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Cover -- Unsettled States, Disputed Lands -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Preface -- Part I The Changing Shape of States -- 1. Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip: Disengagement or Incorporation? -- 2. Thresholds of State-Building and State Contraction -- Part II Wars of Position and the Fate of Hegemonic Projects -- 3· Becoming Problematic: Breakdown of a Hegemonic Conception of Ireland -- 4· Where and What Is France? Three Failures of Hegemonic Construction -- 5· Patterns of Hegemonic Change: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria -- Part III State Contraction and the Regime Threshold in Britain and France -- 6. The Irish Question in British Politics, 1886-1922 -- 7· The Algerian Question in French Politics, 1955-1962 -- 8. Regimes at Risk: Rescaling the Irish and Algerian Questions in Britain and France -- Part IV Applications to Israel and Other Cases -- 9· Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip: Tracing the Status of a Changing Relationship -- 10. Hegemonic Failure and Regime Crisis in Israel -- 11. A Theory of States and Territories: Extensions and Implications -- Abbreviations -- Appendix -- Notes -- Index

Abstract
Political scientists distinguish between governments and regimes. A government is comprised of incumbents holding positions of authority specified within an institutionalized "regime," that is, a legal order. Within a well-institutionalized regime, politics consists of legal struggles over what governments and government officials do. But when the issues in contention pertain to what governments are authorized to do, and not about what they should do, competitors may no longer feel bound to follow the rules. Such struggles can threaten the integrity of the regime. This article suggests that the prolonged, if temporarily sidelined, crisis over the overhaul of the Israeli judiciary should be understood less as a threat to democracy than as both a challenge to the Israeli regime's remaining liberal features and as an early skirmish in what will be a long political war over whether and how to emancipate millions of non-citizen Palestinian Arabs living in effectively annexed territories.

The one-state reality has dramatically changed the discursive landscape of the movement of Israeli settlers and their supporters who have waged a half century campaign to prevent territorial compromise as a basis for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Analysis of the discourse of the Sovereignty movement, as reflected in the pages of its journal, Ribonut, traces these changes and highlights the new challenges posed to the annexationist project by the prospect of the attainability of its goals and the necessity to confront the "Arab problem."

Ariel Handel, Marco Allegra, and Erez Maggor, eds., Normalizing
Occupation: The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements
(Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2017), 244 pp. Hardback,
$90.00. Paperback, $35.00.
Sara Yael Hirschhorn, City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli
Settler Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017),
368 pp. Hardback, $39.95.
Gershon Shafir, A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the
World's Most Intractable Conflict (Oakland: University of California
Press, 2017), 296 pp. Hardback, $26.95.

Zionist claims to rightful rule of most or all of Palestine/the Land of Israel ultimately depend on naturalizing those claims into common sense, for Jews, of course, but also for the international community. Following the 1967 war, Israelis in favor of withdrawing from occupied territories have relied on distinguishing between the justice of the 1949 Armistice Lines, and the process that led to the State of Israel within those lines, versus the injustice of the occupation of territories conquered in 1967 and of their settlement and gradual absorption. But as the truth of the expulsions and forced dispossession of Palestinians in 1948 becomes accepted by wider swaths of both Israeli-Jewish and international public opinion, the traditional narrative distinguishing the justice of 1948 and the injustice of 1967 breaks down. Ari Shavit's book, My Promised Land, can be understood as a response by Israeli two-staters to accusations of hypocrisy by the extreme right.