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146 SHOFAR Fall 1994 Vol. 13, No.1 The Israeli Economy: Dreams and Realities, by Yair Aharoni. London: Routledge, 1991. 364 pp. $55.00. On the whole, Israeli economists have not done well in presenting the distinctive features of their country's economic system to foreign readers. The bulk of their work has been oblivious to the "endogenous" character of key political and sociological characteristics, choosing instead to define problems and analyze data of a very conventional kind. The shortcomings of such an approach were more than evident in the most authoritative recent study of the Israeli economy, the landmark collection published in 1986 under the editorship of the late Yoram Ben-Porath. The gap between Beil-Porath's insightful observations in his introduction to the volume and the content of the research reported in the rest of the volume could hardly have been wider. A handful of political scientists, such as Daniel Shimshoni and Ira Sharkansky, have attempted to provide more realistic treatments of the political economy, as have a number of works by writers of a more radical bent, including this reviewer. Yair Aharoni has been an unusual figure within this constellation, almost the lone institutional economist on the Israeli scholarly landscape. Aharoni has written extensively, from the perspective of both a field researcher and an insider, on the structure and working of the corporate sector in Israel. While the empirical base of these studies is outdated, their conclusions are not. Aharoni pioneered in showing that business in Israel has a pronounced dual-economy character, that its core sector is run by a managerial class that behaves quite similarly irrespective of ownership (public, private, or Histadrut), and that this sector has become transformed over the years' from a dependent client of a seemingly omnipotent state to a major power over the state. All the more disappointing, then, that the unfocused and undisciplined volume under review fails to either empirically extend or analytically sharpen Aharoni's earlier forays into a critical institutionalism. Indeed, the messages in this book are contradictory and confusing. On the one hand, Aharoni clearly sees himself as the bearer of unvarnished truths, whose task it is to strip away the pretenses of "ideology" in order to reveal the often unflattering "reality" beneath. But he repeatedly defers to ideology as the paramount force that has shaped Israeli society. Moreover, many of Aharoni's frequent reflections on the non-economic dimensions of the society are either naive or downright propagandistic. With similar inconsistency, Aharoni astutely notes a number of the contradictions between reigning economists' conceptions and key features of the real existing political economy ofIsrael, including the dominant role Book Reviews 147 of big business. Yet such observations are never developed or integrated and get lost in a sea of descriptive detail. Equally disappointingly, in his conclusions Aharoni reverts altogether to the familiar exhortations of conventional economists. "To survive into the 21st century," he observes on page 347, "Israel will have to ... move to an economy in which only firms able to compete in the world market will survive." Unfortunately, no concrete indications are offered of why, and how, Israel will overcome the ample barriers to such a transformation which are noted elsewhere in the book. The Israeli Economy is strongest as a fount of information, covering considerable breadth and historical depth. Nevertheless, the author frequently obliges the reader to take his authority on faith. Large tracts of description (especially when history is discussed), and even some tables, fail to indicate sources. Worse, the book is studded with cliches and burdened by Aharoni's undisguised compulsion to cheerlead for Israel in a style that echoes the hyperbole of old-style fundraisers. "The origins of civilization in Israel reach to the mists of antiquity" (p. 17); "Israelis love to be organized" (p. 189); "Understanding Israel is like trying to catch a moving target" (p. 315 and again on p. 319); "The country ... was turned from a weary and neglected place, infested by swamps and eroded by desert climate, to a mosaic of green ..." (p. 321). The world according to Aharoni is remarkably benign: thus, Israeli's extraordinary levels of military spending and its development of a militaryindustrial complex...

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