This paper examines the evolution of bureaucratic control in Israel and Turkey over the Palestinian and Kurdish minorities in the early state-building period. As part of their nation-building strategies, Israel and Turkey have adopted very different approaches to the manifestation of “cultural difference” in their minority communities. While Turkey has denied the existence of cultural differences between Kurds and Turks and sought to eliminate the Kurdish-Turkish boundary through a highly repressive assimilation policy, Israel has not attempted to transform the cultural identity of its Palestinian citizens. On the contrary, preserving the Jewish-Arab boundary has been an integral part of the exclusion of Palestinians in the Jewish State. I argue that these contrasting nation-state building strategies, one based on assimilation, and the other, on separation, led to two distinct modes of governance, which constrained state officials in different and unexpected ways in day-to-day relations with minority communities. Specifically, I claim that Turkey’s rotating bureaucracy over its Kurdish population, and Israel’s government via Arabists (Jewish “experts” of Arab culture) constituted two distinct modes of governance. These modes of governance generated different forms of state knowledge over the minority, which, in turn, led to varying levels of state capacity and catalyzed different styles of everyday resistance within the minority community. The paper aims to contribute to recent studies that examine the sources of state power not exclusively in the outcomes of consciously designed policies, but in everyday practices, and in ways of knowing and seeing institutionalized in bureaucracies.