Israel: A Visitor’s Notes

What a tourist can learn in a few weeks about the political situation of a country is notoriously questionable. All I propose to do here is to supplement Menahem Brinker’s report with a few observations and speculations gleaned from talking to some good political minds in Israel.

The Israeli sociologist Dan Horowitz, writing in Emda, a monthly rather similar to Dissent, distinguishes between structural and conjunctural causes for the electoral shift from the Labor Alignment to Begin’s Likud. A structural cause would be the demographic changes that have gradually been taking place in Israel over the past 25 years; a conjunctural cause, the scandals about corruption that beset the Labor regime during it...