8THE CREATION OF
ISRAELI DEMOCRACY

Of all the states created after 1945, Israel is one of the few that has maintained a democratic regime. Certainly it has not been a perfect democracy (and it is doubtful if such a democracy exists), but considering the state of war in which Israel was founded, the tremendous demographic shock waves that rattled it during its early years, and the nature of its immigrants—most of whom came from countries lacking a democratic tradition—there is something miraculous in the speed with which the new state established proper governance, and made that governance democratic.

The Mandatory authorities refused to cooperate in any matters pertaining to the November 29, 1947, UN resolution because of Arab opposition to it. Therefore there was no orderly transfer of power by the Mandatory authorities to the Jewish government that was to replace it. Furthermore, right up to the eve of the declaration of statehood, it was not clear that the state would indeed be established and become a reality. Nevertheless the leadership had already begun to formulate new structures designed to ensure governmental continuity and prevent anarchy. In April 1948 the Zionist Executive established a People’s Council and a People’s Administration. The former, consisting of thirty-seven members, was a sort of embryonic parliament, as noted in an earlier chapter; the latter, with thirteen members, was an embryonic government. The members of both these bodies came partly from the Jewish Agency Executive elected by the Zionist Congress, and partly from the National Committee elected by the Jews of Palestine. Since the Mandatory government prohibited the establishment of alternative government bodies while it was still in power, these entities were given names emphasizing that the source of their authority was the people, not the state. Once statehood was declared, they became the Provisional State Council and the Provisional Government.

Although disagreements among the political parties and different political worldviews and perceptions remained, all shared the sense of being present at an unparalleled, historic, exalted hour. This feeling precluded contentiousness and led to mutual tolerance, cooperation, and willingness to make concessions. Thus representatives of parties that had withdrawn from public office, such as Agudat Yisrael, the Revisionists, and the Communist Party, participated in both bodies. The excitement was palpable: “Everyone is moving, there is momentum, everyone is tense and ready,” wrote Uri Heinsheimer (Yadin) on April 5. “It is hardly surprising that one wakes up at five in the morning despite working hard till late at night, who can sleep at a time like this, who would not do anything to live this time even more awake, even more intensively, even closer, more attentive and dedicated?”1 Soon afterward he was put in charge of legislation in the Ministry of Justice.

A declaration of independence had been drafted that included the Zionist narrative explaining the connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, the international recognition of the Jews’ right to their country, and the proud declaration of “our natural and historic right” to establish a Jewish state in the Land of Israel. The country’s borders were not mentioned. Ben-Gurion replied to questions about this by noting that even the American Declaration of Independence did not mention borders. The declaration emphasized the nature of the state as a democracy that would ensure complete equality of social and political rights for all its citizens, and it appealed to the neighboring states and their Arab citizens with an offer of peace. Nevertheless the state was to be a Jewish state, open to Jewish immigration. The declaration was written in a nonreligious spirit, and although the words “as envisaged by the prophets of Israel” appear, it contains no religious concepts. The Mizrachi representatives protested this absence, and in the spirit of those great days a compromise was found whereby the document concluded with the words “Placing our trust in the Rock of Israel,” a nebulous phrase that may be interpreted either as a reference to the Almighty or as a literary expression referring to the Jewish people.

The ceremony marking the declaration of statehood at the Tel Aviv Museum was modest. Due to concerns about a possible air raid or another act of sabotage, the location and time of the ceremony were kept secret, but the secret was not as closely guarded as it should have been, and on that Friday afternoon a large crowd gathered outside the building. After Ben-Gurion read the declaration, Rabbi Yehuda Leib Fishman-Maimon intoned the blessing in a voice shaking with emotion: “Blessed are You, LORD, our God, King of the universe, Who has kept us alive, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this season.” Those present were hit with the full recognition of the meaning of independence when Ben-Gurion read the Provisional Government “proclamation” revoking the ordinances deriving from the 1939 White Paper, which prohibited immigration. Foreign rule was no more. The independence scroll bearing the signatures of those present was put into a safe in the basement of the Anglo-Palestine Bank so that if Tel Aviv were bombed, it would be preserved for generations.

Ben-Gurion’s thinking about what the regime should be like was guided by the concept of mamlakhtiyut (statism). He wanted the state to be the sovereign entity to which all other government bodies were subordinate. Under its aegis he sought to introduce all the societal powers of the Yishuv, plus powers that the Yishuv had not possessed, such as the courts and legal enforcement, a monopoly over the use of force, and the shaping of the legislative and executive branches. He supported all bodies that reinforced the competence of the state and its status as the exclusive source of inspiration and power. As much as he could, he sought to weaken all bodies that intervened between the authority of the state and its citizens. More specifically he wanted to weaken the parties’ influence and social organizations, such as the kibbutz movements, that had been vehicles for recruiting people during the Yishuv period. In their place he upheld the new state framework as a single undisputed source of authority that ensured equality for all citizens and safeguarded the general good.

From the moment the state was established, its juridical infrastructure was in place and ready to function. The Ministry of Justice, one of the first entities to be established, ensured that all government activities would be grounded in law. In the state’s first week all laws and ordinances were published in the Official Gazette (later known in Hebrew as “Rashumot”), in accordance with the principle of the rule of law. The Law and Administration Ordinance, enacted only a few days after the establishment of the state, gave the governmental institutions the power to govern until proper elections could be held. “And all the state’s services are working: mail, ports, the Citrus Board, radio, arrests, expropriations, tax payments, civil defense, supervision of local authorities, manpower recruitment, fuel supervision, and so on and so forth,” noted Uri Yadin, amazed at how the young state was functioning only two months after its creation. “Even the first claims against the government have already been submitted,” he added, referring to claims submitted to the Tel Aviv District Court, which had been authorized in the interim to serve in the capacity of the not-yet-established Supreme Court.2 Israeli democracy had begun to work.

Its form of government was determined almost by chance; there was in fact no discussion of whether to copy the old structures or establish new ones. The parliamentary system, in which the government is responsible to parliament and must obtain its confidence, was appropriate both to the precedent set by the Zionist Congresses and to British tradition. From the latter Ben-Gurion had learned and copied the concept of collective responsibility: that a decision made by the government was binding on all its ministers. The Knesset, Israel’s parliament, continued the system of proportional representation used by the Zionist Congresses. In those heady early days no one thought to question this electoral system, which by favoring smaller parties encouraged them to exist, but it would later plague the Israeli parliamentary structure. Ben-Gurion demanded a change in this system, but did not succeed in making it happen. Over the next fifteen years, however, Mapai was the central party in Israeli politics, with more than one third of the seats in the Knesset. It formed all the governments and was the majority party in all of them. So long as Mapai’s rule remained intact, the proportional representation system did not impair the government’s functional stability.

The First Knesset, elected on January 25, 1949, was supposed to be a statutory assembly that would formulate and ratify the constitution. But it rapidly became clear that at this point no constitution would be enacted; instead the Knesset would enact a series of Basic Laws that in time would be combined into a constitution. The choice of the British parliamentary system, which has no constitution, derived from both political considerations and reasons of principle. The Israeli legislators reviewed the model of the American Constitution, which grants the Supreme Court the power to declare laws passed by the legislative branch unconstitutional. To Ben-Gurion this authority seemed to bypass the wishes of the democratic majority and restrict the government’s decision-making power. For precisely the same reason, the parties at both ends of the political spectrum—Mapam (United Workers Party) and Herut (liberty, the main right-wing party)—supported a constitution, since it would protect individual and minority rights against the coercive power of the majority. They feared that without a constitution, a government headed by Mapai could enact laws damaging to the small parties.

Ben-Gurion recognized the importance of a constitution as a central symbol of a state that educates its citizens to recognize the rule of law and the principle of equality before the law. But he contended that loyalty to the rule of law results not from the existence of a constitution but from a general civic ethos. Numerous countries have both glorious constitutions and regimes that are oppressive, tyrannical, and detrimental to the freedom of individuals and their rights. Thus a constitution is not a panacea that guarantees democracy and human rights, and its advantages do not outweigh its disadvantages. Ben-Gurion also argued that only 10 percent of the Jewish people were actually in Israel (at the time), and it was unwise for a tiny minority to force a constitution on the entire people for generations to come.

From a political standpoint Ben-Gurion was trying to avoid the internal struggles that accepting a constitution would produce, and he particularly wanted to avoid straining relations with the religious parties. A constitution would raise the issue of making the Halakha the source of law in Israel, or at least a demand to base the constitution on Jewish law, which the judicial system totally rejected. A constitution would also mandate codification of such ad hoc agreements as the “status quo arrangement,” which had been reached in talks between Ben-Gurion and Agudat Yisrael before November 29, 1947. The Jewish Agency had given Agudat Yisrael assurances that in the future state the Sabbath would be the public day of rest, public kitchens would be kosher, efforts would be made to maintain the halakhic laws of personal status, and the autonomy of religious education would be preserved but would include the core studies of the general education system. It would be difficult to anchor this arrangement in a constitution. With the state still unformed, a “culture war” might undermine loyalty to it and damage internal cohesion.

From the perspective of sixty years on, this seems one of Ben-Gurion’s greatest mistakes, largely because he never imagined that the influence of religion and the power of the religious parties would grow. He also agreed to exempt yeshiva students and girls who declared themselves religiously observant from military service, assuming that ultra-Orthodox Jewry was on its last legs and would eventually either disappear altogether or become a small, insignificant sect. As to the religious-Zionist parties, Hamizrachi and Hapoʿel Hamizrachi, he had seen them as faithful coalition partners on the Zionist Executive since 1935. Ben-Gurion maintained this tolerant attitude toward the religious parties not only because they were convenient coalition partners—their demands were limited to the sphere of religion and did not impinge upon either foreign policy or economic matters—but also as a matter of principle. To him they represented a historical tradition among the Jewish people; they were also a trend doomed to disappear, a sort of remnant of the past.

In the state’s early years the trauma of the Holocaust was still strongly embedded in ultra-Orthodox consciousness, the birth of the state was perceived as the dawn of redemption, and in the synagogues on Independence Day the Hallel prayer of praise was chanted. At that time it might have been possible to agree on the adoption of a constitution in Israel. A constitution’s importance goes beyond its purely legal aspect. Such a document is a tool for creating a civic ethos as a central component of the state’s identity. A constitution could have made a significant contribution to healing the rifts in Israeli society and stabilized universally accepted norms of governance. In this regard Ben-Gurion did not foresee historical developments. Bear in mind, however, that the optimistic assumption that Ben-Gurion could have legislated a constitution is simply speculation. Some scholars hold that in those early days the differences of opinion with the religious sector were severe enough to make such a thing impossible.

Even though no constitution was legislated, the Supreme Court possessed from its inception both an elevated status and a legal authority that went beyond those accorded by law. In contrast with the lower courts, which were a continuation of institutions that existed under the Mandatory government, the Supreme Court was an exclusively Israeli creation with no connection to the Mandatory institution that preceded it. Initially Ben-Gurion thought this honored state institution should be located in Haifa, which had not been awarded any national distinctions, but the appointed justices insisted that it be housed in Jerusalem, even though at the time the city’s political status was unclear. The inauguration of the Supreme Court on September 15, 1948, caused great excitement. Court president Moshe Zmora avowed emotionally: “For almost two thousand years the Jewish people have prayed three times a day for ‘And I will restore thy judges as at the first, and thy counselors as at the beginning.’ Today in awe we come closer to fulfilling that vision.”3

In the early years Supreme Court justices were appointed by the political system, and although one might have expected members of the ruling Mapai party to be given preference, in fact the goal was to create a politically balanced panel of justices that would also represent the religiously observant and the political center, while giving clear priority to professional jurists over political appointees. As time went by, the Supreme Court ensured its independence with an ordinance decreeing that its own members would elect new justices, unanimously. The political system generally made sure to uphold the dignity and independence of the Supreme Court—an unmistakable manifestation of the concept of statism.

Initially the court was inclined toward formal judgment according to the letter of the law, influenced perhaps by the German legal system, which many leading members of the Israeli system had graduated from. Researchers are divided regarding the reasons for this disposition. Explanations range from the justices’ fear of clashing with the collectivist trends prevailing in Israeli society to their desire to educate the public to respect the rule of law and the public arena. But the court swiftly extended its authority. In 1953 two communist newspapers, the Hebrew Kol Haʿam (voice of the people) and the Arabic Al-Ittihad (the union), petitioned the Supreme Court to revoke an order by the minister of the interior to close the papers because they had published defamatory articles against the government that were interpreted as inciting the public against enlisting in the army. In itself the issue amounted to a tempest in a teapot, since the articles had been published in response to a story that Israel’s UN ambassador had expressed agreement to mobilizing 200,000 Israelis to fight against the USSR in Korea, which turned out to be a fiction. What was important was the court’s decision to revoke the minister’s order to close the papers, because it found that the articles provided insufficient grounds for restricting freedom of the press. The court based its decision on the freedoms enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, thus giving the declaration the status of a sort of constitution guaranteeing individual freedom and rights.

The Declaration of Independence mentions the right of Jews to immigrate to Israel and declares “ingathering of the exiles” to be a state objective. This was a preferential right granted to Jews over other citizens. It arose from the Zionist worldview that Israel was to be the Jewish state, the home of every Jew desiring to live in it. The Law of Return, passed in July 1950, codified the right stated in the declaration. The juxtaposition of Jewish national identity and immigration to Israel grants Jews the unconditional right to Israeli citizenship from the day of their arrival in the country, except if they endanger public order (for reasons of criminality, health, security, or acts against the Jewish people). Citizenship includes the right to vote and to be elected to office. When the law was drafted in 1950, it did not explain how to define who is a Jew. Between 1948 and 1951, the years of mass immigration, no one investigated or examined this issue, and anyone’s declaration that he or she was Jewish was accepted and recorded under “Nationality” on the person’s identity card.

In the late 1950s Minister of the Interior Yisrael Bar-Yehuda (of the left-wing Ahdut Haʿavoda party) learned that his ministry’s officials were taking the law into their own hands, sometimes accepting a declaration in good faith and other times refusing to do so. He issued specific instructions: any person declaring in good faith that he or she was a Jew, as well as children of mixed marriages, should be registered as a Jew, with no additional proof required. Bar-Yehuda’s amendment turned a flexible procedure into an inflexible law, and this explosive issue, which until then had been avoided thanks to the Law of Return’s ambiguity, was now placed on the public agenda. July 1958 saw the first Knesset debate on “Who Is a Jew.” The government ratified Bar-Yehuda’s guidelines, thus determining that a person could be considered Jewish from the standpoint of belonging to the Jewish people, even if not considered so according to Jewish religious law. In response to this decision the Mafdal (National Religious Party) ministers resigned. To them this issue was paramount, since it redefined the borderlines of the Jewish collective.

In the absence of a compromise that met the demands of both the nonreligious side, which endorsed the national-identity definition, and the religious side, which insisted on the halakhic definition, Ben-Gurion decided to consult with fifty Jewish sages in Israel and the Diaspora. The problem was, first, that he was handing this issue over to people who were not only unfamiliar with it but also detached from the reality of life in Israel, and second, that the majority of the chosen fifty were religiously observant. In essence Ben-Gurion had “commissioned” a response that would satisfy the Mafdal and put an end to the coalition crisis. And indeed the majority of the respondents stated that “Who Is a Jew” should be defined according to halakhic law. When the Mafdal ministers returned to the government fold, the Ministry of the Interior was transferred to a religious individual who annulled his predecessor’s guidelines and unofficially ordered the ministry officials to register as Jewish only persons either born to a Jewish mother or who had converted in accordance with the Halakha. Not being grounded in law, these instructions invited appeals against them.

The first appeal, based on the contradiction between the law’s stipulations and the minister of the interior’s regulations, was lodged by Brother Daniel, a Carmelite monk of Jewish origin whose former name was David Oswald Rufeisen. Rufeisen saw himself as a Jew of the Christian faith, and had asked to be registered as Jewish on his identity card. A Ministry of the Interior official denied his request, and in 1962 Rufeisen petitioned the Supreme Court, claiming his right under the Law of Return. His petition required the court to decide whether the Law of Return’s definition of Jewish nationality overlaps its religious definition, or whether the two are separate. In a majority decision the court ruled against Brother Daniel, basing its decision not on the halakhic definition of “Who Is a Jew,” whereby he was in fact considered Jewish (“A Jew who has transgressed is still a Jew”), but on how a Jew is perceived by the man in the street. No one would think that a Christian monk might be a Jew. At least one justice, however, believed there should be a complete distinction between the religious and national definitions, and therefore concluded that Brother Daniel was a Jew according to his own definition. Ultimately, Brother Daniel was granted citizenship under the Nationality Law, which covers all non-Jewish citizens in Israel, but the ideological issue remained unresolved. Can an individual be a Jew by nationality without being Jewish by religion?

The controversy resurfaced several years later, when Benjamin Shalit, a senior IDF officer married to a Scottish woman who defined herself as an atheist, demanded that their children be registered as Jews. When the registrar denied his request, Shalit appealed to the High Court of Justice with a petition based on the Law of Return. In a long, detailed decision the court recognized the right of the Shalit children to be registered as Jews, based on the fact that the Law of Return contained no formal definition of “Who Is a Jew.” It said that children growing up in Israel, raised as Jews, who identify with the Jewish people, were worthy of recognition as Jews. The court added that this in no way undermined the halakhic perception, since the identity card was an official state document that neither proved nor disproved an individual’s Jewishness for the purposes of marriage and divorce, which came under the authority of the rabbinic courts.

The religiously observant considered that the court had taken upon itself the authority to distinguish between religious and national identity, the “Siamese twins” that had accompanied the Jews throughout history. The first appeal against connecting the two had been voiced by Clermont-Tonnerre in the debate on Jewish emancipation in France during the French Revolution. He was prepared to grant the Jews equal rights on condition that they relinquished their identity as a nation and adhered only to their religious one. In Israel the issue came up from the opposite direction: can a person be a Jew by nationality without being a Jew according to the Jewish faith? This topic was linked with another, complex one: did this mean that the State of Israel should permit civil marriages? In the late 1960s this question generated stormy controversy between Jewish freethinkers and the religiously observant. Nevertheless it remained on the fringes of public consciousness, since the vast majority of nonobservant Jews accepted the connection between religious and national identity as self-evident, and did not challenge the religious character of either the marriage and divorce laws or the rites of passage ceremonies (circumcision, bar mitzvah, burial).

In the end, under pressure from the religious parties, an amendment to the Law of Return was enacted in 1970 that defined a Jew as a person born to a Jewish mother or a person who has converted, and who is not a member of another faith. This definition contained two concessions to the nonreligious public. First, there is no mention of “conversion according to halakhic law,” which means that those who converted through the Reform or Conservative movement in the United States—which the Orthodox religious establishment in Israel had disqualified—were not excluded. Second, from then on the Law of Return would also include the children and grandchildren of Jews, the intention being to include the offspring of mixed marriages. This regulation concerned above all immigrants from the USSR. It became a central issue after the mass emigration from Russia in the 1990s (discussed later).

CONSOLIDATING STATE POWER

The need for a transition from a society governed by consensus such as existed during the Yishuv period—in which each entity could reject the authority of the majority and withdraw—to a state run by a government under law, which had the power to compel, was not accepted as self-evident. Thus the state had first to ensure its monopoly over the use of force. As we have seen, Yishuv minorities that did not accept the rule of the majority had posed a challenge in this respect. With the establishment of the state, the Lehi underground organization announced that it was disbanding and that its soldiers would join the IDF. The Etzel, however, did not do this. Even before the state was established, it had negotiated with the Haganah leaders about integrating into the army of the new state. The Etzel demanded several special rights, such as maintaining its units within the IDF, as well as an agreement that it would not be dismantled in Jerusalem, whose inclusion in the State of Israel was still unclear. However, it agreed to accept the state’s authority, and its soldiers joined the IDF.

During the first ceasefire, however, a crisis erupted. An Etzel vessel carrying arms and immigrants, the SS Altalena (a pen name of Jabotinsky), reached the shores of Israel. Since the government had given the UN an undertaking that it would not import arms during the ceasefire, the ship was diverted to a remote beach at Kfar Vitkin in the hope that the UN inspectors would not discover it, and it could unload its cargo of arms there and transfer them to the IDF. The Etzel tried to negotiate for its units to have priority in receiving the arms, and for part of the cargo to be sent to its separate organization in Jerusalem. The government rejected these terms and refused to accept the Etzel as a negotiating partner. Initially the Etzel appeared ready to transfer the arms to the IDF, but soon made clear that it would not. Etzel people and IDF soldiers clashed on the beach, with casualties on both sides. The ship set sail and ran aground off Tel Aviv in full view of the global media. Menachem Begin, the Etzel commander, boarded the ship and in a dramatic radio broadcast called upon his members to come help unload the cargo. Former Etzel members deserted from their IDF units and hurried to the shore. Violent clashes ensued between the Etzel people and IDF soldiers. A curfew was imposed on Tel Aviv, and Yigal Allon, the Palmach commander, was ordered to stop what the government and most of the public viewed as an attempt to challenge government authority. A cannon round fired from the Yona camp in north Tel Aviv hit the vessel, which started burning. A number of people were killed or wounded, and the Etzel members were forced to abandon the burning vessel and surrender. The Altalena story became Menachem Begin’s seminal myth as a leader prepared to assume responsibility for the welfare of the nation as a whole, because when the ship went up in flames he called upon his men to stop fighting and avoid an internecine war. But it also became a seminal myth of Israeli state sovereignty, for Ben-Gurion had proved his determination to ensure state control by military force, if necessary. The Etzel people now returned to the IDF as individuals and integrated into various units.

On August 17, 1948, UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte was assassinated by former members of Lehi. In response the government took decisive action, arresting Lehi and Etzel activists and eliminating the Etzel’s last vestiges of independence in Jerusalem. In September 1948 Ben-Gurion ordered the Palmach disbanded. The Palmach, the IDF spearhead, had proved its worth in fierce battles. It did not breach IDF discipline and did not constitute a potential threat to the government as the Etzel had seemed to do. But Palmach headquarters was linked politically with the left, especially Mapam, the left-wing party founded in January 1948. Ben-Gurion wanted an army whose primary loyalty was to the state, with no other sources of inspiration. By dismantling the Palmach he intended to show that there was only one army, the IDF, and one legal source of authority, the elected government. There were those who contended that Ben-Gurion was trying to weaken his political adversaries, but in retrospect there can be no doubt that his actions created precedents for the state that guaranteed the army’s noninvolvement in politics.

Yishuv society had possessed strong political awareness. Its parties were mobilizing and organizing entities that helped mediate between the individual and society. Everything was allocated according to political allegiance: immigration certificates, national settlement, the Haganah national command, the employment exchanges, even the order of boarding the illegal immigration ships. The banner of statism raised by Ben-Gurion was meant to counter the power of political bodies and establish the state as the representative of the general interest that strove to ensure the welfare of all citizens. The state was committed to a policy of equality for its citizens regardless of their political affiliation.

As we have seen, depoliticizing the army was one of the first actions taken to this end. Five of the six IDF chiefs of staff who served under Minister of Defense Ben-Gurion were nonpartisan, and not by chance. Senior officers who leaned obviously to the left did not find a place in the IDF. In the 1950s one could still identify senior IDF officers who were active in political parties, mainly Mapai, but the principle of separation between political activity and active military service slowly penetrated public consciousness, and by the end of the period was universally accepted. The legal system was another arena for depoliticization. As hinted at in the discussion on “Who Is a Jew,” most judges had no clear political affiliation, while the courts took care to display ideological neutrality and did not hesitate to criticize government institutions.

The civil service, on the other hand, was built on the departments that had existed in the Jewish Agency Executive, the National Committee, and the Mandatory government. The first two had a tradition of politicization that was now transferred to the civil service. Each minister swiftly staffed his ministry with his cronies. The idea of professional civil servants who could serve as a counterweight to a minister motivated by partisan considerations was barely accepted. For the first decade the civil servant worked on behalf of the minister’s political interests. Finally, in 1959 a number of civil service laws were enacted that established universal, meritocratic criteria for appointments. From now on each minister was entitled to appoint three of his own people to “positions of trust,” while the rest of the officials were selected by professional committees based on their skills, and the minister was not allowed to replace them. The Civil Service Commission was entrusted with these appointments.

The principle of meritocracy ultimately triumphed, so that civil servants’ level of education and ability had greater influence on their advancement than their political affiliation. One fine example is the development of the Ministry of Finance. Its civil servants were students of a young economist, an American immigrant called Don Patinkin, who introduced modern economic thinking into the Hebrew University Department of Economics. “Patinkin’s Boys” became the hard core of the Ministry of Finance and Bank of Israel professional staff, and they introduced norms of professionalism and political neutrality to subjects such as management of the state budget, ministry allocations, tax collection, and so forth.

During the Yishuv period the education system was structured into “streams” controlled by different interest groups. The “general stream” was Zionist and nonreligious; it had no political affiliation but was identified with the center and the right and run by the municipalities and the local councils. The Histadrut “workers’ stream” educated students for manual labor, agriculture, going to the kibbutz, and dedication to the collective. It nurtured an affiliation with socialist images and ideas and identification with the world’s wretched and oppressed. The pioneering youth movements, associated with political parties, were active in its schoolyards. The “Zionist-religious stream” belonged to Hamizrachi and fostered religious studies and a religious worldview, but also included general studies with an emphasis on traditional Jewish and Zionist values and images. Finally, the Agudat Yisrael “independent stream” taught religious studies only.

Education is a significant tool for shaping national identity. Leaving it in the hands of political factions would have perpetuated the Yishuv’s political legacy. But none of these groups was eager to give up its power, especially the workers’ stream, whose power had increased due to its dominance in the immigrants’ camps and maʿabarot (transit camps, sing. maʿabara, discussed later). It was now the biggest stream, even though its scope during the Yishuv period had not been impressive. (Most workers in the cities and moshavot sent their children to the general-stream schools.) In the wake of fierce clashes between the religious and workers’ streams over the immigrant children, an arrangement was devised. Hamizrachi and the workers’ stream agreed to relinquish political control over education, which was now the responsibility of the Ministry of Education and was divided into “state” and “state-religious” tracks. The Agudat Yisrael independent stream remained in control of its own education system, but as we have seen, it was small and nobody thought it had a future.

Some assert that Ben-Gurion assumed that state education would be conducted in the spirit of the workers’ stream, which was growing at the time. But the situation did not turn out that way. For better or worse, education took on a neutral character. Ben-Gurion’s critics later contended that eliminating the streams had actually led to the destruction of the workers’ stream and its special way of educating, while the other streams remained as they were. The result was to diminish the left’s ability to impart its worldview to the younger generation. At the same time, transferring education from the control of political factions to the state was a great achievement for the concept of statism.

One focus of political power was the labor exchanges. From the end of the 1930s on, these were run by the Jewish Agency. Their staffing and the apportioning of work were determined politically. When the state was established the labor exchanges were transferred to the Ministry of Labor, but their political character and the influence of political affiliation on job seekers’ getting work continued until the late 1950s, when the labor exchanges became “employment services” and their staff civil servants. Mechanisms of allocating work were now run according to civil service rules and under the supervision of the state comptroller: another victory for statism.

Other movements in addition to labor found their traditional roles expropriated by the state. Herzl’s creation, the Zionist Organization—“the emerging state”—was suddenly left without a clear mission. The Jewish state had become reality. So what now? The question of the role and position of the World Zionist Organization in the new state was linked to relations between Israel and the strong, wealthy American Jewish community. The American Jewish leadership had been prepared to support the Yishuv enterprise in Palestine, and approved sending it aid, but on condition that its activity would have no national aspirations that might play into the hands of antisemitic elements in American society, which could then accuse American Jews of dual loyalty. Thus, for example, Hadassah (the Women’s Zionist Organization of America) operated a wide-ranging health care organization in the Yishuv. Beginning this work with the British conquest of Palestine, it had established a preventive medicine system, infant welfare centers, and hospitals in the Yishuv and later in Israel. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (“the Joint”) was also active in the country. On the face of it at least, these organizations acted as philanthropic, not national, bodies.

Some groups among the American Jewish elites totally dissociated themselves from the Zionist Organization. The most extreme of these was the American Council for Judaism, which went so far as to engage in virulent anti-Zionist propaganda; its members helped Arab spokespeople prepare their speeches at the UN when the decision on partition was pending. Other groups, such as the American Jewish Committee (AJC), adopted a more moderate tone. They were concerned about involvement in matters that might portray the Jews as a nation, not solely a religion, and dissociated themselves from Zionism. This position was also adopted by the Reform movement. As the fate of European Jewry became known, the leaders of non-Zionist American Jewry were increasingly inclined to associate themselves with the Zionist struggle, and also to donate generously for arms procurement, the establishment of an arms industry in Israel, and the cost of the War of Independence. The leaders of the AJC, Joseph M. Proskauer and later Jacob Blaustein, and the heads of the United Jewish Appeal, Henry Morgenthau Jr. and Henry Montor, developed a direct connection with Ben-Gurion and his fellow members of the Zionist Executive, bypassing the leadership of the Zionist Organization of America. At that time the Zionist Organization of America had a forceful, influential leadership headed by Abba Hillel Silver and Emmanuel Neuman that did not see eye to eye with Ben-Gurion on numerous issues, and it conditioned its willingness to mobilize to assist the state on a set of demands. This position irked Ben-Gurion, who believed that the Zionist Organization should be committed to the state without reservation.

The establishment of the state put two main issues on the state’s agenda with regard to the Zionist Organization. The first was defining the difference between Zionists and non-Zionists, now that the state existed. The second was redefining the limits of the state’s sovereignty vis-à-vis the Zionist Organization. Ben-Gurion could now see no real difference between Zionists and non-Zionists; neither group was immigrating to Israel, while both wanted Israel to flourish and were active on its behalf. Moreover, the non-Zionists’ fundraising capabilities turned out to be far greater than those of the Zionists. And with respect to political influence, the non-Zionists had far more effective contacts. The Zionist Organization suffered a drastic drop in both prestige and influence, while the non-Zionists, led by AJC president Blaustein, demanded a clear definition of the state’s authority that would apply to its citizens only, with no claims whatsoever on American Jewry. They also demanded that the United States be defined as a “diaspora” and not an “exile” (a term implying that Jews ought to immigrate to Israel) and that the slogan “ingathering of the exiles” not apply to American Jewry, but only to countries where Jews were in distress.

In fact there was no difference between the non-Zionists and Zionists on the issue of immigration. Both saw the United States as a homeland, not a place of exile. But the Zionists wanted Israel to recognize them as a mediator between the new state and the Jews of the Diaspora; the Zionist Organization would represent those Jews vis-à-vis Israel and represent Israel to them. Ben-Gurion rejected this notion out of hand; the sovereign State of Israel could establish relations with whomever it deemed fit. He vehemently refused to grant the Zionist Organization exclusivity as a mediator. There are numerous Jews who are not Zionists, he said, and they too wish to play a part in building the state. Here two interests converged: that of the state, in defining itself as the focus and source of inspiration of world Jewry, and that of the non-Zionists, in preventing the Zionist Organization from obtaining the status of sole representative of the Diaspora Jews.

Ben-Gurion was adamant: only citizens of Israel were entitled to influence its policies, and Jews not living there had no right to interfere. On the other hand, he declared that the state had no intention of interfering in the internal affairs of the American Jewish communities. This was the spirit of the “understandings” reached between Ben-Gurion and Blaustein. At the Twenty-third Zionist Congress in 1951, the first to be held after the establishment of the state, Zionism’s aims were set out in the Jerusalem Program: “The task of Zionism is the consolidation of the State of Israel, the ingathering of exiles in Eretz Yisrael, and the fostering of the unity of the Jewish people.” This definition was ambiguous in the extreme. The reference to “ingathering of exiles” did not differentiate between countries where Jews were in distress and the Jews of the West, but the fact is that it was not aimed at Jews in the West. The reference to “the Jewish people” was also extremely general, out of concern for the feelings of Blaustein and the other non-Zionists.

The congress decided, however, that Israel should enact a law recognizing the special status of the Zionist Organization as the representative of Diaspora Jews. Such a law contravened not only the “understandings” between Ben-Gurion and Blaustein, but also Israeli interests as Ben-Gurion perceived them. Consequently, along the way from the congress’s decision to the Knesset’s enactment of the law, the Zionist Organization’s status was eroded. The paragraph describing it as “the representative of the Jewish people” was deleted and replaced by a description of it as “an authorized agency” acting in Israel for the development and settlement of the country, immigrant absorption, and coordination of the activities of Jewish institutions working in these areas in Israel. In 1954 a covenant was signed between the Zionist Organization and the government granting the Zionist Organization official status as the representative of world Jewry in all matters pertaining to its missions. But this agreement did not prevent the government of Israel from negotiating with other Jewish organizations. The State of Israel Bonds enterprise, with sales revenue greater than that of the United Jewish Appeal (whose income declined during the 1950s), was placed in the hands of the non-Zionists.

Ben-Gurion found it easier to negotiate with representatives of the non-Zionist organizations. Zionist Organization representatives were party members with political pretensions who sought to interfere in Israeli affairs from both within and without. The non-Zionists, for their part, did not want Israeli intervention in Diaspora matters, and in return refrained from interfering in Israeli matters. Instead of political power they asked for respect, and for their counsel to be heeded. Ben-Gurion asserted that the Zionist Organization had fulfilled its role and advocated that it be disbanded, but he found no support for this position even in his own party. Many in the Israeli leadership felt a commitment to the entity that had only recently led the struggle to establish the state. They also recognized that the Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency (which had shared personnel) were experienced in organizing immigration and absorbing and settling immigrants. They therefore supported the organization’s continued existence despite Ben-Gurion’s opposition.

Over the years the difference between non-Zionists and Zionists in American Jewry became blurred. The subject of dual loyalty, which had troubled the non-Zionists after the state was established, was now marginal. The enthusiasm that gripped Diaspora Jews over the Six-Day War brought down the barriers between the two types of identification with the state. The year 1968 saw the formulation of the second Jerusalem Program, which declared the aims of Zionism as follows: “The unity of the Jewish people and the centrality of Israel in Jewish life; the ingathering of the Jewish people in the historic homeland, Eretz Yisrael, through aliya from all countries; the strengthening of the State of Israel which is based on the prophetic vision of justice and peace; the preservation of the identity of the Jewish people through the fostering of Jewish, Hebrew, and Zionist education and of Jewish spiritual and cultural values; the protection of Jewish rights everywhere.” Very little remained of the Ben-Gurion–Blaustein “understandings” of the early 1950s. The program recognized the centrality of Israel in the life of the Jewish people; it recognized immigration as one of Zionism’s goals, without excluding Western Jewry; and it gave the Zionist Organization an important role in the Diaspora that it had not previously played. In 1971 an expanded Jewish Agency was established, with 50 percent of its representatives coming from the Zionist Organization, 30 percent from the United Jewish Appeal, and 20 percent from contributing organizations in the rest of the world. Thus the final barrier between the fundraisers, most of whom came from the non-Zionist organizations, and the Zionist representatives fell.

THE EARLY YEARS OF ISRAELI DEMOCRACY

In contrast to the norm in other social democratic countries, in Israel the left opposed “big government” and the right endorsed it. The voluntarist organizations of the left, such as the kibbutz movements, whose organizational skills and dedication underlay the mobilizing capabilities and resourcefulness that fortified them during the Mandatory period, did not accept losing the national functions they had performed when these were transferred to the state. Mapam, a Marxist party established in 1948 as a result of a union between the Hashomer Hatzaʿir party (which was based in the Kibbutz Haʾartzi Hashomer Hatzaʿir) and Ahdut Haʿavoda (established in 1944 by former Mapai members, most of whom were members of Hakibbutz Hameuhad), saw statism as an attempt by Ben-Gurion to dispossess the labor movement of its ideological and socioeconomic assets and transfer the movement’s nation-building roles to the state. Mapam considered itself a leftist alternative to Mapai and interpreted Ben-Gurion’s statism as a crude attempt to shunt it aside while Mapai took over the new positions of power.

The left’s feeling of alienation from the new state was heightened by the dismantling of the Palmach, by Ben-Gurion’s demand that the kibbutzim absorb hired workers from among the new immigrants (discussed later), and by the quelling of the “Seamen’s Rebellion,” a strike by the Israeli merchant fleet that was put down with the use of military mobilization orders. During those years of the Cold War, the left blindly admired the USSR, whereas Ben-Gurion took the State of Israel from a position of neutrality between the blocs, which it had adopted during the War of Independence, to a clearly pro-Western stance. The hostility from members of the left toward statism and Ben-Gurion derived from what they saw as damage to their historical assets for the sake of statism, and from their opposition to Ben-Gurion’s political line, which ran counter to their ideology and politics.

Israel’s first era (1948–1967) was marked by Mapai dominance. The party had a majority in all the governments headed by Ben-Gurion. It also had a majority in the Histadrut executive committee, and the Histadrut general secretary was a Mapai member. Mapai filled most Histadrut posts, including those in the Hevrat Haʿovdim (society of workers, the Histadrut’s holding company), Solel Boneh (the major Histadrut construction company), and even the workers’ councils, which ruled workplaces rigorously, granting little power to workers’ committees or trade unions. Mapai members also dominated the civil service. Mapai and the Histadrut seemed almost like subcontractors tasked to apply the principles of statism. They acted as a sort of Praetorian Guard that implemented the national policy formulated by Ben-Gurion. This process turned Mapai into a political machine that stamped out any attempt to democratize it from within or without, to change its way of operating, or to introduce new groups into its leadership. Statism Mapai-style was paternalistic, with control in the hands of one political movement that guided the state in the direction it perceived best for the public good. During this period Israel was a parliamentary democracy, but with a level of centralized political and economic power unknown in democratic countries. A democracy of the people, for the people, but not by the people.

Ben-Gurion declared it possible to create a coalition that included the entire political spectrum in Israel but “without Herut and Maki” (the latter being the Israeli Communist Party). Herut was the party founded by Menachem Begin after the Etzel had disbanded. It was not certain that Begin would decide to switch to parliamentary activity and accept the rules of the democratic game, nor were his behavior and political style during those first years always compatible with those rules. In 1952, when the Knesset debated the reparations agreement with West Germany (discussed later), Begin allowed demonstrators from his party to assault the Knesset and throw stones at its façade, until the speaker was forced to suspend the session—the first time this occurred in the legislature’s history. Begin adopted the affectations of a populist leader, such as having motorcycle outriders escort him to election rallies. He presented his right-wing party as the true alternative to Mapai and its socialistic methods. But the core of his concept was political: demanding the entire Land of Israel, on both sides of the River Jordan, for the State of Israel. He accused the Ben-Gurion government of being fainthearted and submitting to the Great Powers, a position most Israelis perceived as unrealistic and warmongering.

Although as time went by Herut became institutionalized and more moderate, and suspicion aroused by its use of undemocratic tactics waned, as long as Ben-Gurion was prime minister Herut did not enter the coalition. Nor did it manage to gain more than seventeen seats in the Knesset. In 1965 Herut merged with the Liberal Party (which had been spawned by the General Zionists) in hopes of shedding the image of a radical, irresponsible right-wing party and reaching a broader audience of voters. The new party was named Gahal (an acronym of Gush Herut-Liberalim, Herut-Liberals bloc). A few months earlier, in 1964, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol had fulfilled Zeʾev Jabotinsky’s request in his last will and testament that an independent Israeli government would bring his remains to Israel for reburial. This symbolic act heralded the legitimization of Herut in Israeli political life.

Maki, the Israeli Communist Party, was outside the Zionist consensus altogether. Although it accepted the existence of Israel as a state (since the USSR had voted for the two-state solution on November 29, 1947, and had recognized Israel), it was an anti-Zionist party that adhered without reservation to Soviet policy. Maki was binational, and it provided an authentic voice for the Israeli Arabs during the period after the 1948 war when they were deprived and isolated. It fought fiercely against the military government imposed on the Arabs after the war and against government expropriation of Arab land. As time went by, the party became polarized between its Jewish members, who objected to Arab nationalist statements calling for the destruction of Israel, and its Arab members, who endorsed such statements. According to one version, at a secret meeting of the party’s central committee, Knesset member Tawfik Tubi proposed that the USSR declare the establishment of the State of Israel to be a Stalinist mistake that should be rectified. The proposal was rejected by a vote along national lines. In 1964 the party split. Only Jewish members remained in Maki, while the breakaway party, Rakah (acronym for Reshima Kommunistit Hadasha, New Communist List), consisted almost entirely of Arabs. Maki supported the Israeli position on the eve of the Six-Day War, and Rakah supported the Arabs.

The Arab minority in Israel after the War of Independence numbered 156,000, about 20 percent of the population. Most Arabs lived in the Galilee, the “Little Triangle” given to Israel by Jordan after the armistice agreement, and the Negev. Stunned by the defeat, the flight, and the expulsion, they had no acknowledged leadership. Israel seized abandoned Arab property and expropriated Arab land for Jewish settlement. According to some estimates, between 40 and 60 percent of the Arab-owned land in Israeli areas in 1948 was now transferred to Jewish settlement. In the Declaration of Independence Israel assured its Arab inhabitants of equal rights, but in the wake of the war Ben-Gurion was persuaded that the Arabs could not be trusted and military government should be imposed on them for security reasons—meaning that they were excluded from the right to defend themselves in the Israeli judicial system.

Ironically this military government was based on the British Mandate Defence (Emergency) Laws that had been used against the Jewish Yishuv. Military government restricted the Arab inhabitants’ freedom of movement. They needed permits to leave their towns and villages, a situation that prevented them from obtaining employment in the center of the country or higher education. The military administration was entitled to demolish buildings and confiscate land if it thought they had been used to perpetrate hostile actions. Employment in education or the municipalities was conditional upon the administration’s consent. Except for Maki and, after 1954, Mapam, Arabs were excluded from Jewish political parties. Only in 1960 were they accepted as members with equal rights in the Histadrut, whose descriptor was now changed to “General Federation of Workers in Israel.” Mapai established Arab “satellite” (electoral) lists, whose elected members supported Mapai in the Knesset. In this the party was supported by the military administration, whose staff treated the Arab minority as a clientele that received privileges in return for political support. Mapai activists supported the Arab clan leadership, which provided votes in elections. In Israel’s second decade, military government laws were weakened and restrictions on movement abolished. But even though most parties (including Herut) recommended abolishing the harmful, anachronistic apparatus of military government, which was a stain on Israeli democracy, this was not done until 1966, during Levi Eshkol’s premiership. After that the satellite lists were gradually weakened, then completely done away with in 1981, and independent Arab parties appeared.

In the history of Jewish-Arab relations in Israel in the 1950s, one traumatic event became a symbol. On October 29, 1956, on the eve of the Sinai Campaign, tension along the border with Jordan heightened. The sector commander changed the night curfew imposed on the villages from 9 p.m. to 5 p.m., without notifying the workers in the fields. A border police battalion commander ordered his subordinates to shoot anyone breaking the curfew. Of the battalion’s eight platoon commanders, seven made sure that the inhabitants were allowed to return safely to their homes, but one obeyed the order to the letter, and that evening in Kafr Kassem forty-seven men, women, and children were killed.

The defense establishment was in shock, and the immediate reaction was a cover-up. Ben-Gurion tried to silence public discourse. The military censor prohibited mention of the massacre, but the news spread. Maki Knesset members interviewed the wounded in the hospital and took evidence. Afterward, protected by their parliamentary immunity, they revealed all the details from the Knesset podium. Haʿolam Hazeh, an opposition newspaper, printed the shocking facts in a blatant breach of censorship. The Israeli public was stunned. Eleven officers and men were tried, and eight were sentenced to long prison terms, though within two years they were all pardoned. The court that tried them set a precedent, which ever since has been a keystone of Israeli law: an order over which a “black flag” flies is manifestly illegal. In other words, the excuse that one was obeying an order is invalid in cases where the order is clearly illegal—as here, where it involved killing innocent civilians. The Arab population has not forgotten the Kafr Kassem affair. Every year a remembrance day marks this massacre, which is presented as a link in the chain of injustices and acts of brutality perpetrated by the State of Israel against them.

For the Jewish public, on the other hand, the Kafr Kassem affair represented the obligation to set clear boundaries between what was permitted and what was prohibited in relations between the army and citizens, and to establish ethical norms for military conduct. During the War of Independence the poet Nathan Alterman had written in his weekly newspaper column (called “The Seventh Column”) about the cold-blooded murder of an elderly Arab during the conquest of Lydda (Lod). Titled “On This,” the column called for the murderer to be tried: “For the bearers of arms, and we with them / Either actively / Or with a nod of consent, / Are pushed with a murmur of ‘necessity’ and ‘vengeance,’ / Into the sphere of war criminals.” Alterman added, “Let’s eradicate the serenity whispering ‘Indeed’ / Which is frightened of its face in the mirror!” Ben-Gurion endorsed this column and had it distributed throughout the IDF.4

However, it is doubtful whether this understanding of the nature of relations between the army and the citizens in a democracy had filtered into the public consciousness. In the early 1950s brutal searches for infiltrators were conducted in Arab villages, and the army’s finger was light on the trigger. Again and again Alterman vainly warned about the injustices of the military government and opposed suppressing the communist Tawfik Tubi’s “right of outcry” in the Knesset. In this instance Ben-Gurion, the poet’s great admirer, did not assent. Thus the Kafr Kassem massacre was a great crisis that had the dialectical effect of creating a catharsis. It called for moral stocktaking and establishing binding criteria, which if not always maintained still had an educational force that limited violence.

In its infancy Israeli democracy borrowed both liberal parliamentarian models from the West and some models from the Eastern bloc’s “guided democracy.” It was a unique combination in which freedom of speech and assembly, an independent judicial system that protected individual rights, free elections, and a free press coexisted with a centralized political system controlled mainly by one party, protectionist government apparatuses, and standards that enabled politicians to profit from their positions. When the Jewish Agency comptroller drew the attention of Levi Eshkol, then director of the Agency’s settlement department, to corruption among his officials, he replied with a Bible quote that became a classic: “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn” (Deut. 25:4)—implying that the use of public office for financial gain was inevitable. In the bureaucratic system of the time, when importing, exporting, or receiving foreign currency required a permit, and during the period of austerity in the 1950s when all luxury goods were considered a violation of the law, using “contacts” to obtain discounts, relief, licenses, and so forth was accepted practice. There was a saying that if you had friends, you didn’t need protektsia (pull, influence, clout).

There were rumors of bribery. As Alterman put it: “They talk quite openly, not in a whisper, / And mention names and title, / And tell positively: Who, when, and the sum, / And in which institution / And post / And profession. / And one hears not shameful names / Like Al Capone for instance, / No! But names of people who labored on the roads, / And sang ‘The Temple shall be rebuilt.’ ”5 Political life was managed by parties, and every party in the coalition sought perks for its organizations and activists. The left took care of the kibbutz movements, the moshav movement, the Hevrat Haʿovdim. The center and the right took care of the princes of private enterprise, industrialists, citrus grove owners, hoteliers, and contractors. The idea of public tenders had not yet been internalized. Thus there was fertile soil for corruption—of individuals and organizations alike—that circumvented the procedures of statism.

Israel had a free press: each party owned its own newspaper, and there were also several independent papers. The government was roundly criticized by both right and left. However, journalists were wary of touching upon some areas, one being security. The Editors Committee, a highly respected forum that the prime minister convened from time to time for updates—thus making its members privy to secret information—was one means of guaranteeing press cooperation with the government. Television had not yet penetrated the borders of Israel—Ben-Gurion thought it corrupted the public. Radio broadcasts were controlled by the Broadcasting Authority or the army radio station, both government-supervised bodies. Thus the government enjoyed an advantage over any opposition group in disseminating its version of events. But the opposition fully exploited the freedom of speech it had in the press and managed to convey its point of view to its faithful. The leading newspapers, such as Haʾaretz, Maʿariv, Yedioth Ahronoth, and even Davar, the Histadrut (actually Mapai) paper, were all independent and to varying degrees opposed different government policies and actions.

In one area, the borderline between permitted and prohibited was somewhat vague. Was the government allowed to spy on elected officials? Such an act can have various justifications: state security, suspicion of contact with foreign agents, or the fight against subversive activities. But could the prime minister authorize the Shin Bet (Security Service, later the General Security Service) to wiretap Mapam’s leaders? Hidden microphones discovered in the Mapam leadership’s conference room turned the spotlight onto what would be the tip of the iceberg, for the practice was widespread. The military government had maintained surveillance of and wiretaps on Arab leaders. It may be assumed that other opposition leaders and perhaps even people within the ruling party were also wiretapped. The accepted principle that state institutions like the Shin Bet did not serve particular interests was not always applied. It seems that some members of the security establishment were occasionally intoxicated by the establishment of the state and the feeling that they held the reins of real power. This can explain the use of the Shin Bet for political purposes; the breaking of the seamen’s strike by issuing military mobilization orders; or the idea that was included (though not implemented) in the IDF Law—that every soldier would work in agriculture for one year as a form of education. It was only this type of atmosphere that could give rise to the foolhardy idea of operating a network of Zionist Jews in Egypt to undertake sabotage that would destabilize the British evacuation of that country. This affair was inscribed in Israeli mythology under the euphemistic code name “The Bad Business” (1954).

THE COEXISTENCE OF INDIVIDUALISM AND COLLECTIVISM

The state’s first two decades were marked by tension between collectivist norms supporting dedication to society and the importance of recruiting individuals to work for the good of the state, and people’s individualist aspirations to improve their standard of living, secure a good education for their children, and climb the social ladder. The Zionist-socialist values dominated the rhetoric, but in everyday life people increased their efforts to improve their personal situation. This conflict had interesting manifestations in three extra-parliamentary opposition groups that appeared at this time.

The first, “Shurat Hamitnadvim” (the volunteers’ line), appeared in 1952. This group of idealists consisted of Hebrew University students who wanted to improve Israeli society. Most were either members of Mapai or ideologically close to it. They seem to have internalized Ben-Gurion’s concept of statism and sought to put it into practice. They maintained their independence and the group itself did not align with any political party, but worked to help absorb mass immigration on the one hand, and fight corruption in the government apparatus on the other. Shurat Hamitnadvim embraced collectivist standards. Its members believed they were obligated to prove their right to make demands on others by undertaking volunteer work. Thus their first activity was to help the residents of a transit camp near Jerusalem during the floods of the winter of 1951–1952, and teach the new immigrants Hebrew.

Afterward, in the name of social responsibility, they began warning of and informing about cases of persistent corruption in government circles. Purging the government apparatus was supposed to create a worthier Israeli society. The group’s connection with collectivist trends was clearly evident in its puritanism and its untiring infiltration into the inner workings of the government apparatus, sometimes infringing government authority or invading privacy. Frustration with the negligible results of their actions drove them to seek sensationalist claims that would arouse the public to support purging corruption. So they focused on making accusations against Amos Ben-Gurion, a senior police officer and the prime minister’s son, who sued them for defamation of character. The resulting publicity went far beyond anything they had previously achieved, but also alienated numerous people who had supported them. In the end Shurat Hamitnadvim broke up and its members dispersed in different directions. They can currently be found in either the left or extreme right camps.

The second extra-parliamentary opposition group was embodied in the Haʿolam Hazeh (this world) weekly, edited by Uri Avneri. Avneri started out as a right-winger, a member of the Etzel, with clear leanings toward Canaanism, a movement that sought to create a new Israeli identity based on ancient Semitic peoples (see chapter 11). But by the time he acquired the weekly in 1950, he had undergone a personal revolution and now supported dialogue between the Jews and Arabs. The aim of the weekly was to topple Mapai. Avneri’s pet hatred was for Ben-Gurion, whom he viewed as an evil dwarf acting against the generation of native-born Israelis raised in the Yishuv. Haʿolam Hazeh was an independent publication that subsisted on subscriptions and advertising and had no political identification. It introduced into the Israeli press what later came to be known as “investigative journalism,” and numerous journalists received their training in its office. Its motto was “Without Fear, Without Bias.” Front page headlines screamed about corruption in the Mapai apparatus, as in a series of articles on “Khoushystan”—the city of Haifa, whose Mapai mayor was Abba Khoushy. The back page carried photographs and articles in the Playboy style, adapted to local standards of modesty. This mixture of unbridled political aggression and sensationalist voyeurism made Haʿolam Hazeh very attractive. Many read it, though usually in secret.

In the 1950s Haʿolam Hazeh collaborated with Shmuel Tamir, a fanatical right-wing attorney with a deep-seated hatred of Ben-Gurion, giving him exposure in two legal affairs that rocked Israel: the Grunewald-Kasztner trial (see chapter 11) and the case of Amos Ben-Gurion and Shurat Hamitnadvim. Another of the paper’s targets was “the Organization of Darkness”—the Shin Bet (Sherut Habitahon Haklali, General Security Service)—which it viewed as a serious threat. Avneri coined the Hebrew terms Bitsuism, the tendency of Ben-Gurion’s people to emphasize action at the expense of ideology, and Bitchonism, the subjugation of political and social thinking to the needs of the defense establishment. He was a bitter critic of Ben-Gurion’s control of the defense establishment, and later aimed his barbs at Moshe Dayan, whom he considered a threat to Israeli democracy. At the same time, throughout his life he had a soft spot for the IDF’s soldiers, with whom he served in the War of Independence. He is credited with exposing the Kafr Kassem affair and carried on an unrelenting struggle against the military government. In 1965 Avneri was elected to the Knesset on an activist ticket advocating peace with the Arab states.

Avneri and his paper acted unconventionally. The uninhibited use of the media, the crude style, tearing up the rule book in its exposés, all heralded a new period in government-public relations. Yet like Shurat Hamitnadvim’s idealism, that of Haʿolam Hazeh adhered to collectivism as a guiding ideology. It is difficult to discern liberal elements striving for individual liberty and rights in Avneri’s ideology, and in this sense he, too, belongs to the era of collectivism.

The third opposition group was composed of Hebrew University professors and intellectuals who organized in the 1960s to protest the conduct of Ben-Gurion, which they saw as aggressive and authoritarian. In 1960 forgeries had been discovered in documents relating to “the Bad Business.” Pinchas Lavon, secretary-general of the Histadrut and one of the most powerful men in the country, had been minister of defense at the time of “the Bad Business” and as a consequence had been forced to resign. He now sought to clear his name, contending that it was not he who had given the order to operate the sabotage network in Egypt. Ben-Gurion denied his request for formal exoneration, saying that the prime minister did not decide guilt or innocence, especially based on the version of only one party in the case—the other party being Chief of Military Intelligence Benjamin Gibli, who contended that Lavon had indeed authorized him to activate the network.

Now the “Lavon Affair” snowballed. Lavon broke all the rules of the political game by appearing before the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, a political forum that included representatives of the parties, and laying out an entire list of claims and allegations about the defense establishment. His statement was leaked to the press, again against the accepted rules. When a ministerial committee (“the Committee of Seven”), which had been set up for procedural purposes only, ruled that Lavon had not given the order, Ben-Gurion decided that the whole proceeding injured the principles of both separation of powers and natural justice, and resigned. The more entrenched in this position Ben-Gurion became, the more Lavon played the martyr. The affair took on the proportions of a sort of Dreyfus trial, especially after the Mapai Central Committee relieved Lavon of his duties as secretary-general of the Histadrut.

More than a hundred professors signed a letter of protest against Ben-Gurion, demanding that Lavon’s name be cleared. There are several possible explanations for this unprecedented mobilization of academics to support Lavon. The affair occurred after a number of clashes between Ben-Gurion and the intellectuals, which resulted from his expressions of indifference toward Hebrew literature, his pretension of being not only a political leader but also the shaper of the people’s vision—expressed in his attitude toward the Bible as the focal point of Jewish creativity, while ignoring all the other achievements of Jewish culture down the generations—and his elevating the slogans “The Chosen People” and “A light unto the nations” to the status of national goals. According to this theory, the intellectuals thought that Ben-Gurion’s claim to be not only a leader but also a prophet could lead to a “totalitarian democracy”—a term coined by Yaʿakov Talmon, an important historian and a leader of the intellectual opposition.

Another possible reason for the professors’ action was Lavon’s former leadership in the Gordonia youth movement. Some of the academics’ leaders, such as Nathan Rotenstreich, had belonged to this movement and chose to be loyal to their past leader. Even Amos Oz, then a young author and member of Kibbutz Hulda, which was affiliated with Gordonia, considered Lavon his guide and mentor. Uri Cohen, a historian of higher education in Israel, believes that the government’s decision in the late 1950s to build a university in Tel Aviv, thus breaking the Hebrew University’s monopoly over higher education, created an antagonistic state of mind among the professors, which found its ideological focus in the Lavon Affair. Either way, the affair turned Israeli intellectuals into a powerful opposition group that could mobilize the media and wield great influence over public opinion. During this period a certain fatigue with nation building can be detected among the intellectuals. Still, the very fact that the professors left their ivory tower and went into action on behalf of what to them was a question of values shows that this group, too, was still powerfully driven by the collectivist ethos and considered itself committed to helping shape the image of the state.

From 1960 to 1965 the affair remained high on the country’s agenda. But ordinary citizens were sick to death of it. They were no longer interested in the details of the story, whose various conflicting versions were still popular at private gatherings among the educated middle class—they simply wanted it to go away. Ben-Gurion, however, would not let it go. For him the main issue was now the legal one: government ministers could not clear or indict someone. Allowing this to happen would constitute a deadly blow to the principle of separation of powers and the principle of state supremacy on which it was based. But to the public his unremitting perpetuation of the affair looked like an unnecessary power struggle. One contemporary cartoon showed Ben-Gurion shattering his own bust (that is, demolishing his public image) with a hammer.

In retrospect one can see there was tacit agreement that Ben-Gurion’s position was correct, for in 1968 the State Commissions of Inquiry Law guaranteeing the independence of such commissions from the political system was enacted. But this triumph of Ben-Gurionist statism was a Pyrrhic victory. In the interim Mapai had split, and Ben-Gurion and his supporters founded the Rafi party (an acronym of Reshimat Poalei Yisrael, Israel Workers’ List) from among “the youngsters,” led by Shimon Peres and Moshe Dayan. Mapai’s standing in public opinion was damaged. In the next elections, in 1965, the power of the labor movement decreased. Before the elections the Alignment, a union of Mapai and Ahdut Haʿavoda, was created. Whereas in the elections to the Fifth Knesset Mapai had won forty-two seats and Ahdut Haʿavoda nine, in the elections to the Sixth Knesset the Alignment won only forty-five. Internal unity and the balance between younger and older members had been damaged as the younger leadership was deposed and the older generation took over. Without the attractive power of Ben-Gurion, Mapai began losing its unassailable position among the public. The erosion of its power continued from then on.

In 1953 Ben-Gurion had resigned the premiership and gone to live in Kibbutz Sdeh Boker, which had been built in the middle of the Negev desert and was not affiliated with any of the existing kibbutz movements, in order to demonstrate devotion to pioneering statism even in his retirement. Large sections of the population felt abandoned; the founding father had left the wheel of the ship of state. People did not see Moshe Sharett, who replaced him, as capable of inspiring the same level of confidence in the country’s leadership. Not much time passed before Ben-Gurion returned to the premiership in 1955. But in the 1960s, as debate on the Lavon Affair went on and on, the public felt that the time had come for a changing of the guard. Ben-Gurion had nurtured some talented younger men (Dayan, Abba Eban, and Shimon Peres) whom he appointed to the cabinet he formed in 1959. This act raised concerns among the intermediate Mapai generation that Ben-Gurion was trying to bypass them and hand the baton of government to the younger men. This intermediate generation included figures such as Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, Pinchas Sapir, and Zalman Aranne, all of whom had served in key government posts. They opposed Ben-Gurion in the affair. This clash reflected Ben-Gurion’s diminishing status in his own party and the challenge to his leadership from within it. Ben-Gurion’s resignation and his replacement by Levi Eshkol in 1963 marked the end of an era: the formative period of Israeli democracy was over. The political system for changing the guard worked well. Eshkol’s premiership was marked by more flexibility regarding the centrality of the state and greater tolerance and openness. Abolition of the military government and bringing Jabotinsky’s remains to Israel heralded a new willingness to expand the scope of Israeli democracy and the national consensus.

Statism was a guiding principle, a standard not always realized in practice but that had an essential educational value. In the end a generation grew up that internalized its values and rid itself of politicization—the last vestige of Yishuv practices. During this initial period, control mechanisms were put in place to ensure equality of citizens before the law and to prevent arbitrary action by government: the Supreme Court, the State Comptroller, and the Attorney General. Israel during this period was not a liberal democracy in all matters pertaining to individual and minority rights. According to one scholar’s definition, statism was a republican concept that saw the state as a free commonwealth whose members were committed to acting to promote its success, and whose discourse emphasized the obligations of the citizen. The balance between individual and society tilted toward society. Individual alienation, which is part of liberal democracy, did not exist in Israel during this period; there was a high degree of public involvement in what was going on. The high voting percentages in elections to the Knesset attest to this. In the 1950s and 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, even long-standing democracies such as Great Britain, the United States, and France allowed themselves to subordinate the principles of liberalism if they felt the public welfare was under threat.6 Thus, according to the rules accepted at the time in the democratic West, the young Israeli democracy conducted itself well.

NOTES

1.Uri Yadin’s diary, 10.5.1948, Sefer Uri Yadin: haʾish ufoʿalo (In Memoriam: Uri Yadin), Aharon Barak and Tana Spanitz (eds), Jerusalem: Bursi, 1990, p. 23.

2.Sefer Uri Yadin, 15.7.1948, p. 40.

3.Moshe Zemora’s speech at the inauguration of the Supreme Court, Hapraklit 5, 1948–1949, pp. 187, 189. Cited according to Pnina Lahav, “Haʿoz vehamisra: hashanim haformativiot shel beit hamishpat haʿelyon, 1948–1955” (The Supreme Court of Israel: Formative Years, 1948–1955), in Anita Shapira (ed.), Atzmaʾut—50 hashanim harishonot (Independence—The First Fifty Years), Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1998, p. 152.

4.Nathan Alterman, “Al zot” (On This), Hatur hashviʿi (The Seventh Column), Book Two, Tel Aviv: Davar, 1954, p. 24.

5.Nathan Alterman, “Tnai rishon” (Precondition), Hatur hashviʿi (The Seventh Column), Book Two, Tel Aviv: Davar, 1954, pp. 124–126.

6.The hearings held by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the United States are one example of behavior deviating from the normal standards of democracy. In France, de Gaulle’s government functioned under emergency laws for six months during its early days. The fight against Soviet espionage in Britain caused infringement of individual rights, while the fight against terrorism in Northern Ireland was carried out with the gloves off.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

English

Lahav, Pnina, Judgment in Jerusalem: Chief Justice Simon Agranat and the Zionist Century, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Medding, Peter Y., The Founding of Israeli Democracy, 1948–1967, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Hebrew

Barak, Aharon, and Spanitz, Tana (eds.), Sefer Uri Yadin: Haʾish ufoʿalo (In Memoriam: Uri Yadin), Jerusalem: Bursi, 1990.

Bareli, Avi, Mapai bereishit haʿatzmaʾut: 1948–1953 (Mapai at the Beginning of Independence: 1948–1953), Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 2007.

Bareli, Avi, Gutwein, Daniel, and Friling, Tuvia (eds.), Hevra vekalkala beYisrael: mabat histori veakhshavi (Society and Economy in Israel: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives), Jerusalem and Sdeh Boker: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2005.

Cohen, Chaim, Chaim Cohen shofet elyon: sihot im Michael Shashar (Supreme Court Justice Chaim Cohen: Conversations with Michael Shashar), Jerusalem: Keter, 1989.

Erel, Nitza, “Bli mora bli maso panim”: Uri Avneri veHaʿolam Hazeh (Without Fear, Without Bias: Uri Avneri and Haʿolam Hazeh), Jerusalem: Magnes, 2006.

Feldstein, Ariel L., Kesher gordi: David Ben-Gurion, hahistadrut hatzionit veyahadut artzot habrit, 1948–1963 (Gordian Knot: David Ben-Gurion, the Zionist Organization, and American Jewry, 1948–1963), Sdeh Boker: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Sapir Academic College, 2003.

Kabalo, Paula, Shurat hamitnadvim: korotav shel irgun ezrahim (Shurat Hamitnadvim: The Story of a Civic Association), Tel Aviv: Am Oved and the Institute for the Study of Zionism, 2007.

Kedar, Nir, Mamlakhtiyut: hatefisa haʾezrahit shel David Ben-Gurion (Mamlakhtiyut: Ben-Gurion’s Political-Civic Concept), Jerusalem and Sdeh Boker: Ben-Gurion Institute, 2009.

Margolin, Ron (ed.), Medinat Yisrael kemedina yehudit vedemokratit: rav siah umekorot (Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State), Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 1999.

Pilovsky, Varda (ed.), Hamaʿavar miyishuv lemedina, 1947–1949: retzifut utemurot (Transition from Yishuv to Statehood: Continuity and Change), Haifa: University of Haifa, 1990.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Ben-Rafael, Eliezer, and Sharot, Stephen, Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in Israeli Society, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Cohen, Mitchell, Zion and State: Nation, Class, and the Shaping of Modern Israel, Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1987.

Curtis, Michael, and Chertoff Mordecai S. (eds.), Israel: Social Structure and Change, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1973.

Eytan, Walter, The First Ten Years, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1958.

Liebman, Charles S., Pressure without Sanctions: The Influence of World Jewry on Israeli Policy, London: Associated University Presses, 1977.

Medding, Peter Y. (ed.), Israel, State and Society, 1948–1988, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Peled, Yoav, and Shafir, Gershon, Being Israeli, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Sprinzak, Ehud, and Diamond, Larry (eds.), Israeli Democracy under Stress, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1993.

Governance and Politics

Arian, Asher, and Shamir, Michal, Collective Identity and Electoral Competition in Israel, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1997.

Bernstein, Marver H., The Politics of Israel: The First Decade of Statehood, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957.

Medding, Peter Y., Mapai in Israel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972.

Judaism and Democracy

Abramov, Zalman S., Perpetual Dilemma: Jewish Religion in the Jewish State, Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1976.

Liebman, Charles S., and Don Yehiya, Eliezer, Civil Religion in Israel: Traditional Judaism and Political Culture in the Jewish State, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Ravitzky, Aviezer, Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Law

Harris, Ron, Kedar, Alexander, and Likhovski, Assaf (eds.), The History of Law in a Multi-Cultural Society: Israel 1917–1967, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002.

Arabs in Israel

Smooha, Sammy, Arabs and Jews in Israel, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992.

Smooha, Sammy, and Ghanem, Asʾad, Ethnic, Religious and Political Islam among the Arabs in Israel, Haifa: University of Haifa, 1998.

Etzel, Herut, the Altalena

Begin, Menachem, The Revolt, Jerusalem: Steimatzky’s Agency, 1972.

Lankin, Eliahu, To Win the Promised Land, Walnut Creek, CA: Benmir, 1992.

Niv, David, A Short History of the Irgun Zevai Leumi, Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, 1980.