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just freshly arrived either from the Displaced Persons camps in
Europe or from a ghetto in Yemen, these were the issues which
appeared pressing and relevant for him and his family. Labor had
both the machinery of government at. its disposal as well as the
ideological and symbolical language to tackle these problems: the
Ingathering of the Exiles, the Melting Pot, Making the Desert
Blossom - these were the public slogans widely accepted in those
years. For a newcomer still struggling to read the roadsigns leading
from Tel-Aviv to Haifa, an impassioned plea by a person like Begin
for the inalienable historical rights of the Jewish people to Jericho or
Tul-Karm did not make much sense. And indeed, between 1949 and
1967 the Begin-style nationalist appeal appeared mostly irrelevant,
and while Begin's party managed to hold on to the stalwart support
of most erstwhile Irgun members, it never broke through on a
massive scale.
1967 changed all this very drastically: with Israel in control of
all historical Eretz Israel west of the Jordan River, the questions
which appeared to have been settled once and for all in 1948 were
reopened again. Domestic issues were put on the back burner, and
ever since 1967 the constant debate in Israeli public life has centered
around issues dealing with problems of nationalism. Since the after–
math of the Six Days War is still open-ended, and the issues - terri–
torial and other - raised by the war have not been settled, they are
constantly at the center of Israeli public debate: what are the justifi–
cations for Israeli claims to Judea and Samaria; what should be
Israel's policies towards the Palestinians; what should the future
boundaries of Israel be; should Jewish settlements be set up in the
'territories'; how should Israel react to PLO terrorism - through a
willingness to negotiate with the Palestinians or through the iron
fist, etc.
In
all these questions, the simple 'Us vs. Them' approach
expressed by the Likud has - on balance - a much greater chance of
getting across than the complex approach of Labor, which tries to
balance Zionism with universalist values and strike a middle road
between socialist ideas and defense considerations . Young people
who have grown into maturity after 1967 have been exposed to the
constant barrage of public debate on these issues rather than on
internal problems, and have been sensitized to the centrality of these
problems to the concerns of the nation rather than to the centrality of
questions of social justice. For young people, the psychological map
of Israel is that of the post-1967 situation, in which you roam freely
