One of the great political issues of our time is how ethnonationalist
movements seek to express themselves through statehood and how
the two dimensions of statehood and ethnonationalism interact. Dr.
Shmuel Sandler of Bar-Ilan University, a Fellow of the Jerusalem
Center for Public Affairs, who in an earlier book wrote about the
conflicting ethnonationalist claims of Jews and Palestinians ex-
pressed in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians over the
territories Israel occupied in the wake of the Arab-initiated Six-Day
War, here has turned his attention to the interaction of ethnonational
and statist considerations within Israel in foreign policy matters. Dr.
Sandler points out that Israel is both a strong nation and a strong
state.

Jewish nationalism is one of the first of the world's nationalisms,
dating 3,000 years and more. Jewish statehood, however, after more
than 600 years of independence and, with a brief interruption, 1,500
years of self-governance in their own land, was interrupted by the
dispersion of the Jews for at least fifteen centuries. Although Jews
settled in Israel in every century, it was only in the latter part of the
modern epoch that the Zionist movement initiated the return of the
people of Israel to the land of Israel for the unambiguous political
purpose of reestablishing a Jewish national home in the land and
achieving independent statehood. Thus the very reasons for seeking
statehood were clearly ethnonationalist.

Unlike similar ethnonational groups in Europe and elsewhere,
the Jews had the dual task of reestablishing themselves in their land
and achieving statehood. Not surprisingly, the result was to strengthen
both the ethnonationalist and statist elements in the renewed State of
Israel. Through historical exploration of these phenomena during
the pre-state period before 1948 and analysis of the first forty-plus
years of Israel's foreign policy, Dr. Sandler takes a close look at the
interaction between these two elements--the roots and demands of
each, and patterns of reinforcement and conflict between the two
perspectives. As a case study, the Israeli experience helps us under-
stand the interaction of these two phenomena and at the same time

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