Jerusalism and The Tel Aviv Review of Books present a conversation with Haggai Ram on his recent book about the story of hashish.
In the Middle East, hashish has always been more than just a way of passing the day. From the end of the Ottoman Empire on, hashish has often played a pivotal – if largely unacknowledged – role in successive rounds of jostling for social and political hegemony. Nowhere more so than in Mandatory Palestine, key waystation for distributing the (illegal) substance across the region and a thriving consumption market to boot. After the establishment of the State of Israel, Hashish continued to influence social discourse in many ways: an effective means of enforcing socio-political boundaries, an instrument of criminal activity writ both large and small, and – perhaps unexpectedly – an occasional tool for geo-political meddling.