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Contemporary Israel: Domestic Politics, Foreign Policy, and Security Challenges, edited by Robert O. Freedman. Boulder: Westview Press, 2009. 382 pp. $40.00.
Writing about contemporary Israel is a difficult matter. It seems that before a paper or a book about the topic goes to print yet another meaningful event occurs and makes previous analyses quickly outdated. The book Contemporary Israel: Domestic Politics, Foreign Policy, and Security Challenges suffers from a similar fate. Not long after the book was published, two major events already impinged upon many of the topics it covers.
The first event is Olmert’s forced resignation from the Prime Minister’s office. This resignation, which was followed by a failed attempt by the new Kadima leader and Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, to form a new coalition, led to yet another early general election. Second, at the end of December 2008, after a barrage of rockets on cities in Southern Israel, the Israeli government ordered a massive military operation against the Hamas movement in the Gaza strip. The obvious inability to include these two events in a book on contemporary Israel, even though its publication year is dated 2009, illustrate how difficult it is to write about a country and a political system that are in constant, even hyper, flux.
This book is a collection of assays on Israel divided into three general topics: domestic politics, foreign policy, and security challenges. The underlying theme and hypothesis of this edited book is that “the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin . . . was in many ways a turning point” (p. 12). This event, according to Robert O. Freedman, the editor, entered Israeli politics into a domestic turmoil, led to the rise of the Supreme Court, to privatization of the Israeli economy, and to the slowing of the peace process between Israel and Syria, and Israel and the Palestinians.
The actual papers in the book, however, do not support this hypothesis. In fact, most contributors pay only a lip service to this idea and others ignore it altogether. Indeed, the tragic assassination of Rabin did not lead to the outcomes that Freedman mentions in the introduction, and this becomes evidently clear from the book chapters themselves. Paradoxically, the book as a whole shows that most of Israel’s perennial problems persisted after the initial shock of Rabin’s murder, and most of the turbulences that followed cannot be attributed to this event. The book lacks a real shared theme and none of the chapters refers to another chapter in the volume, even though some chapters overlap in their subject matter.
The first seven chapters of the book are aimed to provide overviews of domestic issues in Israel. This task is achieved with mixed results. Ilan Peleg’s chapter about the Israeli right is a concise illustration and overview of the Likud’s dilemmas between ideology and pragmatism. On the other hand, Mark Rosenblum’s chapter on the Zionist Left after Rabin includes many side issues about Middle Eastern politics, talks about PM Shamir more than PM Rabin through a discussion about the U.S.-Israel loan-guarantee episode of the early 1990s, and advances an odd argument that the rise of Rabin and the Israeli Left more generally is owing primarily to U.S. pressure. Rosenblum’s chapter does not provide a good analysis or overview of the decline of the Zionist Left since Rabin because it focuses too much on international factors and hardly on internal political psychological factors.
The chapter by Shmuel Sandler and Aaron Kampinsky about Israel’s religious parties explains Arend Lijphart’s consociational model and then attempts to cover three religious parties, all in fifteen pages. The outcome is quite unsatisfactory and seems to assume the reader has prior knowledge about the subject. Vladimir (Ze’ev) Khanin’s chapter about Israel’s Russian parties is largely a summary and restatement of his analysis in Israel Affairs. His discussion about Arkady Gaydamak’s prospects in Israeli politics is a good example to the fast dynamics of Israeli politics. Since the publication of the book, this Jewish Russian multi-millioner already managed to venture into municipal elections and to fail miserably.
The chapters about Israel’s Arab parties and the Israeli economy by Hillel Frisch and Ofira Seliktar, respectively, provide good short overviews of their subject matter without deviating into many side issues, as the case in other chapters in this book. On the other hand, Pnina Lahav’s chapter on the Israeli Supreme Court is not the best review on the topic. Two of her analysis categories—Unilateralism vs. Multilateralism and Catastrophe vs. Utopian Zionism—are not very useful for understanding the important developments in the Israeli Supreme Court. The historical review is also quite fragmented and will be unclear to readers without background. The chapter ends with an unsubstantiated criminal accusation that PM Olmert supposedly appointed the current Minister of Justice, Prof. Daniel Freedman, “to lower the chances of his indictment” (p. 150).
The remaining six chapters deal with international and security issues pertaining to Israel and the conflict with the Palestinians, but the focus of the chapters is not necessarily Israel. Barry Rubin’s chapter entitled “Israel and the Palestinians” is mostly a one-sided indictment of Yasser Arafat’s leadership. Similarly, Elli Lieberman’s chapter entitled “Israel’s 2006 War with Hizbollah: The Failure of Deterrence” hardly contains a discussion of the actual 2006 Lebanon War and whether it helped Israel reestablished its deterrence or if it improved its strategic situation more generally. Once again, the latest War on Gaza starting in late December 2008 may put this chapter in a new perspective. Nevertheless, the chapter does contain interesting points about Israel’s interactions with Hizbullah before 2006.
Steven David’s chapter “Existential Threats to Israel” mentions two longstanding threats to Israel—demography and conventional war—and one recent threat—the Iranian nuclear program. As the title suggests, this chapter elaborates on, and somewhat exaggerates, the threats and neglects the strategic advantages and opportunities that Israel also faces. Robert Freedman writes about the relationship between Israel and United States. This chapter also deals quite a bit with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the U.S.-Israel relationship is discussed exclusively through the prism of this conflict.
David Lesch writes about Israel and the Arab World, but his paper would have been better entitled “Israel and Syria” because that is really what his paper is about. He argues that there was a missed opportunity for peace between the two countries which, if achieved, could have conceivably led to a very different reality in the Middle East. He also argues that Olmert did not wish to upset the U.S. by negotiating with Syria against the U.S. will, and hence no negotiations ensued. However, by the time the book was published Olmert was actively engaged in Israeli-Syrian negotiations through Turkish auspices. Efraim Inbar gives an interesting review of Israel’s strategic relations with Turkey and India. Despite long and often redundant lists of arm-deals between the countries, this chapter nevertheless clearly illustrates the strategic and economic benefits Israel enjoyed by embarking on the peace process under Rabin and beyond.
Doron Shultziner
Emory University
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