The State of Israel, the Land of Israel is the product of research
begun in 1985, following my return from sabbatical at the University
of British Columbia. During my stay in Canada the 1984 Israeli
elections had taken place. Their results were significant since,
despite the Israeli failure in Lebanon and domestic economic mis-
management, the Likud was not electorally defeated and returned to
form a national unity government. This reality confirmed my devel-
oping conception that Israeli foreign policy had been transformed in
a basic way over the last decade.

Indeed, even earlier, following my return from graduate studies
at Johns Hopkins University in 1977, I recognized certain changes
that had occured in Israeli society in the five years of my absence.
At first I associated these changes merely to the Arab-Israeli conflict
taking on an intercommunal character. Indeed, my book, Israel, the
Palestinians and the West Bank: A Study in Intercommunal Conflict
( 1984), written with my associate Hillel Frisch, was among the
earliest academic works to focus on that aspect.

It was my teacher, the late Dan Horowitz, whose studies of the
Yishuv era led me to the realization that, in addition to the strategic
nature that dominated the Arab-Israeli conflict until 1967, the dis-
pute also had resumed the intercommunal dimension that had char-
acterized it during the Mandatory period. In addition, Daniel J.
Elazar, with whom I have been associated for over a decade at the
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, led me to a better understanding
of the non-strategic dimensions of communal conflict and conflict
resolution.

It became apparent that the transformation of the conflict was
not limited to the level of conflict interaction, but rather also
involved emerging ethnic characteristics that were new to a state
which had always approached its foreign policy from a security
perspective. Israeli politics and strategic thinking could no longer be
explained solely by a purely statist and security rationale.

Looking at other polities, I discovered that the State of Israel was
not the only actor whose political texture as well as foreign policy
were being increasingly dictated by ethnic politics and historical
aspirations. In addition, political science was in the midst of a debate
regarding the centrality of the state in relation to the reemergence of

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