ABSTRACT
This chapter lays out the social and political forces shaping politics in Israel today, including its fraught relationships with its own Palestinian citizens, Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank, and surrounding Arab states. Israel's economy has grown substantially, having transformed itself from a semisocialist backwater low in natural resources and faced with the burdens of massive immigration, universal conscription, and regional tension into a high-tech leader. Based on such a worldview, the Irgun, the Revisionists' main military organization in the Yishuv, carried out numerous terrorist operations against Palestinian civilians, such as the marketplace bombings of Jerusalem, Haifa, and Jaffa, all resulting in heavy casualties. Israeli foreign policy has centered around peace processes with surrounding Arab states and the Palestinians—the success and intensity of which depend on the ruling government and the national mood of the day.
