Through the Lens of Israel: Explorations in State and Society (review)

Notwithstanding its intensely contested legitimacy, Israel has never failed to impress social scientists, most of whom tend to analyze its political development as exceptional. Since its establishment in 1948, the country has constructed a technologically sophisti cated economy, a powerful military, and a vibrant democracy. Once a nation on the fringes of world trends and transactions, Israel has now fully entered the global econ omy and benefited from its market forces. Rivers of ink have been spilled on the curious proposition that these changes were presumably driven by a remarkable consensus on norms and values and/or by an unusual set of organizational experiences. But the process of development depicted by scholars is so harmonious as to be an idealized version of the actual course of events. Although Israeli state institutions may operate more effectively than those in many other countries that achieved their independence after World War II, they do so in accordance with the logic of power politics and social interactions. Far from a benign world of social harmony, Zionist and Israeli politics were and still are arenas of intense struggles over the allocation of resources. While those struggles did not prevent Palestine’s Jews from creating a common political framework, they did produce social tensions and bitter conflicts that shaped the trajectory of political choices for decades.

No one has done more to shift the scholarly perspective on Israel from the realm of the exceptional to the domain of the general than Joel Migdal. Migdal’s knowledge of Israeli politics matches that of any specialist, and his fluency in the theories under- girding the study of comparative politics is well known and highly regarded. Having applied the conceptual tools of comparative politics to Israel’s founding and evolution, Migdal has long insisted that claims of uniqueness only seal off the country from serious academic scrutiny. Moreover, Migdal asserts, understanding Israel can help explain the reasons why some states meet their challenges successfully while others fail. In Through the Lens of Israel, Migdal shows, in a relatively new and powerful way, how to probe Israel’s distribution of power with the conceptual tools of political science. Availing himself of social theories and the best historical works and mono graphs, Migdal attacks the notion of Israel as a socially engineered society and polity. Instead, he points out how diverse groups with radically different visions competed for power and contended with organizations controlling access to resources. Even charismatic leaders with clear visions had to be prepared to compete for power and to compromise with opponents in forging policy stances. No vision was ever translated literally into action, nor could it be. Projecting their goals as ideals of morality and justice, Zionist leaders may have been earnest, but they were also guided by self- interested motivations typical for politicians seeking to augment their power and extract more resources.

Migdal stresses that several historical factors helped Zionists forge a coherent political system. First and foremost, the mandatory administration devolved consider able power on Zionist organizations and afforded a range of opportunities seized by Palestine’s Zionist leaders for creating self-governing institutions. Because the British Government did not assume more than a limited liability for Palestine’s development, its imperialist administration opened up a host of possibilities for providing reasonably effective governance.

In Palestine, the British Mandatory state that preceded Israel could have posed one or the other of two sorts of barriers to increased capabilities for the Zionist political institutions. In fact, they did neither. The British could have promoted strongmen in Jewish society, channeling resources selectively to those creating strategies in local domains. The success of the central Yishuv institutions, especially the Histadrut, in devising new strategies of survival for the immigrants preempted the creation of other effective organizations run by strongmen along ethnic or other lines, which could have provided such strategies.

(p. 35)

Second, the fact that the Jewish population came to Palestine from...