Land of Paradoxes: Interest Politics in Israel (review)

170 SHOFAR Spring 1996 Vol. 14, No.3 Land of Paradoxes: Interest Politics in Israel, by Yael Yishai. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. 413 pp. $54.50 (c); $17.95 (p). This is a study of the involvement of interest groups in Israeli politics. The author is a talented political scientist on the faculty ofHaifa University. She approaches the subject in a broad context, drawing comparisons between Israel and a number of western industrial democracies as well as such developing countries as Turkey and India. The heart of her research was a set of questionnaires submitted to 277 interest groups, ofwhich 162 (or 58.5%) were completed and returned. The questionnaires were designed to elicit information regarding the nature of these organizations and their relationships with the political system, particularly the government and political parties. The book analyzes the data produced by the questionnaires, with individual chapters devoted to the existing interest group system in Israel, the relationship of these groups to the political parties and the state, the institutional organization of the groups, the nature of their efforts to influence the government, and their impact on the public policy-making process. She finds that the Israeli case does not easily fit the two general models which have dominated scholarship in this field (the corporatist and pluralist models). She suggests that perhaps Israel is an example of a third type, the elitist model, characterized by "incongruities among norms, structures, and behavior." Professor Yishai has produced a very interesting and insightful, as well as densely packed, study. Frank Tachau Department of Political Science University of Illinois at Chicago The Grand Mufti: Haj Amin al-Hussaini, Founder of the Palestinian National Movement, by Zvi Elpeleg. London: Frank Cass, 1993. 239 pp. $45.00 (c); $22.50 (P). On the blurb of his biography of Haj Amin al-Hussaini, Zvi Elpeleg laments that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem has not yet received his deserved place in Arab historiography: "As I see it, he is the Weizmann, the Ben-Gurion, even the Herzl, of the Palestinian national movement." There could be no higher praise by an Israeli to the archenemy of Jewish national rebirth in its ancestral homeland, and it is to Elpeleg's credit that his is a remarkably balanced and impartial biography. Regretta- ...