Born amidst the ruin of World War II and into the Cold War environment of realpolitik, Israel has, since its earliest existence, commanded a place on the international stage out of all relation to its size, population or ambitions. This work, part of the series Israel: The First Hundred Years, examines Israel's experience in foreign affairs in its first 50 years of existence. Contributors ask to what extent an Israeli foreign policy can be said to be a Zionist foreign policy and analyse Israel's international role in the Cold War era. They also explore Israel's foreign policy relationships...

Volume 3 in a five-volume series giving a comprehensive evaluation of the first hundred years of Israel's history; Contributors include distinguished Israeli, European and American scholars; Since its founding in 1948 Israel has faced many political, social and indeed psychological challenges, unfamiliar to other nations based on the western democratic political model and peculiar to the Jewish State. The role of the army in a society on constant alert against war, the highly politicized issues of mass absorption of immigrants, the Holocaust, the relationship with the Palestinian population...

The end of the British mandate in Palestine heralded the birth of the new state of Israel. It also marked the end of one of the most tumultuous and momentous chapters in Israeli history. But the new state, born into a hostile environment and struggling with the manifold demands of sovereignty, would have to face many post-Independence challenges to its existence, not least in the form of armed conflict and confrontation with its Arab neighbours. This volume examines the conflicts that from the 1948 until the 1967 Six Day War came to define the Israeli struggle for existence. In doing so,...

The birth of the Zionist Movement, coming in the wake of Jewish emancipation in Western Europe and at a time of intensified persecution of Jewry in Eastern Europe, meant that for the first time since Jewish dispersion, the possibility of the Jews discarding their minority status in the lands they inhabited and creating their own home in their ancestral homeland became a reality, however incomprehensible it may have appeared in these early years. The next half a century saw great strides in the economic, social and political life of the Yishuv that culminated in the creation of the State of...