1. The Shaping of Israeli Democracy

1. Democracy in Israel

Can a state be both Jewish and democratic? Over a century since the Zionist idea began to gather momentum, argument continues over what it means for a state to be Jewish. To those hostile to the very concept, it is clear that Jewishness is antithetical to democracy: “To the extent that Israel is a Jewish state, it cannot be a democratic state.” ^[1]

Such a view essentially equates “Jewish” with race or religion. A state employing racial criteria would clearly be exclusivist (racist), while a state based on religious principles would by definition be theocratic. Some unsympathetic critics attach both definitions to Israel; they bracket Jews with Christians and Muslims (all living under “religious authority and religious law” in Israel), while arguing at the same time that a “sovereign state of the Jewish people” is the same as a “sovereign state of the White people” or of the Anglo-Saxon people.^[2] Most Jews, however, reject the simple equation of Jewishness with race or religion. Jews in Israel and elsewhere clearly comprise a mixed racial group; furthermore, one can either cease to be a Jew or decide to become a Jew by personal choice, without regard to genetics. And while there is a Jewish religion, nonobservant Jews are still considered Jews. Israel demonstrates that a “Jewish” state can operate largely by secular rather than religious law—precisely the major criticism of Israel made by religious Jews.

What, then, is the commonly accepted meaning of “Jewishness”? For most Jews, or for that matter for most outside observers, it is a common national or ethnic identity as a historically developed community of people with distinctive cultural, linguistic, and other attributes. This includes a distinctive Judaic religion, which makes Jews unusual, though not unique, among ethnic groups. Jews are a people, a nation (in the original sense of the word), an ethnos. While the sense of peoplehood has been diluted in modern liberal assimilationist societies such as that of the United States, or even reduced in some cases to religious expressions alone or to nothing at all, this characterization of Jews in history is still valid. It has been true for most Jews, in most places, at most times.

Consequently, a Jewish state, as simply a state with a largely Jewish population and a dominantly Jewish culture, is not necessarily any more undemocratic than any state structured around a dominant ethnic group or groups (in other words, than several dozen states in the world today). The question is, first, whether the dominant group or groups practice democracy among themselves, and second, whether they extend it to citizens from other ethnic groups. This is a question to be answered by observation, not by plays on words or a priori assumptions. Finland is not undemocratic simply because it contains a significant Swedish minority while at the same time maintaining its Finnish character. One must examine the actual functioning of Finnish politics. Likewise, a Jewish state is not by definition undemocratic or democratic. We have to observe the Israeli political system as it operates in order to pass judgment. That is what this book attempts to do.

But isn’t ethnicity much more important in Israel than in progressive, social-democratic, postnationalistic Finland? To be sure, the importance of ethnicity does vary. On one end of the spectrum is the perfectly liberal modern secular state, ethnically neutral in laws and political behavior, and committed to universalistic norms that transcend the narrow confines of race, creed, or national origin (whether such a state actually exists is another question). At the other end is the state that clings to its ethnic identity explicitly, adopting a particularistic orientation rooted not in general principles but in its own traditions and values. This tension between the pull of universalism and the demands of particularism is familiar to anyone who knows Zionist history, because it has always been a basic point of contention. Was the Jewish state to be “a state like other states,” by which advocates usually meant something on the progressive European model? Or was it to be something uniquely Jewish, an expression of the Jewish people’s own history, traditions, and way of life? Or some synthesis of the two? Though Jewish history seems to have been intensely particularistic, universalist ideas were well represented in Zionism. The debate accompanied the movement from its very first days.^[3]

The argument has implications for how one judges the Israeli political system. Those impressed by the particularism or uniqueness of the Jewish people sometimes use this as a basis for judging Israel by a different set of standards. This group includes both critics and sympathizers. Many outside observers, including professed friends, would hold Israel to a higher standard than other states, on grounds of the unique historical experience of Jews or the unique moral importance of Israel as a haven from antisemitism. Some Israelis and Israel supporters, on the other hand, argue that the same history of persecution makes it understandable, and excusable, for Israel to be judged more leniently (Jews having, so often, been the victims of widespread violation of international norms by others).

Both of these arguments are rejected here. Even if we decide that Israeli political traditions and institutions are quite different, bearing little in common with the histories of other peoples, this does not justify invoking different standards. The circumstances under which nations function should be taken into account (for example, the seriousness of threats to security). But to cite the uniqueness of a people’s character or past as cause for either unique condemnation or unique approbation is to enter the treacherous terrain of the double standard. Therefore, wherever Israel falls on the particularist-universalist spectrum, the working assumption here is that Israeli democracy must be judged by the same standards applied elsewhere—no more and no less.

But where does Israel fall on this spectrum? Is it true that Jewish history and traditions are biased toward particularism? Actually the apostles of pure universalism should find much to like in Theodor Herzl’s original vision of the Jewish state. The title of Herzl’s 1896 manifesto that galvanized the emergence of the Zionist movement, Der Judenstaat, usually translated as The Jewish State, is more accurately rendered as The Jews’ State. There was little that was “Jewish” either in the arguments for the state—basically as a response to antisemitism—or in the nature of the state itself. As later depicted in his utopian novel Altneuland (or Old-New Land), Herzl’s “Jews’ state” was basically an empty framework into which he poured various progressive ideas then current in Europe and in which Jews, Muslims, and even Christian Europeans could feel equally comfortable.^[4] Needless to say, many Zionist thinkers (especially Ahad Ha’am, the proponent of “spiritual” Zionism) condemned the near-total absence of Jewish content in Herzl’s background, thinking, and program. But for Herzl, who dominated the movement in its early years, the aim was indeed “a state like other states” (though perhaps even more progressive).

Nor was Herzl alone in failing to find inspiration in purely Jewish themes; in a sense, Zionism itself was a reaction to the particularism of Jewish life. Though nationalist in content, the movement for a Jewish state was very much part of the currents then sweeping Europe. As Shlomo Avineri observes, “in all these founders of modern Zionism there appears again and again the same phenomenon: they did not come from the traditional, religious background. They were all products of European education, imbued with the current ideas of the European intelligentsia.” ^[5] In copying the nationalism of other peoples, proponents of a Jewish state were revolting against the powerlessness, passivity, and pious quietism they associated with the ghettoized Jewish life of recent centuries: “Jewish nationalism was then one specific aspect of the impact of the ideas and social structures unleashed by the French Revolution, modernism, and secularism.…For the Zionism Revolution is very basically a permanent revolution against those powerful forces in Jewish history, existing at least partially within the Jewish people, which have turned the Jews from a self-reliant people into a community living at the margin of and sometimes living off alien communities.” ^[6]

Zionism was thus not merely an act of assertion against external threats, but also a revolution against age-old patterns of Jewish existence and an attempt to establish “normal” social, political, cultural, and occupational patterns that would make Jews more like other nations. Much of early Zionism—at least in its ideology—should therefore meet the approval of those whose ideal is Western secular liberal democracy, shorn of particularism. The “tragedy of Zionism,” writes Bernard Avishai, is “that Labor Zionism is a good revolution that long ago ran its course, that it stopped short of its liberal-democratic goals, and that recent efforts to reinvigorate Zionism in Israel have only brought Israelis more misfortune.” ^[7] In this view, shared by many veteran Israelis, positive aspects of early Zionism, such as the pioneering settlement ethic, have been appropriated in recent years by a narrower and more particularistic version of Zionism: “the question…is whether democratic tendencies—some of which, to be sure, were inherent in historic Labor Zionism—will prevail against the anachronistic institutions which Labor Zionists once made; prevail against the new Zionist ideology of a Greater Israel.” ^[8] Democracy failed to take root in Israel because it was eventually overwhelmed by resurgent Jewish particularism: “Israeli schools have taught children much more about the tribes of Israel than about the Enlightenment.…” ^[9] This was even reflected in the Hebrew language itself, claims Avishai, since Hebrew has no word for democracy except the “borrowed” word demokratia, which, he feels, strikes the Israeli ear as “alien” or “affected.” ^[10]

The fact that many early Zionists sought to divorce themselves from Jewish history does not, of course, mean that they always succeeded in disentangling themselves from its grip. Discussion of this point is central to much of what follows. But it should be noted at the outset that even had Zionists, against all odds, started with an entirely clean slate and had simply copied wholesale the European models they admired, this would still not necessarily have secured democracy. Of course liberal universalism seems much more hospitable to democracy than nationalistic doctrines, especially with regard to treatment of minorities. This was certainly something that Jews were especially well situated to appreciate, since the increasingly tenuous position of minorities in the new nations of Europe was one of the primary motivations for Zionism itself. But this is no simple one-to-one relationship; just as national self-expression can conceivably be achieved democratically, so also universalistic norms are no absolute guarantee of democratic practice.

In the first place, no state can claim to have achieved a true universalism in its politics; the idea of true neutrality toward all citizens, with blindness toward all ethnic, religious, cultural, linguistic, and other attributes, is a chimera. No state exists in a demographic or cultural vacuum; all reflect the human reality from which they are constructed. The prevailing values of a society, the distinctive history through which its people have passed, the very language or languages in which its public affairs are conducted—all these are particulars that give each state its own character. And all states, even the most liberal and progressive, consider the preservation of this national character to be a legitimate and even obligatory function of government. All contemporary states, for example, carefully and selectively limit immigration in order to ensure, among other things, against massive demographic change.^[11]

In the second place, not all universalist ideas are necessarily democratic in content. It should be sufficient to recall socialist internationalism, which does indeed purport to transcend ethnicity and religion but which has laid the groundwork for totalitarian rule based theoretically on dictatorship of one class over others. Traditional nondemocratic regimes never achieved the penetration and control of society achieved by Marxism-Leninism in the name of universal laws of history.

Particular traditions and practices can of course be either democratic or nondemocratic; by definition, particularism offers no single pattern in this regard or others. While we suspect that an inward-looking state might be less likely to respect internal differences, there is no a priori reason to assume this. Some peoples claim to have deeply grounded democratic traditions of their own, that may in the end be a firmer foundation for tolerance than alien doctrines from outside. Typically, a people’s history includes precedents for both popular rule and authoritarianism. Certainly Jewish history includes both democratic and oligarchic tendencies.

In other words, both the “Jewishness” of Israel and the outside influences (ideologies and models) that have operated upon it have an ambivalent relationship to democracy. Both include strands that could lead in either direction. As Benyamin Neuberger has put it: “Israel’s political tradition is a mix of democratic and nondemocratic traditions because its major components such as the Jewish religion and the Judaic historical traditions, but also the modern ideologies of socialism and nationalism, contain both liberal-democratic and authoritarian elements.” ^[12]

That the “Jewish” dimension of Israel should contain both democratic and nondemocratic elements should come as no surprise, since the same could probably be said of most traditions. The real surprise comes when one puts the oligarchic strands of traditions and ideologies together with the objective conditions hostile to democracy that impinged on the Zionist movement and on Israel. Considering the highly unfavorable circumstances attending its emergence, how did Israel achieve any democracy?

Obstacles to Democracy

The central puzzle of Israeli politics is, in fact, how the state has managed to maintain a stable democratic system. The obstacles to such an achievement were enormous. Consider the following ten influences on the development of the State of Israel:

Relatively few of the Jewish immigrants to Palestine or to Israel over the last century came from countries with a viable democratic tradition. A quick survey of official statistics shows that only about 10 percent of those who entered Palestine or Israel from 1919 to 1987 came from countries with democratic governments at the time (and the pre-1919 figure would be even lower).^[13] Not only were the countries of origin undemocratic but typically the Jewish communities there lived in a state of hostility toward official authority; Jews did not look to governments for protection but regarded them in “us–them”terms, with fear and antagonism.

Most immigrants came as refugees, with a life experience molded by disaster and political perceptions dominated by a sense of insecurity and vulnerability. Another rough survey of official figures shows that about three-quarters of those who arrived over the years would probably meet the standard definition of refugee: those fleeing because of “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” ^[14]

Those who came were plunged into a situation of permanent war, requiring full mobilization of manpower and resources, overwhelming dependence on the military, and a constant state of high readiness for emergency. All able-bodied males between the ages of eighteen and fifty-one are subject to military service, and most women are also drafted for two years. Contiguous Arab states have a combined advantage over Israel of 18 to 1 in population and 12 to 1 in size of armed forces.

The country is plagued by serious threats to internal cohesion, not only from a significant minority identified ethnically with the enemy but also by deep communal, religious, ideological, and political cleavages within the Jewish community itself. It has become a commonplace, if untested, observation that, without the unity enforced by the ArabIsraeli conflict, Israel would tear itself apart in internal squabbles.

The defense burden during much of Israel’s history consumed a crushing 20 to 30 percent of the gross national product, an outlay unmatched by any contemporary state not engaged in full-scale war and several times the level of defense spending in any other democratic state. This heavy weight on the economy increased over time, growing from less than 10 percent of GDP before 1967 to a high of near 30 percent in the late 1970s, declining only in the 1980s after peace with Egypt.^[16]

Because of small size, historical legacy, and a state of emergency, the Israel government formally has a very centralized structure, with authority concentrated on the national level and few institutional constraints on executive power (so long as supported by a majority in the Knesset).

As already indicated, the ideologies imported by early settlers were not unambiguously aligned with Western-style liberal democracy. Labor Zionism, especially among more leftist factions, flirted very seriously with democratic centralism and other doctrines of elite control then current in Eastern European revolutionary circles. Later the nationalistic right—Revisionist Zionists in particular—stressed the values of unity, military strength, and strong leadership, again reflecting the influence of contemporary antidemocratic ideas elsewhere. Furthermore, Israeli society has faced the challenge of all postrevolutionary societies: the challenge, in Shmuel Eisenstadt’s words, of “the transformation of revolutionary groups from socio-political movements into rulers of states”—a process often attended by the collapse of democracy as ideals meet the pressures of reality.^[17] One consequence of the influence of Eastern European revolutionary or postrevolutionary models of democracy has been, in the eyes of many close observers, that the emphasis in Israel has been on the formal and procedural aspects of democracy rather than on its content, especially in such areas as individual and minority rights.^[18]

There are also elements in Jewish religion, as in any religion, that at the least create some tension with the demands of democracy. From the religious perspective, the dictates of God-given law must always take precedence over man-made rules and institutions. The biblical injunction that “thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil” (Exodus 23:2) is often cited as an argument against majority rule. In any event, many in the religious (Orthodox) community refuse to recognize the legitimacy of democratically derived laws that they feel to be in conflict with the “higher law” as developed over the centuries by rabbinic Judaism.

Finally, after the 1967 war many Israelis asked how long democratic institutions could be maintained within Israel itself while the military administration of territories occupied in the war continued. These territories (except for East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights) were not made juridically a part of Israel but fell under the international law of belligerent occupation. This law was never designed for such a protracted period of control, and many feared that the reality of creeping de facto integration would erode democracy not only in the occupied territories but also in Israel itself. This issue will be the specific focus of chapter 10.

Concern over the strength of Israeli democracy increased considerably after the electoral upheaval of 1977, following which Menachem Begin’s Likud bloc formed the first government not led by Labor in Israel’s history (or in a sense, since the 1920s). Were Begin and his revisionist comrades, who had flirted with doctrines of the far right during the 1930s, truly dedicated to the democratic process? The increased visibility and political power of voters of African and Asian background and of religious nationalists—groups without strong ties to Western liberal values—added to the sense, among secular Westernized Israelis, of a rising tide of Jewish parochialism and religious obscurantism. The rise of the explicitly antidemocratic Meir Kahane, who won a Knesset seat in 1984 on a protofascist program calling for the expulsion of Arabs from Israel as well as the occupied territories and who according to polls would win several seats in 1988, brought these concerns to a head.

With all these influences to overcome, how does public support of democracy in Israel measure up? The bottom line is that there is strong support for democratic values generally among the Israeli public, but this support has some clearly identifiable soft spots.

Beginning in 1987, a systematic series of surveys was carried out by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI; formerly the Israel Diaspora Institute) on similar issues. These surveys confirmed the Israeli public’s low level of trust in political institutions, with the government, Knesset, and parties consistently falling much lower in prestige than the army, courts, and universities. Furthermore, over one-third of the respondents, time after time, stated that Israel was “too democratic” or “far too democratic.” Application of various demographic criteria showed that these opinions were not just conflictrelated but also were a function of more traditional ways of life: those of African or Asian background, those professing a higher degree of religious observance, and those with lower levels of educational achievement were all more likely to express attitudes hostile to democracy.^[19]

These surveys also demonstrated three particularly weak areas in public support of democracy—weaknesses that make some sense in light of the peculiarities of Jewish history and Israeli circumstances.

First, the Israeli public demonstrated a marked deference to authority on matters directly linked to security. As Yochanan Peres concludes, “a significant minority is prepared to curtail democracy when faced with the slightest threat to national security.” ^[20] One aspect of this tendency was the marked support for strong leadership, even at the expense of democratic norms.

Second, there was a marked willingness to curb the media whenever the state’s image or interests were threatened. This aversion to unfavorable publicity may reflect the traditional closure of the Jewish community and its obsession with the image projected to the outside world (what the goyim, or non-Jews, think), as well as security concerns related to the revealing of sensitive information.

Third, and most marked, there was a special weakness with regard to minority rights—that is, with regard to the non-Jewish minority in Israel. IDI studies and other surveys showed greater intolerance in Israel toward target groups on the left than toward those on the right end of the spectrum. The explanation, fairly clearly, is that the disliked groups on the left are either Arab groups or are perceived as pro-Arab.^[21] Thus, while majorities of around 80 percent support democracy generally, only half of the population opposes discrimination between Jews who harm Arabs and Arabs who harm Jews. The ideal of equality before the law runs into considerable resistance when applied to Arabs; it is the “Achilles heel” of Israeli democracy.^[22]

Survey results give us an important part of the picture regarding the overall strength of Israeli democracy and the threats it faces. Another important piece of the puzzle is the intense public discussion, within Israel, over these same issues. From its very inception, Israeli democracy has been barraged by complaints regarding its flaws and by lamentations heralding its imminent collapse. The character of this critical debate has, of course, evolved over time as the system itself evolved. In the pre-1977 critiques, focus was on the general dominance of parties in public life, the lack of internal democracy within parties, the long-standing hegemony of one party within the government, and the role of nongovernmental institutions (such as the Labor Federation) in what would elsewhere be governmental affairs.

After 1977, with the loss of coherence associated with the long period of Labor hegemony, the discussion of democracy shifted to other targets. Government seemed unable to cope with the increasingly complex problems it faced. The vociferous debate over the future of the occupied territories seemed to threaten the very fabric of the system. The state of the economy reached crisis proportions. Scandals in public life multiplied, and faith in public institutions plummeted. Extremism seemed to flourish; extra-parliamentary groups such as Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful, a group promoting Jewish settlement in the occupied territories) adopted postures that questioned parliamentary rule, if not democracy itself. Religious symbolism and pressures became more visible in public life, injecting new sources of tension and conflict. Elections became rowdier, and there appeared to be much more violence in public life. Many on the left feared what they saw as the demagoguery of the nationalistic right, which controlled the government and maintained close ties to more extreme groups that seemed to threaten the very basis of democratic rule.

In short, the particularistic side of Jewish life was resurgent after a long period during which the presumed universalism of Labor Zionist ideology had had the upper hand (at least on the surface). There was a human reality that had been obscured by the success of Labor Zionism. Those who came to Palestine or Israel were largely refugees motivated not by socialist ideology or Western liberalism but by desperation; they were far more closely wedded to tradition than were their Zionist mentors. They were not in revolt against Jewishness, as were many Zionist ideologues, and as ideology faded it was perhaps inevitable that Jewishness would make a comeback (though, as we shall see, it was never really absent). Along with a renewed emphasis on Jewish values came, also perhaps inevitably, objections to the universalistic pretensions of Western liberalism—including attacks on the primacy of democracy. One began to see statements such as the following, taken at random from numerous examples: “The perpetuation of the Jewish character of Israel is paramount to and transcends all other considerations, including the ideal of democracy.…Teaching and indoctrinating the young as to democratic values in the abstract and out of Jewish context is fraught with danger.…Assimilation, like Nazism, is anathema to Jewish survival and no less odious.” ^[23]

A sustained, reasoned, intellectual challenge to democratic ideals was mounted in some nationalistic and religious circles, such as the pages of the right-wing intellectual journal Nativ. Accepting the argument of a conflict between Jewishness and democracy in Israel, these critics drew exactly the opposite conclusion to that drawn by their liberal opponents: democracy would have to be compromised, as preserving the Jewish character of the state was the first priority. Behind this was the assumption that Arab hostility to Israel was a given, and that consequently self-preservation meant some curtailing of Arab rights. Under such conditions, Israel could not afford pluralism; equality could be extended only to those fully accepting the state and their duties as citizens, and acts of hostility should be suppressed without apology. Any people, it was argued, has a distinct character that is inextricably linked to its statehood. The essence of nationhood was particularism, not a vague set of liberal principles that few states observed in practice anyway (especially when their survival was at stake).^[24]

All of this adds up to a rather dismal view of Israeli democracy, or at least of trends that threaten to undermine it. But is the pessimism justified? Do the opinion surveys, the dire predictions, and the open attacks on democratic principles all reflect an actual decline in democratic practice, as the particularistic side of Jewish life reasserts itself? The answer is that the total picture is much more complex. To each claim or finding outlined above, there is generally an opposed counterclaim challenging the picture of erosion in democracy.

Democratic Realities

What expectations do we bring to bear in evaluating democratic attitudes, in Israel or elsewhere? If political institutions are held in low repute everywhere, what is the significance of the Israeli data? Beginning with the assumption that Israel is to be judged as other countries are judged, the comparative perspective becomes necessary. Such problems as minority rights in a conflict situation, security pressures on civil liberties, the role of religion in politics, and overwhelming pressures on available resources can be fully evaluated only by comparing the Israeli case to others, similar and dissimilar.^[25]

More fundamentally, one must begin with a recognition of the general tenuousness of democracy. Democracy is a relatively recent and still far-from-universal human achievement; if we posit universal suffrage, including women, as part of the minimal criteria, there were no democracies at all until the early twentieth century, and only twenty-three states have been continuously democratic since the immediate post-World War II period. All of these are relatively well-developed, prosperous nations; all but Israel, India, Costa Rica, and Japan are in Western Europe, North America, or the British Commonwealth.^[26]

Looking at matters comparatively, it appears the Israeli public is not substantially more intolerant than the U.S. public, and that existing differences can be explained by differences in the nature and degree of threat to which the two societies are exposed. The major comparative study, published in 1983, concluded that “the two countries are quite similar, with Americans only slightly more tolerant.” On the abstract level, there was no difference; for example, 85 percent of Americans and 83 percent of Israelis endorsed the principle of free speech.^[27] Differences appeared when the principle was put in the context of the least-liked target group, with a result that support of free speech declined by 30 percent among Americans and by 45 percent among Israelis. This is explained by the fact that there was less agreement among Americans on the identity of the target group—a situation of “pluralistic intolerance”—while in the Israeli setting of “focused intolerance” the Arab minority is more clearly identified and linked with an external threat.^[28]

Outside observers, employing presumably objective criteria regarding freeness of elections, competitiveness, and individual rights, have always ranked Israel among the democratic polities. The annual Freedom House series ranks Israel among the “free” nations while also putting it on the second rung regarding political rights, as a nation with a functioning electoral system but “particular problems.” ^[29] Israel made Dankwart Rustow’s 1967 list of thirty-one democracies, Robert Dahl’s 1971 roster of twenty-nine “polyarchies,” and G. Bingham Powell’s 1982 enumeration of twenty nations with continuous democratic regimes from 1958 to 1976 (as well as Arend Lijphart’s similar list of twenty-one, mentioned earlier).^[30] In short, those who approached the topic with empirical criteria, rather than semantic arguments, have had little difficulty recognizing the essentially democratic character of Israel’s political system.

Israel also appears in general discussions as one of the major case studies of democracy in a deeply divided society. Ethnic and religious cleavages clearly make the achievement of democracy more difficult; analysts point to a strong correlation between homogeneity and political democracy.^[31] Generally, only a handful of states with deep and numerically significant ethnic divisions have maintained stable democracies: Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, arguably India—and Israel. Thus it is not too surprising that one of the weaker aspects of Israeli democracy is minority rights, or that the style of democracy adopted by Israel is that considered by political scientists to be most suitable for deeply split societies.

What Kind of Democracy?

How has Israel preserved the essentially democratic character of its political institutions against such odds? In answering this question, it is important to understand just what kind of democracy Israel has managed to maintain and where the strength of its democratic habits lie. It is useful to begin with the distinction that Arend Lijphart makes between majoritarian democracy, on one hand, and consensus democracy or consociationalism on the other.

Majoritarian democracy—or the “Westminster model” in Lijphart’s words—is based on the idea that majority rule is the essence of democracy and that this principle should not be diluted (by a minority veto, for example). The British style of parliamentarism, with bare-majority governments, fusion of executive and legislative power, and tendency to unicameralism, is an expression of the majoritarian ideal. It also can be characterized by a unidimensional two-party system with one-party governments, by nonproportional electoral systems, by centralized as opposed to federalized government, and by unentrenched (or even unwritten) constitutions that can be altered by ordinary acts of parliament, since all of these arrangements help to guarantee that the untrammeled will of the majority will prevail.^[32]

Consensus democracy and the related concept of consociationalism embody the idea that the exclusion of losing groups or minorities from all decision-making is, in some basic sense, undemocratic. This model regards the diffusion and sharing of power according to some principle of proportionality as the ideal to be pursued. Lijphart identifies the eight characteristics of consensus democracy that stand in contrast to the majoritarian model. The following five characteristics fall along what could be called an “executive-parties” dimension:

1. Executive power-sharing. There is a tendency to share executive powers beyond a bare majority, making otherwise powerless minorities a part of the system.
2. Executive–legislative balance. The executive and legislative branches, instead of being fused, serve as a check on each other.
3. Multiparty system. The presence of many parties makes it unlikely that any one party will gain a majority, necessitating coalitions among smaller parties in which the interests of each is safeguarded.
4. Multidimensional party system. The formation of parties along many lines of cleavage—such as socioeconomic, ethnic, or religious—also enforces the pluralism of the system and the need to build coalitions protecting the position of smaller groups.
5. Proportional representation. Apart from providing the underpinning for a multiparty system, proportional electoral systems are the classic method of guaranteeing a voice to minorities and smaller groups in society.

The other three characteristics of consensus democracy comprise a “federal-unitary” dimension:

• 6. Federalism and decentralization. Different levels of government serve as a check on each other, and the reservation of powers to local jurisdictions is a means of providing autonomy to distinct groups.
• 7. Strong bicameralism. The second chamber in a two-house system usually serves as a check, representing territorial divisions or minorities to be protected from the tyranny of the majority.
• 8. Written and rigid constitutions. The final guarantee for minorities is the entrenchment of provisions that cannot be changed by a simple majority, either by requiring an extraordinary majority for constitutional changes or by providing a formal or informal right of veto to minorities in matters affecting them.^[33]

Consociationalism is a similar concept developed to describe nonmajoritarian power-sharing practices of democratic states. Lijphart identifies four such practices: grand coalition, segmental autonomy, proportionality, and mutual veto. Clearly these features largely overlap the two dimensions of consensus democracy, though consociationalism is a broader concept that covers informal practices as well as institutional structures.^[34] Since informal arrangements are critically important in Israel, the broader idea of consociationalism is especially applicable.

With its multiparty system and uncompromising proportional representation, Israel clearly ranks among the more “consensual” regimes on the executive-parties dimension of consensual democracy. On the second consensual dimension, however, Israel is “majoritarian” in federal-unitary features (centralization, unicameralism, an unwritten constitution).^[35] But this mixed picture exists primarily on the level of formal institutions; when viewed in terms of the broader concept of consociationalism (see chapters 3 and 4), informal power-sharing is much more evident.

A focus on the formal structure and powers of Israeli institutions is misleading. The Knesset may at first glance invite comparison to the Westminster model. But most important policy decisions have been the product of a bargaining process in which not only various branches of the government but also important quasi-governmental bodies and major social groups are all active participants in setting the political agenda, controlling the debate, and shaping the decisions that result. In practice, then, Israeli democracy has important power-sharing consociational features: grand coalitions, autonomy, proportionality, mutual veto, pluralism, and social bargaining.^[36] It is a process that owes less to formal structures, of British or other provenance, than to the way Jews have traditionally conducted their political life and to the circumstances under which the Israeli system developed.

In building our portrait of Israeli democracy, the first strand of our analysis will be Jewish traditions. It is important to know how Jews conducted their political life before the appearance of Zionism and Israel. As Jews are a people who live by their traditions, even when rebelling against them, it should not be surprising to find continuity between Jewish political experience in the autonomous communities of the Diaspora and Israeli politics of today. In both cases, Jews have conducted their politics as an exercise in vigorous bargaining among the major groups in society, striving to include as many elements of the community as possible and sharing power among them, with uneasy lines of authority and a confrontational style but also a saving sense of the need for unity. Jewish political traditions help to explain the consistency of this behavior and to understand many of the unusual features of the Israeli scene.

There is a paradox here, as one of the aims of Zionism was, as noted, to “escape” from Jewish history. But as in other spheres of life, the Zionist movement and the State of Israel found themselves responding “Jewishly” to the challenges they faced. Even in organizing to promote their revolution in Jewish life, Zionist pioneers were consciously or unconsciously drawing on familiar political practices and habits. In any event, it would be difficult to explain the vigor of Israeli democratic institutions without reference to the values that sustained Jewish life for centuries under trying conditions. The “Jewishness” of Israel helps to explain both the successes and the shortcomings of Israeli democracy.

To this foundation we must then add a second strand that is clearly crucial to the molding of Israeli life—so crucial that it has often been regarded as the central factor. This is the influence of secular ideology—the prevalent ideas of the time that impinged on the thinking and behavior of Israel’s founders and that continue to shape intellectual life in the country. These ideas, largely of non-Jewish origin, served to reinforce the universalistic elements of Jewish life, reducing differences with other nations by channeling Jewish endeavors along the lines of Western liberalism, or various socialist models, or the rising tide of nationalistic ideologies (though nationalism was, of course, a double-edged sword in this regard). Much of this ideological force, as expressed in Labor Zionism, Revisionism, or other variants, represented at least on the surface a revolution against the Jewish past. And while most immigrants came not as rebels against tradition but as refugees who had never questioned those traditions, the society they entered was to some degree shaped by the ideas that had preceded them.

A third strand that will then be added to the analysis is the plain and simple force of objective conditions. The Jewish community in Palestine, and the State of Israel after it, evolved under the pressure of unique circumstances and historical traumas for which there is no exact parallel elsewhere. The realities “on the ground” (as the Hebrew phrase puts it) were often more immediate than either traditions or ideologies, and required uncontemplated adjustments. Building a new society where none had existed before would have been daunting enough, but one overwhelming concern dominated from the outset: the search for security. If refugees in the earlier period found themselves forced by physical threats to put security ahead of other concerns, the coincidence of the Holocaust and the war for independence made it into an obsession for those who came later. Some of these pressures made Israel more “a nation like other nations,” while others served to accentuate the sense of isolation and the cult of self-reliance.

The final strand to be delineated is what, for want of a better term, is called modernization. Israeli society and politics have in recent decades been subjected to the forces of Westernization, technological change, the rise of mass politics and mass communications, and all the other intrusions of a shrinking world. While these forces ought to make Israel more like other nations, they also contribute to the decline of ideology, once the main driving force behind universalist aspirations. In this vacuum, particularistic impulses and traditions that had never been far from the surface can reassert themselves. And as the influence of classic Labor Zionist ideology and other ideologies waned, traditional political habits—protest, civil religiosity, extraparliamentary politics—reemerged more strongly.

The interweaving of these four threads, then, will tell the story of Israeli democracy and help us understand both its strengths and its weaknesses.

Notes

2. Jewish Politics

Is there continuity in Jewish political habits? Certainly political life in the shtetl, the nineteenth-century Jewish community in the towns and villages of Eastern Europe, had elements that would seem familiar to students of contemporary Jewish politics, either in Israel or elsewhere. A anthropological portrait of shtetl politics, drawn from contemporary sources including Yiddish literature of the period, could almost stand as an account of proceedings in the Knesset:

The actual mechanics of election vary widely, but a constant feature is the campaigning inseparable from all elections, the forming of factions, the influencing of the humble members by the city bosses.…The meetings are not notable for parliamentary procedure. On the contrary, there is little order and more talking than listening.…Majority rule is followed but not accepted. The minority may concede momentary victory but the issue is not considered settled.…There is no blind following of a leader on the theory that he is right and we will support him whatever he says. On the contrary, the leader’s dictum is always subject to analysis and criticism. “Every Jew has his own Shulhan Aruch,” they say, meaning his own interpretation of the Law.^[1]

Since this was the immediate political legacy of most of those who shaped the political institutions of Zionism and of Israel, a certain similarity should not be surprising. Political patterns that developed over centuries of experience in self-government could hardly fail to leave an imprint. This chapter seeks to identify the political traditions resulting from that experience, with special attention to the immediate milieu in which the Zionist movement developed. Following this, chapter 3 will record the impact of the external ideologies of the “Zionist revolution”—liberal, socialist, and nationalist—on the way Jews had habitually practiced their politics and trace the interaction of these forces, as further shaped by concrete historical circumstances, through the early Zionist movement and the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine (the yishuv).

One of the great contributions of twentieth-century Jewish historians has been to challenge the notions that Jews have no political history and that Jewish history is a lamentable chronicle of persecution, suffering, and powerlessness. The noted Jewish historian Salo Baron in 1928 attacked the “lachrymose” depiction of the Jewish past; an important recent study argues that Jews were not powerless but exhibited “a wide spectrum of persistent and ongoing political activism.” ^[2] Ironically, the view that Jews were apolitical and powerless was shared both by Zionists—who saw it as the feature of Jewish life most in need of change—and by opponents of Zionism, who regarded Jewish noninvolvement with power as the unique mark of Jewish virtue.^[3] Yet to survive two millennia of hostility required not only spiritual strength but also a capacity for organization and for the assertion of collective interests: in other words, a capacity for politics. As David Biale contends, “without some modicum of political strength and the ability to use it, the Jewish people would certainly have vanished.” ^[4]

The Jewish experience in self-government over the centuries has actually been a rich one; Jews have often managed their own self-contained political system. “The Jewish people,” it has been argued, “is most probably the only people which has realized the principle of personal autonomy in its life, creating in different countries under different political regimes certain forms of national autonomy and national organizations recognized in public law as state institutions”; more concretely, the Encyclopedia Judaica lists over 120 cases of Jewish autonomy, in various forms, over the ages.^[5] Wherever Jews lived, they held in common not only the heritage of Jewish law and other normative Jewish institutions but also patterns that arose from their universal position as a beleaguered minority: contention with a hostile environment, provision of needs that could be met only within the community, self-organization to minimize the intervention of outside authorities, and maintenance of relations with those authorities. In some places and periods (such as Europe in the Middle Ages) it was inconceivable for a Jew to live as a Jew except as part of a Jewish community. Long before the modern concept of a nation had been devised, Jews had acquired many of the attributes that nationhood is said to entail, including a sense of community and a felt need for collective expression.^[6] Thus, despite substantial differences in other respects, Jewish political experience in its varying historic contexts was both extensive and, in a general way, similar.

The Polish-Russian Kahal

The long Jewish experience with political forms is reflected in a rich classic political terminology, much of which remains in use in modern Hebrew. Apart from an extensive vocabulary in legal and judicial matters—as would be expected given the Jewish focus on law—there are terms for such concepts as community, citizenship, authority, factions or parties, and various ranks of officialdom (such as nasi, the title used for the head of the Sanhedrin in ancient times and for the president of Israel today). Classical Jewish usage also included the equivalent of a separation of powers by dividing authority among the three “crowns”: Torah, kingly (civil) authority, and the priesthood.^[7] The covenantal idea, central to Judaism, also has important political implications, since it implies that legitimate authority derives from voluntary contractual arrangements. As some observers note, this has been the universal pattern of Jewish congregations and communities across different ages and cultures.^[8] The development of the synagogue as a center of communal life had political connotations; the term itself (in Hebrew or in Greek) means simply “house of assembly,” and synagogues evolved into “the focal institutions of an ethnic-religious group living outside its own land.” ^[9] But the primary institution of Jewish political expression, as it developed over time, was the community itself: the kehilla or the kahal, as it came to be known.

The origins of the kehilla as an organized response to the realities of Jewish dispersion apparently lie, together with the origins of the synagogue, in the last days of the Second Temple period. But the classic period of the kehilla was from the eleventh to the twentieth centuries, especially in Europe. The functions carried out by the kehilla varied according to the circumstances, as did the ways in which authority was organized. Generally all adult Jewish males were regarded as members of the community, but forms of government varied from autocratic to fairly egalitarian, with variants of oligarchy or aristocratic republicanism as dominant modes.^[10] As it functioned throughout the Middle Ages, the kehilla usually had an established court system (whose roots went back to talmudic precedents), with the threat of herem (excommunication, a severe measure in a period where Jewish life outside the community was unthinkable) as a primary means of enforcement. The community also levied taxes, or apportioned among its members the tax burden imposed on the community as a whole, and carried out a system of tithes to provide for the needy. According to the custom of herem hayishuv, community consent was required before a newcomer could settle there (the equivalent of immigration control). One custom of note, in some locations, was that a community member could interrupt prayers in order to secure a public hearing of grievances.^[11]

Over time, the kehilla developed a law-making authority in addition to the judicial institutions. These man-made laws or takanot (distinguished from laws of divine origin) covered all areas of life, from commerce and family life to criminal acts, civil disputes, and even the regulation of clothing to be worn. Various bodies were chosen to legislate these matters, sometimes with the approval of rabbinical authorities, who also served as courts of appeal. At least one noted authority—Rabbi Gershom—called for majority rule in communal affairs, citing talmudic sources.^[12] During the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, however, as the size and complexity of the kehilla grew, the structure became more formalized and more hierarchical, and authority was concentrated in the hands of a limited number of people. This was especially the case in Poland, increasingly the demographic center of the Jewish world, where a series of royal charters (1551, 1576, 1592) enlarged the prerogatives of community institutions and reinforced the authority of the existing officers and rabbis.^[13]

The same period was also marked by the development of super-kehilla organizations tying the various communities together. Functioning mainly in Poland, Lithuania, Moravia, and western Hungary, such an organization (known sometimes as a medina, the term used in modern Hebrew for “state”) was composed of representatives sent by the various local communities, and it sometimes elected its own executive officials. These bodies, the best known of which was the Council of the Four Lands, carried out fewer direct governmental functions than the kehilla itself but dealt with matters of common interest to all the Jewish communities, such as relations with governments and other external authorities.^[14]

The classic kehilla, or kahal as it became known, that flourished in the Jewish towns and villages of Poland and Lithuania during the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries had most of the aspects of a political system. Jewish communities elected both secular leaders and rabbis, levied taxes, maintained courts with varying types of sanctions, established extensive welfare systems, passed laws regulating extensively all aspects of life in the community, and appointed agents (shtadlanim) as “diplomats” to represent the community in its relations with external authority. A distinctive and persistent political tradition grew out of the normative institutions of Judaism as shaped by the peculiarities of Diaspora existence in its Eastern European variant.^[15]

At the end of the eighteenth century most of this population was incorporated into tsarist Russia, which thus became the homeland of over half the world’s Jews. This is also the historical context of most importance to the subsequent history of the Zionist movement and of Israel.^[16]

The noted anthropologist Margaret Mead once remarked upon her surprise in discovering that Eastern European Jewry constituted a distinct cultural unit “which was essentially all of a piece whether they paid their taxes and marketed in Polish or Ukrainian or Hungarian or were ruled by Czar or Emperor.” ^[17] What Russia had inherited from Poland was, in the words of Salo Baron, “a strong and all-embracing communal organization” whose activities included the regulation of wages and prices, the survey of weights and measures, control over land acquisitions, and even such minutiae as the performances and fees of musicians at weddings.^[18] Even as this Jewish population passed under Russian rule, however, the kahal governance was under pressure from various quarters. The political disintegration and economic impoverishment of eighteenth-century Poland had weakened Jewish institutions, while external authorities increasingly interfered in internal Jewish matters. Symptomatic of the decline in self-governing institutions was the dissolution of the Council of the Four Lands in 1765.^[19]

A more subtle threat to Jewish autonomy was the growth of the secularized civic state as a model of political and social organization. Following the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the idea of government dealing directly and neutrally with citizens of equal rights and duties spread from west to east in Europe. In this universalist ethic, the importance of religion or other particular identities was supposedly diminished. The corporatist or communal features of medieval and early modern societies, into which Jews could fit collectively, were replaced in theory by a direct and unmediated relationship between individuals and their government. This presumably made it possible for Jews to be accepted fully as individual citizens in the states to which they belonged. But would they be able to achieve real equality without sacrificing their identity as Jews? While the Emancipation of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did offer new latitude to Jews as individuals, it also put them in a somewhat anomalous position. The old order, with all its disabilities, left little room for a Jewish identity crisis: unless they converted, Jews remained Jews and had little place outside their own community. But in the new civic state, could Jews be fully accepted also as Germans or Poles? The anomaly sharpened in the course of the nineteenth century as nationalism swept across Europe and became more particularistic, emerging—as we will see—as a central impetus in the rise of Zionism.

In the meantime, Jewish communities were being forced to surrender their civil functions to the state, sometimes as part of a process of democratization but sometimes not. Tsarist authorities sought to curtail Jewish autonomy, though primarily because of the instincts of absolutism rather than the influence of new conceptions of governance. The tsarist regime formally abolished the kahal in 1844, transferring its functions to existing municipal bodies (in which Jews were a minority). But clearly Jewish self-government continued to function unofficially, as demonstrated by the continuing efforts of the Russian government to suppress such activity. In 1870 the Council of State declared that Jewish communities were “a secluded religious and civil case, or one might say, a state within a state,” and called for a commission “to consider ways and means to weaken the communal cohesion among the Jews”; subsequently the commission received a report that the Jews “possess complete self-government in their kahals.…” ^[20]

The 1844 decree left some openings for the continued operation of Jewish communal institutions. Synagogues chose rabbis and other religious officials, and they also continued to elect deputies for other specified tasks (such as welfare). In Polish areas, where most Jews lived, other autonomous institutions were allowed to continue. In most places, the Jewish community continued to take care of its own needs, whether clandestinely or openly, and Jews continued to refer to these arrangements as a kahal even though it had no legal standing. As one historian of the period concludes, “it was a badly mutilated body…but what was left was sufficient to construe it as an organ of Jewish self-government possessing within the small limits of its jurisdiction power of compulsion.” ^[21] When new political ideologies and movements appeared, therefore, the kahal offered a strong tradition of Jewish self-governance as a point of departure. Jewish experience with autonomy could be used; it simply needed to be extended and democratized. As a leader of the Bund (Jewish socialists) declared, “no matter how the communal institutions are crippled, they are still the organs of Jewish self-government, and the road to our autonomy leads to them…autonomy is the same community, but better organized, more democratic and possessing increased powers.” ^[22]

In addition, as Eli Lederhendler argues, the tsarist assault on the powers of the kahal contributed to the rise of “modern” Jewish politics by fragmenting and diffusing the concentration of power in the traditional community and by further increasing the pluralism and blurred lines of authority. Splits within the community, between competing religious movements and rabbinic courts, or between proponents of the “Jewish Enlightenment” and the traditional leadership, helped lay the groundwork by the end of the century for a Jewish politics based on popular support rather than on authority derived from the (Gentile) state.^[23]

To summarize: before the emergence of Zionism, before the spread of Western liberal, socialist, and nationalist ideologies, Jewish communities throughout the Diaspora had long experience with voluntaristic and representative political institutions. In Eastern Europe, in particular, Jewish self-government had achieved a strong hold in communal life and consciousness. While in most respects not democratic by contemporary standards, it contained within itself the seeds for democratic growth. As Shlomo Avineri concludes, “it is in those myriads of Jewish communities, struggling to survive in a hostile environment, carving out for themselves their rules and regulations and developing their institutions, that we have the origins of Israeli democracy.” ^[24]

The Elements of Jewish Politics

What, exactly, were the habits of governance with which Jews met the new realities of the late nineteenth century?

The basic fact of Jewish politics was the very tenuousness of the framework within which politics were conducted. The scope of political activity and sometimes even the simple physical security of the Jewish community itself were subject to the sufferance of the larger community of which it was a part. In the past, even the basic right of residence had been subject to petition and negotiation with local rulers. At all times, the possibility of outside intervention in the community’s internal affairs—sometimes as the result of the actions of “informants” from within the community itself—set limits to the extent and definitiveness of political activity.

Given their insecure status in societies where they comprised the most obviously different group, Jews needed to deal with outside and often hostile authorities over matters that others took for granted. Jewish history generated a psychology characterized by “the hypervigilance of the haunted, the alert scanning of the insecure, and the continuous suspiciousness of the vulnerable.” ^[25] Jews learned to dread events over which they had no control and perfected great skill in detecting the potentially disastrous side of seemingly benign developments internally and externally. This “ gevalt syndrome,” or doomsday mentality, expresses as well as anything the deep-seated pessimism and anxiety rooted in the vicissitudes of Jewish history.

Historically, Jewish communities reacted to threat by closing off from the outside world, building the best possible barriers to maintain separation and minimize outside intervention. In the traditional mindset, the outside was seen as “totally strange and alien, the terrestrial manifestation of the sitra ahara or forces of evil.” ^[26] Religious practices such as dietary laws, and the deep-seated Jewish aversion to intermarriage with non-Jews, are often seen as expressions of the felt need to maintain the clearest possible separation from the non-Jewish world. In time, survival as a people was linked in Jewish thinking to the minimizing of external ties; separation became synonymous with Jewish survival itself.

The other side of closure was the forging of a strong sense of shared fate, and a remarkable cohesion, within Jewish communities. The protective embrace of one’s own group was the primary defense against a hostile environment. This engendered among Jews what has been described as a “familial,” “kinship,” or “clan” relationship. Amos Oz, the Israeli novelist, portrays it as a “tribal feeling” that “creates a perpetual intimate warmth which is sometimes necessary and comforting”; in Boas Evron’s words, “the Jewish God reassumed the traits of a tribal deity.” ^[27] This is related to what Baruch Kimmerling calls the “primordial” definition of Israeli collective identity, and with what Charles Liebman calls the “communitarian” conception of the state, in which individuals see themselves as members of a community, rather than the modern Western “civic” conception that sees the state as an impersonal entity with interests of its own.^[28]

The strong tradition of separation was apparent in the attitude to state laws and courts. Jewish norms dictated compliance with non-Jewish law where it presented no problems (under the doctrine of dina demalchuta dina—the law of the kingdom is law), but Jewish laws and courts were considered to have a higher validity. There was therefore no compunction in evading state laws in case of conflict between the two, or when they posed other problems. Jews tried to keep their disputes within Jewish courts (which often operated more efficiently and equitably anyway) whenever possible. It was also considered honorable, for example, to hide young men, especially religious students, from military conscription.^[29] Expediency in relations to the outside world was also expressed in the frequency of bribery as a common method of dealing with government officials (not that this put Jews apart, as such venality was common practice in such settings as tsarist Russia and the Ottoman Empire). As noted, special agents, or shtadlanim, were often delegated as diplomats of a sort to represent the community’s interests in dealing with officialdom.

Part of the separation from the outside involved a strong presumption against revelations likely to damage the Jewish community. Habits of secrecy, and of intimate and confidential modes of operation, helped the kahal to survive in Russia after its abolition. Special contempt is reserved in tradition for the informer (or malshin) who reveals damaging information to outside authorities; Jewish law provides for the trial and punishment of those guilty of this threatening act. In some “informer’s trials” in Poland recourse to outside authority was reserved in the classic kahal for community officials only, and this right was in a sense the defining attribute of their superior authority within that community.^[31]

Whatever the attitude toward the outside, however, did Jewish traditions favor democracy within the community? As far as the sources of Jewish law are concerned, there is considerable debate. Some stress the voluntary nature of the Covenant, the requirements in talmudic law regarding public consent to appointments and regulations, and the traditional resistance to centralized authority. Shmuel Eisenstadt refers to “the basic ‘democratic’ or rather egalitarian premisses of the Jewish tradition, premisses of basic equality and of equal participation and access of all Jews to the centers of the sacred realm.…” ^[32]

Others argue that traditional Jewish concepts put religious particularism above man-made legislation and cannot be made to encompass universalistic Western liberal versions of democracy and human rights. While the religious mandate of a “higher law” has the virtue of denying the legitimacy of arbitrary authority, it also is “contrary to the people’s political sovereignty upon which every liberal democracy is based.” ^[33]

It is difficult, however, to point to a fully developed “Jewish political theory.” Jewish theorizing is legalistic rather than speculative in style and is usually derived from the discussion of actual cases; it constitutes “a massive, finely reasoned, intricately articulated portrait of public life at the level of practice.” ^[34] Taking this more sociological perspective, it appears that Jewish communities were indeed governed oligarchically by and large but with some strong populist elements such as institutional pluralism, the absence of central ecclesiastical authority, and (at least in late nineteenth-century Eastern Europe) the presence of competing elites.^[35]

In this regard, the voluntary character of Jewish self-government was of decisive importance. The kahal was backed by state enforcement in some cases—mainly the collection of taxes—and was sometimes granted other means of compulsion such as the seizure of property or the imposition of fines. But these means were limited, especially by the late nineteenth century. The organized Jewish community could also impose a herem, or excommunication, which was a very serious sanction in the pre-Emancipation period when there was no Jewish life outside the community: “communal elders could still force a rebellious member to his knees by refusing him certain religious services, such as circumcision, rabbinical wedding, or the religious burial in consecrated ground.” ^[36] Even suppression of the kahal in 1844 did not end the effectiveness of this measure completely. In the past kahal officers could also deliver a community member to the state authorities if his crimes warranted or could sanction other informal acts of coercion (as in the 1649 Moravian decree giving community members permission “to issue forth against [a wrongdoer] with all vigor, to deprive him utterly of his capital and his home” ^[37]).

But even at the peak of kahal powers, enforcement did not depend in the end on formal sanctions as much as on the reputation of the rabbis issuing decrees, on public opinion and pressure, and on shared values and interests such as offering no pretexts for outside intervention. This sufficed to maintain a modicum of public order, but it rested on a large measure of voluntary consent. The fact was that there was no obligatory final authority within the Jewish community.^[38] And in the circumstances of tsarist Russia, by the late nineteenth century, active participation and cooperation was highly dependent on the good will of community members. In a very real sense, it was government by consent of the governed.

Since it was voluntary, Jewish self-government also had to be inclusive. Disgruntled groups and individuals were not at the mercy of the will of the majority; they could opt out of active participation in the community. Given the need for unity against a hostile environment, there was a strong incentive to give all groups in the community a stake in the system. It was understood that benefits must be broadly shared among all members of the community, even when this meant overcoming deep social, ideological, and religious divisions that would ordinarily make cooperation difficult. The principle of proportionality in power and benefits was widely understood and applied before the term itself came into use, as the only conceivable approach in a community or movement that lacked governmental powers.

The best expression of the “participatory mode” in Jewish politics was the regular conduct of elections, in times and places where electoral politics was unknown in the surrounding societies. In the classic kahal, both lay leaders and rabbis were chosen by a group of electors (mevorerim), who were in turn elected by all eligible voters. Elections were regarded as events of great importance and were vigorously contested. Eligibility to vote rested on the payment of taxes, sometimes at a specified level, but scholarship could be substituted for wealth in some cases. Elections to important positions were for fixed terms, thus upholding the accountability of those elected and providing for rotation in office.^[39]

Issues of human rights were also the subject of considerable attention in Jewish law and in traditional governance. One important difference, however, is that individual rights in Jewish law are not stated as rights but are inferred from the duties that are imposed. Jewish law enumerates a large number of obligations and prohibitions, many of which clearly imply recognition of the rights of others who are protected thereby. For example, the commandment “thou shalt not kill” assumes the right to life and led ultimately to a severe circumscribing of the death penalty in Jewish law. Similarly, other commandments and rabbinical rulings clearly protect the right to liberty and security of person, the right to property, freedom of speech and of movement, and even social and cultural rights (in modern terminology) such as the right to work, the right to an education, and the right to rest and leisure (embodied in the institution of the Sabbath, which passed from Jewish law to the world at large). Jewish law is especially strong on legal and judicial safeguards, with provisions that match or surpass those in modern liberal democratic states: there is a presumption of innocence with provision for defense of the accused as well as interrogation of the accuser, and confessions are not admissible even if made voluntarily.^[40]

Given its voluntaristic and inclusive nature Jewish politics was inevitably pluralistic. In the first place, the coexistence of an overarching external system and a sphere of communal politics guaranteed that there would be competing laws, jurisdictions, and authorities. Second, each community chose “secular” officials as well as a rabbinic leadership, and the lines of authority between the two were often unclear and thus the cause of controversy. Part of the problem was that the very distinction between “religious” and “secular” is a case of modern terminology being imposed retrospectively; the term “secular” would have made little sense in the classic kahal, and consequently the term “religious” had limited relevance as its opposite. Rabbis are now referred to as religious authorities because of their credentials in traditional Jewish law, but in the past they also dealt with what would be regarded today as civil matters, while the so-called lay leaders, or nonrabbinical officials, likewise dealt with religious as well as secular questions.

Further divisions within the Jewish communities came in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a result of new spiritual and intellectual currents. First was the appearance of Hasidism, a movement of religious renewal and mysticism, which established yet another center of activity and authority within the kahal. Later came the Haskala, or Jewish Enlightenment, which served as a vehicle for Western liberal ideas and inspired new forms and organs of political activity. The Haskala, whose influence among Russian Jews peaked after the middle of the nineteenth century, did not fit easily into the old leadership or the old kahal order, which in any event was in flux. Haskala proponents (or maskilim) formed new institutions and organizations that were not part of the kahal nor directly under state authority either. They created, in fact, a “public space” where none had existed before.^[41] It served as a bridge between traditional politics and the modern political movements that emerged shortly thereafter; many of the early Zionists had been raised in a Haskala atmosphere.

The pluralism of late nineteenth-century Jewish life, in the Russian setting, was striking. Groups of all types proliferated: artisan guilds, mutual aid societies, cultural associations, political parties, educational groups, savings and loan associations, defense organizations, charitable associations, burial societies, and workers’ groups. In the late tsarist period, according to one estimate, each Jewish community had on the average some twenty different associations, while the large city of Vilna, in 1916, had a total of 160.^[42]

The presence of so many groups, many of them carrying out quasigovernmental functions, served to increase the diffusion of power and further blur the lines of authority. Essential unity was preserved through mutual recognition and accommodation and by an underlying understanding that the legitimacy of these divisions rested on the adherence of all to community norms and interests. But as a result formal structure deviated from the informal bargaining by which governmental functions were actually exercised. The existence of different centers of power also helped legitimize opposition; even rabbinical decisions could be impeached, since there were competing authorities who could be invoked against each other.^[43]

The style of politics under such conditions is likely to be, and indeed was, contentious. As Avineri has pointed out, earlier habits help to explain not only the origins of Israeli democracy but also “some of the lack of elegance which accompanies it.…the Israeli Knesset sometimes resembles an unruly synagogue meeting more than the serene atmosphere of Westminster.” ^[44] The tradition of opposition to power, or basic disrespect to authority, goes beyond matters of parliamentary procedure, however. Sam Lehman-Wilzig, in a study of Jewish “oppositionism,” finds in the Bible more than fifty cases of resistance to authority; the Prophets existed as embodiments of protest, and nothing expresses the argumentative spirit better than the structure and content of the Talmud (where opposing viewpoints are both termed “words of the Living God.”)^[45] As noted, disobedience to temporal law is mandated when it conflicts with divine ordinances. Jewish law also put clear limits on majority rule, providing that the minority must be heard and even institutionalizing the role of dissent; it had a tendency toward “principled political anarchism.” ^[46] The pluralism of institutions, plus a prevailing suspicion of all centralized power, gave rise to an attitude of expediency toward authority within the community as well as toward that outside.

As the excerpt at the beginning of this chapter indicates, leaders in the traditional shtetl were always subject to challenge, and no authority was final: “Every Jew has his own Shulhan Aruch.” The informal arrangements, often more critical than the formal hierarchy, were also based more on personal relationships and mutual help—thus the importance of protektsia (connections), a term still central to modern Israeli life.

Furthermore, while the stress on law and the quality of legal institutions was always one of the hallmarks of Jewish life, the lack of clear jurisdictional lines encouraged evasion of the law. The laws of the state were considered inferior to Jewish law and were submitted to only out of necessity; whenever possible they were avoided. These attitudes carried over within the community, where the letter of the law was regarded as less than decisive, where lines of authority blurred, and where personal arrangements operated alongside formal procedures as a parallel method of handling relations between the individual and the state. This has been defined by Ehud Sprinzak as a pattern of “illegalism,” or of expediency toward the law, growing out of the realities of ghetto life in Eastern Europe as reinforced by the “baksheesh” (bribery) culture of the Ottoman Empire and the “naive socialism” of the early Zionists.^[47]

The communitarian frame of mind and the lack of a history of statecraft on the highest level contribute to what many observers have identified as a lack of state (or civic) consciousness among Jews, both before and after the actual achievement of statehood. The habits of discipline and sense of public duties, developed elsewhere through long endurance of authoritarian rule, are underdeveloped among the Jewish people (a curious instance in which the lack of autocratic precedents can be regarded as a deficiency). In certain respects, therefore, Jews were not well prepared for the task of state-building.^[48]

A softening element in this contentious struggle, though, was a strong tradition of social justice and charity in Jewish life. The care of the poor, the disabled, and the elderly was considered to be a duty of the entire community. A number of institutions of long standing handled a variety of social services from birth to burial. In some ways, these services covered a broader range than the public services in most modern societies, laying the basis for a welfare state before such existed, as well as constituting a fertile ground for the socialist ideas that became current. A “collectivistic” or “cooperative” model of social organization had very strong roots in the Jewish tradition.^[49] Like other aspects of Jewish communal politics, the philanthropic and charitable element, though essentially voluntary, was backed by a strong sense of obligation and by serious community pressure. At times, the charitable societies were “strong enough to defy the very kahal, ” and thus they offered additional checks and balances within the Jewish community.^[50]

A final, and perhaps crucial, feature of traditional Jewish politics was that it seldom dealt with non-Jews within the community. Jewish law and Jewish politics within the community applied only to Jews. Relations between Jews and non-Jews were under the jurisdiction of the state and governed by non-Jewish law, but within the community Jewish law prevailed. Furthermore, this Jewish law was in many respects highly particularistic. Jacob Katz notes how surprised many Jews were to be reminded by the “scientific” antisemites, in the 1880s, of the discriminatory elements in Jewish tradition: “Even learned Jews sincerely maintained that Judaism had always taught universalistic ethics only.” ^[51]

Jewish law in fact clearly distinguished Jewish rights from general human rights, as a consequence of the fact (noted above) that rights, in Jewish law, are inferred from obligations. Non-Jews have fewer obligations than Jews, basically the seven commandments of Noah, and thus they also have correspondingly fewer rights inferred from these obligations. Specifically, this means the rights to life and property, and security from injustice, lawlessness, and bloodshed.^[52] There were, to be sure, numerous biblical injunctions regarding the humane treatment of foreigners: “Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, or oppress him: for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:20); “One law and one code shall there be for you, and for the stranger that sojourns with you” (Numbers 15:16). Injunctions in the Talmud also invoke the principles of “the interests of peace” and “avoidance of ill feelings” as grounds for kindness toward non-Jews, even if this involved a breaking of Jewish laws.^[53] But talmudic law, by distinguishing among resident aliens between the ger tsedek (who has converted to Judaism) and the ger toshav (who has not), limits the demands of strict equality to the former. The ger toshav, on the other hand, is subject to a number of disabilities: they may not act as agent for a Jew, they are generally disqualified as a witness in civil matters, and even their right of refuge is circumscribed. According to Maimonides, no non-Jew (a category he extends to include converts “even after many generations”) may be put in any position of power (serara) within the Jewish community.^[54]

The essence of Jewish law toward “strangers” was, therefore, humanity; the idea of civic equality of Jews and non-Jews in a Jewish society was as unthinkable as the idea of equal status for Jews in non-Jewish society was at that time. Furthermore, the injunction of humane treatment was geared solely to the individual, not to non-Jewish groups who might claim recognition of their collective identity. Recognition of the rights of individual aliens to humane treatment did not provide for any collective legal or political expression of non-Jewish identity, and the matter was never seriously tested under Diaspora conditions. There the Jewish law of the ger toshav was adequate to deal with those non-Jews who chose to live, as individuals, in a Jewish community. Jewish communities never had under their jurisdiction large non-Jewish populations seeking to maintain their own collective identity, and thus Jewish political traditions were singularly unequipped to deal with such a situation. These traditions were not racist in the modern sense; they simply had nothing to say about minorities as such.

One should recall that the idea of a dual system of law and governance was normal in the period before the idea of a civic state, neutral on matters of ethnicity, religion, and nationality, became well established. As Katz says, “The concept of a uniform code of law, regulating human affairs regardless of race and creed, never entered the picture. The double legal and moral standard was not merely a mental reservation but was the accepted practice in all sections of society. The respective Jewish and non-Jewish sections of society were governed by their own mutually exclusive laws.” ^[55]

Jewish law also meshed with social reality; while litigation among Jews was normally handled within the community, matters involving Jews and non-Jews were handled by the non-Jewish (state) courts and authorities. The idea that such distinctions were in their very nature invidious or illegitimate had not yet taken root on either side.

In summary, Jewish history, especially in Eastern Europe but also elsewhere, included a striking exposure to a certain kind of political experience. The main elements of this experience were as follows: (1) struggle for survival on both community and individual levels in a hostile environment; (2) self-regulation through well-developed legal and judicial institutions, and the development of legislative mechanisms as well;(3) processes for selecting the community’s own leadership, with at least some input from the larger public; (4) provision of a broad range of community services without reliance on the outside; (5) a resulting tendency to a collectivist or cooperative model of social organization: (6) enforcement without recourse, in most cases, to the most direct forms of coercion; and (7) typically, a gap between the formal structure of power and the actual influence patterns within the community.

Though not “democratic” by modern standards, these governing practices did provide a foundation for the growth of democratic institutions. They did this by providing modes of participation that reflected the essentially voluntary nature of community membership, by fostering (before the appearance of modern liberal political theory) an attitude of skepticism toward all authority, and by developing a body of law that de facto mandated important basic human rights. Though Jewish tradition, like all traditions, was basically the legacy of a particular people, it incorporated a number of elements that would eventually be regarded as having universal validity as part of modern democratic theory.

Clearly Jewish political traditions strongly inclined toward consociational, rather than majoritarian, democracy (see chapter 1). Competition between different centers of authority, the lack of defined hierarchy, proliferation and influence of organized groups, and the reality of bargaining and power-sharing, rather than the undiluted rule of the majority, marked Jewish political experience. By the late nineteenth century, moreover, the Eastern European Jewish community was divided into a multidimensional political and social system, with splits along socioeconomic, religious, and ideological lines as well as among traditional elites. Even before theorists had identified the essence of consensus or consociational democracy, Jewish communities exemplified many of its characteristic patterns.

Traditional Jewish politics also illustrated the primordial or communitarian conception of a political body, more than the civic conception of an ethnically neutral state. Jewish experience put a premium on solidarity, on group cohesion, rather than on abstract notions of political relationships. This was entirely predictable for a people whose identity as a nation had been strongly forged by circumstances even before modern nationalism had given a name to such forms of group identity.

However, traditional Jewish politics also contained serious sources of weakness, in terms of democratic potential. One was the long habit of secrecy, of concealment and closing off from the outside. A second was the absence of civic habits as they developed elsewhere, as well as the development of an attitude of expediency toward the law. Tied to this was a contentious and even unruly style of politics; sometimes even the basic element of simple civility seemed lacking in public life. But perhaps the most glaring weakness of traditional Jewish politics derived from the very strength of its sense of community; there was little guidance or experience in encompassing groups who were not a part of this community.

Notes

3. The Zionist Revolution

Whatever the weight of tradition, the fact remains that Israel, more than almost any other state, is the result of an idea imposed on reality. Most nations represent an evolution of geographic and ethnic circumstances. But—like the United States in certain respects—Israel would not have come into existence without the strength of beliefs that moved their adherents to create new political realities.

Just as the ideas of the American Revolution must be understood in the context of the republicanism and rationalism of the late eighteenthcentury Enlightenment, so political Zionism—the drive to normalize the status of the Jewish people by achieving political sovereignty—reflected late nineteenth-century European ideologies of nationalism, socialism, and liberal democracy. Of course the aim of returning to Zion had always been central to Jewish thought and ritual, affirmed in daily prayer and by the continuing presence in Palestine of a small Jewish community. But it was the ideological ferment of nineteenth-century Europe that transformed what had been a vague religious aspiration into a largely secularized political movement with an active program for Jewish settlement and sovereignty in Palestine. The Zionist revolution was to affirm a secular self-identity as a nation along with, or even in place of, traditional religious and communal self-identity.

The center of the Jewish world at the time was tsarist Russia, which then included the Baltic states and Poland. In the early 1880s some four million Jews—well over half of world Jewry—lived under tsarist rule.^[1] From the time of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, this population was subjected to a wave of officially inspired persecution that was part of the regime’s response to the impact of revolutionary and nationalistic ideas within Russia.

The historic Jewish response to such repression was flight to more hospitable locales, and there was little difference this time. Between 1881 and 1914 about two and a half million Jews left Russia, most of them for the United States and other Western countries. But a small number, roughly 3 percent, chose to return to the ancient homeland instead.

Why did this tiny proportion choose such a novel response to such an age-old problem? Antisemitism was a major thread of Jewish history, but it had never sparked a significant movement for a return to Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel, as geographic Palestine was known in Hebrew). Zion had always appeared more bleak and inhospitable than the alternatives, and this was no less true in the declining years of Turkish rule there. Furthermore, the previous century had been the century of Emancipation: ghetto walls were torn down across Europe as secularization removed ancient barriers to Jewish participation in public life. Why, in such an improving climate, should a part of the Jewish community suddenly reject patterns of minority existence that had persisted for two millennia?

One reason was that Emancipation posed new dilemmas to which traditional solutions were irrelevant.^[2] In a society sharply divided along religious lines, Jews suffered many disabilities, but the very sharpness of the division left them with a clear sense of their own identity. When nationality replaced religion as the main point of reference, Jews were in a more problematic position. The relationship of Judaism to Christianity was clear, but the identity of Jews as Frenchmen, Germans, or Russians was ambiguous. Presumably the path to integration was open, but could it ever be totally successful? And would such success mean the complete loss of any meaningful identity as Jews? The problem was particularly acute in Eastern Europe; while there was some room in the Western European conception for a citizenship defined simply by membership in a common state, the exclusive identification of a state with a single nationality was much stronger in Eastern Europe.

One possible response was, nevertheless, total assimilation, and a large part of the Jewish community chose this path. Another answer was to embrace an ideology that denied ethnicity itself. Thus the appeal, to large numbers of Jews, of revolutionary socialist doctrines that put class interests above national and ethnic divisions or of Western liberal democratic ideals that put all individuals on a setting of civic equality.

Others responded, however, by embracing the idea of nationality and extending it to include the Jewish people. In an age when Greeks, Italians, Serbs, Romanians, and Albanians were rediscovering their own national identities, it should be no surprise that Jews reacted with a reaffirmation of their identity. By virtue of their 3,500-year history as a people, with distinctive cultural patterns, languages, religion, and a strong self-identity enforced by external hostility—by any test, in fact, but that of geographic concentration—most Jews felt their claim to recognition as a nation was as valid as that of other emerging nationalities of the period.

Jews thus sought answers to new external realities in new ideologies, which were also of external origin. What were these ideologies, and why were Jews so susceptible to their influence at this point in their history?

The Impact of Ideology: Nationalism, Socialism, Liberalism

Nationalism is the main thrust of political Zionism; however Zionists differed in other respects, the common core was application of the principle of the nation-state to the Jewish people. Where it clashed with other ideologies “the fact is undeniable that both emotionally and practically nationalism prevailed.” ^[3] Nationalism was of course one of the great forces of the time, and by the end of the nineteenth century it was generally accepted in the Western world that political sovereignty should correspond to ethnic (“national”) divisions; that is, that the nation-state, rather than the dynastic state or the multinational empire, should be the basic unit of world politics. This principle was to achieve its climactic vindication, at least in theory, in the results of World War I. That Jews should also choose the nation-state as the best vehicle of national survival should not be surprising, therefore. David Biale remarks that Jews “have always demonstrated a shrewd understanding of the political forms of each age,” and that adopting modern nationalism was therefore not essentially different from the “tradition of political imitation and accommodation” that was a legacy of Jewish history.^[4]

In choosing nationalism as a framework, Jews were moving from a more particularistic, if not unique, place in the world to a more universal and common model. With their own nation-state, Jews would join a world community of kindred peoples, each exercising its right of self-determination in its own sovereign space. Even in this liberal and moderate version of nationalism, of course, there is some ambiguity, since one is universalizing a principle of particularism: the right of each people to its particular identity, its particular character, and its particular political choices. If this is taken to imply the goal of homogeneity within a nation, then the position of minorities (such as the Jews) does become problematic. But as long as each nation respects the reciprocal claims of other nations to their own self-determination, then in theory the nation-state could be universalized as the basis of a stable world order. We tend to forget that in the midnineteenth century—the period of the unification of Italy and Germany—nationalism was a liberal principle allied to the struggle for democracy and self-determination for all peoples.

By the time Zionism emerged, however, nationalism was slipping from this liberal and universalizable form to more particularistic expressions. Far from accommodating the rights of other peoples on an equal basis, this more assertive nationalism focused on the presumed virtues or rights of a particular people. Taken to the extreme (with Italy and Germany again as illustrations), in its twentieth-century manifestations it preached not only racial or ethnic homogeneity but also denial of self-determination to others.

Historically, Zionism was an emulation of the first nationalism and a defense against the excesses of the second. In its earlier guise, liberal nationalism in league with democratization had indeed improved the situation of Jews throughout Europe. But in its later manifestation as “exclusive” nationalism, the position of Jews in new nation-states became increasingly precarious. The drive for a Jewish state therefore had behind it both a powerful positive pull, in the desire for Jewish self-determination and selfexpression, and a strong negative push, in the simple need for escape from this second strain of nationalism.

Exclusive nationalism gave rise to a new and more vicious ethnic antisemitism, which for many nullified assimilation as a solution to the problematic position of Jews. When religion was the criterion, Jews at least had the option of conversion. But one could not convert to a new ancestry; consequently even the most thoroughly assimilated Jews were not totally accepted in the new hypernationalist European societies. This was driven home by events like the Dreyfus trial—in liberal France yet—where a Jewish army officer, totally French in culture and loyalty, was falsely convicted of treason in a conspiracy involving the high military command. The final proof, some decades later, was the fate of German Jews, perhaps the most assimilated community in Europe. Many early Zionists, including Theodor Herzl himself, began as assimilationists but became convinced by events that integration would not end the persecution of Jews as a minority. Thus the achievement of political sovereignty was seen not only as an inherent right but also as a necessary response to the position of Jews as an exposed minority in Europe and elsewhere.

Eventually some within the Zionist movement also moved from the first form of nationalism to a more assertive and particularistic version. Like their counterparts in Europe, the “nationalist right” among Zionists asserted the exclusive right of the Jewish people to all of Eretz Yisrael, condemned any “compromise” of this right, and stressed the values of order, discipline, and authority above individual rights and democracy.^[5] Organized as the Revisionist movement in the 1920s, under the leadership of Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, this viewpoint was taken to extremes by others (some even copied elements of European fascism at its peak in the 1930s). Revisionists sought to realize their goals through a political-military strategy, rather than by the slow buildup of a Jewish presence through grassroots settlement activity—Zionism from the top rather than from the bottom.

If nationalism was an ideology with both universalist and particularist potential, the role of socialism should be less ambiguous. Based on a materialist and “objective” view of history, socialism presumes to transcend national differences and provide a class-based analysis of universal applicability. It must be noted at the outset, however, that socialism appealed to Jews in part because of clear points of convergence with Jewish traditions. Among the compatible elements were emphasis on collective identity and interest, concern with social justice, a conception of ultimate deliverance (messianism), perception of a basically hostile environment, and justification of revolt against established authority. The case should not be overstated; clearly other elements in socialism were foreign to Jewish thinking: the primacy of economic factors, historical determinism, the cosmopolitan focus on class rather than nation, the denigration of religion, the argument for centralizing power, and belief in impersonal forces (rather than personal connections). But still many Jews saw secular socialism as “old wine in new bottles,” and some non-Zionist Jewish socialists saw the revival of traditional Jewish autonomy (the kahal) as a logical means of achieving their ends.^[6]

The Haskala had also prepared the ground for socialism by exposing many Eastern European Jews to major currents of Western thought and secularizing their outlook. Changes in Russia also had a major impact: education had advanced sufficiently to create an intellectual class (of both Russians and Jews), but opportunities for integration into the system were blocked. This creation of an alienated group of “rootless intellectuals” is the classic recipe for producing professional revolutionaries, and nineteen-century Russia is a classic example. And since Jewish intellectuals were even more marginal than their Russian counterparts, they were also heavily overrepresented in this “school of dissent.” ^[7]

The structure of Jewish life also enhanced the appeal of Marxist socialism, in particular. By the late nineteenth century, the Jewish population of Eastern Europe had to a great extent been urbanized, pauperized, and proletarianized (with perhaps 40 percent of Jewish workers, by one estimate, employed as cheap industrial labor). This came on top of a strong resentment of the rich by the poor in the traditional kahal, which had earlier been an ingredient in the appearance of Hasidism as a movement. The convergence of all these circumstances created a state of ferment “that stamped the tradition of radicalism irrefragably upon the souls of untold thousands of Russian-Jewish young people.” ^[8]

The first wave of Jewish socialists were indeed universalistic in outlook; they rejected specifically Jewish concerns and outlooks in the belief that all problems would be solved by eliminating class-based oppression. As one orator proclaimed in 1892: “We Jews repudiate all our national holidays and fantasies which are useless for human society. We link ourselves up with armies of Socialism and adopt their holidays.” ^[9] The Jewish participants in the Vai Narod (Movement to the People) tried to take the case for socialism to the Russian peasantry, with even less success than their Russian comrades. Jewish socialists turned to their fellow Jews, in the end, largely for tactical rather than ideological reasons: it was only among Jews that they had any success. But their program still had no Jewish content; when it was decided to establish Jewish agricultural colonies, there was no inclination to favor Palestine over other locations, and colonists were sent to South Dakota, Louisiana, and Oregon.^[10] With the establishment of the Bund a brand of Jewish socialism was devised, but along non-Zionist lines. The Bund sought to achieve Jewish autonomy in existing places of residence, largely through the revival and democratization of the classic kahal.

The next step beyond the program of the Bund, combining socialism with full-blown Jewish nationalism, had actually been taken earlier by one of the founding figures of socialism. Moses Hess, a German Jew and collaborator with Karl Marx, in 1862 published Rome and Jerusalem, calling for the establishment of a Jewish socialist commonwealth in Palestine. The idea attracted no support at the time but was picked up and elaborated fifteen years later by Aaron Liberman, a Russian Jew, who adapted it to Russian circumstances. Then in 1898, only two years after Herzl published Der Judenstaat, Nachman Syrkin published an influential pamphlet that approached Zionism systematically from a socialist context. The final synthesis of Marxism and Zionism was carried out by Ber Borochov, whose first important writing appeared in 1905.^[11]

Even then, Zionistically inclined socialists did not rush to embrace Jewish nationalism wholeheartedly. The strongest group in early Labor Zionism, the Zionist Socialists, were actually supporters of “territorialism,” the idea that a Jewish state could and should be built in any suitable location. Fixation on the historical attachment to Palestine was, in their eyes, romantic nationalism. The important justification for building a new state was to correct what was considered to be the abnormal, distorted structure of Jewish society, and this could be done in any territory in which Jews were free to build their own “normal” society.

Whether attached to Palestine or not, Labor Zionists all shared this preoccupation with the total restructuring of Jewish life. Labor Zionism targeted the “unnatural” economic role that had been forced on Jews in the Diaspora. It urged Jews to move out of such accustomed trades as commerce, finance, and the professions, and to create a Jewish proletariat based on manual labor, a return to the soil, and self-reliance in all spheres of production. In contrast to most other nationalisms, Labor Zionism strongly stressed self-transformation as well as the achievement of external political aims. In the words of the Zionist slogan, Jewish pioneers came to Eretz Yisrael “in order to build and to be built in it.” The establishment of the kibbutz, or rural communal settlement, was a perfect expression of these ideals.^[12]

Labor Zionism represented a clear break with the Jewish past and a clear call for a program that would make the Jewish people “a nation like other nations.” And while its success may have rested in part on its compatibility with some Jewish traditions, it also contributed important novel elements to the Zionist enterprise. The socialist method of building “from the bottom up,” by the slow and patient construction of settlements designed to restructure Jewish life, became the dominant model in the Zionist self-image (even though most settlers came to cities, hardly a novel departure). Socialist ideology provided the rationale—and the manpower—for the mobilization of human resources under prevailing conditions, without waiting for deliverance by the powers-that-be.^[13] But perhaps most importantly, socialism (like nationalism to a lesser degree) put Jewish politics into a conceptual framework and vocabulary of general relevance. It helped to provide the link to secular, Western ideas and influences by which its own progress could be guided and judged.

The direct influence of Western liberalism, as opposed to Eastern European socialism, was more attenuated but still a factor. Even in tsarist Russia, Lockean ideals of limited government and individual rights were not unknown (if socialism could penetrate the walls of absolutism, so could other ideas). The concepts of democracy, if not its practice, had by this time acquired general currency. The early Zionist leaders from Central Europe lived in an intellectual milieu where liberalism was prevalent. A number of “Western” Jews (including, by virtue of his long residence in England, Chaim Weizmann) occupied important posts over the years in the Zionist movement. The British and U.S. branches of that movement were important and vocal in supporting their own political ideals. Finally, the British government presided for thirty years over the development of the Jewish national home, as the Mandatory power.^[14]

While some Western conceptions of unfettered individualism and uncompromising secularism ran against the grain of nationalist, socialist, or religious influences, democratic ideas were also reinforced—it should be recalled—by both traditions and circumstances. Even when democracy was not practiced as a matter of intellectual conviction, some sharing of power had often been necessary because of the voluntary basis of Jewish selfgovernance.

Western liberalism has been especially visible in two areas. First is the legal and judicial system with its strong borrowings from British and other Western sources.^[15] Second is the economic sphere, where the opponents of socialism (organized historically as the General Zionists) adopted liberal economic doctrines as a platform. The General Zionists originally were simply those Zionists who were not socialist, religious, or revisionist; they occupied a centrist position by virtue of their opposition to both left and right. When they were organized as a party, in the 1930s, a large influx of immigrants from Central Europe reinforced the party’s liberal image. General Zionists became the movement most clearly identified with Western liberalism, especially in economic policy but also to some extent in political matters.

The fourth strand of the Zionist movement, after Labor, Revisionist, and General Zionists, was religious Zionism. Religious Zionists accepted the aim of rebuilding a Jewish state in Palestine but sought to do so in strict accordance with traditional Jewish law. Clearly this was the least revolutionary and least universalistic version of Zionism; it remained a small minority within the Zionist movement and, for a considerable period, within the Jewish Orthodox community as well. Perhaps nothing else indicates as well how Zionism was seen as a revolutionary threat to traditional values and hierarchies in the Jewish world. In the eyes of rabbinical authorities, the Zionist movement was regarded as a secular nationalist movement that threatened traditional Judaism. They correctly associated it with the secularizing Haskala movement, which had posed the same threat, and which they had also opposed. The vast majority of them “knew danger when they saw it” and took a hard anti-Zionist line.^[16] This left only a small number in the religious Zionist camp—the forerunners of today’s National Religious Party—who were able, in the early days of Zionism, to reconcile its basically secular and revolutionary ideological thrust with religious Orthodoxy.

Zionism: Change and Continuity

The conflict between change and continuity was basic to Zionism, which might be described as a set of ideologies laid over a substratum of habits and traditions. These ideologies conflicted, in varying degrees, with the traditions. But whether subscribing to nationalist, socialist, or liberal ideologies—or, like Labor Zionists, to some combination of these—Jews of Central and Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century were indeed, in large numbers, seeking a break with the past. They filled the ranks of non-Jewish revolutionary movements in disproportionate numbers, and those who rallied to the Zionist call also saw themselves as being in “revolt” against past patterns of Jewish history. Zionists sought to escape from the particularism of the Jewish past and to rejoin history by recasting Jewish life into new universal molds provided by modern ideology. In David Vital’s apt phrase, they wished “to extricate the Jews from a rhythm of national history such that the quality of their life at all levels was determined in the first instance by the treatment meted out to them by others.…to cease to be object and become subject.” They felt that “the course of Jewish history must be reversed”; the significance of Zionism was nothing less than “the re-entry of the Jewish people into the world political arena.” ^[17]

Traditional Jewish life was seen (with some exaggeration) as politically impotent, as a manifestation of weakness inseparable from the condition of exile. In some cases, the dissociation with the Jewish past reached extreme proportions. Herzl himself largely accepted the antisemitic portrait of Jews as avaricious, unprincipled, parasitic, and vulgar, while arguing that it was Christian oppression that had so deformed the Jewish character.^[18] In one of the well-known stories of Yosef Haim Brenner, a leading literary figure of early Labor Zionism, the protagonist attacks the particularities of Jewish life in harsh language: “With a burning and passionate pleasure I would blot out from the prayer book of the Jews of our day ‘Thou has chosen us’ in every shape and form.” ^[19] The basic logic of this orientation is best demonstrated, perhaps, by those who took it to the very limit. The Canaanite movement, active in the yishuv during the 1940s, rejected any connection with Jews or Judaism and sought to assimilate with the indigenous Arabs as a new Hebrew nation. On the other hand, one of the most common themes of Israeli literature has been an attack on Zionism for having detached Jews from their roots; a well-known example is Yudkeh’s long and anguished sermon against Zionism’s failings in the famous short story by Haim Hazaz.^[20]

Yet despite the endeavors of its disciples and the allegations of its enemies, Zionism was never wholly at odds with tradition. For one thing, Zionism was itself a reaction against the claim that the spread of modern Western ideologies would solve the Jewish problem. Zionism could even be seen as a repudiation of the civic liberal ideal; it “appeared as a criticism of the Jewish problem based on civic emancipation alone; and it was an effort to reestablish continuity with those traditional conceptions of the nature and goal of Jewish history that had been discarded by Jewish disciples of the Enlightenment.” ^[21] One traditional conception of Jewish history with which Zionism was closely associated was messianism. Zionism was in a sense a transformed messianism, drawing its strength from age-old aspirations deep in the Jewish spirit; even a socialist such as Nachman Syrkin could proclaim that “the messianic hope, which was always the greatest dream of exiled Jewry, will be transformed by political action.…Israel will once again become the chosen people of the peoples.” ^[22]

Furthermore, while Herzl and some of the more Westernized Zionists may have had little feel or regard for Jewish tradition, their followers in Eastern Europe were closer to it. They did not reject the past outright but combed it for what might be useful in building the future; “continuity was crucial: the Jewish society at which they aimed…had to contain within it the major elements of the Jewish heritage.” ^[23] The past was invoked and reinterpreted in order to restore Jewish dignity (as in the cults of the Maccabees, Masada, or Bar-Kochba); precedents for “new” Zionist departures were sought in the historical sources. The relationship to history might be selective, and there was a marked tendency to revere antiquity while reviling Diaspora life, but on the whole few Zionists rejected all connection with Jewish history. As the leading study of the subject concludes, “between the two poles of continuity and rejection, Zionism established itself on a broad common base best described as dialectical continuity with the past.” ^[24]

It was unrealistic to believe that a Jewish state could be established without reference to four millennia of Jewish history. Tradition supplied Zion itself as the focus of Zionism; even for the most secular of Jews, only Palestine had the power to mobilize the imagination of would-be settlers. Holidays and national symbols were inevitably drawn from the past, even if attempts were made to alter their content and significance. The very legitimacy of the entire enterprise rested, in the end, on Jewish history and religion, a factor that grew in importance as conflict with the Arab population developed. And if this was the case for the secular Eastern European Zionists who settled in Palestine during the early days, it was that much more the case for religious and non-European Jews who were already settled there, or who came later; among these populations, the primordial tie to Judaism was strong and the impact of revolutionary ideologies, including the model of the civic state, was very faint.

The “dialectical continuity” with the past was often obscured by the rhetoric of revolution and universalism. But even Herzl himself was capable of relapsing “into the set and mode of thought in which particularity and specificity are celebrated as a matter of course” (with the dialectical process also reflected in Herzl’s depiction of his utopian state of the future as an “old-new” land).^[25] Cultural Zionists, following Ahad Ha’am, also sought to revolutionize Jewish life, but by drawing explicitly on Jewish sources of spiritual renewal and thus founding “not merely a state of Jews but truly a Jewish state.” ^[26] Even the most radical Zionist revolutionaries demonstrated links to tradition in subtle ways: in focusing on a redemptive process (albeit a secular one), in showing little interest in political programs not centered on Jewish interests, and in their “mildness” as revolutionaries in the Jewish context (where the emphasis was on building rather than destroying).^[27]

The revolutionary content of Zionism was further attenuated in the new settlements of Eretz Yisrael, where ideology struggled not only with the habits and traditions that new immigrants brought with them but also with new realities about which doctrine was ambivalent or even irrelevant. Indeed, the very fact of Jewish settlement in Palestine was more a product of circumstance than of ideological appeal. As Jacob Katz notes, the aim of uprooting a people and replanting them elsewhere “was beyond the strength of the National idea in itself.” ^[28] It took place only when persecutions and pogroms in Eastern Europe accomplished the uprooting. Even then, very little of the “replanting” was shaped by the national idea; of the two and a half million Jews forced out of Russia between 1880 and 1914, only about 70,000 arrived in Palestine, and many of these did not remain.

This process of self-selection had crucial implications. So long as other destinations were available to the vast majority of uprooted Jews who were not devout Zionists, then the new yishuv would represent a high concentration of the most ideologically committed. Thus the more revolutionary elements of the Jewish intelligentsia were able to establish the conceptual and institutional framework that prevailed for decades and absorbed later mass immigrations of nonideologized Jews who arrived simply because they had nowhere else to go.

Early Zionist Institutions

Settlers of the first aliya, or wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine,^[29] in the period from 1881 to 1905, were imperfect rebels against Jewish tradition. Untouched as yet by the secularism of the second and third aliyot, these members of Hibbat Zion (Love of Zion) build synagogues in their settlements and consulted the rabbinate on matters of Jewish law. In designing their governing institutions, they also drew on political legacies they knew, devising written charters (“covenants”) whose style and terminology were distinctly reminiscent of the traditional kahal. In fact, Vital characterizes these arrangements as “far too smooth a carry-over into the new Hibbat Zion societies of the mental and organizational habits of the properly philanthropic institutions of the community—which often represented everything Hibbat Zion was in rebellion against.” ^[30]

Apart from any conscious copying of past models, however, the conditions of the yishuv replicated in important respects conditions with which Jews had contended in the past, and not surprisingly they responded along familiar lines. There was no enforceable central authority in Zionism, even after the movement was formally launched (as the World Zionist Organization) in 1897. Early settlers were few in number, in a hostile setting, and relied on each other for mutual support. Being self-selected, they also had a high level of political consciousness and commitment and a strong sense of initiative. Voluntarism and partnership were, of necessity, the only means to establish and maintain a coherent political Jewish entity under these conditions. This meant, of necessity, the toleration of differences, since only by compromise would a common framework among the different settlements work. The framework was even looser, of course, than the kahal: it was built from the bottom up, pulling democratically established settlements together in a loose federation at the national level and laying the first groundwork for the “state within a state.” ^[31]

The combination of revolt and continuity that this represented is portrayed by Shlomo Avineri:

When a few members of a pioneering group decided to establish what eventually became the first kibbutz, the only way known to them to do this was to have a meeting, vote on the structure proposed, elect a secretary and a committee. Those people were revolutionaries and socialists, rebelling against the ossified rabbinical and kehilla structure of the European shtetl; but the modes of their behavior were deeply grounded in the societal behavior patterns of the shtetl, the force of dialectics.…It was out of these traditions that the Zionist Organization knew how to hold Congresses and elections. . . .^[32]

It was this reality, more than Theodor Herzl’s exposure to Western liberalism, that shaped the democracy of the Zionist movement. In fact, had it been up to Herzl, Zionism would have been far less democratic. Herzl was an “old-fashioned conservative” who, a few months before publishing Der Judenstaat, had recorded in his diary that “democracy is political nonsense.” ^[33] After entering the Zionist scene, he was repelled by the infighting among various factions: “We haven’t a country yet, and already they are tearing it apart.” ^[34] Herzl’s plan was to settle the problem from above by dealing with monarchs, statesmen, and powerbrokers; only when rejected by the aristocrats did he threaten (and eventually act) to lead a mass movement. Even then, he remained “strongly committed to authoritarian leadership from above…even though circumstances forced him to modify it in practice.” ^[35]

When Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in 1897, the model of parliamentary democracy was taken as a matter of course. The Zionist movement lacked even that small measure of coercive authority that Jewish community officials had possessed and had to proceed entirely on the basis of voluntary participation. Given the fact that Herzl dominated the proceedings and wrote the standing orders that governed this and subsequent congresses (based in part on his four years spent observing the French Parliament), he is often credited with laying the basis for the Israeli Knesset. This may be true regarding much of the parliamentary procedure; some of the rules written in 1897 are still operative in the Knesset.^[36] But in a larger sense Herzl was not the founder of Israeli democracy; he was only coming to terms with a reality that he could not have changed anyway.

One important element of this reality was the appearance of political parties, which within a few years became the main actors on the Zionist stage. The role of parties was an important element in building a Jewish state from the bottom, Israel being one of the instances where parties came before the state rather than the reverse. It was also important in the development of the electoral system. The First Zionist Congress adopted, as a matter of course, a system of proportional representation in which local Zionist organizations were represented on the basis of one delegate for every hundred members. With the growth of parties within the movement, proportional representation of ideological groupings was added at the Fifth Zionist Congress (in 1901). It should be noted that the principle of proportionality was followed by the Zionist movement well before proportional representation was established in national electoral systems.^[37]

The capacity of the Zionist movement to encompass diversity, by virtue of its voluntaristic and power-sharing structure, was astounding. The movement included antithetical worldviews that would have split most movements many times: socialist and nonsocialist; traditional and revolutionary; religious and secular; political Zionists determined on statehood and culturalists who abjured political goals. Nothing better demonstrates how the logic of inclusion worked than the case of religious Zionists. This logic was expressed by Max Nordau at the Third Zionist Congress, in 1899, when he appealed to religious Jews to join the movement: “Within Zionism everyone is guaranteed full freedom to live according to his religious convictions.…For we do not have the possibility of imposing our will on you if it happens to be different from yours!” ^[38] One of the most vigorous debates in early years was over the push of cultural Zionists, led by Ahad Ha’am, to institute a program of Jewish national education, which was seen by religious Zionists as a threat to their traditional role in education. This led to the recognition, in the Fifth Congress, of “two streams with equal rights—the traditional and the progressive,” and to setting up two committees to correspond to the two views.^[39]

In a pattern that was to continue, religious Zionists formed coalitions with other groups to protect their own interests. Herzl obtained their support—most notably in the emotional 1903 “Uganda” debate over the idea of Jewish colonization in British East Africa—in return for holding the line on the educational demands of the Ahad Ha’amists.^[40] Power-sharing, decentralization, mutual veto, coalition-building, multidimensional politics—features of consociational democracy that had their counterparts in traditional Jewish politics—flourished in this setting.

The Arab Issue

Relations between Jews and Arabs in Palestine “are totally different from those of the Jewish people with any other throughout its lengthy history.” ^[41] Jewish political traditions were of little use in dealing with non-Jewish nationalities within its own sphere. Jewish politics dealt with the non-Jewish world as a separate and hostile external environment, to be kept at bay as far as possible. Early Zionists thus had no precedents upon which to rely regarding the place of an Arab population in a Jewish state, as the very confusion of their responses would indicate.

The Zionist response to the Arab presence represents the usual spectrum of human adjustment to uncongenial realities: avoidance, denial, wishful thinking, hostility (and sometimes some or all of these responses simultaneously). And while the very profusion and confusion of the responses are testimony to lack of clear guidelines in tradition, most were consonant with one aspect or another of this tradition.

Avoidance is a normal response to a problem that did not exist in the past. For the Zionist pioneers, Palestine was effectively empty because “they did not expect to model the society they intended to build upon anything provided by the indigenous population.” ^[42] Theodor Herzl, when he passed through a large number of Arab villages during his visit to Palestine, made no references to Arabs in his diary or his written reports afterward: “the natives seemed to have vanished before his eyes. . . .” ^[43] Apart from the inconvenience of their presence, the invisibility of the inhabitants was probably reinforced by the assumption in European nationalism—also basic to Zionism—that a people without a state did not, in fact, have a national identity. In any event, such myopia was common among Zionist leaders, especially those outside Palestine (inside Palestine it was harder to ignore the issue), in the period before the Young Turkish Revolution of 1908 pushed national questions to the fore. Furthermore, it has persisted as a recurring phenomenon throughout the history of the conflict, often in the form of a tendency to minimize the importance or reality of Israeli Arab issues (as in David Ben-Gurion writing, in 1952, that Israel “was virtually emptied of its former owners” even though Arabs still constituted 12.5 percent of its population).^[44]

One form that avoidance took among early Zionists was to place an undue weight on the achievement of a Jewish majority. Once Jews could simply outvote the Arab population in Palestine, it was felt, all would be settled in congruence with democratic procedures and the “minority problem” would fall into place. Even Ahad Ha’am, whose famous 1891 article on the Arab issue was the first to challenge the prevailing avoidance of the issue, came eventually to the conclusion that a Jewish majority would make it possible to respect Arab rights as individuals while achieving Jewish national rights in Palestine.^[45] But as Jewish history demonstrates, establishing the right of a majority to rule does not, in itself, resolve the issue of minority rights.

Most Zionists, however, found it impossible simply to ignore the Arab problem. As time went on, especially among those settled in Palestine, better answers were required. The publication of Yitzhak Epstein’s article “The Hidden Question” in Hashiloah, in 1907, inaugurated a vigorous debate over attitudes toward the Arabs, which Epstein defined as a question “which outweighs all others.” ^[46] This debate did not, however, provide any resolution but reflected the confusion on the issue. The very proliferation of ways of viewing Arabs—as Semitic cousins, as natives, as Gentiles, as Canaanites, as an oppressed class, as a second national movement alongside the Jewish one—indicated the lack of a clear dominant view.

Naive assimilationism was a response favored by some early settlers, who recognized that the Arab presence could not be ignored but who sought to deny the reality of any underlying conflict. The established population could be viewed as kinsmen, as direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews who would willingly cooperate in the reestablishment of the ancient homeland. Even if they did not convert to Judaism, an appeal on the grounds of common ancestry and ethnic kinship might serve to reconcile Arabs to the Zionist enterprise.^[47] Such ideas did not strike a chord among either Jews or Arabs, however, and withered over time. Nevertheless, they did not die out completely; in the 1930s, Rabbi Benjamin (Yehoshua Radler-Feldmann, founder of Brit Shalom, a movement that advocated a binational ArabJewish state) was still promoting his own version of pan-Semitism.^[48]

Paternalism was another variant of the approaches that sought to transcend Arab-Jewish conflict by stressing common interests. The Westernized Jews who led the Zionist movement saw the native population of Palestine as a backward people who could only benefit from the blessings of modern civilization that Jewish settlers would bring. When Herzl finally dealt with the Arab problem, in Altneuland, he portrayed an Arab notable deeply grateful for the economic prosperity and modernization brought by Jewish skills; Max Nordau, in defending Herzl from Ahad Ha’am’s accusations of insensitivity on the issue, argued that Jews would bring progress and civilization to Palestine just as the English had to India. Chaim Weizmann later explained to Lord Balfour that the Arab problem was economic rather than political and that Zionism would coexist peacefully with the Arabs of Palestine by insuring economic development.^[49] Of course all of this was being argued at a time when the superiority of European culture and the advantages of its diffusion were articles of faith and “colonialism” was still considered a progressive concept in the West.

Class solidarity was a more sophisticated path for denying the reality of a national conflict. Labor Zionists argued that the common class interests of Jewish workers and the masses of impoverished Arab peasants created the basis for joint action against the (Arab) effendi, or landowning class. Despite the lack of response from the Arab “proletariat,” this conception had at least two practical advantages that guaranteed it a long lease on life. First, Arab hostility to Zionism could in this view be attributed to the reactionary interests of the effendi rather than to the bulk of the Arab population, with which Zionism was said to have no quarrel. Second, analysis on a class basis made it possible to skirt the issue of whether the Arabs of Palestine constituted a nation or a people, equal in status (and rights) with the Jewish people.

In reality, both paternalistic and class solidarity perspectives, like the naive kinship theories, saw assimilation as the answer to the Arab problem. The basis and form of assimilation had simply become more sophisticated. All three assimilationist approaches had in common the denial of an objective conflict between the Arab and Jewish populations in Palestine, or at least a stress on common interests that would override conflicts. They stressed the material benefits that would accrue to the Arab population, whose interests are defined as economic or social rather than political or national. As Herzl wrote in an oft-quoted letter to Ziah El-Khaldi in 1899, “[Arab] well-being and individual wealth will increase through the importation of ours. Do you believe that an Arab who owns land in Palestine…will be sorry to see [its] value rise five- and ten-fold? But this would most certainly happen with the coming of the Jews.” ^[50]

Behind the stress on material benefits lay the even more important tendency to recognize Arab rights on the individual level, and not as a national group. This was of course entirely consonant with the traditional Jewish view of non-Jews, who were accorded humane treatment as individuals but were not recognized as a collectivity. Needless to say, it also fit perfectly into the political arguments being made by the Zionist movement. The demographic realities of Palestine at the time lent some credence to this view; Arab nationalism was in its infancy, a strong Palestinian Arab identity had yet to take shape, and both Jewish and non-Jewish observers tended to describe the population in segmented terms as “Muslims,” “Christians,” or according to tribal or clan affiliations.^[51]

This distinction between individual and national rights made it possible for Zionist leaders to affirm full support for the civil rights of the non-Jewish “residents” or “inhabitants” of Palestine, while pressing the Jewish national claim to Palestine as a whole. David Ben-Gurion, for example, could argue that “we have no right whatsoever to deprive a single Arab child…” while also making the claim that in a “historical and moral sense” Palestine was a country “without inhabitants.” ^[52] Even those who did recognize the Arabs as a nationality or as a parallel national movement—a number that grew over time—still tended to deny that they possessed the same kind of national rights in Palestine that Jews did. At best, they might be accorded the status of a recognized and protected but subordinated minority.

Separatism was the natural response of those who found the various assimilationist models untenable or undesirable. While the label covers a spectrum of responses, what they had in common was belief that Zionist goals, even in the minimalist version, were bound to be unacceptable to the Arab population of Palestine and that a clash of interests was inevitable. While some thought that this clash might be worked out in nonviolent ways, all saw a strongly competitive element in the relationship and felt that the integrity and security of the Zionist undertaking dictated a course of selfreliance rather than pursuing the chimera of Jewish-Arab collaboration.

In some ways, those skeptical about assimilation found it easier to recognize and deal with Arabs as a collectivity. Since they did not expect Arabs to forego their national identity in pursuit of individual or material gain, Arab nationhood could be viewed as a simple fact of life. This did not necessarily mean recognition of equal national rights, but at least as recognized rivals Arabs were visible as a group.

In later years, separatism was increasingly a defense against Arab hostility. Among the followers of Ze’ev Jabotinsky it took the form of preparation for the armed conflict that was regarded as inevitable. But streaks of separatism appeared among nearly all Zionist groups, as a natural (and Jewish) response to an environment perceived as basically hostile. Jews had been unremittedly conditioned over long historical periods to regard the external environment as hostile; in traditional terms, the Arabs were simply the latest group of Gentiles to whose hatred Jews were exposed. This seemed to be readily confirmed in the Palestinian context: Arabs refused to recognize Jews as a people or nation with rights in Palestine; they engaged in frequent acts of anti-Jewish violence that were seen as a continuation of traditional anti-Semitic persecution; and they displayed no interest in the various visions of integration or cooperation that more idealistic Zionists put forward.

Zionist approaches to the Arab question thus moved between integrative and separatist strategies.^[53] While particular leaders and parties could and did mix elements from different strategies, there were often conflicts and inconsistencies as a result: Arabs could not benefit fully from the Jewish enterprise without being a part of it nor could security considerations take precedence without impinging on Jewish-Arab interaction. Both tradition and the immediate environment gave mixed signals on how to resolve these dilemmas, and many were left unresolved then as well as after the founding of the state. But at the same time, it must be said that both tradition and the immediate environment gave an advantage to separatist tendencies over the integrative visions.

For example, Labor Zionists, who might have been in the forefront in developing institutions of class solidarity with Arab workers, opted instead for “socialist separatism.” This was extended to the principle of avoda ivrit, the employment of Jewish labor in all Jewish enterprises in the yishuv. It was simply assumed, with little explicit thought of exclusion, that the institutions of Zionism were established by and for Jews. Arab participation in them was not a major issue, even if it did cause ideological difficulty for a few. While such practices appear as illiberal discrimination to later generations, at the time they had the progressive connotations of self-reliance, the rebuilding of a normal Jewish occupational structure, and the avoidance of colonial practices based on exploitation of cheap native labor.

Under the Mandate

Under the millet system of government in the Ottoman Empire, each ethnoreligious community enjoyed a wide degree of autonomy in its own internal affairs. The Jewish community in Palestine, including the new Zionist settlements, had exploited this to establish its own institutions covering a broad range of religious, educational, cultural, economic, legal, and even political matters. The customary British style of indirect rule, as practiced in the new Palestine Mandate after World War I, gave even more latitude to the growing yishuv (which increased from 60,000 to 650,000 during the Mandatory period). But in contrast to most colonial situations, institutions were not copied from the colonial power. There is some debate about the influence of the British model on the development of the Jewish (later Israeli) political system, but in summary it appears that the major British contribution—apart from the idea of a cabinet with collective responsibility and some parliamentary trappings—lay in the realm of legal and judicial practices. The British established English (along with Arabic and Hebrew) as an official language in the courts, appointed British judges to the senior positions, and established the legal education system used throughout the Mandatory period. Ottoman law remained in effect where not supplanted, but most of it was replaced by Mandate legislation (on the British model) by 1948, while English common law was used to cover gaps in existing law. Thus legal and judicial institutions and practice were the main legacy directly inherited by the Jewish state from the Mandatory power (or from any Western source).^[54]

For the rest, the Jewish community drew on its own experience in communal politics and on already existing Zionist institutions, including those established in the yishuv before the British came on the scene. There is striking institutional continuity from the earliest Zionist bodies, through the period of the British presence, to the State of Israel. The Jewish community succeeded during the Mandate in establishing its own state-within-a-state, complete with institutions that in some cases—political parties, educational and cultural groups, charitable and welfare bodies, burial societies, religious organizations, economic guilds, workers’ groups, and even private companies—were hardly more than a transplant from the Diaspora. Whatever the importance of previous experience in this community-building enterprise, by the end of the Mandatory period the Jewish community had far outstripped Palestinian Arabs in establishing communal self-government, providing a solid foundation for Jewish statehood.

The central Mandate structures established by the British lacked legitimacy in the eyes of both Jews and Arabs, and had little impact on either. Palestine consisted of two communities with little in common: each had its own political system, educational and cultural bodies, and military forces. The two communities lived apart; there was almost no social interaction, and even economic relations were limited. Efforts to establish overarching common bodies almost always failed, and relations between Arabs and Jews were closer to the model of an international system than to coexistence within a shared political framework.^[55]

Within the Jewish community matters were quite different. The terms of the Mandate called for the creation of a Jewish body to advise the British on matters related to the Jewish national home, and the Jewish Agency (effectively an extension of the World Zionist Organization) was set up for that purpose. At the same time the British authorities also officially recognized the Jewish community in Palestine as a legal entity (Knesset Yisrael, the Assembly of Israel), and allowed it to select governing bodies. These bodies were set up as a three-tiered structure—Assembly of Delegates, National Council, Executive Council—modeled on the structure of the World Zionist Organization.^[56] Membership in Knesset Yisrael was still voluntary, as individuals could withdraw if they chose (and many of the anti-Zionist Orthodox did so). Otherwise voting was universal (including women) and secret, with seats awarded to party lists on a proportional basis (the same system used before and since). The existence of two parallel structures—the Jewish Agency and Knesset Yisrael—also perpetuated the tradition of competing centers of authority.

The leadership of the yishuv still faced the problem of the kahal: how to make decisions binding on all groups within the Jewish community. Since the cost of being outside the communal arrangements was relatively low, minorities possessed almost a veto power. The leadership focused on the building of coalitions that were as inclusive as possible and on a political system described as an “open-ended, informal set of federative arrangements.” ^[57]

Even during the period of greatest crisis, the yishuv remained largely united and politically stable, in part because of the “autonomism” of the constituent bodies.^[58] The acid test came in relations with the Revisionists, who eventually split with the Labor-dominated center and attempted to form their own rival bodies. But the strategy of separation proved to be self-defeating, helping Labor Zionists (primarily Mapai at the time) to delegitimize their opponents as the subverters of Jewish unity during a time of troubles.^[59]

The yishuv organized itself as a “quasi-state” within the Mandate framework and established the institutions that were to dominate Israeli life. The Histadrut, or Labor Federation, grew to play a role in the economy far beyond that of an ordinary labor union. The Jewish Agency, as an organ of the World Zionist Organization, handled relations with Jewish communities abroad, represented the interests of the yishuv diplomatically, and coordinated immigration and settlement within Palestine. The bodies elected by Knesset Yisrael levied taxes and supported religious and other institutions. At the center were the political parties, which were actually ideological movements. Together with the Histadrut, the parties provided a set of institutions and services substituting for the governmental and societal infrastructure that did not exist: schools, newspapers, banks and loan funds, health-care plans, youth movements, sport clubs, housing companies, and various welfare services. Most of the new settlements were established by particular movements. The centrality of the parties in Israeli politics is not just a result of the electoral system; rather, it was the dominance of parties that shaped the electoral system.

Observers have noted the similarity of pre-state Jewish politics to consociationalism, or to similar concepts of “compound polity” or “segmented pluralism.” ^[60] Society is organized into separate camps, each with its own institutions, that share power and distribute benefits proportionately by a process of bargaining and coalition-building. In the yishuv, Labor Zionists were forced to share power despite their central position; grand coalitions (or more than minimal winning coalitions) rather than simple majority rule was the practice; the political system was multidimensional, being split along several axes; there was separation of power between competing authorities; and representation was proportional.

Again, the classic expression was in relations with the religious Zionists. The patterns of power-sharing initiated in the World Zionist Organization carried over into the yishuv. Beginning in the 1930s, the secular leadership of the yishuv made explicit arrangements with the religious Zionist parties (Hapo’el Hamizrahi and Mizrahi ) on the proportionate division of jobs and other benefits, beginning a forty-year period of partnership between Labor Zionists and religious Zionists. Efforts were also made to bring Agudat Yisrael, representing the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) non-Zionists or anti-Zionists (the “old yishuv ”)within the purview of the new communal institutions. Chaim Weizmann sought throughout the 1920s to bring Agudat Yisrael into the National Council, which had the advantage of controlling most of the funds available. In the first stage, this led to Zionist funding of Agudat Yisrael educational institutions, and later, in 1934, to formal cooperation between Agudat Yisrael and the World Zionist Organization. Finally, following World War II, the Agudat Yisrael leadership supported the establishment of a Jewish state, and in return David Ben-Gurion, the chairman of the Jewish Agency, pledged public adherence to certain basic religious laws.

The system of proportional representation adopted was (and remains) the purest form possible. Parties submitted rank-ordered lists of candidates, but voters chose a party rather than individual candidates. Each party then received a proportion of seats matching its proportion of the vote (if there were one hundred seats, a party with 10 percent of the vote would be awarded ten seats, which would go to the first ten candidates on its list). Proportional representation was maintained as the only method of drawing in all parties on a voluntary basis, and the principle of proportionality was extended to all appointive positions, to the allocation of funds, and even to the distribution of immigration certificates.^[61] This method of allotting benefits according to “party key”—that is, in strict proportion to electoral success—was also, obviously, one of the incentives for voluntary cooperation and one of the coercive tools available to those at the center, who could (and did) withhold funds or immigration certificates from those who broke ranks.

This reality was quite different from what socialist ideologues originally had in mind. In the early 1920s, with the Soviet experiment just underway, they had envisioned building a society along entirely new lines; when the Histadrut was founded in 1921, Ben-Gurion advocated organizing it as a country-wide commune with military discipline.^[62] Despite the dominance of agrarian socialist ideology as the governing paradigm of the new society, the gap between it and reality became enormous. The dominance of Labor Zionism, for about half a century beginning in the late 1920s, is in many respects a puzzle. Neither the pre-Zionist Palestinian Jewish community (the “old yishuv ”) nor the pioneers of the first aliya were disposed to secular socialism. The second aliya (1905–1914) is generally regarded as the generation that established Labor’s hegemony, but the prevailing image of this group has been challenged. Daniel Elazar concludes that among the 35,000 to 40,000 who immigrated during these years “relatively few of those thousands fit what was to become the mythic mold of the young Eastern European Zionist socialist revolutionaries who come to the land to fulfill the ideals of Russian-style Marxism, Zionist version.” ^[63] At the end of World War I the number of “pioneers”—rural and urban laborers with Zionist commitments—was in the low thousands, and of these only an estimated 44 percent identified with the socialist parties.^[64]

The third aliya, in the years immediately following World War I, presents a somewhat different picture. This group, mostly from revolutionary Russia, was significantly more radical than its predecessors.^[65] Yet, given the still modest numbers involved, this did not radically alter the demography of the yishuv. Furthermore, beginning in 1924, immigration was no longer limited to self-selected volunteers imbued with strong Zionist motives. As the gates of entry closed in the United States and other traditional places of refuge, Palestine became the destination of entire communities of persecuted Jews who simply had nowhere else to turn. The fourth aliya, in the mid-1920s, brought in a number of middle-class Polish Jews fleeing antisemitic economic measures. The fifth aliya, in the 1930s, was triggered by persecution in Germany, Austria, Poland, and Romania, which forced many urbanized, professional Jews to seek refuge in Palestine. Another 100,000 refugees from the Holocaust arrived, legally or illegally, during the 1940–1947 period. Later came the “displaced persons” from World War II. After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, there was a mass influx of entire Jewish communities from the Arab world. Altogether, about two million Jewish refugees reached Palestine or Israel during these years. These refugees and their descendants constitute a vast majority of the present population of Israel. Any explanation of Israeli political attitudes that does not begin with this reality—that Israel is a nation of refugees—is inadequate.

The agrarian image of a return to the soil, as fostered by kibbutz ideology, was always exaggerated. A majority of new immigrants settled in cities; at its peak, in the 1930s, the agricultural sector accounted for less than a third of the Jewish population. The gap between ideology and reality was reflected in a 1945 survey of Jewish schoolchildren in which 75 percent declared that agriculture was the most important career for building the country—but only 12 percent planned to become farmers.^[66]

The puzzle, then, is not the eventual decline of Labor Zionism but rather its long hold on power. During this period, the bulk of the population came holding no strong prior commitment to socialism, the dignity of manual labor, a return to the soil, a change in the traditional Jewish occupational structure, the secularization of Jewish life, a pragmatic approach to territorial issues, or other features of an ideology rooted in the ferment of late nineteenth-century Eastern European revolutionary movements. They did not come to Eretz Yisrael in order to wage a “revolution against Jewish history.”

How did Labor Zionists achieve their hegemony? First, while beginning as a minority even in the earlier aliyot, the socialists were intensely committed and tireless organizers. By the time that massive immigration began, they had built an infrastructure (the Histadrut, for example) to absorb and socialize (in both senses) the newcomers. Second, at least some of the new immigrants, having passed through the wrenching experience of persecution and flight, were more open to radical Zionist perspectives than they had been previously (and the Holocaust demonstrated what their probable fate would have been had the Zionists not provided, exactly in line with Herzl’s original vision, a haven from the tempest). Third, the fact that they were building a “new society” made it easier for the Zionist pioneers to apply their ideological precepts. They began with a clean slate, freed of the need to deal with established institutions. The “old rulemakers,” those who might have resisted the new doctrines, were underrepresented and outgunned.^[67] Fourth, the decision of Labor Zionists to focus on “practical” Zionism, on the patient construction of a base in Palestine itself, translated over time into an enormous advantage over those (such as the Revisionists) who continued to focus on the world stage or on Zionist politics outside Palestine. Finally, once Labor Zionists actually did control the center in Palestine, they were able to use their leverage effectively to legitimize and propagate their version of Zionism as the standard brand.^[68]

Moving into leadership of the yishuv meant, of course, further compromise with realities, and a wider gap between ideological premises and practical policies. This is pointed out most acutely by Mitchell Cohen, who argues that Labor Zionists achieved dominance by shifting to a policy of “revolutionary constructivism” that separated the concepts of class and nation, stressing the development of the yishuv as a whole rather than classical socialist goals. This strategy isolated and overwhelmed the Revisionist opposition of the time, but at the cost—in Cohen’s view—of subverting Labor Zionism’s own future. This move from “class” to “nation” can indeed be seen as an abandonment of socialist ideology, at least in its purest form, but it can also be seen as a move toward a more “civic” conception of the political order, even in the context of communitarian Jewish political practices. The culmination of this came after statehood with Ben-Gurion’s efforts to instill a “civic culture” (mamlachtiut) into Israeli political life (see chapter 4).

Another reinforcement of the move to greater pragmatism was the fact that by the late 1930s security had become a major obsession. At the outset Labor Zionists had believed that their goals could be achieved without displacing the Arab population in Palestine or injuring its basic interests. This was perhaps somewhat utopian, since the minimal Zionist aim—a Jewish state in at least part of Palestine—was never likely to be acceptable, in an age of rising Arab nationalism, to an Arab population that regarded its claims to Palestine as exclusive.

In any event, each new wave of Jewish immigration evoked a new round of violence; there were widespread Arab assaults on Jews in 1920 to 1921 and in 1929, while in 1936 to 1939 there was a general uprising that approached the dimensions of a civil war. In addition, leadership of Palestine Arabs passed into the hands of more fanatical elements, and in particular those of Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem. The mufti, whose forces liquidated many of the more moderate Arab leaders during the 1936–1939 period, preached the destruction of the Jewish community in Palestine and later fled to Nazi Germany where he gained notoriety by endorsing the Nazi solution to the Jewish problem.

The impact of this on the yishuv was to discredit efforts to achieve a negotiated settlement of Arab-Jewish issues. Those who promoted such an effort—in particular, Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization during much of this time—were gradually pushed aside by those within the Labor Zionist movement who stressed the need for self-defense and for creating facts on the ground. Foremost among the latter was Ben-Gurion, who by the early 1930s had become the most prominent leader in the yishuv.

But while Ben-Gurion represented a “realist” perspective on the question of diplomacy versus practical measures, he also represented a pragmatic approach to territorial issues, in contrast to the Revisionists. The leadership of the yishuv had reluctantly come to terms with the British partition of the Palestine Mandate, in 1922, by which 77 percent of the original Mandate—everything east of the Jordan River—was established as the Emirate of Transjordan under the rule of Abdallah, Faisal’s brother, and closed to Jewish settlement. Under Ben-Gurion’s leadership, they also accepted in principle British proposals, in the late 1930s, to partition what remained into Jewish and Arab states, though there was considerable criticism of the specific borders proposed.^[69] Finally, a majority under Ben-Gurion also accepted the UN partition plan of 1947, which from a Jewish perspective was an improvement on the 1930s proposals but which still left Jerusalem outside the proposed Jewish state (see Map 1).

Map 1. UN Partition Plan, 1947

The Revisionists opposed all of these measures, beginning with the creation of Transjordan, and split with the existing leadership over its acceptance of the principle of partition. As noted, they continued to insist on the priority of Jewish national rights in all of historic Palestine (including Transjordan).

There was still a tendency to avoid hard thinking about the future position of Arabs in a Jewish state by focusing on the simple push for a Jewish majority. Except for the few supporters of binationalism clustered around Brit Shalom, majority rule was the spoken or unspoken aim that unified all Zionists from left to right. The shared assumption seemed to be that the very act of achieving majority status would reduce the Arab issue to a “mere” question of minority rights, which could be resolved with a modicum of good will. Ben-Gurion referred to Canada and Finland as examples of states where a dominant majority determined the character of the state but ethnic minorities lived peacefully; he indicated, however, no understanding of the guarantees and compromises, including dilution of the state’s dominant ethnic image, often required to make such systems work.^[70] There seemed to be an unquestioned confidence—one that could find little support in the contemporary history of majority-minority relations elsewhere—that the simple act of outvoting a national minority would resolve the problematic relationship. Even Jabotinsky, whose followers later minimized the importance of numbers, paid homage to the principle of a Jewish majority as the solution to existing contradictions.^[71]

Only Brit Shalom, following the assimilationist logic to its conclusion, pursued a solution that was not dependent on relative numbers but gave explicit and equal recognition to the two nations in Palestine. Binationalism, however, was not what the Zionist movement was about, and such ideas remained the province of a small number of intellectuals outside the mainstream. Even the advocates of binationalism, however, assumed that Arab national aspirations, which they were ready to recognize, could be limited and accommodated within a partly non-Arab framework, and in this they also seem to have misread Arab thinking. The lack of Arab interest and response, no less than the lack of Jewish support, led to the demise of Brit Shalom.

The advocates of paternalistic cooperation and class solidarity were also weakened by lack of response and the unfavorable turn of events. Those who put their trust in the blessings of Western civilization turned naturally to Great Britain, the Mandatory power, as intermediary in the civilizing mission. Chaim Weizmann, among others, saw the British presence as obviating the need to negotiate directly with the Arabs; in time this clearly became a weak reed. Labor Zionists acted intermittently on the basis of presumed common interests with Arab workers, as when they urged restraint in response to the Arab riots of 1929 on the grounds that there was no “real” conflict between the two peoples.^[72] At least as late as 1936, mainstream leaders in Labor Zionism still professed to believe in collaboration on a class basis; in a book published that year, Ben-Gurion states, in a typical passage: “The majority of the Arab population know that the Jewish immigration and colonization are bringing prosperity to the land. Only the narrow circles of the Arab ruling strata have egotistical reasons to fear the Jewish immigration, and the social and economic changes caused by it. The selfinterest of the majority of the Arab inhabitants is not in conflict with Jewish immigration and colonization, but on the contrary is in perfect harmony with it.” ^[73]

How far Ben-Gurion actually believed this, by 1936, is open to question, but the dogma of class solidarity remained in the public rhetoric of Labor Zionist leaders even after the 1936–1939 Arab uprising. After World War II, when leftist Labor Zionist groups merged into the United Workers Party (Mapam), they continued to advocate “cooperation and equality between the Jewish people returning to their land, and the masses of the Arab people residing in the country.” ^[74]

But the stance of Labor Zionist groups was contradictory, since they continued to promote avoda ivrit and to maintain the Histadrut and other labor organizations as purely Jewish institutions. A consistent policy of class solidarity would have necessitated the development of frameworks for joint action, but even Hashomer Hatsa’ir (the most doctrinaire party) chose to postpone discussion of a joint Jewish-Arab workers’ association (the other parties rejected it outright).^[75] Furthermore, Labor Zionists, as other Zionists, continued to differentiate between the national rights of the Jews in Palestine and the rights of Arabs to continue living there as inhabitants or residents, that is, as individuals. Ben-Gurion tended to refer to a Jewish “people” and an Arab “community.” Even when the existence of an Arab people or nation was conceded, it was usually described as part of a larger Arab nation rather than as a group with distinct national ties or claims to Palestine.^[76]

The Arab uprising of 1936 to 1939 had a double impact on Zionist attitudes. In its wake, it became harder to deny the existence of an Arab national movement in Palestine, encompassing not simply an unrepresentative landowning class but a broad spectrum of the Arab population. Still, recognition of Arab nationality did not necessarily imply recognition of equal national rights in Palestine. A second result was to make many advocates of cooperation into advocates of separatism. These two developments were related: those who had advocated assimilation in various forms, and were now forced to recognize the strength of Arab particularism, came to separation as the next logical course. The practical expression of this was support for the idea of partition, which drew its strength largely from those in the middle of the spectrum who had supported cooperation.

The partition plans floated in the late 1930s created, not for the first time, some strange alignments and bedfellows within the yishuv. Groups on the left opposed partition and clung to visions of Jewish-Arab cooperation in an undivided Palestine. Other opponents were the Mizrahi (religious Zionists), who opposed partition on biblical grounds, and of course Jabotinsky’s Revisionists on the right. Even some of Ben-Gurion’s own party members deserted him on the issue, but on the other hand he gained many partition supporters from among the liberal and centrist, nonsocialist parties.

One of the ironies of the partition debate was that some of the new supporters of partition were now more committed to separatism in principle than were the Revisionists. While the Revisionists had no plans to assimilate with Arab society, they preferred living with a large Arab minority to dividing Palestine. As noted, Jabotinsky had less trouble recognizing the Arab national movement than did his more liberal opponents. In fact, taking Arab nationalism seriously was a cornerstone of his thought. He simply recognized it as a rival nationalism and planned to defeat it by massive Jewish immigration and (if necessary) military force.

For some advocates of partition, however, the idea of a “transfer” appeared as a logical and just corollary of the division of Palestine: if Jews were to accept a state in only part of the homeland, then at least they should be relieved of a hostile population that would best be relocated to the Arab state to be created. The concept of “population transfer” did not then carry the negative connotation that it acquired later; following World War I, a large number of transfers had been carried out more or less peacefully. As it happened, the idea was never taken seriously.^[77] But the fact that it was mentioned does suggest that at least some yishuv leaders no longer believed that the achievement of majority status would automatically resolve minority issues.

The debate on the “Arab problem” during the Mandatory period is very instructive. The strange and fluid configurations that developed when practical decisions on Arab relations had to be made clearly illustrate the inadequacy, confusion, and arbitrariness of the guidelines furnished by historical experience and prevailing ideologies. The debate over partition was but one case; similar kaleidoscopic variations could be observed regarding debates over British proposals for legislative councils and important debates within the Zionist movement (for example, over such issues as publishing an Arabic-language newspaper or admitting Arab members to yishuv institutions). Nor were the positions of individual leaders much more predictable than those of the shifting party and organizational alignments. Ben-Gurion went through five or six different stages in his approach to Arab issues, according to close observers.^[78] Clearly this was one area in which consensus did not exist.

Nevertheless, by the end of World War II the Jewish community of Palestine had achieved tremendous cohesion, unity, and determination in the face of adversity. Despite internal divisions that sometimes led even to bloodshed, the yishuv was able to maintain a level of organization and self-defense extraordinary for a community without formal governmental powers: it levied and collected taxes, established an army, represented its own interests internationally, administered welfare and educational services, and set its own economic and social policies—all on a voluntary basis. The strength of this social cohesion was apparent in the 1948 war, in which Jewish fighting forces managed not only to retain control of the territory allotted to a Jewish state but also to capture additional territory, including most of Jewish Jerusalem and a corridor linking it with the rest of Israel (see Map 2).

Map 2. Armistice Agreements, 1949

Notes

4. Building a Civic State

In 1948 the first sovereign Jewish state in almost two millennia was launched. During the first two decades of statehood the basic patterns of Israeli politics were set, internal stability was secured, and the government established its legitimacy and its capacity to provide effective direction. Under the circumstances, this was no small achievement. The remarkable coherence and continuity attained in the early days of statehood has been a common theme in studies of the period.^[1]

The imposition of binding authority stands in sharp contrast to the weak and contested institutions of the yishuv. Yet it was the existence of the yishuv framework that made a smooth transition possible, and it was through established principles of inclusion, compromise, and (with one or two notable exceptions) voluntarism that the passage was negotiated peacefully. The bargaining to bring in the non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox (Agudat Yisrael) has been described in the previous chapter. A month before the British exit from Palestine in May 1948, yishuv leaders combined the executive bodies of the National Council and the Jewish Agency, and added representatives from groups not included in these bodies (because they had boycotted the previous elections): Agudat Yisrael, the Revisionists, the Sephardim (representing non-European Jews; on the meaning of “Sephardi” in Israel see chapter 7), and the Communists. This People’s Council of thirty-seven members, proportionally representing the significant groups within the Jewish community, became the legislative body of the new state, and from it was chosen a smaller body (People’s Administration) that became the executive branch (the cabinet or government in Israeli parlance). Only the Communists and (after some debate) the Revisionists were excluded from the cabinet.

During the early statehood period there was a push toward universalistic civic models, including the majoritarian model of democracy rather than more traditional consociational practices. Majoritarianism appealed to Mapai, the dominant party in the Labor camp and the central party in the system, since it stood to gain from changes that reduced the need for power-sharing.^[2] Mapai remained the largest party throughout this period, despite the existing gap between the ideology of the Labor elite and the more traditional moorings of the general public, and despite a huge influx of nonideologized immigrants that widened this gap yet further.

Mapai’s success was due in part to the effective leadership of David Ben-Gurion, who dominated the scene from the early 1930s until his resignation from the prime ministership in 1963. Central to the “Ben-Gurion system” was the concept of mamlachtiut, a term of his own devising that is usually translated as “statism.” But “statism” is misleading because Ben-Gurion did not consider the state as an end in itself. Ben-Gurion sought to instill respect for what Peter Medding terms “legitimate state public authority,” or in Ben-Gurion’s own words, “a sense of public responsibility.” ^[3] This is clearly related to the universalist ethic of the civic state, and in fact the term “civic-mindedness” may come closest to conveying the broader nuances of what Ben-Gurion meant by mamlachtiut.

The Ben-Gurion System

As Ben-Gurion saw it, Jewish history left a legacy that was inimical to statehood: “We brought with us from the diaspora customs of disintegration, anarchy, lack of national responsibility and unity.…” ^[4] He also condemned the pre-state communal politics of the yishuv for its destructive splits and challenges to the collective framework. In response he sought to establish the universally binding character of the new state, not as an end in itself but as an instrument for achieving the common goals of Zionism in restoring the Jewish people to normality among the family of nations.^[5]

But while mamlachtiut was revolutionary as policy, it also had a dialectic relationship with the Jewish past. Unlike those who thought tradition and civic statehood to be irreconcilable, Ben-Gurion sought to redefine tradition so as to make the two compatible. This was accomplished, as with much in Zionism, by the selective use of the past and by filling traditional concepts and symbols with new content (giving religious holidays, for example, a much more national connotation). Like many others, Ben-Gurion turned to the Bible and to the ancient period—the time of Jewish statehood—rather than to the long intervening history of exile and passivity. Even the term he employed (derived from mamlacha, or “kingdom”) reflected a preference for the heroic models of antiquity.^[6]

Ben-Gurion was thus not working strictly according to the Western civic conception of the state but with a synthesis in which the state has positive functions in Jewish terms. Foremost among these functions was to preserve and promote Jewish unity, the lack of which was, for Ben-Gurion, the bane of Jewish history. He was therefore willing to build into the state structure a high tolerance for pluralism, as in his accommodation with religious interests (including the anti-Zionists who had opposed him at every step). This ran counter to Ben-Gurion’s strong bias for majoritarian rather than consociational democracy, especially with regard to the electoral system; he viewed proportional representation and the proliferation of parties as pernicious arrangements that put partisan interests ahead of the general welfare.

But if mamlachtiut was not strictly based on the civic model, it was even further from the socialist faith that saw the state as an instrument for achieving the goals of the working class. Was Labor Zionism, at least in the Mapai version, moving closer to Western liberalism than to classic Marxism? Ben-Gurion expressed increasing ambivalence on some ideological points, such as the primacy of the kibbutz model. He criticized the kibbutz movement for its sluggish response to the national task of absorbing new immigrants: “Only pioneering that is prepared to serve the state faithfully in all its revolutionary tasks in their new form will from now on be worthy of the name.” ^[7] On many issues, he found greater support from the “civic” parties in the center of the spectrum (Progressives and General Zionists) than from his colleagues on the left, who were threatened both ideologically and institutionally by some of his projected reforms.

The first task of mamlachtiut, to bring all elements of the Jewish community under government authority, was accomplished with relative success. The arrangements with the ultra-Orthodox community have already been mentioned. The military arm of the Revisionist movement—Etsel (also known as Irgun), led by Menachem Begin—discussed various options including establishing its own government, but in the end was integrated into the new Israeli army. This process was marred by only one major incident, the Altalena affair of June 1948, when Ben-Gurion ordered the use of force to prevent the unloading of a ship’s cargo of weapons sent by Etsel from Europe. Herut, the political successor to Etsel, was the first party to be founded after independence and quickly integrated into parliamentary life.

The second line of attack was to reduce sectarianism in public life. Ben-Gurion moved to dismantle the Palmach, the elite “striking force” that had its own command structure, because of its close links with the left-wing socialist party Mapam and its affiliated kibbutz movement. Regarding the use of the party key to distribute governmental jobs, after ten years of debate the Knesset finally passed three laws in 1959 designed to ensure appointment by merit, rather than by political considerations, at all but the highest ranks of the civil service.

Ben-Gurion also moved, where possible, to put public services on a civic, nonpartisan basis. After a lengthy fight, the four independent educational networks were reduced to two state systems (one secular, one religious) and one state-supervised and state-supported independent system (in the ultra-Orthodox community). Independent labor exchanges were also eventually taken over by the state. However, Ben-Gurion abandoned efforts to nationalize health services—provided mostly by the Histadrut—because of fierce resistance from his own political camp.^[8]

These efforts were backed up by programs to regularize and professionalize government operations. The Declaration of Independence, like its U.S. counterpart, is a repository of liberal universalism. According to its words, the State of Israel “will promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants…will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race, creed or sex; will guarantee full freedom of conscience, worship, education and culture…and will dedicate itself to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” There is argument over whether these provisions have constitutional status in Israeli law; the Israeli Supreme Court has ruled they are not constitutional, but they may nevertheless have constitutional significance in ruling between two interpretations of a law where the intent of the founders of the state is an issue.^[9] Also, in a 1994 amendment to the Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation, it is stipulated that interpretation of that basic law, as well as the Basic Law: Human Freedom and Dignity, was to be in accord with the spirit of the Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration of Independence, and the formation of a provisional government, were to have been followed by a formal written constitution. The writing of a constitution was, however, stymied by basic disagreement (especially between secular and religious parties) over the basic character of a Jewish state—a question that could hardly be avoided or circumvented in a written constitution. Instead, a compromise was reached whereby certain “Basic Laws” would be adopted one by one, thus assembling over time the building blocks of a finished constitution.

The basic structure and prerogatives of the legislative and executive branches were set in the Transition Law adopted by the newly elected Constituent Assembly (which declared itself to be the First Knesset ) in February 1949. Known as the “Small Constitution,” this was the foundation for later Basic Laws on these matters and thus determined the basic operations of government that still exist.^[10]

The area in which Western liberal norms penetrated most deeply was the legal and judicial system. This involved the continuing construction of a system of civil courts alongside the traditional Jewish courts. The superiority of rabbinic law was no longer assumed; Israel now had a body of civil law, much of it derived from or influenced by Western sources, that took precedence. The coercive authority of religious leaders was limited to a very small sphere, apart from those who voluntarily accept rabbinical rulings (on the other hand, in the area in which they did wield authority—basically family law—rabbinical courts were now backed by the police power of the state).

Why should foreign influence be stronger precisely in law and judiciary, the greatest strength of traditional Jewish governance? This was due in part to the development of a dual court system during the Mandatory period, as the British established civil courts in place of the previous Ottoman institutions. The rabbinic courts continued to function as they had before, within their own community and parallel to similar courts in other communities. The secular courts drew upon both Ottoman and British law (with Ottoman law also being strongly Western-influenced because of its borrowing from the French code). The Jewish aptitude for law is demonstrated in this case by the quick adaptation to, and adoption of, the Mandatory legal system and its continuation as the basis for an Israeli civil system. Thus the traditional strength of the judicial framework was respected and maintained, while the substantive content shifted to Western secular legal principles.

There was some overlap with Jewish law, and Jewish law was specified as one of the sources for Israeli law. But the role of Jewish law in civil courts has been minor, for a number of reasons: the complexity of Jewish law itself, its lack of answers on many contemporary issues, unfamiliarity with it on the part of secular judges, and the existence of a large body of law and precedent designed precisely for the issues faced in civil courts. The greatest contribution of Jewish law, as it turned out, was in the area of terminology, where the traditions of the centuries had developed Hebrew nomenclature for almost any legal concept. But even here, traditional terms were often given new meanings in the new context; even the legal definition of “Jew” became a matter of contention between religious and civil authorities.^[11]

The process of anglicizing Israeli law, mainly through the continuing infusion of English common law, continued in the first twenty years of statehood. After that, the increased role of Israeli legislation reversed the process. But general legal procedures, reasoning, and precedents remain similar to those of countries in the common law tradition. Also, a number of key jurists in the formative period were from what in Israel is termed an “Anglo-Saxon” (English-speaking) background; of the fifteen justices appointed to the Supreme Court from 1948 to 1963, nine had received at least part of their legal education in English-speaking countries.^[12]

The independence and professionalism of the judiciary are protected by a nonpolitical appointment process. Supreme Court justices, for example, are selected by a commission that includes three justices, two cabinet ministers, two members of the Knesset chosen by secret ballot, and two members of the Israeli Bar Association. Attempts to bring political pressure to bear have usually met a sharp response.^[13] At the same time, judges have shown caution in dealing with controversial political issues and have generally refused to substitute their judgment for that of the executive branch on matters other than legal interpretation. But the Supreme Court has asserted the right to nullify both legislation that contravenes entrenched provisions of a Basic Law and administrative actions judged to be contrary to the basic values of a free society. The successful depoliticization and high prestige of the judiciary provides one of the “paradoxes” of Israeli civil life: “These characteristics make the Israeli judicial system very un-Israeli and hence important as a bastion of Israeli democracy in a sea of forces that would hasten the erosion of its foundations.” ^[14]

The penumbra of impartiality extends to a number of quasi-judicial elements in the Israeli government. The attorney general, though appointed by the cabinet, enjoys a wide degree of independence, including the power to prosecute members of the government. The state controller, responsible only to the Knesset, issues yearly reports on government operations, notable for their critical impartiality, that receive great publicity and are taken seriously. In recent years the controller has also functioned as a public ombudsman, receiving and acting upon grievances of individual citizens in their dealings with bureaucracy. A law in 1968 also made provision for the appointment of independent commissions of inquiry, with full investigative powers and the right to make specific recommendations (Ben-Gurion’s long campaign for a judicial investigation into the notorious Lavon affair may have helped in the passage of this law).^[15] The development of “constitutionalism” and civic culture through the judicial system and analogous bodies will be explored further in chapter 6.

Another area of progress in civic-mindedness, less mentioned perhaps because it was so obvious, was foreign affairs and diplomacy. That these realms belong to the prerogatives of a sovereign government is not disputed, and the pressures of the situation ensured that Israel’s interests as a state remained at the core of policy. Nevertheless, even here some particular traditions shaped at least the style of Israeli diplomacy: the assumption of a hostile world was reflected in anger toward external criticism (in the United Nations, for example), the legacy of shtadlanim was seen in the use of special emissaries and tendencies to practice diplomacy secretly or through back channels, and the fate of Jewish communities throughout the world was a consistent concern in foreign policy.^[16]

However, the Holocaust had already made the yishuv more independent by eliminating its Eastern European base of support. On the question of the role of other communities, Ben-Gurion again took the mamlachtiut position, refusing to compromise Israeli sovereignty by formalizing a role for Jews who were not citizens of the state. On the other hand, as a matter of practical compromise with the World Zionist Organization, the Jewish Agency continued to function and to share responsibility with the government on immigration and settlement.^[17]

Apart from foreign and defense policies, where both necessity and tradition supported the need for clear authority, policy was also centralized in some other areas. In economic policy, Mapai’s central role in both the government and the Histadrut ensured a high level of coordination and control. In local government, inheritance of the Mandate structure meant a high degree of centralization, in contrast to the pre-Mandate yishuv structure where authority flowed from the local settlements to the top.^[18]

But the key to centralization of authority in the Ben-Gurion system, and perhaps the greatest break with traditional patterns, was the way Ben-Gurion combined the parliamentary model with strong parties and coalition politics to produce a government with not only a strong civic aspect but also with many elements of majoritarianism. Strong parties had been at the center of yishuv politics; after statehood, they lost some of their functions as ideological movements providing a broad array of services directly to their members. On the other hand, most of them gained a share in running the new government and thus extended their power indirectly, over a broader area and through neutral and more effective machinery.^[19]

Since no party ever captured a majority in an election, control was achieved by assembling a workable majority coalition and imposing the principle of collective responsibility. This tenet, taken from the British, meant that all ministers were bound by cabinet decisions. Parties thus could refuse to go along with a cabinet majority only if they were willing to sacrifice their share of power by leaving the coalition. Furthermore, Ben-Gurion constructed his coalitions in such a way that no single party could make the obvious counterthreat to bring down the government by leaving. This greatly reduced the actual power-sharing required for the central party (Mapai) to put together a government.^[20]

The result, as in other parliamentary systems, is to eclipse the parliament. Although the legislative branch theoretically controls the government, the reality is executive dominance. Arian puts it most tersely: “One of the important myths of Israeli political life is that checks and balances exist within the system. This is simply not so.” ^[21] So long as a government coalition, working through disciplined political parties, commands a stable majority in the Knesset, then it—and not the Knesset—is the locus of important decision-making. This is one of the hallmarks of the Westminster model of majoritarian democracy, and the most majoritarian aspect of the Israeli system (so long as the above assumptions hold). It is also, perhaps, Ben-Gurion’s greatest accomplishment in pulling the Israeli government away from the hold of Jewish politics.

Needless to say, this leaves the Knesset with limited functions. The Knesset serves to register the results of an election, and thus the bargaining strength of each party, until the next election is held. It is also where the bargains and decisions reached are formally validated by legislative approval, serving, in other words, a “legitimizing function” primarily. But it is a weak institution, dependent on the government rather than the reverse.

Ben-Gurion’s success in establishing effective cabinet rule led of course to criticism that there was too much concentration of state power. As already noted in chapter 1, fears for Israeli democracy were widely expressed and focused particularly on the majoritarian aspects of the Ben-Gurion system:

1. The lack of effective oversight by a Knesset dependent on the government.
2. The dominance of parties within the system, with few counterweights.
3. The dominance of one party; little chance for a government without Mapai.
4. The lack of democracy within parties, which tended to oligarchy.
5. The role of interlocking institutions (the Histadrut) tied to the power center.
6. The tendency of a dominant elite to heavy-handed paternalism.

The last point may merit additional comment. Rooted in the elitist traditions of Eastern European socialism and long accustomed to making the important decisions in the molding of a new society, many of the aging generation of Labor Zionists slipped easily into an attitude of benevolent despotism. To take just one illustration: in 1953 the cabinet, facing a growing exodus because of economic hardships, debated a proposal to withdraw from Israeli citizens the right to leave their country. Moshe Sharett, one of the more liberal and Western-oriented Mapai leaders, supported the proposal and even wrote in his diary that “the State should save them and their offspring—if necessary against their will—from the eternal gypsy curse with which they seek relief from absorption pains in their sole home in all the world.” ^[22]

Intense ideological differences still prevailed during this period, leading to questions about the legitimacy of those on either end of the spectrum. At one point, security services implanted listening devices in the offices of Mapam—a party that was at various times a member of government coalitions. On the right, Herut was sometimes condemned as a “fascist” movement and was excluded not only as a potential coalition partner but also in the sharing of benefits. Although the first twenty years represented a high point in applying civic ideology to Israeli political life, it was also in some ways the least democratic period in the nation’s politics. Many democratic trends—greater political competition, more autonomous social groups, less control of media, a judiciary more active in protecting rights, repeal of emergency regulations, less politicization in the civil service—became important factors only later in this period.

The long dominance of Labor Zionists was the central political fact of the first thirty years of statehood. This dominance was the result of a combination of external and internal circumstances that seemed to mold a national consensus around Labor leadership while disguising the developments that were slowly eroding it.

The remarkable political stability during this period is expressed in the consistency of voting behavior. As Table 1 shows, in the seven elections between 1949 and 1969, Labor Zionist parties as a bloc consistently gained at least half of the 120 available seats (from 59 to 65 seats, or 49 to 54 percent, to be precise).The Center-Right parties (a category that combines General Zionists and Revisionists) consistently received a little less than a third of the seats (from 31 to 35 seats, or 26 to 29 percent). Religious parties varied between 12.5 and 15 percent.

This striking regularity took place during a period of mass immigration and enormous social and political upheaval. A number of explanations are usually offered: (1) Given the consensus produced by the concern for survival, there was a tendency to stick to existing leadership; (2) in the circumstances of mass immigration, parties were able to recruit new members in rough proportion to their existing strength; (3) newcomers were more interested in concrete benefits than in ideology, and this instrumental dependence again worked in favor of the existing establishment, which had control of the benefits; (4) Ben-Gurion and Mapai were identified with the state, as the aura of the founding period had not yet faded; (5) the tendency to defer to official leadership in certain policy areas carried over into passive support at the polls.^[23]

The capacity of parties to recruit new members in proportion to their existing strength was even institutionalized in the arrangements for absorption of new immigrants, which were governed by the omnipresent party key. The various camps and settlements were actually allocated to parties according to their electoral strength in the Jewish Agency, Histadrut, and Knesset. Mapai initially received over 50 percent of these allocations, meaning that over half of the new immigrants were dependent on services and instruction provided by Mapai personnel. In addition, new immigrants were funneled into the Histadrut Sick Fund (Kupat Holim Klalit) for health services, where they received three months of free membership and another year of services at a reduced rate—but in order to take advantage of this arrangement they had to become members of the Histadrut, where they were once again exposed to the dominant influence of Mapai.

The remarkable stability of voting patterns also reflected consensus on the tasks facing the nation and the basic strategies for dealing with them. The ruling Labor elite was able to align itself with this consensus not because of mass ideological conversion to its worldview, but because of accumulated institutional advantages, because of the need to focus on practical developmental problems (Labor Zionism’s historic forte), and because it profited from a tendency to defer to existing leadership that was reinforced both by the threats to the state’s existence and by the traditional Jewish habit of unification and closure against the outside.

In addition, different issues cut in different ways; Mapai and the National Religious Party disagreed on religious issues but found common ground on economic policy, while the relationship between Mapai and Mapam was sometimes the other way around. In this situation of cross-cutting alliances, no party was in total opposition to any other party; all would find some grounds for cooperation on at least one set of issues. There were at least three axes, or sets of issues, that cut in different ways in Israeli politics during this period.

First, on the normal left-right socioeconomic dimension, Labor Zionist parties were leftist and General Zionists (the chief ideological supporters of a free market) were rightist. Conflict on this dimension was somewhat muted, however, by the fact that the “far right”—Herut—favored a strong state role in the economy, partly in order to reduce the role of Mapaidominated institutions such as the Histadrut but also as an expression of its general statist orientation and a certain populist streak.^[24] In fact, because of the general acceptance of collective responsibility for social justice (translated in a modern setting into welfare statism), as well as the preoccupation with security, the left-right dimension never achieved in Israel the centrality it holds elsewhere. In fact, it has been obscured even more by a reverse correlation between income levels and party identification; see chapter 6.

Second was the axis of Arab-Israeli relations, which overlapped but was not identical to the first dimension.^[25] There was, for example, a party to the left of Mapai on economic issues—Ahdut Ha’avoda—that took a more hard-line position on defense and territories. Conversely, the Progressives, a nonsocialist party, took a fairly dovish position in foreign policy.

Third was the religious-secular axis, at this time not yet correlated with issues such as settlements in the occupied territories. Religious parties were not deeply involved in economic or foreign policy, beyond the prevailing consensus, but focused on religious matters. As late as 1968, Arian could note that “religious issues in Israel are largely independent of the left-right split.” ^[26] This meant that the religious parties enjoyed a key position in the bargaining to establish a governing coalition. Though controlling only 10 to 15 percent of the seats, their flexibility on most economic and foreign policy issues made a bargain with them irresistible to Mapai. In return for concessions on issues on interest mainly to the religious community, the government would gain the consistent support of 10 to 15 percent of the Knesset, which greatly increased its leverage with parties making serious demands on mainstream issues. Consequently, the religious parties—the National Religious Party in particular—became the “balancers” of the system; with only brief interludes, the NRP was a member of every governing coalition until 1992.

The appearance of consensus was also strengthened in the early period by the weakness or absence of autonomous groups outside the party system. Most institutions and organizations in public life, including even most interest groups and most media, were tied to political parties, if not to the government itself or quasi-governmental bodies such as the Histadrut or the Jewish Agency. Only a part of the press was truly independent. There were relatively few political protest movements, and most of these were short lived. There was a low level of political activity and protest outside the system generally during these years; as late as 1972, a poll of secondary school students would show that fully 85 percent across the board—religious, traditional, or secular—believed in pursuing their political goals through the existing institutional framework.^[27] It would seem, at first glance, that mamlachtiut had succeeded in creating an unmediated political system swept clear of significant autonomous centers of power.

Despite ferocious ideological warfare among the parties, many of the basic issues and decisions that faced the new state were either settled, or dormant, by the end of the first decade. On socioeconomic policy, the respective roles of the public and private sectors were basically settled, with considerable latitude for the latter but strong government direction and support for social welfare. The status quo that was reached on religious questions matched no one’s ideological preferences but served as a reasonable point of reference that avoided major clashes (see chapter 8). The question of Israel’s diplomatic orientation was settled by developments that left a pro-Western stance as the only choice. On security issues, there was general agreement on a policy of self-reliance, active defense, and de facto acceptance of existing borders. Territorial claims beyond the armistice lines of 1949 seemed increasingly unrealistic as time passed; Herut continued to insist on the Jewish right to all of Palestine as an article of faith in its creed, but the issue was dormant in Israeli politics. Nor did religious parties, at this point, challenge the territorial status quo.

This consensus did not, however, include non-Jewish citizens of Israel. Though members of the civic state by universalist criteria, the Arab minority in Israel was not in fact an actor in the political system in any meaningful way, nor did it have an equitable share of the benefits.^[28] The case of Israeli Arabs is the acid test of civic-mindedness, since it poses the problem of an “enemy” minority; it demonstrates the character and limits of traditional communitarian politics in dealing with those outside the community (see chapter 9).

Even within the Jewish community the extent of the prevailing consensus, and the hold of Labor dominance, was limited. Some of the more divisive issues were merely dormant during these years, not resolved. Many of the factors that had given Labor an edge in mobilizing support were temporary in nature. There was a large and measurable gap between the political beliefs of the Labor Zionist elite and the general public; the electorate was voting to the left of its opinions, a situation unlikely to continue indefinitely.^[29] Furthermore, the very longevity of Labor dominance produced bureaucratic ossification over time. By the late 1960s Israel was guided by a traditional political elite noted for its stability, longevity, and homogeneity, despite the growing pluralism of Israeli society. The longevity of this elite’s tenure in power delayed the process of generation change, to an Israel-born leadership, that might have been expected sooner.^[30] As a result, the change never fully took place, since it was soon superseded by a more fundamental revolution in Israeli politics.

In light of these facts, then, how much did mamlachtiut really change Jewish political life below the surface? Many of the “successes” in building a civic state were only minimal features of any sovereign state: a monopoly of legitimate authority in its own territory, control of defense and diplomacy. Ben-Gurion could also begin with a clean slate in structuring an army and a foreign service. In other areas, mamlachtiut was so intertwined with partisan advantages for Mapai that a judgment is difficult: this would apply to the dissolution of the Palmach, the attack on Etsel forces in the Altalena affair, and even the establishment of state-run labor exchanges (under the control of a Mapai minister of labor). In fact, anything that enlarged the scope of government during this period could be seen as an extension of Mapai’s power.

Some argue that the enlargement of the state at the expense of the party was precisely what led to the eventual fall of Labor Zionism; Labor in essence disarmed itself, by allowing such critical functions as education to pass from a framework imbued with socialist values to a sanitized state network.^[31] This greatly overstates, however, the actual impact of mamlachtiut. Mapai actually gave up little in the education reform, as it had only partial control of the Histadrut educational system, and gained in its place direction of the Ministry of Education.^[32] As elsewhere, Labor Zionists moved from direct party rule in a sector of society to broader influence with more effective if “neutral” machinery.

Furthermore, in most of the new government machinery, even after the finalization of the civil service legislation in 1959, political appointments and the party key continued to be important. The legislation left a number of loopholes through which political appointments could be made, so that it is sometimes described as a compromise between a merit system and traditional patronage politics. While the scope of political appointments did narrow gradually over the years, only the most naive could avoid noticing a correlation between a minister’s party affiliation and the political cast of his ministry. One should also add to the scorecard the areas in which mamlachtiut made no progress whatsoever, such as health services and electoral reform.

All in all, there was reason for the advocates of the Western model of a civic state to be disappointed in the final result. As Ben-Gurion himself expressed it in an interview at the end of his career, “Jews never understood mamlachtiut. ” ^[33]

The Persistence of Jewish Politics

While Ben-Gurion’s achievements in establishing effective executive power are impressive, it would be misleading to focus only on the structure and powers of Israeli institutions. As in traditional Jewish politics, there was often a mismatch between the formal procedures of government and the way in which decisions were actually made.

In this regard, the failure to adopt a written constitution is instructive. While absence of a constitution is usually regarded as a hallmark of majoritarianism, in the Israeli case it is more an expression of the traditional consociational style of Jewish politics. Religious party leaders were opposed in principle to the idea of a constitution, so the issue was averted through a compromise that made an eventual constitution possible but put the unbridgeable issue of principle aside for the moment. Unable to adopt a written constitution because of unbridgeable gaps of principle, the political elite devised a system whose stability rested on the sharing of power within the government and between the government and other institutions.

The government itself sometimes resembled a federation of competing bureaucracies. Ministries with different institutional histories (some of them predating the state), and with different constituencies, interacted like independent fiefdoms. There was a proliferation of government bodies or government-sponsored bodies with authority in specific areas; many decisions in Israeli public policy are made by such bodies as the State-Owned Companies Authority, the Council of Higher Education, the Israel Lands Authority, the Local Authorities Center, and even such bodies as the Vegetable Marketing Council and the Citrus Marketing Council. There was a fragmentation of functions among autonomous and overlapping authorities. Tax collection agencies, for example, included separate bodies for income tax, customs and excise taxes, value added tax, national insurance, property tax, television and radio taxes, and consolidated tax, as well as local tax agencies. Five different administrative agencies served the disabled community in Israel, while state planning was divided among at least five separate bodies (which set up some 200 companies). The proliferation of institutions, each jealously guarding its own territory, has reminded some observers of a classic feudal order.^[34] Even in the area of local government there was less centralization among the more than 200 local autonomous authorities than would appear at first, as will be seen in chapter 6.

The Chief Rabbinate represents another autonomous institution carrying out public functions and providing what would normally be considered government services. This extends to an elaborate interlocking network that includes the Ministry for Religious Affairs, religious courts, local religious councils, religious state schools, and other state-supported institutions, all of it together constituting an institutional base from which Orthodox leaders negotiate with the central organs of power. Since ultra-Orthodox groups were independent of this official religious establishment, maintaining their own rabbinical authorities, court systems, schools, and other institutions, power was further diffused.

Another dimension of the diffusion of power was the prominence in Israeli public life of quasi-governmental institutions performing what would ordinarily be considered governmental functions. The Histadrut determined much public policy in such areas as health care, welfare, pensions, and wage policies, and remains a key participant—not just a source of influence, but an actor in the system—in broad economic decision-making. The Jewish Agency remained active in immigration, settlement, economic development, and relations with Jewish communities abroad. The Jewish National Fund continued to handle the purchase and management of public lands.

Among these various bodies bargaining has been the typical mode of operation, even when, as in the early statehood period, it might have appeared otherwise. Major decisions were usually preceded by negotiation not only within the dominant party and within the governing coalition, but also among government ministries and other official bodies, between the government and various quasi-governmental institutions, and even with private organizations and interests. Typical is the triangular bargaining process among the Ministry of Finance, the Histadrut, and the Manufacturers’ Association that precedes any major change in economic policy. This reflects the division of the Israeli economy into three major sectors: governmental, Histadrut, and private. The economic divisions among these three sectors, and among the parties, were blurred considerably during the period of Labor dominance by the policy of extending state subsidies to keep down the cost of basic foodstuffs and to help nascent industries.

The reality of this pattern was also obscured for a considerable time by the dominance of one party. So long as Mapai controlled the government and the most important ministries within it, as well as the Histadrut and the Jewish Agency, then much of the bargaining took place within the party. But over time the role of parties as brokers declined as other bodies became more independent and more assertive. Finally, when control of the key institutions was no longer in the hands of a single party (after 1977), confrontations and bargaining became more intense and more public.

The role of parties is always critical, however, since they are still primary actors in the drama, and the crucial “governmental” decisions themselves are, as often as not, actually made in party councils, whether by the dominant party alone or in bargaining among the parties. The most important governing document in Israeli politics may be the coalition agreement among the parties following each election, which sets the agenda until the next election. Since parties often represent basic social divisions—particularly the religious parties—this is the stage at which some key minority interests are registered and taken into account.

Parties are also critical as the path for success in a political career. Normally it is only through a party that a political activist can advance. According to Gregory Mahler, 80.5 percent of the eighty-six Knesset members interviewed in 1974 and 1975 cited a history of party activity as the reason for their nomination to office.^[35] The key to this process is, of course, the party list, since position on the list determines a candidate’s chances of success. This was in the past centralized in the hands of the party leadership, an arrangement described as a major weakness of Israeli democracy and a prime illustration of the “iron law of oligarchy.” ^[36] In fact, the entire party structure was highly oligarchic, based on the Eastern European model of layers of elected bodies, theoretically responsible to the rank and file but with power—including the all-important decisions on ranking candidates on the party list—actually flowing from the top. However, this process was less centralized than would appear. The ranking was in fact the product of intense intraparty bargaining, with a rough informal proportional representation operating to ensure the inclusion of important blocs and constituencies within the party. As a result, ironically, as the process became more democratic there were more problems in maintaining “balance” and minority representation on the lists.^[37]

During the first two decades, Mapai was the center of every government, but it also had to share power with other parties. Mapai was the largest single party and was located in the middle of the political spectrum; it was inconceivable that any combination of parties on the two ends of the spectrum could organize a majority without Mapai. On the other hand, since Mapai never controlled a majority by itself, it was forced to seek coalition partners both from the left and from the right. The strength of the prevailing consensus is shown by the fact that only the Communists on the far left, and (until 1967) Herut on the far right, were ruled out as potential coalition partners. All other parties could conceivably become part of the government, and nearly all of them did at one time or another.

More-than-minimal governing coalitions that include most of the major groups of society are regarded as a feature of consociational democracy, as opposed to the majoritarian practice of rule with a bare majority. Since independence Israel has been governed about three-quarters of the time by more-than-minimal coalitions; that is, parties have been added to the government even though their votes were not needed for a majority in the Knesset.^[38] On three occasions (1967–1970, 1984–1988, and 1988–1990), this even brought the two major blocs together in a Government of National Unity, a development which has only occasionally been matched by democratic regimes elsewhere. This kind of a “grand coalition” has not been the rule in the Israeli government either, though it has been routinely applied in other institutions such as the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization. But overall the coalition-building has expressed the centrality of compromise and accommodation, trying to bring as many as possible inside the tent rather than leaving them in opposition. In this connection, the conventional wisdom that the religious parties have been the “balancers” in the system is exaggerated, especially for the earlier period. Religious parties (principally the National Religious Party) have been a part of almost every coalition, but up to 1992, only in ten of twenty-four coalitions was the government actually dependent on religious votes to keep a majority.^[39]

There are also good political reasons to put together a more-thanminimal coalition. The prospective prime minister may simply be trying to domesticate pivotal groups and keep them out of the opposition, or show loyalty to faithful partners of the past, or simply build an extra margin for safety. But above all, Ben-Gurion’s coalition strategy avoided dependence on one party, adding partners on both sides of the spectrum to neutralize each other and give himself greater leverage. This strategy outlasted BenGurion: in the period from 1977 to 1992 there was at least one expendable party in the government at all times except for two brief periods in 1977 and 1990–1991. All in all, the tendency to broaden governing coalitions goes beyond the dominant-party period, and beyond what can be explained on tactical grounds alone, and has managed to encompass within one government parties with broadly different philosophical outlooks (dovish and hawkish, religious and secular, modernist and traditional).

The major expression of inclusiveness, however, was the dominance of proportionality. Cursory consideration was given at the outset to other electoral systems, but it was quickly decided to retain proportional representation. This would avoid any argument that might delay the early holding of the first state elections, reflecting the widespread acceptance of the principle of proportionality as well as the half-century precedent of its use. In 1958, the principle of proportionality was entrenched in the Basic Law establishing the Knesset, which was made subject to amendment only by an absolute majority of Knesset members rather than a majority of those present, as is the case with ordinary legislation.

In a wider sense, this was not just a matter of an electoral system but part of the entire system of power-sharing. In the Knesset, proportionality was extended to the deputy speakerships and to committee chairmanships and seats. Government-wide, the party key was the criterion by which offices, budgets, and ultimately the full range of institutional resources were divided among parties according to their electoral strength. This was of course already the case in the quasi-governmental institutions, such as the Histadrut, which continued to operate in accustomed fashion. The World Zionist Organization elected a total of eight vice presidents so that each party could sit on the Presidium. Within the government, this “spoils system” coexisted with the civil service legislation since it was not always easy to disentangle party interests from the merits of the case. Though the Likud was at first slow to exploit this system after coming to power, by its second term in office there was little hesitation; a government minister could even brag, in 1986, that stories on political appointments in his ministry actually helped him within his own party, and consequently he did not deny them even if there were false.^[40]

Proportional representation guarantees a proliferation of parties, especially in Israel where the threshold for entry into the Knesset is set at the remarkably low level of 1.5 percent (before 1991 it was 1 percent). Generally twenty to thirty parties have run in the elections and ten to fifteen of them have passed the threshold. The proliferation of small parties has drawn much critical attention, and indeed the sheer number of bargaining partners has made coalition negotiation much more complex and has led to disproportionate material rewards (control of a government ministry by a two- or three-person faction, for example). But by their presence, small parties also serve several purposes in the system. During the earlier period, they served as a check on domination by Mapai. The easy access of small parties also checked oligarchic trends within parties, since dissatisfied factions always had (and often used) the option of seceding and running as a separate list, with reasonable chances for success. Small parties also serve to test the appeal of new ideas and the measure of dissatisfaction with the major parties. Finally, it is only through the low threshold for representation that minorities not close to the mainstream—particularly the ultra-Orthodox and the Arabs—gain direct representation in the Knesset.

The weakness of the Knesset also appears somewhat differently in this context. It is then seen not simply as a legislative body dominated by the executive but as one of the numerous arenas of bargaining and power-sharing brokered by the parties. As a legislative body, it is an easy target of ridicule. Seldom do Knesset deliberations change the thrust of government decisions. Nearly all government-initiated bills are enacted into law, and they account for the vastly greater part of the legislation adopted.^[41] Only twice has the Knesset passed a no-confidence vote in the government. Parties not only control the votes of their members (except on minor matters or, occasionally, by prior agreement on particularly controversial issues), but they also control the time allotted for speaking in plenary sessions and the right to propose a private bill (a quota is issued to each party). Even the right to ask questions is limited: questions must be in writing, those from members of government parties are screened by party leaders, and there is no guarantee that the minister will respond with a serious answer. It is, therefore, not too surprising that the level of dissatisfaction and frustration among rank and file legislators is extremely high.^[42]

Yet the Knesset is an integral part of the bargaining process and a mirror of the political culture in which it is embedded. It does more than merely process government decisions; though most legislation comes from the government, hardly any of it emerges in exactly the form it was introduced. And while the government rarely loses a no-confidence vote, it has often been defeated on other votes where the expression of contrariness is less heavily penalized. Debate is lively and provocative; the opposition has and uses the chance to dramatize its dissent. Furthermore, the sessions are totally open to the media, with television coverage usually focusing precisely on the most vociferous and unruly moments of parliamentary wrangling. As a result the Knesset’s lack of decorum has become a standing joke; a frequent plea used to quiet a gathering is “Order, please! This is not the Knesset here!”

Knesset members also, surprisingly, play a role as representatives of specific constituencies. This is surprising because they are not formally elected from any constituency and because the lack of such ties is supposedly one of the weakest aspects of proportional representation. Yet in fact party lists are drawn up to include representatives of key groups both inside and outside the party: major city party branches, the kibbutz and moshav (cooperative) movements, the Histadrut, those from various communal or occupational groups, women, or minorities. The matter is even simpler for the smaller parties, whose supporters can clearly identify the one or two representatives who speak for them. As a result, many citizens actually do have their “functional” representative to whom they turn. In this way the intimacy of the system counters the distance presumably created by proportional representation.

Ironically, Knesset members say that they spend most of their time, and derive most of their satisfaction, from constituent services. Some admit spending little time in Knesset sessions, using it instead to respond to those who have turned to them for assistance. This often involves acting as an intermediary between private citizens and groups on one side, and government agencies on the other (a kind of informal ombudsman). Knesset members can and do, however, go directly to the minister responsible rather than dealing with lower levels of the civil service. These kinds of personalized channels do not differ greatly from traditional patterns, and therefore it is no surprise that “the Israeli bureaucracy is geared to this clientele style of problem solving.” ^[43]

Interest groups in Israel also reflect this state of affairs. There is relatively little legislative lobbying of the traditional sort, since the important decisions are not made in the Knesset. There was also a relatively low level of truly autonomous bodies in the earlier period. Interest groups were organized to bargain with, or to pressure, the governmental ministries, parties, and other bodies that together made the important decisions. For this purpose, they not only approached decision-makers directly, as they would in most pluralist democratic systems, but sometimes become an integral part of the process. The kibbutz and moshav movements have been closely tied to the Ministry of Agriculture; the Israeli Manufacturers’ Association works closely with the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. To an unusual extent, in comparison to like situations elsewhere, doctors are consulted on the policies of the Ministry of Health, bus drivers on those of the Ministry of Transport, and teachers on those of the Ministry of Education. In some cases, especially on economic issues, the interest group goes beyond the role of bargaining for its own interests, and itself becomes a participant in the decisionmaking. At a minimum, many such groups are able to informally veto proposals that they consider inimical to their interests.^[44]

Even at its peak, therefore, centralized authority was offset by a bargaining style that permeated Israeli public life. What has been called a sense of “federative kinship” enables Israelis to regard official acts as points of reference, rather than as self-evident obligations. There is always room for argument; any decision can be (and usually is) contested both before it is made and after it has supposedly been finalized. Characteristically, therefore, there is a search for consensus before a decision is made, and strong disagreement usually leads to postponement of the matter pending further negotiations. Daniel Elazar argues that the pervasiveness of this consensual style of operation has made hierarchical organizations in Israel less efficient than those that respect and accommodate the traditional ways of doing business.^[45]

Another dimension of this pattern is the tendency to deal with outside challenges by trying to bring them within the system. Such efforts of cooptation were partly successful in the pre-state period, as we have seen, and were pursued more energetically after statehood. The history of the gradual step-by-step inclusion of the ultra-Orthodox community has, in a sense, been an essay in co-optation of a potentially alienated and disruptive force. Discontent among Jews from Asia and Africa has typically been met by cooptation of leaders of those communities, at first on a symbolic scale and eventually on a broad—if not quite proportional—basis (see chapter 7). The few incidents of extraparliamentary protest that arose in the early period on this communal background led to co-optation of the leaders directly involved. This perhaps helps explain the relatively low level of protest and extraparliamentary political activity during these years, when the political system was still able to cope with the relatively few challenges that it faced by resorting to this traditional tool.^[46]

While traditional protest and direct action may have been at a low ebb during the first two or three decades after 1948, the level of political awareness and knowledge was high. The Israeli public, as Jewish publics generally, was highly politicized and sensitive to developments likely to impinge on it. In a study done to compare Israeli “civic culture” with that of the five nations studied in Gabriel Almond and Sydney Verba’s classic 1963 study, 79 percent of the Israeli respondents reported reading a newspaper at least once a week (the highest figure in Almond and Verba’s study was 53 percent in Western Germany). Also, 76 percent of the Israeli sample followed political news on radio or television at least once a week (the highest elsewhere was 58 percent in the United States). In terms of political knowledge, 74 percent of the Israelis could name at least four government ministries and party leaders, as against 40 percent of the Germans, 34 percent of the Americans and the British, 23 percent of the Italians, and 21 percent of the Mexicans. Other studies have confirmed the general finding of a remarkably high (by comparative standards) level of political interest and awareness in Israel.^[47]

This is matched by a fairly high level of participation in elections, with about 80 percent turning out regularly. Access to the system for new parties is relatively easy, as seen in the large number of parties contending. Only two parties that met the minimal requirements have ever been excluded from the election: the Arab nationalist party El Ard in 1964, on grounds that it challenged the existence of Israel, and Rabbi Meir Kahane’s party, Kach, after 1988 because its platform was judged to be racist.

Access to the media was more limited in the early period, since radio (and television, which began in the late 1960s) were under state control, and most of the press was party affiliated. This became more pluralistic and more flexible over time, however. In 1965 the establishment of the Israel Broadcasting Authority brought more autonomy to the electronic media, though a degree of political influence remained and the issue became even more controversial after the Likud takeover in 1977. Nevertheless, a variety of viewpoints are heard, especially during election campaigns when each party is given free broadcast time (again, in proportion to its electoral strength). The press over the years became increasingly variegated and critical, with much of the party press disappearing. Access to the foreign press, which is unrestricted, has undercut occasional government efforts to keep sensitive issues out of the media; once printed in a foreign publication, a story can be circulated freely in Israel and (usually) even reprinted in Hebrew translation by Israeli periodicals.

The intimate scale of Israeli politics should also be taken into account. The exposure of Israeli leaders to their own public is extensive: a prominent Israeli party leader, in or out of government, will spend a large number of hours every week in direct and unrehearsed contact with the public in various forums, all open to media coverage. Those at the very top appear almost nightly on Israeli news programs (watched by a vast majority of the nation), either in live interviews or in films of appearances elsewhere. The average educated Israeli has seen the prominent political figures so often on the screen and in flesh that they see them as acquaintances, if not as members of the family. Certainly the aura of office is eroded to a great extent by this close contact. Members of the public are not inhibited by any sense of awe in dealing with their own leaders; the mystery has been dissipated.

But while political awareness and knowledge were at high levels, participation in the early years was usually limited to verbal expression, as opposed to direct action.There were only a few instances in which a wave of public discontent was strong enough to force the hand of the government, notably in forcing the formation of the National Unity Government on the eve of the 1967 war, and in establishing a commission of inquiry to probe the government’s failings in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. On the whole, however, during the 1948–1977 period Israel ranked about average compared to other nations on indicators of political protest and well below average on indicators of political violence.^[48]

This lack of direct political activity can be attributed to the lack of nonpartisan civic organizations standing outside the system, to the seemingly unchallengeable centralization in Ben-Gurion’s party government, and to the general aura of paternalistic control. Public reaction remained largely verbal because other channels seemed to be of little use. There were danger signals that the Israeli Establishment failed to note or to act upon. Despite (or because of) the high level of political awareness and knowledge, public appraisal of the government’s performance and of the average citizen’s ability to influence it (what political scientists call the “sense of political efficacy”) were both remarkably low. In the comparison to the five nations studied by Almond and Verba in the 1960s, only 5 percent of Israelis thought that the government generally improved conditions, as against 58 to 71 percent in the other cases. Only 27 percent expected equal treatment from the government, fewer than the 32 percent in Mexico and well below the 56 to 89 percent in the other four democratic nations.^[49] In answer to the question “Do people like yourself have an influence on the government?” only 25 percent responded positively in 1960, and only 15 percent in a 1969 survey. In a series of surveys in 1973, the affirmative answers ranged from about a third to less than one-half. Again, the figures were notably higher in other democratic countries.^[50]

Most Israelis still felt that the best way to influence the government was through family or personal connections. The traditional Jewish reliance on connections was entirely consonant with prevailing Middle Eastern practices and with the pragmatic view of officialdom adopted by early settlers; only the fleeting British presence during the Mandatory period presented a model of objective and impartial bureaucracy. It is not surprising, then, to find that Israelis developed a low regard for civil servants as “relatively dishonest, unpleasant, inefficient, passive, slow, and unstable…Israelis find their national bureaucracy and its employees to be undesirable features of the political community.” ^[51]

Underneath the seeming stability, there were signs of a basically confrontational view of politics that was only temporarily submerged. There was a widespread assumption that only direct action, outside the system and in defiance both of established procedures and the law, could actually achieve anything. One of the leaders of the dissident Black Panthers, a group active in the early 1970s, later reported that he had been urged by Establishment figures themselves to act disruptively in order to get attention and “to move things.” Another Black Panther leader, emphasizing the need for street action for lack of a viable option, declared that “we must do things which are illegal but legitimate.” ^[52] Contemporary Israeli Hebrew is rich with phrases that suggest the need and utility of bypassing established procedures and acting directly: “to move things,” “to get by” (l’histader), “to create facts,” “to whistle at (defy) all of them,” “to take matters in hand,” “to get what one has coming,” “to pound on the table,” “to turn tables upside down,” “to make noise,” “to take to the streets.” Even when appearances seemed to indicate otherwise, the traditional attitude of expediency and disrespect toward established authority and procedures remained as a strong undercurrent in Israeli political culture.

This is linked to the long-standing pattern of “illegalism” identified by Ehud Sprinzak. Sprinzak defines this pattern as “an orientation that regards respect for the law and respect for the rule of law not as a basic value, but as a specific mode of behavior that one may or may not follow according to considerations of expediency.” ^[53] Such behavior can be traced back to the Eastern European shtetl but was buttressed by the corrupt practices of the Ottoman system and by the premium put on circumventing British opposition during the Mandatory period. Its expressions include corruption, both personal and political; clientalism (protektsia) and patronage (including the traditional role of the macher, or man of influence, in Jewish life); a general contempt for civil law or other universal norms; ideologies that justify skirting the law (in the name of higher principle, or for “the good of the movement”); and extraparliamentary political methods, including violence.^[54]

Some of these tendencies were curbed or submerged in the Ben-Gurion system; personal corruption was not so visible, and extraparliamentary activity was in temporary eclipse. But as Sprinzak notes, the push for mamlachtiut did not focus on the rule of law and in fact did not even include a legal theory as one of its elements.^[55] There were in fact considerable abuses of power, bordering on corruption, by the parties in power—all in the name of “the good of the movement.” The prevailing ethos was reflected in a letter that Levi Eshkol, then treasurer of the Jewish Agency, wrote to the controller of that agency regarding a case of petty corruption among some of its foreign representatives. Quoting from the Bible (Deuteronomy 25:4), Eshkol admonished the controller that “you shall not muzzle the ox when it treads the grain”—in other words, those working hard for the cause are entitled to some benefits under the table.

Thus the drive for “civicness” did not alter many habits of Jewish political behavior. It did achieve some coherence in government authority and pushed the system, at least temporarily, toward greater centralization and unqualified majority rule. A working parliamentary system was established, dominated by the executive and without separation of powers, and with no written constitution or other limits on parliamentary sovereignty. Local government was subordinated to central control, a dominant party assured coordination of the whole, collective responsibility prevailed in the cabinet, nonparty groups remained relatively weak, and governing coalitions fell short of the kind of “grand coalition” associated with a broad social contract. Thus, despite the elements of consociational democracy that remained, Lijphart classified the Israeli government as only semi-consociational, while Medding maintains that the majoritarian elements were at least temporarily dominant.^[56]

Yet many elements of consociationalism, in the Jewish style, remained in the new state. Proportional representation, with the ubiquitous party key, and mutual veto, especially in religious matters, were central. But above all, there was power-sharing among different centers, obscured for the time being by the dominant role of the same party in these centers. Politics was still pervaded by a bargaining and negotiating style on most key issues.

Thus, even at the peak of mamlachtiut, the intense dialectic between universalist impulses and traditional patterns continued. Particularistic dimensions were submerged but not subdued. Furthermore, with the passage of time came increasing signs of the weakening of both Labor dominance and the civic and majoritarian elements Labor had imposed on the system. “The very establishment of a sovereign state created the potential for [basic themes and orientations latent in earlier periods of Jewish history] to erupt anew, to break through the existing institutional hold, thus generating continual challenges for Israeli society and the political system.” ^[57]

However, this struggle was submerged in turn by an even more forceful reality: preoccupation with security. This overwhelming concern cut across the universalist-particularist tension in various and unexpected ways.

Notes

5. The Filter of Security

The drift away from the civic model, analyzed in the previous chapter, also threatened to erode civilian control over the military. The potential for such a development existed in the system: just as the “interpenetration” of army and society involved civilianization of military life, it also opened the door to military influence on political decisions. The end of Labor dominance, in 1977, opened the door further. The loss of consensus and the polarization of opinions gave top commanders greater room to maneuver; the political orientation of the chief of staff acquired an importance it had not previously had. In addition, the big jump in defense budgets after the 1973 war also increased the importance of the military establishment and enlarged the infrastructure from which it drew support (Israel now had a “military-industrial complex” worth mentioning on an international scale).^[1]

To many it appeared that this threat materialized in the 1980s. In his second government, formed in August 1981, Menachem Begin appointed Ariel Sharon, a reserve army general, as minister of defense. Though Sharon was not the first former military commander to serve in this civilian post—he was preceded by Moshe Dayan and Ezer Weizman—his appointment provoked apprehension because of the widespread perception that he had little regard for legal and political constraints (unconfirmed reports claimed that Begin himself worried aloud that Sharon’s first act would be to surround the Knesset with tanks).^[2] In carrying out the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Sharon went far beyond the official aim of expelling Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) forces from southern Lebanon, in effect carrying out his own undeclared agenda of driving both the PLO and Syria out of Lebanon entirely, overseeing the emergence of a Lebanese government friendly to Israel, and creating a situation in which Palestinians would have to pursue their political aspirations in Jordan rather than the West Bank.^[3]

In order to pursue this design, Sharon misled the Israeli cabinet at various stages of the campaign, which eventually brought him into direct conflict with Begin. Ultimately the design failed of its own impracticality, but only the massacre of Palestinian civilians at Sabra and Shatila by Lebanese Christian forces, leading to the government inquiry under the Kahan Commission, brought about Sharon’s resignation as minister of defense.^[4] It might be pointed out, however, that some of the stiffest opposition to Sharon’s moves came from within the army itself, where dovish military commanders spoke up both within and outside of channels—indicating that the close intertwining of civilian and military can work in both directions.

Ironically, the state founded to solve the perennial problem of Jewish security has itself been plagued by constant insecurity. Israelis cite security—“the refuge and protection which Israel gives each Jew”—more often than any other reason as a basis for Jewish rights in Israel.^[5] As insecure as life in Israel might appear, its role as a means for Jews to provide for their own security, rather than being subject to what the fates decreed, was basic to Zionism’s very purpose.

But viewed coldly and objectively, the realities of the threat to Israel’s existence were overwhelming. The State of Israel was closed off by a wall of hostile Arab states committed to reversing the results of the 1948 war. Until 1967 the bulk of the population was within artillery range of hostile armies, and through the 1991 Persian Gulf War the Israeli public was never more than about five years from either the last conflict or the next one. The six neighboring Arab states enjoyed a population advantage over Israel that varied between 50 to 1 and 20 to 1. Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq together still have an advantage of about 8 to 1 in regular armed forces, 5 to 1 with all reserves mobilized, and 3 to 1 in major battle tanks and in combat aircraft.^[6] Israel also faced a number of active terrorist organizations whose international support and sources of finance were without precedent. In addition, international isolation left the country increasingly dependent on a single major power for both vital military equipment and economic viability.

The economic pressures were enormous. Not only did Israel bear a crushing defense burden by any standard, but in the first years of statehood it also faced economic warfare (the Arab boycott) and a massive influx of new immigrants. In the first three and a half years under independence the population doubled, and by the end of the first decade it had tripled. In the 1970s defense spending as a proportion of GDP (gross domestic product) hovered in the 20 to 30 percent range, against the 3 to 6 percent common in Western countries or the peak figure of 12 to 17 percent in the former Soviet Union. But with the highest per capita national debt in the world, debt service topped even defense in the national budget, leading to an almost unbelievable level of total government spending: 60 to 80 percent of the GDP, depending on how it is measured.

Nor could Israel rely on international support to redress this imbalance. The circumstances that led to a convergence of U.S. and Soviet support for Israeli statehood in 1948 changed, and from the early 1950s the Soviet Union was increasingly the ally and armorer of Israel’s enemies. Most Western countries would not sell arms to Israel, though many sold arms to Arab states. The international climate became yet more hostile with the rise of the Third World, which tended to regard Israel as part of the colonial West and the Palestinian Arabs as victims of Western imperialism.

Consequently security considerations became the central constraint of Israeli politics, the filter through which all other issues and debates were forced to pass.^[7]

The Diktat of Defense

Analysts sometimes define Israel’s security as its ability to defeat any likely coalition of belligerents in all-out war. This would be difficult enough to guarantee under all circumstances. But Israelis, with their personal experiences as refugees, tend to interpret security more broadly as freedom from threat to their personal safety and the ability to live without fear of politically motivated violence. This is an infinitely more difficult level of security for any government to guarantee its citizens when daily existence is threatened by violence short of war: artillery bombardments, armed incursions, street violence, random terrorism, long-range missile strikes on civilian centers. We must distinguish between basic security (war-fighting capability) and current or personal security (control of lesser threats), and no account of the impact of security concerns on Israeli life can afford to focus exclusively on the former. In a 1993 survey, 85 percent of Israelis expressed fear of being attacked by an Arab during their daily activities.^[8]

Security cannot be measured simply by the objective threats that a nation faces. In the end, it is a matter of a subjective feeling of safety in the minds of individuals, which is more difficult to achieve among a Jewish generation that passed through successive waves of twentieth-century antisemitism culminating in the Holocaust. The Jewish worldview is in any event the product of twenty centuries of religious and ethnic persecution; no minority in history has been so unremittingly conditioned to regard the world as an essentially vicious place. The Holocaust was merely the latest and most brutal chapter in a long history. Nevertheless, Jews throughout the world were stunned by the world’s lack of response to Nazi genocide. They noted the lack of any international effort to save Jewish lives in Europe and the general closing of doors to would-be refugees. Even after the war, the Palestinian Jewish community, most of whom lost family and friends in the Holocaust, were not allowed to receive the survivors. In the words of a leading Israeli literary figure, the Holocaust left a “latent hysteria” in Israeli life.^[9]

A mood of despair and outrage, born of the Mandate experience and the Holocaust, intensified during the period of the Israeli War of Independence. Though the United Nations recommended establishment of a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine, no effort was made to enforce this decision against Arab opposition. The Jewish community was left to face the regular armies of five Arab states, some of them armed by Western states while Israel contended with a general arms embargo (broken only, to some extent, by Soviet-bloc countries). Despite the widespread perception that another Holocaust was in the making, the world seemed as indifferent or as passive as it had the first time.

This sense of isolation in a hostile world was further strengthened by the events of 1956–1957 and 1967. In the first case, Israel faced universal condemnation for what most Israelis regarded as a necessary act of selfdefense to stop attacks along the Egyptian border and to end an illegal blocking of access to Israel’s southern port, Eilat. Israel was then forced to withdraw from Sinai in return for international assurances of free passage to Eilat that turned out to be valueless when tested ten years later. When these guarantees collapsed, in 1967, Israel again stood alone. Once more, as Israelis saw it, only the strength of their own armed forces prevented national destruction.

In some ways the constraints of security favored universalistic and civic ideas, and in other ways they reinforced particularistic and traditional leanings. In either case, security concerns meant greater pressure on democracy, encouraging either greater centralization of authority or greater clannishness in dealing with the outside.

The centrality of foreign affairs and defense ought to promote mamlachtiut (civic-mindedness), since the need for national unity under crisis conditions was obvious. Some maintain that it is only the external threat that has held Israel together. The army and the foreign service operated basically outside the “bargaining” framework and could be built along rational civic and statist lines. In foreign policy, there was little bargaining over a compromise policy; one approach was dominant before 1977 and from 1992 to 1996, and another has been dominant whenever the Likud was in a position to set or veto policy.

The need for unity translated into a strong tendency to defer to the existing leadership, despite the strong Jewish tradition of skepticism toward authority. The question then became: is there too much deference to authority? Whatever happened to the traditional Jewish opposition to the concentration of power? The truth is that obsession with security actually meshes very well with proclivities rooted in the Jewish past. The threat of danger from the outside was to a great extent what made consensus and voluntarism work in the kahal and in the yishuv. Increased threat usually forced Jews to bond more closely together, with tradition as the glue that held them together and ensured their survival. Finding themselves surrounded by enemies who swore to destroy them did not strike Israelis as a novel occurrence calling for new departures; to the contrary, it evoked a long collective memory of similar threats (or threats seen as similar) of which this was merely the latest instance. Four of the major holidays on the Jewish calendar (Passover, Purim, Hanukkah, and Tishah b’Av) commemorate a threat to Jewish existence in one form or another. The main difference this time was that Jews were organized to fight back.

Wars with Arab states were not seen as events in international politics rooted in a territorial dispute, but as acts of primordial hostility that evoked images of the Holocaust and other historical attempts simply to kill Jews. Acts of terror against Israeli civilians were seen not as political actions designed (however brutally) to achieve Palestinian national aims but as plain and simple acts of antisemitism. A deep sense of “familism” has always pervaded the Israeli reaction to these events; the death of a single Israeli “on a national background” (that is, by an Arab, for political reasons) is seen by most Israelis as an attack on a family member and as a personal threat, evoking a degree of horror and rage far beyond that triggered by an ordinary “nonpolitical” murder. Finally, traditional Jewish politics included a tendency to secrecy and closure to the outside, and a problematic approach to non-Jewish minorities. The first of these will be examined in the following section, and the second in chapter 9.

The consensus was that Arab threats should be taken seriously—that they were not just words—and that the security of Israel was always in jeopardy, since a single defeat would mean national destruction.^[10] Demonstrations of Arab moderation were regarded with suspicion, as they were likely to be tactical maneuvers rather than abandonment of the basic design of destroying Israel. This primordial “us–them” view of this conflict clings to the assumption of unyielding hostility as an explanation that makes sense of a threatening world and reinforces the Jewish self-image as the perpetual victim of unreasoning hatred, rather than simply as the party to a conflict.

In this view there was no choice but self-reliance. International support or guarantees could not be trusted as a reliable basis for national security. The only reliable outside allies were the Jewish communities of the world. Apart from other forms of support, the Jewish Diaspora was also important as a source of immigration, the raison d’etre of the state. Israel was concerned with the well-being of Jewish communities elsewhere, and its relations with other nations have often been affected by the interests of local Jewish communities.

Given perceived vulnerability and self-reliance, Israelis adopted an active defense. They stressed the need to anticipate, to seize the initiative, and to take the war to the other’s territory. The preemptive attacks of 1956 and 1967 are cases in point. In terms of concrete defense doctrines, this was expressed in the focus on mobility, forward deployment, and threats of punitive counterblows that in some ways resembled strategies of nuclear deterrence.^[11] But if Israel tended to active defense on a military level, it showed an aversion to risk taking in politics or diplomacy. Israeli diplomacy tended to be reactive, responding to events and shunning bold initiatives. There was a distinct distaste for diplomatic methods in general, given the meager resources that Israel possessed for playing the diplomatic game and natural suspicion of a process in which Jews had little experience and for which history had not taught them to have high regard.^[12]

Another element in the consensus was a pro-Western orientation. There were, in the beginning, neutralist tendencies in the Israeli leadership, given their East European ties, socialist sympathies, and hopes of continuing support from both sides of the Cold War. But the behavior of the Soviet Union from the early 1950s, toward Jews within its borders and Zionism generally, soon led to a revision of this attitude. Even before the Soviet Union adopted a pro-Arab stance and moved to arm Israel’s enemies, it had for ideological reasons tried to discredit the idea of Israel as a homeland for all Jews, especially Soviet Jews. In the Soviet version of socialism there was little room for recognition of Jewish nationality.

Israel thus found itself pushed into closer cooperation with those who opposed the Soviets. This was reinforced by a natural affinity of values with democratic Western countries, as well as the importance of Jewish communities in the West and especially in the United States. Economic realities also played a role, as the Israeli economy quickly developed close linkages with the West. Pro-Soviet views, which had once been frequently heard in Labor Zionist circles (especially in Mapam), practically disappeared from Israeli public debate within a decade.

On specific issues, there was a consensus that Arab refugees from the 1948 war should be dealt with only in the framework of final peace treaties with the Arab states, and that most of them would have to be resettled in Arab countries, as Jewish refugees from Arab countries had been resettled in Israel. There was also general acceptance of the 1949 armistice lines as a basis for final borders; those who still sought the whole of Palestine were stymied by the seeming impossibility of the goal. By 1965 even Herut, in adopting a common electoral platform with the Liberals, had dropped specific territorial claims beyond the existing lines. The dominant view was that the key to an Israeli-Arab peace was negotiation with Jordan, which by annexing the West Bank held most of what was to have been the Arab state in Palestine. In fact, negotiations with Jordan’s King Abdallah were carried out immediately after the 1948 war and ended only when the king was assassinated in 1951.

Events seemed to support the traditional Labor attitude that a compact but clearly Jewish state in part of Palestine was preferable to the assertion of sovereignty over all of Palestine, which would always have a large Arab population even if Jews did come to constitute a majority. In the 1950s and 1960s Ben-Gurion was the key representative of this “low territorial profile” that combined minimal rule over Arabs with an active defense.^[13] The molding of a consensus was furthered by Ben-Gurion’s strong personality and by the fact that many Israelis, especially new immigrants, tended to identify him with the state itself because of his historic role in Israel’s founding.

The tension between security demands and democracy was greatest precisely at those points where democracy was weakest in tradition. The dictates of security fit in only too well with the passion for secrecy and the lack of provision for the collective rights of non-Jewish minorities. There were other manifestations of security mania that may be linked to the past. The penchant for activism can be seen as overcompensation for the passivity and weakness of the past, leading to such heady gestures as the challenging of Soviet anti-aircraft crews, and even Soviet pilots, during the 1969–1970 war of attrition on the Suez Canal. Many observers noted a “cult of toughness” among Israeli youth, symbolized by popular figures such as Meir Har-Tsion, a soldier whose exploits became legendary.^[14]

None of this is very surprising; mobilization against external threats is generally thought to be inimical to democracy. In 1941 the noted social scientist Harold Lasswell projected as “probable” a state of the future in which the specialists in violence would dominate and in which the entire population would be mobilized on behalf of the national military effort. This “garrison state,” as he later elaborated, would be characterized by constant increases in defense spending, the expansion and centralization of government, the withholding of information, the weakening of political parties and the legislature, loss of civil liberties, and the decline of courts as limits on the government.^[15] Such a course of development seemed quite possible in the Israel of the 1950s, and indeed some of these developments (such as higher defense spending and weaker political parties) came to pass. Yet overall Israel did not become a garrison state by Lasswell’s definition.

Why has Israel not behaved like a society under siege? Why hasn’t the army become the dominant institution in the country?

One answer to this question, often overlooked, is that a crisis that extends for half a century is no longer a crisis but a normal state of affairs. The high state of tension and the high degree of mobilization become routinized; it is impossible to keep an entire society forever living at the highest pitch of anxiety. Normality sets in; ordinary patterns of life develop even under the most unpropitious conditions. As will be seen, the “emergency regulations” under which Israelis live become less emergency-like, and more regularized and routinized, as time passes. A better image for the cycle of war and normality in Israel may be the concept of the “interrupted society” as developed by Baruch Kimmerling. Israelis pull together in time of genuine crisis (wartime), but revert to more disorderly and individualistic behavior when tensions are “merely” normal.^[16] This, also, is hardly a new pattern in Jewish life, but reflects in a general way the rhythm of intermittent threat and quiescence that characterized much of Diaspora life.

The absence of a strictly military tradition also helps account for Israel’s relatively nonpolitical army. There was no history of a military role in politics, and in fact it was the political leadership (in the yishuv) that invented the military. The fighting forces—Hagana and Etsel—began as extensions of civilian organizations. Ben-Gurion made sure of civilian supremacy before and after statehood, while moving to professionalize the military force being created. To keep the army out of politics, he took over its direction personally, serving as minister of defense as well as prime minister. Ultimate control of the military was vested in the cabinet, through the minister of defense, with the chief of staff (the highest-ranking military professional) appointed by the cabinet on the recommendation of the minister of defense. These arrangements were formalized in the Basic Law: Israel Defense Forces, adopted in 1976.

There are imperfections in civilian control as the system actually operates. Much depends on the minister of defense, who is the link between military professionals and the civilian government. So long as the minister is a strong representative of the cabinet, and at the same time holds the respect of the top military leadership, the structure can work as designed. But this is a highly personalized arrangement, like so much in Israeli politics. In essence, civilian control is not really institutionalized in a civilianized Ministry of Defense but rests on one person. There is no assurance that the cabinet will control the minister of defense, and any outside oversight (by the Knesset, for example) is usually weak and after the fact.

So long as Ben-Gurion held both positions, until 1963, his personal stature was a guarantee that military officers would not exceed their role. But when the two positions were divided, and when former military professionals became ministers of defense, the lines of authority became murky and an avenue for military influence on policymaking was opened up. This peaked in the Lebanese War in 1982, when Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon conducted his own policy rather than that of the cabinet and (as a former commander himself) also took over some of the operational responsibility in the field.

However, when military officers did cross the line into political matters, their views were not uniform but ran the same gamut as their civilian counterparts. In fact, much of the dovish opposition to the Lebanese War came from within the army itself, as did many of the more moderate views on dealing with the Palestinian intifada (uprising) that began in 1987. The universality of military service and the ad hoc way in which the military was built limit the development of a military ethos and careerism separate from the society at large. Nearly all Israeli males, and a high proportion of young women as well, pass through a required period of service. But the regular army remains relatively small; most of the forces mobilized in wartime are reservists drawn from all walks of life. The small core of career army officers is also rotated out for early retirement by the time they are in their forties, thus limiting the development of a senior class of professional officers who might gain institutional status in the Israeli bargaining network. Given the scale of the country, there is little “garrison life”—most soldiers go home on weekends and some even commute on a daily basis. The social democracy in the Israeli army—its informality, lack of attention to rank, and absence of spit and polish—has long been notorious.^[17]

Thus no separate military caste has developed in Israel; the army reflects the society, with a spectrum of views that differs very little (the slight difference in voting patterns seems to be a function of age rather than military service). Left-wing positions are as well represented in the army as elsewhere; many dovish political parties and movements have featured former top military commanders in their leadership. Left-wing kibbutzim have traditionally supplied officers and men for the most prestigious elite fighting units.^[18] Where army and society are so intertwined and interpenetrated, civilianization of the army is as apparent as militarization of society. The blurring of lines between the two works in both directions. The leading military sociologists in Israel summarize the situation in these words: “Although Israel has been immersed in a prolonged violent conflict, it does not behave like a society under siege. Its democratic government and routine civilian life are a far cry from the type of ‘siege mentality’ bred by living under a constant state of emergency. Israel has not turned into a garrison state, a modern Sparta ruled by specialists in violence whose entire way of life is subordinated to meeting the challenge of an external threat.” ^[19]

The problem is not an institutionalized army against civilians, then, but rather the way in which the constant preoccupation with defense has affected attributes of the whole society. Militarism can exist in a political culture even when civilian supremacy in the government is secured.^[20] In the Israeli case, army and society share the view that military considerations have priority and that the conflict should be interpreted predominantly in military terms; military values penetrate areas of life from economic planning to gender relations. With security as the dominant standard and a high priority assigned to defense in the allocation of resources, the impact is felt everywhere. Decisions on industrial policy, on the transportation infrastructure, on educational priorities—on almost any policy issue—are run through the security filter. The bigger question is whether this has caused an erosion of humanitarian values of Western liberalism or of traditional Judaism. How has democracy survived these pressures, and what has been their impact on the tension between modernism and tradition?

Civil Liberties under Pressure

Even the most democratic and civic-minded of countries has found that the conflict between war and human liberties is profound. Writing in 1917, J. A. Hobson recounted the vast invasions of liberty that took place during World War I in Great Britain and warned his fellow citizens that the termination of actual hostilities would not bring about a quick restoration of previous norms.^[21] In Israel there are even fewer safeguards than in other democratic nations: there is no written constitution and no bill of rights, and in the prevailing conception civil liberties “are granted to the individual by authorities rather than assured the individual.” ^[22]

Despite all this Israel has been relatively free of restrictions on freedom of expression. As the annual human rights report of the U.S. Department of State summarizes the matter, “Israeli society is characterized by its openness and by the wide-ranging and lively public debate of all issues of popular concern.” ^[23] To take one striking example, during the 1973 Yom Kippur War an Arab member of the Israeli Knesset published a poem eulogizing the Egyptian soldiers who had launched an attack on Israeli forces across the Suez Canal. Clearly security concerns have not had the impact on human liberties that could have been projected from the general experience of democratic regimes in wartime.

If Israel’s record is generally good, especially in a comparative perspective, it clearly has its weak points. The major weaknesses in Israeli civil liberties are in the area of religious laws, many of which conflict with secular democratic standards, and in the role of emergency regulations in the country’s governance.^[24] The issue of religion and politics will be covered in chapter 8; here we will focus primarily on the tension between civil liberties and the use of “emergency” measures to protect national security.

On May 19, 1948, four days after the declaration of Israeli independence, the provisional government of the new state proclaimed a state of emergency. This state of emergency has been in force continuously ever since.

When the emergency was first declared, the 650,000 Jews of Mandatory Palestine had already been engaged for almost six months in a civil war with 1.5 million Palestinian Arabs, and they faced an invasion by the regular armies of five Arab states with a total population of about 30 million. The new state survived by an effort of total mobilization, but about 1 percent of the population was killed—almost fifty times the American casualty rate in Vietnam. After 1948 Israel remained on a permanent war footing. A protracted official state of emergency may be more understandable for Israel than for almost any other contemporary state. But it is difficult to maintain the same sense of urgency for such an extended period of time. The protraction of the crisis leads, inevitably, to a routinization of crisis procedures, to a normalization of what were originally extraordinary measures. The crisis becomes devalued over time.

The most drastic and controversial emergency provisions are the Defense (Emergency) Regulations promulgated by the British Mandatory government in 1945, which remain in effect except where explicitly annulled or superseded by either actions of the cabinet (under Section 9 of the Law and Administration Ordinance) or by Knesset legislation.^[25] The 1945 Defense (Emergency) Regulations were a compilation of old and new Mandatory orders issued in response to the double threat of internal rebellion and world war. Following the Arab “revolt” in Palestine in 1936, the Privy Council in London adopted the Palestine (Defense) Order in Council 1937, authorizing the British high commissioner in Palestine to enact such defense regulations “as appear to him in his unfettered discretion to be necessary or expedient for securing public safety, the defence of Palestine, the maintenance of public order and the suppression of mutiny, rebellion, and riot and for maintaining supplies and services essential to the life of the community.” ^[26] The subsequent regulations reflected the preoccupations of a colonial power facing widespread unrest and the threat of war; according to one British expert, they were “the type of regulations that came from the Boer War.” ^[27]

In September 1945, facing now the prospect of Jewish rebellion, the Mandate authorities published the collected set of regulations, including new measures on such subjects as illegal immigration.^[28] The 147 regulations, covering forty-one pages, establish a virtual regime of martial law. They include a military court system empowered to try all offenses against the regulations, with no writ of habeas corpus and no appeal. Broad powers of search and seizure were given to British soldiers. Other sections of the regulations severely circumscribe “unlawful” groups and permit long-term detention without trial—a provision under which thousands of Jews were held, some for up to five or six years. The regulations permit deportation of even native-born citizens and establish prior censorship requiring a permit for any material of “political significance.” Any area can be closed, with suspension of civil courts there, property can be requisitioned or destroyed, movement limited, mail opened, services suspended, or businesses closed—all by virtue of incontestable military orders. Furthermore, the military is not even required to publish orders that it intends to enforce.

The Defense Regulations aroused a storm of protest from the Jewish population in Palestine. Richard Crossman, after hearing Jewish complaints as a visiting member of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in early 1946, recorded in his diary that “I certainly had no idea of the severity of the Emergency Regulations.…there can be no doubt that Palestine today is a police state.” ^[29] This opinion was shared by Bernard (Dov) Joseph, later Israeli minister of justice, who in 1948 published a critique of British rule in Palestine that also used the term “police state” in describing the Defense Regulations.^[30]

The State of Israel inherited all Mandate legislation, unless explicitly annulled. The new government thus found itself effortlessly in possession of a formidable apparatus of emergency powers that could be attributed to the law-abiding British. Only the section restricting immigration was canceled; the rest, despite previous criticism, remained on the books.

There were some efforts to jettison this dubious colonial legacy, especially from Israeli leaders who had themselves been detained under the Defense Regulations. Opposition leader Menachem Begin, who with his comrades in Etsel had been a prime target of the regulations, declared during a 1951 debate: “The law that you used is Nazi, it is tyrannical, it is immoral; and an immoral law is also an illegal law.…If these laws, terror laws of a repressive regime, remain in the State of Israel—the day will come when no group will remain unharmed by them. . . .” ^[31]

But in time it became clear that there was no overwhelming impulse to revoke or replace the 1945 regulations. The continuing threat to national existence made retention of some extraordinary powers, beyond normal civil and judicial procedures, seem the better part of wisdom. And it was unlikely that any subsequent Knesset legislation would provide the full range of measures fortuitously made available by the British.

With such wide powers available, the use of the Defense Regulations has been relatively limited. Whole sections of the regulations have hardly been utilized. Such measures as the death penalty and corporal punishment have never been invoked. The major use—and most controversy—involve a small number of the regulations: Regulations 86–101 on censorship; Regulations 109–112 on restriction, detention, and deportation; and Regulation 125 on closed areas.

The most broadly applied have been the censorship provisions, which still form the legal basis for control of the media. The regulations require the licensing of all media and put the decision in the hands of Interior Ministry officials, who need not justify their refusal to grant a license. An earlier 1933 Press Ordinance also gives the minister of interior power to stop the publication of any newspaper for any period of time. The Defense Regulations permit the censorship of any material “prejudicial to the defence of Palestine [Israel] or to the public safety or to public order.”

For Israelis, control of the media is not just a question of genuine threats to security but also evokes the traditional sensitivity to how the community is seen on the outside. Amos Elon calls this “a provincial determination not to let the skeletons out,” reminiscent of the biblical injunction “to tell it not in Gath and publish it not on the streets of Ashkelon.” ^[32] A striking parallel to this verse was expressed by an Israeli chief of staff, Rafael Eytan, who declared that “nothing which might give satisfaction to an Arab, should be allowed to be published by the Israeli news media.” ^[33] This may be an extreme view, but in fact the “right to know” is not officially recognized in Israel. On the contrary, the Defense Regulations dealing with censorship have been backed up by other statutes designed to reinforce secrecy.

In practice, restrictions are usually limited to sensitive security information. In the case of the press, censorship is softened by a voluntary arrangement, renegotiated in 1996, under which newspapers submit military and political material for review, and excisions can be appealed to a committee representing the press, military, and the general public. The clubbiness of this system certainly suggests a pragmatic Jewish approach to keeping secrets within the family, while circumventing the harsh potential of the British regulations. However, the arrangement covers only the press; books are submitted directly to the censor for review if they “relate to state security,” and some have been withheld from publication or censored, usually because of revelation of secrets. Censorship of movies and theater has usually, though not always, been limited to material that is offensive to religious or social mores—such as pornography—and a narrow appeal process is available.^[34]

Early attempts to censure extreme views in the press by suspending publication outright, through the emergency regulations, led to the Kol Ha’am case before the Israeli Supreme Court in 1953. In this case the high court struck down a government suspension of the Communist Party newspaper, invalidating censorship carried out on political rather than narrowly defined security grounds. But secrecy on security grounds has also been stripped away considerably by the general informal leakiness of the system. Cabinet meetings have often been leaked to the press, complete with direct quotations. The ubiquity of leaks may go some way to meet the public’s right or need to know: “the news media are in a position to circulate sufficient amounts of information to enable the Israeli political system to function according to the democratic model.” ^[35] Thus, in the end, the balance between security requirements and the need to know is shaped by the convergence of three traditional patterns: an urge to shield sensitive matters from outside scrutiny, an institutionalized bargaining relationship among the important players, and the usual informal flow of unvarnished opinion and information. Somehow the more sensitive information does not generally get out while the merely embarrassing facts usually do. But the arrangements governing this have little to do with formal rules, whether in emergency regulations or otherwise.

All of this applies, however, within the Jewish community and does not extend across the ethnic divide to the Arab minority in Israel. The Arabic-language press is concentrated in East Jerusalem, thus falling under Israeli law rather than the military occupation regime, though it serves the West Bank and Gaza population as well as Israeli Arabs. But permits to publish a newspaper have been denied because of suspicion of links to hostile organizations, and there is little chance for an appellant to disprove the “security risk” label.^[36] Before 1996 Arab newspapers did not benefit from the voluntary arrangement described above but were required to submit all material for review, with no appeal process. Consequently even translated articles from the Hebrew press were sometimes disallowed.

Even more than the censorship provisions, other Defense Regulations have been applied almost exclusively to the Arab minority. From 1948 to 1966, many border areas, not coincidentally corresponding to Arab-populated areas, were placed under a military government whose legal basis was the 1945 Defense Regulations. The de facto result was that Jews and Arabs lived under different sets of rules despite the formal civic equality. Though restrictions on movement were applied elsewhere as well, their main use was in the military government area. Under Regulation 125, these areas were declared “closed,” and all entrance and exit required a permit, though in practice this was seldom required of Jews passing through such areas. Under Regulations 109 and 110, persons under special suspicion could be further restricted in their movements, to a particular town or even house arrest.^[37]

Most serious, perhaps, was the way in which Regulation 125 could be used to create “uncultivated” or “abandoned” land that, in accord with Israeli legislation, became subject to expropriation by the state. Villagers who happened to be elsewhere could be kept there or prevented from entering their home village. In some cases—in at least eleven villages in the 1949–1950 period—Regulation 125 was used to evacuate entire villages of their existing populations, on security grounds. The courts interfered in these cases only on technical grounds, or when it seemed clear that the motivation was not security.^[38]

Most of the land expropriations occurred in the early 1950s, and the military government in Arab areas ended in 1966. From that point, at least formally, emergency measures under the British regulations applied equally to all areas of the country and all sectors of the population. The most serious continuing controversy regarding the use of the Defense Regulations has been the matter of administrative detention.

Regulation 111 empowered “a military commander” to detain any person in any place of the commander’s choosing, for renewable periods of one year. In essence, this authority could mean indefinite imprisonment without trial, with no restrictions on the discretion of the commander, loose rules of evidence, and no judicial review apart from an “advisory committee” to make recommendations to the officer. As noted, this measure was used extensively by the British in the 1945–1948 period. It is argued that preventive detention may be the lesser of evils in dealing with the kinds of threats presented by terrorist organizations. The evidence available in such cases often cannot be used in a court of law: it is based on hearsay, or on intelligence sources that cannot be revealed, or on the testimony of informers whose identification would put them in jeopardy. Rather than changing the rules of the courtroom in order to obtain criminal convictions, it is preferable to adopt lesser measures, still subject to some form of review, that make it possible to act when a reasonable certainty of danger to society exists.^[39]

There is, inevitably, controversy about whether those detained are actually threats to society. One outside critic of preventive detention, who studied the cases of those detained in 1971, concluded “that virtually all of those detained had, in fact, been involved in terrorist activities; that the vast majority could not be tried under Israeli law; and that a considerable number would probably engage in future terrorism if released.” ^[40] In any event, the number of those detained has never been great, and the overall trend within Israel was to reduce the number. From the figures announced sporadically, it appears that 315 detention orders were issued in 1956–1957, but that the number fell to twenty-three in 1970 and fifteen in 1971 (not including the West Bank and Gaza, where the number was much higher; see chapter 10). By 1978 the total, including the occupied territories, was thirty; in 1979 (when Regulation 111 was replaced by regular legislation) there were eighteen; and by 1981 the number had dropped to twelve in the occupied territories and none in Israel.^[41] Since then the use of administrative detention has been limited almost entirely to the occupied territories.

In summary, the continuing existence of the 1945 British Defense (Emergency) Regulations raises serious problems from a civil liberties perspecive, and hard questions can also be raised regarding some of the ways they have been applied. But at the same time, usage of the regulations has generally been selective and limited and has been softened in implementation by internal guidelines and court review that provide some protection against abuse. Critics ask why these guidelines, which actually define practice, could not be converted into laws that would remove the specter of colonial police powers from the books. This has been done with administrative detention, perhaps the most controversial of the “emergency” measures; it would not be so revolutionary to apply the same treatment to the remaining regulations.

There are two channels for replacing the British Defense Regulations with more regularized and more accountable provisions. The first is emergency regulations issued by government ministers under Section 9 of the Law and Administration Ordinance of 1948; these are measures based on a grant of authority from the legislative branch and are not valid beyond three months unless extended by the Knesset. Finally, there is regular legislation whose period of validity is dependent on the existence of a state of emergency, or whose functioning is in some other way affected by the emergency. Such legislation may also give the government the right to carry out “emergency-type” measures, subject to review; this was the approach used in the Emergency Powers (Detention) Law, 1979, which replaced the detention provisions of the 1945 British regulations.

The Law and Administration Ordinance was the first law passed by the Provisional State Council of the new State of Israel, on May 19, 1948. It provides in Section 9 that, upon declaration of a state of emergency, the cabinet could authorize the prime minister or any other minister to issue emergency regulations “for the defense of the state, the public safety, and the maintenance of essential supplies and services.” The major use of Section 9 emergency regulations since the mid-1970s has been in authorizing return-to-work orders to employees providing “vital public services.” With the increase of such orders has also come a number of instances in which ministers have reissued emergency regulations, without Knesset action, in order to keep a particular group of employees working. In the 1977–1982 period, ten such renewed regulations were issued either before the end of the three-month period, or within three months after its expiration. In one of these cases, involving workers in the Ministry of Education, the reissue of the regulation without Knesset approval was successfully challenged in a district labor court.^[42] On the whole, the use of emergency regulations under Section 9 was relatively noncontroversial, despite the broad wording of the statute, and declined over time (apart from their use in labor disputes). They were used primarily in wartime, reflecting the need, even under conditions of permanent crisis, to reserve some measures for the most threatening occasions only. It is interesting to note that during the 1982 Lebanese War, for example, the government made use of Section 9 to authorize the detention of non-Israeli citizens, but in doing so proclaimed a “special” state of emergency whose legal provenance was uncertain.^[43]

The third channel for emergency measures, as noted, is directly through the Knesset. Since it is the act of a deliberative legislative body, Knesset “emergency” legislation represents the greatest degree of normalization in adjustment to permanent crisis. When a declared state of emergency is a permanent fixture, laws whose operation is dependent on its existence are difficult to distinguish from other laws. A number of Israeli laws fit this description, as do emergency regulations under Section 9 that were simply extended by the Knesset until the end of the state of emergency.^[44] Many of these laws are “emergency” measures in name only, since in scope, procedure, reviewability in court, and other respects, they do not differ from ordinary legislation. An example of delegated powers that are genuinely emergency-related is the authority given the minister of defense, in the Law of Military Service, to order a mobilization and take other appropriate military measures in the face of an imminent threat. As befits genuine emergencies, these powers are limited to fourteen days without Knesset approval.^[45]

All of the emergency regulations are subject to judicial review. Courts have generally applied two criteria: whether the procedural requirements of the law have been followed, and whether substantively the authority has acted in good faith and in accord with the stated purposes of the regulation. Regarding the merits of the case, however, the court has ordinarily declined to look at the content of orders under the Defense Regulations, beyond ascertaining that they were enacted in good faith and according to relevant considerations within the scope of the regulation (Alyubi v. Minister of Defense, H. C. 46/50, 4 P.D. 222).^[46]

The realistic possibility of reversing an order has also been limited by the refusal of authorities to divulge evidence or the reasons behind their actions. This can make it almost impossible to show that an authority has acted in bad faith. This problem was alleviated to some degree by changes in the Law of Evidence, in 1968, which abolished absolute state privilege on disclosure of evidence and authorized courts to hear evidence in camera when state security was involved. Subsequently, judges on appeal have examined secret evidence to see if it really needed to be withheld from the defendant.^[47]

Generally the judicial system has functioned as an independent guardian of civil liberties and the chief repository of the civic approach in Israeli life. Given the traditional strength of legal and judicial institutions in Jewish life, this is perhaps to be expected; the strongest resistance to the pressures of security come where Western liberal ideas and a deeply Jewish respect for the judiciary come together and reinforce each other. Other aspects of tradition that have worked to desanctify security fetishes are the habitual skepticism toward authority (the lese majesté of Jewish life), the tendency to practical bargaining rather than rigid hierarchies, the unstoppable flow of informal communication within the community, and the sheer lack of experience in carrying out the kind of controls associated with a garrison state. To this should be added the normal human tendency to normalize or routinize life during a protracted crisis, rather than to remain indefinitely fixated on the presumed threat.

On the other hand, where the dictates of security coincided with particular legacies of the Jewish experience, the challenge to democracy was greatest. The very ease with which the young and vulnerable state accepted the primacy of security concerns was testimony to the preoccupation—perhaps even the obsession—with security that is a part of the Jewish condition. And on issues like guarding secrets from the outside world, contracting civilly with an enemy minority, or dealing with acts of political violence, it was also too easy to slip into the particularist or communal frame of reference.

In summary, however, the overriding security constraints have not led to the sacrifices of civil liberties that has occurred in other democratic states during wartime or periods of protracted conflict:

1. Emergency powers have not challenged the normal functioning of government. The Knesset has operated undisturbed and has the formal power to change emergency measures as it sees fit (though the exercise of this right may depend on coalition politics); courts continue to function, and to review (within limits) the use of such powers. There is no general suspension of rights, even in wartime.
2. In practice, the use of emergency powers has fallen far short of what could be done, legally, under existing grants of authority. Many of the broad powers available have not been utilized, and others have been moderated in usage by self-imposed administrative guidelines. This reverses the common pattern among many nondemocratic governments, which stretch their emergency authority in various ways; while the law in such cases is better than the practice, in Israel the practice is better than the law.
3. Over time, there has been a trend to greater regularity in the use of emergency powers and greater reliance on legal and judicial procedures governing them. The role of judicial review, for example, has been expanded. In recent years there has been less automatic deference to security claims than in the early years of statehood.

In conclusion, the balance between the demands of security and the ideals of law and liberty is at least as problematic in Israel as in any other democratic state. Given the circumstances, Israel may even represent the extreme test case of such balancing. In the event, there are good arguments for criticizing the weight assigned to emergency powers and for wishing the balance moved somewhat in the opposite direction. But it is important to bear in mind that an act of balancing is taking place.

The picture up to the Six-Day War, therefore, was one of unusual continuity, despite (or because of) the extreme pressure under which the government operated. Israel had one of the few regimes—practically the only one in the region—that could claim such stability in leadership and policy over such a long period. But appearances were deceptive. Underneath the surface were forces for change that would eventually shatter the hold of the Labor Zionist establishment and call into question Israel’s commitment to the civic, liberal, universalist conception of state-building.

Notes

6. The Erosion of Ideology

By the late 1960s Israeli politics was headed for fundamental change. But this is said with the advantage of hindsight; few if any observers foresaw the coming whirlwind at the time. As late as 1971, one of the more perceptive Israeli analysts could still claim that Israeli youth were more dovish than their elders and that “no liberal-centrist or right-wing opposition is likely to gain power within the foreseeable future.” ^[1] Neither the stunning victory of the 1967 war nor the demoralizing impact of the 1973 war left a sense that basic transformations were underway.

Yet in retrospect the signs of erosion were evident. As time passed, the hold of ideology in daily life was being progressively loosened (in part because governmental services were replacing party functions). The gap between a secularized socialist elite, mainly of Eastern European origin, and a significantly more traditional public, much of it of Middle Eastern origin, was bound to assert itself. But the dominant elite did not bridge the generation gap within its own ranks, let alone reach out to alienated nonEuropean and religious Jews.

Gradually a viable option to Mapai and its Labor Zionist allies emerged. The 1967 war, by reviving dormant territorial issues, contributed to the rise of the nationalist right’s agenda, and the general malaise following the 1973 war cast a giant shadow over Labor’s aura of invincibility. The culmination came in 1977, when the inconceivable occurred and a center-right government came to power after half a century of Labor Zionist hegemony.^[2]

What was the significance of this “upheaval” in Israeli politics? Can it be seen as a reassertion of tradition, as the tide of universalizing ideology ebbed and those untouched by it reclaimed the center of national life? Certainly Middle Eastern and religious Jews became more active, more visible, and more influential in politics. The majoritarian features of the early statehood period receded as political parties themselves became less coherent, as their role in the system declined, and as autonomous (and often extraparliamentary) groups made their weight felt. More fundamentally, there was increased challenge to Western liberal and rationalist values and a resurgence of particularistic thinking. The post-1977 period was dominated, some believed, by a “New Zionism” rooted in primordial religious and ethnic sentiments and focused on exclusivist territorial claims. There was concern, as described in chapter 1, that this reassertion of tradition was undermining the strength of democracy.

The overall picture, however, was not so simple. Other trends, connected directly neither to tradition nor to ideology, were also at work in Israel. Modernization brought new technologies, new social patterns, penetration of Westernization in many guises, and new styles of mass politics in public life. Though these social forces contributed mightily to the undermining of classic Zionist ideologies, they also constituted a challenge to tradition no less potent than secular ideology at its peak. Thus, even while traditional forces were reemerging, the process of synthesis between Jewish particularism and universalistic influences continued. But the universalizing pressures came from “modernity” itself more than from spent or declining ideological fervor.

Decline of the Classic Consensus

Protracted conflict imposes costs on any political system; emergency measures become routinized and security concerns become the defining issues in politics. In Israel, the left-right spectrum is defined mostly by security and foreign policy positions rather than by socioeconomic issues. In 1977 one survey found no difference between the self-identified left and the self-identified right in Israel regarding socioeconomic gaps.^[3] Economic issues became blurred as security concerns dominated political debate. In such a situation, the appeal of an ideology based on class interests is undercut by the change in public priorities.

Paradoxically, the improvement in Israel’s security brought about by the 1967 war also helped to undermine Labor by removing one of the stronger motives to stand behind the existing government. As the risk of actual physical destruction receded, the need to maintain national unity at all costs also lessened. Security remained a dominant fixation, but there was more willingness to bring differences out into the open and less deference to present policies and leaders. Where choices in the past had been “strategic imperatives,” dictated by circumstances over which Israel had no control, more policy options were now available. Sheer survival was no longer the yardstick of all policy.

By the end of the 1970s, with a reduction of the Soviet role in the region and the signing of the Egyptian peace treaty, Israel’s security position was better than it had ever been. The 1982 attack on the PLO in southern Lebanon and the decision to pursue the PLO forces to Beirut represented policy choices that, wise or unwise, would have been impossible in an earlier period. The Lebanon campaign was, as many Israelis saw it, the nation’s first “optional” war—one that policymakers could have chosen to fight at a different time, or in a different way, or not at all.

With more leeway on security issues, the gap between a leftist elite and a more centrist electorate became more visible. In the 1960s the electorate was voting to the left of its opinions on the issues.^[4] A large part of the public, despite support of Labor Zionist parties at the polls, had not been swept away by Western socialist or liberal visions. With regard to religious belief the public as a whole was much more traditional than the customary vote of about 15 percent for religious parties would indicate. Surveys done during the 1960s and 1970s showed that up to 30 percent observed most religious law, while an even larger percentage considered itself “traditional” if not wholly observant, and only a minority considered itself wholly secular.^[5]

The gap was closing, however. From the 1950s there was a drift of religious Zionist voters to the nationalist right, as the precursor parties of the Likud (rather than Labor Zionist parties) became their preferred second choice.^[6] Throughout the 1970s, opinions in the Knesset moved to the right.^[7] This reflected both the increased number of Likud members (from twenty-six in 1969 to forty-three in 1977) and the increased hawkishness of the National Religious Party members of parliament.

Contributing to this was another demographic reality. From the 1950s, about half of the electorate consisted of refugees, or the descendants of refugees, from Arab countries. In a pattern common to refugees, these voters tended to be strongly anti-Arab and thus over time increasingly attracted to the more hawkish parties. Having endured as a minority in the Arab world, they saw no injustice in West Bank Arabs continuing to live under Israeli rule.^[8] This tendency was reinforced by the identification of Labor Zionism with the privileged elite and the perception that socialism was an alien, Western doctrine not linked to the Jewish tradition. Jews from Arab lands were still basically tied to the Middle Eastern conception of politics, in which ethnic identity is everything and in which deprivation is seen in relation to established authority. As relative latecomers, the immigrants from Middle East countries had started at the bottom of the ladder and had often been exposed to an attitude of superiority on the part of the “Europeans.” That the Establishment espoused an ideology of equality that favored the downtrodden did not seem to help; the fact was that, whatever its theories, the left was the Establishment. After a period of incubation, alienation from the Labor Establishment grew quickly among the younger Middle Eastern generation that had grown up in Israel.

The Likud was attractive to Middle Eastern Jews because it, too, was “outside” the system. They responded to Begin’s warm appeal on traditional historic and religious grounds, as opposed to the cold rationalism of Western liberalism and socialism represented by the Labor Party. For a time Labor’s superior mobilization of new immigrants, backed by its legitimacy as the ruling party and by Ben-Gurion’s image as the founder of the state, succeeded in stemming the tide. But after Ben-Gurion, and with a second generation raised in Israel under Labor hegemony, the shift to the right become inexorable. While an estimated 35 percent of non-European Jews voted for the Likud in 1969, this rose to 45 percent in 1973, to 56 percent in 1977, and to 69 percent in 1981.^[9]

What happened was the reassertion of human realities. But at the same time, Labor Zionism was losing its vitality. This may be the inevitable fate of all revolutions that have run their course; in any event, even its staunchest supporters admit that Labor Zionist institutions had become bureaucratized and ossified. As a generation of apparatchiks took over from the ideologues, ideas became less important than securing the benefits of power. There was less access to newcomers—the younger generation, Middle Eastern Jews—precisely at a time when expanded access was needed in order to keep Labor Zionism abreast of demographic changes. The dominant elite developed into what Amos Elon called a “Mandarin class,” and when the concept of an “Establishment” was developed in other contexts, the term was translated into Hebrew and applied to the Israeli scene with no loss in translation.^[10]

Symptoms of decay had appeared earlier, when Mapai tore itself apart over the Lavon affair in 1960 to 1961 and 1964 to 1965. This was the first major intraparty issue that did not cut primarily along ideological grounds but was basically a power struggle between party factions (though justified, of course, in ideological language). The unedifying spectacle of “The Affair” undermined Mapai’s claims to moral preeminence and a monopoly on political legitimacy. It could be seen as a “tragedy of success”; Labor Zionism had accomplished its immediate aims and, left with little sense of purpose, sank into a state of organizational sclerosis, surviving in power until 1977 only because no viable alternative emerged before then.^[11]

Like most ossified elites, Labor Zionists experienced a serious problem with succession. The transfer of top positions to the new native-born generation took place only in the 1970s, by which time it was overtaken by more profound changes. But in any event, the younger generation was not well-equipped to carry on. The founding generation had not inculcated its ideology deeply in its successors nor trained them adequately in leadership roles.^[12] In fact this failure was not limited to the education of a new generation of party leaders; it reflected a broader failure in the socialization of youth to Labor Zionist thinking.

In pursuit of mamlachtiut (civic-mindedness), Labor Zionists undercut their own movement by putting national symbols and values ahead of socialist ideology and party institutions. Much of Labor’s ability to recruit new immigrants had been tied to its ability to deliver benefits. Now this dependence—often the only bond to Labor Zionism—was broken by the growth of government services outside the party system. In particular, it is said, the integration of Labor Zionist schools into the state system robbed the movement of the principal means of passing on its distinctive values.^[13] Not only did the new state educational system provide no socialist content, but it was even revised in 1957 to include a “Jewish Consciousness Program” that introduced more particularistic elements into the curriculum.

Secular ideology was under attack on a number of fronts. In 1953, it should be recalled, the integration of the socialist schools into the official network could still be delayed by controversy over the flying of the red flag and the singing of the workers’ anthem on certain days, in schools where a majority of the parents so requested. But the ideologues lost that battle, and advocacy of socialist symbolism in an official setting became passé. Along with most modernizing societies, Israel was experiencing a general decline of ideology as new lifestyles challenged old doctrines. Urbanization and consumerism were replacing agrarian pioneering, and economic rewards were increasingly individual rather than collective.^[14] Also, the fountainhead and reservoir that had continuously replenished the ideological vigor of Zionism no longer existed: Eastern European Jewry, as a meaningful source of inspiration and dedicated adherents, had been destroyed. Without roots in their new environment, and without reinforcement from the point of origin, the transplanted creeds of Eastern Europe withered in the alien and inhospitable soil.

External support and inspiration now came from Western Jews, particularly from the large Jewish community in the United States. There was little support for radical doctrines from these quarters. For that matter, by the time of Stalin and his successors, any refugees reaching Israel from Eastern Europe also tended to be congenitally hostile to anything bearing a socialist label.

The lines of social division that developed in Israel simply did not fit classic Labor Zionist thinking. Labor Zionists were the Establishment and paid the price of power by becoming the target of discontent from below. The discontented, many of them Middle Eastern Jews from traditional backgrounds, interpreted their grievances in communal terms or as resentment of established authority rather than in terms of class. In any event, most of the country’s capital investment was in state or Histadrut hands, making organization of workers against private interests very secondary. The one respect in which Labor’s worldview coincided with popular expectations was in the provision of a broad range of governmental services, but this welfare statism was accepted by most groups in Israeli politics.^[15] All in all, socialist ideology appeared increasingly irrelevant to Israel’s circumstances, and in time voting patterns became the reverse of what class analysis would predict: Labor veterans moved into the middle class and working-class voters turned to the right.

The erosion of ideology had many expressions. Among the youth, even on kibbutzim, the phrase “preaching Zionism” became a term of derision.^[16] The influence of the kibbutz model receded, after its image of agrarian pioneering and collective endeavor had once enjoyed ideological supremacy. The prestige of middle-class occupations rose; by 1976 the highest-status professions in public opinion were biologists, dentists, lawyers, and judges, while kibbutz officials ranked far down in the list.^[17] Inequality increased, moving Israel from one of the most egalitarian social structures in the world to a pattern more typical of developed countries, even as class consciousness actually decreased.^[18]

Consequently, party- and movement-affiliated institutions declined or became less doctrinaire. The party press was supplanted by independent mass circulation newspapers. Affiliated youth movements, which had been a critical focus of political socialization, declined in importance. Parties themselves moved away from identification with a particular segment of society, becoming more heterogeneous in their composition and appeal. Mapai moved from a predominantly agricultural and pioneering orientation to a largely urban base, drawing in members of the growing middle class. The parties on the right (and especially Herut, with its populist streak) made inroads among the working-class population.^[19]

The ideological loosening made it easier for parties to coalesce into larger blocs for electoral purposes, presenting a common list to the electorate. Mapai, Ahdut Ha’avoda, and Rafi (a splinter party established by Ben-Gurion toward the end of his career) merged to form the Israel Labor Party in 1968. From 1969 to 1984, the Labor Party and Mapam presented a single list (the Alignment) in all Israeli elections. The Liberals and Herut formed an electoral list (Gahal) in 1965, and in 1973 this was expanded, with the addition of some smaller parties, to establish the Likud (Unity). In all of this, cooperating parties overcame ideological differences that in an earlier period would have been considered insuperable.

By greatly enlarging the territory under Israeli control, the 1967 war also dealt a severe blow to the classic consensus (see Map 3). This consensus assumed that the 1948 war had settled not only the question of Israel’s existence but also its borders and its character as a predominantly Jewish state. Of course some remained committed in theory to a claim to all of historic Eretz Yisrael, taken in practice to mean the British Mandate in Palestine. But this was not an active issue in political debate. If neighboring Arab states had at the time offered to conclude a peace treaty based on the existing borders (the armistice lines of 1949), a majority in Israel would have readily agreed. The general expectation then was that peace would evolve along these lines, with Jordan assimilating the West Bank and becoming the de facto Palestinian state.

Map 3. Israeli-controlled Territories, 1967

What the 1967 war did, in Avner Yaniv’s words, was “to salvage from oblivion the twin ghosts of Jewish maximalism and Palestinian particularism.” ^[20] Israel now occupied all of Mandatory Palestine, plus Egyptian Sinai in the south and the Syrian Golan Heights in the north. The war brought to life contentious questions that had been locked in cold storage for twenty years. These questions involved not just the future of territories occupied in war, but the very nature of Israel itself: a relatively compact and homogeneous state with a predominantly Jewish character, or a binational state of two peoples.^[21]

Initially, Mapai/Labor policy continued the unofficial preference for a resolution based on de facto division of Palestine with Jordan. It was clearly contemplated that the West Bank (except for East Jerusalem and some minor claims) would be returned to Jordan in exchange for a peace treaty, and likewise the Sinai Peninsula would be restored to Egypt in exchange for a peace treaty, while the Golan Heights would be retained by Israel because of its strategic importance and because of Syrian intransigence. In line with these intentions, the Israeli government adopted a policy of minimal interference in the daily lives of the West Bank population, with one important exception: prohibition of local political organization, since development of a West Bank leadership would undercut the strategy of resolving the conflict by cutting a deal with Jordan.

Labor Zionists also found it hard to reverse past habits. The strength of “practical” Zionism, in the socialist version, had been its success in grassroots settlement, in creating facts on the ground. This had not ceased in 1948; efforts simply shifted to previously unsettled areas within the new armistice lines. Thus many Labor Zionists approached the results of the 1967 war in a similar frame of mind, falling back into a settlement mode. The government itself opened the door by establishing settlements in areas where border changes were anticipated, either for security reasons (the Golan Heights and the Jordan Valley) or because of Jewish settlement there before 1948 (East Jerusalem, the Etzion bloc of settlements near Bethlehem). Regarding the West Bank, this evolved into what became known as the Allon Plan, according to which Israel would establish a security frontier on the Jordan River, but most of the West Bank and nearly all of its Arab population would be demilitarized and returned to Jordan, to which it would be connected by a corridor through the Israeli security belt.^[22]

Mapai/Labor also compromised its policy by hitching its wagon to Moshe Dayan, an authentic national hero who had been made minister of defense at the peak of the 1967 crisis and emerged from the victory in a powerful position. Dayan had his own program, enunciated in various versions at various times, for maintaining a permanent Israeli presence in the West Bank. This involved using the West Bank as an opening to the Arab world by a policy of “open bridges” between the West Bank and Jordan, and integrating the West Bank economy and infrastructure with those of Israel.^[23]

Thus the Labor Party itself laid the foundation for a program of permanent Israel control of the West Bank (or Judea and Samaria, as traditionally known). Backed by public opinion and legitimized by the actions of the Labor Party, the nationalist right was revitalized and provided with a galvanizing issue ideal to its purposes. It could even appropriate one of Labor’s traditional methods—grassroots settlement activity—in pursuit of its own maximalist aims, over the opposition of Labor. At the same time, Labor faced the challenges of a new era in a state of unilateral intellectual and ideological disarmament.

As Labor’s fortunes declined, the Yom Kippur War of 1973 dealt a punishing blow to public confidence in its ability to lead. As in all wars, there was at first a surge of unity behind the government, which enabled Labor to emerge relatively undamaged in the Knesset elections held a few weeks afterward. But the shock of the unanticipated Egyptian and Syrian attack and initial successes, together with the high casualty rate, undermined Labor’s image as the party that had always successfully defended national security. A deep sense of malaise and demoralization pervaded the nation, and Labor’s leadership came to represent complacency, deterioration, and lack of clear direction. On the eve of the 1973 war, around 60 percent of the Israeli public had perceived the general situation in Israel as positive; after the war, and throughout the 1974–1977 period, this dropped to 10 to 20 percent.^[24]

The changing climate finally triggered the long-expected “changing of the guard” to a new generation of Labor leadership (Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Yigal Allon). But the Rabin government, in the 1974–1977 period, was unable to reverse the trends already set in motion. Labor continued to suffer from the lack of a sense of direction, which was aggravated by bitter personal rivalries between Rabin and Peres. The general malaise was compounded by scandals in the ruling party, further strengthening the image of a leadership corrupted by its lengthy tenure in office. The evaluation of government performance, which had been 90 percent positive in 1967, had plummeted to 15 percent by mid-1977.^[25]

Nevertheless, there was little expectation that the governing party would be cast into the wilderness. It might very well be weakened by the elections, as an angry electorate punished it for its sins, but it was still inconceivable that it would not continue as the core of the Israeli government.^[26] However, the visible and not so visible developments that converged in May 1977 changed the face of Israeli politics irrevocably. After half a century on the outside, the Revisionist Zionists, under Menachem Begin, came to power.

The 1977 Likud victory marked in a dramatic way the broadening of the range of difference in relevant political debate, even as a general weakening of ideology was taking place on most fronts. A convergence of developments had undermined prevailing patterns of accommodation and sharpened the differences on standing policy issues. There were, to be sure, still many points of consensus: the primacy of security, dedication to nation-building, social and economic integration (at least within the Jewish community), and welfare statism. But there were also deepening divisions in the body politic, expressed in “a growing intolerance of opponents” and tendencies “to delegitimize them in terms of the seemingly common Zionist themes. . . .” ^[27] There was need of a new paradigm to describe Israeli society and politics, as the classic Zionist vision of the Jewish state—or at least its Labor Zionist version—became increasingly irrelevant. Such a new paradigm would need to encompass not only the emerging nationalist right but also the more assertive and visible religious communities, both Zionist and haredi (ultra-Orthodox) and—given the demographic realities since 1967—the growing Arab populations both in Israel and in the occupied territories.

There was a loss of consensus on the most basic issue: the very definition of the state that Zionism pursued. The nationalist right reopened the territorial issue and raised the prospect of a state without a Jewish majority. The gulf that opened between competing territorial and demographic conceptions was reinforced and sharpened by an overlapping communal (Ashkenazi-Sephardi) division that had not been politically significant before. The new combination of religion and nationalism, as expressed by the hawkishness of the National Religious Party and the activities of Gush Emunim and similar groups, made political compromise more difficult to achieve. The larger political role of the haredi community added to this difficulty by bringing to the political center groups that continued to challenge basic Zionist premises. Finally, at about the same time the Arab citizens of Israel, who had been politically quiescent for two decades, began to demonstrate increasing political consciousness and sophistication in pursuing their demands through the system (see chapter 9). All in all, the Israeli political system encompassed an extraordinarily broad spectrum of ideological differences, much broader than that of other democratic states.^[28]

However, this increased pluralism did not lead to an increase of issue dimensions in Israeli politics. In fact, the dominance of the territorial issue actually led to a partial convergence of the three separate political axes of the past. With socialism on the decline, the socioeconomic dimension was subordinated to divisions on foreign policy. Ahdut Ha’avoda followed the lead of its Labor partners on both issues, while the Liberals and Herut overcame their differences on foreign policy. Choice between parties on economic issues became more and more difficult as party positions became incoherent or indistinguishable from each other. At the same time, as the National Religious Party and other religious groups became more hawkish, the religious dimension also came to parallel security issues to some extent. In the words of one analyst, there was a “gradual reduction of the multidimensional character of the political scene.” ^[29] Theoretically this could make it easier to achieve coherent majoritarian government—but not when the divisions on the one overriding issue become insurmountable. In this case, the dominance of one political axis in the system produced polarization and deadlock.

Reassertion of Tradition?

As classic Labor Zionist ideology declined and the somewhat atypical period of mamlachtiut became a memory, it appeared that traditional political habits—protest, civil religiosity, extraparliamentary politics—were reasserting themselves. Can post-1977 Israeli politics be interpreted as a resurgence of tradition? In some respects it can be, but with caution: other forces are also at work, and in any event the end result has not been a triumph of one worldview over another but polarization and stalemate. There has been no dominant consensus to shape the nation’s response on the key issues of territory and security.

Politically, the deadlock was a result of the decline of Labor and the rise of the right. As Table 2 shows, there was a steady upward trend in Likud strength, from thirty-two seats in 1969 (counting the parties that later joined the Likud), to thirty-nine in 1973 and forty-three in 1977. The long-term steady slide of Labor, from fifty-six seats in 1969 to thirty-nine in 1988, is also apparent. But in 1977 this was magnified by the appearance of the Democratic Movement for Change, a reformist movement led by popular military commander and archeologist Yigael Yadin, whose fifteen seats came primarily at Labor’s expense. This, more than its own electoral success, put Likud in a position to form a government in 1977—but given prevailing trends, this would have happened one or two elections later in any event. Once it had happened, however, the election served to legitimate the Likud in the public mind. There was a significant shift in polling data to support of Likud positions, bringing opinion polls and party support into closer correlation. On the eve of the 1977 elections 61 percent of one sample still claimed to be closest to the Labor position on foreign policy, against only 30 percent for Likud. But immediately after the election and before any other changes had taken place, the same question drew only a 38 percent support for the Alignment’s foreign policy, while identification with the Likud rose to 53 percent.^[30] This was not just a change in parties but a watershed in Israeli politics. It brought a new orientation, with new values and political symbols, into equal political legitimacy and at least equal electoral potential with Labor Zionism. It marked the emergence of a truly competitive system, with clearly opposed options, as well as Israel’s first successful transfer of power.

The thought that the 1977 elections might have been an aberration was put to rest by the 1981 elections. The Likud continued its slow but steady accretion of strength, gaining an additional five seats over 1977. Furthermore, although the Likud had only a one-vote edge, the remaining seats were held by parties that, by and large, preferred Likud to Labor (religious and nationalist parties accounting for sixteen of the twenty-five seats). Ironically, the election left the religious parties in a better bargaining position, despite a drop in seats, because of the close balance between the two major blocs.

Nevertheless, Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir (who had succeeded Menachem Begin in September 1983) appeared in a weak position when he was forced to call elections a year early, in July 1984. By this time the inflation rate was estimated at over 400 percent, and Israeli forces were still bogged down in southern Lebanon following the controversial Israeli invasion of that country in 1982. Public opinion polls in the early phase of the campaign predicted a decisive Labor victory—as they had in 1981. In any event, it was widely expected that the election would provide a clear mandate to one or the other of the two major blocs and end the stalemate between the two opposed conceptions that they represented.

This was not to be, however. In defiance of expectations, the 1984 elections produced a balance even more delicate than 1981, forcing Labor and Likud to embark on an era of power-sharing and mutual veto. While consensus on some pressing domestic issues—primarily the economy—proved to be within reach of the two blocs, their shared control of foreign and defense policy was marked by mutual paralysis and rejection of any new departures. To the surprise of most observers and despite repeated threats of collapse, this rickety structure actually lasted out its term of office. In part this could be attributed to the inability of either bloc to form a government on its own and the unwillingness of key parties, at crucial junctures, to face new elections. But it also represented recognition of the need for unity in addressing the country’s economic crisis, a task that could not be accomplished unless both major blocs were willing to share the onus of instituting the tough and unpopular measures required.

Paralysis in foreign policy seemed to be a price most Israelis were willing to pay in return for unity on economic and other domestic matters. It was also a luxury they could afford so long as no credible Palestinian negotiating partner, committed to coexistence with Israel, emerged. The government was thus under little domestic pressure, and only minimal international pressure, to offer any major concessions. In the mid-1980s, international conditions also favored inaction: the Iran-Iraq war preoccupied much of the Arab world, and Egypt was reintegrating back into the Arab fold without withdrawing from the Egypt-Israel peace treaty (though this remained a “cold” peace in most respects). These conditions changed, however, with the onset of sustained Arab unrest (the intifada) in the occupied territories from the end of 1987.

The intifada, unlike the previous sporadic rioting against Israel’s control of the territories, brought about a lasting change on this front. It threatened the country’s international standing and its internal cohesion, posing a sharp challenge that the country’s deadlocked political system was ill equipped to handle. It did not become a blatantly partisan issue, since Labor shared responsibility with Likud, but the future of the territories could no longer be shelved as a political issue. In this context, the scheduled elections of November 1, 1988, like those of 1984, were again a potential turning point that turned nowhere: the two blocs again emerged nearly equal in the number of seats won. But the Likud had a slight edge in postelection bargaining because the balance was held by a reinvigorated religious bloc with eighteen of the 120 Knesset seats. Some of the religious parties were closer to the Likud position on foreign policy and defense, and none of them were likely to sit in the same government with Labor’s secular leftist partners. As a result, Labor was forced to agree to a renewed National Unity Government on less-than-equal terms, with Shamir projected as prime minister for the full four-year term of office.

Basic disagreement over foreign policy still deadlocked the government, despite Shamir’s stronger position. This became more critical after December 1988, when PLO leader Yasir Arafat made his highly publicized declaration renouncing terrorism and calling for a negotiated peace based on coexistence of Israel and a Palestinian state. This statement changed the rules of the diplomatic game, increasing pressure on Israel for something other than the standard negative response. Also, the intifada was having a mixed impact on Israeli opinion: while the public continued to favor severe measures against violence in the territories, there was also a slight but measurable shift in a dovish direction on key long-term questions in Arab-Israeli relations.

By early 1990, the popularity of the National Unity Government had plummeted to the point that three-quarters of the public were unhappy with it.^[31] Finally, in March Labor Party leader (and Finance Minister) Peres succeeded in bringing down the government on a no-confidence vote. Bringing down the government did not mean, however, that Peres could offer a viable alternative. After long and intricate maneuvering, Shamir emerged as head of a “narrow” Likud-led government with a bare majority, marking the end of five and a half years of power-sharing by the two major blocs. But this government was also unable to pursue a coherent policy or serve out its full term of office. Shamir’s agreement to participate in the U.S.-initiated peace talks that began in October 1991 led to the defection of the smaller right-wing parties and to the calling of early elections in June 1992.

The 1992 elections produced a narrow margin of sixty-one seats for Labor together with other parties on the left, a “blocking majority” that forestalled formation of another right-religious coalition. On the basis of this slim edge, the Labor-led government of Prime Minister Rabin and Foreign Minister Peres opened up direct negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), initiating a process that led to the Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles in September 1993, agreement on Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and Jericho in May 1994, and an interim agreement on Palestinian autonomy in October 1995 (see chapter 10). But Israel remained deeply divided between a secular, modernizing, more dovish half and a traditional, conservative, more hawkish half. This was underlined by the 1996 elections where for the first time the electorate had to choose directly between two candidates for prime minister and in which Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu defeated Labor’s Peres by less than 1 percent of the vote.

The delicacy of the political balance meant that while the public did overwhelmingly support the idea of a peace process, there was still no clear consensus on the nature of the peace. Labor and Likud offered clearly different visions of an overall settlement of the Arab-Israel conflict. The Likud consistently advocated the Israeli right to remain in Judea and Samaria and to expand Jewish settlement there; there would be no Arab sovereignty west of the Jordan River, and Arabs living there would be offered autonomy as individuals but not as a nationality or by territorial definition. Peace would be finalized by the simple signing of peace treaties with bordering Arab states on the basis of existing lines of demarcation. Labor leaders called for some amendment of the pre-1967 borders in Israel’s favor, basically on strategic grounds, but favored withdrawing Israeli control over most of the West Bank in the framework of a permanent peace that would include demilitarization of the returned territory. Initially this meant the “Jordanian option,” which would avoid a Palestinian state by inviting King Hussein back into the West Bank. But in July 1988, King Hussein relinquished all claim to the West Bank and to speaking for Arabs living there, and Labor was eventually forced to deal with the PLO as the only credible representative of the Palestinians.

On the surface, the Likud’s conception was no less ideological than the Labor version: it proclaimed Revisionist tenets of the Jewish right to the entire Land of Israel and a veneration of ethnicity typical of modern nationalism (as described in chapter 3). In this sense, the post-1977 division simply marked the renewal of the intense ideological conflict of the pre-state period, which had been muffled in the first two decades of statehood. But the worldview represented by Menachem Begin also incorporated some new elements, leading some to describe it as a “New Zionism” or as “neoRevisionism.” In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the message became much more emotional, with an even stronger focus on assertive self-defense and a defiant rejection of the outside world.^[32]

Revisionism in any variant was, of course, more receptive to claims of Jewish tradition than Labor Zionism had ever been. It embodied a militant and unapologetic affirmation of historical and ethnic roots and the rejection (in theory) of “non-Jewish” secular doctrines. Religious symbolism was assimilated and adapted to a nationalist ethos, creating a new “civil religion” synthesizing these two elements.^[33] In its more extreme manifestations, it could even be seen as an atavistic response to modernity, similar to Islamic fundamentalism in rejecting the modern world and calling for a return to one’s own roots.

Modernized secular Zionists saw this as a huge step backward. Uniqueness, rather than normalization, was becoming the watchword. Diaspora mentality “was forcefully returning, uninvited, to the house which Zionism built.” ^[34] Instead of becoming a nation like other nations, Israelis were again seeing themselves, in the words of Balaam’s blessing, as “a people who shall dwell alone” (Numbers 23:9). Israel was moving from a universalistic, secular, rational, civic orientation to one that was particularistic, religious, mystical, and primordial. It was reverting from an “Israeli” outlook, embodied in the concept of the State of Israel, back to a more “Jewish” self-identity, tied to the idea of Eretz Yisrael.^[35] There was a reassertion of tradition after an interlude during which it had been temporarily submerged by a now-receding wave of secular ideology.

The reassertion of tradition could be seen on a number of fronts, from a strengthening of Jewish studies in secular schools to a revival of femininity in daily life. The impact on the role of women is especially instructive. Labor Zionism had taken pride in its progressive stance on women’s issues, reflected in such images as women serving alongside men in the army and Golda Meir’s election as one of the first women heads of government in the world. In truth these images were always overdrawn; Israel was in the forefront as far as legal equality was concerned but lagged behind many other states regarding de facto equality in public life, in the marketplace, and in society at large. Even some of the advances made were rolled back as progressive ideology yielded ground to more traditional attitudes associated with growing religiosity or imported non-Western folkways. For example, the representation of women in the Knesset fell from twelve seats in 1948 (and a high of thirteen in 1955) to a low of seven seats in 1988 and eight seats in 1996.

Religious revivalism and messianism were important dimensions of the new intellectual climate. The establishment of a separate state religious school system, as part of a network of institutions tied to the National Religious Party, had reinforced a distinct religious-Zionist subculture within Israeli society. The younger generation that passed through this network underwent intense socialization into the religious interpretation of Zionism. They served as the basis for Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), the group that spearheaded the establishment of Jewish settlements throughout the occupied territories.

Gush Emunim was not simply a religious faction but represented more broadly a “revitalization” movement of a type not unknown elsewhere.^[36] In reaction to the threat of modern secular culture, such movements seek to revive traditional patterns (as they conceive those patterns). Gush Emunim adherents felt that the movement was acting to realize a divine purpose and that the return of Jews to Eretz Yisrael was the beginning of the final redemption for Jews and for mankind. In seeking to reclaim the entire Jewish homeland, therefore, they were performing a sacred mission. They did not seek the normalization of Jews among the family of nations but rather a return to the concept of chosenness that secular Zionists had tried to abandon. Jews, in this view, have a unique attachment to Eretz Yisrael that transcends the kinds of claims others may have there. The Western civic ideal is not applicable: equality among different peoples is not possible in these circumstances, and democracy is secondary to national rights. Arabs who live in Eretz Yisrael should have full civic rights only if they accept the essential Jewishness of the state; otherwise, they must choose between living there peacefully without full rights, or leaving.

Gush Emunim served as the ideological vanguard of the New Zionism, as the main force behind the settlement movement in the territories, and as a bridge between religious and secular nationalists. In some ways, it was co-opted and used by the leadership of Likud, which shared most of its immediate goals. In another sense, this connection with the ruling party gave Gush Emunim and the settlement movement an influence in public life well beyond what would be expected from the actual size of their membership. The influence of Gush Emunim-style nationalist ideology cannot account, however, for all of the overlap between religious self-identity and support of more hawkish parties. The core supporters of Gush Emunim, and the ideological expressions of nationalism generally, came disproportionately from Jews of European background. The religious orientation of Middle Eastern Jews is generally less doctrinaire and less messianic. In the style of the Middle East, religion is more a matter of traditions and customs tied to group identity than of inviolable sacred ideology. Religious Jews of Middle Eastern background were drawn to the Likud and other secular nationalist parties more by a general sense of ethnic particularism than by ideological fervor. But they were still predisposed more to support of Likud than of Labor, with its secular socialism and Western universalism.

This visceral attraction of Revisionism to many less Westernized Jews, religious and nonreligious, was apparent in some early successes. For example, the first place where the Revisionists gained a majority in a Zionist movement branch was in Tunis, in 1928.^[37] This tendency was obscured in the early statehood period, for reasons already outlined (above and chapter 4). But it emerged more strongly as time passed, reinforced by the hostility of refugees toward their lands of origin. Many Middle Eastern Jews related easily to Menachem Begin’s emotional appeal to ethnic sentiment and his unapologetic defense of Jewishness. Middle Eastern Jews also shared with the Likud (before 1977) common ground as outsiders facing a haughty and patronizing Labor Establishment.

The appeal of the right to Middle Eastern Jewish voters was not, therefore, ideological or intellectual primarily, but more attitudinal and emotional. Support of the Likud was a way of breaking the hegemony of a Western-oriented elite, of asserting full and equal membership in Israeli society, and even of turning the tables on those who had been disdainful of them (now it was Labor Zionists who were “less Zionist”). Belief in the historical or God-given right to the entire Land of Israel was less central to this than the social and demographic realities that had shaped the historical experience of Israelis from non-European lands.^[38]

The loss of a dominant consensus meant, inevitably, the loss of coherence and strong direction in government. Though one bloc might control the government, it held no monopoly on legitimacy and its ability to make basic changes was limited. There were more autonomous forces to deal with, as new organizations and groups appeared to represent their own interests. The role of parties was weakened, and the cabinet was less able to act with unity and decisiveness. In some ways, these trends marked the reemergence of the pre-state coalition tradition, when power-sharing arrangements were broad and shallow with much less coalition discipline. There was also less coherence within the parties, however, as the hold of ideological camps and movements loosened. In a sense, what was happening was what Peter Medding has called “the breakthrough of society.” ^[39] This moved Israeli politics closer to underlying human realities and fostered the reemergence of pre-civic patterns of behavior; in the words of one commentator, the loss of governmental coherence was “taking us back to the shtetl” (the Jewish village of Eastern Europe).^[40]

The pattern of decentralized bargaining among semiautonomous agencies has emerged even more strongly. Kupat Holim Klalit (the Sick Fund of the Histadrut), which had been a direct participant in making health policy when the Labor Party was in power, became a “veto group” in the setting of that policy.^[41] A proposal for a five-day work week was the subject of negotiations between the Histadrut and the Ministry of Finance. Reforms in energy policy were negotiated among the Ministry of Energy, the three major oil companies, and the corporation operating the refineries. The transfer of absorption services for new immigrants from the Jewish Agency to the government was the subject of difficult negotiations between the agency and the Ministry of Absorption, with the Ministry of Finance also involved. The examples could be multiplied extensively, involving a variety of public, semipublic, and private bodies according to the subject involved.

As a result of frustration over their inability to influence policy, Israelis turned—or, perhaps more accurately, returned—increasingly to unofficial and unstructured channels of political action. The level of protest and other forms of direct action had as noted been relatively low during the period of state-building on the civic model. But from the early 1970s there was a steep rise in direct public participation (or “hyper-participation”) in politics, creating greater democracy (in a basic sense) at the cost of greater discord and disorder. As Itzhak Galnoor summarized the situation, “there has been…increased committed participation and more direct impact on steering, accompanied by less stability and greater difficulties in governing.” ^[42] In short, by the 1980s the incidence of protest and demonstration in Israel surpassed that of almost any other democratic regime.

As measured by Sam Lehman-Wilzig, the frequency of “protest events” in Israel can be divided into four distinct periods. During the first six years of statehood, despite the enormous problems of state-building and mass immigration, there were on the average only fifty-four significant protests or demonstrations annually. With improvement in the economic situation and greater overall stability, this decreased to an average of thirty-nine protest events per year in the domestically quiescent period of 1955–1970. Beginning in 1971—a year marked by the end of an external threat (the war of attrition) and the breakup of the National Unity Government that had ruled since the eve of the 1967 war—the number of protests and demonstrations tripled to an average of 122 per year over the next eight years. At that point, corresponding with the Egyptian peace treaty and the onset of triple-digit inflation, this level of protest almost doubled again, to an average of 202 annually during the following eight years.^[43] In 1986 Lehman-Wilzig concluded that Israel was “the most protest-oriented polity in the democratic world today,” pointing out a 1981 survey which showed that 21.5 percent of Israelis had taken part in a protest event while the highest proportion anywhere else was 11 percent, in the United States.^[44] Gadi Wolfsfeld, comparing Israel to eight other democratic states, found that only in Italy had a higher percentage of the public participated in a demonstration.^[45] In this light, perhaps the most symptomatic political event of post-1977 Israel was the 1982 demonstration by an estimated 400,000 protesters—nearly 20 percent of the country’s adult population—demanding an official inquiry into the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon (a demand that the government was forced to meet).

In these “old-new” patterns of direct action and confrontational politics, as with traditional Jewish politics, the prevalence of informal bargaining and unclear lines of authority led competing groups and interests to resort to tactics outside of normal procedure. Linking this contemporary surge of protest to classical Jewish “oppositionism,” Lehman-Wilzig argues that “the modern secular State of Israel may be somewhat of a novum in Jewish political history, but the political culture animating it has roots deep in the past.” ^[46]

The growing frustration with existing channels of political communication and influence, in the 1970s and 1989s, was reflected in the declining role of parties. From Zionism’s earliest days parties had been the dominant channels in politics. But after 1948 the role of parties was undercut by the development of state institutions and bureaucracy, vast changes in demography, growing social and economic complexity, generational change, and the overall decline of ideology. One clear index of this development is the decline in party membership: in the mid-1950s over one-quarter of the Israeli population were members of a political party, but this figure declined to 18 percent in 1969, 13 percent in 1977, and only 8 percent in 1988.^[47]

Together with this came a devastating increase in the percentage of those surveyed who said the government was performing “poorly” or “very poorly,” from only 8 percent in 1967 to 81 percent in 1977 (and with similar high percentages for Likud governments in the 1980s).^[48] Public frustration with existing channels led to more direct forms of communication, whether as protest or other forms of direct action. It was “the lack of formal opportunities for political communication” or the “blocked opportunities” that lay behind the resort to venerable patterns of confrontational politics. When asked to identify the reasons for Israel’s high level of protest activity, the leading explanation chosen by Israeli respondents was that “the citizen does not have enough other ways to express himself to the authorities.” ^[49]

There were of course other circumstances that pushed politics into irregular channels. The 1967 war had put on the table issues upon which there was deep division and toward which some groups put principle ahead of adherence to procedure. At the same time, the war also created greater room for such debate by reducing security fears that normally impelled Israelis to unite and submerge their differences. In addition, the second generation from the great influx of Middle Eastern Jews in the 1950s, born or raised in Israel, was less hesitant than its parents in challenging inequities, and this generation was coming to political maturity. Finally, modernization also reinforced the return of extraparliamentary politics; in particular, the introduction of television in the late 1960s greatly enlarged the potential of public drama as a means of getting the attention of nonresponsive leaders.

While there is something “democratic” about direct public involvement on the political stage, there are also drawbacks. As Wolfsfeld puts it, “Israel has developed a participatory democracy, but the modes of participation leave something to be desired.” ^[50] Politics conducted in the street tends to be episodic, reactive, negative, and something of a blunt instrument. Rewards go to those groups that are best organized, most disruptive, and least ready to compromise, which hardly encourages a civil political discourse. Even in the best circumstances there is a potential threat of violence. Finally, increased recourse to such methods undercuts the ordinary processes of government and fosters disrespect for regular procedures and the rule of law.

All of this is part of a process in which the centralization of the system is challenged and a diffusion of power is taking place. Even in the area of local government, usually considered the most centralized feature of the Israeli system, there has been considerable diffusion of power. As local governments have almost no restriction on their borrowing, they often go deeply into debt and then bargain with the state for funds to repay the loans. So long as local expenditures do not violate state policy, the state usually ends up covering them (the Knesset passed a law to prohibit such practices, but it has not been effective). Even more importantly, there has been a trend in some of the larger municipalities toward increasing financial independence by increasing local taxes and forgoing the fiscal support of the national government upon which they had depended in the past.^[51]

More is involved here than protest plain and simple; the diffusion of power and expansion of public involvement extend to other ways of bypassing formal channels of government. In this broader sense, it could be said that Israelis have a penchant for direct action as part of the informal bargaining that takes place. Perhaps this can best be seen by citing the direct actions reported in the Israeli press during one randomly chosen week:

A right-wing group blocks the road between Gaza and Israel with burning tires in order to protest the entrance of Arab labor to Israel.

Na’amat, the women’s division of the Histadrut, conducts a national “referendum” on the issue of economic equality for women.

Young Labor Party activists bring sacks of garbage to the twelfth-floor office of Tel Aviv’s Likud mayor as a strike of municipal sanitation workers continues.

Tel Aviv’s striking garbage collectors try to physically block the work of private contractors hired to remove the accumulated refuse.

Parents and children in a Jerusalem neighborhood stage an unlicensed demonstrationto demand installation of traffic lights in a busy intersection (licenses to demonstrate are usually given for the asking).

Also in Jerusalem, members of a right-wing group try to disrupt an open-air performance of a play they deem objectionable.

A construction firm in Haifa occupies a building it has built for the municipality and refuses to transfer possession until its financial claims are settled.

The municipal offices of Yokne’am, a development town, shut down for two hours to protest the loss of jobs at a local factory.

Eighth-graders in Kiryat Shmonah barricade themselves on the upper floor of their school building following cancellation of a class trip.

A national protest meeting is held in Jerusalem to press Bezek, the government communications company, to remedy defective telephone service.

Right-wing demonstrators block a convoy of vehicles, organized by left-wing groups, that is carrying food supplies into the Gaza strip during a curfew there.^[52]

Another dimension of the “old-new” pattern of direct action was the establishment of alternative social and economic networks. The Israeli public has often organized its own informal systems to address unmet needs. Under this rubric are phenomena as varied as the settlers’ movement in the occupied territories, pirate cable television (operating, at one time, in a quarter of Israel’s households), the black market, and private health insurance plans. In the 1970s and 1980s budgetary pressures forced serious cutbacks in government spending, leading to the emergence of “gray education” and “gray medicine” as families made their own arrangements for additional schooling or medical treatment. Likewise, dissatisfaction with police protection sparked an explosion of private security forces, which by the late 1980s outnumbered Israeli police three to one; even in the isolated haredi community, residents organized civil patrols to secure the safety of the streets.^[53]

Another “old-new” pattern was the tendency to illegalism, or an attitude of expediency toward the law, a tendency which “is nourished by the venerable tradition of the shtetl.” ^[54] During the Ben-Gurion period, this tendency remained largely under the surface as the government promoted its version of mamlachtiut, or civic-mindedness, as a cure for age-old habits of circumventing unwanted authority. After Ben-Gurion left the scene, familiar attitudes came back into the open as public scandals multiplied and corruption at higher levels became increasingly open. It appeared that the exploitation of a public position for private or party needs was “almost legitimate,” or so widespread that no guilt was really involved. As extraparliamentary politics became more common, violations of the law by extreme movements were opposed only by political enemies; few figures in public life condemned the illegal acts of groups with which they sympathized.^[55] The expansion of protest politics involved a paradox: greater acceptance of the democratic right of protest, but consequently a lessening of respect for orderly procedure and the general rule of law.^[56]

To what extent can a decline in support for democratic values be documented? As summarized in chapter 1, the evidence is mixed:

1. Respect for political parties, the media, and some other institutions in democratic politics is remarkably low, though not substantially different from some other democratic nations.
2. A significant part of the public thinks that Israel is “too democratic,” and such attitudes tend to increase with greater religiosity and decrease with greater education. Again, this is not radically different from other democracies, though Israel tends to the European approach permitting greater curbs on free speech, in the name of public order, than American thinking would customarily permit.^[57]
3. Where Israeli belief in democracy seems relatively weak is in three particular areas: (a) deference to authority and support of strong leadership, especially when security issues are invoked; (b) sensitivity to the image being projected externally, and consequently demands for controls on the media; and (c) accommodation of non-Jewish minorities on a fair and equal basis. All three of these weaknesses reflect in one way or another the impact or limitations of Jewish historical experience.
4. Israel is characterized by “focused intolerance” toward an Arab minority that is clearly identified and linked with a foreign threat, while democracies such as the United States, with a variety of target groups, demonstrate “pluralistic intolerance.”
5. The intifada or Arab uprising in the occupied territories, from late 1987, led in the short term to demands for tougher policing, but in the long term to greater readiness for compromise (see chapter 10).

The New Zionism never became dominant in the way classical Labor Zionism had been at its peak. Vociferous debate over the future of the territories continued unabated, with the dominant tone in intellectual and academic circles still set by the doves. (The novelist Amos Oz taunted the hawks: “Why are most of the creative people in the country, heaven help us, ‘leftists’? Is it a conspiracy? Has Damascus bought out Hebrew literature lock, stock, and barrel?”)^[58] The political success of the Likud from 1977 to 1992 served to legitimize it as a contender for power, but the effort to substitute Revisionist symbols and myths for established Zionist symbols and myths did not succeed: “The majority of the nation’s educational and cultural elite and leading figures in the media are among the substantial number of Israelis who do not share the cultural definition of political reality staged by the Likud.…” ^[59]

The Likud’s success in pulling even with Labor at the polls was not achieved on the basis of its ideological appeal alone; in fact, the ideology may on balance have been a handicap. There is substantial evidence that many of those voting for the Likud were actually closer to Labor on issues such as the territories.^[60] In other words, by the 1980s the electorate was voting somewhat to the right of its beliefs, just as in the 1950s and 1960s it had voted to the left of its beliefs (see chapter 4). Menachem Begin’s success in attracting votes did not come from his ideology, which he had learned to downplay, but from his appeal to the emotions and sentiments of traditional, religious, and above all Middle Eastern Jews who were alienated from the Labor Zionist Establishment. Begin’s own party, Herut, had by this time completed the transition from ideological movement to modern, bureaucratized political party.^[61]

What we have seen, in sum, is a reassertion of traditional Jewish occupational and social patterns, religious beliefs, and non-European influences that ended the dominance of Labor Zionism. Like other “new societies,” Israel moved from ideology to patterns more reflective of its human and material realities.^[62] There was a weakening of the “movement style of life” and an accentuation of occupational, economic, and ethnic differences.^[63] While politics created society in the yishuv, the more common pattern is now emerging: social realities shape politics.

Economic Transition

Israel’s first twenty-five years also stand apart in economic terms. Before the 1970s, Israel was judged to be one of the world’s true economic success stories. With the help of reparations payments from Germany and private aid from Jewish communities, economic growth averaged around 10 percent a year. This was achieved despite the pressures of massive immigration and a level of defense spending (8 to 10 percent of the gross domestic product, or GDP) heavier than that in any other democratic state. Israel did suffer from a chronic negative balance of trade, as well as an overall negative balance of payments, which helped to fuel a high rate of inflation. Nevertheless, until 1966 taxes were sufficient to cover domestic government spending, and taxes consistently took about a quarter of the GDP—not a particularly heavy burden by Western European standards.^[64]

The wars of 1967 and 1973 ratcheted defense spending up to new levels where it remained stuck for the time being. After 1967 it rose to over 20 percent of GDP and to 28 percent or more after 1973, peaking somewhere above 30 percent (by most calculations) in 1975.^[65] At the same time, with a sixfold increase in world oil prices during this period, the costs of imported energy skyrocketed. Yet there was no offsetting reduction in governmental social spending; in fact pubic services continued to expand, with real spending on health rising 60 percent per capita and on education 80 percent per capita during the 1968–1978 decade. By 1978 Israel ranked fifth in the world in public education expenditure as a proportion of GDP, at 8.5 percent.^[66] Though growth had slowed down by this time, the standard of living continued to rise. The result was “the overburdened polity”: a state with unrealistic goals on one side and limited resources, growing demands, loss of cohesion, and a protracted conflict on the other. Part of this problem was that the decline in the level of ideological commitment left the public less willing to delay personal gratification in order to achieve common goals (as earlier Zionists did).^[67]

Though there were tax increases, they were insufficient to close the broadening gap between revenue and consumption. Many public services were being provided free of charge or well below cost, and reliance on external sources of funding inevitably grew. “A pattern of over-consumption was created”; in other words, the country was simply living beyond its means.^[68] The government’s response to this situation was described by one economist as “schizophrenia”: pressing economic realities were being willfully ignored, and deficit financing was pursued as though large-scale foreign aid and massive borrowing could continue indefinitely into the future.^[69]

The results were entirely predictable. As defense spending, public services, and private consumption all rose, gross investment fell from 33 percent of GDP in the 1973–1975 period to 24 percent in the 1980–1983 period.^[70] The growth rate of the economy fell to an average of 3.2 percent in the 1976–1989 period, with a low point of 1 to 2 percent in the early 1980s.^[71] Israel was not keeping pace with other developed countries; while per capita income stood at 83 percent of the average of the twenty-three most developed economies in 1960, this figure had dropped to 48 percent by 1978.^[72] One index of the underlying problem was the level of governmental expenditure in relation to the size of the economy. The weight of public spending in Israel had always been impressive by world standards, running at around 50 percent of GDP, but by the early 1980s this had risen to 75 percent or more of GDP by most accounts, and for some years and by some measures even exceeded the official GDP.^[73] The difference was made up by borrowing; net external debt increased from $500 million in 1964 to over $17.7 billion in 1983—a 35-fold expansion.

By the mid-1980s inflation was running at a 300–400 percent annual rate. Despite its supposed commitment to a market economy, the Likud after its 1977 victory found itself no more able politically than Labor to tame the runaway economy (indeed, the Likud’s base of support was disproportionately, and paradoxically, among those most dependent on a continuing high level of government subsidies and services). Though taxes had risen from about 25 percent of GDP to around 50 percent and austerity measures were intermittently attempted (only to be abandoned before elections), the economy remained out of kilter. Inevitably, public services began to decline as the crunch grew more severe, contributing to the development of “gray education,” “gray medicine,” and the other alternative private social service networks described above.

The need for a massive restructuring of the economy was one of the major incentives for formation of the National Unity Government (NUG) after the elections of July 1984. This forced the two major blocs to share responsibility for the unpopular steps required, thus removing the issue from politics. After some false starts, the NUG used its emergency powers in July 1985, to impose a sweeping Economic Stabilization Plan (ESP) that was, like most larger economic policies, the result of hard bargaining among the government, labor, and industry. The ESP included dramatic cuts in government spending and subsidies, strict price controls, severe wage restraints, and devaluation, as well as measures to encourage private sector growth and the liberalization of trade restrictions in order to expose more of the economy to open competition. In part, cuts in government spending were made possible by the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, Israel’s most powerful enemy; defense spending had already fallen in the early 1980s to under 20 percent of GDP, and the downward trend continued as Israel disengaged from its heavy involvement in Lebanon in the middle of the decade.

The ESP set in motion a gradual turnaround in the Israeli economy. In the short term, of course, it accelerated the deterioration of public services, as well as threatening economic collapse in the agricultural sector (the kibbutz and moshav movements were overburdened with debt). But it was a textbook success in curtailing inflation to the low double-digits; the annual increase in the consumer price index averaged only 18.5 percent from July 1985 through 1991 and fell to 9.4 percent in 1992 (the first single-digit increase since 1970).^[74]

In the short term, the ESP also cut the purchasing power of wages by about 30 percent. Wage increases that were intended to compensate for part of this loss were overly generous, however, because the likely rate of inflation was overestimated, and as a result private consumption rebounded and the previous imbalance reappeared in 1988–1989. Fortuitously this distortion was corrected by the wave of mass immigration that began in 1989, with 500,000 new Israelis, mostly from the former Soviet Union, arriving by mid-1994. This increase of roughly 10 percent in the population pushed wages downward again; together with lower interest rates and a more stable and predictable exchange rate for the Israeli shekel, this triggered a period of sustained and impressive growth.^[75]

From 1990 to 1995 the Israeli economy grew by 42 percent, near the top among developed economies. The 1995 GDP was $86 billion or $15,500 per capita, putting Israel ahead of many European states. Government spending had returned to a more normal level of about 49 percent of GDP, with defense spending below 10 percent of GDP at that point and falling. Unemployment had fallen to 6 percent.^[76]

Serious problems still remained in Israel’s economy and in the scramble over scarce resources; Israel was still an “overburdened polity” by any standard. But after the dramatic economic turnaround it was clear that Israel of the mid-1990s was a modernizing state increasingly drawn into the converging social and economic currents that pull such states together. In some ways Israel, ranked very highly in the number of videocassette recorders and personal computers per capita, was even in the vanguard of the electronic age. More is at work here than economics alone; whether labeled as “modernization” or “Westernization,” Israel, no less than other states and perhaps more than most, was becoming a part of the global village. Are cellular phones, Scandinavian vacations, and TV-age electoral campaigns replacing pioneering ideologies as the universalizing counteweight to reassertive Jewish particularism? Will hard disks rather than hard dogmas serve as the vehicle of civicness and secularization? The very success of Israel’s economic transition calls attention to the changing nature of challenges to tradition in Israeli life and politics.

Impact of Modernization

At its most fundamental level modernization is said to involve liberation from traditional authority, a new positive attitude toward change, and a turn from cultural orientations or values to social rationality. A civil society autonomous of the state emerges, as do new social strata (particularly professionals), more complex economic division of labor, and general bureaucratization. The weight of tradition, and its associated particularities, decline as objective forces mold all aspects of life. There is a convergence as societies respond to the same forces, a process which accelerates as these forces become internationalized. Of course, we are reminded, the dichotomy between tradition and modernity is not absolute; traditional societies also can undergo considerable change and modern societies retain considerable diversity, often incorporating traditional elements in a variety of ways. But modernization still involves a number of common universalizing tendencies.^[77]

In terms of these basic definitions, Israel has long been a modernizing or modernized society. Zionism was itself part of a broad historical challenge to old identities and value orientations. Jews were to join other peoples in a process of nation-building, creating a new order consonant with the progressive currents of the time. Zionism, and Israeli society, were attuned to, and even fixated on, technological innovation and prevailing models of social and economic development. The yishuv and the state, like other modernizing societies, underwent increased social mobilization, organizational diversification and proliferation, rationalized regulation and allocation (market mechanisms, voting), greater division of labor and occupational specialization, enhanced social mobility, urbanization, secularization, expansion of media, and diffusion of political power.^[78]

This process—long and slow but cumulative—was obscured by ideological habits of thought and revived resistance of traditionalists. But by the 1980s and 1990s, with the decline of ideology, the pressures of modernity were taking center stage. In the third great revolution of the modern era—that of information technology, following the earlier industrial and scientific revolutions—Israel was not only a full participant but was even at the forefront in certain respects. The electronic age was integrating Israel into the larger world in ways that the founders of Zionism could hardly have imagined, while at the same time rewriting the rules of Israeli politics.

The impact of modernization on politics, as generally understood, is to create a more diversified political structure, to extend the scope of law and administration into all spheres, to spread power more widely, to weaken traditional elites and traditional sources of legitimation, and to foster a new accountability in which the ruled participate more directly in selection of the rulers and in setting major policies.^[79] In the Israeli case, this has been expressed by diffusion of power within and among parties, decline of party dominance, emergence of new kinds of political actors, a new “mass politics” based more on personalities and less on issues, greater electoral fluidity and volatility, and the strengthening of administrative and legislative regularity.

“Mass politics” meant appeals to a broad central spectrum of the electorate, to a large floating vote influenced more by the images of leading candidates and by general public mood than by ideological loyalties. This was closely linked to the changing role of the media. Since late 1968 television had come to play a large role in election campaigns and in shaping public images of candidates and issues, in place of the classic party-sponsored political rallies of the past. The party press, which had once dominated the newspaper scene, was pushed aside by the popular independent papers more closely tuned to the general public mood.

The correlation of voting to party platforms was strikingly weak; if voters had for certain historical reasons voted to the left of their beliefs during the glory days of Labor Zionism, they now deviated in the other direction because of a general weakening of ideology and the presence of personal and emotional factors that overshadowed the issues. About half of the voters remained loyal to their parties through several elections—a proportion higher than in other Western democracies—but this still left a considerable floating vote that could potentially cause a radical shift in power any time it flowed more in one direction than the other.^[80] The shift from issue-centered politics to image-centered media campaigns sparked the emergence of populist appeals in election campaigns; in 1981, for example, the government in power made imported television sets and videocassette recorders much cheaper to buy—at the cost of great damage to the nation’s balance of payments—in order to create a more favorable climate on election day. To some observers, there was even a risk that the system might become too responsive, moving from tight party control to unrestrained populism and demagoguery.^[81]

Another aspect of the loosening party system, and one generally regarded positively, was the democratization that took place within the parties. In the past party leaderships had tightly controlled the selection and ranking of Knesset candidates, thus insuring fairly strong party discipline. By the early 1980s there was some loosening of this process as candidate selection, in at least its early stages, was passed on to broader and more representative party bodies. In 1988 the Labor Party chose most of its candidates through twenty-three councils of district branches with the final ranking done by the Central Committee (a body of 1,267 members), a procedure that led to the rejection of some prominent party figures (Abba Eban in particular).^[82]

By 1992 Labor had moved all the way to a full-fledged primary system for both Knesset candidates and for selection of party leader, with all registered party members eligible to vote in the election that replaced Shimon Peres with Yitzhak Rabin. The ensuing general election was also unusually personalized, with Rabin’s supporters and opponents both focusing on his personal strengths and weaknesses in the confrontation with the comparatively less popular Yitzhak Shamir. Other parties were undergoing similar transitions during this period; in March 1993, the Likud replaced Shamir as party leader with Benjamin Netanyahu in its first general party primaries.

The new open elections did change party slates to some degree, at least in bringing in younger candidates and increasing representation of Jews from Asia and Africa, though they were less successful in increasing the numbers of women and Arab candidates. More broadly, like modern parties elsewhere Israeli political institutions were becoming less ideological. In place of the old party ties centered around youth movements, newspapers, and other elements of the “movement” style of life, they now waged modern election campaigns aimed at the amorphous middle of the political spectrum with hired U.S. political consultants and public relations firms. Differences on issues were blurred, especially in the realm of economic policy where the gap between the two major blocs had long been narrowing. The Labor Party had long subsidized business interests, for example, and the Likud after 1977 continued to do so despite its supposed commitment to a free market. And while more voters identified with the right than had been the case before 1977, a majority (60 percent in one survey) continued to support socialism and to oppose reduction of the state’s role in the economy.^[83] Even differences on the occupied territories narrowed somewhat, as both Labor and Likud moved toward autonomy as at least an interim solution; debate now focused on the scope of autonomy and whether it would be the permanent solution. While “polarization” between hawks and doves was a major concern of the early 1980s, commentators a decade later were remarking over a lessening of distance between the two camps and the incorporation of more extreme groups back into the two major parties.^[84]

Israelis were turning more to other bodies for services and channels of access previously provided by parties, as reflected in the expansion of governmental activities and the proliferation of other political, social, and economic groups. Parties, it seemed, were simply becoming less important. Or were they? It could be argued that it was primarily the parties’ mode of operation and electoral behavior that changed, and that once an election was over they were no less important than before. Parties still held the key to forming governing coalitions and negotiating government policy.

In other respects, modernization or Westernization of Israeli public life also contributed to greater regularization and rationalization in areas where a predisposition in this direction existed. The best expression of this was in the legal and judicial sphere, though the picture regarding attitudes toward the law is somewhat contradictory; two opposed trends were operating at the same time. On one hand, “illegalism” accompanied the growth of extraparliamentary politics and the breakdown of the tight Ben-Gurion system. Yet at the same time there was often more tolerance in practice, politics was more competitive, groups at the margin of the system were now drawn within it, and arbitrary procedures were reduced in a number of specific areas.^[85]

To be sure, Israel remained one of only seven nations, and only three democratic nations (together with the United Kingdom and New Zealand), that have never had a formal, entrenched, written constitution.^[86] But part of the progress toward a civic legal order was passage of nine of the eleven Basic Laws projected as building blocks for such a constitution, as well as two pieces of what was to have been the tenth Basic Law. Put together these Basic Laws are an impressive body of “constitutional” material (see Table 3).

The last two laws listed in Table 3 were to have been part of a Basic Law on Civil Rights, but they were passed separately when other parts of that proposed law bogged down in controversies over security concerns and religious opposition. The projected eleventh Basic Law, on Legislation, also raises religious objections since it affirms the legitimacy of nonreligious sources of law; thus, completing the process of writing Basic Laws is problematic. Only specified clauses in some of the Basic Laws are entrenched to any extent, requiring an absolute majority (or in one case a majority of 80 members) of the Knesset for any change; otherwise any of these provisions can, like an ordinary piece of legislation, be changed or invalidated by a simple majority of those voting (as they in fact have been). In essence, for the constitution as a whole to be entrenched the Knesset will have to vote away its own prerogatives, an act rare in the annals of legislative history.^[87]

Nevertheless the net result of this process has been a steady growth of constitutionality over time. The basic contours of Israel’s political and legal order has stabilized and are not going to be suddenly or arbitrarily changed. Apart from the Basic Laws, some other documents and Knesset laws also have an aura of basic definition of government about them: the Declaration of Independence, the Law of Return (1950) asserting the Jewish link to Israel, the 1952 law specifying the status of the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency, the Equal Rights for Women Law (1951), and others.

The solidification of the court system also has advanced the rule of law. In this area tradition and modernity go hand in hand: courts and legal institutions have always played a central role in Jewish life, while in a contemporary context they are a prime vehicle for instilling the civic ethic.^[88] Of course Israeli courts, like other features of public life, come in a variety of shapes and sizes. There is in fact a loosely coordinated set of court systems: civil courts, military courts, and religious courts (in fourteen different recognized religious communities). Of these the civil courts are the most instrumental in promoting democracy and the rule of law, while military and religious courts tend to draw on and strengthen group identity and solidarity.^[89]

The judiciary remains one of the most important channels of Western influence. The Supreme Court is particularly important in promoting universalist values. Sitting as the High Court of Justice, it exercises an equity jurisdiction as a court of first instance as well as appeal, intervening to protect individuals from government arbitrariness. The court has increasingly applied principles of natural justice to legislation and administrative measures, adding safeguards to existing procedures and curtailing actions said to impinge on human rights. It has also expanded its jurisdiction to cover such areas as internal decisions of the Knesset and the substance of security claims made by the government.^[90]

The Israeli system remains majoritarian in that a Knesset majority is still sovereign; ordinarily acts of the Knesset cannot be invalidated by the courts. But even in this regard the scope of judicial review has been expanded somewhat. In 1969 the Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice, invalidated an election financing law that conflicted with an entrenched provision of a Basic Law but had not been passed by the absolute majority needed to amend that Basic Law (Bergman v. Minister of Finance). The Knesset subsequently passed a new law consistent with the Basic Law, while at the same time mobilizing the necessary sixty-one votes. Similar court actions were taken in 1981 and 1982, again negating changes in entrenched provisions of Basic Laws passed without the absolute majority required by these provisions. In essence the High Court was simply forcing the Knesset to observe its own rules, while recognizing the right of the Knesset to change any legislation, including Basic Laws and the rules themselves, so long as proper procedure was followed. On the other hand the proposed Basic Law: Legislation would give all Basic Laws a superior status, requiring an absolute majority at all stages for changes and providing formally for judicial review; if passed this would again increase the constitutionality of the Israeli system.^[91]

Finally, there was increasing resort to quasi-judicial official commissions of inquiry set up under the 1968 Commissions of Inquiry Law, empowered to require all officials—even the prime minister—to testify and supply evidence, and to issue specific recommendations that are generally implemented. Such commissions sorted out a number of front-page controversies, including lack of preparedness in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, failure to prevent the massacre of Palestinians in Lebanese refugee camps (Sabra and Shatila) in 1982, collapse of the bank shares market in 1983, controversy over the interrogation methods of the General Security Service in 1986, and the 1994 massacre of Moslem worshippers by a Jewish settler in Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs.

At the same time Knesset legislation accumulated over time, gradually replacing older Ottoman and British laws and creating the basis of a unified and rationalized code of law. The role of common law diminished as the gaps in existing laws were filled in. Executive discretion has been narrowed as laws become more detailed, and ministerial regulations are reviewed more consistently by Knesset committees. Knesset procedures have also been tightened, with committees meeting more often and maintaining a closer watch over government activities and finances.^[92]

Among the areas in which governmental powers have been more carefully defined is wiretapping, where a 1979 act detailed procedures designed to prevent arbitrary or unjustified invasions of privacy. In addition, over time governmental secrecy loosened considerably: public debate over strategic issues (even nuclear weapons) became less restrained, the inner workings of government (never totally hidden) became more visible, and information on sensitive topics became more available.^[93] For example, efforts to contain information about the 1986 arrest of former nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu provide an interesting contrast to the Lavon affair some thirty years earlier. While details of the Lavon affair became public knowledge only years after the fact, the sensational story of Vanunu passing Israel’s nuclear secrets to the Sunday Times (in London), and his subsequent abduction to Israel, swiftly became public knowledge (even though his trial was conducted in secret).

Progress was even made in regularizing some of the more controversial emergency regulations. Following the assumption of power by the right-wing Likud bloc in 1977, a law replacing Regulation 111 of the 1945 Defense Regulations (on administrative detention) with more circumscribed procedures and abolishing the deportation measures in Regulation 112 (within Israel itself), was enacted in 1979. In contrast to the British regulations, the new law required judicial approval of any detention within forty-eight hours (as with ordinary police arrests). Judicial review explicitly includes examination of the “objective reasons of state security” that justify the detention. Amnon Rubinstein, who had been among the leading critics of previous arrangements, called the new law a “most liberal arrangement—almost without precedent in countries facing emergency situations and war. . . .” ^[94] Judged by international human rights standards, the 1979 Emergency Detention Law meets the International Law Association standards on administrative detention: procedures set by law, the right to be informed of grounds for detention, the right to consult a lawyer, judicial review, limited duration, and humane treatment. Only on publication of the names of the detainees is Israeli practice remiss.^[95]

According to the International Commission of Jurists, as of 1985 at least eighty-five countries had laws permitting preventive detention.^[96] Compared even to such nations as Great Britain (especially in Northern Ireland), Canada (where 450 French Canadians were detained in 1970), or the United States in its treatment of the Japanese during World War II, the 1979 Israeli law, as applied, seems unexceptional. This, however, raises another question: if this most problematic part of the 1945 British Defense Regulations can be successfully replaced by “ordinary” legislation, then why are the rest of them still on the books?

The issuance of emergency regulations under Section 9 of the Law and Administration Ordinance, on the other hand, seems at first glance to have skyrocketed. The number of new regulations jumped to an annual average of nearly twenty after the mid-1970s. But most of this quantitative leap is a result of an explosion of regulations authorizing return-to-work orders to striking public employees. Of the 144 new regulations in the 1975–1982 period, 124 were of this type, meaning that the underlying pattern had not significantly altered. At the rate of two to three a year, non-work-related emergency regulations were being enacted less frequently than during the first fifteen years of the state’s existence, and a large proportion of these came during the 1982 Lebanese War.^[97]

In 1985 Section 9 was used by the National Unity Government to enact the broad-ranging and drastic Economic Stabilization Program. The emergency regulations, signed by both Shimon Peres of Labor as prime minister and Yitzhak Modai of Likud as minister of finance, established strict controls on wages, prices, conditions of employment, taxes, welfare, and number of public employees, superseding all previous laws and agreements. Leaders of both major parties defended the unusual use of emergency powers on grounds that the economic crisis was threatening imminent disaster and that getting such a program through the Knesset expeditiously was a practical impossibility given the range and importance of interests affected. Nevertheless, there were strong reactions from many sources, including condemnation by a former minister of justice and some calls for resignation of the attorney general, who had approved the use of Section 9.^[98]

Considering the amount of discretion available and the absence of firm institutional obstacles in a system without a written constitution or bill of rights, the use of emergency powers in Israel has been modest. The same might be said in comparison to other nations; for example, the British Emergency Powers (Defense) Acts of 1939 and 1940 (in Britain itself) went much further than Israeli laws or practice, and many of the provisions were continued after the war, until as late as 1959.^[99] Nevertheless, an alert civil libertarian could easily identify several areas of weakness in the application of Israeli emergency powers. Among these would be the use of emergency regulations in nonemergency situations, the remaining limitations on judicial review, defective safeguards in the administrative process itself, the unequal application of emergency rules, and the use of measures questionable in themselves.

Israelis vs. Jews?

While policy differences between the two major blocs on certain issues may have narrowed, the pressures of modernity seem to have sharpened a more basic kind of polarization. As Myron Aronoff notes, the most serious division among Jews in Israel continues to be “the basic, conflicting, and even contradictory interpretations over what should be the exact Jewish character of Israel as a Jewish state. . . .” ^[100] Aronoff further defines this polarization in terms that echo the age-old struggle between particularity and universalism:

The nation is polarized between those who emphasize the duty of the Jewish people to colonize and incorporate the ancient biblical heartland of the state of Israel (Judea and Samaria, or the West Bank) at any cost, and those who argue that to do so would threaten both the Jewish and the democratic character of the state and would make the perpetuation of war inevitable. There is an equally deep division between those who argue that the Jewish character of the state should be based on conformity with religious tradition and law, and those who strongly reject this position, arguing for a democratic, liberal, and humanistic adaptation of Jewish values to contemporary contexts.^[101]

These two cleavages coincide to a great extent, though not completely. Those who celebrate particular Jewish values and traditions tend to be more hawkish on territorial issues, while those who feel comfortable as part of modern secular Western culture are more likely to apply a liberal critique to continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. There is also a rough correlation to the intensity of nationalism: the first approach, Nationalist or Ultranationalist Zionism, stresses “the singularity of the Jewish people and the isolation of Israel” because of irremediable hostility of non-Jews toward Jews, while the second orientation, Humanist Zionism, calls for the normalization and integration of the Jewish state into a world of states, with Israel as “a light unto the nations” in the achievement of universally recognized values.^[102] This dichotomy also corresponds to Baruch Kimmerling’s two definitions of the collectivity: (1) Eretz Yisrael, based on primordial kinship ties among all Jews, historical borders, and traditional Jewish law; and (2) the State of Israel, stressing the Western civic model, negotiated borders, and Israeli secular law.^[103] Or to put it on the simplest level, as some observers have suggested, the Israeli public may divide into “Jews,” particularistic and tradition-oriented, and “Israelis,” building a new national identity among the free nations of the West.^[104]

The strength of the “Israeli” orientation is not entirely a product of modernization; it is also testimony to the continuing influence of secular Zionism, including the Labor Zionist variant. Labor Zionism has been undermined by the natural decline of ideology in a poststatehood society, a massive influx of immigrants indifferent or even hostile to socialism, the inevitable bureaucratic sclerosis of a long-dominant group and growth of resentment toward it, and a continuing preoccupation with military security and a hostile environment. Yet there is a tendency to exaggerate its decline, in part because the extent of its domination during its peak was also exaggerated. As we have seen, Labor Zionism never enjoyed real ideological hegemony, so its decline as ideology is hardly unexpected. At the same time, its institutions—the Histadrut, kibbutzim and moshavim, cooperative enterprises in the economy, the welfare state, much of the basic structure of government—survive as key elements in Israeli life. Though the agrarian ideal has to be seen in perspective in a country that is overwhelmingly urban, that part of European Zionism that represented a rebellion against traditional Jewish life in Eastern Europe still has an imprint on contemporary life. Old Jewish habits may be emerging as classic Labor Zionist ideology declines, but it can be argued that without this ideology, there would have been no state.

Will polarization between “Jews” and “Israelis” continue and deepen? Or will the pressures of modernity bring about renewed synthesis, parallel to the earlier de facto synthesis between tradition and change? There are signs that many Israelis are in fact beginning to reconcile the conflicting forces in ways that make sense to them. A religious peace movement defines itself as a choice between secular liberal humanism and religiously based nationalism. Similarly, a Sephardi group advocates both Jewish values and peaceful integration into the region.^[105] The growth of “civil religion” (see chapter 8) is testimony to dissatisfaction with both total secularism and unchanging orthodoxy. Religious schools teach computing skills—and revolutionize talmudic scholarship by computerizing it—while free-thinking kibbutzim build their first synagogues.

Both universalism and particularism are basic to Jewish history; the tension between them may be the key dynamic in the unfolding of this history. In the end, Israel will, no doubt, develop into a society and a polity that is both modern and Jewish. Jews are a people who live by their traditions, even when rebelling against them.

Notes