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This all changed in 1977 when Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir of the Likud Party, a formation rooted deeply in the beliefs of Revisionist Zionism, got elected to power in Israel. They did so, in no small measure, on the basis of their ability to sell their expansionist form of nationalism to the country’s new wave of immigrants, Sephardic Jews from Arab and/or Islamic countries such as Morocco, Iraq, Iran and Yemen, who tended to be of considerably lower educational levels than the European Jews who had made up the bulk of the country’s first and second generations of settlers.

Revisionist Zionism’s long walk in the desert was over. Indeed, since that time the Revisionists have steadily increased their domination over Israeli political life to the point where the Labor Party, like the Democrats in the US, spends much of its life cowering in front of the Likud out of fear of becoming called “antipatriotic” and/or “soft on terror.”

Key to the continued rise of Revisionist Zionism, was the ability to organize key elements of American Jewry around this new, hyper-martial view of the Israeli reality. They did so by infiltrating AIPAC and by flooding the think tanks then being created to prop up the Reagan Revolution (e.g. Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute) with thinkers amenable to their cause, and by founding think tanks of their own (e.g. WINEP, Hudson Institute, Center for Security Policy, JINSA, MEMRI) dedicated wholeheartedly toward promoting a pro-Likud approach to things in the Mideast.