Hashish Across Borders

The history of hashish is intertwined with the history of borders—political, cultural, class, ethnic, and gendered. Since the early modern period, hashish has circulated across regions and along transcontinental trade routes but has also been entangled in struggles over identity, morality, and social order. In the process, hashish became a means of drawing and policing social and cultural boundaries: between East and West, progress and backwardness, respectability and deviance, and those deemed to belong within the social order and those cast as a threat to it.    

Hashish Across Borders traces the social life of hashish in Mandatory Palestine and Israel, from the early decades of the twentieth century to the present. The story moves from the cannabis fields of Lebanon and Syria to Mediterranean ports and smuggling routes leading to Egypt; from cafés and hashish dens to police stations, government offices, and international organizations. Situating Palestine-Israel within Levantine and global contexts, the book examines how commodities, people, ideas, and knowledge crossed borders and shaped the local realities.

The book also shows how colonial knowledge and representations shaped perceptions of hashish and its users in Palestine-Israel. For much of the twentieth century, hashish came to symbolize what Israeli society sought to distance itself from; by the early twenty-first century, however, cannabis had been incorporated into medicine, scientific research, and financial investment. The changing meanings of hashish thus offer a lens onto the changing society that produced, contested, and transformed them.

Haggai Ram is a Professor of Middle East History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His research and teaching interests include the cultural and social history of modern Iran and Palestine-Israel, the global history of drugs, and the history of colonialism and imperialism.