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Israel

Officially  State of Israel , Hebrew Medinat Yisra'el , Arabic  Isra'il;  country in the Middle East, located at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. It is bounded to the north by Lebanon, to the northeast by Syria, to the east and southeast by Jordan, to the southwest by Egypt, and to the west by the Mediterranean Sea. The total area is 7,992 square miles (20,700 square km) excluding East Jerusalem and other territories occupied in the 1967 war. Jerusalem is the capital and the seat of government.

Israel is a small country with a relatively diverse topography, consisting of a lengthy coastal plain, highlands in the north and central regions, and the Negev desert in the south. Running the length of the country from north to south along its eastern border is the northern terminus of the Great Rift Valley.

The State of Israel is the only Jewish nation in the modern period, and the region that now falls within its borders has a lengthy and rich history that dates from pre-biblical times. The area was a part of the Roman and, later, Byzantine empires before falling under the control of the fledgling Islamic caliphate in the 7th century CE. Although the object of dispute during the European Crusades, the region, then generally known as Palestine, remained under the sway of successive Islamic dynasties until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, when it was placed under British mandate from the League of Nations.

Even before the mandate, the desire for a Jewish homeland prompted a small number of Jews to immigrate to Palestine, a migration that grew dramatically during the second quarter of the 20th century with the increased persecution of Jews worldwide and subsequent Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany. This vast influx of Jewish immigrants into the region, however, caused tension with the native Palestinian Arabs, and violence flared between the two groups leading up to the United Nations plan to partition Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian sectors and Israel's ensuing declaration of statehood on May 14, 1948.

Israel fought a series of wars against neighbouring Arab states during the next 35 years, which have resulted in ongoing disputes over territory and the status of refugees. Despite continuing tensions, however, Israel concluded peace treaties with several neighbouring Arab states during the final quarter of the 20th century.

The people

Religious and ethnic groups


Jews constitute about four-fifths of the total population of Israel. Almost all the rest are Palestinian Arabs, of whom most (roughly three-fourths) are Muslim; the remaining Arabs are Christians and Druze, who each comprise only a small fraction of the total population. Arabs constitute the overwhelming majority of the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. (For information on Palestinians residing outside Israel, see Palestine).

Jews
The Jewish population is diverse. Jews from eastern and western Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, Central Asia, North America, and Latin America have been immigrating to this area since the late 19th century. Differing in ethnic origin and culture, they brought with them languages and customs from a variety of countries. The Jewish community today includes survivors of the Holocaust, offspring of those survivors, and émigrés escaping anti-Semitism. The revival of Hebrew as a common language and a strong Israeli national consciousness have facilitated the assimilation of newcomers to Israel but not completely eradicated native ethnicities. For example, religious Jews immigrating to Israel generally continue to pray in synagogues established by their respective communities.

Religious Jewry in Israel constitutes a significant and articulate section of the population. As such, it is often at odds with a strong secular sector that seeks to prevent religious bodies and authorities from dominating national life. The two main religious-ethnic groupings are those Jews from central and eastern Europe and their descendants who follow the Ashkenazic traditions and those Jews from the Mediterranean region and North Africa who follow the Sephardic. There are two chief rabbis in Israel, one Ashkenazi and one Sephardi. Tension is frequent between the two groups, largely because of their cultural differences and the social and political dominance of the Ashkenazim in Israeli society. Until recently, it was generally true that the Sephardim tended to be poorer, less educated, and less represented in higher political office than the Ashkenazim.

Karaites
The Karaites are a Jewish sect that emerged in the early Middle Ages. Several thousand members live in Ramla, and more recently in Beersheba and Ashdod. Like other religious minorities, they have their own religious courts and communal organizations. Considered part of Jewish society, they have maintained their separate identity by resisting intermarriage and preserving their religious rites based on the Torah as the sole source of religious law.
Samaritans
Samaritans trace their roots to those Jews not dispersed when the Assyrians conquered Israel in the 8th century BCE. About half of the few hundred surviving members of the Samaritan community live near Tel Aviv in the town of Holon. The rest live on Mount Gerizim (Arabic: Jabal al-Tur), near Nabulus in the West Bank. They preserve their separate religious and communal organizations and speak Arabic but pray in an archaic form of Hebrew. They participate in national life as part of the Jewish section of the population.

Arabs
Arabs constitute the largest single minority in Israel, and though most are Muslims of the Sunnite branch, Arab Christians form a significant minority, particularly in the Galilee region in northern Israel. Arabs, whether Christian, Muslim, or Druze, speak a dialect of Levantine Arabic and learn Modern Standard Arabic in school. An increasing number also avail themselves of higher education within Israel's public schools and colleges, and many younger Arabs are now bilingual in Hebrew. Although most Israeli Arabs consider themselves Palestinians, all are full Israeli citizens with political and civil rights that are, with the exception of some limitations on military service, equal to those of Israeli Jews. Many Arabs participate actively in the Israeli political process, and several Arab political parties have members in the Israeli Knesset. Despite this inclusiveness, however, many Israeli Arabs still see themselves as living in an occupied state, and suspicions and antagonism persist.
Muslims
The overwhelming majority of Israel's Muslims are Arabs. Like all other religious communities, Muslims enjoy considerable autonomy in dealing with matters of personal status. They have separate religious courts for issues such as marriage, divorce, and inheritance. The state oversees their religious institutions. Israel's Bedouin, roughly one-tenth of the Arab population, are exclusively Muslim.
Christians
Most Christians in Israel are Arabs, and Christian communities in Israel, regardless of ethnicity, have a wide degree of autonomy in religious and communal affairs. The Greek Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches are the largest denominations, and most of them are found in Jerusalem. Apart from the Greek Orthodox church, which has a patriarchate in Jerusalem, each church is dependent to a degree on a supreme hierarch abroad. These communities include Roman Catholics and Uniates (Melchites, Maronites, Chaldean Catholics, Syrian Catholics, and Armenian Catholics). Jerusalem also has a Russian Orthodox community. The Evangelical, Episcopal, and Lutheran churches are small and primarily Arabic-speaking.
Druze
The Druze, who live in villages in Galilee and around Mount Carmel, have traditionally formed a closed, tight-knit community and practice a secretive religion founded in 11th-century Fatimid Egypt. Though Israeli Druze maintain contact with coreligionists in Lebanon and Syria, members of each group adhere to the authority of the country of their residence. Israel has recognized the Druze as a separate Arab community since 1957, and Israeli Druze serve in the armed forces. Druze have traditionally been agriculturists, but younger members have found employment throughout the economy.

Other groups
The Baha'i faith, a universal religion founded in Iran in the mid-19th century, is the only religion other than Judaism to have its world centre in Israel. A teaching centre, archive building, shrine, and administrative headquarters are located on Mount Carmel in Haifa. There are a few hundred adherents in Israel, most of whom are employed at the centre in Haifa.

The Circassians, who are Sunnite Muslims, emigrated from the Caucasus in the 1870s. They number a few thousand and live in villages in Galilee, preserving their native language and traditions. Older Circassians speak Arabic as well as the Circassian language, but members of the younger generation speak Hebrew. The men serve in the Israeli armed forces.

Demographic trends
The most significant demographic issue in Israel since its establishment has been Jewish immigration. In 1948 the Jewish population of Israel was about 670,000; this number increased to more than 1,000,000 the next year as a result of immigration. Between 1949 and 1997 about 2,350,000 Jewish immigrants entered the country; about 700,000 to 750,000 Jews left it, although some later returned. The total number of immigrants includes more than 320,000 Soviet Jews who came to Israel in 1989–91 and have continued to arrive at the rate of about 50,000 per year. Nearly 28,000 Ethiopian Jews immigrated in 1990–92, adding to an earlier migration of 11,000 in 1984–85. The largest proportion of Jews trace their roots to Europe (including the former Soviet Union) and North America, though some also hail from Africa (mostly North Africa), Asia, and the Middle East.

More than half of the Arab population fled their homes during the war of 1948, of whom only a small fraction were allowed to return after the end of hostilities. While the Jewish population has grown more from immigration than from natural increase since that time, the Arab population has grown mainly through high birth rates, which are markedly higher than among Israel's Jews, and through the addition of about 66,000 residents of East Jerusalem, captured from Jordan in 1967 and later annexed by Israel. Overall, the population is youthful, with about one-fourth being 15 years old or younger. Life expectancy is among the highest in the world: some 80 years for women and 77 years for men.

Government

Constitutional framework
Israel does not have a formal written constitution. Instead, its system of government is founded on a series of “basic laws” plus other legislation, executive orders, and parliamentary practice. The country is a democratic republic with a parliamentary system of government headed by a prime minister and involving numerous political parties representing a wide range of political positions.

Israel's lawmaking body, the Knesset, or assembly, is a single-chamber legislature with 120 members who are elected every four years (or more frequently if a Knesset vote of nonconfidence in the government results in an early election). Members exercise important functions in standing committees. Hebrew and Arabic, the country's two official languages, are used in all proceedings.

The country's prime minister, who is directly elected by separate popular ballot in each national election, is the head of government and is entrusted with the task of forming the cabinet, which is the government's main policy-making and executive body. Israel has a strong cabinet, and its members may be—but need not be—members of the Knesset.

The president, who is the head of state, is elected by the Knesset for a five-year term, which can be renewed only once. The president has no veto powers and exercises mainly ceremonial functions but has the authority to appoint certain key national officials, including state comptroller, governor of the Bank of Israel, judges, and justices of the Supreme Court.

The state comptroller—an independent officer elected by the Knesset before being appointed by the president—is responsible only to the Knesset and is the auditor of the government's financial transactions and is empowered to enquire into the efficiency of its activities. The comptroller also acts as a national ombudsman.

Israel's civil service gradually has become a politically neutral and professional body; previously, it tended to be drawn from, and to support, the party in power. The government's extensive responsibilities and functions have acted to enlarge the bureaucracy.

Israeli-occupied Arab territories
After the 1967 war, Arab territories occupied by Israeli forces were placed under military administration. These included the territory on the west bank of the Jordan River (the West Bank) that had been annexed by Jordan in 1950, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula region of Egypt, and the Golan Heights region of Syria. In addition, East Jerusalem (also formerly part of Jordan) was occupied by Israeli forces, and Israel took over administration of the city as a single municipality; in 1967 Israel incorporated East Jerusalem and adjoining villages and later formally annexed them—actions that have continued to be disputed abroad and hotly contested by Palestinians and neighbouring Arab nations. In 1978 the Israeli military occupied a strip of Lebanese territory adjoining Israel's northern border, from which it withdrew in 2000. Israel passed legislation effectively annexing the Golan Heights in April 1981, but completed a withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula in April 1982 after negotiating a peace treaty with Egypt. Likewise, in May 1994, Israel began turning over control of much of the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank—including jurisdiction over most of the people in those areas—to the Palestinians in accordance with the provisions set forth in the Cairo Agreement on the Gaza Strip and Jericho signed by the two parties earlier that month. These exchanges of territory were part of a series of agreements (generally referred to as the Oslo Accords) that were initiated by the September 1993 Declaration of Principals on Palestinian Self-Rule. The intent of these agreements was to settle outstanding grievances between the two sides over issues relating to Israeli security and that country's occupation of Palestinian territory. The Israelis and the newly formed Palestinian Authority arranged further exchanges of territory as part of the Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza Strip signed in September 1995 and the Wye River Memorandum of October 1998. The transfers actually occurred more slowly than originally agreed.

History
This discussion focuses primarily on the modern state of Israel. For treatment of earlier history and of the country in its regional context, see Palestine, history of.

The nation of Israel is the world's first Jewish state in two millennia. It represents for Jews the restoration of their homeland after the centuries-long Diaspora that followed the demise of the Herodian kingdom in the 1st century CE. As such, it remains the focus of widespread Jewish immigration, and more than one-third of world Jewry now lives there.

The country, barely half a century old, was born in the midst of war. It took Israel three decades and numerous conflicts, large and small, to achieve its first peace treaty with a neighbouring Arab country, Egypt. That process has been complicated by Israel's relations with the Palestinians, many of whom were displaced by the Arab-Israeli war in 1948 or came under Israeli rule following the Six-Day War in 1967. Only since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 has an inclusive peace settlement with other Arab states and with the region's Palestinian Arabs been a possibility.

Israel's national security policy has been dominated by the prime minister and shaped by coalition politics—often disrupted by social and religious issues—that have characterized the state since its creation. While the country's two major parties, the left-wing Labour and right-wing Likud, often found a consensus on security issues, especially during crises, they retained an important difference that dates to the early years of Zionism. Both parties affirm Jewish rights to the biblical land of Israel (an area only slightly larger than the U.S. state of Vermont), but Labour has been ready, as the price of peace, to cede sovereignty to the Arabs of part of the area it occupied after the 1967 war, while Likud has insisted that control of that territory is vital to Israel's security. Neither political party, however, has been prepared to accept the return to Israel of large numbers of Palestinian refugees. Despite extensive peace talks following Oslo, and a peace treaty with Jordan (1994) Israel has not been able to come to an amicable peace with Syria or Lebanon or with the Palestinians. Persistent bouts of violence have dimmed hopes for peace.

Domestically, Israel moved steadily from an economy directed by the state to one that was more market oriented. A novel feature of the earlier economy was the kibbutz, a collective settlement movement that exemplified the Labour-Zionist movement's ideals of sacrifice and leadership. After Labour lost political power to the nonsocialist Likud opposition in 1977, the kibbutz ideal began to wane and with it the socialist and secular beliefs so strong at Israel's birth. The huge influx of Sephardic Jews in the 1950s and Russian Jews in the 1980s and '90s forced more political, social, and economic changes, as these groups acquired increasing power and influence. A crucial unresolved question remained: the relationship between religion and state.

Origins of a modern Jewish state

Zionism
Modern Israel springs from both religious and political sources. The biblical promise of a land for the Jews and a return to the Temple in Jerusalem were enshrined in Judaism and sustained Jewish identity through an exile of 19 centuries following the failed revolts in Judaea against the Romans early in the Common Era. By the 1800s, fewer than 25,000 Jews still lived in their ancient homeland, and these were largely concentrated in Jerusalem, then a provincial backwater of the Ottoman Empire.

In the 1880s, however, a rise in European anti-Semitism and revived Jewish national pride combined to inspire a new wave of emigration to Palestine in the form of agricultural colonies financed by the Rothschilds and other wealthy families. Political Zionism came a decade later, when the Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl began advocating a Jewish state as the political solution for both anti-Semitism (he had covered the sensational Dreyfus affair in France) and a Jewish secular identity. Herzl's brief and dramatic bid for international support from the major powers at the First Zionist Congress (August 1897) failed, but, after his death in 1904, the surviving Zionist organization under the leadership of Chaim Weizmann undertook a major effort to increase the Jewish population in Palestine while continuing to search for political assistance.

These efforts could only be on a small scale while the Ottoman Turks ruled what the Europeans called Palestine (from Palaestina, “Land of the Philistines,” the Latin name given Judaea by the Romans). But in 1917, during World War I, the Zionists persuaded the British government to issue the Balfour Declaration, a document that committed Britain to facilitate the establishment of a “Jewish homeland” in Palestine. Amid considerable controversy over conflicting wartime promises to the Arabs and French, Britain succeeded in gaining the endorsement of the declaration by the new League of Nations, which placed Palestine under British mandate. This achievement reflected a heady mixture of religious and imperial motivations that Britain would find difficult to reconcile in the troubled years ahead.

Immigration and conflict
The Zionist goal of Jewish statehood was violently opposed by the local Arab leaders, who saw the Ottoman defeat as an opportunity either to create their own state or to join a larger Arab entity—thus reviving the old Arab empire of early Islamic times. British efforts to bring the Zionists and the Arabs together in a cooperative government failed, and serious disorders, escalating into organized violence, were to mark the mandate, culminating in the Arab Revolt of 1936–39. This period also marked the birth of local Jewish defense forces. The largest and most widely representative of the various militias, the Haganah (“Defense”) was a branch of the Jewish Agency, the organization most responsible for bringing Jews to Israel.

The most effective of the main, pre-state militias were associated with political factions from both the right and left wings of Zionist politics. The Irgun Zvai Leumi and its even more violent splinter group, Lehi (also known as the Stern Gang), were affiliated with the ultraconservative Revisionist Party, founded by Vladimir Zev Jabotinsky. (The Revisionists withdrew from the main Zionist institutions in 1935 in protest against Jewish cooperation with the British mandate.) Another group, the Palmach, though technically an elite arm of the Haganah, was heavily influenced by a Marxist-socialist party, Achdut HaAvoda, and recruited many of its members from socialist-oriented kibbutzim. Members of these militias were to play an important role in Israeli politics for the next half century: Yigal Allon, Moshe Dayan, and Yitzhak Rabin were high-ranking members of the Haganah-Palmach, Menachem Begin led the Irgun, and Yitzhak Shamir was a prominent member of the Lehi. Three of these men—Rabin, Shamir, and Begin—would later become prime ministers of Israel.

Britain encouraged Jewish immigration in the 1920s, but the onset of the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s and the flight of refugees from Nazi Germany led to a change in policy. The British government proposed the partition of Palestine into mutually dependent Arab and Jewish states. When this was rejected by the Arabs, London decided in 1939 to restrict Jewish immigration severely in the hope that it would retain Arab support against Germany and Italy. Palestine was thus largely closed off to Jews fleeing Nazi-dominated Europe during World War II. Despite this fact, the majority of the Jewish population supported the Allies during the war while seeking, when possible, clandestine Jewish immigration to Palestine. The Jewish community, which was less than 100,000 in 1919, numbered some 600,000 by the end of the war. The Arabs of Palestine had also increased under the mandate (through high birth rates and immigration) from about 440,000 to roughly 1,000,000 in 1940.

The pre-Holocaust Zionist struggle to secure international support, overcome Arab opposition, and promote immigration resumed with special fervour after 1945, when the true extent of Jewish losses in Europe became evident. In Britain, the newly elected government of Prime Minister Clement Attlee, alarmed by growing violence in Palestine between Arabs and Jewish immigrants, decided to end the mandate, but it was unable to do so in a peaceful way. Attlee and his foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, came under pressure by the Zionists and their sympathizers, especially President Harry S. Truman in the United States, to admit the desperate remnant of European Jewry into Palestine; they were equally pressured by local and regional Arab opponents of a Jewish state to put an end to further immigration. Both sides, Arab and Jewish, violently assailed the reinforced garrison in Palestine of the war-weakened British. Finally, London turned the problem over to the newly formed United Nations (UN), and on November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to divide British-ruled Palestine into two states, one Jewish and the other Arab. This decision was immediately opposed by the Arabs who, under the ostensible leadership of Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, attacked Jews throughout Palestine as the British withdrew. The fighting was savage, and many civilians were slain: incidents cited include the killing of 250 Arab villagers by a group of Irgun commandos in the village of Dayr Yasin and the massacre of 77 members of a Hadassah medical convoy by Palestinian Arabs.

Establishment of Israel

The war of 1948
The Zionist militias gained the upper hand over the Palestinians through skill and pluck, aided considerably by intra-Arab rivalries. Israel's declaration of independence on May 14, 1948, was quickly recognized by the United States, the Soviet Union, and many other governments, fulfilling the Zionist dream of an internationally approved Jewish state. Neither the UN nor the world leaders, however, could spare Israel from immediate invasion by the armies of five Arab states—Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Transjordan (now Jordan)—and within a few days, the state's survival appeared to be at stake.

The Israeli forces, desperately short of arms and training, still had the advantage of having just beaten al-Husayni's irregulars, and their morale was high. David Ben-Gurion, the new prime minister, had also, soon after independence, unified the military command, although this process was bloody. When an Irgun ship called the Altalena attempted to land near Tel Aviv in June 1948 under conditions unacceptable to Ben-Gurion, he ordered it stopped. Troops commanded by Yitzhak Rabin fired on the vessel, killing 82 people (Menachem Begin was one of the survivors). The Irgun and Palmach finally consented to the unified command, but relations between the Labour movement Ben-Gurion had established and its right-wing opposition, founded in Jabotinsky's Revisionist Party, were poisoned for years.

The Arab invaders far outnumbered the Zionists but fielded only a few well-trained units. In addition, some Arab logistical lines were long, making resupply and communication difficult. The most formidable Arab force was Transjordan's British-led Arab Legion, but the Jordanian ruler, King 'Abdullah, had secret relations with the Zionists and strongly opposed a Palestinian state led by his enemy al-Husayni. Other states, such as Egypt and Iraq, also had different objectives, and this internal strife, disorganization, and military ineptitude prevented the Arabs from mounting a coordinated attack.

Small numbers of Israeli forces were able to keep Egyptian, Iraqi, and Jordanian units from entering Tel Aviv and cutting off Jerusalem from the rest of the newly founded country during the crucial first month of the war. In June all sides accepted a UN cease-fire, and the nearly exhausted Israelis reequipped themselves, sometimes from secret sources. Notable was the clandestine effort by Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia, which offered Israel both arms and an airfield—Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had decided that the Jewish state might be a useful thorn in the side of Britain and the United States, his Cold War enemies.

Fierce fighting resumed in early July and continued for months interspersed with brief truces. The Israelis drove back the Egyptian and Iraqi forces that menaced the south and central parts of the coastal plain. However, the old walled city of Jerusalem, containing the Western Wall, the last remnant of the ancient Temple destroyed by the Romans and held holy by Jews, was occupied by the Jordanians, and Jerusalem's lifeline to the coast was jeopardized. The Egyptians held Gaza, and the Syrians entrenched themselves in the Golan Heights overlooking Galilee. The 1948 war was Israel's costliest: more than 6,000 were killed and 30,000 wounded out of a population of only 780,000.

Armistice and refugees
Initial UN mediation conducted by Swedish diplomat Count Folke Bernadotte produced a peace plan rejected by all sides, and Bernadotte himself was murdered by Lehi extremists in September 1948. When Israel secured the final armistice of the war in July 1949, the new state controlled one-fifth more territory than the original partition plan had specified and rejected a return to the original partition line. Jordan occupied the West Bank, which was much of the area assigned by the UN to the stillborn Palestinian state, and more than 600,000 Arab refugees fled their homes in an exodus that had begun even before May 1948. Some were forced out by Israeli troops, notably from the towns of Lod and Ramla in the strategic area near Tel Aviv airport. The Israeli government refused to permit these refugees, who gathered under UN care in camps in Gaza, the West Bank, southern Lebanon, and Syria, to return to their homes inside Israel, and many Palestinians were to stay in these camps indefinitely.

Israel's victory in the war did not bring peace. The Arabs, who were humiliated by defeat and still bitterly divided, refused to recognize the Jewish state. In early 1949, the Arab nations announced a state of war with Israel and organized an economic and political boycott of the country.

The Ben-Gurion era

Emergence of a nation
The new Israeli state thus had to deal with challenges similar to those faced by the pre-1948 Zionist movement and needed foreign assistance, an effective strategy to hold off the Arabs, and massive Jewish immigration to settle the land in order to survive. All of this had to be done at once, and none of it could be possible without Israeli national unity.

Israel's first regular election in 1949 returned Ben-Gurion to power but did not give his Mapai (Labour) Party a majority. This set a pattern, and every Israeli government since independence has been formed as a coalition. Ben-Gurion sought a centrist position, condemning those to his left as pro-Soviet and those to his right as antidemocratic. He buttressed these arrangements by adding the Zionist religious parties to his largely secular coalition in what became known as the “status quo.” The Orthodox Jewish religious parties backed Ben-Gurion on security issues, while Ben-Gurion supported an Orthodox monopoly over the control of marriage, divorce, conversion, and other personal status issues. Part of the status quo, however, included rejecting the idea of drafting a written constitution or bill of rights, and the Jewish content of the Jewish state thus would be defined by the rough-and-tumble of Israeli politics and the evolution of Israeli society.

During the early years, Israel had to absorb a major influx of immigrants, including several hundred thousand nearly destitute Holocaust survivors and a large influx of Sephardic Jews from Arab states, who felt increasingly insecure in their home countries following the Arab defeat in 1948. As a result, the Knesset passed the Law of Return in 1950, granting Jews immediate citizenship. This law, however, proved to be controversial in later years when the question of “who is a Jew?” raised other issues in the Jewish state, including those of the immigration of non-Jewish relatives, religious conversion, and, in light of the Orthodox monopoly over such matters, the issue of who is truly qualified to be a rabbi. Ben-Gurion's coalition was also frequently disturbed by quarrels over education and the role religion was to play in it. Orthodox support for the government often faltered over what they saw to be state interference in a religious domain.

No less serious was the question of ethnicity. The Sephardim, or Oriental Jews, were mostly from urban and traditional societies, and after arriving in Israel they encountered an Ashkenazic, or European, Zionist establishment intent on creating a new Israeli culture and settling these predominantly urban newcomers in rural and isolated villages and development towns. The Sephardim soon grew to resent what they regarded as a patronizing Ashkenazic elite, and eventually this was to hurt Labour at the ballot box.

Israel was impoverished, and its economy emerged from severe austerity only after 1952 when the country began to obtain substantial international aid, including grants from Jewish charities, revenue from the sale of bonds, and U.S. government assistance. Beginning in 1953, Ben-Gurion secured economic aid from what was then West Germany, a highly controversial act that was seen by many as reparations for the Holocaust. This action brought about violent protests led by members of Menachem Begin's Herut Party (the successor to the Revisionists), who felt that any such aid would be an abomination.

Continuing tensions
Despite its victory in the 1948 war, Israel soon faced new and severe threats. Arab refugees infiltrated the armistice lines seeking to reclaim fields and houses. Soon, irregular Arab forces, drawn from refugee camps outside Israel's borders, began to attack Israeli villages, farms, and road traffic. Israel also contained a sizable minority of Arabs (then roughly one-sixth of the population), who were kept under military rule in certain areas until 1966 and, in some cases, were relocated away from border zones.

The Israelis intensively cultivated the land on their side of the border, while the Arabs tended to leave their side barren—hence the phrase “green line,” referring to the border between the two sides. The green lines themselves were difficult to defend; only 12 miles (19 km) separated Jordanian army positions from the Mediterranean, and the road connecting Jerusalem with the rest of the Israel was within rifle range of Arab sharpshooters. Israel's potential allies, including the United States, were preoccupied with the Cold War and were willing to placate Arab leaders in order to limit Soviet influence among the Arab states, especially Egypt, which looked to Moscow for help against Britain and France, the remaining colonial powers in the region.

Israel's best chance for peace was King 'Abdullah of Jordan, but in 1950 Palestinian and Arab opposition forced him to abandon a secretly negotiated nonbelligerency agreement. When the Egyptians tried unsuccessfully to establish a rump Palestinian state in Gaza under al-Husayni, 'Abdullah announced the annexation of the West Bank, which his country had occupied two years earlier. Then, in July 1951, the Jordanian king was assassinated on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem by a Palestinian. His grandson, the future King Hussein, barely escaped injury and was to continue 'Abdullah's policy of clandestine contact with Israel but, like his grandfather, never felt politically strong enough to make a separate peace.

In the period 1949–53 Arab attacks killed hundreds of Israelis, four-fifths of whom were civilian. In early 1953 Israel decided to take the offensive against Arab guerrillas who were infiltrating from Jordan and the Egyptian-run Gaza Strip. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) escalated retaliations, fighting pitched battles not only with guerrillas but with regular Jordanian and Egyptian army units. The Israelis also launched undercover operations, one of which, the so-called Lavon affair, was a botched attempt by Israeli intelligence to hurt Egypt's reputation in the United States by staging attacks on U.S. facilities in Egypt and blaming Arab extremists.

The Suez War
The Israeli raids humiliated Egypt's nationalist government headed by Gamal Abdel Nasser, a veteran of the 1948 war and leader of the group that had overthrown King Farouk in 1952. Nasser sought to lead the Arabs in expelling British and French imperial influence and regarded Israel as a symbol of foreign aggression. After he failed to obtain American arms to repel the Israeli attacks, Nasser trumped both Israel and his Western adversaries when in October 1955 he signed a security agreement with the Soviet Union and a major arms deal with Czechoslovakia that threatened overnight to erase Israel's tenuous margin of military superiority, especially in aircraft. He also announced a blockade of the Strait of Tiran, the outlet of Israel's southern port city of Elat.

Ben-Gurion, exhausted by political struggles, had left the premiership in late 1953 to Moshe Sharett, who hoped that vigorous international diplomacy might relieve Israel's insecurity. It did not. Ben-Gurion had a different approach, and returning as prime minister in late 1955 after the Czech-Egyptian arms deal, he soon began to plan a preemptive attack against Egypt before that country's new weaponry gave it strategic superiority. The preparations for an Israeli attack coincided with the Anglo-French decision to regain the Suez Canal, which Nasser had nationalized in July 1956 despite agreements putting it under international control. The French brokered a secret alliance with Israel and Britain, and in October IDF troops, under the leadership of Moshe Dayan, swiftly broke the Egyptian lines in the Sinai. The Israeli attack provided the cover for a ruse in which the British and French invaded the canal zone under the pretext of protecting it. This duplicity infuriated American President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who compelled the British and French governments to withdraw their troops, effectively ending much of the influence of those two countries in the region. Israel was also compelled to return to the old armistice lines, but not before the United States had agreed to placing a UN peacekeeping force in the Sinai. American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles also promised in writing that the United States would treat the Strait of Tiran as an international waterway and keep it open.

These arrangements did not lead to peace negotiations, but they did impose a calm over Israel's southern border for nearly a decade. A regional arms race began in the absence of any movement toward peace, and Shimon Peres, Ben-Gurion's deputy defense minister, found France to be a willing supplier. The French-designed nuclear reactor in Dimona was widely suspected of being the kernel of an Israeli nuclear weapons program, while French Mirage jets became the backbone of Israel's air force. The Israelis also obtained a large indirect supply of arms from the United States, with West Germany as the intermediary. Israel, under the leadership of IDF Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, turned its military into a highly professional organization.

Labour rule after Ben-Gurion
Ben-Gurion stepped down as prime minister in June 1963, angered by the results of a review of the decade-old Lavon affair that had not, in his view, attached blame adequately to those responsible for that failed and illegal operation. His efforts at building the Israeli state had also brought him into conflict with his own party's ideology, the Orthodox religious establishment, and the international Zionist movement. Gathering about him a group of younger leaders in 1965, notably Shimon Peres and Moshe Dayan, Ben-Gurion organized a new political party, Rafi, though he eventually retired from politics permanently in 1970 when that party failed to generate support.

The Six-Day War
Ben-Gurion's successor, Levi Eshkol, had much less experience in defense issues and relied heavily on Rabin. Neither the Jordanian nor the Syrian borders were quiet during the years leading up to the Six-Day War, but all Israelis were taken by surprise when in May 1967 increasingly violent clashes with Palestinian guerrillas and Syrian army forces along Lake Tiberias led to a general crisis. The Soviet Union alleged that Israel was mobilizing to attack Syria, and the Syrian government, in turn, chided President Nasser of Egypt for inaction. Nasser then mobilized his own forces, which he promptly sent into the Sinai after he ordered that UN forces there be withdrawn, and announced a blockade of the Strait of Tiran. The encirclement of Israel was complete when King Hussein of Jordan, despite secret Israeli pleas, felt compelled to join the Arab war coalition.

In reaction, Eshkol mobilized the IDF and sent his foreign minister, Abba Eban, on a futile trip to seek French, British, and American aid. After Rabin suffered a breakdown from exhaustion, the coalition parties forced Eshkol to appoint Moshe Dayan as defense minister and to create a national unity government that included Menachem Begin, the main opposition leader. The next day, June 5, Israeli planes destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground in a preemptive strike that began the total rout of all Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian forces. Israeli troops captured huge quantities of arms and took many prisoners. Six days later, Israeli troops stood victorious along the Suez Canal, having overrun the Sinai Peninsula; on the banks of the Jordan River, after occupying the entire West Bank; and atop the Golan Heights, after driving the Syrians from that strategic position. Most significant to all involved, Israel had captured the remaining sections of Jerusalem not already under its control, including the Old City and the Western Wall.

Troubled victory
Israel's triumph in the Six-Day War (the name by which this conflict became known) brought the entire biblical land of Israel under Jewish control, but the war also brought new complications: rule over more than one million additional Palestinians in the occupied territories; extended military lines along the Suez Canal, the Golan Heights, and the Jordan River that severely strained its small standing army; and strong international opposition to the expansion of Israeli control, especially the absorption of the Old City of Jerusalem. Protesting Israel's surprise attack, French President Charles de Gaulle imposed an arms embargo on Israel, depriving the air force of its only source for advanced warplanes. This situation was resolved when the United States agreed to supply Israel with U.S. fighters to replace the French planes.

It was not clear how military victory could be turned into peace. Shortly after the war's end Israel began that quest, but it would take more than a decade and involve yet another war before yielding any results. Eshkol's secret offer to trade much of the newly won territory for peace agreements with Egypt, Jordan, and Syria was rejected by Nasser, who, supported by an emergency resupply of Soviet arms, led the Arabs at the Khartoum Arab Summit in The Sudan in August 1967 in a refusal to negotiate directly with Israel. The UN Security Council responded by passing Resolution 242 in November, demanding that Israel withdraw from “occupied territories” and that all parties in the dispute recognize the right of residents of each state to live within “secure and recognized borders.” The wording of this statement became crucial to peace negotiations for years to come. By not stating “all the occupied territories” in the English version—the only one accepted by Israel—the resolution left room for the Israelis to negotiate. The Palestinians, the residents of these territories, were mentioned only as refugees, it being presumed that Jordan would represent them.

Nearly two years of fruitless mediation ensued while Israel held the occupied territories with a minimum of force, relied on its air power to deter Arab attack, and—adhering to Dayan's light-handed occupation policy—disturbed the Palestinian population under military rule as little as possible. The Israelis left the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the local Arab institutions, and indeed the Jordanian legal code throughout the West Bank in the hands of the Palestinians, just as they left Egyptian regulations in place in Gaza.

The Israeli and Palestinian economies were to develop strong links over the next decades, as the underemployed Arab workforce in the occupied territories gravitated to Israeli industries that were chronically short of unskilled labour. Eventually more than 150,000 workers would make the daily commute to Israel, returning to the West Bank and Gaza at night. While the export of Israeli goods to the occupied territories became lucrative, it formed but a small part of the economic exchange between the two sides.

Meanwhile, the Israeli government moved to reclaim areas in the newly occupied territories that had been settled by Jews before 1948, including the Etzion Bloc, an Israeli community on the approach to Jerusalem that had been lost to Jordan after heavy fighting during Israel's war of independence. After the Arabs rejected a quick peace, Yigal Allon, a leading Labour politician and a hero of the 1948 war, devised a plan to settle Jews in strategic areas of the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai, and the Golan Heights. Israel also enlarged the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem and developed new neighbourhoods in order to establish a Jewish majority in the capital; and in the Old City, the government reconstructed the historic Jewish quarter. However, except for East Jerusalem, where the Jewish population increased dramatically in the years of Labour dominance, by 1977 only about 5,000 Israelis lived in these so-called strategic settlements. Other Israelis, guided by the prominent Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, believed that settlement everywhere in the biblical land of Israel would hasten the messianic era. Israelis of this mind established the Gush Emunim (“Bloc of Believers”) organization in the West Bank city of Hebron in 1968.

The war of attrition
In early 1969 Egypt began what became known as the “war of attrition” against Israel. Using heavy artillery, new MiG aircraft, Soviet advisers, and an advanced Soviet-designed surface-to-air missile system, the Egyptians inflicted heavy losses on the Israelis. Golda Meir, who became Israel's prime minister following Eshkol's sudden death in February 1969, escalated the war by ordering massive air raids deep into Egypt. These raids were suspended, however, after the Soviet pilots began to fly combat patrols over parts of Egypt, and the battle shifted to the canal zone. Israel was also beset by guerrilla raids from Jordan, launched by Yasir 'Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). These attacks were often on nonmilitary targets, and Israel soon stamped the PLO as a terrorist organization and refused to negotiate with it.

U.S. President Richard Nixon feared an eventual Israeli confrontation with Moscow and sent Secretary of State William Rogers to intervene with a complex cease-fire proposal, which was accepted by Israel, Egypt, and Jordan in August 1970. This plan specified limits on the deployment of missiles and revived a year-old diplomatic initiative (the Rogers Plan) that insisted on an exchange of territory for peace on all fronts.

The Egyptians and Soviets soon violated the agreement by moving their missiles closer to the canal. In Jordan, Hussein's acceptance of the cease-fire ignited savage fighting between the Jordanian army and several PLO militia groups. As the battles intensified, Syria sent tanks to aid the Palestinians, but coordinated Israeli, American, and Jordanian military moves defeated the Syrians and expelled the PLO, whose forces sought refuge in Lebanon.

Meir's gamble had succeeded: Israel's willingness to risk confrontation, even with Soviet pilots along the canal, had strengthened relations with the United States. Hussein's recovery of control in Jordan demoralized Palestinian resistance while securing Israel's eastern border. When Nasser died in September 1970, his successor, Anwar el-Sadat, did not renew the fighting, seeking instead a partial Israeli pullback from the Suez Canal. Israel eventually rejected this idea, but the crisis had passed.

The decline of Labour dominance

The Yom Kippur War
On October 6, 1973—the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur—Egyptian and Syrian forces staged a surprise attack on Israeli forces situated on the Suez Canal and the Golan Heights. Israeli confidence in its early warning systems and air superiority was misplaced, and Egyptian missiles were soon taking a heavy toll of Israeli warplanes. The intensity of the Egyptian and Syrian assault, so unlike the situation in 1967, rapidly began to exhaust Israel's reserve stocks of munitions.

With Israel threatened by catastrophe, Prime Minister Meir turned to the United States for aid, while the Israeli general staff hastily improvised a battle strategy. Washington's reluctance to help Israel changed rapidly when the Soviet Union launched its own resupply effort to Egypt and Syria. President Nixon countered by establishing an emergency supply line to Israel, even though the Arab nations imposed a costly oil embargo, and various American allies refused to facilitate the arms shipments.

With reinforcements on the way, the IDF rapidly turned the tide. A daring Israeli helicopter assault disabled portions of the Egyptian air defenses, which allowed Israeli forces commanded by General Ariel Sharon to cross the Suez Canal and threaten to destroy the Egyptian Third Army. On the Golan, Israeli troops, at heavy cost, repulsed the Syrians and advanced to the edge of the Golan plateau on the road to Damascus. At this point, the United States, alarmed by Soviet threats of direct military intervention and on nuclear alert, secured a cease-fire in place.

Political and social repercussions of the war
Egypt'' Sadat persuaded U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that his country was ready to abandon both its Soviet and Syrian allies for a fresh start with the United States; only Washington, in Sadat's view, could effectively influence Israel to return the Sinai without further bloodshed. Kissinger, supported by Nixon, successfully pressured Israel to end the war short of a complete Egyptian military defeat and then, through intensive travel between the various capitals—what soon was being called shuttle diplomacy—achieved disengagement agreements on both the Egyptian and Syrian fronts during 1974. This became known as the “step by step” process, which was intended to fulfill the intent of Security Council Resolution 242 that territory be exchanged for peace.

Golda Meir's government resigned in April 1974, exhausted and discredited by the war. Still, the Labour Party won a narrow election victory in June by selecting Yitzhak Rabin, hero of the 1967 war and former Israeli ambassador to Washington, to lead its list. The first native-born Israeli to become prime minister, Rabin predicted a period of “seven lean years” until the West, including the United States, would end its heavy dependence on Arab oil. He argued that Israel therefore needed to trade space for time, to coordinate closely with Washington, and to encourage Egypt's new pro-American policy.

Rabin reached a second disengagement agreement with Egypt in September 1975, but little progress was made with Syria. On what had been the “quiet” front—the West Bank and Gaza—the Labour government's preferred strategy of negotiations with the more amenable King Hussein of Jordan (the so-called “Jordanian option”) was threatened in October 1974, when an Arab summit conference in Rabat, Morocco, declared 'Arafat's PLO to be the sole representative of the Palestinians. A year later, Rabin obtained secret assurances from Kissinger that the United States would not recognize the PLO as an entity representing the Palestinians unless that organization first ceased terrorism and recognized Israel's right to exist.

Meanwhile, the Gush Emunim movement on the West Bank gathered force after the Yom Kippur War and between 1974 and 1987 planted small communities near large Arab populations, greatly complicating Israeli policy and arousing international opposition. The secular Israeli government opposed such efforts but rarely used force to dislodge the settlers, who invoked Zionist rights to the homeland in their defense. Still, they numbered fewer than 4,000 when the opposition Likud government of Menachem Begin came to power in 1977.

Diplomatic impasse
The Yom Kippur War left the country in bad economic shape. An accelerating rate of inflation just before the conflict was suddenly combined with a stagnant economy; prices continued to rise even as demand and production fell. The international recession reduced demand for Israeli exports, and, for the first time in years, unemployment became a problem. On top of this, Israel became heavily indebted by arms purchases—partially offset by U.S. aid—and the country's international status suffered. One by one, most of Israel's carefully cultivated African friends broke relations under the threat of Arab oil sanctions, leaving the Jewish state alone with an equally isolated South Africa. Further complicating the situation for Israel, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3379 in 1975, which equated Zionism with racism, and the PLO gained increasing European and Asian support. Meanwhile, Rabin was losing political ground at home, harmed by infighting and corruption. Even the remarkable success of Israel's July 1976 raid at the Entebbe, Uganda, airport—in which commandos rescued the Israeli passengers of an Air France plane hijacked by German and Palestinian terrorists—was of little help. The former general, new to politics, found it difficult to dominate a cabinet in which his chief rival, Shimon Peres, was defense minister, and few others owed him any political allegiance.

A further blow to Rabin fell when he visited Washington in March 1977 to meet with the new American president, Jimmy Carter, who advocated a "comprehensive approach" to Middle East peace instead of the Kissinger step-by-step plan. Carter sought an international conference to resolve all the major issues between Israel and the Arabs and advocated a “homeland” for the Palestinians. For Israelis, this notion (and its similarity to the wording of the Balfour Declaration) was a code word for a Palestinian state, and they hotly opposed it—not least because it also implied a leadership role for the PLO. Rabin, facing a major quarrel with the United States and beset by a personal scandal (his wife had maintained an illegal bank account in Washington from his days as ambassador), resigned in April, and Shimon Peres became Labour's new party leader.

Israel under Likud
To general surprise, the Likud Party, led by Menachem Begin, won the May 1977 election, inaugurating the first non-Labour-led government in Israel's history. Begin's campaign benefited immensely from Sephardic resentment over the patronizing attitude of the Labour establishment and its treatment of non-European Jewish immigrants as second-class citizens. The Sephardim supported Likud in large numbers. In addition, a new “clean government” party drew votes from Labour, and its leader, Yigael Yadin, an eminent archaeologist and a hero of the 1948 war, joined the cabinet. Also included in Begin's cabinet were Ezer Weizman, an air force commander in 1967 and architect of the Likud political strategy, and, to the shock of many Labourites, Moshe Dayan, who agreed to become foreign minister. Begin also attracted the National Religious Party to his coalition.

The beginning of the peace process
Begin strongly opposed any territorial compromise on the West Bank, which, like many Israelis, he felt to be an inalienable part of Israel—the historic Samaria and Judea. He also argued that Resolution 242 did not require withdrawal from this area. The new Israeli leader put off a crisis with Washington by discarding Rabin's notion of “coordination” and declared simply that Israel wanted to sit down with its neighbours to negotiate peace. Meanwhile, Begin inaugurated a policy to strengthen Israel's hold on the West Bank through an extensive settlement program overseen by Ariel Sharon, the minister of agriculture.

Carter spent the summer in futile efforts to convene an international conference, finally approving a Soviet-American communiqué in October 1977 that was intended to stimulate diplomacy; instead, it outraged both Israel and the U.S. Congress, many of whose members condemned Carter for concessions to Moscow. These mishaps convinced Sadat that American tactics were giving his erstwhile Soviet and Syrian allies a veto over any diplomacy, which could lead to a new war in which Egypt would likely pay the highest price. Secret negotiations were held between Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan and Sadat's personal representatives, after which the Egyptian president surprised the world by flying to a delighted Israel in November 1977, where he and Begin addressed the Israeli Knesset.

The two leaders could not agree, however, on the details of a comprehensive peace, and the negotiations were complicated by events in Lebanon. Following its eviction from Jordan in 1971, the PLO had established itself there, exacerbating the volatile political situation in that country and contributing to its collapse into civil war in 1975. Both Israel and the United States had reluctantly consented to Syria's military intervention in Lebanon that same year, but the result was a partitioned state with the PLO dominating the south of the country, which was now a launching point for terror attacks against Israelis living in the Upper Galilee. In March 1978, Israel invaded Lebanon to drive the PLO away from the border but succeeded only partially in this goal before withdrawing from that country, under international pressure, in June. This episode strengthened Israel's ties with a Lebanese Christian militia known as the Phalange, who benefited from Israeli weapons and training.

Camp David
The faltering Egyptian-Israeli negotiations were finally rescued when Carter convened a summit at the presidential retreat of Camp David, Maryland, in September 1978. In this secluded site—an “elegant jail,” Begin called it—Carter shuttled between the two leaders over a 12-day period, and out of these negotiations emerged the Camp David Accords. The accords were a framework for a comprehensive peace between Israel and the Arab states based on Resolution 242 and called for all the parties to complete peace treaties under its principles. Rather than giving the Palestinians full independence, the accords offered them Begin's concept of autonomy, which provided for five years of limited Palestinian self-government to be followed by talks on final status between Israel and a Jordanian-Palestinian joint negotiating team.

The Camp David Accords earned Sadat and Begin each a share of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Peace, but the subsequent peace process proved far more difficult than the parties expected. It took seven more months for Egypt and Israel to reach a final agreement, which was signed on March 26, 1979, and called for a three-year phased Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai, limited-force zones, a multinational observer force, full diplomatic relations between the two countries, and special provisions for Israeli access to the Sinai's oil fields. The United States also agreed to provide large amounts of financial aid to both Israel and Egypt, part of which paid for the relocation of Israeli military installations. Israel's settlements in the Sinai were also evacuated, despite public Israeli protests.

Syria, Iraq, and the PLO were outraged by Egypt's actions and joined diplomatic forces to suspend Cairo from the Arab League and prevent any other Arab state from supporting the accords. Nearly all the Arab states subsequently severed ties with Egypt. Jordan and the Palestinians refused to negotiate autonomy, and a three-year attempt by Israel, Egypt, and the United States to develop the plan on their own came to naught. Meanwhile, Begin refused to halt the building of new Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

A cold peace
Thus, “seven lean years” after the Yom Kippur War and three decades after independence, Israel had reached peace with Egypt, the Soviets were sidelined, and the Jewish state's alliance with the United States was consolidated. However, trouble loomed, as a civil war in Lebanon allowed an increasingly well-armed PLO to raid Israel's northern border. Israel had also begun to fear a military buildup in Iraq, especially its potential for producing nuclear weapons. Nor was the cabinet happy. Both Weizman and Dayan resigned from it, charging that the prime minister did not want to settle the Palestinian issue. The Begin government had also been much less successful in its domestic policies, and the economy, after a brief recovery in 1978–79, entered another inflationary spiral.

Israel faced a complex agenda in dealing with the United States when Ronald Reagan replaced Jimmy Carter as president in 1981. Reagan and his first secretary of state, Alexander Haig, both strong supporters of Israel, promoted a strategic alliance with the Jewish state, but the effort was soon beset by quarrels over the U.S. sale of sophisticated air surveillance aircraft, known as AWACS, to Saudi Arabia. When Israel destroyed Iraq's French-built Osirak nuclear reactor in a daring raid in June, Washington reluctantly supported a UN condemnation of Israel's action.

Begin's policies aroused strong international opposition but aided his victory over Shimon Peres in the June 1981 elections. His new government contained more Likud appointees, including Yitzhak Shamir as foreign minister and Ariel Sharon as defense minister. Then, on October 6, 1981, Sadat was murdered by Muslim extremists. His successor, Hosni Mubarak, reaffirmed the 1979 treaty but was prepared only for a "cold" peace with Israel, and few of the bright hopes for trade and tourism promised by the Camp David agreements materialized—even after Israel completed its withdrawal from the Sinai in April 1982.

War in Lebanon
Begin again turned to Lebanon, where he was determined to defeat the PLO. In July 1981, fearing an Israeli-Syrian clash in Lebanon, the United States had brokered an ambiguous cease-fire, during which the PLO continued to amass heavy arms. Cautioned by Haig not to attack unless there was an “internationally recognized provocation,” Begin ordered the bombing of PLO positions in June 1982 after members of a PLO splinter group attempted to assassinate Israel's ambassador to Britain. The PLO retaliated with a rocket barrage on Israel's northern border towns, whereupon Israel launched a new invasion of southern Lebanon. The Israeli cabinet authorized a limited operation, and Begin made it clear that IDF troops were not to advance farther than 25 miles (40 km) beyond the Lebanese border. But Sharon had more ambitious plans. Even as Reagan's special envoy, Philip Habib, attempted to prevent an Israeli-Syrian clash, Israeli jets destroyed Syrian antiaircraft missiles in Lebanon. This strategic surprise attack was followed by a short but violent series of ground skirmishes and two days of aerial combat that cost Syria some 100 aircraft.

Sharon sent the IDF toward Beirut and well beyond the mandated 25-mile limit. With the Syrians in retreat, Israeli troops besieged 'Arafat and his remaining PLO units in the Lebanese capital. Israel's Maronite Christian allies, the Phalange Party, contrary to Sharon's expectations, did not act to secure the city as they had been expected to do, and a dangerous stalemate ensued. The pro-Israel Haig was forced from office, as a bewildered and angry Reagan, reinforced by U.S. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, sought an Israeli withdrawal. Habib, working under the direction of Haig's successor, George Shultz, managed to insert a multinational peacekeeping force in Lebanon that allowed 'Arafat and a portion of his force to evacuate Beirut in August, following a final Israeli bombardment.

The Lebanese Christians, however, were not to benefit from the Israeli actions. Phalange leader Bashir Gemayel, the new president-elect, was assassinated by Syrian agents in September, and in the ensuing disorders, Israeli forces allowed the Phalangist militia into two Palestinian refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila, where they massacred hundreds of men, women, and children. The multinational force, withdrawn quickly after 'Arafat's departure, was reinserted.

Shortly before the massacres, President Reagan had announced a plan for Arab-Israeli peace that pointedly applied the Resolution 242 formula to the Palestinian issue. The plan was designed, in part, to appease Arab anger and to revive the Jordanian option, but it was rejected by an Arab summit and hotly opposed by an alarmed Begin. However, the embattled prime minister did not have much time left. An official Israeli inquiry condemned Sharon for negligence in the camp massacres, forcing him to resign. Grieving over Israeli losses and the operation's tragic outcome, Israelis mounted massive street demonstrations against the Begin government.

Under U.S. mediation, Israel and Lebanon reached a nonbelligerence agreement in May 1983, and Israeli troops withdrew from the Beirut area. An ailing Begin, devastated by his wife's death and the war's outcome, resigned in September and retreated into a reclusive retirement, dying in 1992. He was replaced by Yitzhak Shamir. On October 23, 1983, a suicide bomber from the radical Shi'ite Muslim organization Hezbollah blew up the U.S. Marine headquarters at the Beirut airport, which was part of the international peacekeeping force, killing 241. Within a few weeks, Reagan began withdrawing American forces, and after they had left, the Syrians and their local allies forced Lebanon to renounce the agreement with Israel.

The national unity government
Labour outpolled the Likud in the 1984 election, but not by a margin sufficient to form a government. To rescue the economy and extricate Israel from its military entanglement in Lebanon, Labour and Likud formed a national unity government in September, giving the premiership to Peres for 25 months, at the end of which the premiership would go to Shamir, with the understanding that the other would take the position of deputy prime minister of foreign affairs. Notably, Rabin was to be defense minister for both men.

Under Peres, the Israelis began a phased withdrawal from Lebanon in June 1985, except for a security zone where an Israeli-sponsored Lebanese force waged intermittent warfare against the Hezbollah, who enjoyed Iranian and Syrian patronage. An economic recovery plan also was put into place, assisted by the United States. For the first time, Israel began to reform its economic structures, which until then had been controlled by the state and the labour federation, Histadrut.

As stipulated by the rotation agreement, Shamir became prime minister in October 1986, with Peres as foreign minister. Determined to regain the top spot through a diplomatic breakthrough, Peres met secretly with Jordan's King Hussein. The two reached an understanding known as the London Agreement in April 1987, but the agreement's vague formulations did not command a majority of votes in the unity cabinet, and Shamir retained control.

Shamir continued the Begin policy of settling Jews throughout the West Bank, hoping to isolate the Arab towns and villages that might form the basis for a Palestinian state. Few Israelis responded to this initiative until Sharon, who returned to Shamir's cabinet as housing minister, began subsidizing residential communities that were within easy commuting distance of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, where housing was scarce and expensive. By 1992 the Jewish population in the occupied territories was approaching 100,000.

The intifadah
The Begin and Shamir governments had gradually abandoned Moshe Dayan's old policy of leaving the Palestinians alone. By late 1987 the combined effects of settlement expansion, bureaucratic encroachment, land seizures, several years of economic stagnation, and the diplomatic stalemate had set the stage for an Arab rebellion in the West Bank and Gaza that quickly became known as the intifadah (Arabic: “shaking off”). This uprising was distinguished by widespread street violence in which children and teenagers battled Israeli troops with rocks and stones.

The Israeli military was caught by surprise and proved ill-equipped to deal with the revolt. A grinding contest of wills ensued that soon claimed many civilian casualties and altered the political landscape. In February 1988 Shamir invited Secretary of State Shultz to intervene, but he tried in vain to revive the diplomatic process. Meanwhile, King Hussein had finally abandoned his formal ambition to represent the Palestinians. Israel's international image was suffering as the media recorded scenes of Israeli soldiers beating young Palestinians in the street. Frequent closures of the areas also severely disrupted the Palestinian economy, and Israel began to replace Arab day labour with immigrant workers from outside the region.

The Israeli election in November 1988 gave Likud a slight majority. Shamir was still forming a government when in December 'Arafat, speaking at a special UN meeting in Geneva, reiterated a declaration that he had made the previous month that he was ready to recognize Israel and suspend terrorism provided the Palestinians obtained a state. The United States promptly recognized the PLO and opened a dialogue with it.

The question of Palestinian autonomy
This stunning event led Shamir to form another national unity government, with Rabin again as defense minister and Peres as finance minister. Rabin was convinced that Israel needed a political initiative to end the intifadah and deflect the PLO. He persuaded Shamir to revive the Camp David-era autonomy plan, but this time it was stripped of its Jordanian component and aimed specifically at the Palestinians. Israel was also facing a new U.S. administration, led by President George Bush, that was determined to restrict Israeli settlement expansion. Efforts by the United States to create an Israeli-Palestinian negotiation on autonomy, however, were rejected by Shamir, who insisted that the Palestinian negotiating team be drawn exclusively from residents of Gaza and the West Bank and not from Jerusalem or the PLO. Peres thereupon resigned from the unity government, only to be outmaneuvered by Shamir, who formed a Likud-dominated coalition that excluded Labour. The prime minister decided to ride out the intifadah while concentrating on a sudden breakthrough with the Soviet Union: as part of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, a massive number of Soviet Jews were allowed to emigrate to Israel, the exodus continuing after the Russian Federation was created in the early 1990s. Included among the hundreds of thousands of new arrivals were many highly trained doctors, engineers, and scientists.

The Gulf War and the Madrid Conference
The stalemated Arab-Israeli conflict was soon overshadowed by a crisis in the Persian Gulf, when the army of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990. As the United States dispatched troops to Saudi Arabia and organized an international coalition against the Iraqi invasion, Saddam attempted to stir up Arab antagonism against Israel. He found ready support among the Palestinians in Jordan and elsewhere, including an endorsement by PLO head 'Arafat.

The United States greatly feared that its focus on Iraqi aggression would be diverted by Arab grievances against Israel, and when the American-led coalition's attack was launched, Washington urged Israel not to respond to Iraqi provocations, even after Iraqi forces began missile attacks on Israeli cities. Accepting U.S. air-defense missiles, Israel held its fire while the coalition devastated the Jewish state's most dangerous Arab opponent. Meanwhile, the Persian Gulf states cut off their previously substantial financial support for the PLO.

Iraq's defeat and the rapid decline of the Soviet Union in 1991 suddenly opened the way for fresh diplomatic initiatives. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker succeeded in convening an Arab-Israeli peace conference in Madrid in October 1991, the first direct official talks between Israel and its neighbours since the Camp David era. Three “tracks” were created under U.S. auspices that sought to achieve peace treaties between Israel and Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria; an interim Palestinian self-government for Gaza and the West Bank (the Palestinian team this time met the Israeli specifications); and European, Japanese, and Arab support for regional economic cooperation and arms control.

The talks, conducted in various locations, stalled after a promising start. The Palestinians demanded statehood rather than autonomy, and Shamir was not interested in reaching quick agreements. The Israeli leader remained faithful to his strategy of outlasting the other side while continuing to construct Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. However, Shamir's policy was hotly contested by the United States, and Bush refused Shamir's request for housing-loan guarantees to accommodate Russian immigrants unless Israel stopped expanding the settlements.

The Labour opposition, sensing an opportunity, put up Rabin as their candidate for prime minister in the elections of June 1992. He promised security but also flexibility, insisting that he would produce progress in the negotiations. He also proposed that less be spent on settlements and more on help for Russian immigrants. In a hard-fought election, the Labour Party won a narrow advantage.

The Rabin government
Rabin established greater control in this premiership than in his earlier one by keeping the defense portfolio to himself and appointing a negotiating team that reported to him rather than to Peres, his foreign minister. His coalition was delicately balanced between left and right and relied on a Sephardic religious party, Shas, to offset the strongly antireligious Meretz Party.

Rabin criticized the comprehensive approach implicit in the Madrid talks, concluding that the Palestinian-Israeli track held more promise for progress because both Israelis and Palestinians wanted to move beyond the status quo of the intifadah. To stimulate diplomacy and to patch up relations with the United States, he ordered a freeze on the construction of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, which allowed the Bush administration to approve housing guarantees for Russian immigrants. (In fact, some previously planned construction continued in the territories, and the settler population grew from 100,000 to 135,000 during Rabin's term.)

Unexpectedly, the negotiations with Syria came to life first, but after an encouraging start they had deadlocked by the summer of 1993. Syria refused to specify what it meant by “full peace,” a key Israeli requirement; and Israel refused to withdraw to the armistice lines as they were prior to the 1967 war, which would have effectively placed the border with Syria on Lake Tiberias (the Sea of Galilee), Israel's largest source of fresh water.

The Oslo Accords
Meanwhile, Peres had been nurturing a secret negotiating track with the Palestinians through Norwegian diplomacy. The PLO officials conducting the so-called unofficial discussions in Oslo, Norway, were far more flexible than the official non-PLO Palestinian delegation in Washington, and Rabin decided to gamble that 'Arafat was the only Palestinian leader who could conceivably deliver peace. 'Arafat also gambled. He was short of money after alienating his main financial backers during the Gulf War and faced challenges to his leadership from Islamic groups, whose influence had grown significantly in the occupied territories during the intifadah. He accepted the idea of Palestinian autonomy in order to at last obtain a foothold in Palestine.
The Declaration of Principles and Cairo Agreement
In September 1993, Israel and the PLO signed the Declaration of Principles on Palestinian Self-Rule, the first agreement between the two sides and the initial document in what became generally known as the Oslo Accords. While the United States had not been aware of the seriousness of the discussions in Oslo, both Rabin and 'Arafat were happy to embrace U.S. President Bill Clinton on the White House lawn in September 1993, in support of their deal. A visibly reluctant Rabin consented to shake 'Arafat's hand.

The Oslo Accords, in fact, comprised a series of agreements, the second of which, the Cairo Agreement on the Gaza Strip and Jericho, was signed in May 1994. This pact enacted the provisions set forth in the original declaration, which had endorsed a five-year interim self-rule for a Palestinian authority to be executed in two stages: first in Gaza and the city of Jericho and then, after an election, throughout the remaining areas under Israeli military rule. Talks on final status were to begin after three years, with a two-year deadline for an agreement to be reached. Issues such as borders, the return of refugees, the status of Jerusalem, and Jewish settlements in the occupied territories were reserved for final status talks. The PLO recognized Israel's right to exist, renounced terrorism, and agreed to change the portions of its charter that called for Israel's destruction. Israel recognized the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people.

The accords embodied two basic sets of exchanges. First, Israel would shed responsibility for the Palestinian population while retaining strategic control of the territory. The Palestinians would be rid of Israeli military rule and gain self-government, potentially leading to statehood. Second, 'Arafat's disavowal of violence and his pledge to fight terrorism—through the use of a domestic Palestinian police force—would improve Israel's security. The Palestinians would benefit from the large amount of foreign aid it would receive from the United States and other countries and from economic agreements made with Israel that were designed to foster employment and trade.

Challenges to peace
Rabin's decision aroused enormous opposition from the Likud and most settlers, although the majority of Israelis at first strongly supported him, especially since the agreement enabled Israel to rid itself of the tumultuous Gaza Strip. In October 1994, Jordan also signed a comprehensive peace treaty with Israel, and many other Arab states, including the smaller Persian Gulf emirates, began to discard the old taboos about contact with the Jewish state.

Not all Palestinians, however, favoured 'Arafat's course. The Islamic group, Hamas, which was especially strong in Gaza, violently opposed the Oslo Accords and launched a series of terror attacks on Israeli civilians, killing scores between 1993 and 1997. Rabin retaliated with border closures that prevented tens of thousands of Palestinian workers living in the occupied territories from commuting to jobs in Israel. Some Israelis sought revenge, such as the murder in February 1994 of some three dozen Arabs at prayer in Hebron's Tomb of the Patriarchs by an Israeli settler. Despite Israeli protests, 'Arafat sought to co-opt rather than repress Hamas. Israel therefore continued its own antiterrorism war, and two Hamas leaders were assassinated in 1994–95, one in Gaza itself.

Economic boom
Peace diplomacy bolstered what had already been a period of strong economic expansion in Israel. Austerity during the 1980s had wrung out bad debt and inefficiency at considerable cost. Many kibbutzim, deprived of cheap credit and a subsidized water supply, had either failed or shifted from agriculture to light industry. Koor Industries Ltd., Histadrut's industrial holding company, had itself fallen on hard times and defaulted on a number of loans before it was restructured. The Israeli government still controlled half the economy, but the earlier socialist ideology, once the mainstay of Israeli politics, was clearly on the wane.

In the late 1980s the Israeli economy was buoyed by the influx of highly skilled Russian immigrants, a competitive high-technology sector, and the country's proximity to the European market. In the period 1990–95, Israel's rate of economic growth exceeded 5 percent annually, unemployment was cut nearly in half, and the annual inflation rate dropped from double to single digits. Foreign investment turned from a trickle into a flood, as Israeli exports to Asia also registered large increases and the Arab boycott eased.

By 1996 Israel's GNP was greater than that of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon combined, and its per capita income was approaching European standards. All this made Israel an economic powerhouse in the region and allowed its leaders to look at a future of decreasing dependence on economic aid from the United States.

Oslo II and Rabin's assassination
In September 1995, Rabin, 'Arafat, and Peres, all newly named winners of the Nobel Prize for Peace, assembled again on the White House lawn to sign the Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza Strip (often called Oslo II). This detailed and long-delayed agreement established a schedule for Israeli withdrawals from the Palestinian population centres (to be implemented in several stages) and created a complex system of zones that were divided between areas fully controlled by the Palestinians, those under Palestinian civil authority but Israeli military control, and those exclusively under Israeli control. It also set elections for a president and council of the Palestinian Authority, which would govern the Palestinian population in the occupied territories.

Although Oslo I had received strong parliamentary support, Oslo II was ratified by only one vote in the Knesset, signaling a significant loss of support for Rabin. Many Israelis were angry over 'Arafat's erratic cooperation on security, and others, especially the Likud—now led by Israel's former ambassador to the UN, Benjamin Netanyahu—hotly opposed withdrawals or further dealings with 'Arafat. Meanwhile, the Sephardic Shas Party had left the coalition in protest over the indictment of its parliamentary leader for fraud. Bereft of his coalition's balance, Rabin had to depend on the vote of the Israeli Arab members of the Knesset for his majority. He was also battered by demands from the Meretz Party and from Conservative and Reform Jews in the United States to loosen the Orthodox religious monopoly established in the early years of the state.

Shortly after Oslo II was passed in the Knesset, Rabin decided on a public campaign to rally his supporters, and it was following the first such rally in Tel Aviv in November 1995 that he was assassinated by a Jewish religious fanatic. Israelis were horrified, and after a funeral attended by many international leaders, including Arabs, a round of soul-searching and recriminations began. Popular Israeli support for the peace process surged, and with the Likud on the defensive, Shimon Peres, Rabin's successor as prime minister, proceeded with Oslo II. By early 1996 nearly all the Palestinians were under self-rule; Israeli forces, though withdrawn from the major towns except Hebron, still controlled most of the occupied territories. In January, 'Arafat easily won election as president of the Palestinian Authority. The voters also selected a Palestinian Council, although its powers were ill-defined. Peres also sought to accelerate an Israeli-Syrian deal but soon concluded that such an agreement could not be reached quickly, if at all.

A new political landscape
Peres had hoped to capitalize on sympathy for Rabin and chose to hold early elections in 1996. His campaign was quickly upset by a series of Hamas suicide attacks against civilians that shocked and angered Israelis. The United States convened an international antiterrorist conference in March to support Peres, but the prime minister lacked Rabin's security credentials and had been an outspoken advocate of partnership with 'Arafat. Peres reacted to Hezbollah attacks along the Lebanese border by ordering a massive artillery bombardment of southern Lebanon that mistakenly hit a UN outpost sheltering hundreds of civilians, which damaged his standing among Israeli Arabs. In addition, Labour had lost popularity among religious voters because of its alliance with Meretz.

The Netanyahu premiership
The May elections were the first held under a new law that allowed separate ballots for prime minister and the Knesset, which was designed to reduce the ability of smaller parties to exact concessions when governments were formed. However, this law had the opposite result: it created a quasi-presidential regime that still depended on an increasingly fractured parliament. Peres narrowly lost to Netanyahu, who promised that he would be tougher on 'Arafat than Peres had been. In the Knesset, however, both Labour and Likud unexpectedly lost ground, while the smaller parties, especially the religious bloc, gained large numbers of seats. An ethnic Russian party, Yisrael B'Aliyah, led by the celebrated Soviet-era dissident Anatoly (Natan) Sharansky, also won seats. The growth of the Shas Party and the emergence of a Russian ethnic bloc offered compelling evidence not only of their grievances against previous governments but of the failure of the major political parties to integrate these constituencies.

Netanyahu, age 46, the first Israeli prime minister born after the founding of the state, promised to accelerate economic reforms, especially the sale of state-owned businesses, but he was quickly confronted by labour union opposition, a slowing economy, and a large budget deficit. He had been a severe critic of the Oslo Accords but, after Rabin's murder, had promised to fix the agreements by insisting on Palestinian “reciprocity” (i.e., strict adherence to the terms). Nonetheless, Netanyahu could not bring himself to meet 'Arafat until September 1996 and raised doubts over his willingness to proceed with the promised Israeli withdrawal from Hebron and other unfinished aspects of Oslo II.

Crisis in the peace process
'Arafat had finally acted against Hamas in the spring and summer of 1996, but Israel's surprise opening of an archaeological tunnel exit at the north end of the Western Wall in Jerusalem in September 1996 allowed 'Arafat to play on Palestinian fears that the tunnel was a threat to the al-Aqsa Mosque. Another violent round of protests ensued, in which Palestinian police fired on Israeli soldiers, killing more than a dozen, while some 60 Arabs died. Clinton, fearing the end of the peace process, called an emergency summit in the White House, after which the Israeli prime minister warmly shook 'Arafat's hand for the cameras. Netanyahu refused to close the tunnel, but he pledged an accelerated effort to negotiate an agreement on the West Bank city of Hebron, which was reached in January 1997.

Netanyahu's cabinet narrowly approved the Hebron Agreement. Part of the price for this action became clear when Israel began constructing a long-planned but often delayed Jewish neighbourhood on the outskirts of Jerusalem, which would effectively cut off the Arab villages on the eastern side of the city from the rest of the West Bank. 'Arafat held his protest of this project until the cabinet's decision on the first of three projected Israeli withdrawals in March. When these withdrawals turned out to be far less significant than 'Arafat had anticipated, the stage was set for another round of protests that quickly escalated into violence. Meanwhile, 'Arafat released Hamas activists from Palestinian jails and suspended security cooperation with Israel. Netanyahu, fearing that his cabinet would not approve any more interim steps, argued that Israel and the Palestinians should begin intensive negotiations to determine the final status of the territories. This proposal was quickly rejected by both 'Arafat and the United States.

The Wye River Memorandum
The breakdown of direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiation at high levels led the United States to intervene again in early 1998 to end the stalemate. Both sides met in rural Maryland in October, and after intensive negotiations that included President Clinton's active participation produced the Wye River Memorandum. The new agreement restored old Israeli promises (such as the opening of a Palestinian airport and a safe passage route between Gaza and the West Bank) for old Palestinian promises (such as publicly renouncing the PLO Charter's anti-Israel provisions, collecting unauthorized arms, and implementing antiterrorist actions), but its novelty consisted of linking phased Israeli withdrawals to Palestinian actions and greatly enlarging the role of the United States as an active participant in both monitoring and judging the performance of the parties. Wye promised to put two-fifths of the West Bank under partial or total Palestinian control.

Netanyahu returned from Wye to face growing political trouble. The Bank of Israel had been using high interest rates in a dramatic effort to reduce Israeli inflation. While the policy succeeded overall (the inflation rate was cut by two-thirds) it also precipitated a recession and rising unemployment, which hit hardest in the poorer sectors of society—notably the largely Sephardic residents of the development towns in the south. Concurrently, the government's budget had been reduced, which hampered the prime minister's ability to satisfy the demands of the various coalition members. In early 1999, after a legislative defeat on the budget, Netanyahu called for early elections and soon suspended the Wye agreement.

The Barak gamble
The May 1999 Israeli election produced an even more fractured Knesset than the one three years earlier. Whereas in 1992, under the old, purely parliamentary system, the two largest parties had between them won 76 of the 120 seats, by 1999 they could command only 45. Labour, renamed One Israel in coalition with two small parties, had the most seats in the Knesset, while Likud, beset by infighting and a stalled economy, was second. The real surprise of the election was the sudden growth of Shas, which now commanded the third-largest number of seats.
Negotiations intensify
Labour's candidate for prime minister was a retired general, Ehud Barak, who triumphed over Netanyahu by a decisive margin. Barak, the most decorated soldier in Israeli history, had promised a renewed drive for peace, economic growth, and resistance to religious demands. He assembled a broad coalition in the Knesset and set about reviving the peace process with both the Palestinian and Syrians with a certain sense of urgency—'Arafat had already threatened to declare unilaterally a Palestinian state at the time of the Wye summit, Syrian President Hafiz al-Assad was seriously ill (he died in June 2000), and President Clinton wished to achieve a peace agreement before the end of his term in office.

In Barak's view, new elements existed that made rapid progress toward peace possible on both the Syrian and Palestinian fronts. Like his predecessor, he wanted definitive talks with 'Arafat about the final status of the territories before vacating much more land, but he encountered heavy resistance to his plans from both foreign and domestic sources. The Palestinians would not agree to abandon the third and final troop withdrawal promised under Oslo II; 'Arafat put off the declaration of a Palestinian state but insisted on maximum American intervention and sought the most territory he could recover before the final negotiations. However, he did agree to Barak's deadline of February 15, 2000, to reach a framework agreement, which was to be preceded by another withdrawal. These new arrangements were incorporated in the so-called Wye II agreement, reached in September 1999. None of the deadlines was met.

As the prime minister expected and 'Arafat feared, the Syrians suddenly signaled their desire to negotiate in early December. Barak himself traveled to the United States to negotiate with Syrian Foreign Minister Faruq al-Shar', under Clinton's patronage. A second session in early January 2000, however, ended when Syrian President Assad broke off the talks, raising the old demand that Israel agree to a return to the borders that existed between the two countries before the Six-Day War as a precondition to further negotiations.

By early March, however, progress again seemed possible on the Syrian front. Assad agreed to a summit with President Clinton at Geneva, but to U.S. and Israeli surprise he yet again insisted on Syria's right to its pre-1967 positions on Lake Tiberias. Neither Barak nor a majority of Israelis would agree to this demand. Barak then carried out his campaign promise to withdraw Israeli troops from Lebanon, even without an agreement with Syria, to a border demarcated by the UN.

Barak's willingness to concede to Arab demands and his mishandling of his coalition destroyed his Knesset majority in June. Nonetheless, he decided to attend Clinton's hastily arranged summit at Camp David in July. This last-ditch effort to reach an agreement between 'Arafat and Barak had been resisted by the Palestinian leader, who stated ahead of time that he could not concede Palestinian rights. This proved to be the case. Barak's unexpected willingness to share Jerusalem with the Palestinians was not reciprocated by 'Arafat, who on this—as on the issue of the return of refugees—refused to compromise, demanding nothing less than full Palestinian sovereignty in East Jerusalem.

The second intifadah
'Arafat returned home from the summit to Palestinian and popular Arab acclaim. He had said “no” to both Israel and the United States. In contrast, Barak's political support evaporated, and as he struggled to survive, a new blow fell when the Palestinians erupted in violence following Likud leader Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in September. Rioting by Israeli Arabs further disturbed the situation. As international efforts to restore peace failed, cameras recorded the death of a 12-year old Arab boy by gunfire in Gaza, and not long thereafter two Israeli soldiers were lynched in the West Bank. By spring 2001, hundreds had been killed, most of them Palestinians. President Clinton made one last attempt to bridge the gap, but neither side accepted his “parameters.”

The failure of the Camp David summit and the outbreak of what came to known as the Aqsa intifadah convinced a majority of Israelis that they lacked a partner in 'Arafat to end the conflict. Barak paid the political price, losing the premiership to Sharon in elections held in February 2001 by nearly 25 percent of the vote.

A changing society
At the end of Barak's brief but dramatic interlude, Israel remained poised on the brink of significant change. At home the Israelis found themselves grappling with both perennial and new problems that included not only the old issue of religion and state and how these institutions related to Jewish identity, but new pressures to reduce religious influence over personal matters such as marriage and divorce and to allow non-Orthodox rabbis to conduct these and other religious ceremonies—raising the very issue of who may legitimately be called a rabbi. Likewise, Israel faced the question of how to assimilate more than 250,000 non-Jews who had been part of the Russian emigration, raising the question of how one becomes a Jew. No less problematic was the issue of a large Arab minority that continued to assert its rights and demand equality in a Jewish state.

On the economic front, Israel had only partially completed its transformation from a socialist state into a more competitive market system by the end of the 20th century. Israel's military, long a unifying social institution, not only needed to counter new dangers from states such as Iraq and Iran (which both had long-range missiles) but also had to face the difficulties of changing to a more technical, less manpower intensive force. Likewise, the political system badly needed reform following the failed experiment with direct elections for prime minister. Against this list of challenges, Israel could marshal its large and highly trained workforce, a dynamic technical sector, a large per capita gross national product, a record of absorbing large groups of immigrants, and a powerful army.

Harvey Sicherman

History
Valuable general surveys of the region's prehistory may be found in William Foxwell Albright, The Archaeology of Palestine, rev. ed. (1954, reprinted 1971); Kathleen M. Kenyon, Archaeology in the Holy Land, 4th ed. (1979, reprinted 1985); and Archaeological Institute of America, Archaeological Discoveries in the Holy Land (1967). Works describing the Zionist movement and the establishment and subsequent history of Israel include Nahum Sokolow, History of Zionism, 1600–1918, 2 vol. (1919, reprinted 2 vol. in 1, 1969); Leonard Stein, Zionism (1925, reissued 1932); Norman Bentwich, Palestine (1934, reissued 1946); Albert M. Hyamson, Palestine Under the Mandate, 1920–1948 (1950, reprinted 1976); and Barnet Litvinoff, To the House of Their Fathers: A History of Zionism (1965). Valuable interpretations are contained in Peter Y. Medding, The Founding of Israeli Democracy, 1948–1967 (1990); and Laurence J. Silberstein, New Perspectives on Israeli History: The Early Years of the State (1991).
The literature on Israel's history since 1948 is both vast and polemical. Useful works include the admirably concise T.G. Fraser, The Arab-Israeli Conflict (1995); Conor Cruise O'Brien, The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism (1986, reissued 1988); Bernard Reich et al. (eds.), An Historical Encyclopedia of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (1996); and Howard M. Sachar, A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Times, 2nd ed., rev. and updated (1996). Benny Morris, Righteous Victory: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–1999 (1999), is a good example of the controversial "new historians" school; and Martin Gilbert, Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 6th ed. (also published as The Dent Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1993), provides critical geographic context.
Autobiographies of Israel's leaders reflect strong views and include David Ben-Gurion, Israel: A Personal History (1971, originally published in Hebrew, 1969); Menachem Begin, The Revolt, rev. ed. (1977, reissued 1983; originally published in Hebrew, 1950); Yigal Allon, The Making of Israel's Army (1970); Moshe Dayan, Breakthrough: A Personal Account of the Egypt-Israel Peace Negotiations (1981); and Golda Meir, My Life (1975, reissued 1977). Yitzhak Rabin, The Rabin Memoirs, expanded ed. (1996; originally published in Hebrew, 1979), should be supplemented by David Horovitz, Shalom, Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin (1996).
Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari, Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising, ed. and trans. by Ina Friedman (1990; originally published in Hebrew, 1990), draws on sources within Israel's political-military establishment. Palestinian autonomy is discussed in Harvey Sicherman, Palestinian Self-Government (Autonomy): Its Past and Its Future (1991; also published as Palestinian Autonomy, Self-Government & Peace, 1993); and an analysis of events within the Israel-Lebanon-Syria triangle is Moshe Ma'oz, Syria and Israel: From War to Peacemaking (1995). The monographic literature concerning Israel's important relationship with the United States includes William B. Quandt, Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967 (1993); and Bernard Reich, Securing the Covenant: United States-Israel Relations After the Cold War (1995). Dov S. Zakheim, Flight of the Lavi (1996), opens the window on the vital U.S.-Israeli military relationship. Finally, good accounts of Israel's peace diplomacy include David Makovsky, Making Peace with the PLO: The Rabin Government's Road to the Oslo Accord (1996); Itamar Rabinovitch, The Brink of Peace: The Israeli-Syrian Negotiations (1998); and Uri Savir, The Process: 1,100 Days That Changed the Middle East (1998).
Harvey Sicherman
 
 



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