9. Swing to the right, 1977–1995

Menachem Begin became prime minister of Israel on June 20, 1977, with a clear goal: to implement as quickly and as extensively as possible the policies of Revisionist Zionism as articulated by his mentor and hero, Vladimir Jabotinsky. “Swing to the right: 1977–1995” outlines the key events in Israeli politics that led to a decisive swing to the right in Zionist ideology, including the 1978 peace treaty with Egypt that returned the Sinai Peninsula, the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements with the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1993, and the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995 by a member of the ultra-right-wing religious Zionist movement.

The Iron Wall Revisited

More than a decade after the publication of his acclaimed The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, Avi Shlaim returns to Ze'ev Jabotinsky's theory as a framework for understanding Israel's Arab policies, this time focusing on the post-1967 period. The author revisits the theory's formulation by the leader of Revisionist Zionism in 1923 and its near total convergence with the (unacknowledged) strategy followed by Labor Zionism. Examining each Israeli government since 1967, he shows that all zealously followed stage one of Jabotinsky's strategy (constructing an “iron wall” of unassailable military strength) but that the lesser known stage two (serious negotiations with the Palestinians after being compelled by stage one to abandon all hope of prevailing over Zionism) has been completely ignored except by Yitzhak Rabin. Indeed, the recent periods have witnessed a full-blown return to the iron wall at its starkest, with increasing resort to violence and unilateralism.