LETTER FROM ISRAEL: POLITICAL TRENDS UNDER THE BEGIN REGIME

...Thus they found their niche in the nascent Sephardic pettybourgeoisie, which graduated not only frotr its proletarian status but also from the tutelage of Labor block captains...

...Political activity in the kibbutzim, too, has recently gone through some changes...

...Nothing of this sort has happened to the Israeli kibbutzim...

...It is now estimated that almost 70,000 workers from the occupied territories cross daily into Israel proper for work in Israel's agriculture, industry, construction sites, and hotel kitchens...

...For laissez-faire means: , New immigrants should be left to fend for themselves, allowed to drift at the fringes of the market rather than be supplied with highly subsidized housing, crash-course language boarding schools (ulpanim), and professional training—all instituted by Labor and still provided in Israel...

...The armistice lines of 1949 were considered the best possible borders Israel could ever achieve, and peace was considered as signifying Arab acceptance of these provisional lines as recognized and permanent borders...

...And while the overall structure of the Jewish community in Israel as it emerged after the establishment of the State of Israel obviously deviated from such an ideal type as envisaged by the visionaries of socialist Zionism, Israeli society by and large lived up to these dreams of a society in which all jobs, from the bottom to the top, would be done by Jewish people: the corollary to this idealism was a highly egalitarian wage system, frequently even penalizing the better educated groups to the benefit of the menial worker who was head of a large family...

...In a country that always had been ruled by Labor-based governments and in which the Labor movement has been the true establishment in more than one sense, merely ephemeral explanations cannot suffice to grasp what has happened...

...It is highly improbable that any future Israeli finance minister of a Likud government will ever again flaunt Milton Friedman's name...

...Consequently, the kibbutzim have almost utterly failed to attract members from this new Oriental immigration...

...Occupation is not only brutalizing and dehumanizing—as recent instances of cruelty have shown—but it also upsets the social structure of the occupier itself...

...On the Israeli left, the argument for a massive territorial compromise is founded not merely on the argument that one should not occupy another people: the argument goes much deeper...

...For 20 years, ever since the establishment of the State of Israel, Begin and his Herut party were viewed by the mainstream of the Israeli public as rabble-rousing right-wing fanatics, unfit to share power under any circumstances...

...Thus the balance of these Sovie immigrants gravitated more toward the Likuc than toward Labor...

...In a way, much of what happened in 1977 was a delayed reaction to the cataclysmic events of 1967: for the Six-Day War and the developments it introduced have drastically changed the delicate balance of Israel's politics...

...During his stay in the government, he kept a low profile, appeared as a reasonable though hawkish statesman, exuded confidence and respectability, and did his best to obliterate the erstwhile image of irresponsibility and streetcorner demagoguery Ben Gurion had so skillfully attached around his neck...

...And so, for the first time, an attempt at integrating the kibbutz society into its immediate nonkibbutz hinterland (not an easy decision for the kibbutzim) has been initiated...

...Yet the economy has gone from bad to worse, inflation has soared in 1979 to around 100 percent, strikes and lockouts are worse than ever—and while nobody can see an easy way out, it is now clear to practically every Israeli voter that a laissez-faire economy—whatever its merits in Adam Smith's 18th-century Scotland or Pinochet's 20th-century Chile—is out of the question in Israel...

...A national renaissance of the Jewish people will be possible, it was argued, only if an overall Jewish social structure will emerge in the Land of Israel, radically different from the Jewish concentration in middle-class positions in the Diaspora...

...Over the last 12 years, Jewish workers began to disappear from construction sites and from much of Israel's agricultural sector (not the kibbutz sector, where a strong ideology of self-work is still the most effective barrier against introduction of any wage labor from the outside...

...For, in that decade, there has been a steady increase in the percentage of Israel's Jewish electorate comprised of "Oriental" immigrants and their children [Sephardic Jews from Arab countries...

...Rabin's illegal dollar account, the squabbles between Rabin and Peres for the leadership of the Labor party, the emergence of Yadin's (now practically defunct) Democratic Movement for Change—all contributed to Labor's defeat, in which it lost about 30 percent of its vote, most of it to Yadin's new reform party...

...Does one or does one not have a right or a claim to areas that, while undoubtedly parts of the historical Land of Israel, are now exclusively populated by Arabs...

...The impact of 1967 was, of course, much deeper than that...

...but anyone looking at Israeli newspapers and public debates of that time would recognize that on external issues a general consensus had crystallized, and public debate centered on matters dealing with social and economic problems...

...31 But in discussing the impact of 1967 on the Israeli electoral scene, one cannot overlook another major side effect that June War and its aftermaths have had on Israeli society and on the tenets of the Zionist dream...

...dic proletariat became petty shopkeepers building contractors, truck and restaurant owners, plumbers, etc...

...Frotr the electoral point of view, however, the shift to the right has proved to be much lest permanent than previously perceived, for many of the voters who have left Labor and shifted toward Yadin's party now are obviously shifting back to Labor...

...Since those heady days in June, Israel has been in constant turmoil over security issues and the future of the occupied territories...

...Are these "liberated" or "occupied" territories...

...While all immigration movements always were motivated in one way or another by a dream of social mobility—the American Dream, if you wish—those Jews who came to Palestine (and they were a tiny minority in the great Jewish waves of immigraion of the 19th and early 20th centuries), believed in conscious downward mobility...

...True, they are more affluent than in the past, and for outside visitors, who sometimes confuse socialism with Puritan asceticism, it is sometimes difficult to square flourishing villages with socialism...

...That the Israeli leader who signed what has been from Israel's point of view a very generous peace treaty vis-a-vis Egypt was none other than Menachem Begin has only added to the dazed incomprehension characterizing the reaction of many Israelis to these developments...

...But still, their ethos of social responsibility was strong enough to prod the kibbutzim into quick action once the glaring social injustice became evident...

...Those who came to Israel were not necessarily the most liberal-minded, 29 universalistically oriented members of thy Soviet Jewish intelligentsia...

...A major feature characterizing the social and economic policies of the Likud government suggests, paradoxically, that the social democratic structures of the country are much deeper than expected and that, despite all the shifts and changes described, the future of Israel lies very much in the sphere of communitarian and not laissez-faire policies...

...Nowhere could the linkage between the political and the social be better exemplified than in this debate...

...A similar trend could be discerned—for different reasons—among immigrants from the Soviet Union...

...The debate about the future of the occupied territories and about the Palestinian question has taken on another aspect: while the government speaks about "liberated territories," on the left the question is asked, of course, in terms of people, not of real estate...

...but the roots of the defeat went much deeper...

...The elections that brought Menachem Begin to power have been such a shock to Labor that the wider implications of this upheaval have sometimes gone unnoticed...

...In this period of national reconstruction—mass immigration, the Ingathering of the Exiles and the Blossoming of the Desert—the Labor party's social democratic ethos and vision appeared central, relevant, and responsive to the needs and vision of the country...

...Many kibbutzim have flourished in areas where large concentrations of new immigrants have lived in rather dismal conditions, with very little involvement of the kibbutzim in their immediate human environment...

...But today their impact is massively felt...

...Government-controlled public companies will be sold to the highest bidder, Likud Finance Minister Ehrlich declared on assuming office, and the top-heavy bureaucratic posts of Israel's economy will be slashed...

...On another level, the extremely high percentage of kibbutzniks on the army casualty lists of Israel's wars (about 20 percent of those killed in the Yom Kippur War were kibbutzniks, with the kibbutzim comprising less than 4 percent of the overall population), also suggests a very strong involvement in community responsibility...

...27 Begin gained something much more important than political clout: he and his party achieved respectability and responsibility...

...Initially, very few people (with the exception of such socialist radicals as former Secretary of the Histadrut Yitzhak Ben-Aharon) foresaw such social consequences of the SixDay War...

...Now any discussion of the future of Israeli society has to take cognizance of structural changes that have slowly eroded Labor's hegemony and have catapulted into power the outcasts of the Israeli political system (for Begin and his Herut party were never anything but outcasts in the Israeli political system, as much as George Wallace in the American system...

...Large families in low-income groups should be discouraged if not penalized rather than rewarded with social benefits...

...Even the government's most publicized project, launched under the personal patronage of the Prime Minister—Project Renewal—is (albeit not very wellcoordinated) a plan for slum clearance and urban renewal, surely far from a laissez-faireoriented program...

...Since 1967 the focus of public debate had moved, then, from the social to the national— and here, because of its simplistic nationalism, Herut had a clear advantage...

...The truth of the matter, of course, is that many of the utopian communities established in the 19th century in America have disappeared not because they failed but because they succeeded: once economic affluence was assured, the founders or their descendants were under immense pressure to parcel out the wealth acquired through so much hardship—and the socialistic communities became "normal," private-enterprises farming villages...

...To put it bluntly: for the immigrants from Muslim countries, the goyim are the Arabs, and, generally speaking, their primordial reaction in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict has shown as much charity toward the Arabs as one could expect of immigrants from the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe vis-à-vis Ukrainian nationalism...

...Kibbutzim now have initiated programs of school integration, not necessitated by the law, aimed at bringing some of the children of the surrounding blighted areas into their highly developed schools...

...Furthermore, the Oriental's attitude to the Israeli-Arab conflict by and large has been much more hawkish, both because of their less secularized culture and because the bitter memories of their agony under Arab rule in Morocco and Iraq were only too easily translated into a hawkish attitude vis-à-vis the Arabs in the context of the political conflict...

...It could be argued that his influence on government policy was minimal, though, doubtless, his very presence might be held responsible for certain policies that were not initiated after the June War...

...It was this centrality of physical and productive labor and the creation of an economic Jewish infrastructure to the Jewish society in Palestine that made Zionist immigration to the country an unusual social phenomenon...

...The debate about partition, for all practical purposes, was closed—closed by the realities of the 1947-49 War of Independence and its outcome...

...And the social and ideological forces that have formed Israeli society as we know it appear to have learned more than one lesson from the debacle of May 17, 1977...

...CONSEQUENTLY, it has become very clear even to the Friedmanesque Ehrlich that running Israel on a laissez-faire approach is a selfcontradiction...

...Again, it was the shock of the '77 elections that shook the kibbutzim out of their selfimposed inward-looking attitudes: all of a sudden it became clear that a prolonged Likud hegemony would mean a profound change in Israeli society, bound to affect the 34 kibbutzim (some particularly nasty remarks by Likud people that the kibbutzim ought to pay higher taxes drove the lesson home even at the gut level...

...Give free rein to laissez-faire policies—and overnight inflation will disappear, strikes will be unheard of, productivity will soar, investment will flow into the country, personal income will rise, and the national debt will decline...

...True, in 1956 the Suez crisis flared up into a war...

...This "Without the Communists and Herut" slogan left Begin a perpetual outsider, a maverick vainly banging at the doors of power that would, by almost universal consensus, be shut to him forever...

...It lingered in the wings of the Israeli political system, quietly cherishing an impossible dream, almost utterly irrelevant to the real concerns of the country at a time when Israel's population more than quadrupled...

...Yet, the kibbutzim have been justly accused—and only recently have they begun to acknowledge this—of having been very much self-centered and inward-looking...

...First of all, the period immediately preceding the June War [the Six-Day War, June 5-11, 19671 had created a crisis of confidence in the ability of the Labor government of Levi Eshkol to lead the country in a crisis: a National Unity government, including Menachem Begin, was formed under public pressure...

...The lesson was not lost on Begin himself, who is always quick to grasp tactical advantages...

...The writing had been on the wall for several years: both in the 1960 and the 1973 parliamentary elections, Labor had lost a few percent of its votes and Begin's Likud (or Gahal as it was then called) had steadily gained a few seats in the Knesset...

...In some cases a reverse class-consciousness appeared, pushing many voters in Beit Shean, for example, to vote for the Likud as a protest against the "fat cats" of the Labor-associated kibbutzim...

...Not all Orienta Israelis live in slums, as any tourist to Israel can find out very quickly when checking into the ethnic background of shopowners, truck and taxi owners, restaurant and entertainment operators, and various other entrepreneurial occupations now very much carried out b3 members of the Oriental communities...

...When the establishment of new towns, settlements, and regional centers was undertaken with the usual combination of vision and messiness that characterized Labor's plodding and resourcefulness...

...For the Likud, whose nationalistic ideology was always completely immune to the social implications of Zionism, this poses no problem: but for the Labor movement, with its strong commitment to social reconstruction, this reversal of galut—where it is usually not the Jew who does the physical work—is a dire predicament and a grave warning...

...The representatives of the kibbutz movements in parliament, for example (all of them, of course, members of the Labor Alignment), until recently, belonged almost exclusively to the older generation...

...The unification, after much squabbling, of the two different kibbutz movements affiliated with the Labor party (one traditionally linked to the Mapai wing, the other to Achdut Ha'avoda) also has visibly increased the political clout the unified kibbutz movement will have in the future councils of the Labor party...

...and Friedman, in one of his Newsweek pieces, welcomed the Likud victory in Israel as proof of socialism's decline ind the victory of the principles of laissezfaire...

...This came as a shock to many kibbutzim with the results of the 1977 elections...

...Israeli agricultural expertise, which truly helped the Palestinian farmer in the West Bank, also created— through mechanization and modernization— an agricultural proletariat drifting toward jobs in the Jewish urban centers of Israel...

...Only merit—and inherited wealth—rather than an egalitarian ideology should direct the educational system...

...In Eretz Yisrael [the land of Israel], Jews will have to fill every function, do every kind of work, hence the stress on Jewish labor even in the most menial positions...

...1977 was the culmination of a secular trend, not a sudden upheaval: its dimensions were dramatic, but its seeds lay in the social and political developments of the country in the last decade...

...Is there or is there not a "Palestinian people...

...in the daily terrorist threats to civilian life...

...Moreover, immigration itself should be curbed or controlled according to economic capacity: certainly, on laissez-faire grounds, Israel should not be ready to take in an indiscriminate number of Jewish immigrants...

...By and large, kibbutzim continue to be the mainstay of Labor, and in elections their members continue to support the parties of the Labor Alignment...

...Ben Gurion's dictum about the kaleidoscopic nature of Israeli coalition governments was that any government was possible, except a government that would include the Communists and Herut...

...I srael's political and social life is still reeling from the impact of two seemingly contradictory developments unforeseen by even the most knowledgeable pundits: first, the end of 30 years of Labor's hegemony in the 1977 elections, and second, Sadat's visit to Jerusalem leading to the Camp David agreements and the Peace Treaty between Israel and Egypt...

...Galut (the Diaspora), Gordon warned, is not only a geograhic concept: it also means alienation from manual labor, dependence on the manual work of others, escaping from, or not having the opportunity to experience, the difficulties and vicissitudes of filling every kind of work that is required to make up a full-fledged society...

...For the Sovie Jews who chose to come to Israel were usualli the more religious, ethnically centered ones And the traumas of the Soviet regime had lef many of them completely color-blind when i came to Israel's social democratic Labo: culture: red is red, many of them felt —anc shied away from Israel's kibbutzim, because to them they seemed just another version o bolshevism with its kolkhoz and coercive labor...

...They continue to be a success story, and there is little evidence that they are fading away or that their egalitarian or communitarian ethos is eroding...

...But in the last decade or so, few young kibbutzniks got directly involved in party activity...

...this movement—symbolized by the kibbutz and the moshav and buttressed by the Histadrut [general federation of labor] and its publicly owned industries—captured the imagination of newcomers and old-timers alike...

...But even Begin's government has begun to realize—though it will hardly admit it publicly—that its economic philosophy is utterly irrelevant to the realities of Israel...

...Precisely because Israel is aimed at helping the weaker elements among the Jewish people to find a place under the sun for themselves (the stronger elements can always—and do—fend for themselves), the Likud government has realized that it could perhaps decontrol foreign exchange, and cause havoc to the economy, especially to the export-oriented industries: but it found itself continuing the policies of linking wages and salaries to the cost-of-living index, and going on with all other welfare-oriented programs...

...Foreign-currency controls were abolished overnight, and some government30 owned companies were sold to private investors...

...A Jewish community in Palestine that will depend on Arab labor will perhaps create Jewish latifundia and a class of Jewish effendis in the Middle East, another Algeria or South Africa—but not a new Jewish nation...

...All the ills of Israeli society, the Likud proclaimed, can be traced to the fact that under Labor the forces of the free market have been hampered by the regulations and bureaucratic controls of Labor's socialistic economic theories...

...One of the basic elements in the Zionist revolution—institutionalized in the Labor Zionist movement's kibbutzim, moshavim, and the Histadrut industries—was a philosophy of radical social transformation...

...In the future, much more will be heard of such Labor leaders as Yaacov Tzur or Mussa Harif—young people practically unknown a couple of years ago—and hence Labor will be much less machine-ridden than it was in the nast IN SUM: while structural changes in Israeli society have brought about the present government, and its existence cannot be discounted as a mere freak accident, much more powerful forces within the society suggest that Likud's attempts to steer a socially different course for Israel are basically abortive...

...Social Zionism was always animated by the ideas—expanded by Ber Borochov, Nachman Syrkin, and A. D. Gordon—that a Jewish society in Palestine must not replicate the social structure of Jewish society in the Diaspora...

...No wonder that, when the Likud took over, Milton Friedman was called in for a quick round of consultations...

...For years, a major feature of Likud propaganda has been its loud criticism of what was generally described as the socialist bureaucratism of Labor...

...Add to this the fact that many of the Oriental immigrants who came to Israel in the '50s were initially introduced to the Israel economy as workers and laborers and taker immediately under the wing of the Labor party's benevolent bureaucratic structure which also made sure that they voted for the right party come election day...

...All of a sudden, in 1967, he gained the public acceptance he and his party craved for and became salonfahig...

...The shift in Israeli politics reflects not merely a change in electoral moods but ar underlying malaise in Israeli society...

...No agricultural or industrial enterprise should be encouraged and bolstered through public funding—except on solely economic grounds—considerations that call, for example, for setting up new settlements only in the most lucrative locations and wholly abandoning all others...

...This reflected in local and trade-union election that were held since the parliamentary elections, as well as in recent public-opinion polls in which the Likud is now consistently trailing behind Labor...

...Hence the Zionist ideology of "back-to-theland," the stress on physical labor, the somewhat naively romantic idealization of agricultural labor, above middle-class "rootlessness," and the denigration of the mythical Jewish intellectual Luftmensch...

...Herut's incoherent mirage of Biblical lands was just besides the point, especially as, paradoxically, these Biblical lands were now governed by precisely the one Arab government (Abdullah's and Hussein's Jordan) that appeared to be ready to acquiesce in a de facto coexistence with Israel...

...While this labor is generally paid according to Israeli wages and has benefited from much of Israel's social legislation, it created—for the 32 first time in Israeli society—a situation in which more and more menial jobs in the labor market were beginning to be filled with Arab workers...

...For Labor's defeat was not a mere electoral accident...

...The wave of the future in Israel most definitely does not belong to Begin & Ehrlich, nor will Milton Friedman be added to the prophets of Israel...

...A final word about the kibbutzim...

...This is reversing the Zionist revolution to the extent that on some sites of the new Jewish settlements put up by the Likud government and Gush Emunim on the West Bank many of the construction jobs are done by Arabs, and in the Yamit area of the Sinai (soon to be evacuated) some of the hired laborers working in the flourishing moshavim are Bedouins...

...All these questions became the central issues of Israeli politics, requiring daily answers and necessitating governmental action of one kind or another...

...The June War of 1967, and the resulting economic boom it brought in its wake, opened Israeli society to the influx of Arab labor from the occupied territories...

...In an era when almost 2 million people immigrated into the country, the philosophy of social responsibility and the welfare state preached by Labor addressed the main concerns of the new immigrants...

...Now Begin sat for three years as minister without portfolio in both Eshkol's and Golda Meir's cabinets, until his party left the government in the summer of 1970...

...Zionism as it developed in Israel was aimed not only at a geographic shift of population from the Diaspora to the Land of Israel but also involved far-reaching social restructuring...

...With their gradual integration into Israeli society, and especially with the introduction of Arab labor into the Israeli economy after 1967, many ol these erstwhile Labor voters from the Sephar...

...Nobody, of course, planned it this way...

...When asked how such an acceptance of the status quo squared with their irredentist ideology, Herut's people usually answered with a shamefaced smile that, after all, one has to leave something for the Messiah, too...

...Middle-class Jewish youngsters, students, intellectuals, petty businessmen and their children—they came to Palestine and became pioneers, i.e., agricultural and industrial workers, not out of mere necessity and the vicissitudes of immigration and its dislocations, but out of an ideology calling for the establishment of a Jewish proletariat in the Jewish land...

...The burden of security, too, which had been relatively light before the war, now was felt much more severely: in the proportions the government's budget and the GNP now devoted to defense, compared to pre-1967 days...

...Labor's successful policy of integration, in a sense, helped pave the way to its own political downfall.* *The emergence of a powerful Sephardic new middle class in Israel always has to be considered against the background of the still existing poverty of other sectors ol the Oriental immigration in Israel...

...For all the simple-mindedness that sometimes went along with these attitudes, at their root was a radical criticism of Jewish life in the Diaspora...

...Not that he became exactly papabile, but the stigma was mostly gone...

...The function of the army should be limited to the military sphere of activities only, and should not also be the fostering of economic and educational mobility for newly arrived immigrants from less developed countries...

...The younger generation 33 may be less involved in philosophical debates than their elders and may care more for the technological advance of their kibbutz than for the talmudic finesse of the debates between various wings of Austro-Marxism: but the communistic basis of the kibbutzim has withstood not only the challenges of poverty but of affluence as well...

...On the other hand, the salience of the internal issues of social justice, economic equality, and vision became secondary: not that they disappeared, but by necessity they had to take a backseat to the burning issues of security, defense, and preoccupation with the new territories now under Israeli rule...

...waiters and dishwashers in Israeli hotels and restaurants tend more and more to be Arabs, as do municipal garbage collectors and domestic workers in such ethnically mixed areas as Jerusalem...

...This, then, paradoxically, is the lesson learned in two years of Likud government: , No government in Israel can be anything but community-oriented...

...FOR LAISSEZ-FAIRE IN AN ISRAELI CONTEXT, if taken seriously, would mean taking a number of steps that a society based on an ideology of national and social renaissance, as Israel is, would find impossible to implement...

...In most cases, the "Oriental" Jews did not go through the crises of enlightenment and emancipation that have characterized European Jewry: hence the Oriental's receptivity to social democratic ideas, and the universalist humanism underlying them, appears to be much lower than that of European Jews...

...Since then a lot of soul-searching has been going on in the kibbutz movement, which has produced a number of visible changes...

...If in the 1950s the "Orientals" were less than 25 percent of the electorate, in the mid-'70s they have reached almost 50 percent...

...Should one, or should one not, settle these areas...

...Kiryat Shemona is a problematical immigrant town in the midst of the flourishing kibbutz area of the Upper Galilee, and Beit Shean is a dismal place in the midst of the fertile Jordan Valley, another highly successful kibbutz cluster...

...and in the burden of army reserve duty, now demanded of the Israeli citizen...

...It may perhaps be premature to say that the Likud government will be a mere episode: it does signify some basic shifts in Israeli society...

...cultural events were planned to include residents of these areas as well as the more highly cultured kibbutzniks...

...Thus Herut, in the 20 years prior to 1967, had very little to bring to the public debate...

...28 All this changed in 1967...

...As a consequence, in the last two years there has emerged within the Labor party a new group of activists coming from the kibbutz movement, activists who are already heading for leadership positions in any future Labor administration...

...Of course, this should have happened long ago, and the kibbutzim now pay heavily—in public esteem as well—for years of of negligence and selfcenteredness...

...While 20 or 30 years ago the percentage of kibbutz members active in various political and public institutions was very high, the last decade saw the younger kibbutzniks spend much time and energy getting involved in the economic and technological activities necessary to maintain their unusually attractive quality of life—but hardly in party politics...

...swimming pools in kibbutzim, naturally built to provide amenities for the local people, were ostentatiously opened free of charge to residents of surrounding immigrant towns...

...For many years, very little contact existed between the kibbutzim in these areas and their immediate urban hinterland, and consequently feelings of alienation and bitterness developed in the towns, mainly populated by immigrants from Middle Eastern countries, against the kibbutzim and their relative affluence...

...More and more these Oriental Israelis were coming tc vote for a party—now the unified Likud— that catered both to their primordial nationalistic feelings and to the economic interests of their newly acquired social mobility...

...Another important factor is the shift in the composition of Israel's electorate at precisely the time when the shift from the social to the nationalistic was occuring in the public arena...

...As it has sometimes been put by Labor spokespeople, not only the Palestinians have to be "liberated": the Israelis too have to be "liberated" from being masters, Israel's social structure has to be freed from the danger of the country gliding into a Settlers' State, into a situation in which the Jews will be the middle class and the Arabs the proletariat...

...The traditional cleavages between socialist Zionism, with its awareness of the social aspects of what national renaissance means, and Revisionist Zionism, with its mere fixation on external symbols of statehood and military might, has thus been exacerbated by the debate about the implications for Israel's internal structure of the decisions regarding the future of the West Bank and Gaza...

...Hence, the percentage of the vote for Herut among these immigrants has been higher than Herut's share in the general electorate, and with the rise in the number of voters from Oriental communities (due to their generally higher birth rate), the tilt toward a more hawkish electorate has become evident...

...Nobody in power thought seriously about extending the borders, the division of Jerusalem was accepted nilly-willy as permanent, and even Begin's Herut party never publicly advocated an Israeli-initiated war for the "liberation" of the "lost territories...

...IN THE period from 1948 to 1967, despite the lack of peace and the constant and imminent danger from its Arab neighbors, Israel's political debate was largely devoted to internal issues...

...In such times, a party like Begin's Herut, which comes out with simple, clear-cut moral choices and perceives the situation in terms of the battle of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness—of either/or, of us/them —has a clear public advantage over a social democratic party that must steer a tortured course between its humanism and its concern for security, between its agricultural collective ethos and its wish not to create a South African settlers' state in the Middle East...

...By and large, this population is less secularized than the European immigrants and their descendants...

...And the only difference between a Labor government and Likud in this sphere is whether such a policy is carried out consciously and with a (relative) amount of planning, as it was under Labor, or whether it is carried out contrary to its own principles by a Likud government that is patching up a badly tainted laissez-faire philosophy with bits and pieces of a social policy based on the fundamental needs of Israel's society—a society engaged in national reconstruction...

...The rat race, rather than social welfare policies, should decide who of the members of the Oriental communities should be able to "make it" into Israeli society in terms of social mobility...

...And here the picture is much bleaker...

...Kibbutzniks may be more interested in university studies today than their parents were (who usually came from an intellectual Jewish background in the Diaspora), but their commitment to the socialist values of their communities is undiminished...

...The glory of a unified Jerusalem, the historical romanticism associated with Judea and Samaria—all these powerful symbols became a political reality, not a passive, quasi messianic hope...

...Laissez-faire has no relevance in Israel...

...Technology is used to minimize the need for outside labor or to abolish it altogether, hence no Arab labor has invaded the kibbutz sector as it has other sectors of Israeli society...