ABSTRACT
During the pre-state days and until 1977, the Israeli Labor movement was the major force behind an ethno-republican hegemonic model that brought together nation building and a collectivist conception of the common good (Peled 1993; Kimmerling 2004). Despite its name, the core of the historical bloc was defined not by class but by a combination of ethno-national2 and ideological characteristics. It was a social group composed of immigrants from Russia and Poland and motivated by an ideology that blended nationalist and collectivist features (with certain socialist elements). During the pre-state and early state years the core of the historical bloc included blue-collar and white-collar workers, as well as agricultural workers who were members of the different cooperative communes.3 They came together in the political party Mapai (acronym for Mifleget Poalei Eretz Israel, The Land of Israel Workers’ Party), which adopted its current name, the Labor party, in the 1960s. Middle-class and national religious sectors were subaltern members of the historical bloc. With the establishment of the state in 1948, the hegemonic project
involved the consolidation of a capitalist market economy with a very strong public sector (in the 1970s the public sector produced 60% of the GDP) and a dual labor market. Credit was centralized and state directed, and the financial markets, underdeveloped and strongly regulated. Most land was nationalized, reflecting both the collectivist and the ethnonational aspects of the hegemonic project (the nationalization of land functioned as a form of exclusion of Israeli Arabs). The Histadrut (General Workers’ Union) was one of the strongest institutions in the country. It was not a traditional trade union organization but a wideranging institution that included firms (among them a bank, an industrial corporation, construction firms, and an insurance company), sports
teams, cultural businesses, and trade unions. In the 1970s the Histadrut’s economic activity represented 30% of the GDP (Kimmerling 2004; Ram 2008; Shalev 1999). The culture and ideology of the hegemonic project espoused the idea
of Israel as the national state of the Jewish people (though the notion of Jewish people was poorly defined, alternating between an ethno-national and a cultural definition), a “progressive,” modernizing view of history, and a republican, collectivist conception of the political community. In this view, the pioneer values of those immigrants who arrived in the first quarter of the twentieth century were the equivalent of republican virtus (Kimmerling 2004; Peled 1993; Shapiro 1976, 1996). The ethno-national and the republican components of this outlook
helped structure a system of concentric circles of belonging. Thus, the Palestinian minority in Israel enjoyed individual rights but lacked group rights, and suffered from structural and direct segregation (Peled 1993; Kimmerling 2004; Yftahel 2006). They were not considered part of the common we in the same sense as Israeli Jews. Mizrahim (Jewish immigrants from Arab countries) were part of the common “we” but occupied a subaltern position, and did not belong to the hegemonic bloc as a group. The hegemonic bloc associated with them through patron/client relations. Furthermore, it did not perceive them as an autonomous political subject, even though in the 1970s and 1980s Arab country immigrants represented more than half of the Israeli Jewish population. Mizrahim and Israeli Arabs were thus only differentially included
through patron/client relations – individuals or small groups received material or political benefits in exchange for political support. Clientelistic inclusion, however, renders members of the subaltern groups into objects to be managed by their patron. Mizrahim would only become a collective political subject through their participation in the development of a populist counter-hegemonic bloc. The labor movement’s hegemony excluded not only Israeli Arabs and
Mizrahim but also the nationalist right. Even though its sociological features were similar to those of the hegemonic elite, this group opposed the hegemonic bloc both ideologically and politically. The national right was represented politically by the Herut (Freedom) party and was molded in the image of the European nationalist right of the early twentieth century (Shapiro 1991). During the late 1950s and 1960s, however, Herut’s leader Menahem Begin headed a transformation within his party. Nationalism was articulated with many of populism’s main themes, that is, anti-elitism, anti-intellectualism, the idea of the people as the depository of truth and virtue, and the notion of the
people as a homogeneous unit embodied by the populist leader. These features came together in such a way that Begin’s party became the means for the symbolic and political inclusion of Mizrahim. As we shall see below, once in power the party supplemented symbolic and political inclusion with a certain degree of material inclusion.
