The lead essay by Robert Freedman highlights the dramatic fluctuations that have characterized relations between Moscow and Jerusalem from 1948 to 1999. Initially the Jewish state’s strongest diplomatic and military supporter, the USSR severed relations with Israel in 1953, restored them after Stalin’s death, cut them off again during the 1967 War, and resumed them again toward the end of Gorbachev’s leadership in November 1991. The warm relationship that was cultivated in the early and mid-1990s by Boris Yeltsin was eventually replaced by yet another chill after Yevgeny Primakov’s appointment as Russia’s foreign minister in January 1996.

Freedman identifies three factors that account for the ups and downs of this relationship: (1) changes in policies toward Soviet Jewry from initial opposition to Jewish immigration under Stalin and Khrushchev to the start and eventual growth of a Jewish exodus, first under Brezhnev and later under Gorbachev and Yeltsin; (2) the close ties between Washington and Jerusalem that induced Soviet and Russian leaders to improve ties with Israel as a means of securing trade, aid and arms-control agreements with the United States; and (3) constant fluctuations in the calculations of the Soviet and Russian leadership regarding Moscow’s security needs.

Robert Lieber’s essay serves as a useful reminder that the eventually close relationship between Israel and the United States evolved rather slowly and unevenly, particularly during the Truman and Eisenhower years. The relationship hit a low point in the aftermath of the 1956 War, when Washington applied heavy pressure on Israel to withdraw from the Sinai. The fact that total U.S. annual aid to Israel amounted to only $13 million as late as 1967 may come as a surprise to those who have grown to view Israel as an oldtime American client. Israel’s strategic relationship with the United States grew slowly after the 1967 War, deepened after the 1973 War, and expanded to unprecedented dimensions in the wake of the 1979 Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.

Lieber argues that the special American-Israeli relationship has rested not only on common strategic interests but also on a variety of historical, moral, ethnic, political and institutional considerations. He notes that the United States has been involved either as a catalyst, intermediary or guarantor in every phase of the peace process since 1973, and maintains that Arab states’ appreciation that the United States will never tolerate the military defeat of Israel has been an important inducement for Israel’s adversaries to negotiate peace. On the other hand, however, on several occasions the close relationship between Washington and Jerusalem has imposed constraints on Israeli decision makers, as evidenced by Golda Meir’s reluctance to approve a preemptive strike against Egypt on the morning of October 6, 1973, and by Yitzhak Shamir’s reluctant acquiescence in American pressure on Israel not to respond militarily to the Iraqi SCUD attacks during the 1991 Gulf War.

As attested to by its subtitle, “Changing Realities Test Traditional Ties,” George Gruen’s article identifies several issues that have contributed to increasing tensions between the American and Israeli Jewish communities. These include religious controversies over the refusal to recognize conversion to Judaism performed by non-Orthodox rabbis in the United States and the refusal to allow Conservative and Reform rabbis in Israel to officiate at marriages; fears that the arrest and conviction of Jonathan Pollard as a spy for Israel would generate a wave of antisemitism and charges of dual loyalty against American Jews; disagreements over the importance of maintaining a strong Diaspora community in the United States as opposed to immigration to Israel; and more vocal and visible dissent by American Jews from various Israeli policies, particularly since the Likud’s ascent to power in 1977.

Gruen notes that while responses to polls indicate a persistently strong sense of personal identification between American Jews and Israel, fewer than one percent of American Jews have immigrated to Israel, and only four out of ten American Jewish adults have ever visited Israel. Interestingly, while two-thirds of American Jewish respondents in a 1998 poll approved of the creation of an independent Palestinian state, in contrast to only 44 percent of the Israeli respondents, the two communities have exhibited similar internal splits over such issues as the future status of Jerusalem, dismantling Jewish settlements in the territories, and Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights.

Malik Mufti’s interpretation of the evolving relationship between Israel and its immediate Arab neighbors relies heavily on the analyses of the so-called “revisionist” Israeli historians, particularly those of Avi Shlaim and Benny Morris. Mufti attributes the outbreak of the 1948 War to two major factors: the inability of Israel and Transjordan to reach agreement on the precise territorial division between them of the Palestine area west of the Jordan River, and the unwillingness of both Egypt and Syria to permit Abdullah to absorb the territories allocated to the Palestinians in the 1947 U.N. partition resolution. Between 1948 and 1967, the conflict was perpetuated by Israeli unwillingness to offer any territorial concessions and by the reluctance of Cairo and Amman to recognize the Jewish state publicly due to fear that such moves would jeopardize their quest for pan-Arab leadership. For its part, Israel sought to enhance its security by driving a wedge between its neighbors and the United States, by keeping them divided against each other, and by destroying their military capabilities on the battlefield.

Mufti argues that during the following phase of the relationship, 1967-94, Israeli officials initially rested on their laurels, erroneously assuming that time was on their side. Jordan, Egypt and to a lesser extent Syria, on the other hand, sought to recapture the territories conquered by Israel in 1967. While the magnitude of the 1967 debacle eventually forced the Arab states to come to terms with the Jewish state, Israel was compelled to reciprocate in response to four consecutive shocks: the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the illfated invasion of Lebanon between 1982 and 1985, the outbreak of the intifada in late 1987 and the 1990-91 Gulf War. Mufti concludes that in the current phase that began with the signing of the 1994 Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty, “the Israeli yearning for normality is coming true.”

In his historical survey of “Israeli Thinking about the Palestinians,” Mark Tessler notes that between 1947 and 1967, Israel’s political leadership was inclined to view the Middle East conflict as an interstate dispute, with the Palestinian dimension receding further into the background. However, in the 1970s and thereafter, the issue of Palestinian homelessness reemerged as a central factor in the Middle East conflict due to two major factors: the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and the rise of the PLO as an influential and legitimate Palestinian institution. Despite these historic transformations, both the Labor and Likud parties – much like most Zionist leaders in the earlier half of the twentieth century – continued to deny that the Palestinians constituted a distinct national group entitled to self-determination. Neither of Israel’s two major parties was willing to recognize and deal with the PLO, and while Labor sought to return much of the West Bank to Jordan, Likud was committed to the retention of Judea and Samaria as part of an indivisible “Land of Israel.”

According to Tessler, significant changes in Israeli attitudes towards the Palestinians first became evident several years before the signing of the Israeli-PLO Declaration of Principles in September 1993. He notes that a majority of Israeli respondents in polls conducted in the late 1980s agreed that Israel should negotiate with the PLO and expressed their belief that the PLO would settle for a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Tessler identifies two factors that account for these changes: (1) the willingness of the PLO to recognize Israel, accept U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338 and renounce terror, as initially manifested in the November 1988 resolution approved by the Palestine National Council; and (2) a conviction among a growing number of Israelis in the wake of the intifada that continued Israeli suppression of the Palestinian right to nationhood could not be sustained indefinitely.

In the first of several essays on the dynamic changes in Israel’s electoral politics, Myron Aronoff argues that the Labor party lost its dominant position in 1977 because its leadership failed to be responsive to the rank and file membership and the party failed to appeal to growing segments of the Israeli electorate, mainly Jews of Middle Eastern background, younger native-born Israelis and Arabs. Labor eventually recovered to win in 1992, and its leader, Yitzhak Rabin, rejected the ideological orientation of the Likud, which had stressed the horrors of the Holocaust and Israel’s isolation in the world, when he proclaimed that “we must stop thinking the whole world is against us.”

Aronoff claims that neither Rabin nor Shimon Peres, his immediate successor, were able to mobilize sufficient support in the Israeli electorate for their policies of rapprochement with the PLO. He notes that Ehud Barak’s victory in 1999 failed to prevent the steady erosion in Labor’s parliamentary strength, which reached an all-time low of 26 Knesset seats. Aronoff is prophetic in his conclusion that “if Barak plays his cards well, demonstrates genuine leadership, and succeeds in educating the Israeli public and bringing it along with his government’s policies, he can build a fairly broad and representative coalition that can make progress toward a just and lasting peace with the Palestinians and with Syria.” It was precisely Barak’s dismal failure to meet these expectations that accounts for the victory of Ariel Sharon in February 2001.

Ilan Peleg argues that throughout Israel’s history, the right-wing parties have articulated a nationalist ethos embodying values that emphasize the military power of the nation, depict the outside world as being hostile to Israel and the Jewish people in general, dehumanize opponents, identify internal critics as disloyal traitors, and demand expansive territorial boundaries. He notes that the status of the Israeli right has varied over time from being marginal, 1948-66 to enjoying a golden age, 1977-91.

Focusing on the policies of prime ministers Menachem Begin (1977-83), Yitzhak Shamir (1983-84, 1986-92) and Benjamin Netanyahu (1996-99), Peleg provides ample evidence that the Israeli right has remained consistently true to its nationalist ideology despite dramatic changes within Israel, the region and the world. However, writing in July 1999, very shortly after Ehud Barak’s victory, Peleg vividly exemplifies the danger of making hasty predictions when he states that “it is clear, at least in the short term, that the future of Likud’s political ideology is rather bleak,” and that “from the perspective of coalition politics, Likud’s future is altogether unpromising.”

Chaim Waxman describes the religious-secular rift as “one of the most serious domestic issues in Israel.” He notes that this conflict has various political ramifications for a number of reasons. In the 1996 Knesset elections, the three religious parties jointly garnered approximately one-fifth of the total electoral vote, winning an unprecedented high of 23 seats in the 120-member chamber. In addition, the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox parties, partly as a reaction to challenges from secular Israelis, have increasingly aligned themselves with the nationalist parties on the right.

Waxman suggests that the fissures within Israeli society have intensified because secular Jews place much greater emphasis on the need for political protection of individual rights, whereas religious nationalists focus increasingly on the corporate character of the Jewish people within the biblical boundaries of the Greater Land of Israel. Among the most divisive issues that challenge the current status quo between the religious and secular camps are the extent of Sabbath observance, the who-is-a-Jew question (with ramifications for marriage, conversions and citizenship under the Law of Return) and obligatory military or national service for the ultra-Orthodox. Waxman concludes that while such disputes are serious, they will not likely threaten the very foundations of Israeli society.

The changes in the situation of Israel’s one million Arab citizens are examined by Elie Rekhess. He notes that since 1948, Israel has pursued a dual and contradictory policy toward the Arab minority: treating Arabs as a potential source of danger and security risks, yet granting them full citizenship rights in an effort to integrate them into the political life of the country. Rekhess notes that after the 1967 War there occurred an intensification of Palestinian consciousness within the Arab sector, in part due to increased contacts among Arabs on both sides of the Green Line. However, since the 1993 Oslo accords and the launching of the peace process, Israeli Arabs have increasingly detached themselves from the external Palestinian cause; at the same time, many of them have come to “internalize their Israeliness to an even greater degree.”

Rekhess shows that while Israeli Arabs have become more actively involved in Israeli politics (Arab parties won 9 Knesset seats in 1996 and 10 in 1999), the socioeconomic gap between the Jewish and Arab sectors remains wide. Rekhess concludes that as their interest in the external Palestinian issue recedes to the background, Israel’s Arabs now focus more intensely on their collective status as a national minority within the Jewish state. This trend has manifested itself in efforts to increase the nationalist content of curricula in Arab schools and demands that Arabs be allowed to return to the historic sites of ancestral villages from which they had been dislocated since 1948.

The historical evolution of Israel’s political economy is traced in meticulous detail by Ofira Seliktar. She notes that under Labor’s rule during the first 25 years of its existence, Israel gradually moved from an emphasis on agriculture to a more diversified base that included manufacturing and industrial development. During this formative period, Israel had established “the most advanced socialist economy outside the Soviet bloc,” a system plagued by all types of economic inefficiencies and structural weaknesses.

Seliktar notes that in response to the rampant stagflation that gripped Israel after the 1973 War, the Likud government attempted to introduce various market reforms, which failed for the most part due to Likud’s inability and unwillingness to curb public spending. However, the need to absorb a rapidly growing labor force due to high levels of immigration of Soviet Jews has pushed both Likud and Labor governments since the mid-1980s to deregulate the economy and privatize inefficient state-owned enterprises. Seliktar believes that Israel might yet experience a brighter economic future as the “Silicon valley of the Middle East” because it leads the world in per capita scientific skills and can serve as “bridge country” for penetrating the North American and European markets.

Dealing with a topic that has been largely ignored in the literature, Michael Keren focuses on the evolving relationship between the press and civil society in Israel. He notes that from the creation of Israel in 1948 to the mid-1960s, almost all Israeli dailies were owned and controlled by political parties, thereby in essence serving as their “masters’ voice.” By the mid-1960s, almost all these newspapers had disappeared, and the press began to focus almost exclusively on the fate of the occupied territories to the neglect of other issues of concern to civil society. Keren notes that, since the 1980s, Israel has experienced a dramatic increase in specialized and localized newspapers, especially those catering to Russian immigrants and to the religious community. Keren concludes with a concern that the currently more diversified Israeli press is more attuned to imagined issues and sensational news than to the real and concrete concerns of civil society.

In an epilogue that focuses on the 1999 elections, Mark Rosenblum attributes the collapse of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to his vacillation between a hard-line and a more pragmatic approach toward the Palestinians. Recalling Netanyahu’s willingness to sign the 1997 Hebron Agreement and the Wye River Memorandum in 1998, and reminding us of Bibi’s support for the Har Homa project and his freezing of additional withdrawals that had been agreed to in the Wye accord, Rosenblum says the following about Netanyahu: “His head seemed to acknowledge the policy requirements of territorial concession; his heart seemed to beat for the cause of ‘Greater Israel.”’ While he entered the campaign with several advantages, Netanyahu lost to Ehud Barak for several reasons: Barak’s ability to establish his security credentials; the severe downturn in the economy, the internecine fighting within Bibi’s coalition among Russian immigrants, Sephardic Jews and the ultra-Orthodox; the high turnout by Arab voters; and Barak’s ability to mobilize the Left by invoking Yitzhak Rabin’s legacy.

Barak’s victory, of course, turned out to be a personal triumph, as One Israel (Labor) lost eight Knesset seats. This compelled Barak to forge a rather broad coalition of varied political stripes. To his credit, writing approximately three months after the election, Rosenblum is considerably more prescient than Peleg when he concludes that “the fault lines he [Barak] has built into his government – right versus left, religious versus secular, Russian versus Sephardic, and hawk versus dove – all require his mediating magic.” With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that Barak unfortunately lacked this talent.

Overall, while they vary in their scope of historical coverage, the essays in this compendium embody very high standards of scholarship. However, the volume would have benefited from more careful editing as irksome errors appear in several places: a growth in Israel’s population from 600,000 to 6 million is not a “sixfold” increase (p. xi), Alexander Haig served as Secretary of State, not Defense (p. 25), the 1977 Knesset elections were held in May, not in March (p. 149), and two references to a “Thacherite revolution” (pp. 212 and 213) do an injustice to the former British prime minister’s surname. Such shortcomings notwithstanding, this book makes an important contribution to our better understanding of the dramatic changes that Israel has undergone during its first 50 years and of the domestic and external challenges confronting the Jewish state as it enters the new century.