Comparative electoral research suggests that issue voting has increased and that the ability of social cleavages to account for voting patterns in most advanced industrial democracies has declined. In Israel, only the first of these generalizations holds. The capacity of social cleavages to structure the vote has been maintained along with our overall ability to explain the vote. Based on longitudinal analysis of electoral cleavages between 1969 and 1996 and on an analysis of the 1996 election, we argue that this pattern is driven by issues involving identity dilemmas that have become increasingly important in structuring the vote. Such dilemmas amalgamate policy issues and social allegiances, while reinforcing existing cleavage structures. Focusing on the 1996 election we probe the meanings of internal and external collective identity concerns in Israeli politics, their considerable overlap, and their translation into political choices.

This article explores the relationship between threat and information processing in various conflict situations and extends the analysis to an examination of the relationship between affective and cognitive components of decision making about policy under conditions of high and low threat. Elements of threatening situations are measured using public opinion surveys done mainly in Israel regarding the Arab/Israeli conflict and the conflict between religious and secular Jews. Some data from surveys done in the Palestinian Authority regarding support for the peace process and support for armed attacks against Israeli targets, and in the United States regarding the social crises of neighborhood crime out of control and the threat of loss of Social Security and Medicare benefits are included as two other illustrations of the relationship between threat and policy. The article focuses on how feelings of threat relate to decisions about how to deal with the situation and under what conditions those decisions will either be inflammatory or conciliatory. Data are presented demonstrating that feelings of threat correlate with policy choices regarding the threatening situation or group, and often at very strong levels. Specifically, the more threatened people feel, the more their policy choice tends to maintain or intensify the conflict—that is, the more incendiary the policy choice is—and vice versa—the lower the threat the more subdued the policy choice is. Our data analysis leads us to the proposition that when people feel very threatened—the decision making process about policy is dominated by emotion—not by logic or rational considerations. On the other hand, under conditions of low threat, both emotions and logic have a role in the process of deciding policy.

The defining challenge for Israel since 1967 has been the future of the territories captured in the Six Day War and the population living in them. With the stalemate festering and the salience of the conflict very high, the conflict with the Palestinians has become the major cleavage dimension in Israeli politics. Building on the multidimensional conceptualization of cleavage, we argue that despite the occurrence of many, dramatic, changes, the cleavage structure has not changed in the past decade, and the 1977 realignment is still in place. The primary cleavage is a full and consistent interlocking cleavage. Its potency, and the quality that permits it to achieve this overarching position, is associated with its expression of underlying collective identity dilemmas, which combine external and internal dimensions. Collective identity concerns, more readily than others, produce full cleavages and are likely to dominate and endure, overriding other issues. The establishment, positioning and success of Kadima in the 2006 elections are explicated within this framework.

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