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The Utopian Crisis of the Israeli State C ^ s ) Yagil Levy and Yoav Peled Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak, Trouble in Utopia: The Overburdened Polity of Israel Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989. Baruch Kimmerling, ed., The Israeli State and Society: Boundaries and Frontiers, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989. Peter Y. Medding, The Founding of Israeli Democracy, 1948-1967, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. ince the Lebanon War, political-sociological discourse in Israel has been increasingly focused on the crisis of the Israeli state. Israeli political sociologists, virtually all of whom belong to the left-liberal camp of Israeli politics, have been grappling with the seeming inability of the state to deal effectively with the problem of the occupied territories. The Six Day War itself, previously celebrated as a great achievement , has now come to be seen as inaugurating the country's fall from grace. Two further points marking this decline are thought to be the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and Likud's assumption of power in 1977. This sense of deep disillusionment generally characterizes the three volumes under review as well. Although Peter Medding does not deal with the consequences of the Six Day War, he considers it the endpoint of the country's founding Q g > 201 The Utopian Crisis of the Israeli State Yagil Levy and Yoav Peled Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak, Trouble in Utopia: The Overburdened Polity ofIsrael, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989. Baruch Kimmerling, ed., The Israeli State and Society: Boundaries and Frontiers, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989. Peter Y. Medding, The Founding ofIsraeli Democracy, 1948-1967, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. ( \ ~ ince the Lebanon War, political-sociological discourse ~ in Israel has been increasingly focused on the crisis of the Israeli state. Israeli political sociologists, virtually all of whom belong to the left-liberal camp of Israeli politics, have been grappling with the seeming inability of the state to deal effectively with the problem of the occupied territories. The Six Day War itself, previously celebrated as a great achievement , has now come to be seen as inaugurating the country's fall from grace. Two further points marking this decline are thought to be the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and Likud's assumption of power in 1977. This sense of deep disillusionment generally characterizes the three volumes under review as well. Although Peter Medding does not deal with the consequences of the Six Day War, he considers it the endpoint of the country's founding 201 Yagil Levy and Yoav Peled 202 period and an important turning point in the course of its development. Horowitz and Lissak focus on the period following that war, and consider the Israeli polity to be "overburdened " by the forces unleashed by its consequences. These concerns are shared by most writers in the volume edited by Kimmerling as well. The fact that two of the three volumes focus on two consecutive periods separated by the Six Day War—1948 to 1967 in Medding's case, and the post-1967 period in Horowitz/Lissak's— provides us with the opportunity to consider critically the way in which the war has figured in sociological and political discussions in Israel. This examination will then serve as a basis for suggesting an alternative way of conceptualizing the place that war has occupied in Israeli history. Our alternative conceptualization will consider the Six Day War as an integral part of the Arab-Israeli conflict, a conflict which, in turn, will be viewed as constitutive of the Israeli social-political order. Israeli Political Sociology The three volumes, especially the ones by Medding and by Horowitz/Lissak, are embedded in the dominant, functionalist discourse within Israeli sociology. The functionalist school, as is well known, has a systemic view of society, seeing it as a composite of specialized roles, each contributing its share to the proper functioning of the whole. The most important regulatory mechanism of the social order, in the functionalist view, is a consensual culture which synchronizes individual interests with society's needs. The existing social order is the starting point of functionalist analysis, while this order itself is not usually questioned. A key element in the functionalist view of society is the universal character of the state. The state (usually referred to as the "polity" or "political system") is viewed as standing above the fray of civil society, entrusted with regulating, through its rational and "neutral...

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