The State of Israel seems closer than ever to its professed loftiest ideal: contractual peace with its Arab neighbours, first and foremost the Palestinians. What are the implications of peace for Israel? How would it affect the country's political and economic systems and its national security? What would peace mean for Israel's regional and international standing and for its relations with world Jewry? A distinguished group of specialists from Israel, Europe and the United States address these crucial issues.

A dozen essays document the evolution of national myths in Israel as the heroic figures and events of independence and survival transmute into blind fanaticism, great-power manipulation, and traditional colonialism and genocide.

Strategists assess the balance of opportunities confronting Israel at the end of the century and offer possible solutions to its pressing dilemmas. The contributors address such issues as the economic consequences of peace for Israeli security, the implications of the new world order for Israel's strategic interests, Israel's nuclear weapons and the operational and strategic challenges posed by the future Middle Eastern battlefield.

The may 1996 election of Benjamin Netanyahu, the 46-year-old leader of the right-wing Likud Party, as Israel's youngest ever prime minister provides further proof of the volatility of Israel politics. This volume discusses the sources of Netanyahu's victory and its domestic and external implications.

The 1996 Israel elections were the first elections by direct vote for the position of Prime Minister in which a newcomer - Binjamin Netanyahu - defeated the veteran Israeli politician, Shimon Peres. The result indicated not only a transition of power for the left-centre to the right-centre, but also the decline of the major parties and the ascendance of the smaller parties. This work looks at the parties, election campaigns and the processes that determined the outcome.

Like most 19th and 20th century national movements, culture played a focal role in the shaping of Jewish-Israeli national identity, and with Zionism being the secular movement that it is, culture became the effective prism through which religious and historical notions of Jewish nationalism were filtered. As Israel reaches its 50th year of statehood, Israeli society faces a deepening crisis of identity. This is particularly evident in Israeli culture which, for quite some time, has been effectively disintegrating into several simultaneous sub-cultures. This process has gained momentum during...

These essays examine changes in Israel's political, social and economic institutions, and describe how Israeli culture and institutions are resisting convergence. They are in four categories: political institutions and organizations; political economy; ethnicity and religion; and public policy.

Israeli historiography has long been subjected to a sustained assault by self-styled new historians vying to expose what they claim to be the distorted Zionist narrative of Israeli history and the Arab-Israeli conflict. They have cast Israel as the regional villain, bearing sole responsibility for the cycle of violence in the Middle east since 1946.

This is an interdisciplinary study of Israeli society in one of the defining moments in the history of Israel. Prominent scholars of Israel's politics and foreign affairs discuss the critical aspects of the political order, economics, the military, the role of the media and legal reform that are shaping a new Israel. The book reflects the profound changes in foreign policy analysis taking place, the delicate interplay between the domestic, the regional and the global, and the divided nature of Israeli politics.

By looking at the political, military and intelligence components of the Yom Kippur War - and making use of unpublished materials, including recently declassified portions of the Agranat Commission that inquired into the intelligence failure - this work offers interpretations of Israel's conflict with the Arabs. The contributors, Israeli academics, some of them involved in the war, make a contribution to the understanding of this chapter in Israel's history.