Bringing together important contributions from leading Israeli Jewish and Palestinian scholars, this comprehensive and multi-disciplinary volume addresses the most recent developments and outcomes of the labor market integration of the Palestinian minority inside Israel.

Abstract: Schiff considers the policy options of the West Bank and Gaza with respect to trade and the export of labor services. He concludes that: Nondiscriminatory trade policy is unambiguously superior to a free trade agreement with Israel; The West Bank and Gaza should pursue a nondiscriminatory trade policy with all its neighbors, but only on the condition that the trade policy be open, transparent, and enforced by a credible lock-in mechanism. Otherwise, a customs union with Israel may be preferable; The Palestinian Authority should establish a system of fee-based permits for Palestinians working in Israel; The Palestinian Authority should consider allowing Jordanians access to the West Bank and Gaza labor market. This paper"a product of Trade, Development Research Group"is part of a larger effort in the group to analyze trade and regional integration policies in the Middle East. The author may be contacted at mschiff@@worldbank.org.

Based upon the author's own experiences this study explores the Israeli government's attitude to the West Bank and Gaza over a period of 30 years. The "fools" in the book's title refers not only to the Arabs who rejected Israeli peace offers but to the Israelis themselves.

This volume addresses different aspects and areas of inequality in Israel, a country characterized by high levels of economic inequality, poverty, and social diversity. The book expands on the mechanisms that produce and maintain inequality, and the role of state policies in influencing those mechanisms.

As Kyrgyzstan moves toward a market economy, it faces population growth, rising unemployment, and increased poverty. The guidelines in this study show how transitional economies can deliver social services to the people who will need them most. Recommendations to improve the labor market include ways to retrain workers, provide unemployment benefits, create a government employment service, and deal with mass layoffs. The report suggests calculating a specific poverty line so that subsidies may be directed more carefully to those in need and social spending may be reduced. This poverty line would be used with other government measures to reform pensions, family allowances, maternity benefits, sick pay, and subsidies for food and heating fuel. Additional reforms suggest ways to strengthen social services and improve policies for education, health care, and family planning. They survey different ways to monitor poverty, allocate budgets, and exploit the services of nongovernmental organizations.

Until recently, issues surrounding ethnic-linked inequality, whether between Jews and Arabs or between Jewish ethnic groups, have dominated research on stratification in Israel to the exclusion of other dimensions. Rapidly growing inequality in Israeli society, and its intergenerational persistence, however, have generated several new trends in research. The chapters included in this volume represent the range and depth of recent developments in the study of social stratification, mobility, and inequality. Although they address a variety of issues, they have in common a focus on the institutional mechanisms that govern the allocation of rewards.

Specialists on Palestinian politics, history, economics, and society examine the continuities that bind the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Recent developments in Palestinian political, economic, and social life have resulted in greater insecurity and diminishing confidence in Israel’s willingness to abide by political agreements or the Palestinian leadership’s ability to forge consensus. This volume examines the legacies of the past century, conditions of life in the present, and the possibilities and constraints on prospects for peace and self-determination in the future. These historically grounded essays by leading scholars engage the issues that continue to shape Palestinian society, such as economic development, access to resources, religious transformation, and political movements. “The multidisciplinary essays in this volume portray a nation contemplating the possibility of stalemate, hemmed in, and searching for outlets to express its self-determination. . . . [Davis and Kirk] divide the book thematically into three sections, focusing broadly on colonialism and its effects, politics and law in the Palestinian territories, and the future of the Palestinian state and its place in the international system.” —Publishers Weekly

Gershon Shafir challenges the heroic myths about the foundation of the State of Israel by investigating the struggle to control land and labor during the early Zionist enterprise. He argues that it was not the imported Zionist ideas that were responsible for the character of the Israeli state, but the particular conditions of the local conflict between the European "settlers" and the Palestinian Arab population.

The state of Israel and the Palestinian nation are at a monumental juncture in their histories. Both have a chance to claim a new future but more than a quarter of a century of occupation has had significant social, political, economic, cultural, psychological and moral ramifications for Israeli and Palestinian men and women. Women and the Israeli Occupation analyses the impact of the occupier/occupied dichotomy on the lives of Palestinian, Israeli Palestinian, and Israeli Jewish women. The book argues that the Occupation has exposed internal conflicts, challenging social structures within all three societies, but has also reinforced existing loyalties as Palestinian and Jewish women have moved into public political action and worked together to end the Occupation. It suggests that although military occupation is not colonialism, there are many similarities in the Israeli/Palestinian case.

The conflict between Israelis and their forebears, on the one hand, and Palestinians and theirs, on the other, has lasted over a century and generated more than its share of commentaries and histories. James L. Gelvin's new account of that conflict offers a compelling, accessible and up-to-the-moment introduction for students and general readers. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, when the inhabitants of Ottoman Palestine and the Jews of Eastern Europe began to conceive of themselves as members of national communities, the book traces the evolution and interaction of these communities from their first encounters, through to the present, as well as exploring the external pressures and internal logic that has propelled their conflict. The book, which places events in Palestine within the framework of global history, skilfully interweaves biographical sketches, eyewitness accounts, poetry, fiction and official documentation into its narrative, and includes photographs, maps and an abundance of supplementary material.