Israel

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Israel - Acknowledgments

The authors wish to acknowledge the contributions of the following individuals who wrote the 1978 edition of Israel: A Country Study, which was edited by Richard F. Nyrop: Richard F. Nyrop, Laraine N. Carter, Darrell R. Eglin, Rinn Sup Shinn, and James D. Rudolph. Their work provided the organization and structure of the present volume, as well as portions of the text.

The authors are grateful to individuals in various government agencies and private institutions who gave of their time, research materials, and expertise to the production of this book. The authors also wish to thank members of the Federal Research Division staff who contributed directly to the preparation of the manuscript. These people include Thomas Collelo, the substantive reviewer of all the textual material and maps; Richard F. Nyrop, who reviewed all drafts and served as liaison with the sponsoring agency; and Martha E. Hopkins, who managed book editing and production. Noelle B. Beatty, Sharon Costello, Deanna D'Errico, and Evan Raynes edited the chapters. Also involved in preparing the text were editorial assistants Barbara Edgerton and Izella Watson. Catherine Schwartzstein performed final prepublication review. Shirley Kessel compiled the index. Malinda B. Neale of the Library of Congress Composing Unit set the type, under the direction of Peggy Pixley.

Invaluable graphics support was provided by David P. Cabitto, assisted by Sandra K. Ferrell. Carolina E. Forrester reviewed the map drafts and prepared the final maps. Special thanks are owed to Kimberly A. Lord, who designed the cover artwork and the illustrations on the title page of each chapter.

The authors would like to thank Arvies J. Staton, who supplied information on ranks and insignia. Joshua Sinai provided invaluable assistance in the transliteration and translation of Hebrew terms. Finally, the authors acknowledge the generosity of the many individuals and public agencies who allowed their photographs to be used in this study.

Israel

Israel - Preface

Like its predecessor, this study is an attempt to treat in a concise and objective manner the dominant social, political, economic, and military aspects of contemporary Israeli society. Sources of information included scholarly journals and monographs, official reports of governments and international organizations, foreign and domestic newspapers, and numerous periodicals. Measurements are given in the metric system.

An effort has been made to limit the use of foreign--mostly Hebrew and Arabic--words and phrases, but a fairly large number were deemed necessary to an understanding of the society.

The transliteration of Hebrew words and phrases follows a modified version of the system adopted by the United States Board on Geographic Names and the Permanent Committee on Geographic Names for British Official Use, known as the BGN/PCGN system. The names of people and places of ancient Israel are generally presented as they appear in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

A modified version of the BGN/PCGN system for transliterating Arabic was employed. The modification is a significant one, however, entailing as it does the omission of diacritical marks and most hyphens.

Israel

Israel - History

ON MAY 14, 1948, in the city of Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. The introductory paragraph affirmed that "Eretz Ysrael (the Land of Israel) was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here they first attained statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance, and gave the world the eternal Book of Books." The issuance of the proclamation was signaled by the ritual blowing of the shofar (ram's-horn trumpet) and was followed by the recitation of the biblical verse (Lev. 25:10): "Proclaim liberty throughout the land and to all the inhabitants thereof." The same verse is inscribed on the American Liberty Bell in Independence Hall in Philadelphia.

The reestablishment of the Jewish nation-state in Palestine has been the pivotal event in contemporary Jewish history. After nearly two millennia of exile, the Jewish people were brought together in their ancient homeland. Despite the ancient attachments of Jews to biblical Israel, the modern state of Israel is more deeply rooted in nineteenth- and twentieth- century European history than it is in the Bible. Thus, although Zionism--the movement to establish a national Jewish entity--is rooted in the messianic impulse of traditional Judaism and claims a right to Palestine based on God's promise to Abraham, the vast majority of Zionists are secularists.

For nearly 2,000 years following the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70, the attachment of the Jewish Diaspora to the Holy Land was more spiritual then physical. The idea of an ingathering of the exiles and a wholesale return to the Holy Land, although frequently expressed in the liturgy, was never seriously considered or acted upon. Throughout most of the exilic experience, the Jewish nation connoted the world Jewish community that was bound by the powerful moral and ethical ethos of the Jewish religion. The lack of a state was seen by many as a virtue, for it ensured that Judaism would not be corrupted by the exigencies of statehood. Despite frequent outbreaks of anti- Semitism, Jewish communities survived and in many cases thrived as enclosed communities managed by a clerical elite in strict accordance with Jewish law.

Zionism called for a revolt against the old established order of religious orthodoxy. It repudiated nearly 2,000 years of Diaspora existence, claiming that the Judaism of the Exile, devoid of its national component, had rendered the Jews a defenseless pariah people. As such, Zionism is the most radical attempt in Jewish history to escape the confines of traditional Judaism. The new order from which Zionism sprang and to which the movement aspired was nineteenth-century liberalism: the age of reason, emancipation, and rising nationalism.

Before Napoleon emancipated French Jewry in 1791, continental and Central European Jews had been forced to reside in designated Jewish "ghettos" apart from the non-Jewish community. Emancipation enabled many Jews to leave the confines of the ghetto and to attain unprecedented success in business, banking, the arts, medicine, and other professions. This led to the assimilation of many Jews into non-Jewish European society. The concomitant rise of ethnically based nationalisms, however, precluded Jewish participation in the political leadership of most of the states where they had settled. Political Zionism was born out of the frustrated hopes of emancipated European Jewry. Political Zionists aspired to establish a Jewish state far from Europe but modeled after the postemancipation European state.

In Eastern Europe, where the bulk of world Jewry lived, any hope of emancipation ended with the assassination of the reform- minded Tsar Alexander II in 1881. The pogroms that ensued led many Russian Jews to emigrate to the United States, while others joined the communist and socialist movements seeking to overthrow the tsarist regime and a much smaller number sought to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. Zionism in its East European context evolved out of a Jewish identity crisis; Jews were rapidly abandoning religious orthodoxy, but were unable to participate as equal citizens in the countries where they lived. This was the beginning of cultural Zionism, which more than political Zionism attached great importance to the economic and cultural content of the new state.

The most important Zionist movement in Palestine was Labor Zionism, which developed after 1903. Influenced by the Bolsheviks, the Labor movement led by David Ben-Gurion created a highly centralized Jewish economic infrastructure that enabled the Jewish population of Palestine (the Yishuv) to absorb waves of new immigrants and to confront successfully the growing Arab and British opposition during the period of the British Mandate (1920- 48). Following independence in May 1948, Ben-Gurion's Labor Zionism would guide Israel through the first thirty years of statehood.

The advent of Zionism and the eventual establishment of the State of Israel posed anew a dilemma that has confronted Jews and Judaism since ancient times: how to reconcile the moral imperatives of the Jewish religion with the power politics and military force necessary to maintain a nation-state. The military and political exigencies of statehood frequently compromised Judaism's transcendent moral code. In the period before the Exile, abuses of state power set in rapidly after the conquests of Joshua, in the reign of Solomon, in both the northern and southern kingdoms, under the Hasmoneans, and under Herod the Great.

In the twentieth century, the Holocaust transformed Zionism from an ideal to an urgent necessity for which the Yishuv and world Jewry were willing to sacrifice much. From that time on, the bulk of world Jewry would view Jewish survival in terms of a Jewish state in Palestine, a goal finally achieved by the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The Nazi annihilation of 6 million Jews, on whose behalf the West proved unwilling to intervene, and the hostility of Israel's Arab neighbors, some of which systematically evicted their Jewish communities, later combined to create a sense of siege among many Israelis. As a result, the modern State of Israel throughout its brief history has given security priority over the country's other needs and has considerably expanded over time its concept of its legitimate security needs. Thus, for reasons of security Israel has justified the dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs, the limited rights granted its Arab citizens, and harsh raids against bordering Arab states that harbored Palestinian guerrillas who had repeatedly threatened Israel.

The June 1967 War was an important turning point in the history of Israel. The ease of victory and the reunification of <"http://worldfacts.us/Israel-Jerusalem.htm"> Jerusalem spurred a growing religio- nationalist movement. Whereas Labor Zionism was a secular movement that sought to sow the land within the Green Line, the new Israeli nationalists, led by Gush Emunim and Rabbi Moshe Levinger, called for Jewish settlement in all of Eretz Yisrael. The June 1967 War also brought under Israel's control the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. From the beginning, control of Jerusalem was a nonnegotiable item for Israel. The Gaza Strip and especially the West Bank, however, posed a serious demographic problem that continued to fester in the late 1980s.

In contrast to the euphoria that erupted in June 1967, the heavy losses suffered in the October 1973 War ushered in a period of uncertainty. Israel's unpreparedness in the early stages of the war discredited the ruling Labor Party, which also suffered from a rash of corruption charges. Moreover, the demographic growth of Oriental Jews (Jews of African or Asian origin), a large number of whom felt alienated from Labor's blend of socialist Zionism, tilted the electoral balance for the first time in Israel's history away from the Labor Party (see <> Jewish Ethnic Groups). In the May 1977 elections Menachem Begin's Likud Bloc unseated Labor.

The early years of the Begin era were dominated by the historic peace initiative of President Anwar as Sadat of Egypt. His trip to Jerusalem in November 1977 and the subsequent signing of the Camp David Accords and the Treaty of Peace between Egypt and Israel ended hostilities between Israel and the largest and militarily strongest Arab country. The proposed Palestinian autonomy laid out in the Camp David Accords never came to fruition because of a combination of Begin's limited view of autonomy--he viewed the West Bank as an integral part of the State of Israel--and because of the refusal of the other Arab states and the Palestinians to participate in the peace process. As a result, violence in the occupied territories increased dramatically in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Following Likud's victory in the 1981 elections, Begin and his new minister of defense, Ariel Sharon, pursued a harder line toward the Arabs in the territories. After numerous attempts to quell the rising tide of Palestinian nationalism failed, Begin, on the advice of Sharon and Chief of Staff General Raphael Eitan, decided to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) major base of operations in Lebanon. On June 6, 1982, Israeli troops crossed the border into Lebanon initiating Operation Peace for Galilee. This was the first war in Israel's history that lacked wide public support.

Israel

Israel - ANCIENT ISRAEL

The history of the evolving relationship between God and the Jewish people set forth in the the Hebrew Bible--the five books of the Torah, neviim (prophets), and ketuvim (writings)--known to Christians as the Old Testament, begins with myths. The stories of creation, the temptation and sin of the first humans, their expulsion from an idyllic sanctuary, the flood, and other folkloric events have analogies with other early societies. With the appearance of Abraham, however, the biblical stories introduce a new idea--that of a single tribal God. Over the course of several centuries, this notion evolved into humanity's first complete monotheism. Abraham looms large in the traditions of the Jewish people and the foundation of their religion. Whether Jews by birth or by conversion, each male Jew is viewed as "a son of Abraham."

It was with Abraham that God, known as Yahweh, made a covenant, promising to protect Abraham and his descendants, to wage wars on their behalf, and to obtain for them the land of Canaan, an area roughly approximate to modern Israel and the occupied West Bank (in another part of the Torah, God pledges to Abraham's descendants "the land from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates," an area much larger than historic Canaan). In exchange, the ancient Hebrews were bound individually and collectively to follow the ethical precepts and rituals laid down by God.

Canaan, the land promised to Abraham and his descendants, was a narrow strip, 130 kilometers wide, bounded by the Mediterranean Sea to the west, the Arabian Desert to the east, Egypt to the south, and Mesopotamia to the north. Situated between the great Mesopotamian and Egyptian cultures, Canaan served as a burgeoning trading center for caravans between the Nile Valley and the Euphrates and as a cultural entrep�t. The clash of cultures and the diverse commercial activities gave Canaan a dynamic spiritual and material creativity. Prior to the emergence of Abraham, however, Egyptian and Mesopotamian hostility, continuous invasions of hostile peoples, and Canaan's varied topography had resulted in frequent fighting and general instability.

In the last quarter of the second millennium B.C., the collapse of the Hittite Empire to the north, and the decline of Egyptian power to the south at a time when the Assyrians had not yet become a major force set the stage for the emergence of the Hebrews. As early as the latter part of the third millennium B.C., invasions from the east significantly disrupted Middle Eastern society. The people who moved from Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean spoke western Semitic languages of which Hebrew is one. The term Hebrew apparently came from the word habiru (also hapiru or apiru), a term that was common to the Canaanites and many of their neighbors. The word was used to designate a social class of wanderers and seminomads who lived on the margins of, and remained separate from, sedentary settlements. Abraham was the leader of one of these immigrant habiru groups. He is depicted as a wealthy seminomad who possessed large flocks of sheep, goats, and cattle, and enough retainers to mount small military expeditions.

The Canaanite chieftains urged Abraham to settle and join with them. Abraham remained in the land, but when it came time to select a wife for his and Sarah's son Isaac, the wife was obtained from their relatives living in Haran, near Urfa in modern Turkey. This endogamous practice was repeated by Isaac's son Jacob, who became known as Israel because he had wrestled with God (Gen. 32:28).

During Jacob-Israel's lifetime the Hebrews completely severed their links with the peoples of the north and east and his followers began to think of themselves as permanently linked to Canaan. By his two wives, Leah and Rachel, and their two serving maids, Bilhah and Zilpah, Israel fathered twelve sons, the progenitors of the twelve tribes of Israel, the "children of Israel." The term Jew derives from the name of one of the tribes, Judah, which was not only one of the largest and most powerful of the tribes but also the tribe that produced David and from which, according to biblical prophecy and postbiblical legend, a messiah will emerge.

Some time late in the sixteenth or early in the fifteenth century B.C., Jacob's family--numbering about 150 people--migrated to Egypt to escape the drought and famine in Canaan. Beginning in the third millennium B.C. large numbers of western Semites had migrated to Egypt, usually drawn by the richness of the Nile Valley. They came seeking trade, work, or escape from hunger, and sometimes they came as slaves. The period of Egyptian oppression that drove the Israelites to revolt and escape probably occurred during the reign of Ramses II (1304-1237 B.C.). Most scholars believe that the Exodus itself took place under his successor Merneptah. A victory stela dated 1220 B.C. relates a battle fought with the Israelites beyond Sinai in Canaan. Taken together with other evidence, it is believed that the Exodus occurred in the thirteenth century B.C. and had been completed by about 1225 B.C.

The Book of Exodus describes in detail the conditions of slavery of the Jews in Egypt and their escape from bondage. The Exodus episode is a pivotal event in Jewish history. The liberation of a slave people from a powerful pharaoh--the first such successful revolt in recorded antiquity--through divine intervention tied successive generations of Hebrews (Jews) to Yahweh. The scale of the revolt and the subsequent sojourn in Sinai created a self-awareness among the Hebrews that they were a separate people sharing a common destiny. Moreover, the giving of the Law to Moses at Mount Sinai set down a moral framework that has guided the Jewish people throughout their history. The Mosaic Code, which includes the Ten Commandments and a wide body of other laws derived from the Torah, not only proclaimed the unity of God but also set forth the revolutionary idea that all men, because they were created in God's image, were equal. Thus, the Hebrews believed that they were to be a people guided by a moral order that transcended the temporal power and wealth of the day.

The conquest of Canaan under the generalship of Joshua took place over several decades. The biblical account depicts a primitive, outnumbered confederation of tribes slowly conquering pieces of territory from a sedentary, relatively advanced people who lived in walled cities and towns. For a long time the various tribes of Israel controlled the higher, less desirable lands, and only with the advent of David did the kingdoms of Israel and Judah come into being with a capital in <"http://worldfacts.us/Israel-Jerusalem.htm">Jerusalem.

Prior to the emergence of David, the Hebrew tribes, as portrayed in the last three chapters of the Book of Judges, were fighting among themselves when the Philistines (whence the term Palestine) appeared on the coast and pushed eastward. The Philistines were a warlike people possessing iron weapons and organized with great discipline under a feudal-military aristocracy. Around 1050 B.C., having exterminated the coastal Canaanites, they began a large-scale movement against the interior hill country, now mainly occupied by the Israelites. To unify the people in the face of the Philistine threat, the prophet Samuel anointed the guerrilla captain Saul as the first king of the Israelites. Only one year after his coronation, however, the Philistines destroyed the new royal army at Mount Gilboa, near Bet Shean, southeast of the Plain of Yizreel (also known as the Plain of Jezreel and the Plain of Esdraelon), killing Saul and his son Jonathan.

Facing imminent peril, the leadership of the Israelites passed to David, a shepherd turned mercenary who had served Saul but also trained under the Philistines. Although David was destined to be the most successful king in Jewish history, his kingdom initially was not a unified nation but two separate national entities, each of which had a separate contract with him personally. King David, a military and political genius, successfully united the north and south under his rule, soundly defeated the Philistines, and expanded the borders of his kingdom, conquering Ammon, Moab, Edom, Zobah (also seen as Aram-Zobah), and even Damascus (also seen as Aram-Damascus) in the far northeast. His success was caused by many factors: the establishment of a powerful professional army that quelled tribal unrest, a regional power vacuum (Egyptian power was on the wane and Assyria and Babylon to the east had not yet matured), his control over the great regional trade routes, and his establishment of economic and cultural contacts with the rich Phoenician city of Tyre. Of major significance, David conquered from the Jebusites the city of Jerusalem, which controlled the main interior north-south route. He then brought the Ark of the Covenant, the most holy relic the Israelites possessed and the symbol of their unity, into the newly constituted "City of David," which would serve as the center of his united kingdom.

Despite reigning over an impressive kingdom, David was not an absolute monarch in the manner of other rulers of his day. He believed that ultimate authority rested not with any king but with God. Throughout his thirty-three-year reign, he never built a grandiose temple associated with his royal line, thus avoiding the creation of a royal temple-state. His successor and son Solomon, however, was of a different ilk. He was less attached to the spiritual aspects of Judaism and more interested in creating sumptuous palaces and monuments. To carry out his large-scale construction projects, Solomon introduced corv�es, or forced labor; these were applied to Canaanite areas and to the northern part of the kingdom but not to Judah in the south. He also imposed a burdensome tax system. Finally, and most egregious to the northern tribes of Israel, Solomon ensured that the Temple in Jerusalem and its priestly caste, both of which were under his authority, established religious belief and practice for the entire nation. Thus, Solomon moved away from the austere spirituality founded by Moses in the desert toward the pagan cultures of the Mediterranean Coast and Nile Valley.

When Solomon died in 925 or 926 B.C., the northerners refused to recognize his successor Rehoboam. Subsequently the north broke away and was ruled by the House of Omri. The northern kingdom of Israel, more populous than the south, possessing more fertile land and closer to the trading centers of the time, flourished until it was completely destroyed and its ten tribes sent into permanent exile by the Assyrians between 740 and 721 B.C. The destruction of the north had a sobering effect on the south. The prophet Isaiah eloquently proclaimed that rather than power and wealth, social justice and adherence to the will of God should be the focus of the Israelites.

At the end of the sixth century B.C., the Assyrian Empire collapsed and the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar besieged the city of Jerusalem, captured the king, and ended the first commonwealth. Even before the first Exile, the prophet Jeremiah had stated that the Israelites did not need a state to carry out the mission given to them by God. After the Exile, Ezekiel voiced a similar belief: what mattered was not states and empires, for they would perish through God's power, but man.

From the time of the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C., the majority of Jews have lived outside the Holy Land. Lacking a state and scattered among the peoples of the Near East, the Jews needed to find alternative methods to preserve their special identity. They turned to the laws and rituals of their faith, which became unifying elements holding the community together. Thus, circumcision, sabbath observance, festivals, dietary laws, and laws of cleanliness became especially important.

In the middle of the sixth century B.C., the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great defeated the Babylonians and permitted the Jews to return to their homeland "to rebuild the house of the Lord." The majority of Jews, however, preferred to remain in the Diaspora, especially in Babylon, which would become a great center of Jewish culture for 1,500 years. During this period Ezra, the great codifier of the laws, compiled the Torah from the vast literature of history, politics, and religion that the Jews had accumulated. The written record depicting the relationship between God and the Jewish people contained in the Torah became the focal point of Judaism.

Israel

Israel - HELLENISM

In 332 B.C., Alexander the Great of Macedon destroyed the Persian Empire but largely ignored Judah. After Alexander's death, his generals divided--and subsequently fought over--his empire. In 301 B.C., Ptolemy I took direct control of the Jewish homeland, but he made no serious effort to interfere in its religious affairs. Ptolemy's successors were in turn supplanted by the Seleucids, and in 175 B.C. Antiochus IV seized power. He launched a campaign to crush Judaism, and in 167 B.C. he sacked the Temple.

The violation of the Second Temple, which had been built about 520-515 B.C., provoked a successful Jewish rebellion under the generalship of Judas (Judah) Maccabaeus. In 140 B.C. the Hasmonean Dynasty began under the leadership of Simon Maccabaeus, who served as ruler, high priest, and commander in chief. Simon, who was assassinated a few years later, formalized what Judas had begun, the establishment of a theocracy, something not found in any biblical text.

Despite priestly rule, Jewish society became Hellenized except in its generally staunch adherence to monotheism. Although rural life was relatively unchanged, cities such as <"http://worldfacts.us/Israel-Jerusalem.htm"> Jerusalem rapidly adopted the Greek language, sponsored games and sports, and in more subtle ways adopted and absorbed the culture of the Hellenes. Even the high priests bore such names as Jason and Menelaus. Biblical scholars have identified extensive Greek influence in the drafting of commentaries and interpolations of ancient texts during and after the Greek period. The most obvious influence of the Hellenistic period can be discerned in the early literature of the new faith, Christianity.

Under the Hasmonean Dynasty, Judah became comparable in extent and power to the ancient Davidic dominion. Internal political and religious discord ran high, however, especially between the Pharisees, who interpreted the written law by adding a wealth of oral law, and the Sadducees, an aristocratic priestly class who called for strict adherence to the written law. In 64 B.C., dynastic contenders for the throne appealed for support to Pompey, who was then establishing Roman power in Asia. The next year Roman legions seized Jerusalem, and Pompey installed one of the contenders for the throne as high priest, but without the title of king. Eighty years of independent Jewish sovereignty ended, and the period of Roman dominion began.

In the subsequent period of Roman wars, Herod was confirmed by the Roman Senate as king of Judah in 37 B.C. and reigned until his death in 4 B.C. Nominally independent, Judah was actually in bondage to Rome, and the land was formally annexed in 6 B.C. as part of the province of Syria Palestina. Rome did, however, grant the Jews religious autonomy and some judicial and legislative rights through the Sanhedrin. The Sanhedrin, which traces its origins to a council of elders established under Persian rule (333 B.C. to 165 B.C.) was the highest Jewish legal and religious body under Rome. The Great Sanhedrin, located on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, supervised smaller local Sanhedrins and was the final authority on many important religious, political, and legal issues, such as declaring war, trying a high priest, and supervising certain rituals. Scholars have sharply debated the structure and composition of the Sanhedrin. The Jewish historian Josephus and the New Testament present the Sanhedrin as a political and judicial council whereas the Talmud describes it as a religious, legislative body headed by a court of seventy-one sages. Another view holds that there were two separate Sanhedrins. The political Sanhedrin was composed primarily of the priestly Sadducee aristocracy and was charged by the Roman procurator with responsibility for civil order, specifically in matters involving imperial directives. The religious Sanhedrin of the Pharisees was concerned with religious law and doctrine, which the Romans disregarded as long as civil order was not threatened. Foremost among the Pharisee leaders of the time were the noted teachers, Hillel and Shammai.

Chafing under foreign rule, a Jewish nationalist movement of the fanatical sect known as the Zealots challenged Roman control in A.D. 66. After a protracted siege begun by Vespasian, the Roman commander in Judah, but completed under his son Titus in A.D. 70, Jerusalem and the Second Temple were seized and destroyed by the Roman legions. The last Zealot survivors perished in A.D. 73 at the mountain fortress of Massada, about fifty-six kilometers southwest of Jerusalem above the western shore of the Dead Sea.

During the siege of Jerusalem, Rabbi Yohanan Ben-Zakki received Vespasian's permission to withdraw to the town of Yibna (also seen as Jabneh) on the coastal plain, about twenty-four kilometers southwest of present-day Tel Aviv. There an academic center or academy was set up and became the central religious authority; its jurisdiction was recognized by Jews in Palestine and beyond. Roman rule, nevertheless, continued. Emperor Hadrian (A.D. 117-38) endeavored to establish cultural uniformity and issued several repressive edicts, including one against circumcision.

The edicts sparked the Bar-Kochba Rebellion of 132-35, which was crushed by the Romans. Hadrian then closed the Academy at Yibna, and prohibited both the study of the Torah and the observance of the Jewish way of life derived from it. Judah was included in Syria Palestina, Jerusalem was renamed Aelia Capitolina, and Jews were forbidden to come within sight of the city. Once a year on the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple, controlled entry was permitted, allowing Jews to mourn at a remaining fragment on the Temple site, the Western Wall, which became known as the Wailing Wall. The Diaspora, which had begun with the Babylonian captivity in the sixth century B.C.,and which had resumed early in the Hellenistic period, now involved most Jews in an exodus from what they continued to view as the land promised to them as the descendants of Abraham.

Following the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D., and especially after the suppression of the Bar-Kochba Rebellion in 135 A.D., religio-nationalist aspects of Judaism were supplanted by a growing intellectual-spiritual trend. Lacking a state, the survival of the Jewish people was dependent on study and observance of the written law, the Torah. To maintain the integrity and cohesiveness of the community, the Torah was enlarged into a coherent system of moral theology and community law. The rabbi and the synagogue became the normative institutions of Judaism, which thereafter was essentially a congregationalist faith.

The focus on study led to the compilation of the Talmud, an immense commentary on the Torah that thoroughly analyzed the application of Jewish law to the day-to-day life of the Jewish community. The complexity of argument and analysis contained in the Palestinian Talmud (100-425 A.D.) and the more authoritative Babylonian Talmud (completed around 500) reflected the high level of intellectual maturity attained by the various schools of Jewish learning. This inward-looking intellectualism, along with a rigid adherence to the laws and rituals of Judaism, maintained the separateness of the Jewish people, enabling them to survive the exilic experience despite the lure of conversion and frequent outbreaks of anti-Semitism.

Israel

Israel - PALESTINE

As a geographic unit, Palestine extended from the Mediterranean on the west to the Arabian Desert on the east and from the lower Litani River in the north to the Gaza Valley in the south. It was named after the Philistines, who occupied the southern coastal region in the twelfth century B.C. The name Philistia was used in the second century A.D. to designate Syria Palestina, which formed the southern third of the Roman province of Syria.

Emperor Constantine (ca. 280-337) shifted his capital from Rome to Constantinople in 330 and made Christianity the official religion. With Constantine's conversion to Christianity, a new era of prosperity came to Palestine, which attracted a flood of pilgrims from all over the empire. Upon partition of the Roman Empire in 395, Palestine passed under eastern control. The scholarly Jewish communities in Galilee continued with varying fortunes under Byzantine rule and dominant Christian influence until the Arab-Muslim conquest of A.D. 638. The period included, however, strong Jewish support of the briefly successful Persian invasion of 610-14.

The Arab caliph, Umar, designated <"http://worldfacts.us/Israel-Jerusalem.htm"> Jerusalem as the third holiest place in Islam, second only to Mecca and Medina. Under the Umayyads, based in Damascus, the Dome of the Rock was erected in 691 on the site of the Temple of Solomon, which was also the alleged nocturnal resting place of the Prophet Muhammad on his journey to heaven. It is the earliest Muslim monument still extant. Close to the shrine, to the south, the Al Aqsa Mosque was built. The Umayyad caliph, Umar II (717-720), imposed humiliating restrictions on his non-Muslim subjects that led many to convert to Islam. These conversions, in addition to a steady tribal flow from the desert, changed the religious character of the inhabitants of Palestine from Christian to Muslim. Under the Abbasids the process of Islamization gained added momentum as a result of further restrictions imposed on non-Muslims by Harun ar Rashid (786-809) and more particularly by Al Mutawakkil (847-61).

The Abbasids were followed by the Fatimids who faced frequent attacks from Qarmatians, Seljuks, and Byzantines, and periodic beduin opposition. Palestine was reduced to a battlefield. In 1071 the Seljuks captured Jerusalem. The Fatimids recaptured the city in 1098, only to deliver it a year later to a new enemy, the Crusaders of Western Europe. In 1100 the Crusaders established the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, which remained until the famous Muslim general Salah ad Din (Saladin) defeated them at the decisive Battle of Hattin in 1187. The Crusaders were not completely evicted from Palestine, however, until 1291 when they were driven out of Acre. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were a "dark age" for Palestine as a result of Mamluk misrule and the spread of several epidemics. The Mamluks were slave-soldiers who established a dynasty that ruled Egypt and Syria, which included Palestine, from 1250 to 1516.

In 1516 the Ottoman Turks, led by Sultan Selim I, routed the Mamluks, and Palestine began four centuries under Ottoman domination. Under the Ottomans, Palestine continued to be linked administratively to Damascus until 1830, when it was placed under Sidon, then under Acre, then once again under Damascus. In 1887-88 the local governmental units of the Ottoman Empire were finally settled, and Palestine was divided into the administrative divisions (sing., mutasarrifiyah) of Nabulus and Acre, both of which were linked with the vilayet (largest Ottoman administrative division, similar to a province) of Beirut and the autonomous mutasarrifiyah of Jerusalem, which dealt directly with Constantinople.

For the first three centuries of Ottoman rule, Palestine was relatively insulated from outside influences. At the end of the eighteenth century, Napoleon's abortive attempt to establish a Middle East empire led to increased Western involvement in Palestine. The trend toward Western influence accelerated during the nine years (1831-40) that the Egyptian viceroy Muhammad Ali and his son Ibrahim ruled Palestine. The Ottomans returned to power in 1840 with the help of the British, Austrians, and Russians. For the remainder of the nineteenth century, Palestine, despite the growth of Christian missionary schools and the establishment of European consulates, remained a mainly rural, poor but self-sufficient, introverted society. Demographically its population was overwhelmingly Arab, mainly Muslim, but with an important Christian merchant and professional class residing in the cities. The Jewish population of Palestine before 1880 consisted of fewer than 25,000 people, two-thirds of whom lived in Jerusalem where they made up half the population (and from 1890 on more than half the population). These were Orthodox Jews, many of whom had immigrated to Palestine simply to be buried in the Holy Land, and who had no real political interest in establishing a Jewish entity. They were supported by alms given by world Jewry.

Israel

Israel - ORIGINS OF ZIONISM

The major event that led to the growth of the Zionist movement was the emancipation of Jews in France (1791), followed shortly thereafter by their emancipation in the rest of continental and Central Europe. After having lived for centuries in the confines of Jewish ghettos, Jews living in Western and Central Europe now had a powerful incentive to enter mainstream European society. Jews, who had previously been confined to petty trade and to banking, rapidly rose in academia, medicine, the arts, journalism, and other professions. The accelerated assimilation of Jews into European society radically altered the nature of relations between Jews and non-Jews. On the one hand, Jews had to reconcile traditional Judaism, which for nearly 2,000 years prior to emancipation had developed structures designed to maintain the integrity and separateness of Jewish community life, with a powerful secular culture in which they were now able to participate. On the other hand, many non-Jews, who prior to the emancipation had had little or no contact with Jews, increasingly saw the Jew as an economic threat. The rapid success of many Jews fueled this resentment.

The rise of ethnically based nationalism in the mid-nineteenth century gave birth to yet another form of anti-Semitism. Before the mid-nineteenth century, European anti-Semitism was based mainly on Christian antipathies toward Jews because of their refusal to convert to Christianity. As a result, an individual Jew could usually avoid persecution by converting, as many did over the centuries. The emergence of ethnically based nationalism, however, radically changed the status of the Jew in European society. The majority gentile population saw Jews as a separate people who could never be full participants in the nation's history.

The vast majority of Jews in Western and Central Europe responded by seeking even deeper assimilation into European culture and a secularization of Judaism. A minority, who believed that greater assimilation would not alter the hostility of non-Jews, adopted Zionism. According to this view, the Jew would remain an outsider in European society regardless of the liberalism of the age because Jews lacked a state of their own. Jewish statelessness, then, was the root cause of anti-Semitism. The Zionists sought to solve the Jewish problem by creating a Jewish entity outside Europe but modeled after the European nation-state. After more then half a century of emancipation, West European Jewry had become distanced from both the ritual and culture of traditional Judaism. Thus, Zionism in its West European Jewish context envisioned a purely political solution to the Jewish problem: a state of Jews rather than a Jewish state.

For the bulk of European Jewry, however, who resided in Eastern Europe's Pale of Settlement --on the western fringe of the Russian Empire, between the Baltic and the Black seas--there was no emancipation. East European Jewry had lived for centuries in kehilot (sing., kehilah), semiautonomous Jewish municipal corporations that were supported by wealthy Jews. Life in the kehilot was governed by a powerful caste of learned religious scholars who strictly enforced adherence to the Jewish legal code. Many Jews found the parochial conformity enforced by the kehilot leadership onerous. As a result, liberal stirring unleashed by the emancipation in the West had an unsettling effect upon the kehilot in the East.

By the early nineteenth century, not only was kehilot life resented but the tsarist regimes were becoming increasingly absolute. In 1825 Tsar Nicholas I, attempting to centralize control of the empire and Russify its peoples, enacted oppressive measures against the Jews; he drafted a large number of under-age Jews for military service, forced Jews out of their traditional occupations, such as the liquor trade, and generally repressed the kehilot. Facing severe economic hardship and social upheaval, tens of thousands of Jews migrated to the cities, especially Odessa on the Russian coast. In their new urban environments, the restless and highly literate Jews clamored for the liberalization of tsarist rule.

In 1855 the prospects for Russian Jewry appeared to improve significantly when the relatively liberal-minded Tsar Alexander II ascended the throne. Alexander II ended the practice of drafting Jewish youth into the military and granted Jews access, albeit limited, to Russian education institutions and various professions previously closed to them. Consequently, a thriving class of Jewish intellectuals, the maskalim (enlightened), emerged in cities like Odessa, just as they had in Western Europe and Central Europe after emancipation. The maskalim believed that Tsar Alexander II was ushering in a new age of Russian liberalism which, as in the West, would eventually lead to the emancipation of Russian Jewry.

The hopes of the maskalim and of Russian Jewry in general, however, were misplaced. Alexander II was assassinated in 1881, and a severe pogrom ensued that devastated Jewish communities throughout the Pale of Settlement. The new Tsar, Alexander III, enacted oppressive policies against the Jews and denied police protection to those Jews who remained in the countryside. As a result, a floodtide of impoverished Jews entered the cities where they joined various movements that sought to overthrow the tsar.

The openly anti-Semitic policies pursued by the new tsar and the popularity of these policies among large segments of the nonJewish population posed serious political, economic, and spiritual dilemmas for Russian Jewry. On the economic level, the tsar's antiSemitic policies severely limited Jewish economic opportunities and undermined the livelihood of the Jewish masses. Many impoverished East European Jews, therefore, emigrated from the Russian Empire. Between 1881 and 1914, an estimated 2.5 million Jews left the empire, 2 million of whom settled in the United States.

For many Jews, especially the maskalim, however, the pogroms and the anti-Semitism of the new tsar not only meant economic hardship and physical suffering but also a deep spiritual malaise. Before 1881, they had been abandoning the strict confines of the kehilot en masse and rebelling against religious orthodoxy, anxiously waiting for the expected emancipation to reach Russia. The 1881 pogroms and their aftermath shattered not only the faith of the maskalim in the inevitable liberalization of tsarist Russia but also their belief that the non-Jewish Russian intellectual would take an active role in opposing anti-Semitism. Most of the Russian intelligentsia were either silent during the pogroms or actually supported them. Having lost their faith in God and in the inevitable spread of liberalism, large numbers of Russian Jews were forced to seek new solutions. Many flocked to the revolutionary socialist and communist movements opposing the tsar, while others became involved with the Bund, a cultural society that sought to establish a Yiddish cultural renaissance within Russia.

A smaller but growing number of Jews were attracted to the ancient but newly formulated notion of reconstituting a Jewish nation-state in Palestine. Zionism as it evolved in Eastern Europe, unlike Zionism in the West, dealt not only with the plight of Jews but with the crisis of Judaism. Thus, despite its secularism, East European Zionism remained attached to the Jewish biblical home in Palestine. It also was imbued with the radical socialist fervor challenging the tsarist regime.

Zionism's reformulation of traditional Judaism was deeply resented by Orthodox Jews, especially the Hasidim. Most East European Jews rejected the notion of a return to the promised land before the appearance of the messiah. They viewed Zionism as a secular European creation that aspired to change the focus of Judaism from devotion to Jewish law and religious ritual to the establishment of a Jewish nation-state.

Israel

Israel - Zionist Precursors

The impulse and development of Zionism was almost exclusively the work of Ashkenazim--Jews of European origin; few Sephardim were directly engaged in the movement in its formative years. (In 1900 about 9.5 million of the world's 10.5 million Jews were Ashkenazim, and about 5.2 million of the Ashkenazim lived in the Pale of Settlement.)

The first writings in what later came to be known as Zionism appeared in the mid-1800s. In 1840 the Jews of Eastern Europe and the Balkans had been aroused by rumors that the messianic era was at hand. Various writers, most prominently Rabbi Judah Alkalai and Rabbi Zevi Hirsch Kalisher but including many others, were impressed by the nationalist fervor of Europe that was creating new nation-states and by the resurgence of messianic expectations among Jews. Kalisher wrote that Jewish nationalism was directly akin to other nationalist movements and was the logical continuation of the Jewish enlightenment that had begun in France in 1791 when Jews were granted civil liberties. Alkalai consciously altered his expectations from a miraculous messianic salvation to a redemption by human effort that would pave the way for the arrival of the messiah. Both authors urged the development of Jewish national unity, and Kalisher in particular foresaw the ingathering to Palestine of many of the world's Jews as part of the process of emancipation.

Another important early Zionist was Moses Hess, a German Jew and socialist comrade of Karl Marx. In his book Rome and Jerusalem, published in 1862, Hess called for the establishment of a Jewish socialist commonwealth in Palestine. He was one of the first Jewish thinkers to see that emancipation would ultimately exacerbate anti-Semitism in Europe. He concluded that the only solution to the Jewish problem was the establishment of a national Jewish society managed by a Jewish proletariat. Although his synthesis of socialism and Jewish nationalism would later become an integral part of the Labor Zionist movement, during his lifetime the prosperity of European Jewry lessened the appeal of his work.

Israel

Israel - Political Zionism

Political Zionism was emancipated West European Jewry's response to the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism and to the failure of the enlightenment to alter the status of the Jew. Its objective was the establishment of a Jewish homeland in any available territory--not necessarily in Palestine--through cooperation with the Great Powers. Political Zionists viewed the "Jewish problem" through the eyes of enlightenment rationalism and believed that European powers would support a Jewish national existence outside Europe because it would rid them of the Jewish problem. These Zionists believed that Jews would come en masse to the new entity, which would be a secular nation modeled after the post-emancipation European state.

The first Jew to articulate a political Zionist platform was not a West European but a Russian physician residing in Odessa. A year after the 1881 pogroms, Leo Pinsker, reflecting the disappointment of other Jewish maskalim, wrote in a pamphlet entitled Auto-Emancipation that anti-Semitism was a modern phenomenon, beyond the reach of any future triumphs of "humanity and enlightenment." Therefore Jews must organize themselves to find their own national home wherever possible, not necessarily in their ancestral home in the Holy Land. Pinsker's work attracted the attention of Hibbat Tziyyon (Lovers of Zion), an organization devoted to Hebrew education and national revival. Ignoring Pinsker's indifference toward the Holy Land, members of Hibbat Tziyyon took up his call for a territorial solution to the Jewish problem. Pinsker, who became leader of the movement, obtained funds from the wealthy Jewish philanthropist, Baron Edmond de Rothschild- -who was not a Zionist--to support Jewish agricultural settlement in Palestine at Rishon LeZiyyon, south of Tel Aviv, and Zikhron Yaaqov, south of Haifa. Although the numbers were meager--only 10,000 settlers by 1891--especially when compared to the large number of Jews who emigrated to the United States, the First Aliyah (1882-1903), or immigration, was important because it established a Jewish bridgehead in Palestine espousing political objectives.

The impetus to the founding of a Zionist organization with specific goals was provided by Theodor Herzl. Born in Budapest on May 2, 1860, Herzl grew up in an environment of assimilation. He was educated in Vienna as a lawyer but instead became a journalist and playwright. By the early 1890s, he had achieved some recognition in Vienna and other major European cities. Until that time, he had only been identified peripherally with Jewish culture and politics. He was unfamiliar with earlier Zionist writings, and he noted in his diary that he would not have written his book had he known the contents of Pinsker's Auto-Emancipation.

While working as Paris correspondent for a Viennese newspaper, Herzl became aware of the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in French society. He saw that emancipation rather than dissipating antiSemitism had exacerbated popular animosity toward the Jews. The tearing down of the ghetto walls placed Jews in competition with non-Jews. Moreover, the newly liberated Jew was blamed by much of non-Jewish French society for the socioeconomic upheaval caused by both emancipation and accelerated industrialization.

The turning point in Herzl's thinking on the Jewish question occurred during the 1894 Paris trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, on charges of treason (the sale of military secrets to Germany). Dreyfus was convicted, and although he was eventually cleared, his career was ruined. The trial and later exoneration sharply divided French society and unleashed widespread anti-Semitic demonstrations and riots throughout France. To Herzl's shock and dismay, many members of the French intellectual, social, and political elites--precisely those elements of society into which the upwardly mobile emancipated Jews wished to be assimilated--were the most vitriolic in their antiSemitic stance.

The Dreyfus affair proved for Herzl, as the 1881 pogroms had for Pinsker, that Jews would always be an alien element in the societies in which they resided as long as they remained stateless. He believed that even if Jewish separateness in religion and social custom were to disappear, the Jews would continue to be treated as outsiders.

Herzl put forth his solution to the Jewish problem in Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) published in 1896. He called for the establishment of a Jewish state in any available territory to which the majority of European Jewry would immigrate. The new state would be modeled after the postemancipation European state. Thus, it would be secular in nature, granting no special place to the Hebrew language, Judaism, or to the ancient Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Another important element contained in Herzl's concept of a Jewish state was the enlightenment faith that all men--including anti-Semites--are basically rational and will work for goals that they perceive to be in their best interest. He was convinced, therefore, that the enlightened nations of Europe would support the Zionist cause to rid their domains of the problem-creating Jews. Consequently, Herzl actively sought international recognition and the cooperation of the Great Powers in creating a Jewish state.

Herzl's ideas were not original, his belief that the Great Powers would cooperate in the Zionist enterprise was naive, and his indifference to the final location of the Jewish state was far removed from the desires of the bulk of the Jewish people residing in the Pale of Settlement. What he accomplished, however, was to cultivate the first seeds of the Zionist movement and to bestow upon the movement a mantle of legitimacy. His stature as a respected Western journalist and his meetings with the pope, princes of Europe, the German kaiser, and other world figures, although not successful, propelled the movement into the international arena. Herzl sparked the hopes and aspirations of the mass of East European Jewry living under Russian oppression. It was the oppressed Jewish masses of the Pale, however--with whom Herzl, the assimilated bourgeois of the West, had so little in common--who absorbed his message most deeply.

In 1897 Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. The first congress adopted the goal: "To create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by Public Law." The World Zionist Organization (WZO) was founded to work toward this goal, and arrangements were made for future congresses. The WZO established a general council, a central executive, and a congress, which was held every year or two. It developed member societies worldwide, continued to encourage settlement in Palestine, registered a bank in London, and established the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet) to buy land in Palestine. The First Zionist Congress was vital to the future development of Zionism, not only because it established an institutional framework for Zionism but also because it came to symbolize for many Jews a new national identity, the first such identity since the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70.

Israel

Israel - Cultural Zionism

The counterpoint to Herzl's political Zionism was provided by Asher Ginsberg, better known by his pen name Ahad HaAm (One of the People). Ahad HaAm, who was the son of a Hasidic rabbi, was typical of the Russian maskalim. In 1886, at the age of thirty, he moved to Odessa with the vague hope of modernizing Judaism. His views on Zionism were rooted in the changing nature of Jewish communal life in Eastern Europe. Ahad HaAm realized that a new meaning to Jewish life would have to be found for the younger generation of East European Jews who were revolting against traditional Jewish practice. Whereas Jews in the West could participate in and benefit from a secular culture, Jews in the East were oppressed. While Herzl focused on the plight of Jews alone, Ahad HaAm was also interested in the plight of Judaism, which could no longer be contained within the limits of traditional religion.

Ahad HaAm's solution was cultural Zionism: the establishment in Palestine of small settlements aimed at reviving the Jewish spirit and culture in the modern world. In the cultural Zionist vision, a small number of Jewish cadres well versed in Jewish culture and speaking Hebrew would settle in Palestine. Ahad HaAm believed that by settling in that ancient land, religious Jews would replace their metaphysical attachment to the Holy Land with a new Hebrew cultural renaissance. Palestine and the Hebrew language were important not because of their religious significance but because they had been an integral part of the Jewish people's history and cultural heritage.

Inherent in the cultural Zionism espoused by Ahad HaAm was a deep mistrust of the gentile world. Ahad HaAm rejected Herzl's notion that the nations of the world would encourage Jews to move and establish a Jewish state. He believed that only through Jewish self-reliance and careful preparation would the Zionist enterprise succeed. Although Ahad HaAm's concept of a vanguard cultural elite establishing a foothold in Palestine was quixotic, his idea of piecemeal settlement in Palestine and the establishment of a Zionist infrastructure became an integral part of the Zionist movement.

The ascendancy of Ahad HaAm's cultural Zionism and its emphasis on practical settlement in Eretz Yisrael climaxed at the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903. After an initial discussion of settlement in the Sinai Peninsula, which was opposed by Egypt, Herzl came to the congress apparently willing to consider, as a temporary shelter, a British proposal for an autonomous Jewish entity in East Africa. The Uganda Plan, as it was called, was vehemently rejected by East European Zionists who, as before, insisted on the ancient political identity with Palestine. Exhausted, Herzl died of pneumonia in 1904, and from that time on the mantle of Zionism was carried by the cultural Zionists led by Ahad HaAm and his close colleague, Chaim Weizmann. They took over the WZO, increased support for Hibbat Tziyyon, and sought Jewish settlement in Palestine as a prerequisite to international support for a Jewish state.

Israel

Israel - Labor Zionism

The defeat of Herzl's Uganda Plan ensured that the fate of the Zionist project would ultimately be determined in Palestine. In Palestine the Zionist movement had to devise a practical settlement plan that would ensure its economic viability in the face of extremely harsh conditions. Neither Herzl's political Zionism nor Ahad HaAm's cultural Zionism articulated a practical plan for settlement in Palestine. Another major challenge facing the fledgling movement was how to appeal to the increasing number of young Jews who were joining the growing socialist and communist movements in Russia. To meet these challenges, Labor Zionism emerged as the dominant force in the Zionist movement.

The intellectual founders of Labor Zionism were Nachman Syrkin and Ber Borochov. They inspired the founding of Poalei Tziyyon (Workers of Zion, see Appendix B)--the first Labor Zionist party, which grew quickly from 1906 until the start of World War I. The concepts of Labor Zionism first emerged as criticisms of the Rothschild-supported settlements of the First Aliyah. Both Borochov and Syrkin believed that the Rothschild settlements, organized on purely capitalist terms and therefore hiring Arab labor, would undermine the Jewish enterprise. Syrkin called for Jewish settlement based on socialist modes of organization: the accumulation of capital managed by a central Jewish organization and employment of Jewish laborers only. He believed that "antiSemitism was the result of unequal distribution of power in society. As long as society is based on might, and as long as the Jew is weak, anti-Semitism will exist." Thus, he reasoned, the Jews needed a material base for their social existence--a state and political power.

Ber Borochov's contribution to Labor Zionism was his synthesis of the concepts of class and nation. In his most famous essay, entitled Nationalism and Class Struggle, Borochov showed how the nation, in this case the Jewish nation, was the best institution through which to conduct the class struggle. According to Borochov, only through the establishment of a Jewish society controlling its own economic infrastructure could Jews be integrated into the revolutionary process. His synthesis of Marxism and Zionism attracted many Russian Jews caught up in the revolutionary fervor of the Bolshevik movement.

Another important Labor Zionist and the first actually to reside in Palestine was Aaron David Gordon. Gordon believed that only by physical labor and by returning to the land could the Jewish people achieve national salvation in Palestine. Gordon became a folk hero to the early Zionists by coming to Palestine in 1905 at a relatively advanced age--forty-seven--and assiduously working the land. He and his political party, HaPoel HaTzair (The Young Worker), were a major force behind the movement to collectivize Jewish settlements in Palestine. The first kibbutz was begun by Gordon and his followers at Deganya in eastern Galilee.

Before Gordon's arrival, the major theorists of Labor Zionism had never set foot in Palestine. Zionism in its theoretical formulations only took practical effect with the coming to Palestine of the Second Aliyah. Between 1904 and 1914, approximately 40,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine in response to the pogroms that followed the attempted Russian revolution of 1905. By the end of the Second Aliyah, the Jewish population of Palestine stood at about 85,000, or 12 percent of the total population. The members of the Second Aliyah, unlike the settlers of the first, were dedicated socialists set on establishing Jewish settlement in Palestine along socialist lines. They undertook a number of measures aimed at establishing an autonomous Jewish presence in Palestine, such as employing only Jewish labor, encouraging the widespread use of Hebrew, and forming the first Jewish self-defense organization, HaShomer (The Watchmen).

The future leadership cadre of the state of Israel emerged out of the Second Aliyah. The most important leader of this group and the first prime minister of Israel was David Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion, who arrived in Palestine in 1906, believed that economic power was a prerequisite of political power. He foresaw that the fate of Zionist settlement in Palestine depended on the creation of a strong Jewish economy. This aim, he believed, could only be accomplished through the creation of a Hebrew-speaking working class and a highly centralized Jewish economic structure. Beginning in the 1920s, he set out to create the immense institutional framework for a Jewish workers' state in Palestine.

Israel

Israel - Revisionist Zionism

Labor Zionism, although by far the largest organization in the Yishuv (the prestate Jewish community in Palestine), did not go unchallenged. The largest and most vocal opposition came from a Russian-born Jewish intellectual residing in Odessa, Vladimir Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky was both a renowned writer and the first military hero of the Zionist revival; he was commander of the Jewish Legion. While residing in Italy, Jabotinsky became attached to the notions of romantic nationalism espoused by the great Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi. Like Garibaldi, Jabotinsky viewed nationalism as the highest value to which humans can aspire. He called for massive Jewish immigration to Palestine and the immediate declaration of Jewish statehood in all of biblical Palestine. He viewed the world in Machiavellian terms: military and political power ultimately determine the fate of peoples and nations. Therefore, he called for the establishment of a well-armed Jewish self-defense organization.

Jabotinsky sharply criticized Ben-Gurion's single-minded focus on creating a Jewish working-class movement, which he felt distracted the Zionist movement from the real issue at hand, Jewish statehood. He gained wide popularity in Poland, where his criticisms of socialism and his calls for Jewish self-defense appealed to a Jewish community of small entrepreneurs hounded as a result of anti-Semitism.

Israel

Israel - EVENTS IN PALESTINE, 1908-48

Before the Second Aliyah, the indigenous Arab population of Palestine had worked for and generally cooperated with the small number of Jewish settlements. The increased Jewish presence and the different policies of the new settlers of the Second Aliyah aroused Arab hostility. The increasing tension between Jewish settler and Arab peasant did not, however, lead to the establishment of Arab nationalist organizations. In the Ottoman-controlled Arab lands the Arab masses were bound by family, tribal, and Islamic ties; the concepts of nationalism and nation-state were viewed as alien Western categories. Thus, an imbalance evolved between the highly organized and nationalistic settlers of the Second Aliyah and the indigenous Arab population, who lacked the organizational sophistication of the Zionists.

There were, however, small groups of Western-educated Arab intellectuals and military officers who formed nationalist organizations demanding greater local autonomy. The primary moving force behind this nascent Arab nationalist movement was the Committee of Union and Progress, a loose umbrella organization of officers and officials within the Ottoman Empire in opposition to the policies of Sultan Abdul Hamid. The removal of Sultan Abdul Hamid by the Committee of Union and Progress in 1908 was widely supported by both Arab nationalists and Zionists. The committee's program of constitutional reform and promised autonomy aroused hope of independence on the part of various nationalities throughout the Ottoman Empire.

After 1908, however, it quickly became clear to Zionists and Arabs alike that the nationalism of Abdul Hamid's successors was Turkish nationalism, bent on Turkification of the Ottoman domain rather than granting local autonomy. In response, Arab intellectuals in Beirut and Damascus formed clandestine political societies, such as the Ottoman Decentralization Party, based in Cairo; Al Ahd (The Covenant Society), formed primarily by army officers in 1914; and Al Fatat (The Young Arabs), formed by students in 1911. The Arab nationalism espoused by these groups lacked support, however, among the Arab masses.

Israel

Israel - World War I

On the eve of World War I, the anticipated break-up of the enfeebled Ottoman Empire raised hopes among both Zionists and Arab nationalists. The Zionists hoped to attain support from one of the Great Powers for increased Jewish immigration and eventual sovereignty in Palestine, whereas the Arab nationalists wanted an independent Arab state covering all the Ottoman Arab domains. From a purely demographic standpoint, the Zionist argument was not very strong--in 1914 they comprised only 12 percent of the total population of Palestine. The nationalist ideal, however, was weak among the Arabs, and even among articulate Arabs competing visions of Arab nationalism--Islamic, pan-Arab, and statism--inhibited coordinated efforts to achieve independence.

A major asset to Zionism was that its chief spokesman, Chaim Weizmann, was an astute statesman and a scientist widely respected in Britain and he was well versed in European diplomacy. Weizmann understood better than the Arab leaders at the time that the future map of the Middle East would be determined less by the desires of its inhabitants than by Great Power rivalries, European strategic thinking, and domestic British politics. Britain, in possession of the Suez Canal and playing a dominant role in India and Egypt, attached great strategic importance to the region. British Middle East policy, however, espoused conflicting objectives, and as a result London became involved in three distinct and contradictory negotiations concerning the fate of the region.

The earliest British discussions of the Middle East question revolved around Sharif Husayn ibn Ali, scion of the Hashimite (also seen as Hashemite) family that claimed descent from the Prophet and acted as the traditional guardians of Islam's most holy sites of Mecca and Medina in the Arabian province of Hijaz. In February 1914, Amir Abdullah, son of Sharif Husayn, went to Cairo to visit Lord Kitchener, British agent and consul general in Egypt, where he inquired about the possibility of British support should his father stage a revolt against Turkey. Turkey and Germany were not yet formally allied, and Germany and Britain were not yet at war; Kitchener's reply was, therefore, noncommittal.

Shortly after the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Kitchener was recalled to London as secretary of state for war. By 1915, as British military fortunes in the Middle East deteriorated, Kitchener saw the usefulness of transferring the Islamic caliphate- -the caliph, or successor to the Prophet Muhammad, was the traditional leader of the Islamic world--to an Arab candidate indebted to Britain, and he energetically sought Arab support for the war against Turkey. In Cairo Sir Henry McMahon, the first British high commissioner in Egypt, conducted an extensive correspondence from July 1915 to January 1916 with Husayn, two of whose sons--Abdullah, later king of Jordan, and Faysal, later king of Syria (ejected by the French in 1920) and of Iraq (1921-33)-- were to figure prominently in subsequent events.

In a letter to McMahon enclosed with a letter dated July 14, 1915, from Abdullah, Husayn specified an area for Arab independence under the "Sharifian Arab Government" consisting of the Arabian Peninsula (except Aden) and the Fertile Crescent of Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. In his letter of October 24, 1915, to Husayn, McMahon, on behalf of the British government, declared British support for postwar Arab independence, subject to certain reservations and exclusions of territory not entirely Arab or concerning which Britain was not free "to act without detriment to the interests of her ally, France." The territories assessed by the British as not purely Arab included: "The districts of Mersin and Alexandretta, and portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo." As with the later Balfour Declaration, the exact meaning was not clear, although Arab spokesmen since then have usually maintained that Palestine was within the pledged area of independence. Although the Husayn- McMahon correspondence was not legally binding on either side, on June 5, 1916, Husayn launched the Arab Revolt against Turkey and in October declared himself "King of the Arabs."

While Husayn and McMahon corresponded over the fate of the Middle East, the British were conducting negotiations with the French over the same territory. Following the British military defeat at the Dardanelles in 1915, the Foreign Office sought a new offensive in the Middle East, which it thought could only be carried out by reassuring the French of Britain's intentions in the region. In February 1916, the Sykes-Picot Agreement (officially the "Asia Minor Agreement") was signed, which, contrary to the contents of the Husayn-McMahon correspondence, proposed to partition the Middle East into French and British zones of control and interest. Under the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Palestine was to be administered by an international "condominium" of the British, French, and Russians (also signatories to the agreement).

The final British pledge, and the one that formally committed the British to the Zionist cause, was the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. Before the emergence of David Lloyd George as prime minister and Arthur James Balfour as foreign secretary in December 1916, the Liberal Herbert Asquith government had viewed a Jewish entity in Palestine as detrimental to British strategic aims in the Middle East. Lloyd George and his Tory supporters, however, saw British control over Palestine as much more attractive than the proposed British-French condominium. Since the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Palestine had taken on increased strategic importance because of its proximity to the Suez Canal, where the British garrison had reached 300,000 men, and because of a planned British attack on Ottoman Syria originating from Egypt. Lloyd George was determined, as early as March 1917, that Palestine should become British and that he would rely on its conquest by British troops to obtain the abrogation of the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

In the new British strategic thinking, the Zionists appeared as a potential ally capable of safeguarding British imperial interests in the region. Furthermore, as British war prospects dimmed throughout 1917, the War Cabinet calculated that supporting a Jewish entity in Palestine would mobilize America's influential Jewish community to support United States intervention in the war and sway the large number of Jewish Bolsheviks who participated in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to keep Russia in the war. Fears were also voiced in the Foreign Office that if Britain did not come out in favor of a Jewish entity in Palestine the Germans would preempt them. Finally, both Lloyd George and Balfour were devout churchgoers who attached great religious significance to the proposed reinstatement of the Jews in their ancient homeland.

The negotiations for a Jewish entity were carried out by Weizmann, who greatly impressed Balfour and maintained important links with the British media. In support of the Zionist cause, his protracted and skillful negotiations with the Foreign Office were climaxed on November 2, 1917, by the letter from the foreign secretary to Lord Rothschild, which became known as the Balfour Declaration. This document declared the British government's "sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations," viewed with favor "the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish People," and announced an intent to facilitate the achievement of this objective. The letter added the provision of "it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

The Balfour Declaration radically changed the status of the Zionist movement. It promised support from a major world power and gave the Zionists international recognition. Zionism was transformed by the British pledge from a quixotic dream into a legitimate and achievable undertaking. For these reasons, the Balfour Declaration was widely criticized throughout the Arab world, and especially in Palestine, as contrary to the spirit of British pledges contained in the Husayn-McMahon correspondence. The wording of the document itself, although painstakingly devised, was interpreted differently by different people, according to their interests. Ultimately, it was found to contain two incompatible undertakings: establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jews and preservation of the rights of existing non-Jewish communities, i.e., the Arabs. The incompatibility sharpened over the succeeding years and became irreconcilable.

On December 9, 1917, five weeks after the Balfour Declaration, British troops led by General Sir Edmund Allenby took Jerusalem from the Turks; Turkish forces in Syria were subsequently defeated; an armistice was concluded with Turkey on October 31, 1918; and all of Palestine came under British military rule. British policy in the Arab lands of the now moribund Ottoman Empire was guided by a need to reduce military commitments, hold down expenditures, prevent a renewal of Turkish hegemony in the region, and safeguard Britain's strategic interest in the Suez Canal. The conflicting promises issued between 1915 and 1918 complicated the attainment of these objectives.

Between January 1919 and January 1920, the Allied Powers met in Paris to negotiate peace treaties with the Central Powers. At the conference, Amir Faysal, representing the Arabs, and Weizmann, representing the Zionists, presented their cases. Although Weizmann and Faysal reached a separate agreement on January 3, 1919, pledging the two parties to cordial cooperation, the latter wrote a proviso on the document in Arabic that his signature was tied to Allied war pledges regarding Arab independence. Since these pledges were not fulfilled to Arab satisfaction after the war, most Arab leaders and spokesmen have not considered the Faysal-Weizmann agreement as binding.

The conferees faced the nearly impossible task of finding a compromise between the generally accepted idea of self- determination, wartime promises, and plans for a division of the spoils. They ultimately decided upon a mandate system whose details were laid out at the San Remo Conference of April 1920. The terms of the British Mandate were approved by the League of Nations Council on July 24, 1922, although they were technically not official until September 29, 1923. The United States was not a member of the League of Nations, but a joint resolution of the United States Congress on June 30, 1922, endorsed the concept of the Jewish national home.

The Mandate's terms recognized the "historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine," called upon the mandatory power to "secure establishment of the Jewish National Home," and recognized "an appropriate Jewish agency" for advice and cooperation to that end. The WZO, which was specifically recognized as the appropriate vehicle, formally established the Jewish Agency in 1929. Jewish immigration was to be facilitated, while ensuring that the "rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced." English, Arabic, and Hebrew were all to be official languages. At the San Remo Conference, the French also were assured of a mandate over Syria. They drove Faysal out of Damascus in the summer; the British provided him with a throne in Iraq a year later. In March 1921, Winston Churchill, then colonial secretary, established Abdullah as ruler of Transjordan under a separate British mandate.

To the WZO, which by 1921 had a worldwide membership of about 770,000, the recognition in the Mandate was seen as a welcome first step. Although not all Zionists and not all Jews were committed at that time to conversion of the Jewish national home into a separate political state, this conversion became firm Zionist policy during the next twenty-five years. The patterns developed during these years strongly influenced the State of Israel proclaimed in 1948.

Arab spokesmen, such as Husayn and his sons, opposed the Mandate's terms because the Covenant of the League of Nations had endorsed popular determination and thereby, they maintained, supported the cause of the Arab majority in Palestine. Further, the covenant specifically declared that all other obligations and understandings inconsistent with it were abrogated. Therefore, Arab argument held that both the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot Agreement were null and void. Arab leaders particularly objected to the Mandate's numerous references to the "Jewish community," whereas the Arab people, then constituting about 88 percent of the Palestinian population, were acknowledged only as "the other sections."

Prior to the Paris Peace Conference, Palestinian Arab nationalists had worked for a Greater Syria under Faysal. The British military occupation authority in Palestine, fearing an Arab rebellion, published an Anglo-French Joint Declaration, issued after the armistice with Turkey in November 1918, which called for self-determination for the indigenous people of the region. By the end of 1919, the British had withdrawn from Syria (exclusive of Palestine), but the French had not yet entered (except in Lebanon) and Faysal had not been explicitly repudiated by Britain. In March 1920, a General Syrian Congress meeting in Damascus elected Faysal king of a united Syria, which included Palestine. This raised the hope of the Palestinian Arab population that the Balfour Declaration would be rescinded, setting off a feverish series of demonstrations in Palestine in the spring of 1920. From April 4 to 8, Arab rioters attacked the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem. Faysal's ouster by the French in the summer of 1920 led to further rioting in Jaffa (contemporary Yafo) as a large number of Palestinian Arabs who had been with Faysal returned to Palestine to fight against the establishment of a Jewish nation.

The end of Faysal's Greater Syria experiment and the application of the mandate system, which artificially carved up the Arab East into new nation-states, had a profound effect on the history of the region in general and Palestine in particular. The mandate system created an identity crisis among Arab nationalists that led to the growth of competing nationalisms: Arab versus Islamic versus the more parochial nationalisms of the newly created states. It also created a serious legitimacy problem for the new Arab elites, whose authority ultimately rested with their European benefactors. The combination of narrowly based leadership and the emergence of competing nationalisms stymied the Arab response to the Zionist challenge in Palestine.

To British authorities, burdened with heavy responsibilities and commitments after World War I, the objective of the Mandate administration was peaceful accommodation and development of Palestine by Arabs and Jews under British control. Sir Herbert Samuels, the first high commissioner of Palestine, was responsible for keeping some semblance of order between the two antagonistic communities. In pursuit of this goal, Samuels, a Jew, was guided by two contradictory principles: liberalism and Zionism. He called for open Jewish immigration and land acquisition, which enabled thousands of highly committed and well-trained socialist Zionists to enter Palestine between 1919 and 1923. The Third Aliyah, as it was called, made important contributions to the development of Jewish agriculture, especially collective farming. Samuels, however, also promised representative institutions, which, if they had emerged in the 1920s, would have had as their first objective the curtailment of Jewish immigration. According to the census of 1922, the Jews numbered only 84,000, or 11 percent of the population of Palestine. The Zionists, moreover, could not openly oppose the establishment of democratic structures, which was clearly in accordance with the Covenant of the League of Nations and the mandatory system.

The Arabs of Palestine, however, believing that participation in Mandate-sanctioned institutions would signify their acquiescence to the Mandate and thus to the Balfour Declaration, refused to participate. As a result, Samuels's proposals for a legislative council, an advisory council, and an Arab agency envisioned as similar to the Jewish Agency, were all rejected by the Arabs. After the collapse of the bid for representative institutions, any possibility of joint consultation between the two communities ended.

Israel

Israel - The Arab Community During the Mandate

The British Mandate and the intensification of Jewish settlement in Palestine significantly altered Palestinian leadership structures and transformed the socioeconomic base of Palestinian Arab society. First, British policy in Palestine, as elsewhere in the Middle East, was based on patronage. This policy entailed granting wide powers to a small group of competing traditional elites whose authority would depend upon the British high commissioner. In Palestine, Samuels granted the most important posts to two competing families, the Husaynis (also seen as Husseinis) and the Nashashibis. Of the two clans, the Husaynis were given the most powerful posts, many of which had no precedent under Ottoman rule. In 1921 Samuels appointed Hajj Amin al Husayni, an ardent anti-Zionist and a major figure behind the April 1920 riots, as mufti (chief Muslim religious jurist) of Jerusalem. In 1922 he augmented Hajj Amin's power by appointing him president of the newly constituted Supreme Muslim Council (SMC), which was given wide powers over the disbursement of funds from religious endowments, fees, and the like.

By heading the SMC, Hajj Amin controlled a vast patronage network, giving him power over a large constituency. This new patronage system competed with and threatened the traditional family-clan and Islamic ties that existed under the Ottoman Empire. Traditional Arab elites hailing from other locales, such as Hebron and Haifa, resented the monopoly of power of the British-supported Jerusalem-based elite. Furthermore, as an agricultural depression pushed many Arabs westward into the coastal cities, a new urbanbased elite emerged that challenged the Nashashibis and Husaynis.

Tension between members of Arab elites was exacerbated because Hajj Amin, who was not an elected official, increasingly attempted to dictate Palestinian politics. The competition between the major families and the increased use of the Zionist threat as a political tool in interelite struggles placed a premium on extremism. Hajj Amin frequently incited his followers against the Nashashibis by referring to the latter as Zionist collaborators. As a result, Palestinian leadership during the Mandate was fragmented and unable to develop a coherent policy to deal with the growing Zionist movement.

The other major transformation in Palestinian Arab society during the Mandate concerned the issue of land ownership. During the years of Ottoman rule, the question of private property rights was never fully articulated. The tenuous nature of private property rights enabled the Zionist movement to acquire large tracts of land that had been Arab owned. The sale of land to Jewish settlers, which occurred even during the most intense phases of the Palestinian Revolt, reflected the lack of national cohesion and institutional structure that might have enabled the Palestinian Arabs to withstand the lure of quick profits. Instead, when increased Jewish land purchases caused property prices to spiral, both the Arab landowning class and absentee landlords, many of whom resided outside Palestine, were quick to sell for unprecedented profits. In the 1930s, when Palestine was beset by a severe economic depression, large numbers of Arab peasants, unable to pay either their Arab landlords or taxes to the government, sold their land. The British did not intervene in the land purchases mainly because they needed the influx of Jewish capital to pay for Jewish social services and to maintain the Jewish economy.

Israel

Israel - The Jewish Community under the Mandate

The greatest asset brought by the Zionists settling Palestine was their organizational acumen, which allowed for the institutionalization of the movement despite deep ideological cleavages. The WZO established an executive office in Palestine, thus implementing the language of the Mandate prescribing such an agency. In August 1929, the formalized Jewish Agency was established with a council, administrative committee, and executive. Each of these bodies consisted of an equal number of Zionist and nominally non-Zionist Jews. The president of the WZO was, however, ex officio president of the agency. Thereafter, the WZO continued to conduct external diplomatic, informational, and cultural activities, and the operational Jewish Agency took over fundraising, activities in Palestine, and local relations with the British Mandate Authority (administered by the colonial secretary). In time, the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency became two different names for virtually the same organization.

Other landmark developments by the WZO and the Jewish Agency under the Mandate included creation of the Asefat Hanivharim (Elected Assembly) and the Vaad Leumi (National Council) in 1920 to promote religious, educational, and welfare services; establishment of the chief rabbinate in 1921; centralized Zionist control of the Hebrew school system in 1919, opening of the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) in Haifa in 1924, and dedication of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1925; and continued acquisition of land--largely via purchases by the Jewish National Fund--increasing from 60,120 hectares in 1922 to about 155,140 hectares in 1939, and the concurrent growth of Jewish urban and village centers.

The architect of the centralized organizational structure that dominated the Yishuv throughout the Mandate and afterward was Ben- Gurion. To achieve a centralized Jewish economic infrastructure in Palestine, he set out to form a large-scale organized Jewish labor movement including both urban and agricultural laborers. In 1919 he founded the first united Labor Zionist party, Ahdut HaAvodah (Unity of Labor), which included Poalei Tziyyon and affiliated socialist groups. This achievement was followed in 1920 by the formation of the Histadrut, or HaHistadrut HaKlalit shel HaOvdim B'Eretz Yisrael (General Federation of Laborers in the Land of Israel).

The Histadrut was the linchpin of Ben-Gurion's reorganization of the Yishuv. He designed the Histadrut to form a tightly controlled autonomous Jewish economic state within the Palestinian economy. It functioned as much more than a traditional labor union, providing the Yishuv with social services and security, setting up training centers, helping absorb new immigrants, and instructing them in Hebrew. Its membership was all-inclusive: any Jewish laborer was entitled to belong and to obtain shares in the organization's assets. It established a general fund supported by workers' dues that provided all members with social services previously provided by individual political parties. The Histadrut also set up Hevrat HaOvdim (Society of Workers) to fund and manage large-scale agricultural and industrial enterprises. Within a year of its establishment in 1921, Hevrat HaOvdim had set up Tenuvah, the agriculture marketing cooperative; Bank HaPoalim, the workers' bank; and Soleh Boneh, the construction firm. Originally established by Ahdut HaAvodah after the Arab riots in 1920, the Haganah under the Histadrut rapidly became the major Jewish defense force.

From the beginning, Ben-Gurion and Ahdut HaAvodah dominated the Histadrut and through it the Yishuv. As secretary general of the Histadrut, Ben-Gurion oversaw the development of the Jewish economy and defense forces in the Yishuv. This centralized control enabled the Yishuv to endure both severe economic hardship and frequent skirmishes with the Arabs and British in the late 1920s. The resilience of the Histadrut in the face of economic depression enabled Ben-Gurion to consolidate his control over the Yishuv. In 1929 many private entrepreneurs were forced to look to Ahdut HaAvodah to pull them through hard economic times. In 1930 Ahdut HaAvodah was powerful enough to absorb its old ideological rival, HaPoel HaTzair. They merged to form Mifleget Poalei Eretz Yisrael (better known by its acronym Mapai), which would dominate political life of the State of Israel for the next two generations.

The hegemony of Ben-Gurion's Labor Zionism in the Yishuv did not go unchallenged. The other major contenders for power were the Revisionist Zionists led by Vladimir Jabotinsky, who espoused a more liberal economic structure and a more zealous defense policy than the Labor movement. Jabotinsky, who had become a hero to the Yishuv because of his role in the defense of the Jews of Jerusalem during the riots of April 1920, believed that there was an inherent conflict between Zionist objectives and the aspirations of Palestinian Arabs. He called for the establishment of a strong Jewish military force capable of compelling the Arabs to accept Zionist claims to Palestine. Jabotinsky also thought that Ben- Gurion's focus on building a socialist Jewish economy in Palestine needlessly diverted the Zionist movement from its true goal: the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.

The appeal of Revisionist Zionism grew between 1924 and 1930 as a result of an influx of Polish immigrants and the escalating conflict with the Arabs. In the mid-1920s, a political and economic crisis in Poland and the Johnson-Lodge Immigration Act passed by the United States Congress, which curtailed mass immigration to America, spurred Polish-Jewish immigration to Israel. Between 1924 and 1931, approximately 80,000 Jews arrived in Palestine from Central Europe. The Fourth Aliyah, as it was called, differed from previous waves of Jewish immigration. The new Polish immigrants, unlike the Bolshevik-minded immigrants of the Second Aliyah, were primarily petty merchants and small-time industrialists with their own capital to invest. Not attracted to the Labor Party's collective settlements, they migrated to the cities where they established the first semblance of an industrialized urban Jewish economy in Palestine. Within five years, the Jewish populations of Jerusalem and Haifa doubled, and the city of Tel Aviv emerged. These new immigrants disdained the socialism of the Histadrut and increasingly identified with the laissez-faire economics espoused by Jabotinsky.

Another reason for Jabotinsky's increasing appeal was the escalation of Jewish-Arab violence. Jabotinsky's belief in the inevitable conflict between Jews and Arabs and his call for the establishment of an "iron wall" that would force the Arabs to accept Zionism were vindicated in the minds of many Jews after a confrontation over Jewish access to the Wailing Wall in August 1929 turned into a violent Arab attack on Jews in Hebron and Jerusalem. By the time the fighting ended, 133 Jews had been killed and 339 wounded. The causes of the disturbances were varied: an inter- Palestinian power struggle, a significant cutback in British military presence in Palestine, and a more conciliatory posture by the new British authorities toward the Arab position.

The inability of the Haganah to protect Jewish civilians during the 1929 riots led Jewish Polish immigrants who supported Jabotinsky to break away from the Labor-dominated Haganah. They were members of Betar, an activist Zionist movement founded in 1923 in Riga, Latvia, under the influence of Jabotinsky. The first Betar congress met at Danzig in 1931 and elected Jabotinsky as its leader. In 1937, a group of Haganah members left the organization in protest against its "defensive" orientation and joined forces with Betar to set up a new and more militant armed underground organization, known as the Irgun. The formal name of the Irgun was the Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization), sometimes also called by the acronym, Etzel, from the initial letters of the Hebrew name. The more extreme terrorist group, known to the British as the Stern Gang, split off from the Irgun in 1939. The Stern Gang was formally known as the Lohamei Herut Israel (Fighters for Israel's Freedom), sometimes identified by the acronym Lehi. Betar (which later formed a nucleus for Herut) and Irgun rejected the Histadrut/Haganah doctrine of havlaga (self-restraint) and favored retaliation.

Although the 1929 riots intensified the Labor-Revisionist split over the tactics necessary to attain Jewish sovereignty in Palestine, their respective visions of the indigenous Arab population coalesced. Ben-Gurion, like Jabotinsky, came to realize that the conflict between Arab and Jewish nationalisms was irreconcilable and therefore that the Yishuv needed to prepare for an eventual military confrontation with the Arabs. He differed with Jabotinsky, however, on the need to make tactical compromises in the short term to attain Jewish statehood at a more propitious time. Whereas Jabotinsky adamantly put forth maximalist demands, such as the immediate proclamation of statehood in all of historic Palestine--on both banks of the Jordan River--Ben-Gurion operated within the confines of the Mandate. He understood better than Jabotinsky that timing was the key to the Zionist enterprise in Palestine. The Yishuv in the 1930s lacked the necessary military or economic power to carry out Jabotinsky's vision in the face of Arab and British opposition.

Another development resulting from the 1929 riots was the growing animosity between the British Mandate Authority and the Yishuv. The inactivity of the British while Arab bands were attacking Jewish settlers strengthened Zionist anti-British forces. Following the riots, the British set up the Shaw Commission to determine the cause of the disturbances. The commission report, dated March 30, 1930, refrained from blaming either community but focused on Arab apprehensions about Jewish labor practices and land purchases. The commission's allegations were investigated by an agrarian expert, Sir John Hope Simpson, who concluded that about 30 percent of the Arab population was already landless and that the amount of land remaining in Arab hands would be insufficient to divide among their offspring. This led to the Passfield White Paper (October 1930), which recommended that Jewish immigration be stopped if it prevented Arabs from obtaining employment and that Jewish land purchases be curtailed. Although the Passfield White Paper was publicly repudiated by Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald in 1931, it served to alienate further the Yishuv from the British.

The year 1929 also saw the beginning of a severe economic crisis in Germany that launched the rise of Adolf Hitler. Although both Germany and Austria had long histories of anti-Semitism, the genocide policies preached by Hitler were unprecedented. When in January 1930 he became chancellor of the Reich, a massive wave of mostly German Jewish immigration to Palestine ensued. Recorded Jewish immigration was 37,000 in 1933, 45,000 in 1934, and an all- time record for the Yishu of 61,000 in 1935. In addition, the British estimated that a total of 40,000 Jews had entered Palestine without legal certificates during the period from 1920 to 1939. Between 1929, the year of the Wailing Wall disturbances, and 1936, the year the Palestinian Revolt began, the Jewish population of Palestine increased from 170,000 or 17 percent of the population, to 400,000, or approximately 31 percent of the total. The immigration of thousands of German Jews accelerated the pace of industrialization and made the concept of a Jewish state in Palestine a more formidable reality.

Israel

Israel - The Palestinian Revolt

By 1936 the increase in Jewish immigration and land acquisition, the growing power of Hajj Amin al Husayni, and general Arab frustration at the continuation of European rule, radicalized increasing numbers of Palestinian Arabs. Thus, in April 1936 an Arab attack on a Jewish bus led to a series of incidents that escalated into a major Palestinian rebellion. An Arab Higher Committee (AHC), a loose coalition of recently formed Arab political parties, was created. It declared a national strike in support of three basic demands: cessation of Jewish immigration, an end to all further land sales to the Jews, and the establishment of an Arab national government.

The intensity of the Palestinian Revolt, at a time when Britain was preparing for the possibility of another world war, led the British to reorient their policy in Palestine. As war with Germany became imminent, Britain's dependence on Middle Eastern oil, and therefore the need for Arab goodwill, loomed increasingly large in its strategic thinking. Jewish leverage in the Foreign Office, on the other hand, had waned; the pro-Zionists, Balfour and Samuels, had left the Foreign Office and the new administration was not inclined toward the Zionist position. Furthermore, the Jews had little choice but to support Britain against Nazi Germany. Thus, Britain's commitment to a Jewish homeland in Palestine dissipated, and the Mandate authorities pursued a policy of appeasement with respect to the Arabs.

Britain's policy change in Palestine was not, however, easily implemented. Since the 1917 Balfour Declaration, successive British governments had supported (or at least not rejected) a Jewish national home in Palestine. The Mandate itself was premised on that pledge. By the mid-1930s, the Yishuv had grown to about 400,000, and the Jewish economic and political structures in Palestine were well ensconced. The extent of the Jewish presence and the rapidly deteriorating fate of European Jewry meant that the British would have an extremely difficult time extricating themselves from the Balfour Declaration. Furthermore, the existing Palestinian leadership, dominated by Hajj Amin al Husayni, was unwilling to grant members of the Jewish community citizenship or to guarantee their safety if a new Arab entity were to emerge. Thus, for the British the real options were to impose partition, to pull out and leave the Jews and Arabs to fight it out, or to stay and improvise.

In 1937 the British, working with their regional Arab allies, Amir Abdullah of Transjordan, King Ghazi of Iraq, and King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, mediated an end to the revolt with the AHC. A Royal Commission on Palestine (known as the Peel Commission) was immediately dispatched to Palestine. Its report, issued in July 1937, described the Arab and Zionist positions and the British obligation to each as irreconcilable and the existing Mandate as unworkable. It recommended partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, with a retained British Mandate over Nazareth, Bethlehem, and <"http://worldfacts.us/Israel-Jerusalem.htm"> Jerusalem and a corridor from Jerusalem to the coast.

In 1937 the Twentieth Zionist Congress rejected the proposed boundaries but agreed in principle to partition. Palestinian Arab nationalists rejected any kind of partition. The British government approved the idea of partition and sent a technical team to make a detailed plan. This group, the Woodhead Commission, reversed the Peel Commission's findings and reported in November 1937 that partition was impracticable; this view in its turn was accepted. The Palestinian Revolt broke out again in the autumn of 1937. The British put down the revolt using harsh measures, shutting down the AHC and deporting many Palestinian Arab leaders.

With their leadership residing outside Palestine, the Arabs were unable to match the Zionists' highly sophisticated organization. Another outcome of the Palestinian Revolt was the involvement of the Arab states as advocates of the Palestinian Arabs. Whereas Britain had previously tended to deal with its commitments in Palestine as separate from its commitments elsewhere in the Middle East, by 1939 pan-Arab pressure carried increasing weight in London.

In the Yishuv, the Palestinian Revolt reinforced the already firm belief in the need for a strong Jewish defense network. Finally, the Arab agricultural boycott that began in 1936 forced the Jewish economy into even greater self-sufficiency.

Israel

Israel - World War II

In May 1939, the British published a White Paper that marked the end of its commitment to the Jews under the Balfour Declaration. It provided for the establishment of a Palestinian (Arab) state within ten years and the appointment of Palestinian ministers to begin taking over the government as soon as "peace and order" were restored to Palestine; 75,000 Jews would be allowed into Palestine over the next five years, after which all immigration would be subject to Arab consent; all further land sales would be severely restricted. The 1939 White Paper met a mixed Arab reception and was rejected by the AHC. The Jewish Agency rejected it emphatically, branding it as a total repudiation of Balfour and Mandate obligations. In September 1939, at the outset of World War II, Ben-Gurion, then chairman of the Jewish Agency, declared: "We shall fight the war against Hitler as if there were no White Paper, and we shall fight the White Paper as if there were no war."

Ben-Gurion's statement of 1939 set the tone for Jewish Agency policy and operations during World War II. In May 1940, however, when Winston Churchill, a longtime Zionist sympathizer, became prime minister, it appeared that the 1939 White Paper might be rescinded. A brief period of close British-Jewish military cooperation ensued, and there was talk (which never came to fruition) of establishing a Jewish division within the British Army. The British trained Jewish commando units, the first elements of the famous Palmach (Pelugot Mahatz--Shock Forces)--the strategic reserve of the Haganah--and they also gave Jewish volunteers intensive training in sabotage, demolition, and partisan warfare. Ironically, this training proved indispensable in the Yishuv's efforts after the war to force the British to withdraw from Palestine.

The entry of <"http://worldfacts.us/Italy.htm"> Italy into the war in May 1940, which brought the war closer to the Middle East, convinced Churchill and his military advisers that the immigration provisions of the White Paper needed to be enforced so as not to antagonize the Arabs. Thus, the British strictly enforced the immigration limits at a time when European Jewry sought desperately to reach the shores of Palestine. Despite rising British-Jewish tensions, thousands of Jewish volunteers served in the British army, and on September 14, 1944, the Jewish Brigade was established.

The event that did the most to turn the Zionist movement against Churchill's Britain was the Struma affair. The Struma, a ship carrying Jewish refugees from Romania, was denied entry into Palestine, after which the ship sank in the Black Sea leaving all but two of its passengers dead. In the aftermath of the loss of the Struma in April 1942, young Menachem Begin, then a soldier in the Polish army-in-exile, first came to Palestine. Begin was a disciple of Jabotinsky, but he rejected Jabotinsky's pro-British sympathies. Upon entering Palestine, Begin immediately set out to draw together the whole underground, including Lehi, in preparation for a Jewish war of liberation against the British.

By 1943 as news regarding Nazi persecution of Jews in Europe increased, the Irgun and Stern Gang stepped up harassment of British forces in an attempt to obtain unrestricted Jewish immigration. In November 1944, Lord Moyne, the British ministerresident in Cairo and a close personal friend of Churchill, was assassinated by Lehi. Lord Moyne's assassination alienated the British prime minister, who until then had supported a Jewish national home in Palestine. Subsequently, no British government considered setting up a Jewish state in Palestine. The assassination also led the Jewish Agency's clandestine military arm, Haganah, to cooperate with the British against the Irgun.

Another result of the anti-Zionist trend in British policy was the Yishuv's increasing reliance on the United States. In May 1942, Zionist policy and objectives were clarified at a conference of Zionist parties held at the Biltmore Hotel in <"http://worldfacts.us/US-New-York.htm"> New York City. This conference was called at the initiative of Ben-Gurion, who had come to solicit the support of American Jews. Ben-Gurion was determined to seek a resolution that Jewish immigration to Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state would proceed despite British opposition. Weizmann, who objected to the idea of severing ties with Britain, was outflanked at the conference. The Biltmore Program adopted at the conference and approved by the Zionist General Council in November 1942 called for unlimited Jewish immigration to Palestine and control of immigration by the Jewish commonwealth, the word commonwealth thus replacing homeland.

Israel

Israel - The Holocaust

The impact of the Holocaust on world Jewry, either on contemporaries of the horror or on succeeding generations, cannot be exaggerated. The scope of Hitler's genocidal efforts can be quickly summarized. In 1939 about 10 million of the estimated 16 million Jews in the world lived in Europe. By 1945 almost 6 million had been killed, most of them in the nineteen main concentration camps. Of prewar Czechoslovakia's 281,000 Jews, about 4,000 survived. Before the German conquest and occupation, the Jewish population of Greece was estimated to be between 65,000 and 72,000; about 2,000 survived. Only 5,000 of Austria's prewar Jewish community of 70,000 escaped. In addition, an estimated 4.6 million Jews were killed in Poland and in those areas of the Soviet Union seized and occupied by the Germans. (see <"http://worldfacts.us/Germany.htm">Germany)

The magnitude of the Holocaust cast a deep gloom over the Jewish people and tormented the spirit of Judaism. The faith of observant Jews was shaken, and the hope of the assimilationists smashed. Not only had 6 million Jews perished, but the Allies, who by 1944 could have easily disrupted the operation of the death camps, did nothing. In this spiritual vacuum, Zionism alone emerged as a viable Jewish response to this demonic anti-Semitism. Zionist thinkers since the days of Pinsker had made dire predictions concerning the fate of European Jewry. For much of world Jewry that had suffered centuries of persecution, Zionism and its call for a Jewish national home and for the radical transformation of the Jew from passive victim to self-sufficient citizen residing in his own homeland became the only possible positive response to the Holocaust. Zionism unified the Jewish people, entered deeply into the Jewish spirit, and became an integral part of Jewish identity and religious experience.

Israel

Israel - Prelude to Statehood

The British position in Palestine at the end of World War II was becoming increasingly untenable. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish Holocaust survivors temporarily housed in displaced persons camps in Europe were clamoring to be settled in Palestine. The fate of these refugees aroused international public opinion against British policy. Moreover, the administration of President Harry S Truman, feeling morally bound to help the Jewish refugees and exhorted by a large and vocal Jewish community, pressured Britain to change its course in Palestine. Postwar Britain depended on American economic aid to reconstruct its war-torn economy. Furthermore, Britain's staying power in its old colonial holdings was waning; in 1947 British rule in India came to an end and Britain informed Washington that London could no longer carry the military burden of strengthening Greece and Turkey against communist encroachment.

In May 1946, the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry unanimously declared its opposition to the White Paper of 1939 and proposed, among other recommendations, that the immigration to Palestine of 100,000 European Jews be authorized at once. The British Mandate Authority rejected the proposal, stating that such immigration was impossible while armed organizations in Palestine-- both Arab and Jewish--were fighting the authority and disrupting public order.

Despite American, Jewish, and international pressure and the recommendations of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, the new Labour Party government of Prime Minister Clement Atlee and his foreign minister, Ernest Bevin, continued to enforce the policy articulated in the White Paper. British adamancy on immigration radicalized the Yishuv. Under Ben-Gurion's direction, the Jewish Agency decided in October 1945 to unite with Jewish dissident groups in a combined rebellion against the British administration in Palestine. The combined Jewish resistance movement organized illegal immigration and kidnapping of British officials in Palestine and sabotaged the British infrastructure in Palestine. In response Bevin ordered a crackdown on the Haganah and arrested many of its leaders. While the British concentrated their efforts on the Haganah, the Irgun and Lehi carried out terrorist attacks against British forces, the most spectacular of which was the bombing of the King David Hotel in <"http://worldfacts.us/Israel-Jerusalem.htm"> Jerusalem in July 1946. The latter event led Ben-Gurion to sever his relationship with the Irgun and Lehi.

By 1947 Palestine was a major trouble spot in the British Empire, requiring some 100,000 troops and a huge maintenance budget. On February 18, 1947, Bevin informed the House of Commons of the government's decision to present the Palestine problem to the United Nations (UN). On May 15, 1947, a special session of the UN General Assembly established the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), consisting of eleven members. The UNSCOP reported on August 31 that a majority of its members supported a geographically complex system of partition into separate Arab and Jewish states, a special international status for Jerusalem, and an economic union linking the three members. Backed by both the United States and the Soviet Union, the plan was adopted after two months of intense deliberations as the UN General Assembly Resolution of November 29, 1947. Although considering the plan defective in terms of their expectations from the League of Nations Mandate twenty-five years earlier, the Zionist General Council stated willingness in principle to accept partition. The League of Arab States (Arab League) Council, meeting in December 1947, said it would take whatever measures were required to prevent implementation of the resolution.

Despite the passage of the UN partition plan, the situation in Palestine in early 1948 did not look auspicious for the Yishuv. When the AHC rejected the plan immediately after its passage and called for a general strike, violence between Arabs and Jews mounted. Many Jewish centers, including Jerusalem, were besieged by the Arabs. In January 1948, President Truman, warned by the United States Department of State that a Jewish state was not viable, reversed himself on the issue of Palestine, agreeing to postpone partition and to transfer the Mandate to a trusteeship council. Moreover, the British forces in Palestine sided with the Arabs and attempted to thwart the Yishuv's attempts to arm itself.

In mid-March the Yishuv's military prospects changed dramatically after receiving the first clandestine shipment of heavy arms from Czechoslovakia. The Haganah went on the offensive and, in a series of operations carried out from early April until mid-May, successfully consolidated and created communications links with those Jewish settlements designated by the UN to become the Jewish state. In the meantime, Weizmann convinced Truman to reverse himself and pledge his support for the proposed Jewish state. In April 1948, the Palestinian Arab community panicked after Begin's Irgun killed 250 Arab civilians at the village of Dayr Yasin near Jerusalem. The news of Dayr Yasin precipitated a flight of the Arab population from areas with large Jewish populations.

On May 14, 1948, Ben-Gurion and his associates proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. On the following day Britain relinquished the Mandate at 6:00 P.M. and the United States announced de facto recognition of Israel. Soviet recognition was accorded on May 18; by April 1949, fifty-three nations, including Britain, had extended recognition. In May 1949, the UN General Assembly, on recommendation of the Security Council, admitted Israel to the UN.

Meanwhile, Arab military forces began their invasion of Israel on May 15. Initially these forces consisted of approximately 8,000 to 10,000 Egyptians, 2,000 to 4,000 Iraqis, 4,000 to 5,000 Transjordanians, 3,000 to 4,000 Syrians, 1,000 to 2,000 Lebanese, and smaller numbers of Saudi Arabian and Yemeni troops, about 25,000 in all. Israeli forces composed of the Haganah, such irregular units as the Irgun and the Stern Gang, and women's auxiliaries numbered 35,000 or more. By October 14, Arab forces deployed in the war zones had increased to about 55,000, including not more than 5,000 irregulars of Hajj Amin al Husayni's Palestine Liberation Force. The Israeli military forces had increased to approximately 100,000. Except for the British-trained Arab Legion of Transjordan, Arab units were largely ill-trained and inexperienced. Israeli forces, usually operating with interior lines of communication, included an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 European World War II veterans.

By January 1949, Jewish forces held the area that was to define Israel's territory until June 1967, an area that was significantly larger than the area designated by the UN partition plan. The part of Palestine remaining in Arab hands was limited to that held by the Arab Legion of Transjordan and the Gaza area held by Egypt at the cessation of hostilities. The area held by the Arab Legion was subsequently annexed by Jordan and is commonly referred to as the West Bank. Jerusalem was divided. The Old City, the Western Wall and the site of Solomon's Temple, upon which stands the Muslim mosque called the Dome of the Rock, remained in Jordanian hands; the New City lay on the Israeli side of the line. Although the West Bank remained under Jordanian suzerainty until 1967, only two countries--Britain and Pakistan--granted de jure recognition of the annexation.

Early in the conflict, on May 29, 1948, the UN Security Council established the Truce Commission headed by a UN mediator, Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte, who was assassinated in Jerusalem on September 17, 1948. He was succeeded by Ralph Bunche, an American, as acting mediator. The commission, which later evolved into the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization-Palestine (UNSTOP), attempted to devise new settlement plans and arranged the truces of June 11-July 8 and July 19-October 14, 1948. Armistice talks were initiated with Egypt in January 1949, and an armistice agreement was concluded with Egypt on February 24, with Lebanon on March 23, with Transjordan on April 3, and with Syria on July 20. Iraq did not enter into an armistice agreement but withdrew its forces after turning over its positions to Transjordanian units.

Israel

Israel - PROBLEMS OF THE NEW STATE, 1948-67

Etatism

The War of Independence was the most costly war Israel has fought; more than 6,000 Jewish fighters and civilians died. At the war's end in 1949, the fledgling state was burdened with a number of difficult problems. These included reacting to the absorption of hundreds of thousands of new immigrants and to a festering refugee problem on its borders, maintaining a defense against a hostile and numerically superior Arab world, keeping a war-torn economy afloat, and managing foreign policy alignments. Faced with such intractable problems, Ben-Gurion sought to ensure a fluid transition from existing prestate institutions to the new state apparatus. He announced the formation of a Provisional Council of State, actually a transformed executive committee of the Jewish Agency with himself as prime minister. Weizmann became president of the council, although Ben-Gurion was careful to make the presidency a distinctly ceremonial position. The provisional government would hold elections no later than October 1948 for the Constituent Assembly to draw up a formal constitution. The proposed constitution was never ratified, however, and on February 16, 1949 the Constituent Assembly became Israel's first parliament or Knesset.

A key element of Ben-Gurion's etatism was the integration of Israel's independent military forces into a unified military structure. On May 28, 1948, Ben-Gurion 's provisional government created the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the Hebrew name of which, Zvah Haganah Le Yisrael, is commonly abbreviated to Zahal, and prohibited maintenance of any other armed force. This proclamation was challenged by the Irgun, which sailed the Altalena, a ship carrying arms, into Tel Aviv harbor. Ben-Gurion ordered Haganah troops to fire on the ship, which was set aflame on the beach in Tel Aviv. With the two camps on the verge of civil war, Begin, the leader of the Irgun, ordered his troops not to fire on the Haganah. Although the Altalena affair unified the IDF, it remained a bitter memory for Begin and the Irgun. Begin subsequently converted his armed movement into a political party, the Herut (or Freedom Movement). By January 1949, Ben-Gurion had also dissolved the Palmach, the strike force of the Haganah.

Israel

Israel - Ingathering of the Exiles

The first legislative act of the Provisional Council of State was the Law and Administrative Ordinance of 1948 that declared null and void the restrictions on Jewish immigration imposed by British authorities. In July 1950, the Knesset passed the Law of Return, which stated that "Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an olah (new immigrant)."

In 1939 the British Mandate Authority had estimated that about 445,000 out of 1.5 million residents of the Mandate were Jews. Israeli officials estimated that as of May 15, 1948, about 650,000 Jews lived in the area scheduled to become Israel under the November 1947 UN partition proposal. Between May 1948 and December 31, 1951, approximately 684,000 Jewish immigrants entered the new state, thus providing a Jewish majority in the region for the first time in the modern era. The largest single group of immigrants consisted of Jews from Eastern Europe; more than 300,000 people came from refugee and displaced persons camps.

The highly organized state structure created by Ben-Gurion and the old guard Mapai leadership served the Yishuv well in the prestate era, but was ill prepared for the massive influx of nonEuropean refugees that flooded into the new state in its first years of existence. Between 1948 and 1952 about 300,000 Sephardic immigrants came to Israel. Aside from 120,000 highly educated Iraqi Jews and 10,000 Egyptian Jews, the majority of new immigrants (55,000 Turkish Jews, 40,000 Iranian Jews, 55,000 Yemeni Jews, and thousands more from Jewish enclaves in Afghanistan, the Caucasus, and Cochin in southwest India) were poorly educated, impoverished, and culturally very different from the country's dominant European culture. They were religious Jews who had worked primarily in petty trade, while the ruling Ashkenazim of the Labor Party were secular socialists. As a result, the Ashkenazim-dominated kibbutz movement spurned them, and Mapai leadership as a whole viewed the new immigrants as "raw material" for their socialist program.

In the late 1950s, a new flood of 400,000 mainly undereducated Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, and Egyptian Jews immigrated to Israel following Israel's Sinai Campaign. The total addition to Israel's population during the first twelve years of statehood was about 1.2 million, and at least two-thirds of the newcomers were of Sephardic extraction. By 1961 the Sephardic portion of the Jewish population was about 45 percent, or approximately 800,000 people. By the end of the first decade, about four-fifths of the Sephardic population lived in the large towns, mostly development towns, and cities where they became workers in an economy dominated by Ashkenazim.

Israel

Israel - Israeli Arabs, Arab Land, and Arab Refugees

Events immediately before and during the War of Independence and during the first years of independence remain, so far as those events involved the Arab residents of Palestine, matters of bitter and emotional dispute. Palestinian Arab refugees insist that they were driven out of their homeland by Jewish terrorists and regular Jewish military forces; the government of Israel asserts that the invading Arab forces urged the Palestinian Arabs to leave their houses temporarily to avoid the perils of the war that would end the Jewish intrusion into Arab lands. Forty years after the event, advocates of Arabs or Jews continue to present and believe diametrically opposed descriptions of those events.

According to British Mandate Authority population figures in 1947, there were about 1.3 million Arabs in all of Palestine. Between 700,000 and 900,000 of the Arabs lived in the region eventually bounded by the 1949 Armistice line, the so-called Green Line. By the time the fighting stopped, there were only about 170,000 Arabs left in the new State of Israel. By the summer of 1949, about 750,000 Palestinian Arabs were living in squalid refugee camps, set up virtually overnight in territories adjacent to Israel's borders. About 300,000 lived in the Gaza Strip, which was occupied by the Egyptian army. Another 450,000 became unwelcome residents of the West Bank of the Jordan, recently occupied by the Arab Legion of Transjordan.

The Arabs who remained inside post-1948 Israel became citizens of the Jewish state. They had voting rights equal to the state's Jewish community, and according to Israel's Declaration of Independence were guaranteed social and political equality. Because Israel's parliament has never passed a constitution, however, Arab rights in the Jewish state have remained precarious. Israel's Arab residents were seen both by Jewish Israelis and by themselves as aliens in a foreign country. They had been waging war since the 1920s against Zionism and could not be expected to accept enthusiastically residence in the Jewish state. The institutions of the new state were designed to facilitate the growth of the Jewish nation, which in many instances entailed a perceived infringement upon Arab rights. Thus, Arab land was confiscated to make way for Jewish immigrants, the Hebrew language and Judaism predominated over Arabic and Islam, foreign economic aid poured into the Jewish economy while Arab agriculture and business received only meager assistance, and Israeli security concerns severely restricted the Arabs' freedom of movement.

After independence the areas in which 90 percent of the Arabs lived were placed under military government. This system and the assignment of almost unfettered powers to military governors were based on the Defense (Emergency) Regulations promulgated by the British Mandate Authority in 1945. Using the 1945 regulations as a legal base, the government created three areas or zones to be ruled by the Ministry of Defense. The most important was the Northern Area, also known as the Galilee Area, the locale of about twothirds of the Arab population. The second critical area was the socalled Little Triangle, located between the villages of Et Tira and Et Taiyiba near the border with Jordan (then Transjordan). The third area included much of the Negev Desert, the region traversed by the previously apolitical nomadic beduins.

The most salient feature of military government was restriction of movement. Article 125 of the Defense (Emergency) Regulations empowered military governors to declare any specified area "offlimits " to those having no written authorization. The area was then declared a security zone and thus closed to Israeli Arabs who lacked written permission either from the army chief of staff or the minister of defense. Under these provisions, 93 out of 104 Arab villages in Israel were constituted as closed areas out of which no one could move without a military permit. In these areas, official acts of military governors were, with rare exceptions, not subject to review by the civil courts. Individuals could be arrested and imprisoned on unspecified charges, and private property was subject to search and seizure without warrant. Furthermore, the physical expulsion of individuals or groups from the state was not subject to review by the civil courts.

Another land expropriation measure evolved from the Defense (Emergency) Regulations, which were passed in 1949 and renewed annually until 1972 when the legislation was allowed to lapse. Under this law, the Ministry of Defense could, subject to approval by an appropriate committee of the Knesset, create security zones in all or part of what was designated as the "protected zone," an area that included lands adjacent to Israel's borders and other specified areas. According to Sabri Jiryis, an Arab political economist who based his work exclusively on Israeli government sources, the defense minister used this law to categorize "almost half of Galilee, all of the Triangle, an area near the Gaza Strip, and another along the Jerusalem-Jaffa railway line near Batir as security zones." A clause of the law provided that permanent as well as temporary residents could be required to leave the zone and that the individual expelled had four days within which to appeal the eviction notice to an appeals committee. The decisions of these committees were not subject to review or appeal by a civil court.

Yet another measure enacted by the Knesset in 1949 was the Emergency Regulations (Cultivation of Waste Lands) Ordinance. One use of this law was to transfer to kibbutzim or other Jewish settlements land in the security zones that was lying fallow because the owner of the land or other property was not allowed to enter the zone as a result of national security legislation. The 1949 law provided that such land transfers were valid only for a period of two years and eleven months, but subsequent amending legislation extended the validity of the transfers for the duration of the state of emergency.

Another common procedure was for the military government to seize up to 40 percent of the land in a given region--the maximum allowed for national security reasons--and to transfer the land to a new kibbutz or moshav. Between 1948 and 1953, about 370 new Jewish settlements were built, and an estimated 350 of the settlements were established on what was termed abandoned Arab property.

The property of the Arabs who were refugees outside the state and the property expropriated from the Arabs who remained in Israel became a major asset to the new state. According to Don Peretz, an American scholar, by 1954 "more than one-third of Israel's Jewish population lived on absentee property, and nearly a third of the new immigrants (250,000 people) settled in the urban areas abandoned by Arabs." The fleeing Arabs emptied thriving cities such as Jaffa, Acre (Akko), Lydda (Lod), and Ramla, plus "338 towns and villages and large parts of 94 other cities and towns, containing nearly a quarter of all the buildings in Israel."

To the Israeli Arabs, one of the more devastating aspects of the loss of their property was their knowledge that the loss was legally irreversible. The early Zionist settlers--particularly those of the Second Aliyah--adopted a rigid policy that land purchased or in any way acquired by a Jewish organization or individual could never again be sold, leased, or rented to a nonJew . The policy went so far as to preclude the use of non-Jewish labor on the land. This policy was carried over into the new state. At independence the State of Israel succeeded to the "state lands" of the British Mandate Authority, which had "inherited" the lands held by the government of the Ottoman Empire. The Jewish National Fund was the operating and controlling agency of the Land Development Authority and ensured that land once held by Jews-- either individually or by the "sovereign state of the Jewish people"--did not revert to non-Jews. This denied Israel's nonJewish , mostly Arab, population access to about 95 percent of the land.

Israel

Israel - The IDF

In February 1950, the Israeli government had discreetly negotiated a draft treaty with King Abdullah of Transjordan, including a five-year nonaggression pact, open borders, and free access to the port of Haifa. In April Abdullah annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem, thus creating the united Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Ben-Gurion acquiesced because he thought this would mean an end to independent claims on Israeli territory and material claims on confiscated Arab territory. Abdullah, however, was assassinated in July 1951. Moreover, Israel was boycotted by all its Arab neighbors, and from the end of 1951 the Suez Canal and the Strait of Tiran (at the southern end of the Gulf of Aqaba, where it opens into the Red Sea) were closed to Israeli shipping.

Surrounded by enemies and having to integrate thousands of immigrants into the new state, Ben-Gurion attempted to make the IDF the new unifying symbol of the fledgling state. He realized that the socialism of the Histadrut was ill suited to solving the problems facing the new state. Above all, Israel needed a unity of purpose, which in Ben-Gurion's thinking could only be provided by a strong army that would defend the country against its enemies and help assimilate its culturally diverse immigrants. Thus, Ben-Gurion added to the socialist ethos of the Histadrut and kibbutz movements an aggressive Israeli nationalism spearheaded by the IDF. To carry out this new orientation, he cultivated a "new guard" Mapai leadership headed by dynamic young General Moshe Dayan and technocrat Shimon Peres. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s the Dayan-Peres supporters in Mapai and the "old guard" Labor establishment would compete for power.

In November 1953, Ben-Gurion tendered his resignation, and the less militaristic Moshe Sharett took over as prime minister. Under Sharett's weaker leadership, the conflict between the old-guard Mapai leadership and Ben-Gurion's new technocratic elite festered openly. This led to a major scandal in the Labor Party called the Lavon affair. Defense Minister Pinchas Lavon, an important figure in the old guard, had authorized intelligence chief Benjamin Gibly to launch Israeli spy rings in Cairo and Alexandria in an attempt to embarrass Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser. The Egyptians, however, caught and later executed the spies, and the affair proved to be a major embarrassment to the Israeli government. The commission authorized to investigate the affair became embroiled in a test of strength between the young military establishment-- including Dayan and Peres--and the Mapai old guard, whose support Lavon solicited.

In February 1955, Ben-Gurion returned to the Ministry of Defense, and with the malleable Sharett still as prime minister was able to promote his hard-line defense policy. This position resulted in a number of raids against the Egyptians in response to attacks on Israeli settlements originating from Egyptian-held territory. Subsequently, Ben-Gurion was restored to leadership of the Mapai government. At this time, his biggest concern was the rising power of Nasser. By October 1955, Nasser had signed an agreement to buy arms from the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, while President Dwight D. Eisenhower refused to supply Israel with weapons.

Ben-Gurion sought to inflict a mortal blow on the Egyptian regime. Because Nasser threatened Western interests in the Suez Canal, Ben-Gurion entered into secret talks with Britain and France about the possibility of Israel striking at the Sinai Peninsula, while Britain and France moved in on the Suez Canal, ostensibly to help protect Western shipping from combat. In late October, the IDF routed the Egyptian army at Gaza and after a week pushed to the Gidi and Mitla passes. On November 5, 1956, the French and British took over the Suez Canal area. After intense pressure from the Eisenhower administration, which was worried about the threat of Soviet military involvement, the European powers acceded to a cease-fire.

In March 1957, Israeli troops were forced to withdraw. The war served to spur Ben-Gurion's drive toward greater militarization. Although Israel was forced to withdraw from Sinai, Ben-Gurion deemed the war a success: the raids from Gaza ceased, UN peacekeeping forces separated Egypt and Israel, greater cooperation with France led to more arms sales to Israel and the building of a nuclear reactor, and, most important, the army's near-perfect performance vindicated his view on the centrality of the IDF.

Israel

Israel - 1967 AND AFTERWARD

By the spring of 1967, Nasser's waning prestige, escalating Syrian-Israeli tensions, and the emergence of Levi Eshkol as prime minister set the stage for the third Arab-Israeli war. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Nasser was the fulcrum of Arab politics. Nasser's success, however, was shortlived; his union with Syria fell apart, a revolutionary government in Iraq proved to be a competitor for power, and Egypt became embroiled in a debilitating civil war in Yemen. After 1964, when Israel began diverting waters (of the Jordan River) originating in the Golan Heights for its new National Water Carrier, Syria built its own diverting facility, which the IDF frequently attacked. Finally, in 1963, Ben-Gurion stepped down and the more cautious Levi Eshkol became prime minister, giving the impression that Israel would be less willing to engage the Arab world in hostilities.

On April 6, 1967, Israeli jet fighters shot down six Syrian planes over the Golan Heights, which led to a further escalation of Israeli-Syrian tensions. The Soviet Union, wanting to involve Egypt as a deterrent to an Israeli initiative against Syria, misinformed Nasser on May 13 that the Israelis were planning to attack Syria on May 17 and that they had already concentrated eleven to thirteen brigades on the Syrian border for this purpose. In response Nasser put his armed forces in a state of maximum alert, sent combat troops into Sinai, notified UN Secretary General U Thant of his decision "to terminate the existence of the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) on United Arab Republic (UAR) soil and in the Gaza Strip," and announced the closure of the Strait of Tiran.

The Eshkol government, to avoid the international pressure that forced Israel to retreat in 1956, sent Foreign Minister Abba Eban to Europe and the United States to convince Western leaders to pressure Nasser into reversing his course. In Israel, Eshkol's diplomatic waiting game and Nasser's threatening rhetoric created a somber mood. To reassure the public, Moshe Dayan, the hero of the 1956 Sinai Campaign, was appointed minister of defense and a National Unity Government was formed, which for the first time included Begin's Herut Party, the dominant element in Gahal.

The actual fighting was over almost before it began; the Israeli Air Corps on June 5 destroyed nearly the entire Egyptian Air Force on the ground. King Hussein of Jordan, misinformed by Nasser about Egyptian losses, authorized Jordanian artillery to fire on Jerusalem. Subsequently, both the Jordanians in the east and the Syrians in the north were quickly defeated.

The June 1967 War was a watershed event in the history of Israel and the Middle East. After only six days of fighting, Israel had radically altered the political map of the region. By June 13, Israeli forces had captured the Golan Heights from Syria, Sinai and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, and all of Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan. The new territories more than doubled the size of pre1967 Israel, placing under Israel's control more than 1 million Palestinian Arabs. In Israel, the ease of the victory, the expansion of the state's territory, and the reuniting of Jerusalem, the holiest place in Judaism, permanently altered political discourse. In the Arab camp, the war significantly weakened Nasserism, and led to the emergence of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the leading representative of the Palestinian people and effective player in Arab politics.

The heroic performance of the IDF and especially the capture of Jerusalem unleashed a wave of religious nationalism throughout Israel. The war was widely viewed in Israel as a vindication of political Zionism; the defenseless Jew of the shtetl (the typical Jewish town or village of the Pale of Settlement), oppressed by the tsar and slaughtered by the Nazis, had become the courageous soldier of the IDF, who in the face of Arab hostility and superpower apathy had won a miraculous victory. After 2,000 years of exile, the Jews now possessed all of historic Palestine, including a united Jerusalem. The secular messianism that had been Zionism's creed since its formation in the late 1800s was now supplanted by a religious-territorial messianism whose major Yisrad objective was securing the unity of Eretz Yisrael. In the process, the ethos of Labor Zionism, which had been on the decline throughout the 1960s, was overshadowed.

In the midst of the nationalist euphoria that followed the war, talk of exchanging newly captured territories for peace had little public appeal. The Eshkol government followed a two-track policy with respect to the territories, which would be continued under future Labor governments: on the one hand, it stated a willingness to negotiate, while on the other, it laid plans to create Jewish settlements in the disputed territories. Thus, immediately following the war, Eshkol issued a statement that he was willing to negotiate "everything" for a full peace, which would include free passage through the Suez Canal and the Strait of Tiran and a solution to the refugee problem in the context of regional cooperation. This was followed in November 1967 by his acceptance of UN Security Council Resolution 242, which called for "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict" in exchange for Arab acceptance of Israel. Concurrently, on September 24, Eshkol's government announced plans for the resettlement of the Old City of Jerusalem, of the Etzion Bloc-- kibbutzim on the Bethlehem-Hebron road wiped out by Palestinians in the war of 1948--and for kibbutzim in the northern sector of the Golan Heights. Plans were also unveiled for new neighborhoods around Jerusalem, near the old buildings of Hebrew University, and near the Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus.

The Arab states, however, rejected outright any negotiations with the Jewish state. At Khartoum, Sudan, in the summer of 1967, the Arab states unanimously adopted their famous "three nos": no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiation with Israel concerning any Palestinian territory. The stridency of the Khartoum resolution, however, masked important changes that the June 1967 War caused in inter-Arab politics. At Khartoum, Nasser pledged to stop destabilizing the region and launching acerbic propaganda attacks against the Persian Gulf monarchies in exchange for badly needed economic assistance. This meant that Egypt, along with the other Arab states, would focus on consolidating power at home and on pressing economic problems rather than on revolutionary unity schemes. After 1967 Arab regimes increasingly viewed Israel and the Palestinian problem not as the key to revolutionary change of the Arab state system, but in terms of how they affected domestic political stability. The Palestinians, who since the late 1940s had looked to the Arab countries to defeat Israel and regain their homeland, were radicalized by the 1967 defeat. The PLO--an umbrella organization of Palestinian resistance groups led by Yasir Arafat's Al Fatah--moved to the forefront of Arab resistance against Israel. Recruits and money poured in, and throughout 1968 Palestinian guerrillas launched a number of border raids on Israel that added to the organization's popularity. The fedayeen (Arab guerrillas) attacks brought large-scale Israeli retaliation, which the Arab states were not capable of counteracting. The tension between Arab states' interests and the more revolutionary aspirations of the Palestinian resistance foreshadowed a major inter-Arab political conflict.

Israel

Israel - The War of Attrition

The tarnished legitimacy of the Arab states following the June 1967 War was especially poignant in Egypt. Israeli troops were situated on the east bank of the Suez Canal, the canal was closed to shipping, and Israel was occupying a large piece of Egyptian territory. Nasser responded by maintaining a constant state of military activity along the canal--the so-called War of Attrition-- between February 1969 and August 1970. Given the wide disparity in the populations of Israel and Egypt, Israel could not long tolerate trading casualties with the Egyptians. The Israeli government, now led by Golda Meir, pursued a policy of "asymmetrical response"-- retaliation on a scale far exceeding any individual attack.

As the tension along the Egyptian border continued to heat, United States secretary of state William Rogers proposed a new peace plan. In effect, the Rogers Plan was an interpretation of UN Security Council Resolution 242; it called for the international frontier between Egypt and Israel to be the secure and recognized border between the two countries. There would be "a formal state of peace between the two, negotiations on Gaza and Sharm ash Shaykh, and demilitarized zones." In November Israel rejected the offer, and in January 1970 Israeli fighter planes made their first deep penetration into Egypt.

Following the Israeli attack, Nasser went to Moscow requesting advanced surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and other military equipment. After some wavering, the Kremlin committed itself to modernizing and retraining the Egyptian military. Egypt's new Soviet-made arsenal threatened to alter the regional military balance with Israel. The tension in Israeli-Soviet relations escalated in July 1970, when Israeli fighter planes shot down four Egyptian planes flown by Soviet pilots about thirty kilometers west of the canal. Fearing Soviet retaliation, and uncertain of American support, Israel in August accepted a cease-fire and the application of Resolution 242.

Following the June 1967 War, the PLO established in Jordan its major base of operations for the war against Israel. Throughout the late 1960s, a cycle of Palestinian guerrilla attacks followed by Israeli retaliatory raids against Jordan caused much damage to Jordan. In September 1970, after militant factions of the PLO (who previously had stated that "the road to Tel Aviv lies through Amman") hijacked four foreign planes and forced them to land in Jordan, King Hussein decided it was time to act. Throughout September the Jordanian military launched an attack to push the PLO out of Jordan. Jordan's attack on the PLO led to an escalation of Syrian-Israeli tensions. It was widely believed in Washington that deployment of Israeli troops along the Jordan River had deterred a large-scale Syrian invasion of Jordan. As a result, President Richard M. Nixon increasingly viewed Israel as an important strategic asset, and the Rogers Plan was allowed to die.

While negotiating a cease-fire to the conflict in Jordan, Nasser died of a heart attack. The new Egyptian president, Anwar as Sadat, quickly realized, just as Nasser had toward the end of his life, that Egypt's acute economic and social problems were more pressing than the conflict with Israel. Sadat believed that by making peace with Israel Egypt could reduce its huge defense burden and obtain desperately needed American financial assistance. He realized, however, that before some type of arrangement with Israel could be reached, Egypt would have to regain the territory lost to Israel in the June 1967 War. To achieve these ends, Sadat launched a diplomatic initiative as early as 1971, aimed at exchanging territory for peace. On February 4, 1971, he told the Egyptian parliament:

that if Israel withdrew her forces in Sinai to the passes I would be willing to reopen the Suez Canal; to have my forces cross to the East Bank . . . to make a solemn declaration of a cease-fire; to restore diplomatic relations with the United States and to sign a peace agreement with Israel through the efforts of Dr. Jarring, the representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations.

Sadat's peace initiative, similar to the Rogers Plan, was not warmly received in Israel. Prime Minister Golda Meir stated unequivocally that Israel would never return to the prewar borders. She also commissioned the establishment of a settlement on occupied Egyptian territory at Yamit, near the Gaza Strip. Her rejection of the Egyptian offer reflected the hawkish but also complacent politico-military strategy that had guided Israeli policy after the June 1967 War. Advised by Minister of Defense General Moshe Dayan and ambassador to Washington General Yitzhak Rabin, the Meir government held that the IDF's preponderance of power, the disarray of the Arab world, and the large buffer provided by Sinai, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights would deter the Arab states from launching an attack against Israel. Therefore, the Israeli government perceived no compelling reason to trade territory for peace. This view had wide Israeli public support as a result of a growing settler movement in the occupied territories, a spate of Arab terrorist attacks that hardened public opinion against compromise with the Arabs, and the widespread feeling that the Arab states were incapable of launching a successful attack on Israel. Israel's complacency concerning an Arab attack was bolstered in July 1972 by Sadat's surprise announcement that he was expelling most Soviet military advisers.

Israel

Israel - The October 1973 War

The Meir government's rejection of Sadat's peace overtures convinced the Egyptian president that to alter the status quo and gain needed legitimacy at home he must initiate a war with limited objectives. On Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, October 6, 1973, Syria and Egypt launched a surprise attack against Israel. In the south, waves of Egyptian infantrymen crossed the Suez Canal and overran the defense of the much touted Bar-Lev Line. In the north, Syrian forces outnumbering the Israeli defenders (1,100 Syrian tanks against 157 Israeli tanks) reached the outer perimeter of the Golan Heights overlooking the Hula Basin. In the first few days of the war, Israeli counterattacks failed, Israel suffered hundreds of casualties, and lost nearly 150 planes. Finally, on October 10 the tide of the war turned; the Syrians were driven out of all territories conquered by them at the beginning of the war and on the following day Israeli forces advanced into Syria proper, about twenty kilometers from the outskirts of Damascus. The Soviet Union responded by making massive airlifts to Damascus and Cairo, which were matched by equally large <"http://worldfacts.us/US.htm"> United States airlifts to Israel. In the south, an Egyptian offensive into Sinai was repelled, and Israeli forces led by General Ariel Sharon crossed the canal to surround the Egyptian Third Army. At the urgent request of the Soviet Union, United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger went to Moscow to negotiate a cease-fire arrangement. This arrangement found expression in UN Security Council Resolution 338, which called for a cease-fire to be in place within twelve hours, for the implementation of Resolution 242, and for "negotiations between the parties concerned under appropriate auspices aimed at establishing a just and durable peace in the Middle East." Following Kissinger's return to Washington, the Soviets announced that Israel had broken the terms of the cease-fire and was threatening to destroy the besieged Egyptian Third Army. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev informed Nixon that if the siege were not lifted the Soviet Union would take unilateral steps. The United States pressured Israel, and the final cease-fire took effect on October 25.

The October 1973 War had a devastating effect on Israel. More than 6,000 troops had been killed or wounded in eighteen days of fighting. The loss of equipment and the decline of production and exports as a consequence of mobilization came to nearly US$7 billion, the equivalent of Israel's gross national product (GNP) for an entire year. Most important, the image of an invincible Israel that had prevailed since the June 1967 War was destroyed forever. Whereas the June 1967 War had given Israel in general and the declining Labor Party in particular a badly needed morale booster, the events of October 1973 shook the country's self-confidence and cast a shadow over the competence of the Labor elite. A war-weary public was especially critical of Minister of Defense Dayan, who nonetheless escaped criticism in the report of the Agranat Commission, a body established after the war to determine responsibility for Israel's military unpreparedness.

Israel's vulnerability during the war led to another important development: its increasing dependence on United States military, economic, and diplomatic aid. The war set off a spiraling regional arms race in which Israel was hard pressed to match the Arab states, which were enriched by skyrocketing world oil prices. The vastly improved Arab arsenals forced Israel to spend increasingly on defense, straining its already strapped economy. The emergence of Arab oil as a political weapon further isolated Israel in the world community. The Arab oil boycott that accompanied the war and the subsequent quadrupling of world oil prices dramatized the West's dependence on Arab oil production. Evidence of this dependence was reflected, for example, in the denial of permission during the fighting for United States transport planes carrying weapons to Israel to land anywhere in Europe except Portugal.

The dominant personality in the postwar settlement period was Kissinger. Kissinger believed that the combination of Israel's increased dependence on the United States and Sadat's desire to portray the war as an Egyptian victory and regain Sinai allowed for an American-brokered settlement. The key to this diplomatic strategy was that only Washington could induce a vulnerable Israel to exchange territories for peace in the south.

The first direct Israeli-Egyptian talks following the war were held at Kilometer 101 on the Cairo-Suez road. They dealt with stabilizing the cease-fire and supplying Egypt's surrounded Third Army. Following these talks, Kissinger began his highly publicized "shuttle diplomacy," moving between Jerusalem and the Arab capitals trying to work out an agreement. In January 1974, Kissinger, along with Sadat and Dayan, devised the First Sinai Disengagement Agreement, which called for thinning out forces in the Suez Canal zone and restoring the UN buffer zone. The published plan was accompanied by private (but leaked) assurances from the United States to Israel that Egypt would not interfere with Israeli freedom of navigation in the Red Sea and that UN forces would not be withdrawn without the consent of both sides. Following the signing of this agreement, Kissinger shuttled between Damascus and Jerusalem, finally attaining an agreement that called for Israel to withdraw from its forward positions in the Golan Heights, including the return of the Syrian town of Al Qunaytirah. The evacuated zone was to be demilitarized and monitored by a UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF).

After the signing of the Israeli-Syrian Disengagement Agreement in June 1974, the public mood in Israel shifted against concessions. In part, Israel's hardened stance was a reaction to the 1974 Arab summit in Rabat, Morocco. At that summit, both Syria and Egypt supported a resolution recognizing the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. The Israeli public viewed the PLO as a terrorist organization bent on destroying the Jewish state. Throughout 1974 Palestinian terrorism increased; in the summer alone there were attacks in Qiryat Shemona, Maalot, and Jerusalem.

Another important factor underlying Israel's firmer stance was an internal political struggle in the newly elected government of Yitzhak Rabin. Rabin had narrowly defeated his chief rival Shimon Peres in bitterly fought internal Labor Party elections in late December 1973. Peres, who was appointed minister of defense, forced Israel into a less flexible posture by blocking any concessions proposed by Rabin. In addition, the issuing of the Agranat Commission report and the return from the front of reservists mobilized for the war further fueled public clamor for a stronger defense posture.

In Washington, President Gerald R. Ford, facing a recalcitrant Israel and under pressure from the pro-Israel lobby, decided to sweeten the offer to Israel. The United States pledged to provide Israel US$2 billion in financial aid, to drop the idea of an interim withdrawal in the West Bank, and to accept that only cosmetic changes could be expected in the Second Syrian-Israeli Disengagement Agreement. In addition, in a special secret memorandum Israel received a pledge that the United States would not deal with the PLO as long as the PLO failed to recognize Israel's right to exist and failed to accept Security Council Resolution 242. In September 1975, Israel signed the Second Sinai Disengagement Agreement, which called for Israel to withdraw from the Sinai passes, leaving them as a demilitarized zone monitored by American technicians and the UNEF.

Israel

Israel - The Decline of the Labor Party

Even before the October 1973 War, the Labor Party was hampered by internal dissension, persistent allegations of corruption, ambiguities and contradictions in its political platform, and by the disaffection of Oriental Jews (see <>Oriental Jews. Labor's failure to prepare the country for the war further alienated a large segment of the electorate.

Despite Labor's commitment to exchange occupied territories for peace, successive Labor governments beginning soon after the June 1967 War established settlements in the territories and refrained from dismantling illegal settlements, such as those established in 1968 at Qiryat Arba in Hebron by Rabbi Moshe Levinger and others set up by the extremist settler movement Gush Emunim. By 1976 more than thirty settlements had been established on the West Bank.

Another contradiction in Labor's political platform concerned Jerusalem. All Labor governments have proclaimed that Jerusalem will always remain the undivided capital of Israel. In effect, this stance precludes the peace for territories formula contained in Resolution 242 because neither Jordan nor the Palestinians would be likely to accept any agreement by which Jerusalem remained in Israeli hands.

The post-1973 Labor Party estrangement from the Israeli public intensified throughout 1976 as the party was hit with a barrage of corruption charges that struck at the highest echelons. Rabin's minister of housing, who was under investigation for alleged abuses during his time as director general of the Histadrut Housing Authority, committed suicide in January 1977. At the same time, the governor of the Bank of Israel, who had been nominated by Rabin, was sentenced to jail for taking bribes and evading taxes, and the director general of the Ministry of Housing was apprehended in various extortion schemes. Finally, and most egregious, Rabin himself was caught lying about money illegally kept in a bank account in the <"http://worldfacts.us/US.htm"> United States.

Israel's growing defense budget (about 35 to 40 percent of GNP), along with rising world oil prices, also created chaos in the Israeli economy. Inflation was running at 40 to 50 percent annually, wages were falling, and citizen accumulation of so-called black money (unreported income) was rampant. The worsening economic situation led to greater income disparities between the Ashkenazim, who dominated the higher echelons of government, the military, and business, and the majority Oriental population, which was primarily employed in low paying blue-collar jobs.

Israel

Israel - Oriental Jews

By the mid-1970s, economic grievances, corruption, and the perceived haughtiness of the Labor elite led to a major shift in the voting patterns of Oriental Jews (those of African or Asian origin). During the first twenty years of Israel's existence, Oriental Jews voted for the Labor Party mainly because the Histadrut, the Jewish Agency, and other state institutions on which they as new immigrants depended were dominated by Labor. But even during the early years of the state, Labor's ideological blend of secular-socialist Zionism conflicted sharply with the Oriental Jews' cultural heritage, which tended to be more religious and oriented toward a free market economy. As Oriental Jews became more integrated into Israeli society, especially after the June 1967 War, resentment of Labor's cultural, political, and economic hegemony increased. Most unacceptable to the Oriental Jews was the hypocrisy of Labor slogans that continued to espouse egalitarianism while Ashkenazim monopolized the political and economic reins of power.

Despite Labor's frequent references to closing the AshkenaziOriental socioeconomic gap, the disparity of incomes between the two groups actually widened. Between 1968 and 1971, Minister of Finance Pinchas Sapir's program of encouraging foreign investment and subsidizing private investment led to an economic boom; GNP grew at 7 percent per year. Given the persistent dominance of Labor institutions in the economy, however, this economic growth was not evenly distributed. The kibbutzim, moshavim, and Histadrut enterprises, along with private defense and housing contractors, enriched themselves, while the majority of Oriental Jews, lacking connections with the ruling Labor elite, saw their position deteriorate. Furthermore, while Oriental Jews remained for the most part in the urban slums, the government provided new European immigrants with generous loans and new housing. This dissatisfaction led to the growth of the first Oriental protest movement--the Black Panthers--based in the <"http://worldfacts.us/Israel-Jerusalem.htm"> Jerusalem slums in early 1971.

Oriental Jews, many of whom were forced to leave their homes in the Arab states, also supported tougher measures against Israeli Arabs and neighboring Arab states than the policies pursued by Labor. Their ill feelings were buttressed by the widely held perception that the establishment of an independent Palestinian entity would oblige Oriental Jews to accept the menial jobs performed by Arab laborers, as they had in the early years of the state.

Israel

Israel - THE BEGIN ERA

In the May 1977 elections, the Labor Party's dominance of Israeli politics ended. The Likud Bloc--an alliance of Begin's Herut Party, the Liberal Party, and other smaller parties formed in the aftermath of the October 1973 War--formed a ruling coalition government for the first time in Israel's history. Likud gained forty-three seats, Labor dropped to thirty-two seats, down by nineteen from the 1973 figure. Likud's supporters consisted of disaffected middle-class elements alienated by the series of scandals, many new immigrants from the Soviet Union, and large numbers of defecting Oriental Jews. Begin appealed to many because he was viewed as incorruptible and untarnished by scandal. He was a strong leader who did not equivocate about his plans for a strong Israel (which he believed included the occupied territories), or about his willingness to stand up to the Arabs or even the superpowers if Israel's needs demanded. Begin also attracted some veteran Labor Zionists for whom his focus on Jewish settlement and self-reliance was reminiscent of an earlier unadulterated Labor Zionism.

Begin's vision of Israel and its role in the region was deeply rooted in the Revisionist platform with which he had been associated since the days of Jabotinsky. He strongly advocated Israeli sovereignty over all of Eretz Yisrael, which in his view included Jerusalem and the West Bank, but not Sinai.

Israel

Israel - The Peace Process

The international climate at the time of Begin's rise to power in May 1977 leaned strongly toward some type of superpowersanctioned settlement to the Arab-Israeli dispute. New United States president Jimmy Carter and Soviet leader Brezhnev both advocated a comprehensive Arab-Israeli settlement that would include autonomy for the Palestinians. On October 1, 1977, in preparation for a reconvened Geneva conference, the United States and the Soviet Union issued a joint statement committing themselves to a comprehensive settlement incorporating all parties concerned and all questions.

Nevertheless, the idea of a Geneva conference on the Middle East was actively opposed and eventually defeated by a constellation of Israeli, Egyptian, and powerful private American interests. Begin proclaimed that he would never accept the authority of an international forum to dictate how Israel should deal with its territory, especially because, aside from Washington, the Israelis would lack allies at such a meeting. Inside the United States, the Jewish lobby and anti-Soviet political groups vehemently opposed the Geneva conference idea. Sadat also opposed a Geneva conference, seeing it as a way for Syria, supported by the Soviet Union, to gain leverage in an Arab-Israeli settlement. Sadat realized that if an international conference were held, Egypt's recovery of Sinai, which was his primary objective in dealing with Israel, would be secondary to the Palestinian issue and the return of the Golan Heights to Syria.

To stave off an international conference and to save Egypt's rapidly collapsing economy, Sadat made the boldest of diplomatic moves: he offered to address the Knesset. Begin consented, and in November 1977 Sadat made his historic journey to Jerusalem, opening a new era in Egyptian-Israeli relations. Although Sadat expressed his commitment to the settlement of the Palestinian issue and to that issue's centrality in Arab-Israeli relations, his main interest remained Israel's return of Egyptian territory. Begin's acceptance of the Egyptian initiative was based on the premise that Sinai, but not the West Bank, was negotiable. He foresaw that exchanging Sinai for a peace treaty with Egypt would remove Egypt from the Arab-Israeli military balance and relieve pressure on Israel to make territorial concessions on the West Bank. President Carter, who had been a major advocate of a Geneva conference, was forced by the momentum of Sadat's initiative to drop the international conference idea. Subsequently, he played a crucial role in facilitating an Egyptian-Israeli peace settlement.

Following nearly a year of stalled negotiations, Begin, Sadat, and Carter met at Camp David near Washington, D.C., for two weeks in September 1978. The crux of the problem at Camp David was that Begin, the old-time Revisionist who had opposed territorial concessions to the Arabs for so many years, was reluctant to dismantle existing Sinai settlements. Finally, on September 17 he consented, and the Camp David Accords were signed. On the following day, Begin obtained Knesset approval of the accords.

The Camp David Accords consisted of two agreements: one dealt with the future of the West Bank and the other with the return of Sinai. The sections on the West Bank were vague and open to various interpretations. They called for Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and "the representatives of the Palestinian people to negotiate about the future of the West Bank and Gaza." A five-year period of "transitional autonomy" was called for "to ensure a peaceful and orderly transfer of authority." The agreement also called for peace talks between Israel and its other Arab neighbors, namely Syria. The other part of the accords was more specific. It provided for "the full exercise of Egyptian sovereignty up to the internationally recognized border," as well as for the Israeli right of free passage through the Strait of Tiran and the Suez Canal. The agreements were accompanied by letters. A letter from Begin to Carter promised that the removal of settlers from Sinai would be put to Knesset vote. A letter from Sadat to Carter stated that if the settlers were not withdrawn from Sinai, there would be no peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. It was also understood that to make the agreement more palatable the United States would significantly increase aid to both countries.

Begin's limited view of Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank became apparent almost immediately after the agreement known as the Treaty of Peace Between Egypt and Israel was signed in March 1979. The following month his government approved two new settlements between Ram Allah and Nabulus. The military government established civilian regional councils for the Jewish settlements. Finally, and most provocative, autonomy plans were prepared in which Israel would keep exclusive control over the West Bank's water, communications, roads, public order, and immigration.

In effect, the acceleration of settlements, the growth of an increasingly militaristic Jewish settler movement, and Israel's stated desire to retain complete control over resources in the territories precluded the participation in the peace process of either moderate Palestinians, such as the newly formed National Guidance Committee composed of West Bank mayors (the PLO refused from the beginning to participate in the peace process) or King Hussein of Jordan. No Arab leader could accept Begin's truncated version of autonomy. Hussein, who had initially withheld judgment on the accords, joined hands with the Arab radicals in a meeting in Baghdad that denounced the Camp David Accords and the peace treaty and ostracized Egypt. Sadat protested Israeli actions in the occupied territories, but he was unwilling to change his course for fear that doing so would leave Sinai permanently in Israeli hands. President Carter objected to the new settlements but was unable to force the Begin government to change its settlement policy. Although ambassadors were exchanged; commercial, trade, and cultural ties were established; and Sinai was returned in May 1982, relations between Israel and Egypt remained chilly.

Israel

Israel - The Occupied Territories

During the June 1967 War, about 1.1 million Palestinian Arabs living in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem came under Israeli rule. Immediately after the war, East Jerusalem was occupied and reunited with the rest of Israel's capital. Its Arab inhabitants--about 67,000 after the war--became citizens of Israel with the same rights as other Israeli Arabs. The West Bank, ruled by Jordan since 1948, was economically underdeveloped but possessed a relatively efficient administrative infrastructure. Its 750,000 people consisted of a settled population and refugees from Israel who had led during the 1948 War. Both the refugees and the settled population were Jordanian citizens, free to work in Jordan. Most of the leading urban families and virtually all the rural clans had cooperated with Hussein. The Gaza Strip, on the other hand, was seething with discontent when Israeli forces arrived in 1967. Its 1967 population of 350,000--the highest population density in the world at the time--had been under Egyptian rule, but the inhabitants were not accepted as Egyptian citizens or allowed to travel to Egypt proper. As a result they were unable to find work outside the camps and were almost completely dependent on the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. In the Gaza Strip, Israel implemented harsh security measures to quell widespread unrest and root out the growing resistance movement.

Labor's settlement policy in the occupied territories was based on a plan formaulated during the summer of 1965 by Yigal Allon, deputy prime minister of the Eshkol government. The plan, primarily dictated by security concerns, called for rural and urban settlements to be erected in a sparsely Arab-populated strip twelve to fifteen kilometers wide along the western bank of the Jordan River and the western shores of the Dead Sea. Labor governments sought to interfere as little as possible in the day-to-day lives of the Arab inhabitants. Political and social arrangements were, as much as possible, kept under Jordanian or pro-Jordanian control, the currency remained the Jordanian dinar, the application of Jordanian law continued, and a revised Jordanian curriculum was used in the schools.

Another aspect of Labor's occupation policies was the integration of the territories into the Israeli economy. By the mid-1970s, Arabs from Israel and the territories provided nearly one-quarter of Israel's factory labor and half the workers in construction and service industries. Moreover, the territories became an important market for Israeli domestic production; by 1975 about 16 percent of all Israeli exports were sold in the territories.

The final element of Labor's occupation policies was economic and social modernization. This included the mechanization of agriculture, the spread of television, and vast improvements in education and health care. This led to a marked increase in GNP, which grew by 14.5 percent annually between 1968 and 1973 in the West Bank and 19.4 percent annually in Gaza. As a result, the traditional elites, who had cooperated with Hussein during the years of Jordanian rule, were challenged by a younger, better educated, and more radical elite that was growing increasingly impatient with the Israeli occupation and the older generation's complacency. In the spring of 1976, Minister of Defense Shimon Peres held West Bank municipal elections, hoping to bolster the declining power of the old guard Palestinian leadership. Peres wrongly calculated that the PLO would boycott the elections. Instead, pro-PLO candidates won in every major town except Bethlehem.

Israel's settlement policy in the occupied territories changed in 1977 with the coming to power of Begin. Whereas Labor's policies had been guided primarily by security concerns, Begin espoused a deep ideological attachment to the territories. He viewed the Jewish right of settlement in the occupied territories as fulfilling biblical prophecy and therefore not a matter for either the Arabs or the international community to accept or reject. Begin's messianic designs on the territories were supported by the rapid growth of religious nationalist groups, such as Gush Emunim, which established settlements in heavily populated Arab areas.

The increase in Jewish settlements and the radicalization of the settlers created an explosive situation. When in May 1980 six students of a Hebron yeshiva, a Jewish religious school, were killed by Arab gunfire, a chain of violence was set off that included a government crackdown on Hebron and the expulsion of three leaders of the Hebron Arab community. West Bank Jewish settlers increasingly took the law into their own hands; they were widely believed to be responsible for car-bomb attacks on the mayors of Ram Allah and Nabulus.

Begin's policies toward the occupied territories became increasingly annexationist following the Likud victory in the 1981 parliamentary elections. He viewed the Likud's margin of victory, which was larger than in 1977, as a mandate to pursue a more aggressive policy in the territories. After the election, he appointed the hawkish Ariel Sharon as minister of defense, replacing the more moderate Ezer Weizman, who had resigned in protest against Begin's settlement policy. In November 1981, Sharon installed a civilian administration in the West Bank headed by Menachem Milson. Milson immediately set out to stifle rapidly growing Palestinian nationalist sentiments; he deposed pro-PLO mayors, dissolved the mayors' National Guidance Committee, and shut two Arab newspapers and Bir Zeit University.

While Milson was working to quell Palestinian nationalism in the territories, the Begin regime accelerated the pace of settlements by providing low-interest mortgages and other economic benefits to prospective settlers. This action induced a number of secular Jews, who were not part of Gush Emunim, to settle in the territories, further consolidating Israel's hold on the area. Moreover, Israel established large military bases and extensive road, electricity, and water networks in the occupied territories.

In November 1981, Milson established village leagues in the West Bank consisting of pro-Jordanian Palestinians to counter the PLO's growing strength there. The leadership of the village leagues had a limited base of support, however, especially because the growth of Jewish settlements had adversely affected Arab villagers. The failure of the Village League Plan, the escalating violence in the occupied territories, in addition to increased PLO attacks against northern Israeli settlements, and Syria's unwillingness to respond when the Knesset extended Israeli law to the occupied Golan Heights in December 1981 convinced Begin and Sharon of the need to intervene militarily in southern Lebanon.

Israel

Israel - Israel in Lebanon

The precarious sectarian balance prevailing in Lebanon has presented Israeli policy makers with opportunities and risks. Lebanon's Christian Maronites, who under French tutelage occupied the most important political and economic posts in the country, were, like Israeli Jews, a minority among the region's Muslim majority. As early as 1954, Ben-Gurion had proposed that Israel support the establishment in part of Lebanon of a Maronite- dominated Christian ministate that would ally itself with Israel. During the Lebanese Civil War (1975-76), then Prime Minister Rabin reportedly invested US$150 million in equipping and training the Maronite Phalange Party's militia.

The instability of Lebanon's sectarian balance, however, enabled hostile states or groups to use Lebanon as a staging ground for attacks against Israel. The PLO, following its expulsion from Jordan in September 1970, set up its major base of operations in southern Lebanon from which it attacked northern Israel. The number and size of PLO operations in the south accelerated throughout the late 1970s as central authority deteriorated and Lebanon became a battleground of warring militias. In March 1978, following a fedayeen attack, originating in Lebanon, on the Tel Aviv-Haifa road that killed thirty-seven people, Israel launched Operation Litani, a massive military offensive that resulted in Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon up to the Litani River. By June Prime Minister Begin, under intense American pressure, withdrew Israeli forces, which were replaced by a UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). The withdrawal of Israeli troops without having removed the PLO from its bases in southern Lebanon became a major embarrassment to the Begin government.

By the spring of 1981, Bashir Jumayyil (also cited as Gemayel) emerged as the Maronite strong man and major Israeli ally in Lebanon. Having ruthlessly eliminated his Maronite rivals, he was attempting to extend his authority to other Lebanese Christian sects. In late 1980 and early 1981, he extended the protection of his Maronite militia to the Greek Orthodox inhabitants of Zahlah, in eastern Lebanon. Syrian president Hafiz al Assad considered Zahlah, which was located near the Beirut-Damascus road, a stronghold that was strategically important to Syria. In April 1981, Syrian forces bombed and besieged Zahlah, ousting the Phalangists, the Maronite group loyal to Jumayyil, from the city. In response to the defeat of its major Lebanese ally, Israeli aircraft destroyed two Syrian helicopters over Lebanon, prompting Assad to move Soviet-made SAMs into Lebanon. Israel threatened to destroy the missiles but was dissuaded from doing so by the administration of President Ronald Reagan. In the end, the Zahlah crisis, like the Litani Operation, badly tarnished the image of the Begin government, which had come to power in 1977 espousing a hard- line security policy.

In June 1981, Israel held Knesset elections that focused on the Likud's failure to stop the PLO buildup in southern Lebanon or to remove Syrian missile batteries from the Biqa (Bekaa) Valley in eastern Lebanon. To remove a potential nuclear threat and also to bolster its public image, the IDF launched a successful attack on the French-built Iraqi Osiraq (acronym for Osiris-Iraq) nuclear reactor three weeks before the elections. Begin interpreted widespread public approval of the attack as a mandate for a more aggressive policy in Lebanon. The Likud also rallied a large number of undecided voters by reducing import duties on luxury goods, enabling Israeli consumers to go on an unprecedented buying spree that would later result in spiraling inflation. Although Labor regained an additional fifteen seats over its poor showing in 1977 when it won only thirty-two seats, it was unable to prevail over Likud.

Begin's perception that the Israeli public supported a more active defense posture influenced the composition of his 1981 postelection cabinet. His new minister of defense, Ariel Sharon, was unquestionably an Israeli war hero of longstanding; he had played an important role in the 1956, 1967, and 1973 wars and was widely respected as a brilliant military tactician. Sharon, however, was also feared as a military man with political ambitions, one who was ignorant of political protocol and who was known to make precipitous moves. Aligned with Sharon was chief of staff General Rafael Eytan who also advocated an aggressive Israeli defense posture. Because Begin was not a military man, Israel's defense policy was increasingly decided by the minister of defense and the chief of staff. The combination of wide discretionary powers granted Sharon and Eytan over Israeli military strategy, the PLO's menacing growth in southern Lebanon, and the existence of Syrian SAMs in the Biqa Valley pointed to imminent Syrian-PLO- Israeli hostilities.

In July 1981, Israel responded to PLO rocket attacks on northern Israeli settlements by bombing PLO encampments in southern Lebanon. <"http://worldfacts.us/US.htm"> United States envoy Philip Habib eventually negotiated a shaky cease-fire that was monitored by UNIFIL.

Another factor that influenced Israel's decision to take action in Lebanon was the disarray of the Arab world throughout the early 1980s. The unanimity shown by the Arab states in Baghdad in condemning Sadat's separate peace with Israel soon dissipated. The 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution, the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in September 1980, and the December 1980 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan badly divided the Arab world. The hard-line countries, Syria and Libya, supported Iran, and the moderate countries, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states, supported Iraq. Moreover, Syrian president Assad's regime, dominated by the minority Alawi Muslim sect, was confronted with growing domestic opposition from the Muslim Brotherhood, which Assad violently quelled in February 1982 by besieging the city of Hamah. Finally, early United States opposition to an invasion of Lebanon appeared to have weakened, following Israel's final withdrawal from Sinai in May 1982.

Israel's incursion into Lebanon, called Operation Peace for Galilee, was launched in early June 1982. After an attack on Israel's ambassador in London carried out by the Abu Nidal group but blamed on the PLO, Israeli troops marched into southern Lebanon. On the afternoon of June 4 the Israeli air force bombed a sports stadium in Beirut, said to be used for ammunition storage by the PLO. The PLO responded by shelling Israeli towns in Galilee. On June 5, the government of Israel formally accused the PLO of breaking the cease-fire. At 11 A.M. on June 6, Israeli ground forces crossed the border into Lebanon. The stated goals of the operation were to free northern Israel from PLO rocket attacks by creating a forty-kilometer-wide security zone in southern Lebanon and by signing a peace treaty with Lebanon.

The June 1982 invasion of Lebanon was the first war fought by the IDF without a domestic consensus. Unlike the 1948, 1967, and 1973 wars, the Israeli public did not view Operation Peace for Galilee as essential to the survival of the Jewish state. By the early 1980s--less than forty years after its establishment--Israel had attained a military prowess unmatched in the region. The architects of the 1982 invasion, Ariel Sharon and Rafael Eitan, sought to use Israel's military strength to create a more favorable regional political setting. This strategy included weakening the PLO and supporting the rise to power in Lebanon of Israel's Christian allies. The attempt to impose a military solution to the intractable Palestinian problem and to force political change in Lebanon failed. The PLO, although defeated militarily, remained an important political force, and Bashir Jumayyil, Israel's major ally in Lebanon, was killed shortly after becoming president. Inside Israel, a mounting death toll caused sharp criticism by a war-weary public of the war of and of the Likud government.

Israel

Israel - Geography

Israel is located at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. It is bounded on the north by Lebanon, on the northeast by Syria, on the east and southeast by Jordan, on the southwest by Egypt, and on the west by the Mediterranean Sea. Before June 1967, the area composing Israel (resulting from the armistice lines of 1949 and 1950) was about 20,700 square kilometers, which included 445 square kilometers of inland water. Thus Israel was roughly the size of the state of New Jersey, stretching 424 kilometers from north to south. Its width ranged from 114 kilometers to, at its narrowest point, 10 kilometers. The area added to Israel after the June 1967 War, consisting of occupied territories (the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) and annexed territories (East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights) totaled an additional 7,477 square kilometers. The areas comprised the West Bank, 5,879 kilometers; the Gaza Strip, 378; East Jerusalem, 70; and the Golan Heights, 1,150.

<>Topography
<>Climate

Israel

Israel - Topography

The country is divided into four regions: the coastal plain, the central hills, the Jordan Rift Valley, and the Negev Desert. The Mediterranean coastal plain stretches from the Lebanese border in the north to Gaza in the south, interrupted only by Cape Carmel at Haifa Bay. It is about forty kilometers wide at Gaza and narrows toward the north to about five kilometers at the Lebanese border. The region is fertile and humid (historically malarial) and is known for its citrus and viniculture. The plain is traversed by several short streams, of which only two, the Yarqon and Qishon, have permanent water flows.

East of the coastal plain lies the central highland region. In the north of this region lie the mountains and hills of Upper Galilee and Lower Galilee; farther to the south are the Samarian Hills with numerous small, fertile valleys; and south of Jerusalem are the mainly barren hills of Judea. The central highlands average 610 meters in height and reach their highest elevation at Mount Meron, at 1,208 meters, in Galilee near Zefat (Safad). Several valleys cut across the highlands roughly from east to west; the largest is the Yizreel or Jezreel Valley (also known as the Plain of Esdraelon), which stretches forty-eight kilometers from Haifa southeast to the valley of the Jordan River, and is nineteen kilometers across at its widest point.

East of the central highlands lies the Jordan Rift Valley, which is a small part of the 6,500-kilometer-long Syrian-East African Rift. In Israel the Rift Valley is dominated by the Jordan River, Lake Tiberias (known also as the Sea of Galilee and to Israelis as Lake Kinneret), and the Dead Sea. The Jordan, Israel's largest river (322 kilometers long), originates in the Dan, Baniyas, and Hasbani rivers near Mount Hermon in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains and flows south through the drained Hula Basin into the freshwater Lake Tiberias. Lake Tiberias is 165 square kilometers in size and, depending on the season and rainfall, is at about 213 meters below sea level. With a capacity estimated at 3 billion cubic meters, it serves as the principal reservoir of the National Water Carrier (also known as the Kinneret-Negev Conduit). The Jordan River continues its course from the southern end of Lake Tiberias (forming the boundary between the West Bank and Jordan) to its terminus in the highly saline Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is 1,020 square kilometers in size and, at 399 meters below sea level, is the lowest point in the world. South of the Dead Sea, the Rift Valley continues in the Nahal HaArava (Wadi al Arabah in Arabic), which has no permanent water flow, for 170 kilometers to the Gulf of Aqaba.

The Negev Desert comprises approximately 12,000 square kilometers, more than half of Israel's total land area. Geographically it is an extension of the Sinai Desert, forming a rough triangle with its base in the north near Beersheba (also seen as Beersheva), the Dead Sea, and the southern Judean Hills, and it has its apex in the southern tip of the country at Elat. Topographically, it parallels the other regions of the country, with lowlands in the west, hills in the central portion, and the Nahal HaArava as its eastern border.

Israel

Israel - Climate

Israel has a Mediterranean climate characterized by long, hot, dry summers and short, cool, rainy winters, as modified locally by altitude and latitude. The climate is determined by Israel's location between the subtropical aridity characteristic of Egypt and the subtropical humidity of the Levant or eastern Mediterranean. January is the coldest month, with temperatures from 5 C to 10 C, and August is the hottest month at 18 C to 38 C. About 70 percent of the average rainfall in the country falls between November and March; June through August are often rainless. Rainfall is unevenly distributed, decreasing sharply as one moves southward. In the extreme south, rainfall averages less than 100 millimeters annually; in the north, average annual rainfall is 1,128 millimeters. Rainfall varies from season to season and from year to year, particularly in the Negev Desert. Precipitation is often concentrated in violent storms, causing erosion and flooding. During January and February, it may take the form of snow at the higher elevations of the central highlands, including Jerusalem. The areas of the country most cultivated are those that receive more than 300 millimeters of rainfall annually; about one-third of the country is cultivable.

Israel

Israel - Society

THE SOCIETY OF MODERN ISRAEL has diverse sources, but the majority of these sources stem ultimately from Judaism and the modern political movement called Zionism. Crystallizing in the late nineteenth century as a response to both the repression of Jews in Eastern Europe and the non-Jewish European nationalist movements of the time, Zionism called for the reversal of the Jewish dispersion (Diaspora) and the "ingathering of the exiles" to their biblical homeland. Although only small numbers of Jews had resided in Palestine since the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in A.D. 70, the "new Yishuv" (as opposed to the "old Yishuv" consisting of traditional Orthodox Jewish residents), or prestate Jewish community in Palestine, dates from 1882 and the arrival from Russia of a group called Hibbat Tziyyon (Lovers of Zion), intent on settling the land as part of its fulfillment of the Zionist ideal.

As a nationalist movement, Zionism largely succeeded: much of the Jewish Diaspora was dissolved, and the people were integrated into the population of the State of Israel--a self-consciously modern Jewish state. Along with this political achievement, a cultural achievement of equal, if not greater, importance took place. Hebrew, the ancient biblical language, was revived and became the modern spoken and written vernacular. The revival of Hebrew linked the new Jewish state to its Middle Eastern past and helped to unify the people of the new state by providing them with a common tongue that transcended the diversity of languages the immigrants brought with them.

Despite these political and cultural achievements--achievements that Israeli sociologist S.N. Eisenstadt sees as comprising "the Jewish re-entry into history"--modern Israeli society is still beset by problems, some of them profound. Among these are problems found in all industrial and economically differentiated social systems, including stratification by socioeconomic class, differential prestige attached to various occupations or professions, barriers to social mobility, and different qualities of life in urban centers, towns, and rural localities. For example, there are significant differences between the quality of life in the so-called development towns and the rural localities known as kibbutzim (sing., kibbutz) and moshavim (sing., moshav), respectively collective and cooperative settlements that are strongly socialist and Zionist in history and character.

Other social problems that Israel faces are unique to its own society and culture. The role that traditional Judaism should play in the modern state is a major source of controversy. The tension between religious and secular influences pervades all aspects of society. For example, religious practices influence the education system, the way ethnic groups are dealt with, how political debate is conducted, and there is no civil marriage in Israel.

The division between the Ashkenazim (Jews of European or American origin) and Oriental Jews (Jews of African or Asian origin) is another serious problem. This divisiveness results from the extreme cultural diversity in the migratory streams that brought Jewish immigrants to Israel between the late nineteenth century and the late 1980s. Already-settled members of the receiving society have had difficulty absorbing immigrants whose cultures differ so greatly from their own and from each other. Adding further to cultural disharmony is the problem of the place of non-Jews in the Jewish state. In Israel non-Jews are primarily Arabs (who are mostly Muslims, but also Christians and Druzes) a small number are non-Arab Muslims (such as the Circassians) or Christians (such as the Armenian residents of Jerusalem). Jewish Israelis also distinguish between Arabs who reside within the pre-June 1967 War boundaries of Israel and Arabs who live in the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Gaza Strip--the latter group is perceived as having no loyalty to the state.

The rift between Arabs and Jews in Israel is, of course, related to Israel's position in the contemporary Middle East. By Israeli count, the 1982 invasion of Lebanon was the fifth major Arab-Israeli war since 1948. This does not count smaller military actions or larger, more celebrated military actions, such as the Entebbe raid of July 1976. American political scientist Bernard Reich has written that "Israel is perhaps unique among states in having hostile neighbors on all of its borders, with the exception, since 1979, of Egypt." He adds that this fact has dominated all aspects of Israeli life since 1948, when the state was established and was invaded by Arab armies. It might be noted that security concerns were a striking feature of life (especially after 1929 and Arab violence against Jews) in the Yishuv as well. To the tension caused by cleavages between Oriental and Ashkenazi Jews, between the religious and the secularists, and between Jews and non-Jews must be added the profound social and psychological stress of living in a society at war with, and feeling itself to be under siege by, its neighbors. Many Israelis would also cite the special stress of having to serve as soldiers in areas regarded by Arab inhabitants as "occupied territories," a situation characterized, especially since December 1987, by increasing civil disobedience and violence.

Israel

Israel - Population

At the end of October 1987, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics, the population of Israel was 4,389,600, of which 3,601,200 (82 percent) were Jews. About 27 percent of the world's Jews lived in Israel. About 605,765 (13.8 percent) of the population of Israel were Muslims, 100,960 (2.3 percent) were Christians, and about 74,623 (1.7 percent) were Druzes and others. At the end of 1986 the population was growing at a rate of 1.3 percent for Jews, 3.0 percent for Muslims, 1.5 percent for Christians, and 2.8 percent for Druzes and others.

In 1986 the median age of the Israeli population was 25.4. Differences among segments of the population, among Jews and Muslim Arabs in particular, were striking. The non-Jewish population was much younger; in 1986 its median age was 16.8, that of Jews was 27.6. The Jewish population was skewed toward the upper and lower extremes of age, as compared with the non-Jewish age distribution. This skewing resulted from large-scale Jewish immigration, especially the immigration that accompanied the formation of the state in 1948. Many of these immigrants were older individuals; moreover, most of the younger immigrants were single and did not marry and raise families until after their settlement. This circumstance accounts in part for the relatively small percentage of the Jewish population in the twenty to thirty-five-year-old age- group.

With regard to minorities, Muslim Arabs clearly predominated over Christians, Druzes, and others. In 1986 Muslims accounted for 77 percent of the non-Jewish Israeli population. Together with the Druzes, who resembled them closely in demographic terms, they had the highest rate of growth, with all the associated indicators (family size, fertility rate, etc.). Christian Arabs in 1986 were demographically more similar to Israeli Jews than to Muslims or Druzes.

The Jewish Israeli population differed also in country of origin; the population included African-Asian and European-American Jews, and native-born Israelis, or sabras. In the oldest age-groups, those of European-American provenance, called "Ashkenazim," predominated, reflecting the population of the pre-1948 era. By the early 1970s, the number of Israelis of African-Asian origin outnumbered European or American Jews. In Israel, immigrants from African and Asian countries were called either Orientals, from the Hebrew Edot Mizrah (communities of the East), or Sephardim, from an older and different usage. It was not until 1975 that the sabras outnumbered immigrants.

Understanding the importance of aliyah (pl., aliyot), as immigration to Israel is called in Hebrew, is crucial to understanding much about Israeli society, from its demography to its ethnic composition. Aliyah has historical, ideological, and political ramifications. Ideologically, aliyah was one of the central constituents of the Zionist goal of ingathering of the exiles. Historically and politically, aliyah accounted for most of the growth in the Jewish population before and just after the advent of the state. For example, between 1922 and 1948 the Jewish population in Palestine grew at an annual average rate of 9 percent. Of this growth, 75 percent was due to immigration. By contrast, in the same period, the Arab population grew at an average annual rate of 2.75 percent--almost all as a result of natural increase. Between 1948 and 1960, immigration still accounted for 69 percent of the annual average growth rate of 8.6 percent. A significant group entering Israel since 1965 has been Soviet Jews, of whom approximately 174,000 immigrated between 1965 and 1986. In the most recent period for which data existed in 1988, the period from 1983 through 1986, immigration contributed only a little more than 6 percent to a much diminished average annual growth rate of 1.5 percent.

The practical political aspects of declining aliyot are important in comparing the Jewish and non-Jewish population growth rates; one must also consider emigration of Jews from Israel, called yerida, a term with pejorative connotations in Hebrew. It is estimated that from 400,000 to 500,000 Israelis emigrated between 1948 and 1986. Emigration is a politically sensitive topic, and statistical estimates of its magnitude vary greatly. To take one possible index, the Central Bureau of Statistics noted that of the more than 466,000 Israeli residents who went abroad for any period of time in 1980, about 19,200 had not returned by the end of 1986. Continued emigration combined with falling immigration, together with unequal natural population growth rates of Jews and Arabs, mean that by the year 2010, assuming medium projections of Arab and Jewish fertility, the proportion of the Jewish population within Israel's pre-1967 borders would decrease to 75 percent. If the occupied territories in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were to be annexed, by 2010 Jews would become a clear minority in the state, comprising approximately 45 percent of the total population.

These demographic facts have affected population and family planning policies in Israel, but as of 1988 no consistent course of action had emerged. Until the mid-1960s, Israel followed a policy favoring large families, and family planning was not a priority. In the early 1970s, as a result of unrest among Oriental Jews, the Labor government under Golda Meir decided to support family planning as a way of reducing the size of Oriental Jewish families and narrowing the socioeconomic gap between them and Ashkenazim. Nevertheless, most family planning consisted, unsatisfactorily to most people concerned with the issue, of abortions performed under a liberal abortion law that was opposed bitterly by Orthodox Jews for religious reasons. (Orthodox Jews managed to restrict the criteria for performing abortions after Menachem Begin came to power in 1977.) Thus, because Jews feared being demographically overtaken by Arabs and because of potent opposition by Orthodox Jews, the development of a coherent family-planning policy was stymied. In the late 1980s, Israel's policies on family planning remained largely contradictory.

The dispersal of the population has been a matter of concern throughout the existence of the state. In 1986 the average population density in Israel was 199 persons per square kilometer, with densities much higher in the cities (close to 6,000 persons per square kilometer in the Tel Aviv District in 1986) and considerably lower in the very arid regions of the south. The population continues to be overwhelmingly urban. Almost 90 percent resides in urban localities, more than one-third of the total in the three largest cities (in order of population), Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa. Since 1948, despite calls throughout the 1960s to "Judaize" Galilee, the population has been shifting southward. Still, as of 1988, almost two-thirds of the population was concentrated on the Mediterranean coast between Haifa and Ashdod.

In the mid-1950s, in an effort both to disperse the population from the coast and settle the large numbers of immigrants coming from Middle Eastern and North African countries, so-called development towns were planned and built over the next fifteen years. They were settled primarily by Oriental Jews, or Sephardim and through the years they have often been arenas of unrest and protest among ethnic groups. In 1986, about 77 percent of rural Jews lived in kibbutzim and moshavim; still, these two rather striking Israeli social institutions attracted a very small percentage (3.5 percent and 4.4 percent, respectively) of the total Jewish population.

The changing distribution of population was more pronounced among Arabs. Whereas 75 percent of the Arabs lived in rural localities in 1948, less than 30 percent did by 1983. This pattern was not entirely because of internal migration to urban areas, but rather resulted from the urbanization of larger Arab villages. For example, in 1950 the Arab locality of Et Taiyiba near Nabulus had 5,100 residents; by 1986 its population had risen to 19,000. Israeli Arabs were concentrated in central and western Galilee, around the city of Nazareth, and in the city of Jaffa (Yafo in Hebrew), northeast of Tel Aviv. Arabs resided also in Acre (Akko in Hebrew), Lydda (Lod in Hebrew), Ramla, Haifa, and near Beersheba. They constituted the majority in East Jerusalem, annexed formally in July 1980.

According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, at the end of 1986 about 51,200 Jews resided in the the West Bank occupied territories (called Judea and Samaria by Jewish Israelis), and an additional 2,100 resided in the Gaza Strip (these figures represented 1.4 percent and 0.1 percent, respectively, of the 1986 Jewish population of Israel). They lived in 122 localities in both areas, including 4 cities, 10 kibbutzim, 31 moshavim, and 77 "other rural localities." This last category included more than fifty localities of a kind called yishuv kehillati, a nonagricultural cooperative settlement, a form new to Israel. Such settlements were associated especially with Amana, the settlement arm of Gush Emunim, and developed in the mid-1970s especially to enhance Jewish presence in the West Bank. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, in 1985 about 7,094, and in 1986 approximately 5,160, Jews settled in the occupied territories. Some did so for religious and nationalistic reasons, but many more were motivated by the high costs of housing inside Israel, combined with economic incentives offered by the Likud governments of the late 1970s and early 1980s to those who settled in the West Bank.

The Central Bureau of Statistics estimated the 1986 Arab population of the West Bank to be 836,000, and that of Gaza to be 545,000, for a total population of close to 1.4 million. In 1986 the population increased at a rate of 2.5 percent for the West Bank and 3.4 percent for Gaza--among the highest annual rates attained during the Israeli occupation.

Israel

Israel - SOCIAL STRUCTURE

The social structure of contemporary Israel has been shaped by a variety of forces and circumstances. Israel inherited some institutions and customs from the Ottomans and some from the British mandatory rule over Palestine. Zionists who strove to build the Yishuv under Ottoman and British rule also wielded influence. Immigration patterns have altered the social structure radically at different times. From 1882 to 1948, Israel received many immigrants from Eastern Europe and Central Europe. Following independence, huge numbers of Middle Eastern, North African, and Asian Jews came to the new state and altered its dominant Ashkenazi cast. Another shaping force was the presence of non-Jews in the Jewish state--a growing Arab minority within the pre-1967 borders of Israel and an absolute majority in the territories held under military occupation since the June 1967 War. Finally, among the most important forces shaping contemporary Israeli society is religion.

Israel

Israel - Varieties of Israeli Judaism

As the references to "Orthodox Zionists," "Orthodox non-Zionists," and "Orthodox anti-Zionists" indicate, Judaism is not a monolithic cultural entity in contemporary Israel. Furthermore, an understanding of religious categories in American Judaism, is not sufficient for understanding Israeli Judaism. Israelis religiously categorize themselves first as dati, that is, "religiously" observant Jews or lo dati, "not religiously" observant Jews. One who is religious strictly follows halakah, that is, adheres to the totality of rabbinic law. One who is not religious is not a strict follower of rabbinic law; however, the category can be further subdivided into agnostic or atheistic secularists, on the one hand, and individuals who are committed to Judaism in principle, on the other. The latter groups calls itself "traditionalist."

Many Oriental Jews, especially in the second generation since immigration, are traditionalists, expressing this commitment in observance of folk customs such as ethnic festivals and pilgrimages. This group is important because, although members may not vote directly for religious political parties, they respond positively to religious symbols used politically by a number of parties; for example, the idea of the Jewish people's right to a greater, biblical land of Israel as divinely ordained.

Israel

Israel - Orthodox Judaism

Within the Orthodox or dati category one can distinguish between the ultra-Orthodox or haredi, and the "modern" or "neo-Orthodox." At the very extreme, the ultra-Orthodox consists of groups such as the Neturei Karta, a small fringe group of antiZionist extremists, who reject Israel and view it as a heretical entity. They want nothing to do with the state and live in enclaves (Mea Shearim in Jerusalem and towns such as Bene Beraq), where they shut out the secular modern world as much as possible. Nevertheless, among the ultra-Orthodox one can also count some of the adherents of the Agudat Israel Party, who accept the state, although not its messianic pretensions, and work within many of its institutions. These adherents are exempt from compulsory military service and do not volunteer for police work, yet they demand that the state protect their way of life, a political arrangement known as the "preservation of the status quo". In practice, they live in the same neighborhoods as the more extreme haredi and maintain their own schools, rabbinical courts, charitable institutions, and so on. The state has not only committed itself to protecting the separate institutions of different Orthodox Jewish groups but also, especially since 1977, to their financial subvention.

The modern or neo-Orthodox are those who, while scrupulously adhering to halakah, have not cut themselves off from society at large. They are oriented to the same ideological goals as many of the secularists, and they share the basic commitment to Israel as a Zionist state. Furthermore, they participate fully in all the major institutions of the state, including the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). This group is also referred to as "Orthodox Zionists." They have been represented historically by a number of political parties or coalitions, and have been the driving force behind many of the extraparliamentary social, political, and Jewish terrorist movements that have characterized Israeli society since the June 1967 War. Most Orthodox Zionists have been "ultra-hawkish" and irredentist in orientation; Gush Emunim, the Bloc of the Faithful, is the most prominent of these groups. A minority of other Zionist groups, for example, Oz Veshalom, an Orthodox Zionist movement that is the religious counterpart to Peace Now, have been more moderate.

Relations between the ultra-Orthodox and the neo-Orthodox have been complicated and not always cordial. Nevertheless, the neo-Orthodox have tended to look to the ultra-Orthodox for legitimacy on religious matters, and the ultra-Orthodox have managed to maintain their virtual monopoly on the training and certification of rabbis (including neo-Orthodox ones) in Israel. (The neo-Orthodox university, Bar-Ilan, as part of the parliamentary legislation that enabled it, was prohibited from ordaining rabbis.) Thus ultra-Orthodoxy has an aura of ultimate authenticity, a special connection to tradition that has been difficult for others to overcome. Even a staunch secularist such as David Ben-Gurion lamented during a confrontation that the ultra-Orthodox "look like our grandfathers. How can you slap your grandfather into jail, even if he throws stones at you?"

Israel

Israel - Non-Orthodox Judaism

The American denominations of Conservative Jews and Reform Jews, although they have enrolled between them the vast majority of affiliated American Jews, have achieved a very modest presence in Israel. Neither Reform nor Conservative rabbinical ordination is recognized by the Israeli chief rabbinate; thus, these rabbis are generally forbidden to perform weddings or authorize divorces. (In the mid-1980s a few Conservative rabbis were granted the right, on an ad hoc basis, to perform weddings.) In the early 1980s, there were twelve Reform congregations in Israel and about 900 members--almost 90 percent of whom were born outside the country. During the same period there were more than twenty Conservative congregations with more than 1,500 members; only about 14 percent were native-born Israelis (and, as in the case of Reform, the great majority of these were of Ashkenazi descent).

Although both Reform and Conservative movements dated their presence in Israel to the 1930s, they experienced real growth, the Conservative movement in particular, only in the late 1960s to mid-1970s. During this period, relatively large numbers of American Jews immigrated--more than 36,000 between 1968 and 1975. Nevertheless, the opposition of the Israeli Orthodox establishment to recognizing Conservative and (particularly) Reform Judaism as legitimate was strong, and it continued to be unwilling to share power and patronage with these movements. Neither of the newer movements has attracted native-born Israelis in significant numbers. The importance of the non-Orthodox movements in Israel in the late 1980s mainly reflects the influence they have wielded in the American and West European Diaspora.

Israel

Israel - The Role of Judaism

In 1988 two-thirds to three-quarters of Jewish Israelis were not religious or Orthodox in observance or practice. Among the minority of the religious who were the most extreme in their adherence to Judaism--the haredi--the very existence of Israel as a self-proclaimed Jewish state was anathema because Israel is for them (ironically, as it is for many Arabs) a wholly illegitimate entity. Given these facts--the large number of secular Israelis, and the sometimes fierce denunciation of the state by a small number of the most religious extremists--one might expect the traditionalists to play a modest role in Israeli society and culture. But the opposite is true; traditional Judaism has been playing a more dominant role since the late 1960s and affecting more of the political and economic dimensions of everyday life.

The relation between traditionalists and the Jewish state has always been ambivalent and fraught with paradox. In the nineteenth century, Zionism often competed with Orthodox Judaism for the hearts and minds of young Jews, and enmity existed between Orthodox Jews of Eastern Europe and the Zionists (and those residing in Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). Orthodox Jews resented the dominantly secular nature of Jewish nationalism (for example, the desire to turn the holy tongue of Hebrew into an instrument of everyday discourse), whereas the Zionists derogated the other-worldly passivity of Orthodox Jews. Among the most extreme Orthodox Jews, the Zionist movement was deemed heretical because it sought to "force the End of Days" and preempt the hand of God in restoring the Jewish people to their Holy Land before the Messiah's advent.

Nevertheless, for all its secular trappings, Zionism as an ideology was also profoundly tied to Jewish tradition--as its commitment to the revival of the Jews' biblical language, and, indeed, its commitment to settle for nothing less than a Jewish home in biblical Palestine indicate. Thus, secular Zionism and religious Judaism are inextricably linked, and hence the conceptual ambivalence and paradoxes of enmity and attraction.

In any case, conceptual difficulties have been suspended by world events: the violence of the pogroms in Eastern Europe throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the Holocaust carried out by Nazi Germany, in which approximately 6 million Jews were killed, nearly destroying Central and East European Jewry in the 1930s and 1940s. In the face of such suffering--and especially after the magnitude of the Holocaust became known--Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews devised ways to work together in Palestine despite their fundamental differences. When the advent of the state was followed immediately by invasion and lasting Arab hostility, this cooperative modus vivendi in the face of a common enemy continued.

The spearheads of cooperation on the Orthodox side were the so-called religious Zionists, who were able to reconcile their nationalism with their piety. Following Rabbi A.I. Kook (1865-1935), the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Palestine, many believed that Zionism and Zionists, however secular, were nonetheless instruments of God who were engaged in divinely inspired work. On a more pragmatic level, under leadership such as that of Rabbi I.J. Reines (1839-1915), the religious, like the secularists, organized in political parties, such as the Mizrahi Party. They were joined in the political arena by the non-Zionist Orthodox, organized as the Agudat Israel Party. Although Agudat Israel was originally opposed to the idea of a Jewish state, it came to accept the rationale for it in a hostile gentile world (especially after the Central and East European centers of Orthodoxy were destroyed in the Holocaust). Because Orthodox Jews, like secularists, were organized in political parties, from an early date they participated--the religious Zionists more directly than the religious non-Zionists-- in the central institutions of the Yishuv and, later, the State of Israel. Indeed, since 1977 and the coming to power of Menachem Begin's Likud, Orthodox Jews have been increasingly vocal in their desire not just to participate in but also to shape--reshape, if need be--the central institutions of Israeli society.

Israel

Israel - Judaism, Civil Religion, and the New Zionism

All varieties of Judaism--ultra-Orthodoxy, neo-Orthodoxy, the Reform and Conservative forms--together counted as their formal adherents only a minority of Jewish Israelis. Yet religion was a potent force, and increasingly so, in Israeli society. Traditional Judaism has exerted its influence in Israel in three important ways. First, traditional Judaism has influenced political and judicial legislation and state institutions, which have been championed by the various Orthodox political parties and enshrined in the "preservation of the status quo" arrangements through the years. Second, religion has exerted influence through the symbols and practices of traditional Judaism that literally pervade everyday life. Saturday is the sabbath (Shabbat), the official day of rest for Jews (although the majority do not attend synagogue), and most enterprises are closed. Jewish holidays also affect school curricula, programming on radio and television, features in the newspapers, and so on. Minority traditionalists, who extol halakah even if they do not observe all rabbinic law, also observe many folk customs. Through the years, much of the folk religion has taken on an Oriental-Jewish flavor, reflecting in part the demographic preponderance of Oriental Jews since the 1970s. Such customs include ethnic festivals such as the Moroccan mimouna (an annual festival of Moroccan Jews, originally a minor holiday in Morocco, which has become in Israel a major celebration of Moroccan Jewish ethnic identity) and family pilgrimages to the tombs of Jewish holy men. The latter have become country-wide events. Traditional Judaism has influenced Israeli society in yet a third way: Israel's political elite has selectively co-opted symbols and practices of traditional Judaism in an attempt to promote nationalism and social integration. In this way traditional Judaism, or some aspects of it, becomes part of the political culture of the Jewish state, and aspects of traditional Judaism are then enlisted in what some analysts have called the "civil religion" of Jewish society. Thus, Judaism speaks to Israelis who may themselves be nonreligious, indeed even secularist.

Of all the manifestations of religion in Israel, civil religion has undergone the most profound changes through the years, specifically becoming more religious--in the sense of incorporating more traditional, Orthodox-like Judaism. In the prestate period, the civil religion of Jewish society was generally socialist, that is, Labor Zionism. Labor Zionists were hostile to much of traditional Jewish life, to the concept of exile, and to what they viewed as the cultural obscurantism of traditional Jews. They actively rejected Orthodoxy in religion and considered it to be a key reason for the inertia and lack of modernity of exiled Jews. Labor Zionists sought to reconstitute a revolutionary new form of Jewish person in a radically new kind of society.

After 1948, however, new problems faced Israeli society--not only military and economic problems, but also the massive immigration of Jews and their assimilation. First came the remnants of East and Central European Jewry from the detention and displaced-persons camps; then came Jews from Africa and Asia. Social integration and solidarity were essential to successful assimilation, yet Labor Zionism neither appealed to nor united many sectors of the new society. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s--roughly the period of Ben-Gurion's preeminence--a civil religion was fashioned by some factions of the political elite (led by Ben-Gurion himself), which sought to stress the new Israeli state as the object of ultimate value.

Israelis have called this the period of mamlakhtiyut or statism. The Jewish Bible was the key text and symbol, and secular youths studied parts of it as the Jewish nation's history and cultural heritage. Religious holidays, such as Hanukkah and Passover, or Pesach, were reinterpreted to emphasize nationalist and liberation themes, and Independence Day was promoted as a holiday of stature equal to the old religious holidays. The archaeology of the Holy Land, particularly during the Israelite (post-Joshua) period, became a national obsession, first because of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and later because of Yigal Yadin's excavations at Massada (a site of fierce Jewish resistance to the Romans after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.). At the same time, the two thousand years of Jewish history that followed the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, Jewish cultural life in the various diasporas (Ashkenazi as well as Sephardi), and Jewish religion of the postbiblical eras (rabbinic Judaism, exemplified in the Talmud) were rejected or ignored.

For many reasons, the statist focus of Israeli civil religion did not continue after the June 1967 War. These reasons ranged from the greater traditionalism and piety of the Oriental immigrants, who were never satisfactorily engaged by the more limited scope of statism; to the exhaustion of the Labor Alignment, which, after the October 1973 War, had sought to embody socialist Zionism and Israeli modern statism as a manifestation of its own identity and agenda; to the rise of Begin's Likud Bloc with its populist appeals to ethnic traditionalism and an irredentist territorial program as a challenge to Labor Zionism's fading hegemony. Begin and his Likud championed a new civil religion to embody its identity and agenda. This new right-wing civil religion affirmed traditional Judaism and denigrated modernistic secularism--the reverse of the earlier civil religion. Unlike the statist version of Ben-Gurion's time, which focused on the Bible and pre-exilic Jewish history, the new civil religion was permeated by symbols from the whole of Jewish history. It gave special emphasis, however, to the Holocaust as a sign of the ultimate isolation of the Jewish people and the enduring hostility of the gentile world.

The new civil religion (which in its more political guise some have called the New Zionism) has brought traditional Judaism back to a position in the Jewish state very different from that which it occupied twenty, forty, or eighty years ago. After the June 1967 War, the New Zionists linked up with the revitalized and transformed neo-Orthodox--young, self-assured religious Jews who have self-consciously connected retention and Jewish settlement of the West Bank, the biblical Judea and Samaria, with the Messiah's advent. The rise of messianic right-wing politics gave birth in the mid-1970s to the irrendentist, extraparliamentary movement Gush Emunim, which in turn led to the Jewish terrorist underground of the 1980s. When the underground was uncovered and broken by Israeli security in April 1984, it had already carried out several attacks on Arabs, including, it was thought, Arab mayors, in the West Bank and was planning to destroy the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem. Even before the June 1967 War, however, Orthodox Judaism had been able to exert influence on Israeli society simply because its religious institutions were so historically entrenched in the society.

Israel

Israel - Religious Institutions

The basis of all religious institutions in Israel dates back to the Ottoman Empire (1402-1921) and its system of confessional group autonomy called the millet system. Under the millet, each religious group was allowed limited independence in running its own community under a recognized (usually religious) leader who represented the community politically to the imperial authorities. Matters of law relating to personal status--marriage, divorce, inheritance, legitimacy of children--were also left to community control, so long as they did not involve a Muslim, in which case the sharia (Islamic law) courts took precedence.

The Jewish community in Ottoman Palestine was represented by its chief rabbi, called the Hakham Rashi or Rishon Le Tziyyon (the First in Zion), who was a Sephardi. The Orthodox Ashkenazim in Ottoman Palestine, who never formed a unified community, resented Sephardi preeminence. The secular European Jews who began to arrive in large numbers after 1882 ignored the constraints of the millet system and the standing of the chief rabbi and his council as best they could.

Under their League of Nations Mandate over Palestine, the British retained this system of religious courts (the Jewish Agency became the political representative of the Yishuv as a whole). In recognition of the growing numerical preponderance of Ashkenazim, however, the British recommended the formation of a joint chief rabbinate, one Sephardi and one Ashkenazi, and a joint chief rabbinical council. This system was implemented in 1921, together with a hierarchical court structure composed of local courts, regional appellate courts, and the joint Supreme Rabbinical Court in Jerusalem. After Israel's independence--even with the establishment of autonomous secular and military judiciaries--this system of rabbinical courts prevailed. An addition to the system was a Ministry of Religious Affairs under the control of the religious political party that sat in coalition to form the government, originally Mizrahi and later the National Religious Party.

In 1988, in addition to the two chief rabbis and their Chief Rabbinical Council, local chief rabbis were based in the larger cities (again, generally two, one Ashkenazi and one Sephardi) and on local religious councils. These councils (under the Ministry of Religious Affairs) functioned as administrative bodies and provided religious services. They supervised dietary laws (kashrut) in public institutions, inspected slaughterhouses, maintained ritual baths, and supported synagogues--about 5,000 of them--and their officials. They also registered marriages and divorces, that is, legal matters of personal status that came under their jurisdiction.

Israel's Proclamation of Independence guarantees freedom of religion for all groups within the society. Thus, the Ministry of Religious Affairs also supervised and supported the local religious councils and religious courts of the non-Jewish population: Christian, Druze, and Muslim. As in Ottoman times, the autonomy of the confessional groups is maintained in matters of religion and personal status, although all courts are subject to the jurisdiction of the (secular) Supreme Court. (This was true technically even of Jewish rabbinical courts, but outright confrontation or imposition of secular appellate review was, in fact, avoided.) Among Christians, the Greek Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Latin, Maronite, and Arab Anglican groups operated their own courts. In 1962 a separate system of Druze courts was established. Sunni Muslim judges (qadis) presided over courts that followed sharia.

The Ministry of Religious Affairs also exerted control over Muslim religious endowments (waqfs), and for this reason has been a political presence in Muslim communities. The ministry traditionally was a portfolio held by the National Religious Party, which at times also controlled the Arab departments in the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Social Welfare. This helped to account for the otherwise paradoxical fact that some Arabs--8.2 percent of voters in 1973--supported the neo-Orthodox, Zionist, Nationalist Religious Party in elections.

Besides Christian, Muslim, and Druze courts, there was yet another system of Orthodox Jewish courts that ran parallel to, and independently of, the rabbinate courts. These courts served the ultra-Orthodox (non-Zionist Agudat Israel as well as anti-Zionist Neturei Karta and other groups) because the ultra-Orthodox had never accepted the authority or even the legitimacy of the official, state-sponsored (pro-Zionist, neo-Orthodox) rabbinate and the Ministry of Religious Affairs. In place of the rabbinate and Rabbinical Council, Agudat Israel and the community it represented were guided by a Council of Torah Sages, which functioned also as the highest rabbinical court for the ultra-Orthodox. The members of this council represent the pinnacle of religious learning (rather than political connections, as was alleged for the rabbinate) in the ultra-Orthodox community. The council also oversaw for its community inspectors of kashrut, ritual slaughterers, ritual baths, and schools--all independent of the rabbinate and the Ministry of Religious Affairs.

In 1983 this state of affairs was even further complicated when the former Sephardi chief rabbi, Ovadia Yoseph, angry at not being reelected to this post, withdrew from the rabbinate to set up his own Sephardic ultra-Orthodox council and political party, called Shas (an acronym for Sephardic Torah Guardians). Shas ran successfully in the 1983 Jerusalem municipal elections, winning three of twenty-one seats, and later in the national Knesset (parliament) elections in 1984, where it cut deeply into Agudat Israel's hold on ultra-Orthodox Oriental voters. Shas won four seats in 1984, Agudat Israel only two. In this context, Shas's importance lay in the fact that it split the Oriental ultra-Orthodox from Ashkenazi domination under Agudat Israel, adding yet another institutionalized variety of Israeli traditional Judaism to an already complicated mix.

The practical result of all these separate and semiautonomous judiciaries based on religious grounds was that, for a large area of law dealing with matters of personal status, there was no civil code or judiciary that applied to all Israeli citizens. Marriages, divorces, adoptions, wills, and inheritance were all matters for adjudication by Christian clerics, Muslim qadis, or dayanim (sing., dayan; Jewish religious judge). An essential practical difficulty was that, in strictly legal terms, marriages across confessional lines were problematic. Another result was that citizens found themselves under the jurisdiction of religious authorities even if they were themselves secular. This situation has posed the greatest problem for the Jewish majority, not only because most Jewish Israelis are neither religiously observant nor Orthodox, but also because the hegemony of Orthodox halakah has from time to time forced the raising of issues of fundamental concern to modern Israel. Foremost among these has been the issue of "Who is a Jew?" in the Jewish state.

Israel

Israel - The "Who Is a Jew?" Controversy

The predominance of halakah and religious courts in adjudicating matters of personal status--and for that matter, the privileged position of the Orthodox minority in Israeli society--date back to arrangements worked out between the Orthodox and Labor Zionists on the eve of statehood. In June 1947, the executive committee of Agudat Israel received a letter from Ben-Gurion, then chairman of the executive committee of the Jewish Agency, who was the predominant political leader of the Yishuv. Ben-Gurion, wishing to have the support of all sectors of the Yishuv in the dire struggle he knew was soon to come, asked Agudat Israel to join the coalition that would constitute the first government of the State of Israel. In return for Agudat Israel's support, Ben-Gurion offered a set of guarantees relating to traditional Judaism's place in the new society. These guarantees formalized the customary arrangements that had developed in Ottoman times and continued through the British Mandate; hence they came to be known as agreements for the "preservation of the status quo."

The core of the status quo agreements focused on the following areas: the Jewish Shabbat, Saturday, would be the official day of rest for all Jews; public transportation would not operate nationwide on Shabbat and religious holidays, although localities would remain free to run local transportation systems; kashrut would be maintained in all public institutions; the existing religious school system would remain separate from the secular one but would receive funding from the state; and rabbinical courts applying halakah would decide matters of personal status. Both Agudat Israel and the Zionist Orthodox party, Mizrahi (later the National Religious Party), accepted the agreements and joined the first elected government of Israel in 1949.

Ben-Gurion's concern that a more-or-less united Israel confront its enemies was answered by the status quo arrangement. But this arrangement--particularly the educational and judicial aspects--also set the stage for conflict between Orthodox and secular Jewish Israelis. This conflict became quickly apparent in the wake of the first flood of Jewish immigration to the new state and as a direct result of one of the first laws passed by the new Knesset, the Law of Return.

The Law of Return, passed in 1950, guaranteed to all Jews the right to immigrate to Israel. Along with the Nationality Law (1952), which granted Israeli citizenship to people (including non-Jews) who lived in the country prior to 1948, the Law of Return also extended to Jewish immigrants (unless they specifically deferred citizenship or renounced it) immediate Israeli citizenship. Non-Jewish immigrants could acquire citizenship through a slower process of naturalization.

The problem of what constitutes Jewish "nationality" (leom) was essentially new. Before the modern era, one was a Jew (in the eyes of Jews and gentiles alike) by religious criteria; to renounce the religion meant renouncing one's membership in the community. In modern nation-states membership (citizenship) and religion were formally and, it was hoped, conceptually independent: one could be a British, French, or American citizen of the "Jewish persuasion." But the modern State of Israel presented special opportunities to Jews--the right to settle in the country and claim Israeli citizenship as a right, in Ben-Gurion's words, "inherent in being a Jew." With these opportunities have come problems, both formal and conceptual, about the definition of "a Jew."

A halakic definition is available: a Jew is one who is born of a Jewish mother or who converts according to the halakah. The traditional criteria thus consist of biology (descent) and religion. In a sense, biology dominates religion, because, according to halakah, someone remains a Jew if born of a Jewish mother, even if he or she converts to another religion, although such a person is referred to as "one who has destroyed himself."

Another problem is that of defining "nationality". Such an issue is of concern to a modern state and its minister of interior. Moreover, a modern state is interested in the nationality question as part of the determination of citizenship, with all its associated rights and duties. The Orthodox, however, are less concerned with nationality as a guide to citizenship and more concerned with nationality as it determines proper marriage partners, with the attendant legitimacy of children. In Orthodox Judaism an illegitimate child (mamzer; pl., mamzerim) is severely limited in the range of permissible marriage partners; the children of mamzerim are ("even to the tenth generation," according to Deuteronomy 23:2) themselves illegitimate. Furthermore, a woman who has not been divorced according to halakah will have mamzerim as the children of subsequent marriages. Rabbis would never knowingly sanctify the marriage of improper or forbidden partners, nor would such improper unions hold up in rabbinical courts. For the Orthodox, therefore, to know, as assuredly as one can, the status of a potential marriage partner as a "full and proper" Jew is crucial. Any doubts, even in principle, would have the effect of dividing the Jewish community into endogamous groups, that is, groups that would marry only within the confines of assurance against bastardy (mamzerut). This threat of sundering the "whole Jewish community" into mutually nonintermarrying segments has been used by the Orthodox to great effect.

Against this background one can understand much of the "Who is a Jew?" question and the vehemence with which positions have been taken. In 1958 the Bureau of the Registration of Inhabitants, under the minister of interior (from a left-of-center party), was directed to register individuals and issue identity cards that had separate categories under nationality and religion, according to the "good faith" declaration of the individual. Thus a non-Jewish mother could declare herself or her children to be Jewish and would be so registered. The rabbinate and the religious political parties were incensed, especially after they were told that population registry and identity cards were civil matters and need never affect marriages and divorces, which, under the status quo arrangements, would continue to fall under the jurisdiction of rabbinical courts. Orthodox Jews reasoned that if they had to deal with questions of Jewish nationality in a modern society, they could not allow nationality to be separated from religion in the Jewish state. The National Religious Party precipitated a cabinet crisis, and Prime Minister Ben-Gurion responded by forming a committee of Jewish "sages" (including non-Orthodox Diaspora scholars) to study the question.

The response of the scholars--even the non-Orthodox ones--was that it was premature to define who was a Jew in such a way that religion and nationality were separate. If not born of a Jewish mother, then a person must undergo a conversion to the Jewish faith to become a Jew. On the basis of this agreement, as well as Ben-Gurion's own political considerations, a new minister of interior from the National Religious Party, which rejoined the government, was appointed. In 1960 the new minister redirected the Bureau of the Registration of Inhabitants to define a Jew by administrative fiat as "a person born of a Jewish mother who does not belong to another religion, or one who has converted in accordance with religious law." This definition, advanced by an Orthodox minister, is not strictly halakic, since an apostate is still a Jew according to halakah but not according to this definition. Such was the criterion used to deny automatic Israeli citizenship to Brother Daniel, a Carmelite monk who was born Oswald Rufeisen, a Jew, but who converted to Christianity and then tried to claim citizenship under the Law of Return. The Supreme Court in 1962 upheld the ministry's definition, since according to the "commonsense" definition of who is a Jew of the "average" Israeli, "a Christian cannot be a Jew." (Brother Daniel later acquired Israeli citizenship through naturalization.)

The "Who is a Jew?" question still vexes the Knesset and the Supreme Court, and it has brought Orthodox and secular Israelis into sharp conflict. Sometimes, as in the Brother Daniel case, the issue has arisen as individuals tested the directives in terms of their own predicament. In 1968 Benjamin Shalit, an officer in the Israeli navy who was married to a non-Jewish naturalized Israeli citizen, sought to register his children as "Jewish" under the nationality category, but to leave the category under religion blank. This would have the effect of separating religion from nationality but not violate the "commonsense" notion that one cannot be an adherent of another religion (as was Brother Daniel) and still be Jewish. Shalit was claiming no religion for his children. The citizenship of the children was never in question: they were Israelis. What was at stake was their nationality.

The court's first response was to ask the government to drop the nationality category from registration lists; the government declined, ostensibly for security reasons. Finally, after the 1969 national elections, the court ruled by a five-to-four majority in 1970 that Shalit could register his children as "Jews" by nationality with no religion--invalidating the directives of 1960. Orthodox Jews rose up in defiance; Prime Minister Golda Meir backed down, and in 1970, after fierce debate, the Knesset passed an amendment to the Law of Return that revalidated and legalized the 1960 administrative directive; thus: a Jew is one "born to a Jewish mother, or who has become converted to Judaism, and who is not a member of another religion." What the Orthodox did not win, at this time, was the proviso that the conversion to Judaism must have been carried out in conformance with halakah. Thus the status of conversions carried out by Reform or Conservative rabbis in the Diaspora remained in question in the eyes of the religious minority in Israel.

Another way in which the "Who is a Jew?" issue arose involved the status of entire communities. Among these were the Karaites (a schismatic Jewish sect of the eighth century that rejected the legitimacy of rabbinic law), the Bene Yisrael (Jews from near Bombay, India, who immigrated in large numbers in the 1950s), and from the 1970s onward, Jews from Ethiopia--Falashas. The controversy arose over the fitness of these Jews, according to halakic criteria, for intermarriage with other Jews--not over whether they were Jews. The question was whether, because of their isolation (Bene Israel or Falashas) or schismatic deviance (the Karaites), their ignorance or improper observance of halakic rules had not rendered them essentially communities of mamzerim, fit only to marry each other or (according to halakah) Jewish proselytes.

These community-level disputes have had different outcomes: the Orthodox Jewish authorities have not relented on the Karaites, who were doctrinal opponents of rabbinic law, despite pleas to bring them fully into the fold. The Karaites thus remained, according to halakah, a separate community for purposes of marriage. Young Karaites sometimes concealed their affiliation to "pass" in the larger Jewish Israeli society, where they were in all ways indistinguishable. In the mid-1960s, the Orthodox backed down on the Bene Yisrael, changing the rabbinate's special caution against them in the registration of marriages between Jewish ethnic groups to a general caution. The Ethiopian Falashas, among the newest additions to the Israeli Jewish mix, still faced some uncertainty in the 1980s--again, not so much in terms of their Jewishness, which was accepted, but with respect to marriage to other Jews.

Halakah provides many other stipulations and constraints on proper marriages and divorces. Among others these include the biblical levirate, whereby a childless widow must first obtain the ritual release of her brother-in-law before she may remarry; laws restricting the marriage of Cohens, the priestly caste of Israelites, who today have few corporate functions but whose putative individual members are recognized; and laws governing the status of agunot (sing., aguna), married women "abandoned" by their husbands whose remarriage is disallowed until the man files a proper bill of divorce or until his death can be halakically established. This last law has made it difficult for women married to soldiers listed as "missing in action" to remarry within halakah, because the requisite two witnesses to their husband's death (or other admissible evidence) are not always forthcoming. People involved in such hardship cases can get married outside Israel, but then the status of their children, in the eyes of halakah, is tainted. Although such cases arouse the sympathy of Orthodox Jews, the principle followed is that halakah, being divine and eternal, cannot be modified.

It is in regard to the principles of the divinity and immutability of halakah that Orthodoxy opposes Conservative and Reform Judaism. Conservative Judaism affirms the divinity of halakah, but questions its immutability. Reform Judaism denies the authority of both principles. Because of these views and their control over the religious establishment, Orthodox Jews have been able to keep rabbis of either persuasion from establishing full legitimacy in Israel. But because the majority of Jews in the Western democracies, if they are affiliated at all, are affiliated with Reform or Conservative congregations, and because of the high intermarriage rates, as of 1988 Orthodox Jews have been unable publicly to invalidate Reform or Conservative conversions to Judaism under the Law of Return by amending the law again to stipulate specific conformance with halakah as the sole mode of conversion. Yet many new immigrants (and some long-time residents) whose status is in doubt have undergone Orthodox conversions--often added onto their previous Reform or Conservative ones--once resident in Israel.

Israel

Israel - The Orthodox and Secular

As has been seen, Israeli Judaism in the late 1980s exerted its influence on society through a complex interplay of ethnicity, halakah, and political and ideological ferment--as well as through the notions of Israeli Jewish citizenship, nationality, security, and sovereignty. In part because of the institutionalization of the status quo arrangements of the late 1940s and early 1950s, in part because of the disproportionate power available to small (religious) political parties in the Israeli parliamentary system, traditional Judaism both pervades and structures much of everyday life. Because many of the Orthodox of various persuasions view the status quo as the baseline from which to advance, they are accused by many secular Israelis of trying to impose additional cultural controls and religious structures. As an example of Orthodox pressures, when Begin formed his first coalition government in 1977, the religious parties took advantage of this change in the political status quo to push for changes in the religious status quo as well. Thirty-five of the forty-three clauses in the 1977 multiparty coalition agreement submitted to the Knesset dealt with religious questions.

Since the early 1970s, neo-Orthodox youths have been more assertive and less defensive in their religious observance--a charge leveled against their elders in the 1950s and 1960s. The "knitted skullcap generation" of the post-June 1967 War era has in some ways replaced the Labor Zionist kibbutzniks of a former era as the pioneering vanguard of Israeli society. Meanwhile, the ultra-Orthodox in 1988 were as willing as ever to challenge secular authorities, on the streets and with violence if need be, to protect their prerogatives and to preserve the special character of their enclave communities.

The results of these trends have been twofold: a growing traditionalization of Israeli society in terms of religion, and the sharpening of conflict between the extremist Orthodox and their sympathizers and the secularists who oppose the Orthodox Jews and their agendas. Despite the sharp rift, a sort of modus vivendi has emerged, which is what the status quo agreements intended. But the status quo itself has not been stable or stagnant; on the contrary it has been dynamic, gradually shifting toward religion.

Israel

Israel - Jewish Ethnic Groups

The division of Jewish Israelis into ethnic groups is primarily a legacy of the cultural diversity and far-flung nature of the Jewish Diaspora: it is said that Jews have come to modern Israel from 103 countries and speak more than 70 different languages. As in the United States, the immigrants of yesterday became the ethnic groups of today. But Jewish ethnicity troubles many Israelis, and since the late 1950s it has sometimes been viewed as Israel's major social problem.

There are two principal sources of concern. First, in a rather utopian way, Zionism was supposed to bring about the dissolution of the Diaspora and the reconstitution of world Jewry into a single, unified Jewish people. The persistence of cultural diversity-- Jewish ethnicity in a Jewish state--was simply inconceivable. Second, the socialist Labor Zionists assumed that the Jewish society of Israel would be egalitarian, free of the class divisions that plagued Europe. Instead, along with the growing, industrializing economy came the usual divisions of class, stratification, and socioeconomic inequality. These class divisions seemed to coincide with ethnic divisions: certain kinds of ethnic groups were overrepresented in the lowest classes. For utopian thinkers, the persistence of Jewish ethnic groups was troubling enough; their stratification into a class structure was unthinkable.

<>The Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Oriental

Israel

Israel - The Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Oriental

The two dominant Jewish ethnic groups in Israel are the Ashkenazim (the term comes from the old Hebrew word for Germany), which now includes Jews from northern and eastern Europe (and, later, their descendants from America); and Sephardim (the term comes from the old Hebrew word for Spain), which now includes Jews of Mediterranean, Balkan, Aegean, and Middle Eastern lands. There are differences in ritual and liturgy between these two groups, but both sides have always recognized the validity and authority of the other's rabbinical courts and rulings. Nor, throughout the centuries, were scholars or notables from either branch totally isolated from the other. In some countries, Italy for example, communities representing both groups lived together. Originally, Ashkenazi meant one who spoke Yiddish, a dialect of German, in everyday life and Sephardi meant one who spoke Ladino, a dialect of Castilian Spanish. Although this narrow understanding of Sephardim is still retained at times, in Israeli colloquial usage, Sephardim include Jews who speak (or whose fathers or grandfathers spoke) dialects of Arabic, Berber, or Persian as well. In this extended sense of Sephardim, they are now also referred to as the Edot Mizrah, "the communities of the East," or in English as "Oriental Jews."

Whereas the Ashkenazi-Sephardi division is a very old one, the Ashkenazi-Oriental division is new to Israel. The term "Oriental" refers specifically to Israelis of African or Asian origin. This geographical distinction has developed over the years into a euphemism for talking about the poor, underprivileged, or educationally disadvantaged (those "in need of fostering," in the Hebrew phrase). Some social scientists as well as some Sephardi activists have seen a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy in this classification. Many Sephardim will not refer to themselves as Orientals.

The heterogenous nature of the Oriental segment of Israeli Jewry is sometimes lost when someone speaks of "the" Oriental community, or collects census data (as does the Central Bureau of Statistics) on the basis of the "continent of origin" ("Europe-America versus Africa-Asia") of its citizens and residents. The category "Oriental" includes Jews from Moroccan and Yemeni backgrounds--to take only two examples that span the range of the Arabic-speaking world. These two communities see themselves, and are seen by other Israelis--particularly Ashkenazim--very differently. Yemenis enjoy a positive self-image, and they are likewise viewed positively by other Israelis; the Moroccans' self-image has been more ambivalent, and they are often viewed by others as instigators of violence and crime. Although this image has become something of a stereotype, Moroccan Jews did instigate acts of violence against the Labor Party in the 1981 elections, and statistically their communities have tended to have a high crime rate. In a similar way, Iraqi, Iranian, and Kurdish Jewish ethnic groups all differ from one another in matters of self-perception and perception by other Israelis. They differ also according to such indices as income (for example, Iraqis are more concentrated in the middle class, Kurds in the lower classes), orientation to tradition (Yemenis are probably the most religious of all non-Ashkenazi groups, Iranians are relatively secular), and so on. These differences are likely to continue, moreover, as marriage statistics in the 1980s indicate a higher rate of endogamy among members of Oriental ethnic groups, as compared to the Ashkenazim. As an ethnic group in the 1980s, Ashkenazim have become much more culturally homogeneous than the Orientals.

Israel

Israel - The Second Israel

Before 1882 Sephardim or Oriental Jews were the majority, about 60 percent, of the Jewish population in Palestine. Although Oriental Jews did immigrate between this period and that of the British Mandate--more than 15,000 came from Yemen and Aden Protectorate between 1919 and 1948--they were a minority, about 10 percent of all immigrants. Thus, by 1948 Ashkenazim accounted for 77 percent of the population of the new State of Israel. But this was to change quickly in the period of mass migration that followed the establishment of the state. Between 1948 and 1951 Oriental immigrants accounted for 49 percent of all immigrants; in the Jewish calendar year 1952-53 they comprised 70 percent, and from 1954 to 1957 (following the Sinai Campaign and turbulence in North Africa), African-born Jews, the majority from Morocco, constituted 63 percent of all immigrants. By 1958 almost the entire Jewish populations of Yemen, Aden, Libya, and Iraq had immigrated.

The new state was barely equipped, and had few of the resources needed, to handle this influx. The immigrants were housed in tented "transition camps" (maabarot; sing., maabara); and then directed, often without their approval, to some cooperative settlement (immigrants' moshav) or one of the new development towns. In both cases, authorities wanted to disperse the Jewish population from the coast and place the immigrants in economically productive (especially agricultural or light industrial) settings. The results were village or town settlements that were peripherally located, ethnically homogeneous or nearly homogeneous, and the poorest settlements in the nation.

The lack of resources, however, was not the only obstacle to the successful integration of the Oriental immigrants. Although their intentions were noble, in practice the Ashkenazim viewed their Oriental brethren as primitive--if not quite savage--representatives of "stone age Judaism," according to one extreme phrase. Paternalism and arrogance went hand in hand; the socialist Labor Zionists, in particular, had little use for the Orientals' reverence for the traditional Jewish criteria of accomplishment and rectitude: learnedness and religious piety. In the transition camps and the new settlements, the old elite of the Oriental communities lost their status and with it, often, their self-respect. The wealthy among them had been obliged to leave most of their wealth behind; besides, more often than not, they had been merchants or engaged in some "bourgeois" profession held in low esteem by the Labor Zionists. The rabbis and learned men among them fared no better with the secular Zionists but they were often patronized as well by representatives of the Ashkenazi religious parties, who respected their piety but evinced little respect for the scholarly accomplishments of rabbinical authorities who did not discourse in Yiddish. The religious and secular political parties knew, however, that the immigrants represented votes, and so, despite their patronizing attitudes, at times they courted them for support. In the early years, the leftist predecessor parties to the Labor Party even tried adding religious education to their transition camp schools as a way of enrolling Orientals.

The transition camps were largely eliminated within a decade; a few became development towns. But the stresses and strains of immigrant absorption had taken their toll, and in July 1959 rioting broke out in Wadi Salib, a slum area in Haifa inhabited mostly by Moroccan Jews. The rioters spread to Haifa's commercial area, damaging stores and automobiles. It was the first violence of its kind in Israel, and it led to disturbances in other towns as the summer progressed. Israelis were now acutely aware of the ethnic problem, and soon afterward many began to speak of Israel Shniya, the "Second Israel," in discussing the socioeconomic gaps that separated the two segments of society. In the early 1970s, violent protests again erupted, as second-generation Orientals (mostly Moroccans), organized as the "Black Panthers" (named to great effect after the American Black protest group of the same period) confronted the Ashkenazi "establishment," demanding equality of opportunity in housing, education, and employment. Prime Minister Meir infuriated them even more by calling them "not nice boys."

This remark underscored the perception of many Orientals that when they protested against Israel's establishment they were largely protesting against the Labor Party and its leaders. Many Orientals came to see the Labor Party as being unresponsive to their needs, and many also blamed Labor for the indignities of the transition camps. These were legacies that contributed to Labor's fall from power in 1977; but, in fact, Oriental voters were turning away from Labor and toward Herut, Menachem Begin's party, as early as the 1965 national elections.

The Oriental protest movements, however, were never separatist. On the contrary, they expressed the intense desire of the Oriental communities for integration--to be closer to the centers of power and to share in the rewards of centrality. For example, some of the Black Panthers were protesting against their exclusion from service in the IDF, the result in most cases of previous criminal convictions. This desire was also reflected in the Orientals' turn to Labor's opposition, Herut and later Likud, as a means of penetrating power centers from which they felt excluded--by supporting the establishment of new ones.

Israel

Israel - Ethnicity and Social Class

The Orientals' electoral rejection of Labor and embrace of Likud can thus be seen as the political part of a larger attempt to try to lessen the socioeconomic gaps that have separated these two broad segments of Israel's Jewry. The gaps are reflected in the close correlation between Israel's class structure and its ethnic divisions along several critical dimensions, among them educational achievement, occupational structure, housing, and income.

In education, the proportion of Orientals in junior high schools and high schools has risen through the years, but in the late 1980s a gap remained. For example, in 1975 the median years of schooling for Ashkenazim was 9.8, compared with 7.1 for Orientals. In 1986, although both groups enjoyed increased schooling, the median for Ashkenazim was 12.2 years, compared with 10.4 for Oriental Jews. Despite the expansion of higher education in Israel after the June 1967 War, Orientals lagged considerably behind Ashkenazim in their presence in institutions of higher education. In the 1984-85 school year, only 14 percent of university degree recipients were of Oriental heritage, up from 10.6 percent a decade earlier.

In terms of occupational structures, Oriental Jews were still overrepresented in the blue-collar professions. In 1982, for example, 36.6 percent of Oriental immigrants and 34.5 percent of second-generation Orientals were employed in the blue-collar sector. Among Ashkenazim, 25.2 percent of the immigrant generation, and 13 percent of the next (sabra or native-born) generation were employed in the blue-collar sector. Among professional and technical workers, the proportion for Orientals rose from 9 percent in the immigrant generation to 12 percent in the sabra generation, clearly some improvement. Nevertheless, in the same occupations among Ashkenazim, professional and technical employment rose from 15.5 percent in the immigrant to 24.7 percent in the Ashkenazi sabra generation. In the sciences and academia, the gap has remained much larger, in generational terms.

As a result of differential income levels and larger families, Orientals have lagged behind Ashkenazim in housing. In 1984 Ashkenazi households averaged 3.1 persons per room, as compared with 4.5 per room in Oriental households. In 1984 the income of the average Oriental family was 78 percent of that of the average Ashkenazi family--the same proportion as it had been in 1946, and down 4 percent from what it was in 1975. Studies of the regional distribution of income indicated that development towns, most with large Oriental populations, ranked well below the national average in income. Data comparing the period 1975-76 with that of 1979-80, however, indicated a significant improvement in Oriental income status. In this period, there was a decrease in the proportion of Oriental Jews defined as "poor" (having incomes in the lowest 10 percent of the population). These data on education, occupation, and income indicate that although Oriental Jews have made progress over the years, the gaps separating them from Ashkenazim have not been significantly reduced. Moreover, these gaps have not been closing under Likud governments any more quickly or substantively than they had been under Labor.

The close correlation between ethnicity and socioeconomic class in Israel remains the main axis along which the Ashkenazi-Oriental cleavage is drawn. The "hardening" of ethnicity into social class--what some analysts have referred to as the formation of Israeli "ethnoclasses"--represents, with the Orthodox-secular division, the most serious cleavage that divides the Jewish society of Israel from within. In Israel's class structure in the late 1980s, the upper classes were predominantly Ashkenazi and the lower classes predominantly Oriental. Mobility has been most evident in the movement, even though gradual, by Orientals into the large middle class.

Those Sephardim, however, who do rise to the middle class are unlikely to think of themselves as Orientals. They identify more with Ashkenazi patterns--in family size, age at termination of child-bearing, nature of leisure activities, and the like. Upwardly mobile Orientals loosen their ties with their own ethnic groups, and for them the term "Oriental" is reserved for the poor or underprivileged. This phenomenon has been seen by some as a sort of co-optation of upwardly mobile Orientals by Ashkenazi Israelis. Oriental upward mobility has strengthened the correlation for those who do not rise in class between Oriental ethnicity and low class standing. This correlation has led some analysts to speak of Oriental cultural patterns as essentially the culture of a particular stratum of society, the "Israeli working class." To some extent, too, Oriental culture patterns mitigate the integrationist effect of Ashkenazi-Oriental "intermarriage," estimated at nearly 30 percent for women of Oriental heritage who have nine or more years of schooling.

The social manifestations of this rift, however, have been more evident in the political arena than in the economic. Since the mid-1970s, Orientals have comprised a numerical majority of the Jewish population. Thus far, the beneficiaries of this majority have been political parties, often religious ones and typically right-of-center, that have ranged themselves in opposition to Labor. The height of Ashkenazi-Oriental ethnic tensions occurred in the national elections of the 1980s--especially 1981--in which anti-Labor sentiment was expressed, sometimes with violence, as anti-Ashkenazi sentiment. That Orientals supported in those elections the Likud Bloc led by Menachem Begin, himself an Ashkenazi from Poland, whose ultranationalist oratory served to inflame the violence, was a paradox that troubled few in Israel at the time. More troubling to many Israelis were the violence and anti-Ashkenazi overtones of the opposition to the peace demonstrations that were organized by Israeli doves in the wake of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and, from the doves' side, the imputation of "anti-democratic" tendencies, en masse, to the Orientals.

Some commentators have referred to these recent crystallizations as the "new Oriental ethnicity." Unlike the Oriental ethnicity of the 1970s, it has been less concerned with promoting festivals, pilgrimages, and other cultural events, and more explicitly focused on political power. In the 1980s, self-consciously Oriental minor political parties have reentered the political arena, the first serious and successful ones since the Yishuv and early years of the state.

To some extent, the new ethnicity dovetailed with the new civil religion, the new Zionism, in its positive orientation to traditional Judaism and its negative orientation to the modern secularism of Labor Zionism. In this sense, the new ethnicity has contributed to the traditionalization of Israeli society. But the two movements are not identical. As a group, for example, Oriental Jews--although they are hawkish on the question of the occupied territories--have been less committed than many ultranationalist Ashkenazim to the settlement of the West Bank. The primary reason has been that Orientals see such costly efforts as draining resources into new settlements at the expense of solving serious housing problems in the cities and development towns of pre-1967 Israel.

Around issues such as the Jewish settlement of the West Bank can be seen the complicated interplay of ethnicity, religion, politics, and social class interests in contemporary Israeli society. In the late 1980s, the Ashkenazi-Oriental distinction continued to be colored by all these factors. Both Israeli and foreign observers believed that the Ashkenazi-Oriental rift would remain salient for many years, partly because it was a source of social tensions in Israel and partly because it was a lightning rod for them.

Israel

Israel - Minority Groups

The non-Jewish--almost entirely Arab--population of Israel in the mid-1980s comprised 18 percent of the total population (these figures refer to Arabs resident within the pre-1967 borders of Israel). More than three-fourths were Sunni Muslims. Among Muslim Arabs the beduins, concentrated in the Negev, were culturally and administratively distinctive. They numbered about 29,000, divided among about forty ethnically based factions. There were approximately 2,500 (non-Arab) Sunni Muslim Circassians, concentrated in two small villages in Galilee. Among non-Muslim Arabs were Christians of various affiliations: Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholics, Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Protestants of different sects; the Greek Orthodox community being the largest of the Christian groups. In addition, there were Armenians who belonged to several Christian churches.

Another tiny minority group was that of the Samaritans, of whom about 500 remained in Israel in the late 1980s. The Samaritans are thought to be descendants of the Jews who lived in the area at the time of the Exile in Babylon beginning in 722 B.C. and who intermarried with the local inhabitants. Their religion resembles the form of ancient Judaism.

In addition, Israel contained a small number of adherents of Bahaism, an offshoot of Shia Islam. They are followers of Mirza Husayn Ali, known as Baha Ullah (the glory of God), who claimed leadership of a community founded by an Iranian spiritual leader known as the Bab (the way), in the 1850s, after the Bab was executed as a heretic. Bahais have a syncretistic faith that incorporates elements of Islam, Christianity, and universal ethical principles. Their governing body, the Universal House of Justice, which consists of elected representatives from various national spiritual assemblies, acts as supreme administrative, legislative, and judicial body for Bahais, and is located in Haifa.

As a result of a high birth rate and improved health and sanitation conditions, the total number of Israeli Arabs in 1988 (exclusive of those in the West Bank and Gaza Strip) was about equal to (and was expected soon to surpass) what it was in 1947 Palestine under the British Mandate. During and immediately after Israel's War of Independence, approximately 600,000 Arabs left the country of their own volition or were expelled; most went to Jordan's West Bank or the Gaza Strip, and some to Lebanon and the Persian Gulf states. In 1948 many had expected to return to their homes (or to take over abandoned Jewish property) in the wake of victorious Arab armies. Instead, they have come to constitute the Palestinian diaspora, whose disposition has proved fateful to the history of many states in the modern Middle East.

Israel's Arabs are guaranteed equal religious and civil rights with Jews under the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. They have voted in national elections and sent members to the Knesset since 1949; following the 1984 elections, seven Arabs sat in the Knesset. Nevertheless, until the end of 1966, Israel's Arabs lived under a military jurisdiction that severely limited their physical mobility and ranges of permissible political expression. They have also lost much land to the Israeli government, a good deal of it expropriated by the army for "security purposes," but much more turned over to Jewish settlements in attempts to increase the Jewish presence in northern and western Galilee, the centers of Arab population.

In social and economic terms, the state has sought to dominate its Arab minority by encouraging dependence. This aim has been achieved, for example, by providing funding for the separate Arab (Muslim, Christian, and Druze) school systems, as well as access to Jewish institutions of higher learning, and by providing funding for health facilities, religious institutions, and courts. Many of these institutions have encouraged the maintenance of Arab spheres of interaction segregated from Jewish ones. But the real dependency has resulted from the integration of Arab labor into Israel's economy. This has entailed an acute deemphasis on agriculture (abetted by government expropriations of arable land) and a funneling of labor into industry, especially construction, and into services. Under the British Mandate, for example, about two-thirds of all Arabs worked in agriculture. By 1955, this figure dropped to 50 percent of Arab labor employed in the agricultural sector, 36 percent in industry and construction, and almost 14 percent in services. By the early 1980s, less than 12 percent were engaged in agriculture, 45 percent in industry and construction, and close to 43 percent in the service sector. Along with this proletarianization of Arab labor--the loss of its agrarian base--has come the urbanization of its population. In 1948 less than one-fourth of the Arab population lived in cities or towns; by the 1980s more than two-thirds did.

Yet another way in which the government has related to its Arab minorities has been by encouraging internal segmentation, primarily along religious lines, in the Arab communities. Thus Muslims, Christians, and Druzes have been differentially treated. (So have the beduins, who are Muslims but are culturally distinctive as pastoralists from Muslim Arab village and town dwellers; and so have the Circassians, who although Muslims are not Arabs. Like Christians, beduins may volunteer for service in the army, and some do; like the Druzes, Circassians are conscripted.) Differential treatment almost always has favored Christians and Druzes over Muslims; at least this has been the semi-official "policy." Some ethnographic and sociological studies of Arab villages, however, indicate that other Israeli policies have had the effect of weakening the Christian and Druze position and strengthening that of Arab Muslims.

In the past, Christian dominance, for example, was based on the control of agrarian resources in villages. The dismantling of the agrarian bases of the Arab economy and the proletarianization of Arab labor led to Arab dependence on the Jewish economy. But it did so at the expense of the wealth, and thus the political standing, of Christians. Similarly, the building and support of village and town schools open to all created an educated (and underemployed) Muslim cadre whose intellectual energies have tended to flow into antiestablishment politics.

Israel

Israel - The Druzes

The case of the Druzes is a special one. The Druzes belong to an eleventh century offshoot of Shia Islam, which originated in Egypt. They soon migrated northward, settling first along the western slopes of Mount Hermon, and thence westward into the Shuf Mountains of Lebanon, south to Galilee and Mount Carmel, and east into Syria. In 1988 there were approximately 318,000 Druzes in Syria and 182,000 in Lebanon. Including the Druze population of the Golan Heights, annexed by Israel in December 1981, there were about 72,000 Druzes in Israel. This number represented a large increase from the 1948 population of about 13,000. Besides the Golan Heights, in the late 1980s Druzes lived in seventeen villages in Galilee and around Mount Carmel. Of these, nine were all Druze and the rest mixed, mostly with Christian Arabs. Less than 10 percent of Druzes in Israel lived in cities--compared to more than 60 percent of Christians.

The Druze religion is known mainly for being shrouded in secrecy, even from large groups of Druzes themselves, the juhhal, uninitiated or "ignorant ones." The uqqal, the "wise," or initiated, undergo periods of initiation, each signaling an increased mastery of the mysteries of the faith. Although there is a formal separation between religious and political leadership, the wise ones (particularly the ajawid, or excellent, among them) have traditionally wielded considerable political influence. The religion is fiercely monotheistic and includes an elaborate doctrine of the reincarnation and transmigration of souls. It shares with Shia Islam the doctrine of practicing taqiya, the art of dissimulation in hostile environments. In the past this practice meant seeming to worship in the manner of the conqueror or dominant group, without apostasy. In more recent times, some observers note, it has meant being loyal to the state in which they reside, including serving in its army.

Because the Druze religion was considered schismatic to Islam, even to Shia Islam, Druzes occasionally suffered discrimination and persecution at the hands of Muslims and, like other Middle Eastern dissidents, inhabited marginal or easily defensible areas: mountain slopes and intermontane valleys. Because the Druzes have long enjoyed a reputation for military prowess and good soldiery, they have often not suffered discrimination or persecutions lightly or without responding in kind. Whether because of the desire to settle old scores, or because the doctrine of taqiya can be stretched in this direction, Druzes have been remarkable in being a non-Jewish, Arabic-speaking group that has supported the Jewish state, both in the late Mandate period and since Israel's independence through service of Druze young men in the IDF and the paramilitary Border Police. About 175 Druzes have been killed in action, including a large proportion of that number in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

Jewish Israelis have recognized this service and sought to reward it. Druze villages had military supervision and restrictions lifted from them about four years before other Arab areas. Since 1977 there has been a Druze member of the Knesset from the right-of-center Likud, and under Labor they have served in highly visible positions such as that of presidential adviser on minority affairs and, at one time, the Israeli consul in New York City. In 1962 Israeli authorities recognized "Druze" as a separate nationality on internal identification cards--previously Druzes were differentiated only under dat, religion; their nationality was Arab. Although authorities assured Druzes that recognition as a separate nationality would enhance their most favored status, some analysts and younger Druzes have viewed the identification as an attempt to drive a wedge between them and other Arabs.

Many among the younger generation of Druzes have been partly radicalized in their politics--for a number of reasons. First, the favored status accorded the Druzes has not significantly helped them materially. Druzes have been among the least affluent of all groups in Israel, the number receiving higher education has been low, and few Druzes could be found in top professional or technical positions. Even those who have made the army their career have complained of severe limitations in promotions. Second, Israeli actions against Druzes in the occupied and then annexed Golan Heights troubled their coreligionists in Israel. Particularly troublesome was the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. During this invasion, Israeli soldiers, as allies of the Lebanese Christians, were opposed by Druzes of the Shuf Mountains. Pitched battles or military encounters between the IDF and the Lebanese Druzes were avoided. Nevertheless, the Lebanese Christian Maronites have been among the Druzes' most bitter enemies, and many Druzes serving in the IDF were killed or wounded in Lebanon. This was a particularly difficult time for Jewish-Druze relations, one from which they had not fully recovered in 1988.

Israel

Israel - The Arab-Jewish Cleavage

The case of the Druzes highlights the peculiar problem of non-Jews, even demonstrably loyal ones, in the Jewish state. Both conceptually and pragmatically, the cleavage between Arabs and Jews is much more profound and perhaps unbridgeable than the one between Orthodox and secular Jews, or that between Ashkenazim and Oriental Jews. There has been an inherent tension between evolving an authentic Israeli national identity centered on the age-old religious character of Judaism and forging an egalitarian socioeconomic system open to all citizens. Reconciling the place of non-Jews within the Jewish state has been a particular problem. These problems have been characterized with special lucidity and frankness by the Israeli-American political scientist, Daniel Elazar:

The views of Israeli Jews regarding the Arabs in their midst are hardly monolithic, but whatever their character, all flow out of a common wish and a general ambivalence. The common wish of virtually all Jews is that the Arabs simply would go away (and vice versa, it may be added). It is possible to get many Israelis to articulate this wish when they are pushed to do so, but needless to say, its very unreality means that it is rarely articulated, and, if articulated by a few extremists, such as Meir Kahane, it is rapidly dismissed from consideration by the vast majority. Yet it should be noted at the outset, because for Israeli Jews, every other option, no matter which they choose, is clearly a poor second.

It is against this background that the Israeli settlement policies of the West Bank and Gaza must be understood. To annex these areas would be to add almost 1.5 million Arabs to the non-Jewish population of the Jewish state--hardly a way to make the problem "simply go away." Until late 1987, Israeli planners had proceeded to build infrastructure in the West Bank as though operating under the premise that two totally separate socioeconomic systems--one Arab, the other Jewish--would exist side by side. Alternatively, the Arab sector was hardly mentioned--as if it did not exist. Still, West Bank Arab labor has been significantly absorbed into the larger Israeli economy; the situation recalls the experience of Arabs in pre-1967 Israel.

The violent protests that began in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in December 1987 may well change this sort of thinking. For example, it has been argued by some analysts that the West Bank (as Judea and Samaria) had already become part of a "cognitive map" for a generation of Jewish Israelis born after the June 1967 War. In light of this analysis, some have noted that security efforts begun in April 1988 to close off the West Bank, thereby keeping journalists (among others) out and, Israelis hope, violent Palestinians in, have already had the unintended effect of reviving the old Green Line. Israeli Arabs living within the old Green Line have also been affected by events on the West Bank and Gaza--events that might prove fateful for Israel.

Between 1948 and 1967 Israeli Arabs were effectively isolated from the rest of the Arab world. They were viewed by other Arabs as, at worst, collaborators, and, at best, hostages. After the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the economic integration of its Arab population into Israel, social intercourse between Israeli Arabs and West Bank and Gaza Palestinians increased. Among other things, this contact has done much to raise the political consciousness of Israeli Arabs and strengthen their sense of Palestinian identity. In this sense, in the minds of many Jewish Israelis the dismantling of the old Green Line and the movement of Jewish settlers to fulfill their religio-nationalistic aspirations in biblical Judea and Samaria has been a double-edged sword. Along the way, the nationalist aspirations of Israeli Arabs have been invigorated as well.

Renewed political activity among Israeli Arabs was already evident when, in 1976, March 30 was proclaimed Land Day as a protest against Israeli expropriations of Arab lands. Several Arabs were shot by authorities during a demonstration, and since then Land Day has become a major event for expressing Israeli Arab political discontent, and for testing its organizational potential. Since early 1988, the political energies of Israeli Arabs have also been focused on expressing solidarity with their West Bank and Gazan brothers and sisters, who themselves have pursued more violent confrontations with Israeli authorities. It seems less and less likely that an unproblematic Israeli Arab identity will develop and that the Israeli Arabs will become, as Israeli Jews had once hoped, "proud Arabs and loyal Israelis." In the late 1980s, it was more relevant to speak of the Palestinization of Israel's Arab minorities.

Israel

Israel - Distinctive Social Institutions

Israeli society in the late 1980s continued to be characterized by a number of distinctive institutions. Some, like the Histadrut, were legacies of the socialist aspects of Labor Zionism, with its commitments to the socioeconomic reconfiguration of the Jewish people and the establishment of an egalitarian and industrial nation-state society. Others, like the kibbutz and moshav, stemmed from these values but combined them with the practical problems posed by the need to pioneer and settle the land. Still others--the ulpan (Hebrew school for immigrants) or the merkaz klita (absorption center)--arose from the need to settle and integrate large numbers of Jewish immigrants from diverse lands and cultures.

Israel

Israel - The Histadrut

The Histadrut (short for HaHistadrut HaKlalit shel HaOvdim B'Eretz Yisrael--The General Federation of Laborers in the Land of Israel) was founded in December 1920 as the primary representative of Jewish labor in Palestine; it has accepted Arabs as full members since 1969. When founded the Histadrut claimed 4,500 members; in the 1985 Histadrut elections more than 1.5 million members were eligible to vote.

Much more than a labor union, the Histadrut was also, next to the government itself, the second largest employer in Israel, through its many cooperative economic enterprises--in industry, building trades, banking, insurance, transportation, travel agencies, dairy cooperatives, and so on--organized under Hevrat HaOvdim, the Histadrut's holding company. The Histadrut also operated pension and social service programs, the most important of which was Kupat Holim (the Sick Fund), the largest provider of health care to Israelis. The Histadrut published Davar, a liberal Hebrew daily newspaper, and owned Am Oved, a major publishing house. In addition, the collective and cooperative agricultural settlements--kibbutzim and moshavim--founded by the Labor-Zionist parties belonged to Histadrut, which marketed their products through its various cooperatives. The dual character of the Histadrut, as both the largest trade union federation in the country and the second largest employer, has sometimes led to difficulties with both the government and labor. A long doctors' strike in the summer of 1983, for example, caused much rancor.

Israel

Israel - Kibbutz and Moshav

The first kibbutz, Deganya, near the Sea of Galilee, was founded in 1910. In addition to the two largest kibbutz federations, HaKibbutz HaMeuhad (the United Kibbutz Movement) and HaKibbutz HaArtzi (the Kibbutz of the Land), there were in 1988 a number of small movements including the agricultural collective settlements of the religious HaKibbutz HaDati, affiliated with the labor wing of the National Religious Party. In 1986 there were 125,700 residents of about 265 kibbutzim, divided among five kibbutz federations. The kibbutz is a collective settlement, originally devoted solely to agriculture, but since the late 1960s, it has included industrial concerns, too. Founded by social democrats, kibbutzim are characterized by the collectivization of labor and capital: the means of production, consumption, and distribution are communally owned and controlled, with considerable emphasis on participatory democracy in the operation of kibbutzim. Education and, in some federations, the rearing of children in age-graded dormitories, are communal as well.

Until the 1980s, the kibbutz and its residents played a largerthan -life role in Israeli society. Kibbutzim embodied the courageous and selfless pioneer who settled the most difficult and dangerous areas to claim them for the Jewish state. They sent the highest proportion of young men to elite units of the army and its officers' corps, and later to positions of responsibility in the Histadrut and the government. If there were a sociopolitical elite in Israel (not an economic one, because members of the kibbutz lived with simplicity), it came from the kibbutzim.

This highly positive image no longer held in 1988 for a number of reasons. First, the kibbutz was to a large extent a victim of its own successes. Its economic success raised the standard of living of the average member into the solid middle or upper middle class. It is difficult to conceive of a rural village with air-conditioned housing, a well-equipped clinic, a large auditorium, and an olympic-sized swimming-pool as a pioneer outpost. Second, the economic success and the expansion of the kibbutz economy has forced it to go outside the community to hire labor--a direct contradiction of its earliest canons. Third, the membership of kibbutzim has been overwhelmingly Ashkenazi. Often the labor hired, if not Arab, consisted of Oriental Jews who resided in development towns near the kibbutz. Oriental Jews complained that the only time they saw members of kibbutzim as near equals was when the members came to town just before national elections to lobby the Orientals for votes for the left-of-center parties aligned with the kibbutzim. The turn of the mass of the Israeli electorate to the right wing was both a reflection and a cause of the loss of social prestige for the kibbutz, which has suffered a relative loss of influence in the centers of power in Israel. Nevertheless, the kibbutzim still contributed to Israel's economy and sociopolitical elite out of proportion to their number.

The first moshav was established in the Jezreel, or Yizreel, Valley (Emeq, Yizreel is also seen as the Valley of Esdraelon in English) in 1921. In 1986 about 156,700 Israelis lived and worked on 448 moshavim, the great majority divided among eight federations. There are two types of moshavim, the more numerous (405) moshavim ovdim, and the moshavim shitufim. The former relies on cooperative purchasing of supplies and marketing of produce; the family or household is, however, the basic unit of production and consumption. The moshav shitufi form is closer to the collectivity of the kibbutz: although consumption is family-or household-based, production and marketing are collective. Unlike the moshavim ovdim, land is not allotted to households or individuals, but is collectively worked.

Because the moshav form retained the family as the center of social life and eschewed bold experiments with communal child-rearing or equality of the sexes, it was much more attractive to traditional Oriental immigrants in the 1950s and early 1960s than was the more communally radical kibbutz. For this reason, the kibbutz has remained basically an Ashkenazi institution, whereas the moshav has not. On the contrary, the so-called immigrants' moshav (moshav olim) was one of the most-used and successful forms of absorption and integration of Oriental immigrants, and it allowed them a much steadier ascent into the middle class than did life in some development towns.

Like the kibbutzim, moshavim since 1967 have relied increasingly on outside--particularly Arab--labor. Financial instabilities in the early 1980s have hit many moshavim hard, as has the problem of absorbing all the children who might wish to remain in the community. By the late 1980s, more and more moshav members were employed in nonagricultural sectors outside the community, so that some moshavim were coming to resemble suburban or exurban villages whose residents commute to work. In general moshavim never enjoyed the elite status accorded to kibbutzim; correspondingly they have not suffered a decline in prestige in the 1970s and 1980s.

Israel

Israel - The Ulpan and Merkaz Klita

Immigration has always been a serious Israeli concern, as evidenced by the ministerial rank given to the chief official in charge of immigration and the absorption of immigrants. Various institutions and programs have helped integrate immigrants into Israeli society. Perhaps the most ubiquitous is the ulpan (pl., ulpanim), or intensive Hebrew language school. Some ulpanim were funded by municipalities, others by the Ministry of Education and Culture, the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, or the Jewish Agency. Because they were heavily subsidized, ulpanim were free or charged only nominal fees to new immigrants. Some were residential, offering dormitory-like accommodations with board. They were mainly intended for single immigrants and offered half-day instruction in a course that lasted six months. The municipal ulpanim offered less intensive night classes. Many kibbutzim also ran ulpanim, which combined half-day language instruction with a half day's labor on the kibbutz. In the late 1970s, when immigration to Israel was high, about 23,000 individuals were enrolled in some sort of ulpan.

The merkaz klita, or absorption center, was developed in the late 1960s to accommodate the increased immigration that occurred between 1969 and 1975 of relatively well-off and educated Jews from the West, particularly from the United States. These centers combined the ulpan with long-term (often exceeding one year) accommodation for families. With representatives of all the major ministries ideally on hand or on call, these centers were supposed to cushion the entry of the new immigrant into Israeli society. They were a far cry from the often squalid transition camps of the 1950s, a fact that did not go unnoticed by many Oriental Jews. In the late 1970s, at the height of immigration from the United States, there were more than twenty-five absorption centers housing almost 4,000 new immigrants. Taking all the forms of such immigrant-absorption institutions together--centers, hostels (for families without children) and residential ulpanim--almost 10,000 persons were living in some form of them in early 1976. As of 1988 the occupancy had declined, as had Western immigration to Israel.

Israel

Israel - EDUCATION

Education in Israel has been characterized historically by the same social and cultural cleavages separating the Orthodox from the secular and Arabs from Jews. In addition, because of residential patterns and concentrations--of Orientals in development towns, for example--or because of "tracking" of one sort or another, critics have charged that education has been functionally divided by an Ashkenazi-Oriental distinction, as well.

Before 1948 there were in the Jewish sector alone four different, recognized educational systems or "trends," each supported and used by political parties and movements or interest groups. As part of the prestate status quo agreements between Ben-Gurion and the Orthodox, this educational segregation, favored by the Orthodox, was to be protected and supported by the state. This system proved unwieldy and was the source of intense conflict and competition, especially as large numbers of immigrants arrived between 1948 and 1953. The different parties fought over the immigrants for their votes and over the immigrants' children for the chance to socialize them and thus secure their own political future. This conflict precipitated several parliamentary crises, and in 1953 resulted in reform legislation--the State Education Law--which reduced the number of trends to two: a state-supported religious trend and a state-supported secular trend. In reality, however, there were still a few systems outside the two trends that nevertheless enjoyed state subsidies: schools run by the various kibbutz federations and traditional religious schools, yeshivot (sing., yeshiva), devoted to the study of the Talmud, run by the ultra-Orthodox Agudat Israel and others. In the 1986-87 school year, about 6 percent of all Jewish primary school students were enrolled in yeshivot, about 22 percent in state religious primary schools, and about 72 percent in state secular primary schools. These figures remained constant throughout secondary education as well. Throughout this period and in 1988, Arab education was separately administered by the Ministry of Education and Culture and was divided by emphases on Muslim, Christian, or Druze subjects.

Israeli youth were required to attend at least ten years of school, in addition to preschool. The education system was structured in four levels. Preschool was available to children between the ages of three and six; it was obligatory from age five. Primary education ran from grades one through six; grades seven, eight, and nine were handled in intermediate or junior high schools. Secondary education comprised grades ten through twelve. Secondary schools were of three main types: the general academic high school, which prepared students to take the national matriculation examination, passage of which was necessary to enter university; vocational high schools; and agricultural high schools. The latter two schools offered diplomas that allowed holders to continue in technical or engineering fields at the postsecondary level but did not lead to the matriculation exam. The Ministry of Labor and the Ministry of Agriculture shared with the Ministry of Education and Culture some responsibilities for curriculum and support of vocational and agricultural schools. Education through the intermediate school level was free. Before 1978 tuition was charged in secondary schools, and many argued that this discriminated against the poor, especially Orientals. A January 1984 reform imposed a reduced monthly fee of approximately US$10 in secondary schools.

Israeli education has often been at the center of social and ideological controversy. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, sociological surveys indicated that youth attending the state secular system were both ignorant of and insufficiently attached to "traditional Jewish values," which included a sense of kinship with Diaspora Jewry. A Jewish Consciousness Program was then hastily implemented, but results were considered mixed. Most observers of Israeli education believed that the events of the June 1967 War, and the subsequent trauma of the October 1973 War, from which followed the increasing political isolation of Israel, did more than any curriculum to reinstill a sense of Jewish national identity in Israeli youth.

Meanwhile, in the 1960s the state religious system, particularly at the high school level, underwent its own transformation, which many analysts considered to have had far-reaching effects on Israeli society. The state religious system has always included a high proportion of Oriental students from traditional homes. Middle class Ashkenazim began to complain of the "leveling effects" the Orientals were having, and more specifically of the teachers (who were accused of not being pious enough) and the curriculum (criticized for giving insufficient attention to the study of the Talmud).

In response to this dissatisfaction, activists from the youth organization of the National Religious Party, the Bene Akiva (Sons of Rabbi Akiva), in the 1960s fashioned an alternative religious high school system, in which academic and religious standards were much higher than in the usual state religious high school. This alternative form soon attracted many middle class, Ashkenazi youth from the older state religious high schools. In addition to having a more rigorous academic curriculum, the new system was also strongly ultranationalistic, as reflected in the form known as the yeshiva hesder, which combined the traditional values of the European talmudic academy with a commitment, on the part of its students, to serve in the IDF. These institutions have turned out a generation of self-assured religious youth who are not apologetic about their piety--something they accused their elders of being. Israelis referred to them as the "knitted skullcap generation", after their characteristic headgear (as distinguished from the solid black cloth or silk skullcaps of the ultra-Orthodox). Over the years, they have been more aggressive than their elders in trying to extend Orthodox Judaism's political influence in the society at large as well as within the territorial boundaries of the Jewish state. Many of these graduates have been instrumental in shaping the New Zionism.

Arab education in Israel followed the same pattern as Jewish education, with students learning about Jewish history, heroes, and the like, but education is in Arabic. Arab education in East Jerusalem and the West Bank followed the Jordanian curriculm and students sat for Jordanian examinations; the textbooks used, however, had to be approved by Israeli authorities. After the outbreak of the intifadah (uprising) in December 1987, frequent school closings occurred so that students attended school only infrequently.

<>Higher Education
<>Youth Movements and Organizations

Israel

Israel - Higher Education

In the late 1980s, seven universities existed in Israel: the Technion (Israel Institute for Technology, founded in 1912); the Hebrew University (1925); Tel Aviv University (begun in 1935, functioning fully since 1956); Bar-Ilan University (1955); Haifa University (1963); Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (1965); and the postgraduate Weizmann Institute of Technology (1934). Higher education in Israel has grown tremendously since independence: in the 1948-49 academic year a total of 1,635 students attended degree-granting institutions, whereas in 1986-87 the figure was 67,160. In terms of enrollments, the largest institution was Tel Aviv University (19,400 students in 1986-87), followed by Hebrew University (16,870), Bar-Ilan (9,480), the Technion (9,090), Haifa (6,550), Ben-Gurion University (5,200), and the Weizmann Institute (570).

Israeli universities have not been isolated from the larger problems of society. High inflation and budget cutbacks have hit them severely since the late 1970s; many observers have expressed fear of a potential "brain-drain" as talented academics, unable to find suitable employment in Israel, emigrate. There have been repeated calls to increase the number of Israelis of Oriental background in colleges and universities, at the same time that charges of "compromised standards" have been advanced. The university campuses have also been centers of political activity among all shades of the political spectrum in Israel, including Arab students.

Israel

Israel - Youth Movements and Organizations

During the Yishuv period and in the early 1950s, youth movements associated with political parties were important institutions of political education and socialization. Affiliated branches even existed in the European and American diasporas. They were training grounds for future members, and especially for the future elite, of the parties. Each party of any size had one: Mapam (the original Labor-oriented youth movement was HaShomer HaTzair-- see Appendix B), Herut (Betar--see Appendix B), National Religious Party (Bene Akiva), as well as the Histadrut and other organizations. The fate of these youth movements over the years has reflected the broader changes that have occurred in Israeli society. The relatively apolitical and nonideological Boy Scout organization has grown; left-of-center movements have not. The Bene Akiva, on the other hand, has also grown, more than three-fold since 1960. In the late 1980s, it enrolled more than 30,000 Israeli religious youths, who make up a large part of the "knitted skullcaps." The Bene Akiva has acted as a training ground for many of the young extremist and right-wing Orthodox political activists who have gained prominence since the June 1967 War.

Israel

Israel - HEALTH

In part as a legacy of the socialist thrusts of Labor Zionism, Israelis enjoy a widely available health care system. The major complaints of the population have focused on the heavy bureaucratization of health care. In general, the health of the population compares favorably with West European standards, and the decrease in rates of infectious diseases has been very marked. The highest incidences of disease in 1986 were bacillary dysentery, 162 per 100,000, and viral hepatitis, 75 per 100,000. There were reportedly forty-three cases in Israel of acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, by the end of September 1987.

In both Arab and Jewish populations, control of sanitation also has improved markedly since the the mid-1950s. Still, health care delivery has been better developed for the Jewish sector than for the Arab sector. In 1985 the life expectancy of Jewish men and women was 73.9 and 77.3 years, respectively; for non-Jews the figures were 72.0 (men) and 75.8 (women). Among Jews, in 1986 the live birth rate per 1,000 was 21.2, the death rate 7.5. Among Muslims the live birth rate per 1,000 was 33.8, the death rate 3.4. The average number of children a woman may have during her lifetime was 2.83 for Jews and 4.63 for Muslims. The infant mortality rate was 9.6 for Jews and 18.0 for Muslims.

The Ministry of Health, the principal public health agency in the country, functioned as the supreme body for licensing medical, dental, nursing, pharmaceutical, and paramedical professions, as well as for implementing all health-related legislation passed by the Knesset. It also functioned when no other nongovernmental agency was present. This fact was important in Israel because in 1985-86 the Sick Funds (Kupat Holim) contributed almost 45 percent of the national expenditure on health; in comparison, the government contributed only some 22 percent. Kupat Holim, the largest sick fund, was affiliated with the Histadrut and was supported by almost two-thirds of the Histadrut's membership dues. As the largest medical insurance carrier in Israel, the Histadrut fund covered about 70 percent of the population (Arabs included). Another 20 percent was covered by the sick funds of other organizations, which means that in general the Israeli population was well protected by health care coverage. Further evidence of the availability of health care was the ratio of physicians to the general population; in the 1970s it was more than 1 to 400, one of the highest in the world.

Israel

Israel - WELFARE

The Ministry of Social Welfare began its work in June 1948, carrying on the mission of the Social Welfare Department established in 1931 under the Mandate. The National Insurance Act of 1953 and the Social Welfare Service Law, passed by the Knesset in 1958, authorized a broad range of welfare programs, including old age and survivors' pensions, maternity insurance, workers' compensation provisions, and special allowances for large families. Retirement age was seventy for men and sixty-five for women, but persons were eligible for some benefits five years before retirement age. The Histadrut was also a principal provider of pensions and a supplier of insurance. In addition, there were a number of voluntary agencies, many funded by Diaspora Jewry, that contributed significantly to the social welfare of Israelis.

Special subventionary programs, including low-interest loans, subsidized housing, and rent or mortgage relief, were available to new immigrants after 1967 through the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption and the World Zionist Organization. At times these programs have been criticized by native-born Israelis or long-time settlers in the lower income brackets, especially for benefiting relatively well-to-do immigrants from the West. Even more controversial have been benefit programs designed to aid returning Israeli emigrants readjust to life in Israel.

Israel

Israel - The Economy

SINCE THE FOUNDING of Israel in 1948, the Israeli economy has experienced two distinct periods: one spanning the years 1948 through 1972, and another stretching from 1973 to 1988. The three prominent features of the Israeli economy during the first period were the ingathering of the exiles (resulting in a very high rate of population growth), considerable importing of capital, and rapid growth of total and per capita gross national product (GNP). During this period, the Israeli economy grew at a very rapid rate, averaging an annual GNP increase of 10.4 percent annually.

Between 1973 and 1986, by contrast, GNP growth declined to about 2 percent per annum, with no increase in per capita output. At the same time, the rate of inflation--which from 1948 through 1972 was in single digits--increased to a high of 445 percent in 1984. In 1975, 1983, and 1984, the Israeli economy came close to exhausting its potential sources of short-term financing to cover its balance of payments deficits.

In July 1985, the government instituted an emergency program to interrupt the hyperinflation that was threatening the survival of the economy. By the end of 1985, the rate of inflation had been reduced to 20 percent. Even more remarkable was the elimination of the government's budget deficit in fiscal year (FY) 1985. At the beginning of FY 1986, the budget deficit remained close to zero. The emergency program ended fourteen years of steadily worsening inflation and devaluations, and reversed years of government overspending. The relative stability the program achieved was seen as the necessary precondition to an assault on the underlying structural shortcomings responsible for the slow growth of the economy since 1973.

Israel

Israel - The Economy - 1948-72

The years immediately following the state's creation in 1948 were difficult for the Israeli economy. The new state possessed no natural or financial resources, no monetary reserves, little economic infrastructure, and few public services. A sizable portion of the existing Arab population fled the new state, while impoverished and afflicted Jewish refugees poured in from the European displaced persons camps and, later, from the Arab countries. In contrast to the 1930s, when Jewish immigrants to the Yishuv (or prestate Israel) had arrived with ample financial and human capital, after 1948 most immigrants lacked the wealth and skills needed by the new state.

The new state had to supply food, clothing, shelter, and employment for its new citizens; set up civil and community services; and establish an independent foreign exchange, monetary, and fiscal system. Given the shortage of private capital, the burden of dealing with these problems naturally fell upon the public sector. The financial capital needed to deal with the influx of immigrants was drawn either from the high level of domestic savings, or from capital imports (such as foreign loans and grants), or foreign private sector investments (such as Israeli bonds). The government's solution to the capital shortage included an austerity program of stringent price controls and rationing. The government also decided to promote investment projects in agriculture and housing through the use of public funds rather than through private capital markets. The public sector thus gained control over a large part of Israel's investment resources and hence over the country's future economic activity.

The result of this long-term state intervention was the development of a quasi-socialist economy, which, in terms of ownership, was divided into three sectors: private, public, and Histadrut, the abbreviation of HaHistadrut HaKlalit Shel HaOdim B'Eretz Yisrael (General Federation of Laborers in the Land of Israel). The Histadrut, the umbrella organization of trade unions, quickly became one of the most powerful institutions in Israel. Although Histadrut-owned enterprises generally behaved like privately owned firms, the collective nature of the labor organization precluded the timely demise of economically inefficient enterprises. Public sector firms were owned by local authorities and quasi-governmental bodies such as the Jewish Agency. As in the case of the Histadrut-run corporations, criteria other than profit maximization dominated the economic operation of these firms.

The Israeli service sector, therefore, became totally dominated by the government and the Histadrut. Histadrut-affiliated cooperatives achieved a near monopoly in such areas as public transport and the production and marketing of many agricultural products. The Jewish Agency acquired Israel's two major banks, which together made up 70 percent of the banking system; and the two largest insurance companies were (and in 1988 continued to be) owned by the Histadrut.

The importance of the government and the Histadrut was not limited to the service sector. They became increasingly involved in the industrial sector as well. Whereas the percentage of plants owned by the public and Histadrut sectors in 1972 was less than 2.5 percent, their share of total industrial employment was 27 percent. Similarly their share of total industrial output in 1972 was 34 percent. This situation continued until 1988, when discussions were initiated to decrease government control of business activity.

The major factor accounting for the increased role in industry of the public and Histadrut sectors was the development of Israel's defense industry. After the June 1967 War and the French arms embargo that followed, the Israeli government decided to build as many domestic weapons systems as it could. In the 1980s, companies such as Israel Aircraft Industries and Israel Military Industries continued to be state owned and among the largest firms in the country. The Histadrut-owned Tadiran Electronic Industries became a major defense contractor and the state's largest electronics firm. Similarly, the government-owned Israel Chemicals Limited and its subsidiaries held the sole rights to mine potash, bromine, and other raw materials in the Dead Sea area. The oil refineries, as well as the retail gas distributors, were also mostly government owned.

Israel

Israel - ECONOMIC GROWTH AND STRUCTURAL CHANGE

Between 1948 and 1972, Israel's GNP rose by more than 10 percent per annum on average. Thereafter, Israel's growth rate slowed to an annual average of 2 percent. Not only was Israel's economic growth rate much lower after 1972, it was also far less stable. The reasons most often cited for this slowdown include a sharp increase in defense spending, the 1982-83 energy crisis, and increased expenditures on social welfare.

A breakdown of Israel's GNP into categories of consumption, investment, government expenditures, and net exports for the years 1960 through 1986, highlights some of the difficulties experienced by a small, open economy burdened with a massive defense expenditure. During this period, Israel experienced chronic current account deficits and increased government expenditures. The trade deficit, which accounted for an average of 20 percent of annual GNP from 1960 through 1964, reached a high of 35 percent in 1973. It declined to 16 percent in 1986, however, primarily because the real value of exports increased while the real value of imports remained unchanged.

Until the June 1967 War, defense spending ranged from 10 to 16 percent of GNP. Between 1970 and 1982, however, defense spending escalated to over 25 percent of GNP--a high ratio, even for the volatile Middle East. A significant share of defense spending originated from military imports. In the aftermath of the October 1973 War, military imports equaled 17 percent of GNP. About onequarter to one-third of this defense expenditure was paid for by United States aid. After 1984 the increase in United States aid reduced the defense burden in Israel virtually to pre-1967 levels. In 1986, the defense burden declined to 10 percent of GNP.

The sharp upturn in world oil prices in 1973 increased the cost of oil imports by more than 3 percent of GNP in that year. The oil price increases of 1979, which occurred at about the same time as the return to Egypt of the Sinai oil fields, are estimated to have had an even more devastating effect on the Israeli economy. The total direct losses to the Israeli economy caused by the increase in energy prices from 1973 to 1982 have been estimated at US$12 billion--the equivalent of one year's GNP.

In addition to these external shocks, the economy had to accommodate substantial increases in spending on domestic welfare programs in the early 1970s. In response to domestic social unrest, the government introduced large-scale social programs to improve education, housing, and welfare assistance for the urban poor. These programs were designed before 1973, but were implemented after the economy had begun to stagnate.

Slowdown of Economic Growth

The economy's behavior during the 1961-72 and 1973-88 periods was starkly different. The growth of capital stock declined modestly from an 8.9 percent annual increase during the first period to a 6 percent annual increase during the second period. A major decline occurred, however, in gross domestic product (GDP). From a 9.7 percent annual growth rate in the first period, GDP fell to a 3.4 percent annual growth rate in the second period. Furthermore, labor inputs (measured either as employed persons or total hours of work) declined from the first to the second period. The annual increase in employed persons from 1961 through 1972 averaged 3.6 percent; employed persons increased only 1.5 percent annually from 1973 through 1981. Similarly, total hours worked increased by an annual rate of 3.9 percent during the first period as compared to 1 percent during the second period. If the growth of the economy is measured as GDP per employed person, then Israeli performance declined from 6.1 percent to 1.9 percent over the two periods. If GDP per hour of work is used, Israel's performance declined from 5.8 percent to 2.4 percent. Finally, if GDP growth is measured per unit of capital, it declined from 0.8 percent a year between 1961 and 1972 to -2.6 percent a year from 1973 through 1981.

Until 1973 the rise in labor and capital productivity was the major growth-generating ingredient in the Israeli economy, accounting for about 43 percent of total output growth and for 72 percent of the increase in output per worker hour. By contrast, beginning in 1973, increases in capital stock accounted for 64.7 percent of total growth. The contribution of labor and capital productivity to total output declined to 18 percent, and its contribution to the increase in output per worker hour declined to 25 percent. Between 1961 and 1981, the relative contributions of capital per unit of labor and of total labor and capital productivity to the increase in labor productivity were reversed. In large part, this reversal explains the slowdown in Israel's growth after 1972.

Three factors apparently led to a decline in the growth of business sector employment from 1973 through 1981. First, the growth rate of new people entering the labor force dropped, primarily because net immigration declined from an annual increase of 3.8 percent in the 1961-72 period to 2.5 percent in the 1973-81 period. Second, because of the increase in the income tax rate at higher levels of income, the average rate of labor force participation among men declined from 73.6 to 64.9 percent, while the rate for women increased from 29.2 to 33.4 percent. Fewer families found it worthwhile for the husbands to work at highertaxed , high-paying jobs; instead, the wives worked at lower-paying, lower-taxed jobs. Finally, the influx of Arab employees from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip declined in the 1973-81 period. In all, the share of business sector employment relative to the whole economy declined from 77.2 percent in the 1961-72 period to 73.6 percent in the 1973-81 period.

By 1988 the potential sources of large-scale net immigration had almost run dry. Since 1979 (as of 1988, 1979 was the last year during which the Soviet Union had permitted large numbers of Soviet Jews to leave) the rate of net immigration had been low; during several years, it had been surpassed by emigration. In 1987 immigration increased slightly, although this addition to the labor pool was insufficient to increase Israel's growth rate. The immigration of Oriental Jews had also decreased significantly by the 1980s. Given the low probability of sizable immigration from the United States or the Soviet Union, observers concluded that a return to the rapid economic growth of the 1950s and 1960s depended on Israel's ability to substitute alternative sources of sustained growth. Possibilities in this area were the new, science-based and high technology industries.

Changes in Investment Patterns

Gross investment reached an exceptionally high level of 30 percent of GNP in the period ending in the early 1970s, but subsequently dropped to 20 percent of GNP in 1986. While this figure is substantially lower than that achieved by earlier Israeli performance, it is internationally an acceptable standard of investment and private savings.

Nonetheless, concern existed in Israel about the extent of public-sector debt. Since 1973 the government has incurred a substantial domestic and foreign debt that has resulted in a significant reduction in the proportion of private savings available for investment. From 1970 through 1983, private savings averaged slightly above 10 percent of GNP. The success of the Economic Stabilization Program adopted in July 1985 in order to cut back on government spending led to an increase in private saving, however; by 1986, private savings stood at 21 percent of GNP.

Unlike the unstable trend in private savings recorded in the banking sector, investment in housing has taken a consistently high share of GNP, hitting a 40 percent peak in 1980. This high level of investment in housing, which many economists argue is not justified economically, further constrained the rise of gross business investment. For example, despite the rise of the share in GNP of gross investment in manufacturing during the 1970s, Israel's 1982- 86 average share of 4 percent clearly is below international norms.

The lack of uniformity in government investment incentives and in the rate of return on capital within the manufacturing sector may be responsible for the mix of Israeli investments. Economists generally agree that inefficiencies have arisen as a result of excessive substitution of capital for labor, underused capacity, and inappropriate project selection. Government policy has been identified as the primary factor causing capital market inefficiencies by crowding out business investment, creating excessively high average investment subsidies, and introducing capital market controls based on inefficient discretionary policy.

The 1967 Law for the Encouragement of Capital Investment provided for the following incentives to "approved-type" enterprises: cash grants, unlinked long-term loans at 6.5 percent interest, and reduced taxes. The Treasury assumed full responsibility for any discrepancy between the linked rates paid to savers and the unlinked rates charged to investors. Because inflation in the mid-1970s reached levels close to 40 percent, the real interest rate paid on long-term loans was close to -30 percent per annum, with a total subsidy on long-term loans reaching a high of 35 percent in 1977. These extremely favorable interest rates and implied subsidies led to an excessive substitution of capital for labor.

The investment system has been characterized by the following factors: private firms generally are not allowed to issue bonds, the government establishes the real interest paid to savers and the nominal interest paid by investors, and the economy is plagued by high and unpredictable rates of inflation. These conditions have maintained an excess demand for investment. The result has been a continuous need to ration loans--and an implicit role for government discretion in project approval. Thus, since the late 1960s, as a result of capital market controls, the government has been making industrial policy.

Changes in Industrial Structure

The industrial structure of the economy can be seen in terms of the allocation of GDP, employment, and foreign capital among the tradable, nontradable, semitradable, and service sectors. The tradable sector includes agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation; nontradables include public services and construction; and semitradables include business and financial services, commerce, tourism, and personal services. Public services include the activities of government, national institutions, and local authorities; education, research, and scientific organizations; health, religious, political, and trade-union groups; and defense.

Up to 1981, the economy allocated approximately 40 percent of its GDP to the tradable sector and about 33 to 35 percent to the nontradable sector. This distribution was mirrored in the allocation of civilian employment across the two sectors. The size of the public service sector in 1981 was 21 percent of GDP and 28 percent of civilian employment. Some economists argue that this latter figure is very high relative to the international norms for a developing country. They are not high, however, when compared to developed socialist countries in Europe. Some economists also argue that Israel's high level of nontradables can be explained by the high level of capital inflows from abroad, by a high demand for public services and construction as a result of immigration, and by defense needs.

From 1955 through 1972, the real output of tradables increased relative to that of nontradables. Most of this increase was attributable to the importance of physical capital in the form of machinery and increased productivity. After 1972 the importance of machinery declined, while that of labor increased. Educated workers were being absorbed into the public and financial services; simultaneously, manufacturing productivity was declining. Increased demand favored nontradables, and the share of tradables in both employment and output further declined. The overriding factor remained the rapid increase in the educated labor force.

Changes in Labor Force

In the 1950s and 1960s, through a state effort to absorb the large number of immigrant children into the public school system, the government assured itself of a future supply of educated workers. The demand for more educated workers was provided by the rapid expansion of public services, which are inherently humancapital intensive. Growth in public services resulted from the rapid and sustained economic growth that lasted until the early 1970s, and from the high rate of population growth.

In the 1970s, the education level of the labor force continued to rise markedly. Unlike the experience of other Western economies, the increased supply of educated workers in Israel did not, on average, depress the relative wage level of those with more schooling; nor did it markedly worsen the employment condition of more educated workers as compared with workers with a secondary education. The continued increase in demand for education-intensive services and for more sophisticated goods and services generally have so far precluded the negative effects experienced in other countries. The widespread high level of human capital is expected to continue into the twenty-first century as long as investment in education continues to be profitable.

Israel

Israel - The Economy - THE PUBLIC SECTOR

The two most important tools of economic policy in Israel have been the budget and foreign exchange control. Through the budget, the government can deal with all financial activities of the public sector. Defined in its broadest terms, the public sector includes the central government, local authorities, and national institutions (where the central government clearly dominates). In 1986 government and private nonprofit institutions represented about 20 percent of GDP, which was about a 20 percent increase over the public sector's importance in 1968. Similarly, the provision of government-owned housing and rental services increased by 28 percent, rising from 8.4 percent of GDP in 1968 to 11 percent in 1986. Overall, in 1986 the business sector represented 69 percent of GDP, whereas the public sector, in all of its dimensions, represented 31 percent of GDP.

Government Budget

By 1988 the government had been operating under a deficit for more than a decade. Between 1982 and 1984, the deficit equaled between 12 and 15 percent of GNP. After the implementation of the July 1985 Economic Stabilization Program, the government succeeded in balancing its budget. This balance was achieved not only because the government raised taxes and reduced spending, but also because the reduced inflation increased the real value of tax revenues. During FY 1986, the expansion of the economy compensated for the reduction in direct and indirect taxes. The government also initiated plans to reduce further its public debt.

Before the July 1985 reforms, the tax system was considered to be very progressive on individual income but barely touched corporate income. After the reforms, which included a new corporate tax law, large sums of taxes were collected from business sectors that previously had been untaxed. Personal income tax ranged from a base rate of 20 percent (payable on incomes equivalent to about US$500 per month) to a top rate of 60 percent on a monthly income of about US$2,100. Corporate income tax generally was 45 percent. Few corporations, however, actually paid this rate once various government subsidies were included in the calculation.

Provision of Civilian Services

Civilian public services have employed a high proportion of the labor force and consequently have absorbed a high share of Israel's GNP. Spending on health, education, and welfare services rose from 17 percent of GNP in 1968 to 20 percent in the early 1970s. The level of spending on civilian public services remained constant at about 20 percent through 1986. The share of the total civilian labor force employed in civilian public services rose from 22 percent in 1968 to 30 percent in 1986.

The civilian services primarily responsible for these high outlays were education and health services, whose share increased from 50 percent of the total in 1969 to more than 60 percent in 1986. At the other end of the scale were economic and general services, whose expenditures declined from 33 percent of the total in 1969 to 23 percent in 1986. The share of other welfare services (including immigrant absorption services) remained constant. The decline of general and economic services reflected a transfer of some of these functions from the public sector to the business community and a decline in direct government intervention in the economy.

Unlike social welfare and economic services, which were directly funded by the government, until the early 1970s education and health services received substantial funding from foreign sources. In 1968, for example, the government financed only 70.5 percent of Israel's education services. By 1978 the government's share had increased to 84.5 percent. Whereas in 1968 the Jewish Agency financed about 20 percent of the total national expenditure on education from foreign aid funds, by 1978 only 7.6 percent came from foreign aid, and this percentage has decreased further since. The result was an added burden on the taxpayer, equal to approximately 22 percent of the national expenditure on education. Direct private financing of education expenditures contracted from 9.5 percent of the total in FY 1968 to 1.7 percent in FY 1978. The key element explaining this latter drop was the institution of free, compulsory secondary education in the late 1970s.

Health services' funding followed a similar pattern. The government's share rose from 53 percent in 1968 to 62 percent in 1980. Here, however, the Jewish Agency's participation decreased even more sharply, from 20 percent of the total national expenditure on health in 1968 to nearly zero in 1980. The added burden of government financing from internal sources over the decade was almost 30 percent.

In both health and education, the trend illustrated a transition from foreign financing to internal resources and a switch from direct private financing (and independent fundraising by nonprofit institutions) to the imposition of a greater burden on the central fiscal system. In the past, when these services were expanded, the cost often was carried by aid from abroad. As this source began to dwindle, the cost increasingly shifted to the government, which for political reasons could not reduce these public civil expenditures.

Provision of Defense Services

Throughout its existence, Israel has been obliged to devote a considerable part of its resources to national defense. Since 1973, Israel's annual defense expenditure has equaled that of the Netherlands and exceeded that of Sweden. In per capita terms, Israel's expenditure has been two to three times as large as theirs. Defense expenditures in the Netherlands and Sweden each amounted to 3 to 4 percent of GNP in FY 1976; in Israel, they amounted to more than 25 percent of GNP. The persistence of a high defense expenditure over a very long period makes Israel's situation unique.

The simplest definition of the defense burden is the total budgeted resources diverted to defense and thus precluded from other uses by citizens. Other resource costs include the opportunity cost of labor working for the defense sector and therefore unavailable to other sectors, thus reducing civilian output. Finally, foreign currency spent on military imports is unavailable for civilian imports.

Although estimates of the defense burden suffer from inadequate data, the Central Bureau of Statistics publishes data on the noncivilian component of public consumption, which is used as a proxy for defense expenditures. Apart from the war years of 1967 and 1973, the annual fluctuations have been dominated by long-term changes in defense costs (commonly referred to as "ratchets" or step functions). By 1986 defense expenditure had declined to a range from 10 to 16 percent of GNP, depending on the measure used.

These official data do not include information on forfeited earnings of conscripted soldiers, forfeited earnings of persons on reserve duty, and costs of casualties, stockpiling, civil defense, land devoted for army training, and many other government and civilian expenditures ascribed to defense. Although it is impossible to assign a rough order of magnitude to the items mentioned, some economists have speculated that they are not insignificant components of the civilian public sector. This becomes clear when one considers that the length of time devoted to conscription, reserve duty, and regular army duty has been lengthened. Government defense functions involved in operations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip add a further cost to the defense burden.

The cost of defense also includes direct defense imports and military aid from the United States. In FY 1986, Israel received United States military aid in the range of US$3 billion. A large share of these funds has regularly been spent in the United States.

On the other side of the defense-burden equation are the beneficial by-products associated with military activity. The most important benefits are education, absorption of immigrants, agricultural settlement, and the development and manufacture of weapons and equipment. An example of these beneficial by-products was the development of the Kfir interceptor, which created jobs for technicians and laborers. In short, when estimating Israel's defense burden it is important to consider the cost reductions implicit from these beneficial by-products.

Taxation

From 1961 to 1983, government expenditures grew far more rapidly than Israel's GNP, primarily because of the sharp increase in defense outlays from the latter half of the 1960s through the 1970s. Taxation was insufficient to finance the increase in government spending. Although gross taxes increased, net taxes declined continuously during the period. To meet the deficit, the government resorted to domestic and foreign borrowing.

By the mid-1970s, the government increasingly relied on foreign sources to finance the domestic deficit. These growing debts were equivalent to almost 14 percent of each year's GNP, during a time when GNP was growing at less than 2 percent a year.

In the second half of the 1970s, the tax system collected approximately 47 percent of GNP, compared with 35 percent in the 1960s and 41 percent in the first half of the 1970s. This rise occurred mainly in direct taxes and taxation of domestically produced goods, while taxes on imports declined by a small margin. During FY 1981, direct taxes represented 25.7 percent of GNP; they were 14.3 percent of GNP in FY 1961. Taxes on domestic production represented 12 percent of GNP in FY 1981, a decline from the FY 1961 high of 13.9 percent. The introduction of the value-added tax on both domestic and foreign goods added a tax base of 8.7 percent of GNP in FY 1981.

In FY 1986, income taxes collected represented 33 percent of GNP. Value-added taxes represented 20 percent of GNP and customs duties represented 4 percent of GNP. In late 1987, the government announced plans to revamp the tax structure in the light of the 1985 Economic Stabilization Program.

Israel

Israel - INDUSTRY

The Histadrut directly owns or controls a significant portion of Israeli industry. The separation of industries among the public, private, and Histadrut sectors of the economy, however, is not a simple one. Many important enterprises are partners with either or both the Histadrut and the government. Most big industrial concerns, such as the Nesher cement and Shemen vegetable oil plants, are owned either solely by Histadrut (through its industrial conglomerate, Koor Industries) or in partnership with private investors. About 10 percent of FY 1985 industrial output was produced by joint ventures of the private and Histadrut sectors.

In FY 1985, private-sector industrial ownership was as follows: electronics, 51 percent; textiles, 92 percent; clothing, 97 percent; machinery, 61 percent; food and tobacco, 60 percent; leather goods, 80 percent; wood products, 72 percent; paper products, 81 percent; and printing and publishing, 86 percent.

Manufacturing, particularly for export, has been a major component of GDP. In FY 1985, manufacturing contributed 23.4 percent of GDP. Industrial production grew at a rate of 3.6 percent in 1986, compared with 3 percent in 1984. Most of this growth has been in export products. For many years, export growth was led by the electronics and metallurgic industries, especially in the field of military equipment. In the 1980s, exports from the textile, clothing and fashion industries expanded, as did exports of food products of various sorts. Following a slump in the 1980s, diamond exports made a strong recovery after 1985.

<>Electronics
<>Biotechnology
<>Diamonds
<>Chemicals, Rubber, and Plastics
<>Clothing and Textiles
<>Tourism
<>Energy

Israel

Israel - Electronics

In the 1980s, high-technology industries received the greatest attention from the government. Israeli electronics companies competed worldwide and in some cases were leaders in their fields. Israel's Scitex was a leading image-processing firm, Laser Industries led in laser surgery, Elbit led in defense electronics, and Fibronics led in fiberoptic communication. In 1985 the electric and electronic equipment industry represented 4.5 percent of industrial establishments, 12 percent of industrial employment, and almost 13 percent of industrial revenues.

Despite the success of the electronics industry in the 1980s, experts predicted that in the 1990s this sector will face a shortage of engineers and technicians. A major reason for this shortage is the lower net pay for engineers in Israel relative to the United States. An identical 1985 gross salary of US$30,000 in Israel and in California would generate a net income of US$9,000 in Israel and US$20,000 in California. Although the Israeli would consume a higher amount of social services than his or her counterpart in California, a wide gap would remain between the two salaries. As long as this gap exists, Israel will have difficuly keeping skilled engineers.

Israel

Israel - Biotechnology

Israel's biotechnology industry is relatively new and an offspring of its American counterpart. Its creation in the late 1960s resulted from the establishment in Israel of subsidiaries of foreign pharmaceutical companies. The first of these was a subsidiary formed by Miles Laboratories with the Weizmann Institute of Technology, called Miles-Yeda. This was followed by the Hebrew University-Weizmann Institute subsidiary, Ames-Yissum. Over time, these firms became wholly Israeli-owned entities. Gradually, foreign venture capitalists began to initiate other independent biotechnology entities in Israel. As of the early 1980s, Israeli venture capitalists had begun creating their own science-based entities.

Many economists call biotechnology a "natural" Israeli industry. Its primary input has been data from research and university laboratories. The only other major ingredient has been American capital to support research and development activity. The main areas of research in the mid-1980s included genetic engineering, human and animal diagnostics, agricultural biofertilization, and aquatic biotechnology.

Israel

Israel - Diamonds

Israel's diamond industry in the 1980s differed considerably from its 1950s version. Until the early 1980s, a handful of large firms dominated the Israeli diamond industry. The nucleus consisted of European Jewish cutters who had immigrated during the Yishuv. In the 1970s, Israel surpassed <"http://worldfacts.us/Belgium-Antwerp.htm"> Antwerp as the largest wholesale diamond center, accounting for more than 50 percent of all cut and polished gem diamonds. Diamonds were the only export in which Israel was more than a marginal supplier.

Unlike other industries, the diamond industry was affected entirely by external factors not under Israeli control. The diamond industry imported rough diamonds, cut and polished them, and then exported them. The slump in the industry from 1980 through 1982 surprised many Israeli firms that had speculative stockpiles. The result was a complete restructuring of the industry in FY 1984, and the creation of approximately 800 new and smaller manufacturing units. These small entities in mid-1986 concentrated exclusively on cutting, leaving the marketing to larger export firms. This latter task was supported by the 2,000-member Israel Diamond Exchange and the 300-member Israel Precious Stones and Diamonds Exchange, together with the quasi-governmental Israel Diamond Institute.

The success of this revitalization can be seen in the trade figures for the industry. In 1982 net diamond exports were US$905 million, equal to 18 percent of total exports; in 1986, however, diamond exports had grown to nearly US$1.7 billion, or approximately 24 percent of total exports.

Israel

Israel - Chemicals, Rubber, and Plastics

The chemical industry began in the early 1920s, when a small plant was started to extract potash and bromine from the Dead Sea. In the past, the chemical industry concentrated on the sale of raw materials, such as potash and phosphates, and their processed derivatives. In the early 1980s, the industry undertook a comprehensive research and development program, which has substantially transformed it. Helping Israel to become one of the world's largest chemical-producing nations was the industry's development of new treatment processes for ceramics, glass, textiles, plastics, and wood. In 1986 the chemicals, rubber, and plastics industries together provided 15.6 percent of total industrial sales and engaged 11 percent of the industrial labor force.

In the 1980s, Israel Chemicals Limited (ICL)--a governmentowned corporation--was the largest chemical complex and also dominated Israel's mineral resources industry. Its subsidiaries included the Dead Sea Works, Dead Sea Bromine, and Negev Phosphates. ICL also was parent to smaller research, desalination, telecommunications, shipping, and trucking firms. In addition, ICL owned Amsterdam Fertilizers in the Netherlands and Broomchemie, Guilin Chemie, and Stadiek Dunger in the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany).

In the plastics field, Kibbutz Industries Association--a member of the Histadrut--accounted for more than 60 percent of Israel's plastics output and more than 75 percent of plastics exports. Virtually all the successful plastics establishments were kibbutz owned.

Israel

Israel - Clothing and Textiles

During the mid-1950s, Israel, like other developing countries, promoted the textile and apparel industry to be a ready source of employment. By 1985 the textile and clothing industry was represented by 1,523 establishments. These businesses employed about 46,000 workers (representing 15 percent of industrial workers) and earned revenues equal to approximately US$13 million, or 8.8 percent of total industrial earnings. In 1988 Israel continued to promote this industry as a source of employment for unskilled and semiskilled immigrants and for local Israeli Arab labor.

The textile and apparel industries were characterized by many small firms and a few large, vertically integrated companies (including Polgat Enterprises, considered one of the most efficient producers in the world). Like other Israeli industries, the textile and apparel industry depended for its survival on its ability to export to Europe and the United States. Given the generally high tariff barriers in Europe and the United States on such products, the agreement Israel signed with the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1977, the Israel-EEC Preferential Agreement, as well as the United States-Israel Free Trade Area Agreement (as of 1987) have lowered and will lower further these tariffs, thus making Israeli textile and apparel products marginally competitive. Duty savings were not expected to play a major role in increasing Israel's trade competitiveness in these markets as long as Israeli wages in these industries were higher then comparable wages in Asia. Because they pay higher wages, Israeli textile and apparel producers have continued to concentrate on the more expensive segment of the market.

Israel

Israel - Tourism

Tourism has always been an important source of foreign currency for Israel. In 1984 this industry earned US$1.08 billion. The Israeli airlines earned an additional US$210 million in touristrelated business. In 1986, 929,631 tourists arrived by air and 18,252 arrived by sea. Another 17,563 tourists arrived from Jordan by land via the Allenby Bridge. Sixty percent of total 1986 tourists originated in Europe, an additional 20 percent originated in the United States.

Although the 1986 figures are respectable, they represent a decline by 13 percent over the preceding three years. Moreover, the 1986 figure for American tourists is 41 percent lower than comparable figures for the years 1983 through 1985. This decline in tourism to Israel in 1986 reflected a general decline in American tourism to the Middle East, which was caused by security considerations and by a weakening of the United States dollar against European currencies.

Israel

Israel - Energy

Israel depends almost totally on imported fuel for its energy requirements; domestic production of crude petroleum and natural gas is negligible. After the June 1967 War, Israel acquired a large portion of its oil supply from captured Egyptian fields in the Sinai Peninsula. In 1979 these fields were returned to Egypt. Exploration within Israel was continuing in the mid-1980s, with interest centered on the Dead Sea and northern Negev areas, as well as in the Helez region along the coastal plain near Ashqelon. Despite having spent about US$250 million between 1975 and 1985 searching for oil, Israel remained almost devoid of domestic energy sources. By 1986 domestic and foreign oil exploration in Israel ground to a near halt, although Occidental Petroleum (headed by Armand Hammer) continued its seismic studies in preparation for future drilling.

Because of the failure to find economically worthwhile deposits of fossil fuels, Israel has devoted large sums to developing other energy sources, particularly solar energy. In fact, Israel has long been an acknowledged leader in this field. Overall, the structure of Israel's energy economy has changed considerably since 1973. Between 1982 and 1984, about 50 percent of Israel's electricity came from coal. By 1985 oil-to-coal conversion programs made coal the source of 17 percent of Israel's primary energy. It appeared unlikely in 1988 that a major improvement in Israel's energy balance would occur.

The Arab oil embargo and the Iranian Islamic Revolution have forced Israel to diversify both its coal and oil imports. In 1986 Israel's major sources of coal were Australia, South Africa, and Britain. The bulk of Israel's oil came from Mexico and Egypt.

Israel

Israel - AGRICULTURE

Historically, agriculture has played a more important role in Israeli national life than its economic contribution would indicate. It has had a central place in Zionist ideology and has been a major factor in the settlement of the country and the absorption of new immigrants although its income-producing importance has been minimal. As the economy has developed, the importance of agriculture has declined even further. For example, by 1979 agricultural output accounted for just under 6 percent of GDP. In 1985 agricultural output accounted for 5.1 percent of GDP, whereas manufacturing accounted for 23.4 percent.

In 1981, the year of the last agricultural census (as of 1988), there were 43,000 farm units with an overall average size of 13.5 hectares. Of these, 19.8 percent were smaller than 1 hectare, 75.7 percent were between 1 and 9 hectares, 3.3 percent were between 10 and 49 hectares, 0.4 percent were between 50 and 190 hectares, and 0.8 percent were more than 200 hectares. Of the 380,000 hectares under cultivation in that year, 20.8 percent was under permanent cultivation and 79.2 percent under rotating cultivation. The farm units also included a total of 160,000 hectares of land used for purposes other than cultivation. In general, land was divided as follows: forest, 5.7 percent; pasture, 40.2 percent; cultivated, 21.5 percent, and desert and all other uses, 32.6 percent. Cultivation was based mainly in three zones: the northern coastal plains, the hills of the interior, and the upper Jordan Valley.

Agricultural activities generally were conducted in cooperative settlements, which fell into two principal types: kibbutzim and moshavim. Kibbutzim often served strategic or defensive purposes in addition to purely agricultural functions. In the 1980s, such settlements usually engaged in mixed farming and had some processing industry attached to them. A moshav provides its members with credit and other services, such as marketing and purchasing of seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, and the like. By centralizing some essential purchases, the moshavim were able to benefit from the advantages of size without having to adopt the kibbutz ideology.

The agricultural sector declined in importance from 1952 to 1985. This decline reflects the rapid development of manufacturing and services rather than a decrease of agricultural productivity. In fact, from 1966 through 1984, agriculture was far more productive than industry.

Efficient use of the factors of production and the change in their relative composition explain a significant portion of the increased productivity in the agricultural sector. From 1955 to 1983, the agricultural sector cut back on employed persons and increased the use of water, fertilizer, and pesticides, leading to a substantial increase in productivity. Other factors that contributed to increased productivity included research, training, improved crop varieties, and better organization. These changes in factor utilization led to a twelvefold increase in the value of agricultural production, calculated in constant prices, between 1950 and 1983.

In absolute terms, the amount of cultivated land increased from 250,000 hectares in FY 1950 to 440,000 hectares in FY 1984. Of this total, the percentage of irrigated land increased from 15 percent in FY 1950 (37,500 hectares) to around 54 percent in FY 1984 (237,000 hectares). The amount of water used for agricultural purposes increased from 332 million cubic meters in FY 1950 to 1.2 billion cubic meters in FY 1984.

The most dramatic change over this period was the reduction in the agricultural labor force. Whereas the number of workers employed in agriculture in the early 1950s reached about 100,000, or 17.4 percent of the civilian labor force, by 1986 it had dropped to 70,000, or 5.3 percent of the civilian labor force.

Agriculture has benefited from high capital inputs and careful development, making full use of available technology over a long period. Specialization in certain profitable export crops, in turn, has generated more funds for investment in agricultural production and processing, as has the development of sophisticated marketing mechanisms. In particular, Israel has had success in exporting citrus fruit, eggs, vegetables, poultry, and melons.

Another factor important in Israel's agricultural development has been the sector's impressive performance in foreign trade. The rapid growth of agricultural exports was accompanied by a general increase in total exports. Between 1950 and 1983, a prominent development was the decline (by 65 percent) in the importance of citrus fruit exports in relation to total raw agricultural exports. This decrease was more than balanced by the increase in importance of processed agricultural products, whose exports increased by 4,000 percent over the same period.

Israel

Israel - Government and Politics

ISRAELI GOVERNMENTAL AND POLITICAL structures stem from certain premises and institutional arrangements generally associated with West European parliamentary democracies, East European and Central European institutions and traditions, and even some Middle Eastern sociopolitical patterns. These influences were transmitted though the unique history, political culture, and political institutions of Israel's formative prestate period and the Middle Eastern environment in which it is situated. The legitimacy of Israeli society and the identification by the majority Jewish population with the state and its institutions rest on several foundations: Zionist Jewish nationalism, the existence of an outside threat to Israeli security, Judaism, collectivism, and democracy. These bases are affected by the Arab/Palestinian-Israeli conflict (hereafter the Arab-Israeli conflict) and by the pluralist nature of Israeli society, in which a substantial Arab minority participates in the country's political system, but has an ambivalent role within the majority Jewish society.

The Israeli political system is characterized by certain West European democratic arrangements: elected government, multiparty competition, a high level of voter participation in local and national elections, an independent judiciary that is the country's foremost guardian of civil liberties, a vigorous and free press, and the supremacy of civilian rule. Other features, such as collectivism and a lack of expension of the liberal component in Israeli politics, are distinctly East European and Central European in origin. These features are expressed by the absence of a written constitution limiting the powers of government and imposing restraints on the majority to safeguard the rights of individuals, particularly in matters of civil rights and relations between state and religious interests. In the late 1980s, increasing disagreement over some fundamental questions, for instance, the state's territorial boundaries and the role of religion in the state, led to a breakdown in the pre-1967 national consensus over such issues. Such disagreement has resulted in intense ideological polarization as reflected in electoral and parliamentary stalemates between the two major political parties--Likud (Union) and the Israel Labor Party (generally referred to as the Labor Party or simply Labor)-- and their allies.

In July 1984, the political system faced a challenge of unprecedented magnitude. For the first time in the country's thirty-six-year postindependence history, neither major party was able to form a coalition government without the other's equal participation. The result, the National Unity Government formed in September 1984, represented a milestone in the country's political development. That development had already undergone an unprecedented shock in May 1977, when the left-of-center Labor Party was voted out of office for the first time after nearly half a century of unbroken political dominance in pre- and post-state Israel. In 1977 a newly mandated regime was ushered in under Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who led the right-of-center Likud Bloc and who differed sharply with the Labor Party over political philosophy and both domestic and foreign policy. Likud was reconfirmed in power by the 1981 elections, but it suffered an almost irreparable blow with Begin's resignation in September 1983, which followed a series of failed policies concerning the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the domestic economy. The less charismatic and more cautious Yitzhak Shamir succeeded Begin. Under the terms of the National Unity Government, established in September 1984, the leader of the Labor Party, Shimon Peres, was entrusted with the formation of a government with himself as prime minister, on the written understanding that he would relinquish the prime ministership in two years' time--halfway through the parliamentary term--to his designated "vice prime minister" (or vice premier) Shamir. The next elections to the Knesset (parliament) were held in November 1988; by reproducing the same inconclusive electoral results as in 1984, they led to the formation of a second Likud-and-Labor-led National Unity Government, except that this time Labor joined as a junior partner. Following a period of protracted coalition bargaining, Shamir was reinstated as prime minister, with Peres moving from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Ministry of Finance. Moshe Arens, a former Likud minister of defense and a Shamir ally, was appointed minister of foreign affairs, and Labor's Yitzhak Rabin became minister of defense.

From 1984 to 1988, the National Unity Government acted as a joint executive committee of Labor and Likud. Under its direction, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) withdrew to an Israeli-dominated security zone in southern Lebanon; Israel's runaway inflation, which had plagued the economy under previous Likud rule, was curbed; and divisive political debates on major national issues were, to some extent, subdued. Nevertheless, on major issues such as participation in United States-sponsored peace initiatives to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, the exchange of "land for peace," and the political future of the West Bank and Gaza Strip territories, unity between Labor and Likud was lacking. The unity cabinet became deadlocked as each partner continuously strove to advance its own foreign policy agenda. In the latter half of the unity government's term, from 1986 to 1988, consensus on domestic issues disintegrated as the parties prepared for the 1988 Knesset elections. For the most part, this breakdown in consensus continued following the elections; although the United States began a dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the government continued to preserve the status quo on security issues.

<>THE CONSTITUTION
<>NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS
<>POLITICAL FRAMEWORK
<>MULTIPARTY SYSTEM
<>CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS
<>FOREIGN RELATIONS

Israel

Israel - THE CONSTITUTION

The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, proclaimed by the Provisional Government and the Provisional Council of State on May 14, 1948, mentions a draft constitution to be prepared by a constitutional committee and to be adopted by an elected constituent assembly not later than October 1, 1948. After convening on February 14, 1949, the Constituent Assembly, however, instead of drafting a constitution, on February 16 converted itself into a legislative body (the first Knesset) and enacted the Transition Law, commonly referred to as the "small constitution." The Constituent Assembly could not agree on a comprehensive written constitution, primarily for fear that a constitution would unleash a divisive conflict between religious and state authorities, a fear that continued to exist in late 1988. The ensuing parliamentary debate, from February 1 through June 13, 1950, between those favoring a written constitution and those opposing it was a microcosm of the conflict between state and religious interests that would continue to agitate Israeli political life.

Proponents argued that under a bill of rights incorporated into a constitution Israel would benefit from the experience of other nations that had adopted written safeguards to ensure religious freedom, minority rights, equal rights, and civil liberties. A written constitution, they asserted, would also safeguard the principle of the separation of powers and, in a period of rapid immigration, referred to in Israel as the "ingathering of exiles," would be a unifying factor, unequivocally establishing the supremacy of civil law.

Opponents contended that the domestic and external circumstances of Israel in 1949 were not auspicious for the adoption of a constitution. They stressed that a written constitution would be politically divisive because the controversial issue of the boundaries between state and religion would inevitably be raised in formulating the principles, goals, and nature of the state as codified in a constitution. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, the leading opponent of a written constitution, maintained that the Proclamation of Independence, however great an event, was merely the beginning of a long process in Israel's evolution as a democratic state and not "the redemption." Perhaps most significantly, Ben-Gurion and Mapai (Mifleget Poalei Eretz Ysrael, Israel Workers' Party--see Appendix B), the Labor Party's predecessor, had already formed an alliance with Orthodox religious parties by entering into a "historical partnership" with Mizrahi (Spiritual Center--see Appendix B) in 1933. As part of the Mapai- Mizrahi agreement of June 19, 1947, they obtained unity among the various groups in the Yishuv (the prestate Jewish community) by promising the leaders of the ultra-Orthodox Agudat Israel (Society of Israel--see Appendix B) that the status quo on issues involving state and religion would be maintained in the new state. Some observers felt that Ben-Gurion and other Labor leaders grossly underestimated the long-term consequences of delaying resolution of the role of religion in a modern Jewish state. In later years, the Orthodox-dominated Ministry of Religious Affairs, Ministry of Interior, rabbinate, rabbinic courts, and municipal religious councils gained a virtual monopoly in patronage and resources over Israel's organized Jewish religious institutions to the detriment of the more moderate Conservative and Reform movements of Judaism. As a consequence of the resurgence of right-wing fundamentalist religious movements, the influence of secular elements in Israeli society, especially of Labor and its allies, was ultimately diminished.

The Israeli solution to the lack of a constitution has been a "building-block" method. In June 1950, the Knesset passed a compromise resolution, known as the "Harari decision" (named after Knesset member Izhar Harari), approving a constitution in principle but postponing its enactment until a future date. The resolution stated that the constitution would be evolved "chapter by chapter in such a way that each chapter will by itself constitute a fundamental law." It stipulated: "The chapters will be submitted to the Knesset to the extent to which the Committee [for Constitution, Law, and Justice of the Knesset] completes its work, and the chapters will be incorporated in the constitution of the State." By 1988 nine Basic Laws had been enacted to deal with the Knesset (1958), Israeli Lands (1960), the Presidency (1964), the Government (1968), the State Economy (1975), the Army (1976), Jerusalem (1980), the Judiciary (1984), and Elections (1988). These Basic Laws, transcending regular legislation, may be amended or changed only by a special majority; in most cases the majority required is at least 80 members of the 120-member Knesset. Moreover, to ensure the country's stability, the Basic Laws may not be amended, suspended, or repealed by emergency legislation.

Apart from the nine Basic Laws, as of the end of 1988 there were a number of ordinary laws that legitimized the structure, functions, and actions of state institutions. These ordinary statutes were intended eventually to take the form of Basic Laws, presumably with appropriate revisions to account for changing needs and circumstances. Among these laws were the Law of Return (1950), Nationality Law (1952), the Judges Law (1953), the State Education Law (1953), the Courts Law (1957), the State Comptroller Law (1958), and the Knesset Elections Law (1969). Legislation such as the Law of Return, the Nationality Law, and the State Education Law sought to resolve fundamental secular-religious disagreements. In the judgment of most Israeli observers, however, the enactment of such laws did not resolve fundamental controversies because Orthodox figures later sought to overturn them. For example, in 1988 the government was engaged in a legislative struggle involving renewed attempts by Orthodox religious parties to amend the 1950 Law of Return, the country's basic immigration law, by granting Orthodox religious authorities exclusive power to decide who is Jewish and to exclude people who had converted to Judaism through the Reform or Conservative movements. On June 14, 1988, the Knesset defeated two such bills by votes of sixty to fifty-three and sixty to fifty-one.

The question of human rights and civil liberties has been an important concern of all Israeli governments. It is reflected, for instance, in the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, sometimes considered analogous to the United States Declaration of Independence. The Israeli declaration reads in part: "The State of Israel will . . . foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice, and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture." The declaration contains sections that were intended to grant constitutional authority for the establishment and operation of state organs during the immediate postindependence years. Apart from that legal significance, however, the declaration lacks the status of a formal constitution against which the legality of other enactments can be tested. This is especially true regarding the issue of fundamental civil rights.

In the absence of an expressed bill of rights, Israeli governments have relied on the court system to safeguard civil rights and liberties. Israeli citizens have enjoyed a large measure of civil rights as a result of high standards of fairness in the administration of justice in Israel proper. Nonetheless, certain infringements have been caused by the dictates of internal security. According to a United States Department of State report on human rights practices in Israel released in February 1988, "Israel is a parliamentary democracy which guarantees by law and respects in practice the civil, political, and religious rights of its citizens . . . As in the past, the most significant human rights problems for Israel in 1987 derived from the strained relations between the Israeli authorities and some Israelis on the one hand and the Arab inhabitants of the occupied territories on the other hand."

A number of attempts have been made to introduce proposals for a detailed constitution. The latest occurred in August 1987, when the Public Council for a Constitution for Israel, a group of Tel Aviv University professors led by Uriel Reichman, dean of its faculty of law, launched a campaign to enact a constitution. The group argued that the existing Basic Laws were not tantamount to a constitution because such topics as judicial review and a bill of rights were not covered and because most of the Basic Laws were regular laws that could be amended by a simple majority vote of the Knesset. A written constitution, in contrast, would spell out the relationship among the different branches of government and establish a type of secularized bill of rights between the individual and the state. The group advocated three necessary reform measures as essential for a democratic and constitutional state: the direct election of the prime minister; the safeguarding of all Basic Laws so that they could be rescinded only by a two-thirds or three-fifths Knesset majority; and the establishment of a well-defined system of judicial review. While the proposal had little chance of Knesset passage, it aroused renewed interest in the reform of the Israeli electoral, legislative, and judicial systems.

<>The President
<>The Cabinet
<>The Civil Service
<>The Knesset
<>The State Comptroller
<>The Judicial System
<>Local Government
<>Civilian Administration in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip

Israel

Israel - The President

The 1964 Basic Law provides that the president is the titular head of state. The president is elected through secret balloting by an absolute majority of the Knesset on the first two ballots, but thereafter by a plurality, for a term of five years. Israeli presidents may not serve more than two consecutive terms, and any resident of Israel is eligible to be a presidential candidate. The office falls vacant upon resignation or upon the decision of three-quarters of the Knesset to depose the president on grounds of misconduct or incapacity. Presidential tenure is not keyed to that of the Knesset in order to assure continuity in government and the nonpartisan character of the office. There is no vice president in the Israeli governmental system. When the president is temporarily incapacitated or the office falls vacant, the speaker of the Knesset may exercise presidential functions.

Presidential powers are usually exercised based on the recommendation of appropriate government ministers. The president signs treaties ratified by the Knesset and laws enacted by the legislature except those relating to presidential powers. The president, who has no veto power over legislation, appoints diplomatic representatives, receives foreign envoys accredited to Israel, and appoints the state comptroller, judges for civil and religious courts, and the governor of the Bank of Israel.

Although the president's role is nonpolitical, Israeli heads of state perform important moral, ceremonial, and educational functions. They also play a part in the formation of a coalition cabinet, or "a government" as the Israelis call it. They are required to consult leaders of all political parties in the Knesset and to designate a member of the legislature to organize a cabinet. If the member so appointed fails, other political parties commanding a plurality in the Knesset may submit their own nominee. The figure called upon to form a cabinet is invariably the leader of the most influential political party or bloc in the Knesset.

As of 1988, all Israeli presidents have been members of, or associated with, the Labor Party and its predecessors, and all have been considered politically moderate. These tendencies were especially significant in the April 1978 election of Labor's Yitzhak Navon, following the inability of the governing Likud coalition to elect its candidate to the presidency. Israeli observers believed that, in counterbalance to Prime Minister Begin's polarizing leadership, Navon, the country's first president of Sephardi origin, provided Israel with unifying symbolic leadership at a time of great political controversy and upheaval. In 1983 Navon decided to reenter Labor politics after five years of nonpartisan service as president, and Chaim Herzog (previously head of military intelligence and ambassador to the United Nations) succeeded him as Israel's sixth president.

Israel

Israel - The Cabinet

The separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches in the Israeli political system generally follows the British pattern. The cabinet is the top executive policy-making body and the center of political power in the nation. It consists of the prime minister and an unspecified number of ministers. The head of government must be a Knesset member, but this is not a requirement for ministers. In practice, most ministers have been Knesset members; when non-Knesset members are considered for cabinet posts, their selection is subject to Knesset approval. A deputy prime minister and deputy ministers may be appointed from among the membership of the Knesset, usually as a result of coalition bargaining, but in this instance only the deputy prime minister is considered a regular cabinet member. As stated above, in September 1984, the National Unity Government established the position of vice prime minister, or vice premier. The vice prime minister, who was the leader of one of the two major parties in the unity coalition, was considered the second leading cabinet minister.

The cabinet takes office upon confirmation by the Knesset, to which it is collectively responsible for all its acts. To obtain this consent, the prime minister-designate must submit a list of cabinet members along with a detailed statement of basic principles and policies of his or her government. The cabinet can be dissolved if it resigns en masse, if the Knesset passes a motion of censure against it, or if the prime minister resigns or dies. The prime minister's resignation invalidates the cabinet, but resignations of individual ministers do not have this effect. Since independence all cabinets have been coalitions of parties, each coalition having been formed to achieve the required total of sixty-one or more Knesset seats. Although often based on political expediency, coalition formation is also concerned with ideological and issue compatibility among the participating groups. Cabinet posts are divided among coalition partners through behind-the-scenes bargaining and in proportion to the parliamentary strength of the parties involved, usually at the ratio of one cabinet portfolio for every three or four Knesset seats. This formula may be dispensed with, however, in times of national emergency or electoral and political stalemate. The first precedent in this direction occurred after the June 1967 War when a "national unity government" was formed by co-opting three opposition party leaders as cabinet ministers. This move, which was achieved without the standard cabinet formation procedure, was designed to demonstrate internal solidarity in the face of an external threat.

The members of coalition governments are obligated to fulfill their commitments to the coalition at the time of seeking a vote of confidence from the Knesset. A cabinet member may be dismissed for failing to support the government on any matter that is included in the original coalition pact except where the minister's dissenting vote in the Knesset for reasons of "conscience" is specifically approved in advance by the minister's party. This obligation also applies in the formation and maintenance of a national unity government, with the exception of times of emergency when opposition elements co-opted into the cabinet may disagree with the mainstream of the coalition on any matters other than those they have pledged to support. At a minimum, coalition members must vote with the government on issues of national defense, foreign policy, the budget, and motions of censure. Failure to do so constitutes grounds for their expulsion; ministers may simply withdraw from the government in protest if they cannot reconcile themselves to the mainstream.

As a rule, the cabinet meets at least once a week on Sunday morning or whenever extraordinary reasons warrant. Cabinet deliberations are confidential; this is especially true when the body meets as a session of the ministerial Committee for Security Affairs.

The cabinet conducts much of its work through four standing committees dealing with economic affairs, legislation, foreign affairs and security, and home affairs and services. The committees meet once a week and may set up special ad hoc committees of inquiry to scrutinize issues affecting coalition unity or other urgent questions. A cabinet member may be assigned to one or more committees. Committee decisions are final unless challenged in plenary cabinet sessions.

As compensation for serving in the cabinet, Knesset members' salaries and accompanying benefits are supplemented by the government. Ministers are given a car and a driver and offices in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The government provides them with an official residence in Jerusalem and covers personal expenses such as travel, hotels, and food on official business. They also receive comprehensive medical insurance and other allowances.

Until November 1988, the unity cabinet included, in addition to Prime Minister Shamir, nineteen ministers with portfolio, including the vice-prime minister and two deputy prime ministers. The jurisdictions of their portfolios were agriculture, communications, defense, economics and planning, education and culture, energy and infrastructure, finance, foreign affairs, health, housing and construction, immigration and absorption, industry and trade, interior, justice and tourism (both ministries were headed by one minister), labor and social affairs, police, religious affairs, science and development, and transportation. In addition, there were six ministers without portfolio. Upon approval of the second unity government by the Knesset in December 1988, the new cabinet consisted of twenty-eight ministers, the largest in the country's history. Its size was expanded to accommodate political demands by the coalition partners.

Interministerial coordination is the responsibility of the four standing cabinet committees and the Office of the Prime Minister, especially the Government Secretariat, which is located in that office. Headed by the secretary to the government (the position is also known as government secretary or cabinet secretary), the secretariat prepares the agenda for meetings of the cabinet and cabinet committees, maintains their records, coordinates the work of ministries, and informs the public of government decisions and policies.

Also in the Office of the Prime Minister are the Prime Minister's Bureau, which deals with confidential matters concerning the chief executive, and a staff of advisers on political and legal issues, national security, terrorism and counterterrorism, the media, petitions and complaints, Arab affairs, and welfare affairs. The most influential advisory personnel carry the title of "director general and political adviser" to the prime minister. Other constituent units of the office include the State Archives and Library, Government Names Committee, Government Press Office, National Council for Research and Development, Technological and Scientific Information Center, Atomic Energy Commission, Institute for Biological Research, National Parks Authority, and Central Bureau of Statistics.

Israel

Israel - The Civil Service

As of late 1988, government employees were recruited through a merit system, with appointment, promotion, transfer, termination, training, discipline, and conditions of employment regulated by law. They were prohibited, especially in the senior grades, from engaging in partisan politics by the Civil Service (Restriction of Party Activities and Fund-Raising) Law of 1959. As of 1988, there were approximately 100,000 government employees, excluding the Israel Police, teachers (who were technically municipal employees), civilian workers in the defense establishment, and employees of the State Employment Service and the autonomous Israel Broadcasting Authority.

The civil service was headed by a commissioner appointed by the cabinet and directly responsible to the minister of finance. The commissioner, who like other senior government officials carried the rank of director general, had broad responsibility for the examination, recruitment, appointment, training, and discipline of civil service personnel. In practice, however, except in the senior grades, these matters were left to the discretion of the various ministries. The commissioner was also chairman of the Civil Service Board, consisting of three directors general representing government ministries and three members representing the public. The purpose of the board was to administer the civil service pension system. In addition, the office of the commissioner directed the operation of the Central School of Administration in Jerusalem and furnished administrative services to the Civil Service Disciplinary Court. Civil servants were automatically members of the Civil Servants' Union--a practice that has been in effect since 1949 when the union became part of the General Federation of Laborers in the Land of Israel (HaHistadrut HaKlalit shel HaOvdim B'Eretz Yisrael, known as Histadrut--literally, organization). Any basic changes in the conditions of government employment must have the concurrence of the union. The mandatory retirement age for civil service workers was sixty-five, and pensions ranged from 20 to 70 percent of terminal salary, depending on length of service.

Israel

Israel - The Knesset

The Knesset is a unicameral parliament and the supreme authority of the state. Its 120 members are elected by universal suffrage for a four-year term under a system of proportional representation. Basic Law: the Knesset provides for "general countryside, direct, equal, secret, and proportional" elections. This provision means that if, for example, in a national election a given party list received approximately 36,000 votes, it would be entitled to two seats in the Knesset. As a result, the top two names on the party's list would obtain Knesset seats. The legislative authority of the Knesset is unlimited, and legislative enactments cannot be vetoed by either the president or the prime minister nor can such enactments be nullified by the Supreme Court. The regular four-year term of the Knesset can be terminated only by the Knesset, which can then call for a new general election before its term expires.

The Knesset also has broad power of direction and supervision over government operations. It approves budgets, monitors government performance by questioning cabinet ministers, provides a public forum for debate of important issues, conducts wide-ranging legislative inquiries, and can topple the cabinet through a vote of no confidence that takes precedence over all other parliamentary business. The Knesset works through eleven permanent legislative committees, including the House Committee, which handles parliamentary rules and procedures, and the Law and Justice Committee, usually referred to as "Law." The jurisdictions of the remaining committees are the constitution, finance, foreign affairs and security, immigration and absorption, economics, education and culture, internal affairs and environment, labor and welfare, and state control. Committee assignments are made by the Arrangements Committee, a committee consisting of representatives of the various parties established at the beginning of each Knesset session, enabling each party to determine for itself where it wants its stronger delegates placed. Committee assignments are for the duration of the Knesset's tenure. Committee chairmen are formally elected at the first meeting of each respective committee upon the nomination of the House Committee. As a rule, however, the chairmanship of important committees is reserved for members of the ruling coalition. If a member resigns from his or her party, the place on the committee reverts to the party, even if the member remains in the Knesset.

Among the first tasks of a new Knesset is to assign members to the various standing committees and to elect a speaker, his or her deputies, and the chairmen of committees. The speaker is assisted by a presidium of several deputies chosen by the Knesset from the major parties. At a minimum, the Knesset is required to hold two sessions a year and to sit not fewer than eight months during the two sessions. The Knesset meets weekly to consider items on its agenda, but not on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays in deference to its Muslim, Jewish, and Christian members. Agendas are set by the speaker to permit the questioning of ministers and the consideration of proposals from the government or motions from members. Time allocations to individual members and parties are made in advance by the speaker so as to preclude filibusters or cloture. Other than national emergencies, budgetary issues have usually been the most important items dealt with by the Knesset at any of its session.

Following the British pattern, legislation is generally introduced by the cabinet; to a lesser extent it is initiated by various Knesset committees; and in limited cases, private bills are initiated by individual Knesset members. Bills are drafted by the ministries concerned in consultation with the Ministry of Justice. By majority vote of the cabinet, draft bills are sent to the speaker of the Knesset for legislative action. Proposed bills are considered by appropriate committees and go through three readings before being voted on by the Knesset after the third reading. Any number of Knesset members present constitutes a quorum, and a simple majority of those present is required for passage. Exceptions to this rule apply in the election or removal of the president of the state, removal of the state comptroller, changes to the system of proportional elections, and changes to or repeal of Basic Laws; in these instances, required majorities are specified by law.

Apart from the Knesset, which is the principal source of legislation, such public institutions as ministries, local authorities, and independent bodies can frame rules and regulations or subsidiary legislation on a wide range of matters. Subsidiary legislation has the effect of law, but it can be declared invalid by the courts when it contravenes any enactment of the Knesset.

Knesset members are granted extensive legal immunity and privileges. Their special legal status, which many observers regard as excessive, ranges from parliamentary immunity to protection from criminal proceedings for the entire period of Knesset membership. Immunity extends to acts committed before becoming a Knesset member, although such immunity can be removed by the Knesset upon the recommendation of the House Committee. Knesset members are also exempt from compulsory military service. The official language of the Knesset is Hebrew, but Arab members may address the legislature in Arabic, with simultaneous translation provided.

Israel

Israel - The State Comptroller

The power of the Knesset to supervise and review government policies and operations is exercised mainly through the state comptroller, also known as the ombudsman or ombudswoman. The state comptroller is appointed by the president upon the recommendation of the House Committee of the Knesset for a renewable term of five years. The incumbent is completely independent of the government and is responsible to the Knesset alone (the state controller's budget is submitted directly to the Knesset's Finance Committee and is exempt from prior consideration by the Ministry of Finance). The state comptroller can be relieved only by the Knesset or by resignation or demise. During the incumbent's term of office, he or she may not be a member of the Knesset or otherwise engage in politics and is prohibited from any public or private activity that could create a conflict of interest with the independent performance of the duties of the office. The state comptroller, although lacking in authority to enforce compliance, has broad investigative powers and employs hundreds of staff members, including accountants, lawyers, and other relevant professionals. Since 1949, when the state comptrollership was created, three individuals have held the office, with each having served for an extended period.

The principal function of the state comptroller is to check on the legality, regularity, efficiency, economy, and ethical conduct of public institutions. The checks are performed by continuous and spot inspections of the financial accounts and activities of all ministries, the armed forces and security services, local government bodies, and any corporations, enterprises, or organizations subsidized or managed by the state in any form.

The state comptroller acts in conjunction with the Finance Committee of the Knesset and reports to it whenever necessary. The state comptroller may recommend that the Finance Committee appoint a special commission of inquiry, but having no statutory authority of its own it relies on the Knesset to impose sanctions on errant bodies. The state comptroller's office is divided into five major inspection units. The first four are concerned with ministries, defense services, local authorities, and corporations; the fifth deals with public complaints concerning government bodies.

Israel

Israel - The Judicial System

The Judiciary Law of 1984 formalized the judicial structure consisting of three main types of courts: civil, religious, and military. There also are special courts for labor, insurance, traffic, municipal, juvenile, and other disputes. Each type of court is administratively responsible to a different ministry. Civilian courts come under the Ministry of Justice; religious courts fall under the Ministry of Religious Affairs, and military courts come under the Ministry of Defense. In the administration of justice, however, all courts are independent and Israelis generally concede their fairness.

Legal codes and judicial procedures derive from various sources. Laws applicable to Israeli Jews in matters of personal status are generally based on the Torah and the halakah. Influences traceable to the British Mandate period include parts of Ottoman legal codes, influenced by the Quran, Arab tribal customary laws, and the Napoleonic Code. In general, British law has provided the main base on which Israel has built its court procedure, criminal law, and civil code, whereas American legal practice has strongly influenced Israeli law regarding civil rights.

The status of the judiciary and the definition and authority of the court structure are spelled out in the Judges Law of 1953, the Courts Laws of 1957, the Rabbinical Courts Jurisdiction (Marriage and Divorce) Law of 1953, the Dayanim Law of 1955 (s., dayan, rabbinical court judge), the Qadis Law of 1961 (sing., qadi, Muslim religious judge), the Druze Religious Courts Law of 1962 (qadi madhab, Druze religious judge), the Jurisdiction in Matters of Dissolution of Marriages (Special Cases) Law of 1969, and the Judiciary Law of 1984. The principal representative of the state in the enforcement of both criminal and civil law is the attorney general, who is responsible to the minister of justice. As was the case during the British Mandate, courts do not use the jury system; all questions of fact and law are determined by the judge or judges of the court concerned, and the system upholds the principle of innocence until proven guilty.

The president, on the recommendation of a nominating committee chaired by the minister of justice, appoints civil courts judges. The nominating committee consists of the president of the Supreme Court, two other justices of the highest court, two members of the Knesset, one cabinet member in addition to the minister of justice, and two practicing lawyers who are members of the Israel Bar Association, a body established in 1961 charged with certifying lawyers for legal practice. The independence of committee members is safeguarded in part by a procedure whereby, except for the minister of justice and the president of the Supreme Court, they are elected through secret ballot by the members of their respective institutions. Whereas the composition of the committee is meant to depoliticize the nominations process, political considerations require the inclusion of at least one religious justice on the Supreme Court, as well as the representation on the nominating committee of Sephardim and women.

The president of the state, on the recommendation of nominating committees, also appoints judges of religious courts, except Christian courts. Nominating committees, chaired by the minister of religious affairs, are organized to ensure the independence of their members and to take account of the unique features of each religious community. Religious courts of the ten recognized Christian communities are administered by judges appointed by individual communities.

Civil and religious judges hold office from the day of appointment; tenure ends only upon death, resignation, mandatory retirement at age seventy, or removal from office by disciplinary judgment as specified by law. Transfers of judges from one locality to another require the consent of the president of the Supreme Court. The salaries of all judges are determined by the Knesset. Judges may not be members of the Knesset or engage in partisan political activity.

Before assuming office, all judges, regardless of religious affiliation, must declare allegiance to the State of Israel and swear to dispense justice fairly. Judges other than dayanim must also pledge loyalty to the laws of the state; dayanim are subject only to religious law. The implication is that Jewish religious law suspersedes the man-made laws of the Knesset; where the two conflict, a dayan will follow religious law in matters of personal status. Israel civil libertarians view this as a blemish on the judiciary system because, as Israeli political scientist Asher Arian points out, religious laws "restrict certain liberties taken for granted in other liberal systems."

At the top of the court hierarchy is the Supreme Court, located in Jerusalem and composed of a number of justices determined by the Knesset. In late 1988, there were eleven justices: a president or chief justice, a vice president, and nine justices. The court has both appellate and original jurisdiction. A minimum of three justices is needed for a court session.

The Supreme Court hears appeals from lower courts in civil and criminal cases. As a court of first instance, it may direct a lower district court to hold a retrial in a criminal case if the original verdict is based on questionable evidence, subject to the stipulation that penalties imposed at retrial should not exceed the severity of those originally imposed. In addition, the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction over petitions seeking relief from administrative decisions that fall outside the jurisdiction of any court. In this role, the Supreme Court sits as the High Court of Justice and may restrain government agencies or other public institutions by such writs as habeas corpus and mandamus, customary under English common law. In its capacity as the High Court of Justice, it may also order a religious court to deal with a case concerned with its competence as a religious body, but only on petitions raised before a verdict is handed down. In this regard, the Supreme Court is limited to the procedural question and may not impinge on the merits of the case.

The Supreme Court serves as the principal guardian of fundamental rights, protecting the individual from any arbitrary action by public officials or agencies. It does not have the power of judicial review and cannot invalidate Knesset legislation. It is empowered, however, to nullify administrative rules and regulations or government and local ordinances on the ground of their illegality or conflict with Knesset enactments. As the highest court of the land, the Supreme Court may also rule on the applicability of laws in a disputed case and on jurisdictional disputes between lower civil courts and religious courts. There is no appeal from its decisions.

The second tier of the civil court structure consists of six district courts located in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ramla, Haifa, Beersheba, and Nazareth. As courts of first instance, district courts hear civil and criminal cases outside the jurisdiction of lower courts. Their jurisdiction includes certain matters of personal status involving foreigners. If the foreigners concerned consent to the authority of religious courts, however, there is concurrent jurisdiction over the issue. The district court at Haifa has additional competence as a court of admiralty for the country as a whole.

District courts also hear appeals from magistrate courts, municipal courts, and various administrative tribunals. Israel's twenty-eight magistrate courts constitute the most basic level of the civil court system. They are located in major towns and have criminal as well as civil jurisdiction. There are a small number of municipal courts that have criminal jurisdiction over any offenses committed within municipal areas against municipal regulations, local ordinances, by-laws, and town-planning orders. The civil court structure includes bodies of special jurisdiction, most notably traffic courts; juvenile courts; administrative tribunals concerned with profiteering, tenancy, and water; and tribal courts specific to the Southern District having jurisdiction in any civil or criminal cases assigned to them by the president of the district court or the district commissioner. Disputes involving management-employee relations and insurance claims go to regional labor courts. The courts, established in 1969, are located in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Beersheba. Appeals from the decisions of these courts are made directly to the National Labor Court, located in Jerusalem. Finally, distinct from court-martial proceedings is the military court system, empowered to prosecute civilians for offenses against defense emergency regulations.

Israel

Israel - Local Government

As of late 1988, there were two levels of local government: the central government operated the upper or district level; citizens elected the lower and relatively autonomous municipal level officials. The system of district administration and local government was for the most part based on statutes first promulgated during the Ottoman era and perpetuated under the British Mandate for Palestine and under Yishuv policies. Since independence it has been modified to deal with changing needs and to foster local self-rule. As of late 1988, local government institutions had limited powers, experienced financial difficulties, and depended to a great extent on national ministries; they were, nevertheless, important in the political framework.

Israel consisted of six administrative districts and fourteen subdistricts under, respectively, district commissioners and district officers. The minister of interior appointed these officials, who were responsible to him for implementing legislative and administrative matters. District officials drafted local government legislation, approved and controlled local tax rates and budgets, reviewed and approved by-laws and ordinances passed by locally elected councils, approved local public works projects, and decided on grants and loans to local governments. In their activities, local officials were also accountable to the Office of the State Comptroller. Staff of other ministries might be placed by the minister of interior under the general supervision of district commissioners.

Israel's local self-government derived its authority from the by-laws and ordinances enacted by elected municipal, local, and regional councils and approved by the minister of interior. Up to and including the municipal elections of 1973, mayors and members of the municipal councils were elected by universal, secret, direct, and proportional balloting for party lists in the same manner as Knesset members. Council members in turn chose mayors and municipal council chairpersons. After 1978 mayoral candidates were elected directly by voters in a specific municipality, while members of municipal and local councils continued to be elected according to the performance of party lists and on the basis of proportional representation.

Population determined the size of municipal and local councils. Large urban areas were classified as municipalities and had municipal councils. Local councils were designated class "A" (larger) or class "B" (smaller), depending on the number of inhabitants in villages or settlements. Regional councils consisted of elected delegates from settlements according to their size. Such councils dealt mainly with the needs of cooperative settlements, including kibbutzim and moshavim. The extensive local government powers of the minister of interior included authority to dissolve municipal councils; district commissioners had the same power with regard to local councils.

Local authorities had responsibility for providing public services in areas such as education, health care and sanitation, water management, road maintenance, parks and recreation, and fire brigades. They also levied and collected local taxes, especially property taxes, and other fees. Given the paucity of locally raised tax revenues, most local authorities depended heavily on grants and loans from the national Treasury. The Ministry of Education and Culture, however, made most of the important decisions regarding education, such as budgets, curriculum, and the hiring, training, and licensing of teachers. Nationwide, in 1986 local authorities contributed approximately 50 percent to financing local budgets. In 1979 the figure was about 29 percent. Over the years, municipalities have relied on two other methods for raising funds: cities such as Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa used special municipal endowment funds, particularly for cultural purposes; and Project Renewal, a collaboration among local authorities, government ministries, and the Jewish Agency provided funds to rehabilitate deteriorated neighborhoods.

Local government employees came under the Local Authorities Order (Employment Service) of 1962. The statutes pertaining to the national Civil Service Commission did not cover them.

The Local Government Center, a voluntary association of major cities and local councils, was originally established in 1936, and reorganized in 1956. It represented the interests of local governing bodies vis-�-vis the central authorities, government ministries, and Knesset committees. It also represented local authorities in wage negotiations and signed relevant agreements together with the Histadrut and the government. The center organized conferences and advisory commissions to study professional, budgetary, and managerial issues, and it participated in various national commissions.

Israel

Israel - Civilian Administration in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip

A civilian administration has been set up in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as an interim measure pending final resolution of the political future of these two areas, which are not part of Israel proper. While Labor was in power, Israeli-sponsored municipal elections were held in the West Bank in 1976. The civilian administration of the area until late 1987 employed approximately 13,000 to 14,000 Palestinian civil servants. The Palestinian uprising (intifadah) in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip that began in December 1987, however, had a profound impact on the relationship between the civilian administration and the Palestinian inhabitants of the occupied territories.

Data as of December 1988

Israel

Israel - NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS

As of late 1988, Israel had a number of so-called "nongovernment public sector" organizations, also known as "national institutions." For all practical purposes, they constituted an integral part of the government system, performing functions that were vital to the fulfillment of Zionist aspirations and to the maintenance of Israeli society. Political parties competed for leadership and patronage within them. During the Mandate period, these organizations served as the British administration's officially recognized governing bodies for the Jewish community in Palestine. The Jewish Agency Executive, for instance, was recognized by the governments of Britain, the United States, and other states and international organizations, including the United Nations (UN). In the process of their work, the organizations acquired considerable experience in self-rule, not to mention jealously guarded bureaucratic prerogatives.

These bodies engaged in fund-raising in the Diaspora, operated social welfare services, and were involved in education and cultural work. They operated enterprises, including housing companies; organized immigration; and promoted Zionist work. After Israel achieved independence, many of these services were taken over by the state, but others remained under the control of these well-entrenched organizations. They came to function side by side with the government, and their activities often overlapped, especially in the field of social welfare services. Until the early 1970s, these organizations were almost completely dominated by Israeli governments; later, the organized representatives of Diaspora Jewry began to function more independently.

<>World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency
<>Histadrut

Israel

Israel - World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency

Principal among these bodies were the World Zionist Organization (WZO) and the Jewish Agency. The Jewish Agency for Palestine was established in 1929 under the terms of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine as the operative arm of the WZO in building a Jewish national homeland. In 1952 the Knesset enacted the World Zionist Organization-The Jewish Agency (Status) Law, defining the WZO as "also the Jewish Agency." The 1952 law expressly designated the WZO as "the authorized agency which will continue to operate in the State of Israel for the development and settlement of the country, the absorption of immigrants from the Diaspora and the coordination of activities in Israel of Jewish institutions and organizations active in those fields." The same statute granted tax-exempt status to the Jewish Agency and the authority to represent the WZO as its action arm for fund raising and, in close cooperation with the government, for the promotion of Jewish immigration. The specifics of cooperation were spelled out in a covenant entered into with the government in 1954. The 1954 pact also recognized the WZO and the Jewish Agency as official representatives of world Jewry.

These two bodies played a significant role in consolidating the new State of Israel, absorbing and resettling immigrants, and enlisting support from, and fostering the unity of, the Diaspora. Their activities included organizing immigration, resettling immigrants, assisting their employment in agriculture and industry, education, raising funds abroad, and purchasing land in Israel for settlers through the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet). In principle, the WZO was responsible mainly for political and organizational matters important to Zionists--Jewish education in the Diaspora and supervision of the Jewish National Fund--whereas the Jewish Agency's main concern was for financial and economic activities. In practice, the division of functions was more often obscured, resulting in a duplication of efforts and a bureaucratic morass.

In 1971 the relationship between the WZO and the Jewish Agency was reconstituted as part of a continuing effort to improve the operations of these bodies and to harmonize and strengthen ties between the state and the Diaspora. The need for this step was thought to be particularly acute after the June 1967 War, when contributions to Israel from previously uncommitted sections of the Diaspora reached unprecedented proportions. Impressed by the show of support, the congress of the WZO, which is usually convened every four years, directed the Jewish Agency to initiate discussions with all fund-raising institutions working for Israel. The purpose of these negotiations was to establish a central framework for cooperation and coordination between the Jewish Agency and other fund-raising groups. These discussions led to an agreement in 1971 whereby the governing bodies of the Jewish Agency were enlarged not only to provide equal representation for Israeli and Diaspora Jews but also to ensure a balance in geographical representation. The reconstitution helped to address the long-standing grievance of non-Zionist and non-Israeli supporters of Israel that the Jewish Agency was dominated by Israel-based Zionists.

Under the 1971 rearrangement, the WZO was separated in terms of its functions, but not its leadership, from the Jewish Agency. This was necessary because of the restrictive provision of the United States tax code pertaining to contributions and gifts. Those of its activities that were "political" or otherwise questionable from a tax-exemption standpoint had to be grouped separately and placed under the WZO. The organization was directed to "continue as the organ of the Zionist movement for the fulfillment of Zionist programs and ideals," but its operations were to be confined mainly to the Diaspora. Among the main functions of the WZO after 1971 were Jewish education, Zionist organizational work, information and cultural programs, youth work, external relations, rural development, and the activities of the Jewish National Fund. For the most part, these functions were financed by funds funneled through the Jewish Agency, which continued to serve as the main financial arm of the WZO. However, because of United States tax law stipulations, funds allocated for the WZO by the Jewish Agency were required to come from those collected by Keren HaYesod (Israel Foundation Fund), the agency's financial arm in countries other than the United States.

The Jewish Agency's task was not only to coordinate various fund-raising institutions but also to finance such programs as immigration and land settlement and to assist immigrants in matters of housing, social welfare, education, and youth care. The United Jewish Appeal (UJA, sometimes designated the United Israel Appeal) raised the agency's funds in the United States. In the 1980s, contributions and gifts from the United States usually accounted for more than two-thirds of the total revenue of the Jewish Agency. In 1988 American Jews donated US$357 million to Israel through the UJA.

The Jewish National Fund was the land-purchasing arm of the WZO. It dealt mainly with land development issues such as reclamation, afforestation, and road construction in frontier regions. Keren HaYesod provided partial funding for programs, which were implemented in close cooperation with the Jewish Agency and various government ministries.

Israel

Israel - Histadrut

As of the late 1980s, the Histadrut (HaHistadrut HaKlalit shel HaOvdim B'Eretz Yisrael, General Federation of Laborers in the Land of Israel) continued to be a major factor in Israeli life as the largest voluntary organization in the country. It also wielded an enormous influence on the government's wage policy and labor legislation, and was influential in political, social, and cultural realms. The largest trade union organization, and largest employer in Israel after the government, the Histadrut has opened its membership to almost all occupations. Its membership in 1983 was 1,600,000 (including dependents), accounting for more than one-third of the total population of Israel and about 85 percent of all wage earners. About 170,000 Histadrut members were Arabs. Founded in 1920 by Labor Zionist parties, traditionally it has been controlled by the Labor Party, but not to the exclusion of other parties. Almost all political parties or their affiliated socioeconomic institutions were represented in the organization.

The Histadrut performed functions that were unique to Israeli society, a legacy of its nation-building role in a wide range of economic, trade union, military, social, and cultural activities. Through its economic arm, Hevrat HaOvdim (Society of Workers), the Histadrut operated numerous economic enterprises and owned and managed the country's largest industrial conglomerates. It owned the country's second largest bank (Bank HaPoalim) and provided the largest and most comprehensive system of health insurance and medical and also operated hospital services. In addition, it coordinated the activities of domestic labor cooperative movements, and through its International Department, as well as organizations such as the Afro-Asian Institute, it maintained connections with labor movements in other countries.

Israeli political parties have regularly contested elections to the Histadrut Conference (Veida), held every four years. They also have contested elections to the National Labor Council and to the country's seventy-two local labor councils. Voting results in these elections have often paralleled or preceded trends in parliamentary and municipal elections.

The Histadrut Conference elects a General Council and an Executive Committee. The committee in turn elects a forty-three member Executive Bureau, which administers day-to-day policy. The Histadrut's secretary general, its most powerful official, is elected by the Executive Committee. As in the past, in late 1988 the Histadrut's secretary general, Israel Kaissar, was a Labor Party leader and a member of its Knesset delegation.

Israel

Israel - POLITICAL FRAMEWORK

When Israel became independent, its founding political elite, associated mainly with Mapai, had almost three decades of experience in operating self-governing institutions under the British Mandate. The top Mapai/Labor Party leaders continued to dominate Israeli politics for another three decades. Their paramount influence for over half a century as founders, architects, and prime movers of a Jewish national homeland has had an enduring effect on their successor generation and the political scene in Israel. The elite, political culture, social structure, and social makeup of any nation entwine in complex ways and in the process shape the character and direction of a given political system. This process holds true especially in Israel, where ideological imperatives and their institutionalization have constituted an important part of the country's evolution.

The first generation of Israeli leaders came to Palestine (which they called Eretz Yisrael, or Land of Israel) mainly during the Second Aliyah between 1900 and 1920. The Ashkenazim (Jews of European origin), who constituted the majority among the Yishuv's mostly Labor Zionist political and socioeconomic elites, were impelled by Zionist ideals. The majority held to Labor Zionism, while others adhered to moderate General Zionism (sometimes called Political Zionism) or right-wing Revisionist Zionism. To the early immigrants, the themes promoted by the different Zionist movements provided powerful impulses for sociopolitical action. These pioneers were essentially Labor Zionists with an abiding faith in the rectitude of values that stressed, among other things, the establishment of a modern Jewish nation promoting mutual assistance under the principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," abolition of private ownership of the means of production, and the idea that human consciousness and character were conditioned by the social environment. They also held that Jewish land should be developed in a collectivist agricultural framework, that well-to-do Jews in the Diaspora should materially aid the cause of the Jewish homeland, and that the Jews of the Diaspora should seek the fullest measure of redemption by immigrating to the new Yishuv. In addition, collectivist values of East European and Central European origin, in which the founding generation had been socialized, affected the political orientation of Israel both before and after independence.

The value system of the first generation came to be exemplified first and foremost in the communal and egalitarian kibbutz and to a lesser extent in the moshav. Together these institutions accounted for less than 3 percent of the Jewish population at any given time, but they have held a special place in Israeli society as the citadel of pioneer ideology. They also gave Israel a distinctive self-image as a robust, dedicated, egalitarian, "farmer- or citizen-soldier" society. The kibbutzim also produced numbers of national leaders out of proportion to their small population; they also provided the country with some of its best soldiers and officers.

The founding generation of Israeli leaders, including David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Berl Katznelson, Moshe Sharett, and later, Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir, in effect shaped the country's socioeconomic structures and political patterns. These people were instrumental in establishing the original Labor Zionist parties beginning in 1905, in merging them to establish Mapai in 1930, and in organizing the Histadrut and Jewish self-defense institutions, such as the Haganah, which later became the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in 1920. These formative, nation-building organizations, along with the quasi-governmental Elected Assembly (Asefat Hanivharim), the National Council (Vaad Leumi), the WZO, and the Jewish Agency, served as the Yishuv's national institutions, shaping the character of postindependence Israel.

From its earliest days, Mapai, which had an interlocking leadership with the Histadrut, dominated Israeli public life, including the top echelons of the IDF, the WZO, and the Jewish Agency. Its legitimacy as a ruling party was seldom questioned because it was identified with the mystique of the Zionist struggle for independence, patriotism, and the successful consolidation of statehood. The essentially secular political values espoused by Mapai leaders were endorsed by most of the Jewish population. The absence of effective alternative governing elites or countervalues within the country's multiparty coalition-type government system made it difficult to challenge the Mapai-controlled political mainstream. Moreover, political patterns from the 1920s until the June 1967 War generally discouraged the rise of radical right-wing or left-wing destabilizing tendencies. This trend was rooted in the overall political dominance of Israel's Labor Party and its predecessors and the strength of the mutual restraints inherent in Israel's political subcultures.

Mainstream Israeli society is composed of persons who represent pluralistic cultural and political backgrounds. Politically, some Israeli Jews have liberal West European orientations; others were reared in more collectivist Central European and East European environments, or in authoritarian Middle Eastern political cultures. Some are religiously more traditional than others, but even among Orthodox Jews, shades of conviction vary substantially over the role of Jewish customary laws and the relationship between the state and religion. Thus, the founding generation had to develop a political system that reconciled and accommodated the varied needs of a wide range of groups.

The political system within Israel proper, excluding the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, is geared to the broadest possible level of public participation. Political activities are relatively free, although authoritarian and antidemocratic tendencies were evident among some of the leaders and supporters of right-wing ultranationalist parties and factions. In the late 1980s, the impetus to "agree to disagree" within the democratic framework of conciliation began to show some weakening as a result of intense polarizing controversies over the future of the occupied territories and various disputes over issues concerning the state and religion.

By the early 1970s, Jews of Sephardic origin (popularly referred to in Israel as Oriental Jews) outnumbered their Ashkenazic counterparts as a demographic group. The older Sephardim were, in general, from politically authoritarian and religiously traditional North African and Middle Eastern societies that regarded the Central European and West European secular and social democratic political value spectrum as too modern and far-reaching as compared to their own. They were accustomed to strong authoritarian leaders rather than ideals emphasizing social democratic collectivism and popular sovereignty. Nonetheless, a sizable proportion of Sephardim joined Labor's ranks both as leaders and rank-and-file party members.

Oriental Jews came to be referred to in the 1960s as "the Second Israel"--the numerically larger but socially, culturally, economically, and politically disadvantaged half of the nation. Not all Orientals were economically deprived, but nearly all of those who were relatively poor belonged to Sephardic communities. The communal gap and attendant tensions between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews have naturally engaged the remedial efforts of successive governments, but results have fallen far short of Oriental expectations. The problem was partly rooted in the country's political institutions and processes. Ashkenazic dominance of sociopolitical and economic life had been firmly institutionalized before independence. Over the years, however, Sephardic representation substantially increased in the country's major political parties, and as of the 1980s, Sephardic Jews occupied leadership positions in many municipalities.

Not surprisingly, beginning in the 1950s, most Sephardim tended to vote against Mapai and its successor, Labor. Both were perceived as representing the Ashkenazic establishment, even though Sephardim were always represented among the ranks of party leaders. In the 1950s and early 1960s, while many Sephardim were impressed with Ben-Gurion's charismatic and authoritative leadership, they nevertheless tended to support Herut, the major opposition party led by Menachem Begin, whose right-wing populism and ultranationalist, anti-Arab national security posture appealed to them. Paradoxically, the socialist-inspired social welfare system, a system built by Mapai and sustained by Labor and the Labor-dominated Histadrut, benefited the Sephardim particularly. In general, the Sephardim tended to support the right-wing Gahal/Likud blocs that for years had advocated a substantial modification of the welfare system so as to decrease its socialist emphasis. In terms of long-range electoral trends, the Sephardic position did not augur well for the Labor Zionist elite of the Labor Party.

Pressure for greater political representation and power has come from the younger, Israeli-born generation of both Ashkenazic and Sephardic origins. As a group, they were less obsessed with the past than their elders. The youth have been moving toward a strong, industrialized, capitalist, Western-style, middle-class society as the national norm. Although some younger right-wing ultranationalists and right-wing religious advocates continued to be imbued with the extremist nationalism and religious messianism of their elders--as shown, for example, by their support of parties favoring annexation of the occupied territories--most of the younger generation were more secular, pragmatic, and moderate on such issues.

The concerns of secular young people went beyond the question of "Who is a Jew"--which they continuously had to confront because of right-wing religious pressures--to such critical issues as the quality of education, social status, economic conditions, and the comforts of modern life. Their primary interests have been how to make Israel more secure from external threat and how to improve the quality of life for all. Nevertheless, for many Israelis, the founding ideologies remained a ritualized part of national politics.

Urbanization and industrialization were equally potent forces of change; their adulterating effect on Israel's founding ideology has been particularly significant. They have led to new demands, new opportunities, and new stresses in social and economic life affecting all social and political strata. The older commitment to agriculture, pioneering, and collectivism has crumbled before the relentless pressure of industrialization and the bridging of the gap between urban and rural life. Collective and communal settlements have become increasingly industrialized; factories and high-technology industries have been set up; the mass media have faciliated an influx of new information and ideas; and additional layers of bureaucratic and institutional arrangements have emerged. Kibbutz idealism, the pride of Israel, has declined, especially among increasingly individualistic and consumer-oriented young people. To stem this tide and to retain young members, kibbutz federations and individual kibbutzim have established many educational and vocational programs and activities.

As the 1970s began, the social base of Israeli politics had become highly complex, and political fluidity resulted. A major catalyst in creating a new mood was the October 1973 War, known in Israel as the Yom Kippur War, which dealt a crushing blow to popular belief in Israel's strength and preparedness in the face of its Arab adversaries. The result was a loss of confidence in the political and national security elite, headed at the time by Prime Minister Golda Meir, Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan, and Minister-without-Portfolio Israel Galilee. After the war, in which Egyptian and Syrian forces scored military gains, many charges and countercharges concerned inadequate military preparedness. Nevertheless, Meir's government returned to power in the country's parliamentary elections held on December 31, 1973. Apparently, despite widespread misgivings, many Israelis believed that continuity was preferable to change and uncertainty under Begin's newly formed and untried center-right Likud Bloc.

Meir's resignation from the prime ministership in April 1974 resulted in a succession crisis and the departure of the last of Labor's old guard party leaders, mostly in their late sixties and seventies, such as Meir, Pinchas Sapir, and Israel Galilee. Meir's departure triggered political infighting among the Labor elite, specifically between the former Mapai and Rafi (Israel Labor List--see Appendix B) factions; a new generation centered around the triumvirate of Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Yigal Allon, succeeded Meir.

The second most striking political development in the 1970s was the ascendance of a new right-wing counterelite in May 1977. An upset victory in the ninth parliamentary elections, called an "earthquake" by some, brought Begin's center-right Likud to power, ending Labor's half a century of political dominance. The new political elite won primarily because of the defection of former Labor leaders and previous Labor voters to the Democratic Movement for Change (DMC), which had been founded in 1976 by Yigal Yadin and several other groups. Despite the subsequent collapse of the DMC and the defection of moderates from the Likud-led cabinet--for example, former Minister of Defense Ezer Weizman formed his own list Yahad (Together--see Appendix B) in 1981 and Minister of Foreign Affairs Moshe Dayan created Telem--Likud's success in the tenth parliamentary elections of 1981 resulted from its continued ability to present itself as a viable governing group and a party dedicated to ultranationalism and territorial expansionism.

The top echelons of the Israeli political elite as of the late 1980s were still predominantly of European background; many of them had either immigrated to Palestine during the 1930s and the 1940s or had been born in the Yishuv to parents of East European or Central European origin. A growing number of Oriental politicians, however, were making their mark in the top ranks of all the major parties and at the ministerial and subministerial levels. A majority of the elite had a secular university education, while a minority had a more traditional religious education. The political elite was overwhelmingly urban--most resided in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, or Haifa. A minority, particularly the Sephardim, came from the newer development towns. Among the elite who resided in rural areas most, especially members of Labor and its satellites, represented communal kibbutzim and, to a lesser extent, moshavim.

By occupational category, professional party politicians constituted by far the largest single group, followed, in numerical order, by lawyers, kibbutz officials, educators, Histadrut or private sector corporate managers, journalists, ex-military officers, and, to a lesser degree, functionaries of religious institutions. Many of the elite were in the forty-to-mid-sixty age bracket. In 1988 the political elite numbered more than 200 individuals, excluding the broader social elite encompassing business, military, religious, educational, cultural, and agricultural figures. The number would be greater if senior officials in such key offices as the Office of the Prime Minister and the ministries of defense, foreign affairs, finance, and commerce, as well as the Histadrut and its industrial and financial enterprises and trade unions, were included.

The power of individual members of the elite varied depending on their personal reputation and their offices. The most influential were found in the cabinet. Members of the Knesset came next. Elected mayors of large municipalities such as Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa had considerable importance because of the influence of local politics on national-level politics. In addition, the president, Supreme Court justices, and the head of the Office of the State Comptroller had the prestige of cabinet members although they lacked decision-making responsibility.

During the late 1980s, the criteria for entrance into the top elite were more open and competitive than previously. Political parties, and, to some extent, the civil service, continued to be the principal vehicles for upward mobility. Under the country's electoral system of proportional representation, participation in party politics remained essential for gaining top positions, except in limited cases of co-optation from nonparty circles, principally the military. In earlier periods, party nominating committees primarily determined a politician's entry into a parliamentary delegation; in the 1980s, internal party elections increasingly governed this decision. This system placed a high premium on partisan loyalty, membership in a party faction, and individual competence.

The political establishment, whether in office or in opposition, secularist or Orthodox, left-wing or right-wing, has remained basically loyal to the state. Establishment interpretations of classical Zionist ideologies have varied according to the adherents' diverse backgrounds and political and religious orientations, but internal political cleavages have not undermined the essential unity of Israeli society and political institutions. Except for certain segments among a minority of extremist right-wing religious or secular ultranationalists, most Israeli citizens have sought to maintain democratic values and procedures; their differences have centered mainly on tactics rather than on the goal of realizing a modern, democratic, prosperous social welfare state.

Israel

Israel - MULTIPARTY SYSTEM

Political power in Israel has been contested within the framework of multiparty competition. Parliamentary elections are held every four years, and, unlike many parliamentary systems, the electorate votes as a single national constituency. Power has revolved around the system of government by coalition led by one of the two major parties, or in partnership among them. From the establishment of Mapai in 1930 until the 1977 Knesset elections, Labor (and its predecessor, Mapai) was the dominant party. Labor's defeat in the 1977 Knesset election, however, transformed the dominant party system into a multiparty system dominated by two major parties, Labor and Likud, in which neither was capable of governing except in alliance with smaller parties or, as in 1984 and 1988, in alliance with each other.

Since 1920, when the first Elected Assembly was held, no party has been able to command a simple majority in any parliamentary election. Israel has always had a pluralistic political culture featuring at least three major polarizing social and political tendencies: secular left-of-center, secular right-of-center, and religious right-of-center. No single tendency was dominant in the 1980s. Political fragmentation, as marked by the proliferation of parties, is a long-standing feature of Israeli society. For example, in the prestate period, between 1920 and 1944, from twelve to twenty-six party lists were represented in the Elected Assembly. In the first Knesset election in 1949, twenty-four political parties and groups competed. Since then the number has fluctuated as a result of occasional splits, realignments, and mergers. However, dominance by two major parties and a multiplicity of smaller parties remained deeply embedded in Israeli political culture (for details of individual political parties, see Appendix B).

In addition to political operations, party functions during the prestate period included "democratic integration," that is, the provision of social, economic, military, and cultural services for party members and supporters. During the postindependence period, party politics, in particular regarding competition between Labor and Likud and their respective allies, continued to be vigorous. Many analysts saw signs of a political crisis looming with the emergence of extremist minor parties and extraparliamentary protest movements (e.g., Kach and Gush Emunim). These groups challenged the traditional parties on such issues as the roles of the state and religion and the future territorial boundaries of the Jewish state.

Israel's major parties originated from the East European and Central European branches of the WZO, founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897, and from political and religious groups in the Mandate period. For example, a faction called the Democratic Zionists, including among its members Chaim Weizmann, Israel's first president, was active in 1900; Mizrahi (Spiritual Center), an Orthodox religious movement, was founded in 1902; and the non-Marxist Labor Zionist HaPoel HaTzair (The Young Worker), was established in 1905. Aaron David Gordon, the latter group's spiritual leader, was instrumental in founding the first kibbutz and moshav soon after the party's establishment. Moreover, in 1906 the Marxist Poalei Tziyyon (Workers of Zion--see Appendix B) was created to initiate a socialist-inspired class struggle in Palestine. Ber Borochov was its ideological mentor, and Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi were among its founding leaders. Vladimir Jabotinsky founded the right-wing Revisionist Party in 1925 to oppose what he considered the WZO executive's conciliatory policy toward the British mandatory government and toward the pace of overall Zionist settlement activity in Palestine.

These early, formative experiences in political activity produced three major alignments. All were Zionist, but they had varying shades of secularism and religious orthodoxy. Two of the alignments were secular but ideologically opposed. The first consisted of leftist or socialist labor parties of which Mapai, founded in 1930, was the dominant party. The second consisted of centrist-rightist parties; Herut (Freedom Movement--see Appendix B), founded in 1949, the Revisionist Party's successor and the present Likud's mainstay, dominated that alignment. Herut, which had become part of Likud, eventually won a mandate to govern in 1977 under Begin. The third major political alignment consisted of Orthodox religious Zionists. A fourth category of minor Zionist parties also emerged, traditionally allied with one of the two major alignments; non-Zionist communist Arab or nationalist Arab parties constituted the fifth grouping.

In the late 1980s, the stated values of Israeli political parties, including religious, communist, Arab nationalist, and mainstream parties, could not properly be placed on the left-right or liberal-conservative spectrum except, perhaps, on the issue of the future of the occupied territories. The positions advocated by Labor, Likud, Orthodox religious parties, and the constellation of smaller parties allied to them have varied greatly. On the extreme left, the most anti-Western element in Israeli politics was Rakah (New Communist List--see Appendix B), a Moscow-oriented group with a contingent of former Sephardic Black Panther activists that appealed to Palestinian Arab nationalist sentiment. Of the long-established minor parties, the moderate left-of-center Mapam (formally Mifleget Poalin Meuchedet, United Workers' Party--see Appendix B), which from 1969 to 1984 constituted a faction in the electoral alignment with Labor, the Citizens' Rights Movement, and Shinui (Change), were Labor's traditional satellites. Labor, in alignment with Mapam from 1969 until 1984, favored a negotiated settlement concerning the occupied territories involving the exchange of land for peace.

On the center-right of the political spectrum were Likud and its satellite parties, Tehiya, Tsomet, and Moledet. On the fringe right was Kach, which the Knesset outlawed in 1988 because of its racist platform that wished to expel all Arabs from the occupied territories. Likud, especially its Herut component, favored retaining much of the occupied territories to regain what it considered to be the ancient boundaries of Eretz Yisrael. The positions of the religious parties--the National Religious Party (NRP--see Appendix B), Agudat Israel, Shas (Sephardic Torah Guardians--see Appendix B), and Degel HaTorah (Torah Flag--see Appendix B)--generally coincided with the right-of-center parties, although the NRP trade-union component has continued its alliance with Labor in the Histadrut.

Israeli parties have engaged in many activities even in nonelection years. Indoctrination of young people has been important, although in the case of the Labor Party it had markedly lessened in the 1980s in comparison to the prestate period. Political parties retained much of their early character as mutual aid societies. Consequently, voters have tended to support the country's political parties as a civic duty. Membership in a registered party has not been a requirement for voting, but formal party membership was high and party members have accounted for 25 to 50 percent of the vote.

Except for small Arab and communist groups, Israeli political parties have been basically Zionist in their orientation. Given the shades of interpretation inherent in Zionism, parties drew their support from adherents who might be secular, religious, or antireligious, adherents of social welfare policies or free enterprise (the distinction was not always clear because Mapai/Labor in fact created Israel's capitalist economy), advocates of territorial compromise or territorial expansion. In general, attempts to organize parties on the basis of ethnic origin--for example, in the cases of Yemeni, Iraqi, or Moroccan Jews--had been unsuccessful until the early 1980s, when the Sephardi-based Tami (Traditional Movement of Israel--see Appendix B) and Shas were formed.

With the exception of religious parties, Israeli parties possessed national constituencies but also engaged in politics based on territorial subdivisions and local interests. Increasingly during the late 1980s, local party branches enjoyed greater independence in selecting local personalities in internal party nominations for mayoral, municipal council, Histadrut, and Knesset elections, as well as their own parties' central committees and conventions. This independence resulted in part from the growing tendency to vote on the basis of individual merit--mayoral elections, for example, reflected an emerging pattern of split-ticket voting--rather than traditional party loyalty. This trend, if sustained, is likely to lead to the decentralization of party control, if only to ensure that voters will support the same party in national as well as local elections.

<>Labor Party
<>Mapam
<>Citizens' Rights Movement (CRM)
<>Shinui
<>The Likud Bloc
<>Religious Parties
<>National Religious Party
<>Agudat Israel
<>Shas
<>Central Religious Camp
<>Gush Emunim
<>Arab Parties
<>Interest Groups

Israel

Israel - Labor Party

Until 1977 Mapai and the Labor Party dominated the political scene. Labor became Israel's dominant party as a result of its predecessors' effective and modernizing leadership during the formative prestate period (1917-48). The Labor Party resulted in 1968 from the merger of Mapai, Ahdut HaAvoda (Unity of Labor), and Rafi. In addition, shortly before the 1969 elections an electoral Alignment (Maarakh) occurred between Labor and the smaller Mapam Party. Although the two parties retained their organizational independence, they shared a common slate in elections to the Knesset, the Histadrut, and local government offices. The Alignment lasted until 1984.

Labor's political dominance broke down, particularly following the June 1967 War, when the party split over its leaders' inability to reach a consensus concerning the future of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Sinai Peninsula; there was agreement only on the need to retain the Golan Heights to ensure strategic depth against Syria. Later, the October 1973 War dealt a blow to public confidence in Labor from which its leadership was unable to recover. The war also exacerbated a number of crises confronting the party such as those concerning leadership succession. Although the party survived the Knesset elections of December 31, 1973, with a slightly reduced plurality, the war led to the resignation of Prime Minister Meir's government on April 10, 1974. The new leadership team of Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Yigal Allon, which assumed power in June 1974, proved unable to govern effectively or to resolve major issues such as the future of the occupied territories. Following its electoral defeat in the 1977 Knesset elections, the Labor Party provided the principal opposition to Likud in the elections of 1981, 1984, and 1988. In the 1988 Knesset elections, the Labor Party, despite its efforts to present a revived platform advocating territorial compromise, gained only thirty-nine seats, down from forty-four in 1984.

In 1988 the dominant personalities in Labor, in addition to Peres and Rabin, included former president Yitzhak Navon, former IDF Chief of Staff Moredechai Gur, and former Likud Defense Minister Ezer Weizman, who joined Labor in preparation for the 1984 elections. Labor's biggest problem in the 1980s has been the gradual decline in its electoral support among growing segments in the electorate, notably Orientals and the young.

Israel

Israel - Mapam

A moderate, left-of-center Labor Zionist party, Mapam has had representatives in the Knesset since the inception of the state; it won three seats in the November 1988 Knesset elections. Opposition to the formation of the unity government in September 1984 led Mapam to withdraw from its fifteen-year-long electoral alignment with Labor. The 1988 Knesset elections represented the first time in twenty years that Mapam had contested an election independently. Mapam's top leaders included the party's secretary general, Elazar Granot, and Knesset member Yair Tzaban.

Mapam has advocated a strong national security and defense posture, with many of its members playing leading roles in the IDF. At the same time, it has urged continuing peace initiatives and territorial compromise, and has opposed the permanent annexation of the territories occupied in the June 1967 War beyond minimal border changes designed to provide Israel with secure and defensible boundaries. Mapam has long believed in Jewish-Arab coexistence and friendship as a means of hastening peace between Israel, the Palestinians, and the Arab states.

Israel

Israel - Citizens' Rights Movement (CRM)

Founded in 1973 by Shulamit Aloni, a former Labor Party Knesset member, the CRM has played an active role in calling for strengthening civil rights in Israel, particularly regarding issues involving the boundaries between the state and religion, and in advocating a peace settlement with the Palestinians and the Arab states based on territorial compromise. In the 1988 Knesset elections, the party increased its representation to five seats, compared with three in 1984. The party has traditionally allied itself with Labor, although it has refused to join Labor in unity governments with Likud. The CRM received considerable support from the country's liberal community, and prominent among its leaders were Knesset members Yossi Sarid (formerly of the Labor Party); Ran Cohen, a high-ranking reservist in the IDF; and Mordechai Bar-On and Dudy Zucker, leaders of the Peace Now movement.

Israel

Israel - Shinui

Founded in 1977 by Amnon Rubenstein, a law professor at Tel Aviv University and a columnist for Ha'aretz, Shinui represented a large faction in the Democratic Movement for Change DMC. The DMC won fifteen seats and played a major role in toppling the Labor Party in the 1977 Knesset elections. Within less than three years, however, the DMC broke up over the issue of continued participation in the Likud government. During the next decade Shinui served as an ally of Labor and was a leading advocate for constitutional and electoral reform and greater flexibility on the Palestinian problem. In the November 1988 elections, Shinui's Knesset representation declined from three to two seats.

Israel

Israel - The Likud Bloc

In the ninth Knesset elections in May 1977, the center-right Likud alliance emerged victorious and replaced the previously dominant Labor alignment for the first time in the history of independent Israel. The Likud Bloc, founded in 1973, consisted of the Free Center, Herut (Tnuat HaHerut or Freedom Movement--see Appendix B), Laam (For the Nation--see Appendix B), and Gahal (Freedom-Liberal Bloc--see Appendix B). In large part, Likud was the direct ideological descendant of the Revisionist Party, established by Vladimir Jabotinsky in 1925.

The Revisionist Party, so named to underscore the urgency of revision in the policies of the WZO's Executive, advocated militancy and ultranationalism as the primary political imperatives of the Zionist struggle for Jewish statehood. The Revisionist Party demanded that the entire mandated territory of historical Palestine on both sides of the Jordan River, including Transjordan, immediately become a Jewish state with a Jewish majority. Revisionist objectives clashed with the policies of the British authorities, Labor Zionists, and Palestinian Arabs. The Revisionist Party, in which Menachem Begin played a major role, contended that the British must permit unlimited Jewish immigration into Palestine and demanded that the Jewish Legion be reestablished and that Jewish youths be trained for defense.

The Revisionist Party also attacked the Histadrut, whose Labor Zionist leadership under Ben-Gurion was synonymous with the leadership of the politically dominant Mapai. Ben-Gurion accused the revisionists of being "fascists"; the latter countercharged that the policies being pursued by Ben-Gurion and his Labor Zionist allies, including Chaim Weizmann, were so conciliatory toward the British authorities and Palestinian Arabs and so gradual in terms of state-building as to be self-defeating.

In 1933 the Revisionist Party seceded from the WZO and formed the rival New Zionist Organization. After 1936 the revisionists rejected British and official Zionist policies of restraint in the face of Arab attacks, and they formed two anti-British and anti-Arab guerrilla groups. One, the Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization, Irgun for short) was formed in 1937; an offshoot of the Irgun, the Stern Gang also known as Lehi (from Lohamei Herut Israel, Fighters for Israel's Freedom), was formed in 1940. These revisionist paramilitary groups operated independently of, and at times in conflict with, the official Zionist defense organization, the Haganah; they engaged in systematic terror and sabotage against the British authorities and the Arabs.

After independence Prime Minister Ben-Gurion dissolved the Irgun and other paramilitary organizations such as Lehi and the Palmach. In 1948 remnants of the dissolved Irgun created Herut.

In the mid-1960s, Herut took steps to broaden its political base and attain greater legitimacy. In 1963 it established the Blue-White (Tkhelet-Lavan) faction to contest the previously boycotted Histadrut elections. In 1965 Herut and the Liberal Party formed Gahal (Gush Herut-Liberalim), a parliamentary and electoral bloc, to contest both Knesset and Histadrut elections. The final step in gaining greater political legitimacy occurred just before the outbreak of the June 1967 War, when Begin and his Gahal associates agreed to join the government to demonstrate internal Israeli unity in response to an external threat.

Gahal continued as part of the Meir cabinet formed after the 1969 elections. Gahal ministers withdrew from the cabinet in 1970 to protest what they believed to be Prime Minister Meir's conciliatory policy on territorial issues. In the summer of 1973, Gahal organized the Likud alignment in which Herut continued to be preeminent.

In the November 1988 elections, Likud lost one Knesset seat. Nevertheless, observers believed that demographic indicators favored continued support for Likud and its right-wing allies among young people and Orientals.

The most prominent leaders of Likud in 1988, as in previous years, were members of its Herut faction. They included Prime Minister Shamir; Minister of Foreign Affairs Moshe Arens, a likely successor to Shamir as leader of Herut; Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Housing David Levi, the chief Sephardic political figure; Minister of Commerce and Industry Ariel Sharon; and Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Benjamin Netanyahu.

Israel

Israel - Religious Parties

Israel's religious parties were originally organized not to seize the reins of power, but rather to engage in what American scholar Norman L. Zucker has called "theopolitics"--to gain theological ends by means of political activity. From the Orthodox viewpoint, Israel remained an imperfect state as long as secular rather than religiously observant Jews constituted a majority. As of 1988, policy issues concerning religious parties included the question of "Who is a Jew," maintaining Orthodox rabbinical control over marriage and divorce, increasing sabbath observance, observing kosher dietary regulations, maintaining and expanding the state religious education systems, ensuring the exemption of religious women and ultra-Orthodox men from military service, and such social issues as abortion.

Despite the minority position of adherents of Orthodox Judaism, several factors have enabled this religious bloc to maintain a central role in the state. Such factors have included the links between Judaism and Israeli nationalism; the political and organizational power of the religious parties--particularly the NRP and later Agudat Israel and Shas--in assuming a pivotal role in the formation and maintenance of coalition governments; and the inability of the Reform and Conservative Jewish religious movements, although powerful in the Jewish Diaspora, to penetrate effectively Israel's religious administrative apparatus. This apparatus consisted particularly of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, the Chief Rabbinate, the Chief Rabbinical Council, and local religious councils. The Reform and Conservative movements played a minor role in Zionism during the prestate period and thus allowed the Orthodox to dominate religious activities in the new state. Among the Orthodox there were varying forms of religious observance in accordance with halakah. The main division was between the ultra-Orthodox, who rejected Zionism and were associated with Agudat Israel and Shas, and the modern Orthodox, who attempted to reconcile Zionism and religious orthodoxy and were associated with the NRP.

Taken together, Israel's religious parties have over the years generally commanded from fifteen to eighteen seats in the Knesset, or about 12 to 15 percent of the Knesset. On occasion they have formed religious coalitions of their own, such as the United Religious Front and the Torah Religious Front. The voter strength of the religious parties, particularly the NRP, made them ideal coalition partners for the two major blocs. Because neither bloc has ever been able to achieve a majority in the Knesset, the potentially pivotal position of the religious parties has given them disproportionate political power. One of the greatest shocks of the 1988 Knesset elections was the surprising increase in strength of the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox parties, which went from thirteen to eighteen Knesset seats.

Israel

Israel - National Religious Party

The National Religious Party, Israel's largest religious party, resulted in 1956 from the merger of its two historical antecedents, Mizrahi (Spiritual Center) and HaPoel HaMizrahi (Spiritual Center Worker). The NRP (as Mizrahi prior to 1956) has participated in every coalition government since independence. Invariably the Ministry of Religious Affairs, as well as the Ministry of Interior, have been headed by Knesset members nominated by this party.

Although the NRP increased from four to five Knesset seats in the 1988 elections, it had not fully recovered from major political and electoral setbacks suffered in the 1981 and 1984 elections. In those elections, much of its previous electoral support shifted to right-wing religio-nationalist parties. As a sign of its attempted recovery, in July 1986 the NRP held its first party convention since 1973. The long interval separating the two conventions was caused by factional struggles between the younger and the veteran leadership groups. In the 1986 convention, the NRP's second generation of leaders, members of the Youth Faction, officially took over the party's institutions and executive bodies. The new NRP leader was Knesset member Zevulun Hammer, former minister of education and culture in the Likud cabinet (1977-84) and secretary general of the party (1984-86). In 1986 Hammer succeeded long-time member Yosef Burg as minister of religious affairs in the National Unity Government. Hammer and Yehuda Ben-Meir, coleader of the Youth Faction until 1984, were among the founders of Gush Emunim in 1974. Both leaders somewhat moderated their views on national security, territorial, and settlement issues following Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, but the NRP's declining political and electoral position and the increasing radicalization of its religiously based constituency led to a reversal in Hammer's views. As a result, in the 1986 party convention the Youth Faction helped incorporate into the NRP the religio-nationalist Morasha (Heritage), which was led by Rabbi Chaim Druckman and held two seats in the Knesset. In return, Rabbi Yitzhak Levi, the third candidate on the Morasha Knesset list, became the NRP's new secretary general. Moroccan-born Levi has been a fervent supporter of Gush Emunim and an advocate of incorporating the West Bank and the Gaza Strip into a greater Israel.

Until the 1986 party convention, the dominant faction in the NRP was LaMifneh (To the Turning Point). The center-most faction, LaMifneh advocated greater pragmatism and ideological pluralism. Burg, a Knesset member since 1949, who had held a variety of cabinet portfolios including interior (1974-84) and religious affairs (1982-86), led LaMifneh. Burg and Rafael Ben-Natan, former party organization strongman, were responsible for maintaining the "historical partnership" with the Labor Party that officially ended in 1977, but continued in some municipal councils and in the Histadrut.

In the 1988 internal party elections, the NRP took a number of steps to regain the support of segments of the Oriental Orthodox electorate that were lost to Tami in 1981 and, to a lesser extent, to Shas in 1988. The party also sought to regain the support of right-wing religious ultranationalists. In the internal party elections the NRP nominated Moroccan-born Avner Sciaki for the top spot on its Knesset list, Zevulun Hammer for the second position, and Hanan Porat, a leader of Gush Emunim and formerly of Tehiya, in the third spot. As a result of these steps, the NRP attained greater ideological homogeneity and competed with Tehiya and Kach for the electoral support of the right-wing ultranationalist religious community.

Israel

Israel - Agudat Israel

During the prestate period, Agudat Israel, founded in 1912, opposed both the ideology of Zionism and its political expression, the World Zionist Organization. It rejected any cooperation with non-Orthodox Jewish groups and considered Zionism profane in that it forced the hand of the Almighty in bringing about the redemption of the Jewish people. A theocratic and clericalist party, Agudat Israel has exhibited intense factionalism and religious extremism. From 1955 to 1961 Agudat Israel formed a part of the Torah Religious Front. Traditionally, the party's Knesset delegation has consisted only of Ashkenazi factions, although ultra-Orthodox Orientals also provided it considerable electoral support.

In preparation for the 1984 Knesset elections, grievances over a lack of representation in party institutions caused Orientals to defect and establish Shas. As a result, Agudat Israel's Knesset representation declined from four to two seats. In the 1988 Knesset elections, as part of an ultra-Orthodox electoral upswing, the Shas Knesset delegation increased from two to six seats.

The Council of Torah Sages, a panel of rabbis to which both religious and secular decisions had to be referred, contained representatives of each faction in Agudat Israel. The main factions represented two Hasidic (ultra-Orthodox) courts: the court of the Rabbi of Gur, which dominated the party and the Council of Torah Sages; and the court of Rabbi Eliezer Shakh.

Agudat Israel engaged in ultra-Orthodox educational and social welfare activities, as well as in immigrant absorption. It usually took the lead in initiating legislation on religious issues. The party has obtained exemptions from military service for its adherents.

Israel

Israel - Shas

Shas resulted in 1984 from allegations of Agudat Israel's inadequate representation of ultra-Orthodox Sephardim in the Council of Torah Sages, the party organization, and educational and social welfare institutions. The leader of Shas was Rabbi Yitzhak Peretz, who served as minister of interior in the National Unity Government until his protest resignation in 1987. As a theocratic party, Shas depended heavily for policy direction on its patrons, former Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yoseph, and Rabbi Eliezer Shakh, former Ashkenazi head of the Agudat Israel-dominated Council of Torah Sages. Rabbi Shakh sanctioned the formation of Shas and its division into separate Sephardi and Ashkenazi factions. In the negotiations to form the National Unity Government in 1984, Shas outmaneuvered the NRP and gained the Ministry of Interior portfolio. As minister of interior, Rabbi Peretz became a source of controversy as a result of his promoting religious fundamentalism in general and the narrow partisan interests of Shas in particular.

Unlike Agudat Israel, Shas saw no contradiction between its religious beliefs and Zionism. It was far more anti-Arab than Agudat Israel and sought increased representation for its adherents in all government bodies, in Zionist institutions, and in the Jewish Agency. Despite its ethnic homogeneity, Shas was not immune from bitter infighting over the spoils of office, as shown by the rivalry between factions led by Rabbi Peretz and Rabbi Arieh Dari, leader of the party's apparatus, who remained director general of the Ministry of Interior until the National Unity Government's term ended in 1988. Shas gained four Knesset seats in the 1984 elections and increased the size of its delegation to six in 1988. In late 1988, it actually held eight Knesset seats when combined with the two seats gained by Degel HaTorah, a Shas Ashkenazi faction formed in 1988.

Israel

Israel - Central Religious Camp

In 1988 Rabbi Yehuda Amital of Jerusalem formed a new moderate religious party, the Central Religious Camp, in an attempt to counteract the growing popularity of right-wing ultranationalist religious parties. Rabbi Tovah Lichtenstein had the second position on the party's Knesset list. The party failed, however, to gain the minimum 1 percent of votes required for Knesset representation.

Right-Wing Ultranationalist Parties

Tehiya (Renaissance--see Appendix B), an ultranationalist party, arose in 1979 in reaction to NRP and Likud support for the 1978 Camp David Accords and the 1979 Treaty of Peace Between Egypt and Israel. The party consisted of religious and secular leaders and activists of Gush Emunim and the Land of Israel Movement. The leaders and parliamentary representatives of Tehiya were Yuval Neeman, party chairman and former minister of science and technology in the Likud-led cabinet (1981-84); Geula Cohen, formerly of Herut; Rabbi Eliezer Waldman, head of the Kiryat Arba Yeshiva; Gershon Shafet; and Kiryat Arba's ultranationalist attorney Eliakim Haetzni. Former IDF Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan ranked among the party's leaders until 1984, when he left to form his own list, Tsomet. Tehiya's platform advocated the eventual imposition of Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the transfer of the Palestinian inhabitants of these territories to Arab countries. In the 1984 elections, Tehiya gained five Knesset seats, an increase of two from 1981. In 1988, however, Tehiya lost two seats to the newly formed Tsomet and Moledet parties.

Tsomet (Crossroads) was an extreme right-wing ultranationalist party founded in 1984 by Eitan. It gained two seats in the 1988 Knesset elections.

Moledet (Homeland) ran in 1988 on an extremist platform advocating the forcible "transfer" of Palestinian Arabs from the West Bank to Arab states. Led by retired IDF General Rehavam (Ghandi) Zeevi, the party won two seats in the 1988 Knesset elections.

Kach (Thus), another ultranationalist party, came into being around Rabbi Meir Kahane, an American-born right-wing Orthodox extremist. Characterized as an internal dictatorship under Kahane, Kach has advocated the forcible expulsion of Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories, followed by the imposition of Israeli sovereignty there. A number of second-echelon party leaders have been implicated in Kach-supported terrorist activities. A terrorist attack on a bus carrying Arab passengers on Mount Hebron, near the town of Hebron, caused the imprisonment of Yehuda Richter, in second place on the Kach Knesset list. Avner Ozen, number four on Kach's 1984 list, was also imprisoned on terrorist charges. To counteract Kach's inflammatory political activities, in 1988 Likud and the Citizens' Rights Movement succeeded in passing a Basic Law empowering the Central Elections Board to prohibit a party advocating racism from contesting parliamentary elections in Israel and Kach was outlawed from participating in the November 1988 elections. Kach, largely funded by American supporters, had gained one seat in the 1984 elections after several earlier unsuccessful attempts to enter the Knesset.

Israel

Israel - Gush Emunim

Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), a right-wing ultranationalist, religio-political revitalization movement, was formed in March 1974 in the aftermath of the October 1973 War. The younger generation of NRP leaders who constituted the party's new religious elite created Gush Emunim. Official links between Gush Emunim and the Youth Faction of the National Religious Party were severed following the NRP's participation in the June 1974 Labor-led coalition government, but close unofficial links between the two groups continued. Gush Emunim also maintained links to Tehiya and factions in the Herut wing of Likud.

The major activity of Gush Emunim has been to initiate Jewish settlements in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. From 1977 to 1984, Likud permitted the launching of a number of Jewish settlements beyond the borders of the Green Line. The Likud regime gave Gush Emunim the active support of government departments, the army, and the WZO, which recognized it as an official settlement movement and allocated it considerable funds for settlement activities.

A thirteen-member secretariat has governed Gush Emunim. A special conference elected nine of the group's secretaries and co-opted the other four from the leadership ranks of its affiliated organizations. Four persons have managed the movement's day-to-day affairs: Rabbi Moshe Levinger, a founder of Gush Emunim and the leader of the Jewish town of Kiryat Arba, near Hebron, on the West Bank; Hanan Porat, a founder of the organization and a former Tehiya Knesset member who later rejoined the NRP; Uri Elitzur, secretary general of Amana, Gush Emunim's settlement movement; and Yitzhak Armoni, secretary general of Gush Emunim since September 1988. From 1984 to August 1988, American-born Daniella Weiss served as Gush Emunim's secretary general.

Amana was Gush Emunim's settlement arm. The Council of Settlements in Judea and Samaria (Yesha), chaired by Israel Harel, was the political organization representing the majority of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. There were more than eighty such settlements, including those affiliated with nonreligious parties. Yesha dealt primarily with practical matters, such as the utilization of land and water, relations with Israeli military authorities and, if necessary, mobilizing political pressure on the government. Yesha has created affiliations between Gush Emunim settlements and Labor, the NRP, and Herut's Betar youth movement. Two factors shape Yesha, a democratically elected political organization: the right-wing and ultranationalist views of its members and its political dependency on external bodies such as government agencies. The group had five councils in Israel proper and six regional councils in the occupied territories.

Israel

Israel - Arab Parties

Israel's approximately 781,350 Arabs, constituting about 17.8 percent of the population, articulated their views through elected officials on the municipal and national levels and through the Arab departments within governmental ministries and nongovernmental institutions such as the Histadrut. In the past, most elected Arab officials traditionally affiliated with the Labor Party and its predecessors, which expected--erroneously as time has proved--that Israeli Arabs would serve as a "bridge" in creating peace among Israeli Jews, the Palestinians, and the Arab world. Beginning in the mid-1970s and throughout the 1980s, increasing numbers of Arab voters, especially younger ones, asserted themselves through organizations calling for greater protection of minority rights and the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Generally, Israeli Arabs remained attached to their religious, cultural, and political values, but their ethnic homogeneity has not necessarily resulted in political cohesion. Internal fissures among Christians, Sunni Muslims, and Druzes, Negev beduins and Galilee Arabs, and communist and noncommunist factions have made it difficult for them to act as a single pressure group in dealing with Israel's Jewish majority.

In 1988, despite their natural sympathy for the year-long uprising by their fellow Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Israeli Arabs continued to be active participants in the Israeli electoral system. They increased their share in the total 1988 Knesset vote to more than 10 percent of the electorate, and the voting percentage among those eligible to participate was approximately 74 percent, as compared to 80 percent for Jewish voters. Israeli Arabs increased their voting support for Arab lists from 50 percent in 1984 to 60 percent in 1988.

As of 1988, Rakah (New Communist List), a predominantly Arab communist party, continued to adhere to the official Soviet line, yet explicitly recognized Israel's right to exist within its pre-1967 borders. Rakah succeeded Poalei Tziyyon, part of which split off in 1921 and became the Communist Party of Palestine. In 1948 it became the Communist Party of Israel Miflaga Komunisfit Yisraelit, known as Maki, and in 1965 it split into two factions: Rakah with mainly Arab membership, and Maki, with mainly Jewish membership. In 1977 Maki and several other groups created Shelli (acronym for Peace for Israel and Equality for Israel), which disbanded before the 1984 elections. In the November 1988 elections, Rakah maintained its relatively constant share of 40 percent of the total Arab vote and four Knesset seats. In 1988 the party's secretary general was Meir Viler, a veteran Israeli communist.

Within the Israeli Arab community, Rakah's strongest challenges came from two more radical parties, the Palestinian nationalist Sons of the Village, which had no Knesset seats, and the Progressive National Movement. The Progressive National Movement, also known as the Progressive List for Peace, came into being in 1984. Its platform advocated recognition of the PLO and the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In the November 1988 elections, the party, led by Muhammad Muari, received about 15 percent of the Arab vote; its Knesset delegation declined to one from the 1984 level of two.

The Arab Democratic Party, founded in early 1988 by Abdul Wahab Daroushe, a former Labor Party Knesset member, gained about 12 percent of the total Arab vote and one seat in the November 1988 Knesset elections. In a March 1988 interview, Daroushe acknowledged that his resignation from the Labor Party resulted from the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the "diminishing choices" open to Israeli Arab politicians affiliated with the government and yet tied to the Arab community by a sense of shared ethnic identity. Echoing the sentiments of other Israeli Arabs, Daroushe has stated that "The PLO is the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinians" living outside Israel's pre-1967 borders.

Israel

Israel - Interest Groups

Major interest groups in Israel influencing the formulation of public policy have included the politically powerful Histadrut, the kibbutzim, and the moshavim, all of which were affiliated with or represented in most of the political parties. Reportedly, one of the main reasons for Labor to join the National Unity Government in 1988 was the opportunity for Peres, as minister of finance and chairman of the Knesset's Finance Committee, to bail out the Histadrut, the kibbutzim, and the moshavim, which were billions of dollars in debt.

As of the late 1980s, other economically oriented interest groups included employer organizations and artisan and retail merchant associations. In addition, there were major groups concerned with promoting civil rights, such as the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and the Association for Beduin Rights in Israel. Numbered among groups concerned with political issues such as the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, were movements such as Peace Now and Gush Emunim.

Furthermore, Diaspora Jewry might be considered, in the words of Canadian scholar Michael Brecher, an externally based foreign policy interest group. In the late 1980s, Diaspora Jewry, and especially American Jewry, had become increasingly critical of Israeli government policy, particularly over the handling of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and issues concerning religion and the state.

Israel

Israel - CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS

The supremacy of civilian authorities over the military has rarely been challenged in Israel's history. The Lavon affair of 1954 remains the major exception. Factors weighing against military interference have included the prohibition on active officers engaging in politics and the population's broad support for the nonpartisan behavior of the armed forces. Given the ever-present external threat to Israeli security, however, the military looms large in everyday life. This has led some foreign observers to call Israel a "garrison democracy." The military has also served as a channel into politics, with political activity providing a "second career" for retired or reservist officers after they complete their military careers, usually between the ages of forty and fifty. This phenomenon has left its mark on Israeli politics as high-ranking retired or reservist IDF figures have often "parachuted" into the leadership ranks of political parties and public institutions.

The most frequent instances of this tendency have occurred during the demobilization of officers in postwar periods, for example, following the 1948, 1967, and 1973 wars. Until the June 1967 War, the great majority of reservist or retired officers joined Labor's ranks. In the 1950s, the first generation of such officers included Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon, Yigal Yadin, Israel Galilee, and Chaim Herzog. After 1967, the number of such officers co-opted into the political elite rose sharply, with many for the first time joining center-right parties. Among those joining the Labor Party were Yitzhak Rabin, Haim Bar-Lev (bar, son of), Aharon Yariv, and Meir Amit. Ezer Weizman, Ariel (Arik) Sharon, Mordechai Zipori, and Shlomo Lahat joined Likud. Despite their widespread participation in politics, these exmilitary officers have not formed a distinct pressure group. The armed forces have generally remained shielded from partisan politics. The only possible exception was the IDF's military action in Lebanon in June 1982, which disregarded the cabinet's decision on the limits of the advance. The invasion occurred while Ariel Sharon was minister of defense (1981-83) and Rafael Eitan was chief of staff (1979-83); both individuals had stressed the independent policy role of the IDF.

Israel

Israel - FOREIGN RELATIONS

The cabinet, and particularly the inner cabinet, consisting of the prime minister, minister of foreign affairs, minister of defense, and other selected ministers, are responsible for formulating Israel's major foreign policy decisions. Within the inner cabinet, the prime minister customarily plays the major role in foreign policy decision making, with policies implemented by the minister of foreign affairs. Other officials at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs include, in order of their rank, the director general, assistant directors general, legal and political advisers, heads of departments, and heads of missions or ambassadors. While the director general may initiate and decide an issue, commit the ministry by making public statements, and respond directly to queries from ambassadors, assistant directors general supervise the implementation of policy. Legal and political advisers have consultative, not operational, roles. Heads of departments serve as aides to assistant directors general, administer the ministry's departments, and maintain routine contact with envoys. The influence of ambassadors depends on their status within the diplomatic service and the importance to the ministry's policy makers of the nation to which they are accredited.

In the Knesset, the Foreign Affairs and Security Committee, with twenty-six members, although prestigious, is not as independent as the foreign affairs committees of the United States Congress. Its role, according to Samuel Sager, an Israeli Knesset official, is not to initiate new policies, but to "legitimize Government policy choices on controversial issues." Members of the committee frequently complain that they do not receive detailed information during briefings by government officials; government spokesmen reply that committee members tend to leak briefing reports to the media.

Israeli foreign policy is chiefly influenced by Israel's strategic situation, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the rejection of Israel by most of the Arab states. The goals of Israeli policy are therefore to overcome diplomatic isolation and to achieve recognition and friendly relations with as many nations as possible, both in the Middle East and beyond. Like many other states, throughout its history Israel has simultaneously practiced open and secret diplomacy to further its main national goals. For example, it has engaged in military procurement, the export of arms and military assistance, intelligence cooperation with its allies, commercial trade, the importation of strategic raw materials, and prisoner-of-war exchanges and other arrangements for hostage releases. It has also sought to foster increased Jewish immigration to Israel and to protect vulnerable Jewish communities in the Diaspora.

Foreign Relations with ...
<>Middle Eastern States
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Israel

Israel - Relations with Middle Eastern States

Despite the Arab-Israeli conflict, Israel has established formal diplomatic relations with Egypt and maintained a de facto peaceful relationship with Jordan. Israeli leaders have traveled to Morocco to discuss Israeli-Arab issues, and Morocco has often served as an intermediary between Israel and the other Arab states. In 1983 Israel signed a peace treaty with Lebanon, although it was quickly abrogated by the Lebanese as a result of Syrian pressure. Some secret diplomatic contacts may also have occurred between Israel and Tunisia.

Egypt

In late 1988, about ten years after the signing of the Camp David Accords and the Treaty of Peace Between Egypt and Israel, a "cool" peace characterized Egyptian-Israeli relations. These relations had originally been envisioned as leading to a reconciliation between Israel and the Arab states, but this development has not occurred. EgyptianIsraeli relations have been restrained by a number of developments, including the June 1981 Israeli bombing of an Iraqi nuclear reactor, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon directed against Palestinian forces a year later, the establishment of an increasing number of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and the "watering down" of proposals for the autonomy of the Palestinian inhabitants of these territories as envisaged by the Camp David Accords and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.

Relations between the two countries warmed somewhat during Peres's tenure as prime minister and minister of foreign affairs in the National Unity Government. They again cooled, however, following the establishment of the Likud-led cabinet in December 1988, and prime minister Shamir's rejection of Israeli participation in an international peace conference with the PLO. Nevertheless, the two countries continued to maintain full diplomatic relations, and in 1985 about 60,000 Israeli tourists visited Egypt, although Egyptian tourism to Israel was much smaller. Cooperation occurred in the academic and scientific areas as well as in a number of joint projects in agriculture, marine science, and disease control.

Another issue that had impeded normal relations between Egypt and Israel concerned the disposition of Taba, an approximately 100- hectare border enclave and tourist area on the Gulf of Aqaba in the Sinai Peninsula claimed by the two countries, but occupied by Israel. Following a September 1988 ruling in Egypt's favor by an international arbitration panel, official delegations from Israel and Egypt met to implement the arbitral award.

Jordan

Secret or "discreet" contacts between the leaders of the Yishuv and later of Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan or Jordan began in the early days of the British Mandate and continued into the late 1980s. These covert contacts were initiated with King Abdullah, the grandfather of King Hussein, Jordan's present ruler. Some observers have speculated that, together with Jordan's annexation of the West Bank in 1950, these contacts may have been responsible for Abdullah's assassination by a Palestinian gunman in East Jerusalem in July 1951. According to Israeli journalists Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv, Hussein renewed Jordan's ties with Israel in 1963. Following Jordan's ill-fated participation in the June 1967 War, secret meetings took place between Hussein and Israeli leaders in 1968, and they lasted until Begin's accession to power in 1977. This "secret" relationship was revived in 1984, following Labor's participation in the National Unity Government, and intensified in 1986-87. The participants reached agreements on Israeli-Jordanian cooperation on such issues as the role of pro-Jordanian Palestinian moderates in the peace process, setting up branches of Jordan's Cairo-Amman Bank in the West Bank, and generally increasing Amman's influence and involvement in the West Bank's financial, agricultural, education, and health affairs, thus blocking the PLO. The last reported meeting between Minister of Foreign Affairs Peres and King Hussein took place in London in November 1987, when the two leaders signed a "memorandum of understanding" on a peace plan. Upon his return to Israel, however, Peres was unable to win support for the agreement in the Israeli cabinet.

Morocco

Morocco has been noted for its generally good relations with its own Jewish community, which in 1988 numbered approximately 18,000; in 1948 there had been about 250,000 Jews in Morocco. Over the years discreet meetings have occurred between Moroccan and Israeli leaders. Beginning in 1976, King Hassan II began to mediate between Arab and Israeli leaders. Then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin reportedly made a secret visit to Morocco in 1976, leading to a September 1977 secret meeting between King Hassan and Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan. King Hassan also played a role in the Egyptian-Israeli contacts that led to the 1978 Camp David Accords. In July 1978, and again in March 1981, Peres, as opposition leader, made secret trips to Morocco. In May 1984, thirty-five prominent Israelis of Moroccan origin attended a conference in Rabat. This meeting was followed by an official visit in May 1985 by Avraham Katz-Oz, Israel's deputy minister of agriculture, to discuss possible agricultural cooperation between the two countries. In August 1986, Moroccan agricultural specialists and journalists reportedly visited Israel, and Haim Corfu, Israel's minister of transport, attended a transportation conference in Morocco. On July 22 and 23, 1986, Prime Minister Peres met King Hassan at the king's palace in Ifrane. This was the first instance of a public meeting between an Arab leader and an Israeli prime minister since the Egyptian-Israeli meetings of the late 1970s. Hassan and Peres, however, were unable to agree on ways to resolve the Palestinian dimension of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Iran

Until the overthrow of the shah's regime in 1979, Israel and Iran had established government missions in both countries although this relationship was never formalized by an exchange of ambassadors. Under the shah, from 1953 to 1979, Iran was one of Israel's primary suppliers of oil and a major commercial partner. In addition, the intelligence services of the two countries cooperated closely, and Israel exported military hardware and provided training and other assistance to Iranian military forces. These close, but discreet, relations were abruptly terminated in 1979, upon the coming to power of the regime of Ayatollah Sayyid Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini and Iran's joining of the anti-Israel camp. Shortly thereafter, Iran called for the "eradication" of the State of Israel through armed struggle and its replacement by a Palestinian state. As a symbolic gesture, the PLO was given the building of the former Israeli mission in Tehran.

In the 1980s, however, Israeli concern about the fate of the approximately 30,000 Jews remaining in Iran, interest in assisting Iran in its war with Iraq, and cooperation with the United States in its efforts to free American hostages held by Iranian-backed Shia extremists in Lebanon, led to a renewal of contacts between Israeli and Iranian leaders and shipments of Israeli arms to Tehran. Israel reportedly sent arms to Iran in exchange for Iran's allowing thousands of Jews to leave the country.

Israel

Israel - Relations with the United States

For strategic security and diplomatic support, Israel has depended almost totally upon the United States. Since the establishment of the state in 1948, the United States has expressed its commitment to Israel's security and well-being and has devoted a considerable share of its world-wide economic and security assistance to Israel. Large-scale American military and economic assistance began during the October 1973 War, with a massive American airlift of vital military mat�riel to Israel at the height of the war. From 1948 through 1985, the United States provided Israel with US$10 billion in economic assistance and US$21 billion in military assistance, 60 percent of which was in the form of grants. From 1986 through 1988, total United States economic and military assistance to Israel averaged more than US$3 billion a year, making Israel the largest recipient of United States aid. Of the annual total, about US$1.8 billion was in Foreign Military Sales credits, and about US$1.2 billion was in economic assistance.

During the administration of President Ronald Reagan, the United States-Israeli relationship was significantly upgraded, with Israel becoming a strategic partner and de facto ally. A number of bilateral arrangements solidified this special relationship. In November 1983, the United States and Israel established a Joint Political-Military Group to coordinate military exercises and security planning between the two countries, as well as to position United States military equipment in Israel for use by American forces in the event of a crisis. In 1984 Israel and the United States concluded the United States-Israel Free Trade Area Agreement to provide tariff-free access to American and Israeli goods. In 1985 the two countries established a Joint Economic Development Group to help Israel solve its economic problems; in 1986 they created a Joint Security Assistance Group to discuss aid issues. Also in 1986, Israel began participating in research and development programs relating to the United States Strategic Defense Initiative. In January 1987, the United States designated Israel a major non-NATO ally, with status similar to that of Australia and Japan. Two months later, Israel agreed to the construction of a Voice of America relay transmitter on its soil to broadcast programs to the Soviet Union. In December 1987, Israel signed a memorandum of understanding allowing it to bid on United States defense contracts on the same basis as NATO countries. Finally, the two countries signed a memorandum of agreement in April 1988 formalizing existing arrangements for mutually beneficial United States-Israel technology transfers.

Israel has also cooperated with the United States on a number of clandestine operations. It acted as a secret channel for United States arms sales to Iran in 1985 and 1986, and during the same period it cooperated with the United States in Central America.

The United States-Israeli relationship, however, has not been free of friction. The United States expressed indignation with Israel over an espionage operation involving Jonathan Jay Pollard, a United States Navy employee who was sentenced to life imprisonment for selling hundreds of vital intelligence documents to Israel. During the affair, Israeli government and diplomatic personnel in Washington served as Pollard's control officers. Nevertheless, United States government agencies continued to maintain a close relationship with Israel in sensitive areas such as military cooperation, intelligence sharing, and joint weapons research.

The main area of friction between the United States and Israel has concerned Washington's efforts to balance its special ties to Jerusalem with its overall Middle Eastern interests and the need to negotiate an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict, in which the United States has played a major mediating role. In 1948 the United States hoped that peace could be achieved between Israel and the Arab states, but this expectation was quickly dashed when Arab nations refused to recognize Israel's independence. American hopes were dashed again when in 1951 Jordan's King Abdullah, with whom some form of settlement seemed possible, was assassinated and in 1953 when the Johnston Plan, a proposal for neighboring states to share the water of the Jordan River, was rejected.

The June 1967 War provided a major opportunity for the United States to serve as a mediator in the conflict; working with Israel and the Arab states the United States persuaded the United Nations (UN) Security Council to pass Resolution 242 of November 22, 1967. The resolution was designed to serve as the basis for a peace settlement involving an Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in the June 1967 War in exchange for peace and Arab recognition of Israel's right to exist. Many disputes over the correct interpretation of a clause concerning an Israeli withdrawal followed the passage of the UN resolution, which was accepted by Israel. The resolution lacked any explicit provision for direct negotiations between the parties. Although the Arab states and the Palestinians did not accept the resolution, it has remained the basis of United States policy regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In December 1969, the Rogers Plan, named after United States Secretary of State William P. Rogers, although unsuccessful in producing peace negotiations, succeeded in ending the War of Attrition between Israel and Egypt that followed the June 1967 War and established a cease-fire along the Suez Canal. In 1971 United States Assistant Secretary of State Joseph P. Sisco proposed an "interim Suez Canal agreement" to bring about a limited Israeli withdrawal from the canal, hoping that such an action would lead to a peace settlement. The proposal failed when neither Israel nor Egypt would agree to the other's conditions.

In October 1973, at the height of the Arab-Israeli war, United States-Soviet negotiations paved the way for UN Security Council Resolution 338. In addition to calling for an immediate cease-fire and opening negotiations aimed at implementing Resolution 242, this resolution inserted a requirement that future talk be conducted "between the parties concerned," that is, between the Arab and the Israelis themselves.

In September 1975, United States secretary of state Henry Kissinger's "shuttle diplomacy" achieved the Second Sinai Disengagement Agreement between Israel and Egypt, laying the groundwork for later negotiations between the two nations. The United States also pledged, as part of a memorandum of understanding with Israel, not to negotiate with the PLO until it was prepared to recognize Israel's right to exist and to renounce terrorism.

Another major United States initiative came in 1977 when President Jimmy Carter stressed the need to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict by convening an international peace conference in Geneva, cochaired by the United States and the Soviet Union. Although Egyptian President Anwar as Sadat conducted his initiative in opening direct Egyptian-Israeli peace talks without United States assistance, the United States played an indispensable role in the complex and difficult negotiation process. Negotiations ultimately led to the signing, under United States auspices, of the September 17, 1978, Camp David Accords, as well as the March 1979 Treaty of Peace Between Egypt and Israel. The accords included provisions that called for granting autonomy to Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip through a freely elected self-governing authority during a five-year transitional period; at the end of the period the final status of the occupied territories was to be decided. Carter had hoped that this process would enable the Palestinians to fulfill their legitimate national aspirations while at the same time safeguarding Israeli security concerns. While criticizing the Begin government's settlement policy in the occupied territories, the Carter administration could not prevent the intensified pace of construction of new settlements.

Following Israel's invasion of Lebanon in early June 1982, on September 1, 1982, President Reagan outlined what came to be called the Reagan Plan. This plan upheld the goals of the Camp David Accords regarding autonomy for the Palestinians of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and disapproved of Israel's establishment of any new settlements in these areas. It further proposed that at the end of a transitional period, the best form of government for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would be self-government by the resident Palestinian population in association with Jordan. Under the plan, Israel would be obliged to withdraw from the occupied territories in exchange for peace, and the city of Jerusalem would remain undivided; its final status would be decided through negotiations. The plan rejected the creation of an independent Palestinian state. Although Labor leader Peres expressed support for the plan, Prime Minister Menachem Begin and the Likud opposed it, as did the PLO and the Arab states. The plan was subsequently shelved.

The United States nevertheless continued its efforts to facilitate Arab-Israeli peace. In March 1987, the United States undertook intensive diplomatic negotiations with Jordan and Israel to achieve agreement on holding an international peace conference, but differences over Palestinian representation created obstacles. In Israel, Likud prime minister Shamir and Labor minister of foreign affairs Peres were at odds, with Shamir rejecting an international conference and Peres accepting it. Peres and Labor Party minister of defense Rabin reportedly held talks with Jordan's King Hussein, who wanted the conference to include the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, as well as Israel, the Arab states, and the PLO. The Reagan administration, on the other hand, was reluctant to invite the Soviet Union to participate in the diplomatic process. The administration insisted that any prospective conference adjourn speedily and then take the form of direct talks between Israel and Jordan. The administration also insisted that the conference have no power to veto any agreement between Israel and Jordan.

A major difficulty involved the nature of Palestinian representation at a conference. A Soviet-Syrian communiqu� repeated the demand for PLO participation, which Israel flatly rejected. The United States asserted that, as the basis for any PLO participation, the PLO must accept UN Resolutions 242 and 338 with their implied recognition of Israel's right to exist. Both the PLO mainstream and its radical wings were unwilling to agree to this demand. The Palestinian uprising (intifadah) in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip began in December 1987. In February 1988, Secretary of State George Shultz visited Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria; in a statement issued in Jerusalem he called for Palestinian participation, as part of a Jordanian/Palestinian delegation, in an international peace conference. The PLO rejected this initiative. The United States proposal called for a comprehensive peace providing for the security of all states in the region and for fulfillment of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people. The proposal consisted of an "integrated whole" and included the following negotiating framework: "early negotiations between Israel and each of its neighbors willing to do so," with the door "specifically open for Syrian participation"; "bilateral negotiations . . . based on United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 in all their parts"; "the parties to each bilateral negotiation" to determine "the procedure and agenda of the negotiation"; "negotiations between an Israeli and a Jordanian/Palestinian delegation on arrangements for a transitional period for the West Bank and Gaza," with the objective of completing "these talks within six months"; and "final status negotiations" beginning "on a date certain seven months after the start of transitional talks," with the objective of completing the talks "within a year."

On March 26, 1988, Shultz met with two members of the Palestine National Council (PNC), which represents Palestinians outside Israel various political and guerrilla groups with the PLO, and associated youth, student, women's and professional bodies. According to a PLO spokesman, the PNC members, Professors Ibrahim Abu Lughod and Edward Said, both Arab Americans, were authorized by Yasir Arafat to speak to Shultz, and they later reported directly to the PLO leader about their talks. Little resulted from this meeting, however, and Shultz found no authoritative party willing to come to the conference table.

The United States once again involved itself in the peace process to break the stalemate among the Arab states, the Palestinians, and Israel following King Hussein's declaration on July 31, 1988, that he was severing most of Jordan's administrative and legal ties with the West Bank, thus throwing the future of the West Bank onto the PLO's shoulders. PLO chairman Yasir Arafat thereby gained new international status, but Shultz barred him from entering the United States to address the UN General Assembly in early December because of Arafat's and the PLO's involvement in terrorist activities. When Arafat, following his December 14 address to a special session of the UN General Assembly in Geneva, met American conditions by recognizing Israel's right to exist in "peace and security," accepted UN Resolutions 242 and 338, and renounced "all forms of terrorism, including individual, group and state terrorism," the United States reversed its thirteen-year policy of not officially speaking to the PLO.

The Israeli National Unity Government, installed in late December, denounced the PLO as an unsuitable negotiating partner. It did not accept the PLO's recognition of Israel and renunciation of terrorism as genuine.

Whether the United States-PLO talks would yield concrete results in terms of Arab-Israeli peace making remained to be seen as of the end of 1988. Notwithstanding the possibility of future progress, the new willingness of the United States to talk to the PLO demonstrated that, despite the special relationship between the United States and Israel and the many areas of mutual agreement and shared geopolitical strategic interests, substantial differences continued to exist between the United States and certain segments of the Israeli government. This was especially true with regard to the Likud and its right-wing allies.

Israel

Israel - Soviet Union

In August 1986, the Soviet Union renewed contacts with Israel for the first time since severing diplomatic relations immediately following the June 1967 War. The Soviet Union had been an early supporter of the 1947 UN Partition of Palestine Resolution, and in 1948 it had recognized the newly established State of Israel. Relations between Israel and the countries of Eastern Europe, however, markedly worsened in the 1950s. The Soviet Union turned to Egypt and Syria as its primary partners in the Middle East, and in the early 1960s it began to support the Palestinian cause and supply the PLO and other Palestinian armed groups with military hardware. But in the mid-1980s, Soviet-Union turned its attention to improving relations with Israel as part of its "new diplomacy" and a change in its Middle Eastern strategy.

Soviet and Israeli representatives held talks in Helsinki, Finland, on August 17, 1986. Although the talks did not lead to renewed diplomatic relations between the two countries, they indicated Soviet interest in improving ties with Israel. Israel viewed the Soviet initiative as an attempt to obtain Israel's agreement to participate in an international peace conference to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict and to increase Soviet involvement in the Middle East as a counterweight to the United States. The Soviets raised three issues: the activity of the Soviet section based in the Finnish legation in Tel Aviv; consular matters connected with the travels of Soviet citizens to Israel; and Soviet property, mainly that belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church, in Israel. In talks with the Soviets, the Israelis demanded that greater numbers of Jews be permitted to emigrate to Israel, that a radical change take place in official Soviet attitudes toward its Jewish community, and that Moscow cease publishing virulent anti-Zionist tracts. Soviet and Israeli officials held a number of additional meetings in 1987.

A major group influencing improved relations between the two countries was the active Israeli lobby, the Soviet Jewry Education and Information Center. This lobby represented about 170,000 Soviet Jews living in Israel, who pressured the government not to restore diplomatic relations with Moscow until the Soviet Union permitted free Jewish emigration.

Despite its renewed contacts with Israel, the Soviet Union continued to support the PLO and the Palestinian cause through military training and arms shipments. Moscow also used various front organizations, such as the World Peace Council, to wage propaganda campaigns against the Israeli regime in international forums.

Israel

Israel - Western Europe

Israeli relations with the states of Western Europe have been conditioned by European desires to further their own commercial interests and ties with the Arab world and their heavy dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Europeans have provided political support for Arab states and the Palestinian cause, even though Europe has served as the battleground for Arab and Palestinian terrorist groups. For example, beginning in the early 1970s, the ministers of foreign affairs of the European Community called for Israel to withdraw from territories occupied during the June 1967 War, expressed "reservations" over the 1978 Camp David Accords, and accepted the "association" of the PLO in solving the Palestinian problem.

Despite such official declarations, West European states have been important trading partners for Israel; about 40 percent of Israel's foreign trade occurred with European countries. Furthermore, there has been strong European-Israeli cooperation-- except with Greece--in the area of counterterrorism. Britain was Israel's most important European trading partner although relations between the two countries were never free of tensions. In 1979, for example, Britain disallowed Israel's purchase of British crude oil after Israel lost oil deliveries from Iran and Sinai. Moreover, Britain imposed an arms embargo on Israel following its June 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

In the early 1950s, France and Israel maintained close political and military relations, and France was Israel's main weapons supplier until the June 1967 War. At that time, during Charles de Gaulle's presidency, France became highly critical of Israeli policies and imposed an arms embargo on Israel. In the early 1980s, French-Israeli relations markedly improved under the presidency of Fran�ois Mitterrand, who pursued a more even-handed approach than his predecessors on Arab-Israeli issues. Mitterand was the first French president to visit Israel while in office.

Relations between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) were "second in importance only to [Israel's] partnership with the United States," according to Michael Wolffsohn, a leading authority on the subject. In Wolffsohn's view, the dominant issues in West German-Israeli relations were: the question of reparations (up to 1953); the establishment of diplomatic relations (up to 1965); the solidification of normal relations (through 1969); the erosion in the West German-Israeli relationship as Chancellor Willi Brandt--the first West German chancellor to visit Israel--began to stress Israel's need to withdraw from all territories occupied in the June 1967 War and to recognize the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination; and, finally, during the 1980s, under the Christian Democrats, West Germany's closer adherence to United States policies on Arab-Israeli issues.

In January 1986, Spain established full diplomatic relations with Israel despite pressures from Arab states and policy differences between Madrid and Jerusalem over the Palestinian question. This step concluded intensive behind-the-scenes Israeli efforts--begun upon the death of President Francisco Franco in 1975--to achieve normal relations with Spain. Prior to establishing diplomatic relations, the two countries discreetly collaborated in antiterrorism efforts, and there were close ties between Labor and Spain's Socialist Party.

Although in 1947 Turkey voted against the UN resolution to establish the Jewish state, in 1948 it became the first Muslim country to establish full diplomatic relations with Israel. The two countries subsequently maintained normal relations.

Israel

Israel - Bibliography

Abu Lughod, Ibrahim (ed.). The Transformation of
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Israel

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