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PARTISAN REVIEW
horizons of the 'Oriental' electorate whose power is growing and will
continue to grow in Israeli politics. To those who always bemoaned
Israel's 'Western' nature and hoped for its integration into the
Middle East, Begin is the cruel answer: Israel now has a leader
better suited to the nature of its growing Middle Eastern Jewish pop–
ulation, and is thus more 'integrated' into the Middle East than
under Ben Gurion, Eshkol, and Golda Meir, with their Western,
social democratic, and universalist ideas.
It
is, though, an integra–
tion into the real, not the imaginary Middle East, into a Middle East
that prefers hierarchical styles of leadership, into a Middle East
where populist nationalism is much more popular than universalist
humanism. With a vengeance, Israel has been integrated into that
Middle East, and Begin, incredible as it may seem, is the symbol of
this Israeli relative integration into the Third World. What a cruel
twist to the hidden hand of the Cunning of Reason.
The second fundamental change in Israeli politics in recent
years has been the shift in the focus of the political agenda of the
country.
Until 1967, there existed a widely held consensus on foreign
policy issues in Israel. The partition of Palestine has been widely
accepted as the best possible deal open to Zionism, and even Begin
and his party have toned down over the years their claims for the
whole of Eretz Israel. Before Nasser's catastrophic moves in May
1967, nobody in Israel seriously challenged the frontiers that were
established in the wake of the 1949 armistice agreements between
Israel and her Arab neighbors. Had the Arab states agreed before
1967 to transform these armistice lines into permanent and recog–
nized borders, there would have been an overwhelming consensus in
Israel for the acceptance of such a proposal.
The political debate in Israel between 1949 and 1967 was conse–
quently focused on internal issues. Occasionally, as in 1956 during
the Suez campaign, fore'ign affairs came up, but even then a widely
held consensus ruled supreme. The main public concerns, as
reflected in the press, in public debates, election campaigns, and the
like, were problems of immigration, integration, nation-building,
economic development, housing, education, retraining of new–
comers, the development and opening up of new areas (like the
Negev) - in short, the focus was on those issues of internal policies in
which a social-democratic party with a strong commitment to
nation-building enjoyed an obvious advantage. To an immigrant
