Trends in Israeli Democracy: The Public's View (review)

132 SHOFAR Summer 1993 Vol. 11, No.4 the political advantage as much as for expanding entry into Palestine. Many of his statements on the Arab denizens of Palestine reflect not so much his true perceptions as his attempts to manipulate British policies. His involvement in military strategy during Israel's War of Independence stemmed from his determination to turn Israel into a modern state like those in Europe and his calculus of the global balance of forces. His Zionism, seemingly so suffused with idealism, also was unencumbered by sentimentality. He appeared distant from the feelings of most ofPalestine's Jews during the Holocaust. Singleness of purpose broached no hesitation even in the face of catastrophe. The essays in Zweig's collection explore Ben-Gurion's successes and failures without reconciling the contradictions of his character. There is both too much and too little information to elucidate the affinities between Ben-Gurion's public and private personae. Nonetheless, the essays are instructive in reminding us how the history made by even great leaders must be scaled to the standard of human fallibility. Donna Robinson Divine Department of Government Smith College Trends in Israeli Democracy: The Public's View, byYochanan Peres and Ephraim Yuchtman Yaar. Boulder, co: Lynne Rienner, 1992. 59 pp. $9.95 (p). This small book is the initial publication of the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), and seeks to "draw academic thinking and policymaking together" for the benefit of the public. In the forward to the volume Arye Carmon, the President of the IDI, indicates that the IDI Policy Studies series "will allow us to share the products of IDI's efforts with decisionmakers and thinkers in Israel and abroad." This is a good beginning for the series. This volume "seeks to describe and explicate recent developments in Israeli democracy" (p. 1) and does so through a series of reports of public opinion surveys taken between January of 1987 and February of 1991. While the conditions of the surveys were clearly not perfect (for example, the principal investigators could not afford to ask all of the questions in all of the surveys, so some of the data are limited; also, kibbutzim and settlements in the occupied territories were not included in the study), the Book Reviews 133 data set appears to offer a number of good "snapshots" of Israeli public opinion. It is especially unfortunate that "the Arab sector" was not included in the surveys, although the explanations of the authors in relation to this shortcoming seem to make sense (finances; a different sampling technique would be required; and a common analysis ofJewish and Arab responses to many of the questions wouldn't be especially valuable for many ofthe questions because the two groups are so different [po 6]). There are many interesting findings that could be reported here; comments here will be limited to only a few. While between 70 and 85 percent of the public appear to "support the principles of freedom and equality" in Israel, some of this support is apparently relatively "soft" when a price tag is attached, and the real figures may be nearer 50 percent than 80 percent: "when support for democracy begins to exact a price, it falls from a clear majority of 75 percent to a near parity between pro- and anti-democratic stands" (p. 13). Similarly, while the Jewish public in Israel is generally supportive of democratic values in a general/abstract sense, a more concrete support for rights of unpopular groups does not seem to have the same strength (e.g., only 15 percent of the respondents agreed that an unpopular group's candidate should have a right to serve as prime minister). Tolerance, then, is "soft" as a central component of Israeli democracy. The Israeli public's trust in major political institutions (e.g., the courts or the legislature) is remarkably similar to levels of public trust in other western democracies. The two areas in which the Israeli public differs notably from the publics of other nations involve the police (international average of support = 74%; Israeli support = 53%) and the press (international average of support = 40%; Israeli support = 20%). There is also a far greater range in support...