Israeli anthropologist David Wesley earned his doctorate from Tel Aviv University for research that contributes to a burgeoning “hot zone” of contemporary scholarship: power relations between Jews and Arabs within the state of Israel. Wesley’s 2006 book, State Practices and Zionist Imges: Shaping Economic Development in Arab Towns in Israel, has drawn accolades from fellow academics and NGO-affiliated advocates of civil society for its original, subtle, sophisticated, and nonpolemical analysis, even as it raises essential, challenging questions about “the Middle East’s only democracy.”

While Israel is a democracy, Arab towns within Israel tend overwhelmingly to be among the poorest in the country. What causes such inequality? What stands in the way of change?

An American-born professional anthropologist who made aliya to Israel in the 1950s, Dr. David Wesley has written what reviewers are calling “the most important book to date from Israeli anthropology”* which explores the situation of Arab citizens of Israel. "Wesley takes great care to avoid the kind of simplistic” analysis “that would leave us with naive, if intellectually and politically neat, visions of politically and bureaucratically astute Jewish oppressors manipulating weak and disorganized Arab victims”. In its place Wesley provides a more nuanced understanding of the processes by which power is used to allocate resources and opportunities.

In his talk, Wesley explores not only the current situation, but its implications for Israel’s future. “By and large,” Wesley writes, “the Jewish people in Israel has been embarked on a course of closing in on itself in ever narrowing circles. That way, I feel, lies not existence but eventual suffocation. ...To share the land would mean to choose, instead, breath and life.”

* Quoted from a review by Tom Selwyn, London Metropolitan University, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (UK), December 2008