Political attitudes of Israeli students: a comparative perspective

Abstract

Student politics is a topic that has long caught the attention of political observers and social scientists. This, it seems, is due to a combination of factors. Firstly, university students are usually recruited from relatively privileged social background. Secondly, in most modern societies, university students serve as a major recruiting ground for elites. Not all students are eventually incorporated into the elites and not all members of the elites are recruited from among university students. But the overlap is considerable and growing. University students (or a certain proportion thereof) can thus be regarded as potential members of the elites that staff society's political, economic, administrative and education establishments, and help shape its ideas and values. At the same time students have been observed to be prone from time to time to radical political action, and to express dissatisfaction with the political establishment and anti-establishment views more frequently than the general public. This, of course, creates a paradox: the very same people who originate from and are apt to become a major part of the establishment tend (more frequently than others) to be opposed to the establishment in their views and from time to time even in their actions. In most Western-style democracies student disgruntlement with the establishment as expressed in anti-establishment student activism became widespread especially in the 1960s, declining again in the 1970s. In this respect, Israel was an exception. Radical student protest, sometimes predicted for Israel as well, never materialized. The common conjecture is that this has to do with the constant state of siege and the intermittent outbreak of wars Israel has been faced with, with students' service in the army and their frequent call-up for reserve duty, although this has never been substantiated empirically. The question raised in this paper is how the Israeli students' political attitudes fit in with their political inaction or non-activism, even when such activism swept many other Western-style democracies. Are Israeli students not only more quiescent, but also more favourably oriented towards the existent political establishment (or the political status quo) as compared to their fellow students in the West? Or are they, too, characterized by the paradox of being critical of the establishment from which they originate and of which many of them will be part in the near future?