[BRIEF NOTE] Frontiers versus Ghettos

[rfmcdonald]

James Ron's 2003 Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) is a provocative comparison of the policies of the Serbian and Israeli states towards ethnic minorities within and without. Why did ethnic cleansing happen in Bosnia-Herzegovina but not in the Gaza Strip? Ron argues that Bosnian Muslims were singularly unlucky because they lived in disputed territories, in frontiers outside of the control of the Serbian state; Sanjaki Muslims, living in territories almost universally recognized as belonging to Serbia proper, escaped with mere harassment and only occasional murder. Kosova/o shift from a ghetto under firm Serbian control to a frontier contested by Kosovar Albanians in the late 1990s initiated, Ron argues, the eventual ethnic cleansing of 1999. He notes the devastation suffered by South Lebanon during the Israeli occupation--a land outside of effective Israeli control, but seen as critical to the Israeli national project--and wonders whether the shift of the West Bank and Gaza Strip from Israel control might also hint at ethnic cleansing in those territories.