308 • 17 ISRAEL'S REBIRTH AND THE RISE OF ARAB NATIONALISMand that the Arabs would either leave or accept their presence and power.
World War II, the Holocaust, and the 1948 war had belied these assump¬
tions. Now Israel was an independent state, surrounded by Arab countries
implacably opposed to its existence, with Jews pouring in from all parts of
the world (mainly from the Middle East and North Africa), and with an
unexpectedly small Arab minority. Despite their political inexperience and
economic problems, though, the Israelis managed to build a nation-state
with a democratic government—at least for Jews. However, they did this in
a way that precluded significant sharing of benefits or experiences with the
Palestinian Arabs.Politics in Israel
Israel's democracy is not an exact copy of Britain's. Political parties, some of
them holdovers from Jewish movements in pre-1914 Eastern Europe, pro¬
liferated. No party could ever win the support of a majority of Israel's vot¬
ers, which included doctrinaire socialists, observant Orthodox Jews, secular
Zionists, and Arab nationalists. Furthermore, Israel did not adopt the sys¬
tem of geographical constituencies familiar to Anglo-Saxons; rather, it set
up a representation system by which the percentage of votes cast in a gen¬
eral election for each party was exactly matched by the proportion of seats
it held in the following session of Israel's legislature, the Knesset. In other
words, if 1,000,000 Israelis voted in an election and 300,000 supported a
particular party, then, out of the 120 Knesset seats, 36 would go to the top
candidates on that party's list. In other words, the first 36 candidates listed
by that party on the ballot would enter the Knesset; those numbered 37 and
beyond would not. Decisions on ranking the candidates were made before¬
hand in party caucuses, not by the voters. Following a pattern familiar to
Europeans but not to Americans, executive power was vested in a council of
ministers (or cabinet) responsible to the Knesset. The head of government,
or prime minister, had to choose a cabinet acceptable to a majority of the
Knesset members. As no party has ever won a majority of the votes (hence
the Knesset seats) in any election, any leader wanting to form a government
has had to combine his or her party with several others, compromising on
ideological principles or policy preferences in the bargain.
In the early years of the state, Israel's leading politician was David Ben-
Gurion, the leader of the moderate labor party known as Mapai. Even
though Ben-Gurion came to personify Israel in the minds of most for¬
eigners and even many Israelis, Mapai never won more than 40 percent of
the vote in any general election. In order to form a cabinet, Ben-Gurion al¬
ways had to form a coalition with other labor parties and usually with the