Eyal Lewin - Böcker

In political science, war is generally considered the most traumatic event a nation faces, often posing threats to a nation’s very existence. The challenge of surviving the war may, therefore, prove central to the life of a nation. However, national resilience during war has not yet been fully investigated. National Resilience during War: Refining the Decision-Making Model, by Eyal Lewin, searches for the mechanisms of national resilience through a deep inquiry into nine different case studies taken from the scenery of World War II. Following a multi-disciplinary attitude, a business management model is adopted (the PEST and SWOT model) and political, economic, social, and military-technological factors are analyzed for each of the case studies. The result is a comprehensive political decision-making model on a national level that can serve as a means for leaders to navigate successfully in geopolitical turbulence as well as for social scientists to better understand the defeats that different countries suffer and the victories that others demonstrate. This research, however, goes further by refining the model and pointing to the exact combination of factors that are crucial for a nation's ability to win its wars. Using a qualitative comparative analysis technique, the exact combination is traced. The results emphasize that the winning scheme blends political and social factors together: leadership, positive psychology and an inspiring national ethos prove to be a necessary, though not a sufficient, conditional combination for success. National Resilience during War fills a significant gap in the literature on the politics of war.

The question of whether Israel is capable of coping with long-term warfare has long haunted scholars of Israel studies. This book tackles the question through a thorough analysis of the Israeli national ethos. The national ethos of a people is the integrating element that defines a nation's identity and bonds it into a coherent social group. However, in the Israeli case, two competing forms of national ethos threaten to tear society apart and weaken it: a republican ethos that cherishes the national group and a liberal ethos that puts the individual above all. In creating an account of Israel's ability to fight possible future wars, this book carefully examines these two competing forms of national ethos that create an ideological dichotomy in Israel. Each ethos has its reasoning, its inherent logic, its historic origins, and theories of social science that can explain the background for its development. This book offers a comprehensive analysis of each ethos that takes account of the environment, setting, and circumstances through which it ought to be understood. The deep inquiry into the dynamics of Israel's national ethos enables a new comprehension of the wobbliness of Israeli politics, and leads to certain conclusions about the fatal question that this book set out to find—whether Israel will eventually survive its international struggles or perish.

The 1973 Yom Kippur War did not only have external implications on Israel, but also some dramatic internal implications, particularly with regards to the civil-military relations as well as the fields of psychology and political sociology. To this day, the consequences of this war are still prevalent in Israel, in terms of drafting security policies and the military doctrine.After the war, new identities were formed in the Israeli civil society, which began to function as active agents in shaping security policy. These players are not a unique Israeli case, yet their actions in Israel serve as a case study that illuminates their significant impact in other countries as well. This is due to the fact that the "Israeli Laboratory" is a liberal democratic society living with an ongoing conflict; it has a mandatory army that is sensitive to fluctuations in public opinion, culture and the media; and issues of national security and military conduct are always a top public concern. Consequently, this book examines the rise of five identities and agents that were formed after the 1973 War and highlights the effects they had on the formation of Israeli defense policy from then on. The book also clarifies the importance of exposure to these agents' activities, referring to the psycho-political social factors that may actually dictate a state's international policies. It therefore forms a study that connects sociology, political psychology, international relations, the field of culture studies and studies of strategy planning. Thus, the book is of interest to both the domestic-Israeli field of research and to the global scholarly discourse, particularly to academic disciplines engaged in civil-military relations (political sociology, political science).