Leading social scientists from Israeli and American universities, using different methods and representing diverse intellectual traditions, address the precedent-setting events of Israel's 1996 elections. The contributors discuss the meaning of collective identity, the role of religion and nationalism in modern Israel, the political behavior of Israeli Arabs, the secrets of success of the immigrant party. Also discussed are issues such as the impact of the direct election law on party organization, primaries and coalition-formation calculations, the repeated electoral failure of Shimon Peres, and the role of the media in the election campaign. The 1996 elections in Israel represented a "first" in Israeli politics in many ways. For the first time Israelis directly elected their prime minister and, in simultaneous but separate elections, they elected their 120-member Knesset (parliament). Also, it was the first time that elections were held after the mutual recognition of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization following the Oslo accords and it was the first election held after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rubin. The political parties made widespread use of primaries in 1996, and hundreds of thousands of new immigrants from the former Soviet Union cast their first ballots. The large support for a party supported by former-Soviet immigrants highlighted the emergence of sectarian interests. This was also expressed in the surge for the two Arab parties from five seats in 1992 to nine seats in 1996, and for the three Jewish religious parties whose combined representation grew from 16 to 23 seats.

The newest volume in the Elections in Israel series focuses on the twentieth Knesset elections held in March 2015 following the collapse of the third Netanyahu government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s main opposition party, the Zionist Camp, ran a negative personalized election campaign, assuming that Israelis had grown tired of him. Netanyahu, however, achieved a surprising and dramatic victory by enhancing and radicalizing the same identity politics strategies that helped him win in 1996. The Elections in Israel 2015 dissects these and other campaigns, from the perspective of the voters, the media and opinion polls, the political parties, and electoral competition. Several contributors delve into the Left and Arab fear mongering Likud campaign, which produced strategic identity voting. Other contributions analyze in-depth the Israeli party and electoral systems, highlighting the exceptional decline of the mainstream parties and the adoption of a higher electoral threshold. Providing a close analysis of electoral competition, legitimacy struggles, stability and change in the voting behavior of various groups, partisanship, personalization and political polarization, this volume is a crucial record of Israeli political history.

Several dramatic events preceded the elections to the Seventeenth Knesset on March 28, 2006, beginning with the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in August 2005 and its attendant and unprecedented removal of Jewish settlements and settlers, followed by major shifts among and within the various political parties. Most dramatic was the split in Likud when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to form a new party, Kadima, leading to the breakup of the Likud party that Sharon had formed in 1973. This volume charts the 2006 elections.

This volume highlights Israel's 1999 elections, in which the prime-ministerial race between incumbent Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak ended with Barak winning by the biggest landslide ever in Israel. Although some observers interpreted these results as a fundamental shift in public opinion, there is little evidence to support this. The book shows how old patterns funneled into a new system of voting produced the 1999 results, where a weak candidate (Barak) bested a wounded prime minister (Netanyahu) abandoned by most of his political allies. Leading social scientists from Israeli and American universities, using a variety of approaches and coming from diverse intellectual traditions, address topics including the emergence of political blocs, strategic voting, and split ticket voting. In addition to major party performance, special interest parties—who did better than ever in 1999—are also discussed, such as the haredi, ultra-orthodox, non-Zionist Shas, the anti-haredi secular Shinui, two parties appealing to former Soviet émigrés and Arab parties.

The Elections in Israel--2003 brings together leading Israeli and North American social scientists and their state-of-the-art, in-depth analysis of the 2003 Israeli national elections. These elections returned Ariel Sharon and the Likud to power amid one of the bloodiest rounds of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and a severe economic downturn in Israel. Contributors analyze the electoral behavior of the voters as a whole and various subgroups, highlighting social cleavages and identity, as well as issues and other strategic considerations. Three chapters analyze in detail the Arab, the national-religious, and the "Russian" vote. The 2003 elections saw Israel's return to the family of parliamentary nations after it experimented with the direct election of the prime minister from 1996 through 2001. The impact of the adoption and repeal of this unique Israeli system of government is another major topic covered in this volume, and several contributions explore the impact of these changes upon the electorate, the party system, and party financing. Other unusual features of the 2003 elections were the low turnout levels among Jewish and Arab voters; political moves to disqualify Arab candidates and lists from running for office, which were overruled by the Supreme Court of Israel; the collapse of the left, the spectacular showing of the centrist Shinui party, and the dominant status of the Likud in the Knesset and in Israeli politics. Through its focus on the 2003 elections, this volume also illuminates developments and changes in Israeli society and politics. Many of these developments--multiculturalism, changes in social stratification, the growing role of the judiciary and of the media, and political reforms--characterize other Western democracies as well, and these are discussed from a comparative perspective. The Elections in Israel--2003 will be of particular interest to those concerned with politics in Israel as well as those concerned with comparative politics and elections in general. Asher Arian is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, a senior research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, and professor of political science at the University of Haifa. Michal Shamir is professor of political science at Tel Aviv University.

In this book, David Novak conducts an historical, philosophical and theological reflection on the central Jewish doctrine of Israel's election by God, also known as the idea of the chosen people. Historically, he analyses the great change in modern Jewish thought brought about by Spinoza's inversion of the doctrine: that it was not God who elected Israel, but Israel who elected God. The development of that inversion is illustrated by the thought of the German philosopher-theologian, Hermann Cohen. Philosophically, Novak explores the ontological implications of the two differing theologies of election. Theologically, he argues for the correlation of election and revelation, and maintains that a theology of election is required in order to deal with two central questions, namely: who are the Jews, and how are Jews to be related to the world? The constructive picture which results leads to a fresh understanding of Jewish modernity.