Israel Studies Review

Ethnicity and religious identity are two major interrelated cleavages within the Israeli-Jewish electorate. Previously, ethnicity’s effect had a stronger impact on voting patterns, while today religious identity is more influential. Former studies conceived religious identity in terms of levels of observance, such as Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox. We claim that each of these groups has unique characteristics independent of degree of religious identity. To test this hypothesis, we measure religious identity as a nominal variable, applying an interactive model that compares the effects of the pairings of religious identity and ethnicity to a common baseline. Data from before the 2015 elections reveal that religious identity has stronger effects than ethnicity: religious groups support the right more than the secular. However, the ultra-Orthodox tend to support the right to a lesser extent than other religious groups. In closing, we compare the role of religious identity in Israel to its status in today’s world.

This article discusses associative initiatives by two underprivileged sectors in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s: inhabitants of low-income neighborhoods on the fringes of Tel Aviv and Arab citizens living in towns and villages under supervision of the Military Administration. Based on varied archival sources comprised largely of letters and memoranda written by members of the associations, the study examines encounters that took place (usually in writing but sometimes face-to-face as well) between marginalized citizens and policymakers from the political (local or national) center. I contend that the effect of the associative initiatives should be viewed through the prism of the community’s sense of self-value and the civic skills that it imparts, regardless of the concrete attainment of goals. I argue that such an inquiry into voluntary associations, both formal (registered) and informal (non-registered), yields a more complex picture of the limited Israeli democracy of the country’s first two decades.

This article examines the major changes in the Israeli political arena, on both the left and right, in the two years before the 1967 War. The shift was marked by the establishment in 1965 of the right-wing Gahal (the Herut-Liberal bloc) and of the Labor Alignment, the semi-merger of Israel’s two main left-wing parties, Mapai and Ahdut HaAvodah. Some dissatisfied Mapai members broke away from the Alignment and formed a new party, Rafi, under the leadership of David Ben-Gurion. They did not gain nearly enough Knesset seats to take power in the November 1965 election, but Rafi did become part of the emergency national unity government that was formed in June 1967, due largely to the weak position of Levi Eshkol as prime minister. This enabled Rafi’s Moshe Dayan to assume the minister of defense position on the eve of the Six-Day War, which began on 5 June 1967.

This article demonstrates how the process that eventually led to the founding of the Likud party in the fall of 1973, alongside the goal of creating an effective alternative to the Labor movement, was actually a failed attempt to diminish the influence of Begin and Herut within the Likud. Herut’s new and old partners wished to effect—through the creation of the Likud—a change in the identity and character of the alternative party. Contrary to expectations, Herut revealed itself to be an open and dynamic movement for an ever-growing sector of the public. The Herut movement became the key axis of the Likud, in light of demographic, cultural, social, and economic processes, which fashioned within Likud an alloy that symbolized the rise of a new Israeli identity.

The article examines the internal processes within Herut that enabled it to retain its dominance even after the formation of the Likud.

The evaluation of citizenship has always been tied to ethical issues, as citizenship laws reflect existing rules and also define the desired ‘good’ citizen. In order to assess whether ethical considerations have affected the legal construction of citizenship in Israel, I compared the two main laws in Israel that regulate newcomers and their citizenship—the Law of Return (1950) and the Citizenship Law (1952). I examined the legal texts and used content analysis to address the subjective intentions of the legislators who proposed them, as presented in an explanatory memorandum. Many scholars have argued that these laws were introduced as the foundational laws of the Jewish state. Nevertheless, until the 1980s, the Citizenship Law was explained as a technical measure governing the citizenship of non-Jews. Although both laws are presented as ethical, politicians characterize them as mainly republican, concealing their liberal ethical component.

Israel has absorbed considerable numbers of non-olim immigrants since the 1990s. This phenomenon has posed new challenges to the state’s highly restrictive and ethnic citizenship policy, resulting in the emergence of a new phase in its politics of citizenship, which this article seeks to describe and analyze. By employing the methodology of political claims analysis—based on newspaper articles reporting attempts to expand immigrants’ access to Israeli citizenship between 1994 and 2013—and an in-depth study of one specific struggle over immigrants’ status, spanning the years 2003–2006, it shows that Israel provides a much narrower, although by no means closed, ‘opportunity structure’ for enabling immigrants to access citizenship when compared to developed liberal democracies.

Until the 1970s, the few interactions between Sderot and the neighboring kibbutzim in the Sha’ar HaNegev Regional Council revolved around the kibbutzim’s economic and political dominance. As political resistance to this control increased, kibbutz members became worried about the consequences of segregation and economic exploitation and wished to alter these problematic relations. Thus, the Sderot–Sha’ar HaNegev partnership program, which aimed to create a shift in the relational structure, was established. This article analyzes the power dynamics between Sderot residents and the kibbutzim during the program’s operation. The partnership, although expected to reduce segregation and change the power relations between the communities, did not bring about a transformation from paternalism to partnership, but rather evolved from dominance to hegemony. Although the hierarchical relations are still in place, the interaction between spatial, class, and identity elements has created new ways in which the relationship operates up to the present day.