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The Jewish State: A Century Later

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Summary

Alan Dowty, The Jewish State: A Century Later (University of California Press, 1998, updated with a new preface): a study of Israeli democracy that asks whether a state can be both Jewish and democratic, and answers by observation rather than definition — Jewishness, Dowty argues, is a national or ethnic identity, and a state structured around a dominant ethnic group is democratic or not according to how it actually functions, judged by the same standards applied elsewhere. Part 1 gives the front matter and Preface, Chapter 1 (Democracy in Israel) in full, and Chapter 2 (Jewish Politics) in its body in full, breaking off in Chapter 2’s notes. Chapter 1 sets out the universalism–particularism tension in Zionism, the ten obstacles to democracy Israel overcame, the survey evidence on democratic support and its weak spots (security deference, curbing the media, and above all minority rights, the “Achilles heel” of Israeli democracy), and the comparative case that Israel is a consensus or consociational democracy in the sense of Arend Lijphart, its style explained by four strands: Jewish political traditions, secular ideology, objective conditions dominated by security, and modernization with the erosion of ideology. Chapter 2 traces the first strand: the self-governing Kehilla tradition of the Diaspora, above all the Polish-Russian kahal, whose voluntaristic, pluralistic, bargaining politics — government by consent, proportionality, contested elections, skepticism toward authority — Dowty presents as the seedbed of Israeli democracy, and whose glaring weakness was the absence of any tradition for encompassing non-Jews as a collective within the community (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1-737). Part 2 completes Chapter 2’s notes and gives Chapter 3 (The Zionist Revolution) in full and Chapter 4’s opening: the ideologies of nationalism, socialism and liberalism laid over Jewish tradition in “dialectical continuity”; the yishuv’s bottom-up, consociational institution-building; a long account of Zionist responses to the Arab presence — avoidance, assimilationist models recognizing Arab rights only individually, and separatism, with tradition and environment together advantaging the separatist tendencies; Labor hegemony and the unresolved Mandatory debate over partition and transfer; and Ben-Gurion’s Mamlachtiut, the civic-state drive of the first two decades, with its majoritarian cabinet rule and its listed democratic deficits (lines 738-1474). Part 3 completes Chapter 4 and gives Chapter 5 (The Filter of Security) in its body in full, breaking off in Chapter 5’s notes: Table 1 completed and the voting stability of 1949-1969 explained institutionally; the three cross-cutting axes and the National Religious Party as balancer; the Arab minority’s exclusion from the consensus as the acid test of civic-mindedness; mamlachtiut’s limits, with Ben-Gurion’s own verdict that Jews never understood it; the persistence of consociational bargaining, proportionality and Illegalism beneath the civic state; then security as the filter through which all other issues pass — the subjective, Holocaust-shaped sense of threat, active defence and self-reliance, the consensus on refugees and the 1949 lines, and the argument that Israel did not become a garrison state; and civil liberties under pressure, above all the inherited 1945 Defense (Emergency) Regulations, their censorship, closed-area and detention provisions, their application almost exclusively to the Arab minority under the 1948-1966 military government, and Dowty’s summary that in Israel the practice is better than the law (lines 1475-2211).

What the file is

The UC Press E-Books Collection Archive HTML edition of the book (preferred citation as printed: Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998, “Updated With a New Preface”, ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft709nb49x), made freely available by the publisher. The original as saved is the HTML file; the paired text copy is a plain-text rendering of the same edition, with no page markers, so locators are line numbers in the text copy (5,894 lines; about 146,052 words). The text copy opens with the archive’s site frame and accessibility notice before the title page. The notes to each chapter are printed at the chapter’s end without note numbers in the text copy; note numbers on wiki pages follow the order of the notes as printed. The contents list gives two parts — “The Shaping of Israeli Democracy” (Chapters 1-6) and “Challenges to Israeli Democracy” (Chapters 7-11) — plus a Bibliography, four maps (UN Partition Plan 1947; Armistice Agreements 1949; Israeli-controlled Territories 1967; West Bank under the Interim Agreement 1995) and nine tables.

Section by section

Front matter and Preface (lines 1-~110)

Title page, dedication “To the generation of the second century” (six names), an unattributed epigraph on the spirit of Judaism going forth from the center in Palestine to the Diaspora, and the table of contents and lists of maps and tables as above. In the Preface Dowty sets out his “inside-outside” perspective, having divided his adult life between residence in Israel and the United States, and his method of synthesis: the many colleagues thanked (research assistants Ari Rosenthal, Caio Blinder and Carmela Lutmar; Menachem Hofnung and a long list across the spectrum of Israeli studies) represent clashing approaches whose advice he could not all accept; the University of Notre Dame gave him a semester’s freedom for writing and the Institute for the Study of the Liberal Arts at Notre Dame supplied a summer stipend for a research assistant; earlier versions of parts of the book appeared between 1988 and 1994 in Middle East Review, Jewish Political Studies Review, Mosaic, Shofar and four edited volumes: Shao-chuan Leng, ed., Coping with Crisis: How Governments Deal with Emergencies (1990); Menachem Mor, ed., Jewish Sects, Religious Movements, and Political Parties (1992); S. Ilan Troen and Noah Lucas, eds., Israel: The First Decade of Independence (1994); and Gabriel Ben-Dor and David B. Dewitt, eds., Confidence Building Measures in the Middle East (1994).

Chapter 1: Democracy in Israel (lines ~110-424)

The chapter opens with the question “Can a state be both Jewish and democratic?” The hostile view — that to the extent Israel is a Jewish state it cannot be a democratic state — equates “Jewish” with race or religion; Dowty rejects the equation: Jews are a people, a nation in the original sense, an ethnos, with a distinctive religion as one attribute among others, and a Jewish state, as a state with a largely Jewish population and dominantly Jewish culture, is to be judged by observation of how it treats democracy among the dominant group and whether it extends democracy to citizens of other ethnic groups, as with Finland and its Swedish minority. Dowty maps the universalist–particularist spectrum: at one end the ethnically neutral liberal state (possibly a chimera), at the other the explicitly particularistic state; Zionism debated from its first days whether the Jewish state was to be “a state like other states”, something uniquely Jewish, or a synthesis. Both the higher-standard and the more-lenient arguments from Jewish uniqueness are rejected: Israeli democracy must be judged by the same standards applied elsewhere, with circumstances such as the seriousness of security threats taken into account. Theodor Herzl’s Der Judenstaat (1896) is read as “The Jews’ State”, nearly empty of Jewish content, its Altneuland a framework for progressive European ideas; Shlomo Avineri is quoted that the founders of modern Zionism were products of European education, and Zionism itself a revolt against the powerlessness and pious quietism of ghettoized Jewish life. Against this, Bernard Avishai’s “tragedy of Zionism” — Labor Zionism a good revolution that ran its course and stopped short of its liberal-democratic goals — is set out and qualified: universalism is no guarantee of democracy (no state is ethnically neutral; all states limit immigration to preserve national character; socialist internationalism grounded totalitarian rule), and particular traditions, Jewish history included, contain both democratic and oligarchic strands, as in Benyamin Neuberger’s formulation that Israel’s political tradition is a mix because its major components each contain liberal-democratic and authoritarian elements.

The “Obstacles to Democracy” section poses the central puzzle — how Israel maintained a stable democratic system at all — and lists the hostile conditions: only about 10 percent of immigrants of 1919-1987 came from countries with democratic governments; about three-quarters of arrivals met the definition of refugees; permanent war and full mobilization (contiguous Arab states holding an 18-to-1 population and 12-to-1 armed-forces advantage); threats to internal cohesion from a minority identified ethnically with the enemy and from deep cleavages among Jews; a defense burden of 20 to 30 percent of GNP (under 10 percent of GDP before 1967, near 30 percent in the late 1970s, declining in the 1980s after peace with Egypt); a formally very centralized government with few institutional constraints on executive power; imported ideologies not unambiguously liberal-democratic (Labor Zionist flirtations with democratic centralism, Revisionist stress on unity, military strength and strong leadership) and the postrevolutionary transformation of movements into rulers, leaving an emphasis on the formal and procedural aspects of democracy over its content; tensions between Jewish religion and majority rule (Exodus 23:2, “thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil”); and, after 1967, prolonged military administration of the territories occupied in the war — which (except for East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights) were not made juridically a part of Israel but fell under the international law of belligerent occupation. Concern intensified after the 1977 electoral upheaval brought Menachem Begin’s Likud to power, and with the rise of the explicitly antidemocratic Meir Kahane, who won a Knesset seat in 1984 on a program calling for the expulsion of Arabs.

Survey evidence (the Israel Democracy Institute series from 1987 and other studies, cited in the chapter notes) shows strong general support for democracy with identifiable soft spots: low trust in government, the Knesset and parties against high prestige for the army, courts and universities; over one-third of respondents repeatedly saying Israel was “too democratic” or “far too democratic”, with hostility to democracy more likely among respondents of African or Asian background, the more religiously observant, and the less educated; and three weak areas — deference to authority on security (including support for strong leadership at the expense of democratic norms), willingness to curb the media when the state’s image or interests are threatened, and, most marked, minority rights: majorities of around 80 percent support democracy generally, but only half the population opposes discrimination between Jews who harm Arabs and Arabs who harm Jews, and intolerance concentrates on Arab or pro-Arab target groups. The post-1977 public debate is traced from party-dominance critiques to fears of particularistic resurgence, including an intellectual challenge in the right-wing journal Nativ holding that democracy would have to be compromised to preserve the state’s Jewish character. The “Democratic Realities” section answers comparatively: democracy is tenuous everywhere (only twenty-three states continuously democratic since the post-World War II period, on the criterion of universal suffrage including women); the 1983 comparative study found Americans only slightly more tolerant than Israelis (free speech endorsed in the abstract by 85 percent of Americans and 83 percent of Israelis, falling 30 and 45 percent respectively for least-liked groups — “pluralistic intolerance” against “focused intolerance”); Freedom House ranks Israel among the “free” nations but on the second rung for political rights; and Israel appears on the democracy lists of Rustow (1967), Dahl (1971), Powell (1982) and Lijphart, and among the handful of deeply divided societies (with Switzerland, Belgium, Canada and arguably India) maintaining stable democracy.

The “What Kind of Democracy?” section applies Arend Lijphart’s distinction between majoritarian (Westminster) democracy and consensus democracy or Consociationalism, with its eight characteristics across an executive-parties dimension and a federal-unitary dimension and consociationalism’s four practices (grand coalition, segmental autonomy, proportionality, mutual veto). Formally Israel is mixed — consensual on the executive-parties dimension (multiparty system, uncompromising proportional representation), majoritarian on the federal-unitary dimension (centralization, unicameralism, unwritten constitution) — but in practice, through bargaining among government branches, quasi-governmental bodies and major social groups, it has important informal power-sharing consociational features. The chapter closes by announcing the book’s four strands: Jewish traditions; secular ideology; objective conditions, dominated by the search for security; and modernization, whose erosion of ideology lets particularistic impulses and traditional political habits reassert themselves. Chapter 1’s notes (36, printed unnumbered) cite, among others, Noam Chomsky’s foreword to Sabri Jiryis’s The Arabs in Israel for the opening hostile view, the Central Bureau of Statistics and B. Gil for the immigrant-origin and refugee figures (9.3 percent from democracies in 1919-1948, 11.5 percent in 1949-1987; refugee shares of about 76.6, 75.7 and 82.2 percent in the periods given), the Israel Democracy Institute survey series, Shamir and Sullivan’s tolerance studies (89 percent of Americans but only 63 percent of Israelis supporting minority rights), and Lijphart’s works throughout.

Chapter 2: Jewish Politics (lines ~425-640, body; notes from line ~640)

The chapter asks whether there is continuity in Jewish political habits, opening with an anthropological portrait of shtetl politics that “could almost stand as an account of proceedings in the Knesset” — factions, campaigning, disorderly meetings, majority rule followed but not accepted, and leaders always subject to challenge: “Every Jew has his own Shulhan Aruch”. Against the “lachrymose” depiction attacked by Salo Baron in 1928, Dowty argues, with David Biale, that Jews were not powerless but practiced extensive self-government: over 120 cases of Jewish autonomy are listed in the Encyclopedia Judaica, and Jews held in common Jewish law and the patterns of a beleaguered minority long before the modern concept of a nation. The section “The Polish-Russian Kahal” describes the Kehilla: its classic period (eleventh to twentieth centuries), its courts and the sanction of herem (excommunication), its taxes and tithes, herem hayishuv as the equivalent of immigration control, its man-made legislation (takanot) reaching even clothing, Rabbi Gershom’s call for majority rule, the Polish royal charters of 1551, 1576 and 1592 that concentrated authority, and the super-kehilla organizations — the best known the Council of the Four Lands — that tied communities together. After the population passed under tsarist Russia (homeland of over half the world’s Jews by the end of the eighteenth century), the civic-state model of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution eroded communal autonomy; the tsars formally abolished the kahal in 1844, but self-government continued unofficially — in 1870 the Council of State called the Jewish communities “a state within a state” — and, as Eli Lederhendler argues, the assault on the kahal fragmented power and helped produce modern Jewish politics based on popular support; Shlomo Avineri is quoted locating the origins of Israeli democracy in those communities.

The section “The Elements of Jewish Politics” analyzes the habits this history produced: the tenuousness of the community’s framework and a psychology of hypervigilance (the “gevalt syndrome”); closure and separation from the outside, experienced as the sitra ahara or forces of evil, with survival linked to separation itself; the other side of closure, a strong shared fate and familial, tribal cohesion, and a communitarian rather than civic conception of the state; compliance with state law only under dina demalchuta dina (the law of the kingdom is law) and without compunction in evading it where Jewish law conflicted, keeping disputes in Jewish courts and hiding religious students from conscription; secrecy and contempt for the informer (malshin); and, within the community, a voluntaristic order — government, in a very real sense, by consent of the governed, without any obligatory final authority, resting on reputation, public opinion and shared values more than on the herem and other limited sanctions. Because participation was voluntary, the system had to be inclusive: benefits broadly shared, proportionality in power and benefits understood and applied before the term existed, and vigorously contested elections (leaders and rabbis chosen through electors, the mevorerim, for fixed terms). Rights in Jewish law are inferred from duties rather than stated, and de facto protect life, property, liberty, speech and movement, rest (the Sabbath), and strong judicial safeguards (presumption of innocence, confessions inadmissible even if voluntary). Pluralism was structural — competing laws, jurisdictions, rabbinic and lay authorities with blurred lines (the religious/secular distinction itself a modern imposition), deepened by Hasidism and then by the Haskala, which created a “public space” outside the kahal, and by the proliferation of associations (an estimated average of some twenty per community in the late tsarist period; 160 in Vilna in 1916) — and opposition was legitimized, even against rabbinical decisions. The style was contentious: more than fifty cases of resistance to authority in the Bible, the Prophets as embodiments of protest, limits on majority rule and institutionalized dissent amounting to “principled political anarchism”, protektsia (connections), and Ehud Sprinzak’s pattern of “illegalism”, expediency toward the law; alongside it a lack of state or civic consciousness that left Jews in certain respects ill-prepared for state-building, softened by a strong tradition of social justice and charity whose institutions laid the basis for a welfare state before such existed and fertile ground for socialist ideas.

The chapter’s closing analysis gives the tradition’s democratic balance sheet. Toward non-Jews, Jewish law’s essence was humanity — biblical and talmudic injunctions of humane treatment of the stranger (Exodus 22:20; Numbers 15:16; the principles of “the interests of peace” and “avoidance of ill feelings”) — but rights, inferred from obligations, were fewer for non-Jews (basically the seven commandments of Noah), the ger toshav (unconverted resident alien) labored under disabilities, and, in Maimonides’ ruling as presented, no non-Jew could hold any position of power (serara) in the Jewish community; humane treatment was geared to individuals, never to non-Jewish groups claiming collective recognition, and Jewish political traditions were “singularly unequipped” to deal with large non-Jewish populations under Jewish jurisdiction — not racist in the modern sense, but with nothing to say about minorities as such, in an era when a dual legal standard was accepted practice on all sides. The summary lists the tradition’s seven elements (survival struggle; legal-judicial self-regulation and legislation; leadership selection with public input; broad community services without outside reliance; a collectivist or cooperative tendency; enforcement mostly without direct coercion; a gap between formal structure and actual influence), concludes that Jewish political traditions inclined strongly toward consociational rather than majoritarian democracy and toward the primordial, communitarian conception of a political body, and names its weaknesses: the habit of secrecy and closure, the absence of civic habits and an expediency toward the law, a contentious and unruly style, and, most glaring, the lack of guidance or experience in encompassing groups who were not part of the community. Chapter 2’s notes begin at the end of this range and continue into the next part; the notes given here (1-43, printed unnumbered) rest chiefly on Zborowski and Herzog’s Life Is with People (1952), Biale’s Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (1986), Jacob Katz’s works, Salo Baron’s, Lederhendler’s The Road to Modern Jewish Politics (1989), Daniel Elazar’s works on the Jewish polity, and Haim H. Cohn’s Human Rights in Jewish Law (1984).

Chapter 2’s notes are completed in part 2 (notes 44-57): Avineri’s lecture; Lehman-Wilzig on oppositionism; Eisenstadt; Sprinzak on illegalism; Dror’s To Build a State; Baron and Zborowski and Herzog on charity and cohesion; Katz’s Exclusiveness and Tolerance (196) on learned Jews and universalistic ethics; Roth and Cohn on the Noahide laws, with Gittin 60a and Avoda Zara 26a; Maimonides, Yad, Hilchot Melakhim 1:4-5, on serara; and Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 36.

Chapter 3: The Zionist Revolution (lines ~800-1278, body and notes)

Israel, Dowty argues, is the result of an idea imposed on reality: political Zionism reflected late nineteenth-century European nationalism, socialism and liberal democracy, transforming a religious aspiration to return to Zion into a largely secularized political movement. The center of the Jewish world was tsarist Russia — some four million Jews, well over half of world Jewry, in the early 1880s; after Alexander II’s assassination in 1881 came officially inspired persecution, and between 1881 and 1914 about two and a half million Jews left Russia, only roughly 3 percent of them for Palestine. Dowty explains the novel minority choice through Emancipation’s dilemmas: when nationality replaced religion as the point of reference, Jewish identity as Frenchmen, Germans or Russians became ambiguous, assimilation and ethnicity-denying ideologies (socialism, civic liberalism) were rival answers, and Jews extended the era’s national principle to themselves.

The section “The Impact of Ideology” treats the three ideologies in turn. Nationalism, the common core, prevailed over the others “both emotionally and practically”; Zionism was an emulation of the first, liberal nationalism of the mid-nineteenth century and a defense against the second, “exclusive” nationalism, whose ethnic antisemitism — conversion no longer an option when ancestry was the criterion — was driven home by the Dreyfus trial and, decades later, by the fate of German Jews. Some Zionists themselves moved to the assertive version: the “nationalist right”, organized as the Revisionist movement in the 1920s under Vladimir Jabotinsky, asserting the exclusive right of the Jewish people to all of Eretz Israel, stressing order, discipline and authority, and pursuing a political-military strategy from the top. Socialism converged with Jewish traditions (collective identity, social justice, messianism, a hostile environment, justified revolt) while other elements were foreign to it; the Haskala, Russia’s blocked and alienated Jewish intellectuals, and the urbanization, pauperization and proletarianization of Eastern European Jews (perhaps 40 percent of Jewish workers as cheap industrial labor, by one estimate) fed a radical ferment. The first Jewish socialists were universalistic — Jewish agricultural colonies went to South Dakota, Louisiana and Oregon, not Palestine — and the Bund devised non-Zionist Jewish socialism through a democratized kahal; the synthesis of socialism with Jewish nationalism ran from Moses Hess’s Rome and Jerusalem (1862) through Aaron Liberman and Nachman Syrkin (1898) to Ber Borochov (1905). Labor Zionism aimed at the total restructuring of Jewish life — a Jewish proletariat, manual labor, return to the soil, the kibbutz — came “in order to build and to be built in it”, built “from the bottom up”, and put Jewish politics into a general conceptual vocabulary. Western liberalism’s influence was more attenuated (Lockean ideals, Central European and Anglo-American Zionists, thirty years of British Mandate) but is most visible in the legal-judicial system and in the General Zionists’ liberal economics. Religious Zionism, the fourth strand, was the least revolutionary and least universalistic, a small minority opposed by the vast majority of rabbinical authorities, who “knew danger when they saw it”; its early adherents were the forerunners of the National Religious Party.

The section “Zionism: Change and Continuity” calls Zionism’s relation to tradition one of “dialectical continuity with the past”: Zionists saw themselves in revolt — David Vital is quoted on the wish “to cease to be object and become subject” and on “the re-entry of the Jewish people into the world political arena”; Theodor Herzl himself, Dowty notes, largely accepted the antisemitic portrait of Jews while blaming Christian oppression; Yosef Haim Brenner’s protagonist would blot out “‘Thou has chosen us’”; and the Canaanite movement of the 1940s took dissociation to its limit — yet Zionism also repudiated emancipation alone, drew on transformed messianism (Syrkin quoted), combed the past for dignity and precedent (Maccabees, Masada, Bar-Kochba), and rested its legitimacy in the end on Jewish history and religion, a factor growing in importance as conflict with the Arab population developed. Ahad Ha’am’s cultural Zionists sought “not merely a state of Jews but truly a Jewish state”. Settlement itself, Dowty stresses with Jacob Katz, was more a product of circumstance than ideology: of the two and a half million forced out of Russia between 1880 and 1914 only about 70,000 arrived in Palestine and many did not remain, so the yishuv concentrated the most ideologically committed, whose framework absorbed later mass immigrations of nonideologized Jews.

The section “Early Zionist Institutions” argues that yishuv conditions replicated the kahal’s: no enforceable central authority even after the World Zionist Organization was launched in 1897, voluntarism and partnership of necessity, settlements federated from the bottom up — Avineri’s pioneers founding the first kibbutz by meeting, vote and election, revolutionaries whose modes were “deeply grounded in the societal behavior patterns of the shtetl”. Herzl, an “old-fashioned conservative” who had written in his diary that “democracy is political nonsense”, wrote the First Zionist Congress’s standing orders in 1897 (some still operative in the Knesset) but, Dowty argues, was not the founder of Israeli democracy. Parties came before the state; proportional representation was adopted as a matter of course (one delegate per hundred members at the First Congress, ideological groupings at the Fifth, 1901); and the movement encompassed antithetical worldviews by power-sharing — Max Nordau’s 1899 assurance to religious Jews, the Fifth Congress’s recognition of “two streams with equal rights — the traditional and the progressive” on education, and Herzl’s Uganda-debate bargain with the religious Zionists.

The section “The Arab Issue” is the chapter’s center for this wiki. Jewish traditions, Dowty argues, were of little use for a non-Jewish nationality within Zionism’s own sphere: relations between Jews and Arabs in Palestine “are totally different from those of the Jewish people with any other throughout its lengthy history” (Yosef Gorny, as quoted). The responses — avoidance, denial, wishful thinking, hostility — are traced in turn. Avoidance: Palestine treated as effectively empty (“they did not expect to model the society they intended to build upon anything provided by the indigenous population”); Herzl’s diary silent on the Arab villages he passed through; and undue weight on a Jewish majority that would settle the “minority problem” by outvoting — a view even Ahad Ha’am, whose 1891 article first challenged the avoidance, eventually reached. Yitzhak Epstein’s “The Hidden Question” (Hashiloah, 1907) opened a debate that produced no resolution; Arabs were viewed proliferatingly as Semitic cousins, natives, Gentiles, Canaanites, an oppressed class, a second national movement. Naive assimilationism (Arabs as descendants of the ancient Hebrews), paternalism (Herzl’s grateful Arab notable in Altneuland; Nordau’s Jews bringing civilization “just as the English had to India”; Chaim Weizmann telling Lord Balfour the Arab problem was economic rather than political), and class solidarity (joint action of Jewish workers and Arab peasants against the effendi) all, Dowty argues, denied an objective national conflict and recognized Arab rights on the individual level only, not as a national group — consonant with the traditional Jewish view of non-Jews and with observers’ segmented descriptions of the population as “Muslims”, “Christians” or clans. Herzl’s 1899 letter to “Ziah El-Khaldi” (as printed) is quoted on Arab well-being rising with Jewish immigration. David Ben-Gurion could say “we have no right whatsoever to deprive a single Arab child…” while claiming Palestine was in a “historical and moral sense” a country “without inhabitants”; even those who recognized an Arab nationality tended to allow at best a recognized, protected but subordinated minority. Separatism — the rival response, holding a clash inevitable — found it easier to recognize Arabs as a collectivity, as recognized rivals; among Jabotinsky’s followers it meant preparation for inevitable armed conflict. Labor Zionists opted for “socialist separatism”, extended to avoda ivrit (Jewish labor in all Jewish enterprises), which Dowty notes appeared as illiberal discrimination to later generations but carried progressive connotations of self-reliance at the time.

The section “Under the Mandate” describes the Ottoman millet latitude and British indirect rule (the yishuv growing from 60,000 to 650,000), the British legacy confined mainly to legal and judicial practice, and striking institutional continuity: a state-within-a-state transplanted in part from the Diaspora, the Jewish Agency and Knesset Yisrael as parallel, competing authorities, universal (including women’s) secret-ballot voting to party lists proportionally, minorities holding almost veto power, and coalition-building as the system’s work. The yishuv organized as a “quasi-state”: the Histadrut far beyond a labor union, parties as ideological movements supplying schools, newspapers, banks, health plans and welfare, proportionality extended by the “party key” to appointive positions, funds and even immigration certificates. Dowty then asks why Labor hegemony lasted: the bulk of the population held no strong prior commitment to socialism; the second aliya numbered 35,000 to 40,000, of whom relatively few fit the mythic mold (Daniel Elazar, as quoted), “pioneers” at the end of World War I were in the low thousands with only an estimated 44 percent identifying with the socialist parties, and about two million Jewish refugees in all reached Palestine or Israel — “Israel is a nation of refugees”. Labor’s advantages were committed organization and infrastructure, a clean slate with the “old rulemakers” underrepresented, the focus on practical Zionism, and control of the center; Mitchell Cohen’s “revolutionary constructivism” — the move from “class” to “nation” — is presented as both abandonment of pure socialism and a move toward a civic conception, culminating in Ben-Gurion’s Mamlachtiut (chapter 4). By the late 1930s security had become a major obsession: violence in 1920-1921 and 1929, the 1936-1939 uprising approaching civil war, and Haj Amin Al-Husseini’s leadership (Dowty presents the mufti’s forces as liquidating more moderate Arab leaders, and the mufti as later fleeing to Nazi Germany and endorsing the Nazi solution) discredited negotiated settlement, pushed Weizmann aside, and raised Ben-Gurion, who accepted partition in principle — Transjordan’s separation in 1922 (77 percent of the original Mandate), the late-1930s British proposals, and the UN plan of 1947 (Map 1 printed here) — against Revisionist opposition. On Arabs’ future position the chapter closes unresolved: majority rule as the unifying aim (Brit Shalom’s binationalism, equal recognition independent of numbers, remaining a small intellectual province whose advocates also misread Arab thinking, in Dowty’s account); Ben-Gurion’s 1936 statement of class solidarity quoted at length; Labor’s contradiction in maintaining the Histadrut as purely Jewish and postponing or rejecting a joint Jewish-Arab workers’ association; the distinction between a Jewish “people” and an Arab “community”; the 1936-1939 uprising’s double impact (harder to deny an Arab national movement; converts from cooperation to separatism and partition); the irony that some new partition supporters were more separatist in principle than the Revisionists, Jabotinsky having taken Arab nationalism seriously as a rival to be defeated; and, for some partition advocates, “Transfer” as a logical corollary — a concept that did not then carry its later negative connotation, which Dowty, citing Shabtai Teveth’s study of its “fleeting and qualified role”, says was never taken seriously. The Mandatory-period debate as a whole, Dowty concludes, shows consensus did not exist on the Arab question — Ben-Gurion alone went through five or six stages — yet by the end of World War II the yishuv had achieved cohesion extraordinary for a community without formal governmental powers, apparent in the 1948 war (Map 2, Armistice Agreements 1949, printed here). Chapter 3’s notes (1-78, printed unnumbered) rest chiefly on Gorny’s Zionism and the Arabs, 1882-1948 for the Arab issue, Vital’s Zionism histories, Avineri’s The Making of Modern Zionism, Katz, Elazar, and Mitchell Cohen’s Zion and State; note 51 is a long excursus arguing “a land without a people for a people without a land” was Israel Zangwill’s phrase, meant a land not identified with a specific nation rather than uninhabited, and was not used by other Zionist leaders.

Chapter 4: Building a Civic State (lines ~1330-1931, body and notes)

The chapter opens on 1948: the first sovereign Jewish state in almost two millennia, its first two decades setting the basic patterns of Israeli politics. A month before the British exit in May 1948 the executive bodies of the National Council and the Jewish Agency were combined, with representatives added from groups that had boycotted previous elections (Agudat Yisrael, the Revisionists, the Sephardim, the Communists), into a People’s Council of thirty-seven members that became the legislature, and a People’s Administration that became the cabinet, from which only the Communists and (after debate) the Revisionists were excluded. Early statehood pushed toward universalistic civic models, including majoritarian democracy, which appealed to Mapai, the dominant and central party, as reducing the need for power-sharing.

The section “The Ben-Gurion System” presents Mamlachtiut — Ben-Gurion’s own term, usually translated “statism” but closer, Dowty argues, to “civic-mindedness”, respect for “legitimate state public authority” and “a sense of public responsibility” — as mamlachtiut’s author saw the Diaspora legacy as “customs of disintegration, anarchy, lack of national responsibility and unity”, and sought a universally binding state as an instrument of Zionism’s common goals, redefining tradition selectively from the Bible and the ancient kingdom period to make it compatible. Mamlachtiut’s tasks as carried out: bringing all elements under government authority — the Altalena affair of June 1948, the one major incident in integrating Menachem Begin’s Etsel into the new army; Herut’s quick integration into parliamentary life; dismantling the Palmach for its links to Mapam; the 1959 laws replacing the party key with merit appointment at all but the highest civil-service ranks; reducing four educational networks to two state systems plus a state-supervised ultra-Orthodox system; state takeover of labor exchanges; and the abandoned attempt to nationalize Histadrut health services. The Declaration of Independence is quoted as a repository of liberal universalism (“will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race, creed or sex”); a written constitution was stymied by secular-religious disagreement over the Jewish state’s basic character and replaced by Basic Laws adopted one by one; the Transition Law of February 1949, the “Small Constitution”, set the legislative and executive structure. Western liberal norms penetrated most deeply in law and the judiciary — civil courts taking precedence over rabbinic courts (whose remaining, family-law sphere was now backed by state police power), Jewish law’s role minor beyond terminology, English common law infused for the first twenty years, nine of the fifteen Supreme Court justices appointed 1948-1963 partly educated in English-speaking countries, a nonpolitical appointments commission, an independent attorney general and state controller, and the 1968 commissions-of-inquiry law; the judiciary is quoted as “very un-Israeli and hence important as a bastion of Israeli democracy”. Foreign policy kept traditional styles (shtadlanim-like emissaries and back channels, concern for world Jewry) while Ben-Gurion refused to formalize a role for non-citizen Jews, the Jewish Agency continuing by compromise on immigration and settlement. Centralization’s key, Dowty argues, was the parliamentary model combined with strong parties and coalition politics under collective responsibility, coalitions built so no single partner could bring the government down — producing executive dominance and eclipsing the Knesset, whose functions are reduced largely to registering election results and legitimizing decisions; Arian is quoted: “One of the important myths of Israeli political life is that checks and balances exist within the system. This is simply not so.” The period’s democratic deficits are listed: a dependent Knesset, party dominance, one-party dominance with little chance of a government without Mapai, oligarchic parties, interlocking institutions, and heavy-handed paternalism — instanced by the 1953 cabinet debate on withdrawing citizens’ right to leave the country, supported by Moshe Sharett, whose diary is quoted (“the State should save them and their offspring — if necessary against their will — from the eternal gypsy curse”); security services’ listening devices in Mapam’s offices; and Herut condemned as “fascist” and excluded from benefits. The first twenty years were thus both a civic high point and, in some ways, the least democratic period; many democratic trends became important only later. Table 1, “Knesset Seats by Bloc and Party, 1949-1969”, begins at the end of this range (Labor Zionists 65, 60, 59, 63, 59, 63, 60 across the seven elections; Mapai 46, 45, 40, 47, 42, 45, 56; Center-Right 33, 35, 33, 31, 34, 31, 32) and continues into the next part.

Chapter 4’s completion (lines 1475-1931) first completes Table 1 (see the Mapai page for the figures) and explains the voting stability of 1949-1969 — Labor Zionist bloc 59-65 of 120 seats, Center-Right 31-35, religious parties 12.5-15 percent — by survival consensus, recruitment of immigrants in proportion to existing strength institutionalized through the party key (Mapai initially receiving over 50 percent of immigrant allocations, newcomers funnelled into the Histadrut Sick Fund), instrumental dependence on the establishment, identification of Ben-Gurion and Mapai with the state, and deference to leadership. Three axes cut across one another — socioeconomic left-right (muted, Herut itself statist), Arab-Israeli relations, and religious-secular — leaving no party in total opposition to any other and making the religious parties, the National Religious Party in particular, the system’s balancers, members of every governing coalition until 1992. By the end of the first decade the socioeconomic settlement, the religious status quo, the pro-Western orientation and de facto acceptance of the 1949 borders were settled or dormant; territorial claims beyond the armistice lines were dormant, Herut’s insistence on all of Palestine an article of faith. “This consensus did not, however, include non-Jewish citizens of Israel”: the Arab minority was not an actor in the political system in any meaningful way nor had an equitable share of benefits, and Dowty calls its case “the acid test of civic-mindedness”. Within the Jewish community the electorate was voting to the left of its opinions, and Labor’s longevity produced ossification and delayed generation change. Mamlachtiut’s real change is then assessed: many successes were the minimal features of any sovereign state; elsewhere it was intertwined with Mapai’s partisan advantage; political appointments and the party key survived the 1959 legislation through loopholes; in health services and electoral reform it made no progress whatsoever; Ben-Gurion himself said “Jews never understood mamlachtiut.”

The section “The Persistence of Jewish Politics” argues that beneath the formal structure the consociational style persisted: the failure to adopt a written constitution as itself a consociational compromise; a government resembling a federation of competing bureaucracies and marketing councils, which reminded some observers of a classic feudal order; the Chief Rabbinate’s interlocking autonomous network; quasi-governmental actors — the Histadrut in health, welfare, pensions and wages, the Jewish Agency, the Jewish National Fund — with bargaining, typically the triangular Finance Ministry-Histadrut-Manufacturers’ Association process, as the mode of operation; decisions made in party councils, the coalition agreement as perhaps the most important governing document; oligarchic party lists tempered by informal intraparty proportionality; more-than-minimal coalitions about three-quarters of the time, including three Governments of National Unity (1967-1970, 1984-1988, 1988-1990); proportionality entrenched in the 1958 Basic Law: The Knesset and extended by the party key to offices and budgets, with a 1.5 percent threshold (1 percent before 1991) proliferating small parties that also check domination and give the ultra-Orthodox and Arabs direct representation; a weak but integral Knesset whose members act as functional representatives and informal ombudsmen; interest groups integrated into decision-making with informal vetoes; cooptation of the ultra-Orthodox and of Jews from Asia and Africa; high political awareness (79 percent reading a newspaper weekly; 74 percent able to name four ministries and leaders) with low political efficacy (5 percent thinking government generally improved conditions; 25 percent in 1960, 15 percent in 1969, feeling people like themselves influenced government); only two parties ever excluded from election, El Ard in 1964 and Kahane’s Kach after 1988; and, beneath it all, Ehud Sprinzak’s Illegalism — respect for law as a matter of expediency — curbed but not displaced, since mamlachtiut included no legal theory. Lijphart classified the period’s government as only semi-consociational, Medding holds its majoritarian elements at least temporarily dominant. Chapter 4’s notes (1-57, printed unnumbered) rest chiefly on Medding’s The Founding of Israeli Democracy, Yanai on mamlachtiut, Arian, Mahler on the Knesset, Sager, and Sprinzak’s Every Man Whatsoever Is Right in His Own Eyes.

Chapter 5: The Filter of Security (lines ~1915-2211, body in full; notes 1-31)

The chapter opens with the threatened erosion of civilian control: the interpenetration of army and society, the end of Labor dominance in 1977, polarized politics giving commanders room to manoeuvre, and post-1973 defence budgets creating a military-industrial complex. The threat appeared to materialize with Arik Sharon as minister of defense from August 1981: in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon he pursued an undeclared agenda beyond expelling the PLO from southern Lebanon — driving the PLO and Syria from Lebanon entirely, a friendly Lebanese government, and Palestinians pursuing their aspirations in Jordan rather than the West Bank — misled the cabinet, and resigned only after the Sabra and Shatila massacre and the Kahan Commission inquiry; some of the stiffest opposition came from within the army itself.

The state founded to solve Jewish security has itself been plagued by constant insecurity: Israelis cite security, “the refuge and protection which Israel gives each Jew”, more often than any other basis for Jewish rights in Israel. Objectively, hostile Arab states committed to reversing 1948; until 1967 the bulk of the population within artillery range; the public never more than about five years from the last conflict or the next through the 1991 Gulf War; the six neighbouring Arab states holding a population advantage between 50 to 1 and 20 to 1, and Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq together still about 8 to 1 in regular armed forces, 5 to 1 with reserves, 3 to 1 in tanks and combat aircraft; unprecedented terrorist organizations; isolation and dependence on a single major power. Economically, defence at 20 to 30 percent of GDP in the 1970s against 3 to 6 percent in Western countries, the world’s highest per capita national debt, and total government spending of 60 to 80 percent of GDP. “Consequently security considerations became the central constraint of Israeli politics, the filter through which all other issues and debates were forced to pass.”

The section “The Diktat of Defense” distinguishes basic security (war-fighting capability) from current or personal security (control of lesser threats): 85 percent of Israelis in a 1993 survey feared being attacked by an Arab during daily activities. Security is ultimately subjective, shaped by twenty centuries of persecution and the Holocaust, which left a “latent hysteria” in Israeli life; by the world’s indifference in 1948, when the Jewish community faced five Arab armies under a general arms embargo; and by 1956-1957 (condemnation, forced Sinai withdrawal, worthless Eilat assurances) and 1967 (guarantees collapsed, Israel alone). Security thus reinforced both civic centralization and traditional clannishness: unity and deference to leadership, consensus and voluntarism as in the kahal under threat, wars read as primordial hostility rather than territorial politics, terror read as antisemitism rather than Palestinian national action, “familism” in reaction to a single Israeli killed “on a national background”, suspicion of Arab moderation as tactical, self-reliance as the only course (with world Jewry the only reliable ally), active defence (preemption in 1956 and 1967, mobility, forward deployment, punitive counterblows) alongside reactive, risk-averse diplomacy, and a pro-Western orientation as Soviet hostility pushed Israel westward. On specifics there was consensus that Arab refugees from 1948 be dealt with only in final peace treaties and most resettled in Arab countries, and acceptance of the 1949 armistice lines as the basis for final borders — by 1965 even Herut had dropped specific claims beyond them — with negotiation with Jordan (King Abdallah, until his 1951 assassination) as the key to peace and Ben-Gurion’s “low territorial profile” combining minimal rule over Arabs with active defence. The tension between security and democracy was greatest where tradition was weakest — secrecy, and no provision for collective rights of non-Jewish minorities — with activism as overcompensation and a “cult of toughness” symbolized by Meir Har-Tsion.

Against Harold Lasswell’s Garrison State projection, Dowty asks why Israel has not behaved like a society under siege: a half-century crisis is routinized normality, Baruch Kimmerling’s “interrupted society”; there was no strictly military tradition, the yishuv’s political leadership invented the military, Ben-Gurion held defence himself until 1963, and civilian control — formalized in the Basic Law: Israel Defense Forces (1976) — rests in practice on the single person of the minister of defense, its imperfection peaking when Sharon in 1982 conducted his own policy. No separate military caste developed: universal service, a small regular army of reservists, early retirement of career officers, soldiers home on weekends, and a notorious social democracy within the army; officers’ views run the civilian gamut, and dovish opposition to the Lebanon war and moderate views on the intifada came from within the army. The problem is not an institutionalized army against civilians but militarism in the political culture — military considerations holding priority across economic planning to gender relations, every policy issue run through the security filter.

The section “Civil Liberties under Pressure” notes Israel’s fewer safeguards — no written constitution or bill of rights, liberties conceived as “granted to the individual by authorities rather than assured the individual” — yet a record on freedom of expression Dowty presents, quoting the U.S. State Department, as one of openness and lively debate, instanced by an Arab Knesset member’s poem eulogizing Egyptian soldiers during the 1973 war. The weak points are religious laws (chapter 8) and emergency regulations. The state of emergency proclaimed on May 19, 1948 “has been in force continuously ever since”; its protraction routinizes crisis — “The crisis becomes devalued over time.” The drastic core is the British 1945 Defense (Emergency) Regulations: 147 regulations establishing a virtual regime of martial law, denounced at the time by Crossman and by Bernard (Dov) Joseph as a “police state” and in the Knesset in 1951 by Begin as tyrannical and immoral, yet retained by Israel with only the immigration section cancelled. Their actual use, Dowty argues, has been relatively limited — death penalty and corporal punishment never invoked — concentrated in censorship (Regulations 86-101, plus the 1933 Press Ordinance; the “right to know” not officially recognized; softened for the Hebrew press by the voluntary arrangement renegotiated in 1996, and by the Kol Ha’am Case of 1953 striking down a political suspension; the Arabic-language press, before 1996, submitting all material with no appeal) and in provisions applied almost exclusively to the Arab minority: the 1948-1966 military government over closed areas under Regulation 125, its use to create expropriable “uncultivated” or “abandoned” land and to evacuate at least eleven villages in 1949-1950, restriction under Regulations 109-110, and Administrative Detention under Regulation 111, whose numbers within Israel fell from 315 orders in 1956-1957 to none by 1981, and which was replaced by the Emergency Powers (Detention) Law of 1979. The other channels — Section 9 emergency regulations of the 1948 Law and Administration Ordinance (mainly return-to-work orders since the mid-1970s) and Knesset emergency legislation — represent progressively greater normalization; judicial review applies two criteria (procedure, and good faith within the regulation’s purposes), was strengthened by the 1968 Law of Evidence changes allowing in camera examination of secret evidence, and the judiciary is presented as the chief repository of the civic approach. Dowty’s three-point summary: emergency powers have not challenged the normal functioning of government; in practice their use has fallen far short of the legal grants — “in Israel the practice is better than the law”; and over time their use has grown more regular and judicial. The chapter closes by noting that the unusual continuity up to the Six-Day War was deceptive, with forces underneath that would shatter the Labor establishment. Chapter 5’s notes begin at the end of this range (notes 1-31 given, resting on Horowitz and Lissak, Benziman on Sharon, Schiff and Ya’ari, Arian’s Security Threatened, Kimmerling, Lasswell, Hofnung and Barzilai, Shetreet and Bracha on emergency law, Crossman’s Palestine Mission and Joseph’s British Rule in Palestine); notes 32 onward continue into the next part.

Key passages

  • “To the extent that Israel is a Jewish state, it cannot be a democratic state.” (lines 115-125; the hostile view Dowty quotes, from Noam Chomsky’s foreword to Sabri Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel, as Chapter 1’s notes give it)

  • “Israel’s political tradition is a mix of democratic and nondemocratic traditions because its major components such as the Jewish religion and the Judaic historical traditions, but also the modern ideologies of socialism and nationalism, contain both liberal-democratic and authoritarian elements.” (lines 170-187; Benyamin Neuberger, as quoted by Dowty)

  • “The perpetuation of the Jewish character of Israel is paramount to and transcends all other considerations, including the ideal of democracy.” (lines 205-215; letter to the editor of the Jerusalem Post, 22 September 1985, quoted by Dowty)

  • “Majority rule is followed but not accepted. The minority may concede momentary victory but the issue is not considered settled.” (lines 430-445; the shtetl portrait quoted at the head of Chapter 2, from Zborowski and Herzog as the notes give it)

  • “without some modicum of political strength and the ability to use it, the Jewish people would certainly have vanished” (lines 445-460; David Biale, as quoted by Dowty)

  • “it is in those myriads of Jewish communities, struggling to survive in a hostile environment, carving out for themselves their rules and regulations and developing their institutions, that we have the origins of Israeli democracy” (lines 505-517; Shlomo Avineri, as quoted by Dowty)

  • “The essence of Jewish law toward “strangers” was, therefore, humanity; the idea of civic equality of Jews and non-Jews in a Jewish society was as unthinkable as the idea of equal status for Jews in non-Jewish society was at that time.” (lines 565-585)

  • “the fact is undeniable that both emotionally and practically nationalism prevailed.” (lines 800-830; Jacob Katz, as quoted by Dowty)

  • “between the two poles of continuity and rejection, Zionism established itself on a broad common base best described as dialectical continuity with the past” (lines 840-870; Shmuel Almog, as quoted by Dowty)

  • “Within Zionism everyone is guaranteed full freedom to live according to his religious convictions.…For we do not have the possibility of imposing our will on you if it happens to be different from yours!” (lines 900-930; Max Nordau at the Third Zionist Congress, 1899, as quoted by Dowty)

  • “they did not expect to model the society they intended to build upon anything provided by the indigenous population.” (lines 915-945; Daniel Elazar, as quoted by Dowty on the pioneers and Palestine)

  • “we have no right whatsoever to deprive a single Arab child…” (lines 945-965; David Ben-Gurion, as quoted by Dowty)

  • “One of the important myths of Israeli political life is that checks and balances exist within the system. This is simply not so.” (lines 1420-1450; Asher Arian, as quoted by Dowty)

  • “Jews never understood mamlachtiut.” (lines 1585-1595; Ben-Gurion, in an interview at the end of his career, as quoted by Dowty)

  • “an orientation that regards respect for the law and respect for the rule of law not as a basic value, but as a specific mode of behavior that one may or may not follow according to considerations of expediency” (lines 1660-1680; Ehud Sprinzak’s definition of illegalism, as quoted by Dowty)

  • “Consequently security considerations became the central constraint of Israeli politics, the filter through which all other issues and debates were forced to pass.” (lines 1938-1950)

  • “Israel has not turned into a garrison state, a modern Sparta ruled by specialists in violence whose entire way of life is subordinated to meeting the challenge of an external threat.” (lines 1985-1995; the leading military sociologists, as quoted by Dowty)

  • “there can be no doubt that Palestine today is a police state” (lines 2010-2020; Richard Crossman, diary entry of early 1946 on the Defense Regulations, as quoted by Dowty)

  • “If these laws, terror laws of a repressive regime, remain in the State of Israel—the day will come when no group will remain unharmed by them… .” (lines 2015-2025; Menachem Begin in the 1951 Knesset debate, as quoted by Dowty)

  • “in Israel the practice is better than the law” (lines 2080-2100; Dowty’s summary of emergency-powers practice)

Evidence the work relies on

  • Official statistics: Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, Statistical Abstract of Israel 1987, and B. Gil, Chronicles of Aliya (1949-1950), for immigrant origins and refugee shares (Chapter 1, note 13-14 as ordered in the notes).

  • Survey series: the Israel Democracy Institute (formerly Israel Diaspora Institute) surveys from 1987 onward, reported by Yochanan Peres, Peres and Freund, Ephraim Yuchtman-Ya’ar and others in Israeli Democracy, with confirming data in Asher Arian, Security Threatened (1995); the Shamir and Sullivan comparative tolerance studies (1983-1985) and Rita Simon’s civil-liberties studies; Freedom House, Freedom in the World 1994–1995.

  • Frameworks and histories cited: Arend Lijphart, Democracies (1984), Democracy in Plural Societies (1977) and later articles; Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism (1981) and his lecture “The Historical Roots of Israeli Democracy” (1985); Bernard Avishai, The Tragedy of Zionism (1985); Benyamin Neuberger’s articles on Israel’s democratic tradition (1989, 1990).

  • For Chapter 2: Zborowski and Herzog, Life Is with People (1952); David Biale, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (1986); Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis, Exclusiveness and Tolerance and related works; Salo W. Baron, The Jewish Community (1942) and The Russian Jew under Tsars and Soviets (1976); Louis Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government in the Middle Ages (1972); Isaac Levitats, The Jewish Community in Russia, 1844–1917 (1981); Eli Lederhendler, The Road to Modern Jewish Politics (1989); Daniel J. Elazar’s works on the Jewish political tradition; Haim H. Cohn, Human Rights in Jewish Law (1984).

  • For Chapter 3: David Vital, The Origins of Zionism (1975), Zionism: The Formative Years (1982) and Zionism: The Crucial Phase (1987); Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism (1981); Yosef Gorny, Zionism and the Arabs, 1882–1948 (1987), the chief source for the Arab-issue section; Mitchell Cohen, Zion and State (1987); Shmuel Almog, Zionism and History (1987); Ben Halpern, The Idea of the Jewish State (1969); Shabtai Teveth, The Evolution of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Thinking (1989) and Ben-Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs (1985); Itzhak Galnoor, The Partition of Palestine (1994).

  • For Chapter 4’s opening: Peter Medding, The Founding of Israeli Democracy, 1948–1967 (1990); Samuel Sager, The Parliamentary System of Israel (1985); Nathan Yanai on Ben-Gurion’s concept of mamlachtiut (1989).

  • For Chapter 4’s completion: Sprinzak, Every Man Whatsoever Is Right in His Own Eyes — Illegalism in Israeli Society (in Hebrew, 1986); Gregory Mahler, The Knesset (1981); Samuel Sager, The Parliamentary System of Israel (1985), for government-bill shares (94 percent of bills enacted 1978-1984 government-initiated); Yael Yishai, Land of Paradoxes: Interest Politics in Israel (1991); the Almond and Verba civic-culture comparison as extended by Esther Golan’s Haifa thesis (1977).

  • For Chapter 5: Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak, Trouble in Utopia (1989); Uzi Benziman, Sharon: An Israeli Caesar (1985); Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari, Israel’s Lebanon War (1984); Asher Arian, Security Threatened (1995), for the 1993 fear survey and opinion data; The Military Balance 1995-1996 (IISS) for force ratios; Harold D. Lasswell, “The Garrison State” (1941); Baruch Kimmerling, The Interrupted Society (1985); Menachem Hofnung, Democracy, Law, and National Security in Israel (1996) and Gad Barzilai, Wars, Internal Conflicts, and Political Order (1996); Shimon Shetreet and Baruch Bracha on emergency detention law, and Dowty’s own “Emergency Powers in Israel: The Devaluation of Crisis” (1990); U.S. Department of State, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1996; Richard Crossman, Palestine Mission (1947), and Bernard Joseph, British Rule in Palestine (1948).

Analysis

Dowty’s method, as announced in the Preface and Chapter 1, is synthesis across clashing schools of Israeli studies, from an “inside-outside” position, with judgment by observation and comparison rather than by definition or by standards unique to Israel. The argument of the two chapters read so far runs in two steps: first, that the hostility of Israel’s circumstances to democracy makes its survival the puzzle to be explained, and that the explanation begins with the kind of democracy Israel practices — informal, consociational power-sharing rather than Westminster majoritarianism; second, that this style is continuous with the political habits of the self-governing Diaspora community, whose voluntarism, pluralism and bargaining supplied democratic seeds and whose communal closure supplied the tradition’s chief democratic deficit, its silence on minorities as collectives. Dowty attributes each position to its holder — critics such as Chomsky and Avishai, defenders and analysts such as Neuberger, Avineri and Lijphart — and qualifies the claims he adopts (for example, noting in a Chapter 1 note that democracy is a borrowed word in every language but Greek, against Avishai’s claim about Hebrew). Chapters 3 and 4 extend the same method: Zionism’s ideologies are treated as overlays on the traditional substratum examined in Chapter 2, so that both the yishuv’s consociational institution-building and its unresolved Arab question are explained from the one inheritance — traditions supplied habits for encompassing Jews and, Dowty argues, no guidance for encompassing a non-Jewish national collectivity — and mamlachtiut is presented as a second, deliberate overlay, civic in intent and dialectically tied to the same past. The analysis sections for the work as a whole are completed in the final part.

People, organizations, places and events (links) · Concepts (links)

Theodor Herzl, Arend Lijphart, Kehilla, Council of the Four Lands, Menachem Begin, Meir Kahane, Likud, Gush Emunim, David Ben-Gurion, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Chaim Weizmann, Ahad Ha’am, Moses Hess, Max Nordau, Amin al-Hussaini, Histadrut, Jewish Agency, World Zionist Organization, Mapai, Brit Shalom, Altalena Affair, Ehud Sprinzak, Arik Sharon, National Religious Party, Baruch Kimmerling, British Emergency Regulations, Lebanon invasion 1982, Sabra and Shatila massacre, Kol Ha’am Case · Zionism, Consociationalism, Haskala, Labor Zionism, Mamlachtiut, Transfer, Jewish Labour Only, Eretz Israel, Socialism, Illegalism, Garrison State, Administrative Detention

How it relates to other sources

  • Dowty cites Ian S. Lustick among the colleagues thanked in the Preface, and his Chapter 1 treatment of Gush Emunim as an extra-parliamentary group questioning parliamentary rule sits alongside For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, whose subject is that movement; the two books share the University of California / Council on Foreign Relations milieu of Israel studies but Dowty’s question is the democratic system as a whole.

  • Dowty’s reading of Theodor Herzl — Der Judenstaat as “The Jews’ State”, a state nearly empty of Jewish content answering antisemitism — contrasts with the accounts on the Herzl page from Kanafani, Said and Pappe, which center Herzl’s diary passages on removing Palestine’s poor inhabitants; Dowty does not discuss those passages in the chapters read so far.

  • His account of Zionism as in large part a revolt against Jewish tradition, carried by European-educated founders, differs from the accounts filed from Sayegh, Said and Pappe, which present Zionism primarily as a colonial project toward Palestine; Dowty’s own framing is of an internal Jewish argument between universalism and particularism.

  • Dowty’s Chapter 3 account of Transfer — an idea mentioned by some partition advocates as a corollary of partition, which “was never taken seriously”, resting on Teveth’s study of its “fleeting and qualified role” — sits against the accounts filed from Pappe and Makdisi, for whom transfer was deeply rooted in Zionist thought, endorsed in the leadership’s own words (including Ben-Gurion’s June 1938 statement to the Jewish Agency Executive in favour of compulsory transfer, as quoted on the Transfer page from Pappe — a date inside Dowty’s Mandatory-period discussion, which Dowty does not mention in the range read). Both accounts are kept with attribution; the conflict is also recorded on the Transfer page.

  • Dowty’s Chapter 3 note 51 argues that “a land without a people for a people without a land” was not used by Zionist leaders other than Israel Zangwill and did not mean the land was uninhabited; other ingested sources use the phrase as evidence of the early Zionist erasure of Palestine’s population. Kept with attribution.

  • Dowty’s Chapter 5 account of the 1945 Defense (Emergency) Regulations — retained, selectively used, and in his summary a case where “the practice is better than the law” — sits alongside the case-level accounts filed from Manna and Kanafani on the British Emergency Regulations page, which record the regulations’ use for closed areas, administrative detention and village evacuations in 1948-1950; Dowty himself records the same eleven-village evacuations and the military government of 1948-1966, while framing the overall record comparatively. Both framings are kept with attribution.

  • Dowty’s account of the 1982 Lebanon invasion, centred on Sharon misleading the cabinet in pursuit of an undeclared agenda, sits alongside Rose’s account on the Lebanon invasion 1982 page, which presents the war’s strategic aim as the physical annihilation of the PLO in Beirut; the two accounts differ in emphasis and are kept with attribution.

Open questions

  • Chapter 1 announces “ten influences” hostile to democracy; the paragraphs that follow enumerate nine distinguishable influences unless the imported-ideologies paragraph and the postrevolutionary-transformation point are counted separately. The count as printed stands unresolved in the text copy.

  • Chapter 1’s notes are printed without numbers in the text copy, and no in-text marker for note 15 (Daniel Shimshoni, Israeli Democracy: The Middle of the Journey, in the notes’ order) is visible in the range read; the notes are cited here by their order.

  • In Chapter 2’s note 42, Levitats’s book is printed as “Jewish Community in Russian” against “Jewish Community in Russia” elsewhere in the same notes; spelling as printed.

  • Chapter 2’s notes likewise are printed without numbers in the text copy, and no in-text marker for note 30 (Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 98, in the notes’ order) is visible in the range read: the text passes directly from the conscription passage’s marker 29 to marker 31.

  • The text copy’s final line has no trailing newline, so a simple line-split counts 5,893 lines against the 5,894-line total the copy is tracked by; coverage follows the 5,894-line count.

  • The epigraph in the front matter is printed without attribution in the text copy; its author is not named in the range read.

  • Chapter 3 quotes Herzl’s 1899 letter as addressed to “Ziah El-Khaldi”, as printed in the text copy; the name as printed is retained.

  • Chapter 3’s text prints “Ben-Gurion advocated organizing it as a country-wide commune” (of the Histadrut’s founding in 1921), with “advocated” presumably intended; as printed.

  • Chapter 3’s notes 74 and 76 cite Gorny’s book as “Zionism and the State” against “Zionism and the Arabs” in notes 41, 45, 49, 53, 70 and 72; note 12 cites “Alan Arian” for Ideological Change in Israel against “Asher Arian” as the name used elsewhere for the same scholar; and note 60 gives Elazar’s book as Israel: Building a Society against Israel: Building a New Society throughout the other notes. Spellings as printed.

  • Table 1 of Chapter 4 (Knesset Seats by Bloc and Party, 1949–1969) begins at the end of the range read in part 2 and continues past line 1474; its remaining rows are covered in part 3.

  • Chapter 5’s notes are printed without numbers in the text copy, as with the earlier chapters; notes 1-31 are given in this part, and the notes referenced in the body as notes 32-47 (Elon on media control through the secret-evidence and judicial-review notes) continue into the next part, so their full citations are not yet recorded here.

  • In Chapter 5’s summary of the Defense Regulations, “perspective” is printed “perspecive” (line ~2055); spelling as printed.

  • In Chapter 4’s note 19 (in the notes’ order), Medding’s book is printed as “Founding of Israel Democracy” against “Founding of Israeli Democracy” elsewhere in the same notes; spelling as printed. In note 33 the Jerusalem Post article is cited as “Ben Gurion on ‘Mamlachtiut’”, without the hyphen used elsewhere.

  • Table 1’s sub-rows: only two series show fewer figures than the seven elections the table covers — Herut (five figures, 14, 8, 15, 17, 17) and the NRP (six figures, 10, 11, 12, 12, 11, 12); every other sub-row (General Zionists, both Others rows, Haredi, Non-Zionist left, Arab lists) prints seven figures. The publisher’s online page was opened and its table layout checked: Herut’s missing figures are blank cells for 1965 and 1969 and the NRP’s is a blank cell for 1949 in the original, not a scramble in the text copy. The Haredi sub-row prints seven figures (16, 5, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6) whose leading 16, under 1949 in the publisher’s layout, equals the Religious bloc’s own 1949 total, and the Religious sub-rows as printed do not sum to the Religious bloc totals (computed from the table as printed); the publisher’s layout confirms the cells’ alignment but does not resolve that inconsistency, so the sub-row alignment within the Religious bloc remains uncertain.

Coverage

lines 1-2211 of 5894 read in full in parts 1-3 of 8

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