Israeli Political Culture Research Articles

Civilian ‘soft’ militarism through informal education in Israel: learning to protect and connect to the land

ABSTRACT The civil society organization HaShomer HaChadash (The New Guard) attempts to fill a security gap in Israel’s periphery by tackling the continuous threat of what it frames as ‘agricultural terrorism’ by securing farms in combination with a wide array of educational activities that emphasize the importance of agriculture, and simultaneously include the teaching of military themes (such as leadership, heroism, and sacrifice) and military skills training (guarding, navigation, and Krav Maga). The proposed paper investigates the nexus of militarism and informal education as manifested in Israeli civil society through the activities of HaShomer HaChadash. While the entanglement of militarism and education has deep roots in Israeli political culture, it has usually been nurtured by the government and not by non-state organizations. We argue that the combination of security and educational activities can be interpreted as a renaissance or evolution of Israeli civilian militarism, which we term ‘soft militarism’ in the margins of the state.

The Impact of Familiarity and Perceived Trustworthiness and Influence on Donations to Nonprofits: An Unaided Recall Study

ABSTRACTWhat affects donations? Is it all in “the ask,” or does brand image matter? In the nonprofit brands literature perceived trustworthiness and influence of the organization are important factors that increase constituents’ willingness to support an organization. We examined the association between a nonprofit organization’s familiarity, trustworthiness, and influence and the propensity of donations it receives. To this end, we used a questionnaire on attitudes toward nonprofit organizations and unaided recall of nonprofit organizations collected from a nationally representative sample. The attitudes data revealed that perceptions of nonprofits’ effectiveness and trustworthiness in Israel are not particularly positive. A multivariate fractional polynomial regression on the unaided recall results shows that while familiarity and perceived effectiveness are positively associated with the propensity of donations to nonprofit organizations, trustworthiness is not. We explain this surprising result by changes in Israeli social policy, political culture, and trust in institutions. We suggest different efforts that organizations can make to enhance their brand image and consequently increase donations.

Response to Ian Lustick’s ‘The Holocaust in Israeli Political Culture: Four Constructions and Their Consequences’

Response to Ian Lustick’s ‘The Holocaust in Israeli Political Culture: Four Constructions and Their Consequences’

Comment on Ian Lustick’s ‘The Holocaust in Israeli Political Culture: Four Constructions and Their Consequences’

Comment on Ian Lustick’s ‘The Holocaust in Israeli Political Culture: Four Constructions and Their Consequences’

The Holocaust in Israeli Political Culture: Four Constructions and Their Consequences

The collective memory of the Holocaust among Israeli Jews has featured competition among four related but distinct constructions: Zionist Proof-text; Wasting Asset; Object Lesson for safeguarding human rights; and Template for Jewish life. This paper will analyze this competition and the implications of the apparent victory of the Template. While there is a sequence to the changing prominence of these different versions of the Holocaust, each version has enjoyed periods of relative success since World War II. In recent decades, however, the Holocaust as a Template for Jewish Life has emerged as ascendant. Throughout, competition among the four constructions was driven by parochial and temporary political interests and by the unintended consequences of dissatisfactions associated with any one of them. My analysis will trace this competition and those consequences, using them to explain the extreme and highly particular features of current Israeli Jewish collective memory of the Holocaust. The paper concludes with an assessment of the implications of the hegemonic status of this version of the Holocaust for appreciating Israel’s contemporary political predicament.

BDS, Israel, and the World System

This article analyzes Israel's actions and policies within a predominantly neorealist framework. Accordingly, it argues that U.S. domestic factors as well as Israeli domestic factors and political culture play little to no role in Israel's foreign policy decisions, which are instead largely determined by John Mearsheimer's five neorealist principles that drive all states. Additionally, the article discusses political economic factors and specifically addresses the claims made in Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler's The Global Political Economy of Israel. Here the argument supplements neorealism by focusing on economics as a historically specific vehicle of modern power. It concludes that the root of Israeli violence and impunity is the international system itself and criticizes the Left and the BDS movement for not adequately grappling with this fact.

Political trends in the Israeli Arab population and its vote in parliamentary elections

Full Arab Israeli involvement in the national political system is disappearing from the Israeli political scene. A parallel system is being developed by the community's political leaders. Within this new structure, national elections and the Knesset are viewed as marginal; they serve mainly as a PR arena intended to bring the Arab Israeli message to Jewish/Zionist awareness. Judging from the evidence of recent election results among Arab voters, it is possible to cautiously conclude that the Israeli Arab political stance is less and less a part of the general Israeli political culture.

The social representation of incapacity: a psycho-cultural analysis of Israel's political arena

This article deals with the social representation of incapacity in Israeli political culture by applying CDA (critical discourse analysis) to two outstanding cases of incapacity: permanent incapacity in the case of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as a result of illness and temporary incapacity in the case of President Moshe Katzav, following a police investigation. A social representation of incapacity in leading figures as seen in the headlines of Ha'aretz (an elite Israeli newspaper) was analysed, with the following results: a) in the case of Prime Minister Sharon, he is a warrior battling for his life, while his successors battle for governmental control and stability; b) in the case of President Katzav, he veers between attacker and attacked. The psycho-social analysis of the political-cultural scene indicates that these social representations provide a mechanism for maintaining stability and cushioning shocks while also disseminating a pronounced sense of confusion.

Introduction: From Centrism to Neo-Centrism

Introduction: From Centrism to Neo-Centrism

Religion, Postmodernization, and Israeli Approaches to the Conflict with the Palestinians

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the relationship between religion and Israeli approaches to the conflict with the Palestinians. It seeks to explain why religion has become closely correlated with hawkishness since 1967. While the Jewish religion advocates no single approach to the conflict with the Palestinians, the religious have been significantly more hawkish than the nonreligious in Israel. This is because religion in Israel has reinforced ethnocentricity among the Jewish public, which in turn is highly correlated with hawkishness. Yet the correlation between religion and hawkishness only became politically prominent after 1967. This prominence is a function of the way religion has interacted with changes in Israeli political culture that were driven by the process of postmodernization. Whereas mainstream Israeli political culture has become less ethnocentric and more liberal, and consequently more dovish, the religious community has moved in the opposite direction. In this vein, religion has served to shield its adherents from most of the effects of postmodernization while simultaneously encouraging countervailing trends, which accounts for the polarization referred to above. In other words, it is the way religion has interacted with postmodernization that has made it the most effective incubator for hawkishness in Israel since 1967.

THE AMBIGUITIES OF MINORITY PATRIOTISM: LOVE FOR HOMELAND VERSUS STATE AMONG PALESTINIAN CITIZENS OF ISRAEL

The article sheds light on minority patriotism in ethno-national states. It utilizes the experience of the Arab minority in Israel demonstrating that patriotism develops in clear interdependence with the dominant ethos of the state. The ethnic citizenship model dominant in Israeli political culture does not incorporate the national or cultural identity of all Israeli citizens equally, rendering Israeli patriotism among Arab citizens more questionable. As a result, Arab patriotic attachment has gradually shifted from civic Israeli to Palestinian patriotism.

Shas between identity construction and clientelist dynamics: the creation of an ‘identity clientelism’

The issue which this article seeks to address is the evolution of clientelist modes of management within a context of political change. Otherwise stated, what is the impact of the Shas movement — an ethno-religious party which was created in the beginning of the 1980s — on the Israeli political culture? More generally, what are the repercussions of global economic change with respect to the identity and political representations of a given group — the Sephardim in Israel? According to us, the Shas movement is trying to adopt the clientelist mode of public funds' distribution, which is entailed by the consociative characteristic of the Israeli social and political system, in order to create an ‘avant-garde’ through the institutional network of the movement.

Violating the Mores, Seizing the Guards: The Riot of the 'Youth of Perestroika' in an Israeli Military Jail

This article focuses on the most extensive mutiny in the history of the IDF, which broke out in Atlite Military Prison No. 6 on 9 August 1997. The central role of the army in Israeli political culture accounts for the fact that a mutiny of such extent has never taken place in the IDF military units and prisons. Israel's political culture, which emphasizes the importance of the state and is characterized by weak liberalism, is not a good breeding ground for civil disobedience, even in circumstances where one would expect such behaviour. In the case under discussion, the mutiny was led by soldiers belonging to peripheral ethnic groups of the IDF recruit population; specifically, it was organized by new immigrants from the former Soviet Union and a number of Druze soldiers. Some military police officials and Israeli politicians of Russian origin clamed that there was no connection between the ethnicity of the prisoners and the riot. I would like to argue, however, that it was the prisoners' unique socialization in the USSR in the Perestroika period, when the attitude towards state and the army swayed from scepticism to hostility, that made this riot possible. I argue that what gave rise to the rebellion was not maltreatment by jail officials (as the mutineers themselves argued), but rather a different civic culture as it had developed among Soviet youngsters who were socialized in the atmosphere of 'liberal nihilism' of the early 1990s - a time when the majority of them emigrated to Israel.

The Making of Israeli Militarism (review)

The Making of Israeli Militarism, by Uri Ben-Eliezer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. 278 pp. $35.00. The election of former IDF chief of staff Ehud Barak as Prime Minister, and the inclusion of retired generals on Barak's personal staff, have prompted renewed interest in civil-military relations in Israel. Indeed, Uri Ben-Eliezer's The Making of Israeli Militarism is only the latest contribution to an impressive body of literature on this topic.1 What distinguishes this book from earUer works is the author's determination to apply to the civil-military paradigm the assumptions and methodologies associated with the new, critical generation of Israeli historiography and sociology. Specifically, BenEliezer sets out to explain the existence in Israel of a sociological phenomenon that he variously terms cultural militarism, politics, nation-in-arms, positive militarism, or civilian militarism, and which he defines as the institutionalization in Israeli political culture of the propensity to solve all national problems through military force. Interestingly, the author does not attribute this phenomenon to a military coup or praetorianism, i.e., the unsolicited intrusion of military commanders into the political affairs of the state. Rather, he attributes it to a complex arrangement established in the pre-state period between the Yishuv's older generation of European-bom political leaders and the younger native-bom generation, who were by the late 1930s becoming increasingly impatient with the policies of selfrestraint (havlagah) and static defense adopted by the Jewish Agency and the Hagana in reaction to both Arab terror attacks and the anti-Zionist drift of British policy in Palestine. For Ben-Eliezer, the major protagonist in this civilian-military entente was David Ben-Gurion. Although part of the older generation, Ben-Gurion was nonetheless disposed toward the more activist approach demanded by sabras like Yigal Allon, Moshe Dayan, and Yitzhak Rabin. Ben-Gurion also saw parochial advantage in establishing close ties with this group, by pre-empting political challenges to himself and his dominant Mapai party from such groups as Revisionist Zionism (and its paramilitary offshoots, the Irgun and LEHI), the socialist-Zionist Mapam party, and the Ahdut Ha'avodah kibbutz movement that was the major breeding ground for the Palmach, the Yishuv's semi-autonomous strike force. Finally, Ben-Gurion saw accommodating the new military elite as an integral step toward implementing his concept of statism (mamlakhtiuf), premised on tight centralized control over all instruments of authority in the nascent country. Ben-Eliezer attributes most important developments in Israel's early history to the influence of cultural - including the decision by the Zionist leadership (at the Biltmore Conference of May 1942) to end all cooperation with the British Mandatory authority; the significant degree of autonomy accorded to field commanders in the 1948-49 war to encourage the permanent evacuation of Arab villages; and the Altalena affair (of June 1 948) in which the civil-military establishment used lethal force against Irgunists to signal that no challenge to state authority would be tolerated. Similarly, the build-up to the 1956 Suez War is attributed to positive militarism. The author claims that a cadre of elites - most notably, Ben-Gurion and his proteges, Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres - conspired to eliminate all options other than a military one for responding to the threat posed by Egypt' s Gamal Abdul Nasser (a threat which, it is implied, was deliberately exaggerated by Ben-Gurion & Co. in order to satisfy their militaristic thirst for war). According to Ben-Eliezer, militarism dominated Israel's response to the crisis preceding the June 1967 Six-Day War - to the extent that all non-military options for calming border tensions with Egypt and Syria were rejected out of hand - and also characterized Israel's relations with West Bank-Gaza Palestinians and with the Arab states after the war. …

The ?Americanization? of Israeli Politics: Political and Cultural Change

DRAMATIC TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE ISRAELI political system and culture have taken place in the past decade. The introduction of internal party primaries and the direct election of the prime minister have contributed to decreasing party discipline among Knesset members, growing tension between the government and legislature, a dramatic decline in the parliamentary representation of the two major parties, and an increase in the representation of parties based on group identities and interests. These parties represent contesting visions of Israeli nationhood that directly challenge the traditional Zionist political culture, which has been hegemonic since before the birth of the state. Many of these changes have been attributed to Americanization.,

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

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

The Peace Ritual and Israeli Images of Social Order

In this article, a series of events associated with President Sadat's pilgrimage to Jerusalem in November 1977 have been organized in accordance with anthropological theory on the ritual process. This perspective suggests that conflict and conflict resolution are processes of dialectical interaction between power relationships and symbolic actions. President Sadat's visit to Jerusalem stands as a unique symbolic initiative in the Arab-Israeli conflict. In this instance, a powerful symbolic alternative to continued warfare was raised before the Israeli public. The failure of the peace ritual to translate immediately into an amiable structure of relationships between Israel and Egypt provoked many Israelis to reexamine their perceptions of social order in the Middle East. This process, expressed in the struggles of the peace movements, was a central feature of the Israeli political culture in the months following the peace ritual. Through these activities, a shift occurred in the constellation of Israeli opinions regarding Israeli-Egyptian relations, thus helping to foster compromise and agreement on a new framework of relations between Israel and Egypt at the Camp David summit of September 1978.