and Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession (2009).
He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Intoxicating Zion: A Social History of Hashish in Mandatory Palestine and Israel, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Intoxicating Zion at the Stanford University Press website.The desire of the [Egyptian] fellahin to hashish was, he [Russell Pasha] claimed, not a self-perpetuating force of nature. Nor was it a product of changeless racial and cultural attributes. It was a provisional and potentially short-term problem, one that would be resolved once their bodies stopped hosting debilitating diseases. Indeed, like many others within and outside the League of Nations, including the subcommittee experts, Russell was an avid advocate of modern science. Optimism, he thought, was not naiveté on his part; rather, it was a realistic assessment supported by recent history. “Thirty-five years ago,” he said, “drug addiction in the villages was practically unknown ... and the fellah ... did his twelve hours day without thinking of or needing a stimulant.”Page 99 of the book, located at the very end of Chapter 4, is part of my exploration of colonial knowledge about cannabis produced in the interwar years. In particular, it relates to the debates about the drug that took place at the League of Nations Subcommittee on Cannabis in the years 1934-1939. Subcommittee experts engaged in lively and, at times, contentious debates about the nature of hashish and its psychoactive effects in the colonies and the metropoles. Even as they tried in earnest to add to previous outdated knowledge about the drug, they kept running into a thick ceiling of taken-for-granted class, racial, gendered and Orientalized ideas which ensured that the knowledge they produced could not catch up with changing global realities.
Russell was also blunt with respect to [Dr. Joules] Bouquet’s broad generalizations about “Arabs.” Egyptians and Tunisians were not one and the same people, he insisted. On the contrary, they were “of totally different characters and habits.” Bouquet contended that lower-class Tunisians got high because they were irredeemably indolent—“laziness [being] the basic element in the character of Muslims,” and added: “They love doing nothing and musing the hours away.” Russell strongly opposed this view, saying that it did not apply to Egyptian peasants. “In point of fact, the fellahin of Egypt were a sober race, who did not touch alcohol.... The Egyptian fellah was on the whole an industrious person, did not drink alcohol, seldom nowadays had more than one wife and was fond of his children.”
Page 99 is a convenient departure point for discussing my entire work. Having been primary recipients of this knowledge, Jews in Mandatory Palestine tended to steer clear of hashish, considering its use a form of "backwardness" linked to the realities of living among Arabs in the Middle East. Yet, while hashish was seldom used by Jews in Mandatory Palestine, the drug did attract new—Arab—devotees in the county. This hashish fever can be traced back to unprecedented global and regional controls over opiates and cannabis established in the interwar years. To overcome these obstacles, new circuits of exchange linked Palestine, and later Israel, to illicit supply chains in the Levant stretching from Lebanon, the producing country in the north, to Egypt, the consuming country in the south. With extensive, crafty trafficking operations carried out across its territory, a significant increase in hashish use occurred among Palestine's urban working-class Arab population. Hence, by the 1930s hashish smoking ran rampant throughout Palestine's urban centers, and many Palestinian Arabs could be seen wandering the streets intoxicated.
Following 1948, Jews had joined the local hashish scene due to new demographic and political realities—i.e. the expulsion of the Arab population of Palestine in the Nakba, and the country's massive repopulation by Jews from the Middle East and North Africa (aka Mizrahim). Some of these Jews used hashish in their countries of origin, and brought the habit with them to Israel. Other Mizrahim were not hashish smokers but had picked up on the habit in Israel owing to their increasing socio-economic and ethnic-cum-racial marginalization. This turned hashish into a Jewish "problem" where formerly it was considered an Arab one. Although the number of hashish smokers did not exceed a few thousand in the 1950s and 1960s, the habit concretized and dramatized the dominant Ashkenazi classes' anxieties about over-Levantinization. At the same time, it exacerbated the marginalization and criminalization of the Mizrahi underclass in Israeli society.
Page 99, which illustrates the ways in which colonial knowledge about cannabis was accommodated in Palestine-Israel, also showcases the transnational approach applied in the book. Exploring the transition from the Mandatory period to the post-1948 era through the perspective of hashish, the book examines the ways in which Palestine-Israel was situated in the region and the wider world, and how the latter two reached deep into it, penetrating and shaping it in matters concerning the commodity chains, consumption, and understandings of the drug itself. To paraphrase Sebastian Conrad, although the book does not seek to abandon national history altogether, it seeks to “transnationalize” it.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
