Beyond Post-Zionism: Jacob Metzer, The Divided Economy of Mandatory Palestine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 275 pages. Deborah S. Bernstein, Constructing Boundaries: Jewish and Arab Workers in Mandatory Palestine, Albany: SUNY Press, 2000, 227 pages. [Review]

The two studies under review here make an important contribution not only to the research on Palestine during the British Mandate period (1918-1948), but also to a more general issue—the study of ethnic and national relations. This topic is, as is well known, a "hot" issue in contemporary scholarship, in which the relationships between Palestinian-Arabs and Zionist-Jews in Israel/Palestine hold a rather central place. In the last two decades, research on the history of Israel/Palestine has been influenced by "critical" and post-Zionist schools that are based on theories of post-modernism (with an added emphasis on the "other"), as well as on theories of colonialism and post-colonialism. Both Metzer and Bernstein are well aware of these approaches and, in many respects, are informed by the Post-Zionist and "critical" schools, but are not bound by them. In contrast to previous reactions to the Post-Zionist revolution—which were characterized by wholehearted denial or acceptance of its premises and interpretation—the studies by Metzer and Bernstein signify a new perspective of Israel/Palestine history—a synthesis, that takes us beyond Post-Zionism. A fundamental trait of both studies is their inductive approach. While much contemporary research is based on a deductive and relativistic approaches that lead to the results apparently expected and desired, the inductive approach of the two authors reviewed here is characterized by a devotion to testing theoretical hypotheses with data assiduously collected.