New Zionism and the Foreign Policy System of Israel

The invasion of Lebanon was the culmination of an extraordinary change New Zionism created in Israel’s foreign policy system.

 

Seliktar examines how New Zionism came to dominate Israeli politics and pur­sues the implications of this new ideolo­gy for the future of the Middle East. He finds that, following the Six-Day war, the ideology of Socialist Zionism was in­creasingly discredited and replaced by the New Zionist quest for Eretz Israel.

 

As a result, Begin’s Likud came to pow­er in 1977 and was able to quickly change the basis of Israel’s foreign policy. Thus while General Sharon was responsible for the actual conduct of the war, it was the New Zionist willingness to use military force to introduce a new order in the Mid­dle East that was responsible for the invasion.

 

Seliktar cautions that it is still too ear­ly to assess the full impact of the war in Lebanon on New Zionism. While the war failed to validate any of the “grand design” tenets of New Zionism, the violent Shiite response may serve to strengthen the New Zionist hard line.