Citizens, Consumers and Believers: The Israeli Public Sphere between Capitalism and Fundamentalism

Abstract

THE LAST NATION-WIDE ELECTORAL campaigns conducted in Israel within the framework of the 1996 elections for the Knesset and Prime Minister have demonstrated the substantial transformation that the Israeli political culture is undergoing recently. We shall argue that, beyond current political controversies and explicit political eventualities, there is a deep-rooted process of transformation in the very concept of what politics is about and how it is conducted. More pointedly, we argue that the concept of citizenship, which is immanent to democratic polity, and which is problematic in Israel for reasons dealt with elsewhere; is under threat of decomposing due to a double challenge: a challenge from the globalist consumerist culture, and a challenge from a localist identity culture. Both challenges threaten the constitution of a public of citizens, to be distinguished from individual consumers, on one hand, and communal believers, on the other. We argue that consumers and believers may live in a democracy, but that democracy can not thrive under their tutelage. In what follows, we shall offer a conceptual framework to the analysis of the newly emergent political culture. We shall consider three different theoretical options relevant for such analysis-the modern, the post-modern, and the critical-modern-and will adopt the latter as our point of reference. We shall offer, therefore, an interpretation of the newly emerging political culture in Israel inspired by the political sociology of the Frankfurt School, from Otto Kirchheimer3 to Jiirgen Habermas,* especially their (respective) concepts of catch-all-party and the structural transformation of