The Israeli Labour Party

An analysis of the development of the Israeli Labour Party, from its origins in the labour movement at the turn of the century, up to and including its defeat in the 1996 elections.

An anthropological study of a major national political party - one which dominated Israeli politics for nearly five decades and was returned to office in summer 1992. The analysis focuses on the relationship between culture and politics to explain the crucial role the Labour Party has played.

This work explains how Mapai governed Israel from 1948 to 1969 when it became a partner to the Israeli Labour Party.

This is the first comprehensive account in any language of Israel's central labour organization, the Histradut, and the Israeli Labour Party, which dominated politics for more than four decades. The author develops a political economy approach which draws on contemporary theories of labourmovements, labour markets, and state/economy relations. In comparison with the corporatist social democracies of Western Europe, the Israeli case is shown to be in many ways paradoxical. Shalev demonstrates that unravelling these paradoxes provides both challenges and insights for comparativestudies of the advanced capitalist democracies. At the same time, he offers students of Israeli society a critical alternative to previous scholarship on labour relations, left-wing politics, and domestic public policy. This volume provides a controversial and theoretically informed assessment ofthe historical record, complemented by a novel interpretation of the dramatic political and economic instability which surfaced in Israel during the 1970s.

Disagreements over national security issues, primarily between Likud and Labour (the two major political forces in Israel), have gradually become the central topic of dispute in Israeli politics. Likewise, the distinction between the political left and right increasingly concerns questions of national security, rather than other clevages in Israeli society.

This book examines Israel’s relationship and political decision-making process towards the Occupied Territories from the aftermath of the Six Day War to the Labour Party’s electoral defeat in 1977. The period represents the first decade of Israel’s occupation of the Occupied Territories and the last decade in which the Labour Party was Israel’s most dominant political force. Arguing that the successive Israeli governments headed by the Labour Party lacked a strategic policy towards the Occupied Territories to address the country’s objectives and needs, this book demonstrates the detrimental effect this had on Israel, on the Middle East in general, and on the Palestinian people in particular. In addressing key aspects of decision making pathologies, this book raises issues which remain important features of Israeli politics today and an analysis relevant for political decision making worldwide.