Studies of Israel's foreign policy have been dominated by realist perspectives, emphasizing a hostile and anarchic international environment as the key determinant of its policies. Even perceptual and psychological interpretations of its policies—relying principally on the perceptions of decision makers—emphasized how these factors shaped their worldviews and affected policy choices. A growing number of studies, however, offer new interpretations of the factors and processes that shaped Israeli security and foreign policy over time, focusing on the social structure of its society or on the use of a foreign and security siege mentality as an instrument of political control and socialization.

Dov Waxman's constructivist perspective views conceptions of national identity as a defining force of Israel's foreign policy. National identity is “a nation's self-image or self-conception, that is, the socially shared set of ideas that make up how a nation imagines itself” (p. 7). The central argument of the book is that Israel's peace policy reflects a continuous crisis of national identity. The ebb and flow of its public attitudes and elite perceptions toward the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in the 1990s reflect a fundamental struggle within the society, as well as among political elites, about a national self-image. Israeli peace policy became a victim in the struggle of “defining the nation.” Unlike many constructivists who use realism as a straw man for their own explanations, Waxman offers his identity-based explanation as a supplement to the more traditional realist and social accounts of these foreign policies. Even if not entirely novel, this book offers a balanced documentation of this identity crisis. It opens even further the window into a social-psychological interpretation of Israeli foreign policy in terms of collective identity, an interpretation that carries important implications.

The book starts with a concise statement of the impact of national identity on foreign policy. It provides a brief characterization of the key elements of the Israeli national identity as they have been shaped by various thinkers and by traumatic events. The major themes that have characterized—in Waxman's view—Israeli foreign policy include the Jewish dimension, the Holocaust, and the search for unifying ideas and symbols. The author shows how these factors affected Israeli policy after the rise of the Likud Party to power in 1977, during the Lebanon War of 1982, and during the first Intifada (1987–91). This serves as a backdrop to the analysis of Israel's peace policy during the Oslo years (1993–2000).

The crisis of identity that was brought to the fore as a result of the Oslo Agreement is fundamentally one between two competing visions of Israeli national identity. First, a liberal, humanistic conception of identity promotes individualism, secularism, and democracy. This conception is labeled the “Israeli” aspect of national identity. Second, a religious (or traditional) notion of identity identifies the Jewish religion as the fundamental basis for the state and defines its borders and its relation to other states and nationalities in terms of the “Jewish” character of Israel. Oslo made the clash between the “Israeli” and the “Jewish” components unavoidable because it would ultimately require Israel to give up “holy” territories on the West Bank. Waxman argues that this identity crisis helps explain Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in 1995, the defeat of his successor, Shimon Peres, by Benjamin Netanyahu in the 1996 elections, the defeat of Netanyahu by Ehud Barak in 1999, and ultimately the collapse of the Barak regime after his failure to bring about a final status agreement at Camp David in July 2000. It also accounts for the conflict between religious and secular groups and institutions (e.g., the Supreme Court), for deterioration of the relations between Israeli Arabs and Jews, and for the general rise of societal tensions. According to Waxman, the crisis of identity abated under Ariel Sharon's government because the outbreak of the Al Aqsa Intifada helped unify Israeli society while easing the social and religious tensions that existed when peace seemed around the corner.

Waxman offers a valuable interpretation of the political crises during the Oslo era and beyond. Unfortunately, the study suffers from a number of logical and empirical problems. First, the theoretical argument is that conceptions of national identity (and especially convergence or divergence of such conceptions) shape states' foreign policies. National identity defines the boundaries of what leaders can do, and it imposes constraints on the pursuit of national interests as the leaders understand those to be. The historical analysis, however, reverses the causal arrow: In fact, Waxman shows that foreign policy events have a powerful effect on national identity conceptions. What one takes away from Waxman's analysis is that the Oslo Accord triggered the crisis of identity. As long as Oslo was operative, this crisis persisted. When Israel and the Palestinians negotiated final status issues that touched upon key identity symbols—Jerusalem, the Temple Mount, the Right of Return—the crisis reached its crescendo. When the Oslo Accords were tabled due to the outbreak of the Intifada, the crisis abated, and even the decision to withdraw from the Gaza Strip did not revive it. Instead of supporting his own theoretical argument, the author's analysis provides evidence for another constructivist argument (e.g., Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, 1999) that national identity is shaped by experience and interaction with the international system. Thus, this study demonstrates a disconnect between theory and empiricism.

Second, since the book advances an identity-based interpretation of a historical process as supplementing or supplanting a realist account, it is disappointing to note that at no point is there a comparison between a realist—interest-based—interpretation of the events discussed and a constructivist—identity-based—one. There is no attempt to confront a realist explanation with the one that forms the core of the book. Consequently, one is left unconvinced as to why we should accept or prefer an identity-based explanation of these events to an interest-based one, or how these two explanations interact in producing a more complete picture of these events.

These problems notwithstanding, the book is a valuable contribution to the literature on Israeli foreign policy that offers a sensible interpretation of a turbulent era in the country's domestic and international politics. As such, it should prove useful to students of Israeli politics, and may even serve as a useful example of the strengths and weaknesses of a constructivist approach to international relations.