the origin of the parties, we find that the youngest was born in the early Twenties. The Revisionist Party, set up by Jabotinsky in opposition to Weizmann, changed its name in 1948 to the Herut Movement (herut meaning liberty) and in 1965 created a bloc with the Liberal Party, now called, for short, Gahal. After forty-five years, this party has not changed an iota of its official ideology -and during this time, it has not changed its proportion of the voters, about fifteen per cent.
A Zionist party, forty years ago, was unlike any other party in the world. It had to be. Its main job was not to gather votes in an existing constituency; it was to create a constituency. The typical party would be centered somewhere in Poland, recruiting members there and trying to convince as many of them as possible to go to Palestine. To help them emigrate, it collected money all over Europe and the United States and set up economic apparatus. To help its members settle in Israel, it set up there another apparatus, dealing with housing, health insurance, education, and the provision of jobs. This typical party, forty years ago, had certain characteristics which were the outcome of these circumstances. Most of its leaders lived abroad. Its ideology originated there, without much connection with the realities of Palestine, certainly without any bearing on the Arab problem. It was controlled by a closely knit group of founders, who, in turn, controlled a growing financial apparatus based abroad and operating in Palestine. It would, in short, control its members rather than receive direction from them.
As yet, there was no state. The Zionist leadership had no police force, no prisons, none of the ordinary means to implement its laws and directives-but it had the parties and their institutions. Thus, the parties became, quite consciously, instruments of control equipped with some of the powers and functions ordinarily reserved for states.
Members who wanted to break party discipline could not simply vote for someone else. They might be members