Probing a Power Elite

...The State Comptroller, a little known administrator awesome in his power, recently complained about "manifestations of Ottoman-ism" in Israeli government...

...It is] in effect a system of self-perpetuation of the ruling elite, including the opposition groups within this elite...

...The Israeli establishment has too many of the characteristics of a political movement for a group that runs the national government: the clubbiness, the necessity of informal contact and communication in preference to—sometimes in violation of—official channels...

...Almost as if by simply pouring out their years of accumulated reporters' notebooks—unfortunately the artless repetitions and clumsy editing of the book confirm this impression of their methodology?the two journalists tell us what they know, and we need to know, about that decisive 200...

...Like the traveler who sees the scenery around him but not the outside of the car in which he is traveling, we know that proximity to the subject is not always an unqualified advantage...

...Against the history of Zionism...

...the Jewish State is not vulnerable to overt military dictatorship—even if the dynamics of its place in the world make this a remote possibility that should never be put totally out of mind...

...25 years is not a very long time for the habits of a political movement to be shed and replaced by the attitudes of an established national society...

...looking beyond the latest war and this month's elections, the Israeli power structure of the future might not at all resemble that of the recent past...

...but there are times in Israel when that is hard to believe...

...perhaps 150 or at most 200, people in Israel in order to know who is responsible for decision-making in the political and military spheres, who makes the wheels of the economy turn and who molds public opinion...

...When the shtetl and the bazaar combine against him, the free-thinking Western intellectual hasn't much of a chance...

...I think a more basic evolution is called for...

...The Anglo-Saxon world, including in this context the Jewish communities of the United States...

...In my opinion, they have succeeded remarkably well in their modest aim of giving the outsider a basic briefing on who is who and why...

...Despite immigration to Israel during its 25 years of existence, despite the fact that within that period its population grew almost fourfold —and perhaps because of these factors—the range wherein all political, economic and perhaps even cultural power is concentrated is extremely narrow," Elizur and Salpeter acknowledge...

...Secretary-General of the Labor party...

...Perhaps the all-powerful clerk with his bulging file folder and straight-pin fasteners is, in fact, dying out...

...Progressive Israelis recognize the aspirations ot the Sephardim, yet they tend to regard the problem as mainly one of urban poverty...

...Without going quite so far as to adopt C. Wright Mills' "positional theory of elites...

...The authors' straightforwardness reflects a positive trend that is underway to study Israel as just one more state and society among others...

...Zionist writers, who used to feel obliged to produce tomes in the same reverent style as the History of the CPSU, are being gratefully yet firmly retired in favor of more objective and critical social analysts...

...The 'cake' is divided up among those who are closest to it...

...Anyone visiting Israel on any form of business will do well to carry this guidebook to the power structure as faithfully as the tourist totes his Bazak Guide to the sights...

...Reviewed by Peter Grose Former Mideast correspondent, member of the editorial board, the New York Times WHO INDEED...

...Equally discouraging is the inability of the established party structure to attract imagination and spontaneity from a younger generation...

...Thus they unhesitatingly explain: "We have tried as much as possible to keep a mental distance from the personalities we describe, as if we were foreign correspondents arriving in Israel on a short visit...

...In practical and day-to-day terms, Israel is governed by a "party key," as Elizur and Salpeter call it, a division of power "perfected before the establishment of the state and accepted in the Zionist movement...

...Israel stands out from the other newly independent nations of the mid-20th century in that corruption among a ruling class plays little role in its decision-making...

...When will tho moshav movement with its rural villages combining private ownership and cooperative sharing, strongly favored by Oriental Jews, gain anything like the stature of the kibbutzim in Israeli ideology...

...Yet if people are the focus of Who Rules Israel?, its underlying concern is what rules Israel, and therefore who will rule Israel in the years and decades to come...

...these two respected Israeli journalists do address the more fundamental alternate question, "What rules Israel...

...Deputy Minister of Finance...

...The two authors believe that technology and higher educational standards will necessarily force an enlargement of the elite...

...Elizur and Salpeter, however, barely touch upon the even more ominous inability of the ruling Ash-kenazi elite to accommodate the growing Sephardic majority...

...Elizur and Salpeter worry that the ruling generation is merely perpetuating itself, by favoring young people whose attitudes are old...

...the struggle is only over the size of the slice to be given to each group, while it is agreed in advance about those who are not 'one of us,' and therefore not eligible to receive any slice at all...

...And contrary to the claims, or perhaps wishful thinking, of professional Arabists...

...Nevertheless, one cannot honestly ignore the underlying notion of "trusteeship for the Jewish People" that motivates Israelis, particularly at moments of crisis...

...Political campaigns that show some sign of flair or fresh thinking—from the Rafi movement of Dayan and Shimon Peres to this year's ill-starred populist campaign of Lova Eliav —always seem to be stymied by the batholith of the conventional political machinery...

...Elizur and Salpeter start from the premise, undeniable in the case of 25-year-old Israel, that there is in fact a power elite, that it is extraordinarily small, and that it is far from a subconscious phenomenon requiring an outside analyst to detect...

...It is enough to know 100...

...Yet what is true of personalities in politics today may not hold tomorrow...

...Elizur and Salpeter suggest that a good deal of the cohesion of Israel's elite stems from their common need to bypass the bureaucratic deadweight, to work together informally just to get things done...

...Confronted with Israeli society, one finds no less than three separate cultural traditions combining toward the same end of bureaucracy triumphant: the Ottoman Empire, in which the Zionist pioneers planted their promised land...

...One answer came from a loyal but frustrated Labor party insider who remarked to me at the start of this year's election campaign, "The only ideology that can move anyone in this government is 'Don't Upset Golda.' " The sight of strong men like Pinhas Sapir or Moshe Dayan shrinking into the crestfallen silence of schoolboys as Prime Minister Golda Meir's glance pierces their hides leaves no doubt about who rules them, if not all their countrymen...

...Social embarrassment—at the least —can be averted by knowing that, for instance, the following four luminaries are not as disparate as they might seem: General Uzi Nar-kiss, Director of Immigration at the Jewish Agency...

...All are married to daughters or nieces of David Hacohen, in his time Israel's leading contractor...

...We do not know whether we have succeeded in our intention because, as writers in Israeli daily newspapers, we are a part of the establishment which we have tried to analyze...

...the self-congratulatory pride with which a narrow homogeniety is being widened—without a sufficient realization of how limited these steps really are, of how much more diversity still remains out there to be absorbed...

...Britain and its dominions, is perhaps not fully aware of its relative freedom from bureaucratic restraints...

...while the tone of public life is still set by the shtetl, the mass of the population springs from the bazaar...

...Professor Yigal Yadin, the revered archaeologist...

...But it is not all that short a time either, and Israel's elite will have to make faster progress in accommodating itself to the realities and responsibilities of nationhood during its second quarter-century...

...and Zevi Din-stein...

...Amos Elon's The Israelis may have stretched the Zionists' tolerance to the very limit, but it is no longer considered disloyal to write a sociological portrait of Israel that is readable, as Elizur and Salpeter have done, omitting all the familiar inspirational material that once filled Israeli "studies...

...Aharon Yadlin...

...Whatever political or functional disagreements may break out among them are tempered by family ties...

...Although the casual visitor waiting at a bus stop in Jerusalem on a Saturday might think otherwise, the tone of Israeli society is not set by the religious law...

...and, finally, the rigid and pettifogging administrative techniques of Tsarist Russia and the Polish countryside...

...Their hope is that advancing technology will prove to be the great antibureaucratic catalyst, not so much through automation of the work of the human automatons, but rather in the range of new talents and specialties to which young Israelis will be drawn...

...the Moslem states of the Near East and North Africa, with their near-feudal custom of state power adhering to the lowliest emissary of the ruler...

...How gently put, as any new immigrant from the democratic West would tell you in relating the stranglehold of the bureaucratic mentality over public life just below the policymaking level...

...The shtetl and the bazaar have bureaucracy and the Bible in common, but not much else...

...Yuval Elizur and Eliahu Salpeter know well that there is more to an examination of influences over a society than anecdotal sketches of this season's top people...