of Ashkenazi pioneering; 3. Mizrachim and women: between quality and quantity; 4. The frontier within: Palestinians as second-class citizens; 5. The wages of legitimation: Zionist and non-Zionist Orthodox Jews; Part II. The Frontier Reopens: 6. New day on the frontier; 7. The frontier erupts: the Intitfadas; Part III. The Emergence of Civil Society: 8. Agents of political change; 9. Economic liberalization and peacemaking; 10. The 'Constitutional Revolution'; 11. Shrinking social rights; 12. Emergent citizenship groups? Immigrants from the FSU and Ethiopia and overseas foreign workers; 13. Conclusion.