Israel Studies Review

This article assumes, first, that during the 1950s the government, the trade union Histadrut, and the political party Mapai situated themselves in an intermediate position between the Ashkenazi public and the recently arrived Mizrahi immigrants. Second, it assumes that the right and center-right public forces, such as the General Zionist and Herut parties, and the influential liberal-oriented newspaper Ha’aretz played key roles in the evolution of ethnic relations during this period and impacted the political orientation of the Ashkenazi middle class. It examines these assumptions by considering the part played by the right, the center-right, and the Mapai government during a prolonged conflict between the Ashkenazi academic middle class and the government during the mid-1950s. This dispute centered on the appropriate extent of the wage gaps set between the salaries of the new Ashkenazi academic middle class and those of the new Mizrahi proletariat.

In light of the labor movement’s prominence in Israel’s history, the recent resurgence of unionizing activity after some 30 years of organized labor’s decline has caused much scholarly debate. However, scholars have paid insufficient attention to political ‘climate’, the wider social context, and the ‘battle of ideas’. This article therefore discusses the status of organized labor in media discourse, the rhetoric against the labor courts, liberalization in legal reasoning, and how organized labor is construed by the courts, as well as the conceptual differentiation between ‘workers’ and ‘the public’. It concludes that both organized labor and vestigial corporatist institutions are facing delegitimizing rhetoric and proposes that, for a fuller assessment of union revitalization, we should pay attention to labor struggles on three planes: the frontal struggle in the workplace, the institutional struggle to shore up the institutions crucial to collective labor relations, and the ideological struggle against the narrative of delegitimation.

Women have long served in the Israel Defense Forces, notwithstanding strong opposition by the Chief Rabbinate. In the twenty-first century, approximately 25 percent of female graduates of Israel’s religious high school system enlist, despite social disapproval. Israel’s Orthodox community has largely ignored the issue in the past. Recently, however, rabbis and public figures within the religious community have acknowledged the reality of women’s conscription and have shown some willingness to address it. Although religious female soldiers are still atypical, they are no longer viewed as the anathema they once were. This article presents a possible model for this legitimation as a social process. It then describes the relationship between religious women, military service, and conscription in Israel, concluding with a suggestion about broader contexts within which this change can be viewed.

Parliaments channel legislation efforts and oversight functions to parliamentary committees in order for them to transform policy ideas into agreed-upon policies and then monitor their implementation. Committees play a major role in the policymaking process when they possess agenda-setting powers over the bills they process and through their employment of oversight capacities. The rules that construct checks and balances between the government and Israel’s Knesset potentially minimize the Knesset committees’ agenda-setting influence. Nevertheless, Knesset committee chairs strategically use their institutional powers to affect committee deliberations through bargaining and dynamic agenda setting. Consequently, Knesset committees play a major role in the policy process due to bargaining rather than through institutional rules.

This article examines the American Jewish Committee’s (AJC) engagement with Israel regarding the state’s Palestinian-Arab minority. It focuses on the period of military government (1948–1966), when the rights of most Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel were curtailed under military rule. In the mid-1950s, AJC leaders became interested in examining and alleviating the plight of the Arab minority. Rather than publicly confronting Israel, the AJC privately lobbied Israeli officials on the matter and later attempted to educate Israelis about liberalism using ideas more closely associated with its work in America than its human rights advocacy abroad. To understand the AJC’s motives, the article points toward AJC’s domestic civil rights and ‘human relations’ activity, its distinct form of pro-Israel non-Zionism, and its concerns about ‘Arab propaganda’, anti-Semitism, and Jewish-Christian relations in America.