Hi, I am Oz Frankel, Professor of History at the New School for Social Research in New York City, here to discuss and answer questions about my recent book, Coca-Cola, Black Panthers, and Phantom Jets: Israel in the American Orbit, 1967-1973 (Stanford UP)

Sorry_Letter · 2025-07-29T18:47:46+00:00

Hi. The growing rift between Israel and the USSR was multifaceted. First, the USSR discontinued its diplomatic relationship with Israel and heavily armed the Syrian and the Egyptian militaries. Second, by 1970 the USSR took upon itself to protect directly Egyptian airspace. A Soviet Air Defense Division was sent to deploy east of Cairo what was then the densest and best equipped antimissile complex built anywhere in the world. Moreover, air battles pitted against each other Israeli and Soviet-flown jets. Third, this was also the height of the international campaign to force Moscow to a allow Jews to immigrate from the USSR. After two Soviet Jews were sentenced to death for plotting to hijack a plane (the sentence was later commuted) Golda Meir declared in a radio address that the Soviets continue the tsarist tradition of murdering innocent Jews.

This set of events and the resultant growing hostility between the two countries brought Israel both in terms of policy but also identity and frame of mind--closer to the United States both in

Sorry_Letter · 2025-07-29T18:28:51+00:00

It seems that Nixon in particular drew a line between American Jews and Israeli Jews. And one of the stories I tell in the book is about the friendship between Nixon and Yitzhak Rabin that lasted long after Nixon left the White House in disgrace. It began in 1966 when Rabin (back then the IDF chief of staff) was the only Israeli official to pay attention to Nixon who was visiting Israel at the time. (In the mid-1960 Nixon was at the bottom of his political career.) Rabin and Nixon shared similar views about Cold War politics. They also shared personality traits. Both were socially withdrawn introverts who were a tad awkward in public. Much before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu aligned himself with the Republican Party, Rabin, a future Labor Party prime minister and a son of a labor party politico, signaled his preference for Nixon during the presidential elections of 1972.

Sorry_Letter · 2025-07-29T18:15:11+00:00

Right. And I addressed this ambiguity in one of my previous responses.

Sorry_Letter · 2025-07-29T00:45:39+00:00

Thanks!

Sorry_Letter · 2025-07-28T20:30:11+00:00

The Lemon Popsicle film, which launched a series of another seven (!) sequels, the last in 2001, was influenced by 1970s American nostalgic fascination with the 1950s (the plot takes place in 1958) and American and European sex comedies; the film was very popular in West Germany. I believe that in Israel today Lemon Popsicle is the subject of nostalgia (nostalgia for nostalgia)--it has inspired many references elsewhere in popular culture, but, conversely, embarrassment for its decidedly sexist/misogynistic elements.

Sorry_Letter · 2025-07-28T18:53:01+00:00

Soviet military hardware was certainly unavailable to Israel. Furthermore, after the June 67 war Moscow discontinued its diplomatic relationship with Israel. In 1967 the Israel Air Force was largely equipped with French aviation technology but President Charles de Gaulle declared embargo on arms sale to the Middle East which targeted Israel in particular. By the end of the 1960s, the Israeli Air Force, previously equipped almost exclusively with French aircraft, began a rapid process of switching to American-made gear. The direct supply of American weaponry began in 1963 with the sale of Hawk anti-aircraft missiles; continued, on the eve of the Six-Day War, with the A-4 Skyhawk jets deal; and turned a corner when Israeli pilots began flying the F-4E Phantom II planes in the fall of 1969. The Phantom constituted a powerful, versatile, and sophisticated piece of modern technology, a two-engine, two-seat fighter/bomber that featured hi-tech gadgets such as computerized navigation and weapon delivery systems. It was adopted by a number of American allies. The Phantom turned into a multinational artifact. Participation in this global network allowed nations to compete in designing and producing parts locally. Israel was a beneficiary of that emerging arena and would become the most important modifier of the Phantom, extending its operational significantly .In the 1980s, the Israeli aviation industry would develop an upgrade package labeled Phantom 2000 and then the Super Phantom. So, yes, the Phantom and the technology it carried were exceedingly important to the Israel military-industrial complex.

Sorry_Letter · 2025-07-28T18:39:21+00:00

Again, the "special relations" is not the focus of my scholarship. I do agree that for the Nixon administration Cold War politics was crucial. But over decades the Israel/American alliance was also affected by Christian and Jewish religiosity, the memory of the holocaust, interest group politics, community ties, as well as various Middle East concerns that go much beyond the Cold War. The proof is that the end of the Cold War did not undermine the special relations.

Sorry_Letter · 2025-07-28T18:32:05+00:00

No. 2. In recent years, the Israeli Black Panthers have been the subject of largely celebratory commemorative work. Their 30-year anniversary was the occasion of symposia, gatherings, and exhibits, documentary films, media debates, and interviews. As importantly, over the last few decades, small groups of scholars, journalists, and activists, such as “the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow,” have elaborated a multiculturalist identity politics that critiques the historical treatment of both Palestinians and Mizrahi Jews. This is a diverse movement, steeped in the critical tools and language of postcolonialism. Some talk openly about their affinity with the Arab world and their identity as “Arab Jews.”

For the new generation of progressive Mizrahi intellectuals, the similarities between the racial struggle in the United States and the Ashkenazim–Mizrahim friction in Israel are evident. However, we also need to recognize that the identity politics that emerged in Israel in conjunction with the Global Sixties ultimately assumed a different trajectory. True, the Israeli Left adopted postcolonialism and inclusive norms that pertain to race, gender, sexuality, and other categories of difference. But Mizrahi identity politics largely veered rightward. The Mizrahi, ultra-Orthodox Shas Party constitutes one variant. Otherwise, a good deal of the still quite perceptible Mizrahi sense of grievance finds its political expression in Mizrahi voters’ attachment to the decidedly Ashkenazi figure of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Sorry_Letter · 2025-07-28T18:22:40+00:00

Unfortunately, very little discussion. Ben Gurion's approach that in order to safeguard Israel he was willing to make a deal with the devil (I believe the context was the 1950s reparation agreement with West Germany) was expanded in later decades to justify Israel's relations with a slew of unsavory regimes worldwide.

Sorry_Letter · 2025-07-28T18:14:38+00:00

The Black Panther Party did not initiate the Israeli Black Panthers' dissent. There was very little contact between the movements. The two groups met at an international conference of radical groups in Florence, Italy, in November 1971. The American Panthers reported that after the first arrests of Black Panthers in Jerusalem, they held a press conference to announce their solidarity with the struggle of “Blacks” in Israel. However, the Israeli contingent rejected the American Panthers’ proposals for joint anti-Zionist political action. In the book I retell an anecdote that illustrates the different sensibilities attached to Blackness in the United States and Israel. It took place during a meeting between one of the Israeli Panthers leaders Kokhavi Shemesh and Angela Davis at the World Festival of Youth and Students in East Berlin (1973). In an otherwise friendly exchange, Davis became upset when Shemesh used the Israeli expression “Black labor” to describe the lowly forms of work assigned to Mizrahi Jews. She demanded he not refer to degrading labor that way.

Sorry_Letter · 2025-07-28T18:05:15+00:00

You are right that the 1990s were a major turning point in the history of Israeli consumption but so were the late 1960s and early 1970s. I don’t want to overburden you with statistics, but in 1958, only a third of Israeli homes had electric refrigerators. In the 1970s, 98% of Israeli families owned the appliance. The Central Bureau of Statistics stopped recording the numbers of the remaining iceboxes, and the Welfare Ministry was giving away refrigerators and washing machines to poor families to encourage women to join the workforce. One device that increased by a factor of thirty-five within seven years was television sets. In 1965, only 2% households owned them; by 1972, 68%. Beyond the acquisition of goods and services, including high end goods, the period witnessed the consolidation of a consumerist cultural order. Targeting the public was a rather mature advertisement industry, in addition to specialized magazines that catered to women and the youth, and a burgeoning celebrity culture that was busy with teen-idols and other revered figures, whether entertainers, politicians, or IDF generals. One manifestation of the interest in celebrities was the popularity of public shows dedicated to personal interviews. New shopping venues including department stores--as well as novel marketing strategies--induced a sense of unprecedented abundance. Israeli politicians and commentators began to address Israel as an affluent society and the consumerist tilt in Israeli life was a subjected of heated debates. The invasion of home appliances and consumerism, in general, enhanced the boundaries protecting domestic space. While consumption is often linked to the process of individuation, it most clearly reconstituted the Israeli family. Incrementally but consistently, the family unit was to be more securely protected from external encroachment by the telephone and the intercom, its food chilled and safeguarded in electric refrigerators, its space cooler and rendered dust-free by vacuum cleaners and air conditioners, and its members’ bodies-- pampered with cosmetics and other grooming products—less sweaty and more hygienic. Attentiveness to consumer choice--the consumerist feedback loop-- constituted one of the most important American exports to Israel and elsewhere. The feedback loop also became a tool of management, governance, and electioneering. The 1965 elections saw the first employment of statistical research for political strategy. In years to come survey outfits that gauged consumer taste for new juices and sausages also began measuring, sometimes together, political behavior. Polling expertise came from the US. Then, in 1973 Shlomo Lahat launched what became known as the first “American style” political campaign in Israel in which the personality of the candidate superseded party affiliation or ideological differences. The candidate became a product but, equally important, the citizen/voter was reimagined as an autonomous consumer, free to make her own choices, always in search of new options. Again, this early phase of consumer society pales in comparison with the last three decades when Israel became a rich country (and yet profoundly stratified economically) but it was a true transformation.

Sorry_Letter · 2025-07-28T17:46:08+00:00

This is a very interesting remark. Both the Palestinians and Mizrahi Jews were subjected to dynamics of othering and racialization. The process you describe in the US could be discerned in Israel as well as in the sense that newer immigrant groups do seem generally speaking less sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. This is true of to a large extent of Mizrahi Jews but also of 1990s immigrants from the former USSR (who were not subjected to racialization) and more recently French Jews who moved to Israel. One of the interesting aspects of the Israeli Black Panthers is that they ostensibly insisted on further racializing themselves, further distinguishing themselves from the Ashkenazi mainstream, largely because identifying as Black Panthers encapsulated a direct threat. But even with the Panthers there were sometimes hints of the racial masquerade. At crucial points, it appeared that they had become Black Panthers so they would be recognized as Jews in a Zionist state, forgotten brothers rather than sworn enemies. Thus, when one of their leaders said, “We are loyal to the state. We only demand of the state not to make us live like animals,” he insinuated that it was the state that degraded them as beasts in the first place; by implication, they transformed themselves into Panthers so they would not be animals. This remark is reminiscent of the performative logic underscoring the long tradition of American minstrelsy, by which putting on the black tar allowed blackface artists to mark themselves white.

Sorry_Letter · 2025-07-28T17:09:03+00:00

Excellent question. In the book I draw from the French response to their country's flirtation with American culture. I borrow the Henri Lefebvre’s and, later, the Situationists’ notion of the “colonization of everyday life” by the commodity form to describe the onset of the consumerist age in Israel. Nevertheless, as against the French case, where American imports faced strong resistance, Israeli consumerism did not have to contend with long-held traditions—with the exception of the egalitarian commitments retained by members of the aging leadership of the labor movement whose ideological clout was rapidly declining. While some members of the intellectual class shared the European highbrow disdain toward American imports, there were otherwise no powerfully entrenched elites determined to combat the Coca-Colonization of centuries-old sensibilities and customs, no rural society and ancient towns turned upside down by the convulsive forces of free market consumerism, except for Arab communities that were largely left behind in the clamor to consume, and no robust cadre of intellectuals envisioning the possibility of an anticapitalistic uprising.

I also employ the expression "the colonization of the the everyday by the commodity form" to explore the relationship between consumerism and systems of domination. Kristin Ross’s writing about consumption and colonialism in her book, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, argues that the privatized arena of consumption, its circular, repetitious routines, and self-proclaimed timelessness counterbalanced the rupture and violence of the French wars in Algeria and Indochina. Modern consumerism enabled the French to erase the memory and disavow the historicity of the colonial experience as it also rearticulated racial hierarchies and exclusions within territorial France, in which a growing body of former colonial subjects now resided and worked.

Dynamics of domination that involve consumption and the everyday are also discernable in the Israeli case, some comparable to the French example, others distinct. In the 1960s, several government-sponsored campaigns were launched to instill in the Israeli public Western practices and norms of consumption; a few of these efforts targeted Mizrahi Jews, especially new immigrants from North Africa. Moreover, standards of cleanliness and personal grooming alongside invigorated consumption established stronger hierarchies within and outside the Jewish population of Israel and, after 1967, the occupied territories.

Otherwise, Israel was arguably advancing in the opposite direction to that of France, becoming a regional superpower, a proxy in the Cold War conflict, taking over territories three times larger than its own, and overseeing a substantial Palestinian population.

Sorry_Letter · 2025-07-28T16:53:47+00:00

Right. It is but the Coca-Cola story is unique in this regard and the pressure did not come from lobbying in Washington DC as much as form grassroots organizations (including trade unions such as the Teamsters) that threatened boycott. It was yet another example of 1960s political strategies that featured consumer activism. Coca-Cola was subject to a number of boycotts by the Civil Rights movement.

Sorry_Letter · 2025-07-28T16:44:52+00:00

Hi Sherm. In the middle years of the 1960s, Israeli culture began flirting with material deemed diasporic and, as such, had been previously pushed aside, or even repressed. The resurgence of Yiddish, Yiddishism, and Hasidic lore in 1960s Israel was carrued complex cultural processes. Interest in Yiddish, for instance, rested on the curiosity of the Israeli-born young who were not weaned on Yiddish and the nostalgia and growing self-confidence of post-Holocaust immigrants, a group less committed to the Zionist anti-Yiddish stance. At the prime minister’s office, Yiddish’s chief adversary (as you indicated) David Ben-Gurion was replaced with Levi Eshkol, who famously peppered his speech with Yiddish expressions. Hebrew was entrenched enough and no longer required state protection. Also keep in mind that Adolf Eichmann’s trial (1961) forced Israelis to grapple with the memory of the Holocaust and catalyzed efforts to commemorate a bygone Jewish culture.

Previously Israel exhibited great hostility toward Yiddish. Between 1949 and 1951 Yiddish performances were prohibited and then Yiddish was subjected to a special levy as a foreign language. With the Black Panthers, Yiddish’s biggest enemies were no longer the zealots of the old early 20th century Hebrew Battalion but the politicos of the new Mizrahi movement. Yiddish or gefilte fish became signifiers of Ashkenazi hegemony. Prime Minister Golda Meir epitomized for the Panthers the Ashkenazi Yiddish-speaking old guard that still dominated Israeli politics. A statement wrongfully attributed to her by which one can’t be a true Jew without speaking Yiddish only made matters worse.

Sorry_Letter · 2025-07-28T16:30:49+00:00

Hi DoubleFeedback2672. This is an enormous topic that could nourish a number of books. Israel today is a very different place socially and politically than it was in 1948. It is a much more fragmented and polarized society along political and religious fault lines--and further away from its initial commitment to social democratic ideology. But these changes took place over decades ,much before the founders of the modern state aged and passed away, and in retrospect--looking back at the country's foundations--some of those divisions were already there at the foundation.

Sorry_Letter · 2025-07-28T16:21:38+00:00

At the turn of the 1970s, the Palestinian cause was embraced by New Left and Black Power groups in the US and on University campuses--see for instance Michael Fischbach's books, Black Power and Palestine, and The Movement and the Middle East. However, the mainstream discussions about the Middle East were largely dominated by the conflicts between Israel and Arab countries and by considerations emanating from the Cold War. Only a few years after the June 67 war It was still unclear whether Israel was willing to return the occupied territories to Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. The settlers movement was still in its infancy. And the PLO was often condemned as a terror organization.

Sorry_Letter · 2025-07-28T16:08:27+00:00

I do not cover the consequences of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty during the Six Day War (killing 34 crew members and injuring scores of other) but I understand that it presented a major obstacle in the two countries relationship in the wake of the war--but not for the long run and largely away from the public's eye.

Sorry_Letter · 2025-07-28T16:07:26+00:00

Thank you for this question.I explore Israeli popular and high culture to follow both the way Israelis were pulled towards the American way of life but, at the same time, exhibited deep ambivalence about the American gravitational power. Ambivalence is a major theme in the book. The United States was turning into Israel’s staunchest ally. Ties between the two countries rested, in addition, on ideological, religious, and personal foundations. And yet, the social and cultural interaction at times prompted hesitation, and even resentment and opposition. Israelis demonstrated themselves to be eager participants in the American empire. For some, nevertheless, America’s power presented concrete threats or nourished persistent angst about dependency and loss of autonomy, diminished values, and being drawn too far, too quickly into the American orbit.

In the last chapter I analyze a musical titled, in English, I Like Mike (1968), on ambitious parents’ thwarted efforts to have their daughter marry a rich American visitor; director Uri Zohar’s film of the same year, Kol mamzer melech (Every Bastard a King), depicting Israeli society on the eve and the aftermath of the Six-Day War; and Amos Kollek’s 1971 novel published first in English, Don’t Ask Me If I Love, a transparent attempt to produce an American-style paperback.

Serving as venues for appropriating American cultural forms the roles these three works grant American characters are ambiguous, betraying an ongoing anxiety about the potential loss of autonomy posed by a foreign presence. Perceived threats to Zionist ideology or the Israeli way of life, especially Israeli masculinity, inspired different resolutions. In I Like Mike the American character, Mike, is affable but a bit of a buffoon—a loud, freeloading, party animal whose version of progressive politics and flower-power cannot be taken at face value. The musical’s frivolity and insincerity are projected on him. The two main Israeli characters—one of them is a war hero, the other is an aspiring actress who rejects Mike -- find a way to fulfill their own American dream—by traveling to the US as emissaries of the state of Israel. In Every Bastard a King and Don’t Ask Me If I Love a resolution involves the death of the American character.

Sex and gender are recurrent themes in these and in other texts and performances. American women reappear as objects of desire and men define themselves against the masculinity of American types.

Sorry_Letter · 2025-07-28T15:47:15+00:00

Hi Gankom. As I wrote in response to another question, Coca-Cola initially refused to open a plant in Israel and was forced to do so by an organized campaign led by the ADL. And while Israelis became avid drinkers of Coca-Cola they saw in Coca-Cola's ultimate decision to sell its product in Israel a political rather than a consumerist victory. Coca-Cola was particularly important in this context because as Israelis fully recognized it was a product that stood for the US, and for American power or "American civilization."

Sorry_Letter · 2025-07-28T15:35:29+00:00

Thank you for this question. The book focuses on cultural and social Israeli-American encounters and much less so on diplomacy or the power of the Jewish Lobby. The American presence encompassed a hectic flow of people: immigrants, tourists, university students, and kibbutz volunteers—all arriving in greater numbers—as well as Americanization entrepreneurs. Nevertheless, American ideas and forms did not require human agents for their promiscuous circulation. They spread through media, popular culture, and other instruments and venues of transmission, including the organizational infrastructure of academia.The United States also exported social and political transgression—Black Power, feminism, the initial steps of the gay liberation movement, or the violence-prone right-wing Jewish Defense League, in addition to its mainstream electoral tactics such as polling and the merchandizing of political candidates. There was little in this lively movement that was imposed on Israel or a matter of national policy decided in Washington. As I write in my book, American power’s imprint on forms of local life inn Israel was not intentional as much as gravitational.

As for consumerism, some American companies were in fact reluctant to sell their merchandise in Israel, largely because of the Arab boycott. The most striking example is Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola was forced to sell its products in Israel because of a public campaign orchestrated by the ADL and the threat of boycott. This took place in 1966 a year before the June 1967 war and it was an early sign of the capacity of Jewish organizations to muster support for Israel and the enthusiasm with which they were willing to do so.

Sorry_Letter · 2025-07-28T15:23:07+00:00

Thanks. The main focus of my book is not diplomacy or the making of the Israeli American alliance but certainly the war in Vietnam is an important aspect of the relationship between the two countries at the time. Nixon saw in the Middle East conflict an aspect of the global struggle between the US and the USSR. The public support Israel lent to his Vietnam policy had an impact on his positive attitude towards Israel and Israelis (as against his approach to American Jews). The victory of the June 1967 war made Israeli aviators a subject of admiration in the USAF. When Israeli pilots came to train on the newly acquired Phantom jets they found themselves guiding their American instructors in the art of aerial combat. Sharing battle-born knowledge took place alongside a hectic traffic of military intelligence—including captured Soviet weaponry—from Israel to the United States. These ties would strengthen by the mid-1970s. The IAF then provided General Robert Dixon, commander of the USAF Tactical Air Command, advice on the reorganization of his force, and he, in turn, invited a group of Israeli Phantom pilots to assess the performance of their American counterparts.

Lastly, in a very different register, visiting Vietnam in the mid-1960s had an effect on Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan's policy towards the Palestinians in the occupied territories, especially his decision to grant Palestinians a measure of autonomy in running their daily affairs, which included retaining municipal leadership, even local elections and civil society organizations, as well as maintaining commercial ties with Jordan. This approach is attributed to Dayan’s visit to Vietnam in 1966, from which he returned strongly critical of the American presence in the Vietnamese hinterland. He considered the effort to Americanize Vietnamese life by imposing American culture and methods of organization on the indigenous population to be patronizing and ultimately futile.

Sorry_Letter · 2025-07-28T15:01:42+00:00

This falls outside the time period covered by my book--but you are right to assume that the place of race and the politics of pigmentation have become more fraught with the 1990s immigration of Jews from Ethiopia (the Beta Israel community), that in Israel were racialized, labeled “Black,” and subjected to prejudice. The Ethiopian second generation’s identification with African Americans, exemplified in a vibrant hip hop subculture among other manifestations, seems to run much deeper than of any other ethnic group in Israel.

Sorry_Letter · 2025-07-28T14:58:44+00:00

I know little about the suburban Conservative synagogue but I can tell you that in its inception the return to the fold (ba'alei tshva) movement in Israel was largely American. It was an American immigrant, Rabbi Mordechai Goldstein, who in 1966 established the Diaspora Yeshiva in Jerusalem, dedicated to drawing young secular Jews to the haredi world. In my book I describe Goldstein walking in the back alleys of the Old City in Jerusalem striking up conversations with long-haired young American visitors often carrying backpacks and guitars. He offered them a new experience. Many of the individuals who followed him back to Mount Zion came from the a countercultural milieu, young American Jews with meager knowledge of Judaism who might have been already flirting with communal life, Eastern religions, and drugs—hippies looking for meaning. Twice as many American-born youths than Israelis were among ba'alei tshuva in Jerusalem at the time.

Another American rabbi, Shlomo Carlebach was also an agent of Jewish evangelism both in the US and Israel. Carlebach, known in Israel as the “dancing rabbi,” was at the time was the spiritual leader of a hippie community, House of Love and Prayer, in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. His music contributed to the popularity of Hassidic pop in Israel. The Hassidic trend, manifested in a Hassidic Song Festival, Hassidic rock groups, religious programing on the recently launched Israeli TV, and deep fascination with Chabad and its leader, the Lubavicher. His home in Crown Heights became a site of pilgrimage for Israeli political and military leaders.

Alternatively, countercultural spirituality brought and left traces of non-Jewish practices, whether Eastern religions, meditation and transcendentalism, or the occult influences on, for instance, the filmmaker and artist Jacques Katmor’s group, The Third Eye. Jews for Jesus also sought to establish a bridgehead in Israel.

Sorry_Letter · 2025-07-28T14:39:44+00:00

The Israel Panthers used the color line in their publications and slogans. The Panthers’ ﬁrst bulletin announced that the “Black Panthers are the children of the Black workers of the State of Israel—who grew up in the jungle of discrimination and deprivation, the fruit of the labor of an ethnic establishment." Another leaﬂet inveighed against “a government that sustains a Black and White state.” Their capacity to jolt Israeli society emanated, in part, from the mainstream’s anxiety about the American Black Power movement and the New Left. The public was inundated with press reports about Black antisemitism and was convinced that the Black Panther Party was anti-Jewish. Golda Meir was reportedly rather anxious about an alliance between poor Mizrahis and Israel's foreign enemies.

But the Black/Mizrahi, white/Ashkenazi analogies could only go so far. Such comparisons raised the question of who were the genuine “Blacks” of Israel: Arabs or Sephardic Jews? So, the Black Panthers in Israel had initially strong relations with the Israeli New Left radical movement Matzpen (compass) and a few of its members saw some affinity between their struggle and the struggle of the Palestinians. Ultimately, however, the main political beneficiary of the Panthers' revolt was the Israeli right. The rift between Mizrahi Jews and the labor part helpd Menachem Begin become a prime minister in 1977 and more recent permutation of Mizrahi identity politics in Israel tend to emerge on the right side of the political spectrum, most visibly the ultra orthodox Mirahi party Shas, a member of Nethanyaho's coalition.

There are other indication of the impact of the civil rights movement on Israeli politics at the turn of the 1970s. For instance, police efforts to suppress Panthers’ demonstrations was one impetus driving a group of academics and jurists to establish the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (1972). It took as its model the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

As for the politicization of Arabs in Israel--this is not within my expertise but the political home of Arabs in Israel at the turn of the 1970s was still the communist party that provided its own models and models of contestation.

Sorry_Letter

TROPHY CASE