"This is the first book that puts the Communist Party of Israel into the context of the larger Arab-Jewish conflict. . . . Kaufman does an excellent job of showing how social mobilization propelled the party through new forms of politicization and also led eventually to the party's declining fortunes."-- Joel S. Migdal, University of Washington In Arab National Communism in the Jewish State, Ilana Kaufman focuses on the role of the Communist Party of Israel (CPI) as a mobilizing force among the Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel from 1948 to the present. She examines the party's complex political strategy for mobilizing support, its success among the Arab electorate in the 1970s, and the influence of geopolitical events and economic change on its subsequent drop in position in the 1980s and 1990s.  While the CPI's organizational structure and ideology initially legitimized the party's "integrative ethnonationalist" agenda, Kaufman finds, they also led to its inability to sustain political payoffs or to push for greater equality for the Arab minority. Drawing on electoral and demographic data from 1949 on, she correlates the changing circumstances of Palestinian Arabs in Israel with the rising and falling fortunes of the CPI. Kaufman's study of the CPI highlights the broader issue of Arabs and Jews in Israel struggling to share a political platform. Her findings suggest that the initiation of an era of peace in the Middle East and even a final reconciliation between Israel and the Palestinians still leave open the question of more acceptable modalities of coexistence for Jews and Arabs in a democratic, multicultural state. Ilana Kaufman is a lecturer in political science at the Tel Aviv University and at the Open University of Israel.