Paper short abstract:

I examine the knowledge about hashish in Palestine-Israel as a link in a chain of "travelling theories." Arriving from Europe's colonies, it spurred the racialization-cum-orientalization of marginalized groups, Palestinians and Mizrahi Jews, excluding them from the dominant (Jewish) community.

Paper long abstract:

This article is concerned with the history of hashish in Palestine-Israel from the beginning of the 1920s. It examines how the "hashish problem" was defined and constructed, and the discourses that developed around it in Mandatory Palestine and the State of Israel. I explore the extent to which hashish came to be loaded with ethnic and racial meanings that have had nothing to do with the substance itself, nor with its actual psychoactive effects. To that end, I examine the knowledge about hashish in Palestine-Israel as a link in a chain of "travelling theories," knowledge that was developed and popularized elsewhere, then assimilated and adapted to local conditions and specific power relations in its new environment. This knowledge should be traced back to colonial encounters with indigenous peoples for whom cannabis was an important constituent in everyday recreational, devotional and medicinal practices. In these encounters hashish and its consumers were racialized and criminalized. Once this knowledge arrived in Palestine from various colonies and the metropoles, where it had already been used to stigmatize minority groups, it was applied to its principal consumers; Palestinians and new Jewish emigrants from Muslim countries (Mizrahim). Although neither of these groups were excessive hashish consumers, and although the drug problem in Israel was comparatively marginal, this knowledge was integrated into the meaning-making activity whose main objective was to exclude these subaltern groups from the dominant community and prevent assimilation of "Oriental" customs and habits in the Jewish state.