Customer Reviews

The Second Republic: Politics in Israel (Comparative Politics & the International Political Economy,)

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This book is very informative, but the structure of it makes it dense and hard to follow at times. There is a lot of important information in it, but it is presented in a way that is difficult, especially for those unfamiliar with Israeli politics, to follow.

This is not an ideal text for undergraduate courses on Israeli politics or the Middle East as it assumes a lot of basic historical information on the part of American undergrads. It is better recommended for a graduate level course on those subjects or on comparative democratic systems. Asher Arian is a leading academic scholar of Israeli politics and does a good job of covering developments since 1977 when the Likud first came to power and the Israeli system began to become dealigned. But precisely because he is used to writing to an audience of his peers he fails to include basic historical information that American undergrads would need to make sense of Israeli politics--on Zionism, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and on early Israeli history.