The Invention and Decline of Israeliness2001

"This book, the first of its kind in the English language, reexamines the nation of Israel in terms of its origin as a haven for a persecuted people and its evolution into a multicultural society. Arguing that the monocultural regime built during the 1950s is over, Baruch Kimmerling suggests that the Israeli state has divided into seven major cultures. These seven groups, he contends, have been challenging one another for control over resource distribution and the identity of the polity.

He posits that six of these segments of the population, excluding Arabs, have bonded together under the umbrella of two ambiguous, but powerfully interlinked, metacultural codes: Jewishness and militarism. Kimmerling calls this phenomenon a "military-cultural complex," in which security and other social...