Israel's “exceptionalism”

There are a few studies of the historical development of the class structure in Israel (Rosenfeld and Carmi, 1976; Shapiro, 1977; Ben-Porat, 1986,1989), but discussions of class consciousness or conflict have rarely been part of the discourse on stratification and inequality in the sociology of Israel (partial exceptions are Yatziv, 1979; Ben-Porat, 1985). Attention has focused on the “ethnic gap” between Ashkenazim and edot ha'Mizrach and disputes among Israeli sociologists have mainly revolved around explanations of this gap (Smooha, 1978; Swirski, 1981; Smooha and Peres, 1975; Hartman and Ayalon, 1975). Marxist analyses have made references to class conflict within Israel, but this theme has been subordinated to, or conflated with, ethnic conflict either within the Jewish population or between Jews and Arabs. The relative absence of class consciousness, which is assumed rather than demonstrated, is explained by nationalism, the centrality of ethnicity, and the uniqueness of the Israeli version of capitalism in the form of co-operation between the private sector and the bureaucracy of the Labor sector (Machover and Orr, 1971; Zureik, 1979). The author of a recent neo-Marxist work on class structure in Israel from 1948 to the 1980s states that, although the emerging capitalist system in Israeli society has inevitably produced classes “in themselves,” there has been no development of classes “for themselves.”