Haggai Ram

Intoxicating Zion (eBook, ePUB)

A Social History of Hashish in Mandatory Palestine and Israel

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

When European powers carved political borders across the Middle East following World War I, a curious event in the international drug trade occurred: Palestine became the most important hashish waystation in the region and a thriving market for consumption. British and French colonial authorities utterly failed to control the illicit trade, raising questions about the legitimacy of their mandatory regimes. The creation of the Israeli state, too, had little effect to curb illicit trade. By the 1960s, drug trade had become a major point of contention in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and drug use widespread.

Intoxicating Zion is the first book to tell the story of hashish in Mandatory Palestine and Israel. Trafficking, use, and regulation; race, gender, and class; colonialism and nation-building all weave together in Haggai Ram's social history of the drug from the 1920s to the aftermath of the 1967 War. The hashish trade encompassed smugglers, international gangs, residents, law enforcers, and political actors, and Ram traces these flows through the interconnected realms of cross-border politics, economics, and culture. Hashish use was and is a marker of belonging and difference, and its history offers readers a unique glimpse into how the modern Middle East was made.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 272
• Erscheinungstermin: 27. Oktober 2020
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781503613928
• Artikelnr.: 60095842

Autorenporträt

Haggai Ram is Associate Professor of Middle East History at Ben Gurion University. He is the author of Myth and Mobilization in Revolutionary Iran (1994) and Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession (Stanford, 2009).

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
1The Drug Trade in the Levant
chapter abstract
This chapter explores the evolution of the Levant hashish trade between
Lebanon in the north and Egypt in the south. This trade was a classic case
of unintended consequences. It was brought about by local and international
drug regulatory regimes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, culminating in the 1925 League of Nations Opium Convention,
which extended global controls over cannabis products. These controls
denied Egypt access to its main hashish supply source in the Greek
archipelago. As supplies from Greece declined, Egyptians turned to
Lebanese-grown cannabis to compensate for the loss of Greek supply. This
shift in supply source inevitably led to a shift in supply routes to Egypt,
which from this point on had to pass through Palestine, whether by land,
sea, or air.
2Smuggling in Mandatory Palestine
chapter abstract
This chapter examines Mandatory Palestine's enmeshment in the Levant
hashish trade. It reconstructs the "biographies" or "life histories" of the
henceforth illicit commodities crossing the Levant through the
Lebanon-Palestine-Egypt axis, demonstrating that political boundaries were
of no concern for smugglers and traffickers. At the same time, it focuses
on the subterfuges and ruses employed by hashish traffickers trespassing in
Palestine to get their contraband across Egypt's borders, and on the
failure of the Palestine Police Force to deal with these circumstances
effectively. Combined, these perspectives underscore the perforated nature
of the borders between the Mandate states, which eroded the legitimacy of
the colonial state.
3The Underworld of Users
chapter abstract
Contrary to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Orientalist representations,
hashish consumption in late-Ottoman Palestine was negligible. This state of
affairs changed dramatically in the course of the mandatory period due to
the territory's emergence as a critical link in the Levant hashish trade
between Lebanon in the north and Egypt in the south. With some of the
Egypt-bound supply left behind for the local market, the availability of
hashish caused a significant rise in consumption, mainly by the country's
urban working-class Arab population. By the 1930s, hashish smoking had
spread throughout Palestine's towns and cities. Venues for
consumption-makeshift hashish dens, coffeehouses, brothels-proliferated in
these towns, and many a person could be seen wandering the streets
intoxicated. The Palestine Police Force was unequipped to deal with this
circumstance effectively.
4Jews, and Interwar Oriental Fantasies
chapter abstract
Mandatory Palestine's Jews tended to steer well clear of hashish. By
exploring the public discourse of Palestine's burgeoning Jewish community
and drawing on interwar colonial knowledge produced by the League of
Nations, I demonstrate that the underlying reason for this abstention was
fear of accommodating an "alien" Oriental artifact. Not unlike sodomy and
homosexuality in pre-1948 Zionist discourse, hashish came to symbolize for
Jews a stereotypical marker of Oriental barbarism. Jews considered hashish
taking a form of "backwardness" linked to the realities of living among
Arabs in the Middle East. It appeared to expose Jewish bodies to the
dangerous temptations of an alien space, culminating in Jewish
overassimilation into the Levantine environment.
5Hashish Trafficking in Israel
chapter abstract
This chapter follows the changing patterns of hashish smuggling and
antihashish enforcement in the transition to the State of Israel up to
1967. The enduring Egyptian demand for hashish and the Lebanese capacity to
satisfy it ensured the survival of the Levant hashish trade after 1948.
With Israel's new borders superimposed on existing smuggling routes, and
with the Israel Police suffering from several constraints, the trade was
not radically disrupted, hashish traffickers (Jews and Arabs alike) coming
up with new deceptions to get their contraband safely to Egypt. Also
discussed is the alleged intensive involvement of the Israeli military in
hashish trafficking operations from Lebanon to Egypt, from the late 1950s
to as recently as the mid-1980s. The attributed objective of this
long-standing and highly confidential enterprise was to immerse and
immobilize the Egyptian population, and specifically the Egyptian military,
with hashish.
6Conclusion
chapter abstract
The conclusion ties together the various perspectives discussed in the
book: the movement of hashish supplies across and beyond Palestine-Israel,
the culture of hashish use by Jews and Arabs, drug-control efforts, and the
discourses in which they were all embedded. It argues that, despite
evolving circumstances and changing regulatory regimes, the hashish trade
continued unabated, new outlets emerging continuously as the number of
hashish users also continued to rise. At the same time, the conclusion
explains why the 1967 Arab-Israeli War should be considered a watershed in
the history of hashish in the region, and it offers a brief, albeit
first-of-its-kind-review of hashish use in Israel from 1967 to the present,
tracing the slow process of cannabis's normalization in Jewish Israeli
society.