ABSTRACT
During the better part of the tenure of the national unity government, the leaders of the two major political alignments developed a fairly close working relationship. The unity government formed in 1984, by far the broadest in forty years of Israeli political independence, failed to undertake electoral reform, which might have significantly strengthened political responsiveness. Until December 1987 the amount of physical coercion required to maintain "order" in the territories was relatively low and was considered to be acceptable to most Israelis. In a very real sense the present situation is forcing many Israelis to reevaluate and to redefine the essence of Zionism a century after its beginnings and how it relates to the state of Israel in its fortieth year of independence. The euphoric national religious messianism that engulfed Israel and set the tone for policy during the Begin era was dominated by nonrational perceptions of reality, which blinded policymakers and much of the public to important political realities.
