The Global Political Economy of Israel

by Jonathan Nitzan, Shimshon Bichler

Over the past century, Israel has been transformed from an agricultural colony, to a welfare-warfare state, to a globally integrated "market economy" characterised by great income disparities. What lies behind this transformation? In order to understand capitalist development, argue Bichler and Nitzan, we need to break the artificial separation between "economics" and "politics", and think of accumulation itself as "capitalisation of power". Applying this concept to Israel, they reveal the big picture that never makes it to the news. Diverse processes – such as regional conflicts and energy crises, ruling class formation and dominant ideology, militarism and dependency, inflation and recession, the politics of high-technology and the transnationalisation of ownership – are all woven into a single story. The result is a fascinating account of one of the world’s most volatile regions.

Genres: Economics, Politics, Nonfiction, Israel

424 pages, Paperback

First published August 20, 2002

Reviews

[David M]

Chapter 5, "The Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition," is absolutely stunning, a tour de force of applied political economy. Even those of us already inclined to view US foreign policy cynically, even committed anti-imperialists, will find they have yet more innocence to lose.

This chapter is actually more about Saudi Arabia and the GCC than it is about Israel. In the decade and a half since this book's publication, we have seen increasing convergence between the interests of the Gulf monarchs and the ethnostate. Area for further study.

[Luke McCarthy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun, polemical writing style, which makes up for how dry and data-heavy this can be. I think Nitzan and Bichler are on to something with their theory of Capital as Power (which basically posits capital as a nominal representation of commodified power, rather than a physical entity). It’s really one of the only theories of political economy I know of that manages to reckon with the qualitative nature of the economy (and its enmeshment with the state) in a serious way. I didn’t find their theory of the weapon-petrodollar coalition convincing as an explanation for regional conflict in the Middle East, which unfortunately takes up a significant portion of the book. But, I think more than anything this is a book which teaches you how to think through and interpret economic and political phenomena in a truly heterodox way. It asks you to always disaggregate macro phenomena (inflation, for example, does not effect everyone equally). It asks you not to discount the ways in which politics can fundamentally reshape the mode by which capitalists accumulate. And It asks you not to underestimate how capital in turn can reshape the political terrain it is operating on.

[Ian M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two writers who actually take Marx seriously and start doing the math. Nitzan and Bichler are fearless, willing to admit where they fall short and great for a difficult, but rewarding, book on the workings of capitalism, the state and the policy-production axis.