The War on Drugs in Israel: Detoxicating “Outsiders Within,” Intoxicating Foreign Enemies

Building on untapped archival documents and press reports, I explore a seeming contradiction underpinning the Israeli authorities’ War on Drugs from the late 1950s to the early 1980s. While the state authorities clamped down on local cannabis users, it was heavily invested in covert cannabis trafficking operations into Egypt, its main enemy at the time. The primary targets of the domestic clampdown were the country’s Jewish consumers of the drug, mainly first- and second-generation Jewish immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa (collectively known as Mizrahim). Provoking latent class, racial, and gendered anxieties, the state authorities used hashish to further marginalize and criminalize Mizrahim in Israel. However, while the state cracked down on Mizrahi hashish dealers and users, the Israeli military was directly involved in large-scale hashish trafficking operations to Egypt. This enterprise aimed to immerse and immobilize the Egyptian population generally—and the Egyptian armed forces specifically—with hashish.