Yonathan Shapiro challenged the self-satisfaction of the “Jerusalem School” (consisting of Eisenstadt, Lissak, Horowitz, and others). Although he never wrote a single comprehensive book on Israeli society and history, Shapiro analyzed internal party politics and mechanisms in a series of monographs, coming to the conclusion that Israel is democratic only in a very formal and narrow sense of the term. He depicted the Israeli political scene as a Bolshevik-type regime, in which a very small old-timer elite group rules the state under the premise of democracy. Fearful even of their own young colleagues and disciples, this oligarchy actively limited the political skills of their successors so as to survive politically throughout their own lifetimes.
Despite Shapiro's highly critical approach to Israeli sociology and political science and his analysis of the ruling elite (very much resembling C. Wright Mills's critiques of American sociology), Shapiro himself was distinctly myopic when it came to other characteristics of Israeli society and its sociology. For example, very much like Eisenstadt, Shapiro completely ignored the impact of the Jewish-Arab conflict. He almost completely overlooked the cultural, religious, gender, ethnic, and national tensions and rifts built into the Israeli state. The Jewish-Arab conflict, wars, and the militarization of society were exogenous factors in his sociology. Shapiro's students (such as Gershon Shafir, Uri Ben-Eliezer, and Hanna Herzog) added major correctives to his work, but also in monographic studies and not in comprehensive, paradigmatically oriented books.
Although Alan Dowty's The Jewish State: A Century Later, published in 1998, includes the most up-to-date data and literature on the Israeli state and society, it should be considered as belonging to the second-generation approach to Israel. Although aware of the growing trend of critical scholarship on the Israeli state and society represented by the first two generations of sociologists and political scientists, Dowty produced an apologetic overview of the Israeli case. Dowty asserted that Israel is a consociational democracy rooted in the “democratic manners” of the Diaspora Jewish community (Kehila). Equating Israeli citizens with the public members of an ethno-religious nonsovereign community (Kahal), Dowty made at least two major errors. He confused rule over a civil sovereign state with decision-making within a community. He also failed to detect the mechanisms and institutional arrangements of consociationalism that traditionally excluded Arabs from the system (a mistake that Horowitz and Lissak had already partially avoided).
To the second-generation books, one may add two “dissident” analyses of Israeli society. While Horowitz and Lissak perceived social, cultural, and ideological heterogeneity as destructive “cleavages,” in his 1978 Israel: Pluralism and Conflict, Sammy Smooha proffers the paradigm of “pluralism.” Heterogeneity is seen as given, natural, and possibly a precondition for a liberal democratic regime. Influenced by the seminal work of Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (1963), Smooha regrouped Israeli society into the dominant Ashkenazi group, the dominated Mizrahi and religious groups, and the exploited and collectively excluded Arab and Palestinian groups. Smooha emphasized the contrast between formal civic equality and the ethnic cultural and stratificational dominance of a secular Ash-kenazi minority over all other social components of the state. Smooha was also the first Israeli sociologist to observe the tension between Israel as a Jewish nation-state and its pretension to be an open democratic state. In a way, the present volume follows the approach begun by Smooha, but takes it into different directions and conclusions.
Elia Zuriek also contributed a highly critical description of the Israeli system in his 1979 book, The Palestinians in Israel: A Study in Internal Colonialism. This was the first Palestinian critique of the Israeli-Zionist state, and was based on the theoretical concept of internal colonization developed by Michael Hechter in his analysis of the Celtic ethnic role in the British state-building process. Both Smooha's and Zuriek's books remained unrecognized by the majority of professional communities in Israel and the world. The Israeli and the American social science and history communities were not yet ripe to analyze the Israeli polity as a real, concrete entity; instead, they were stuck with and enchanted by its mythological and idealistic image.
Despite their heavy ideological biases and their consistent tendency to interchange sociological theory with ideology and terminology, these two generations of sociological streams laid the foundation for a very rich, viable, diverse, and important body of empirical and theoretical knowledge about Israel. In fact, these approaches well reflected the internal sociological process that society was undergoing. This was well analyzed by Uri Ram in his book The Changing Agenda of Israeli Sociology: Theory, Ideology and Identity, published in 1995.
As for myself, I am a sociologist of politics in the wider sense of the term, interested in both the institutional and cultural dynamics of the political foundations of social life and its historical background. I consider myself as acting mainly within the Weberian tradition. The original foci of my research and theoretical, as well as intellectual, interests have been mainly the impact of the Jewish-Arab (and Israeli-Palestinian) conflict on Israeli and Palestinian societies, sociology of war and the military, and later, the development of collective consciousness and emerging nationalism.
The study of military institutions and culture was carried out, not only in terms of the direct outcome of the Jewish-Arab conflict, but also as a central phenomenon penetrating most of the Israeli state's and society's institutional spheres, such as the economy, class stratification, ethnicity, and ideology (including religion and civil religion). This leads me to ask questions about collective identities (including nationalism) in general and identities in Israel (Jewish and Arab) in particular. In this context, the Gordian knot linking secular nationalism and its religious foundations in past and present has captured my sociological imagination. I have analyzed all these societal phenomena in the context of Jewish-Arab relations (but without relating to the conflict as a single or deterministic variable), while challenging the conventional wisdom that constructs the “realities” of most of social, cultural, and economic spheres as “conflict-free” regions and activities.
In 1975, I concluded a Ph.D. thesis that dealt with the territorial factors of Jewish state-and nation-building and introduced me straight into the problematic heart of the Jewish-Arab conflict. This “opening” was the basis for my book Zionism and Territory (1983), which is now generally accepted—even by its critics—as the beginning of a new approach to the analysis of Israeli society and social history. Prior to this book, the conflict was, as indicated above, considered by social scientists mainly as a residual category, and it appeared and disappeared in their works on Israel in a deus ex machina fashion. In Zionism and Territory and other writings, I instead conceptualize the conflict as an inherent characteristic of Israeli society and culture, and hence as an unavoidable variable in their sociological analysis.
Such an analysis located the Israeli collectivity in comparative perspective in the context of immigrant settler societies such as those of North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Rhodesia, and French Algeria, emphasizing both its similarities and uniqueness. The amount of the available “free