"Ethnocracy" and Its Discontents: Minorities, Protests, and the Israeli Polity

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 26, Issue 4, 2000, Pages 725-755

  Yiftachel, Oren ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34247299554     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/448989     Document Type: Article

References (80)

1. Raef Zreik, "Arabs in a Disappearing Homeland," lecture delivered at Giva'at Haviva seminar on settlement policies, Dec. 1997. department of geography and environmental development at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israeli
2. The term ethnocracy has been mentioned in previous literature. See David Little, Sri Lanka: The Invention of Enmity (Washington, D.C., 1994), p. 72
3. Juan J. Linz, "Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes," in Macropol¡tical Theory, vol. 3 of Handbook of Political Science, ed. Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby (Reading, Mass., 1975), pp. 175-411
4. However, as far as I am aware, it was generally used as a derogatory term and not developed into a model or a concept, as attempted here. For an earlier formulation, see Oren Yiftachel, "Israeli Society and Jewish-Palestinian Reconciliation: Έthnocracy' and Its Territorial Contradictions, " Middle East Journal 51 (Autumn 1997): 505-19. The term minority refers here to marginalized groups of different ethnic backgrounds to that of society's mainstream. These are constructed as minorities as part of the constellation of powers
5. As I show elsewhere, despite the many violations of democratic principles by the Israeli regime, a wide agreement that Israel is a democracy exists in the literature, although a debate on the matter has grown stronger in recent years. See Asher Arian, Harepublica hashniyya (The second republic) (Tel Aviv, 1997)
6. Ralph Benyamin Neuberger, Hademokratyah ha-Yisre'elit (Democracy in Israel) (Tel Aviv, 1998)
7. Yoav Peled, "Ethnic Democracy and the Legal Construction of Citizenship: Arab Citizens of the Jewish State," American Political Science Review 86 (June 1992): 432-43
8. Gabriel Sheffer, "Has Israel Really Been a Garrison Democracy? Sources of Change in Israel's Democracy" Israel Affairs 3, no. 1 (1996): 13-39
9. and Sammy Smooha, "Ethnic Democracy: Israel as an Archetype," Israel Studies 2 (Winter 1997): 198-241
10. For my previous critique, see Yiftachel, "Έthnocracy': The Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine," Constellations 6 (Sept. 1999): 364-90
11. See also the recent critiques by Uri Ben-Eliezer, "The Meaning of Political Participation in a Nonliberal Democracy: The Israeli Experience," Comparative Politics 25 (July 1993): 397-412
12. Nadim N. Rouhana, Palestinian Citizens in an Ethnic Jewish State: Identities in Conflict (New Haven, Conn., 1997); As'ad Ghanem, "State and Minority in Israel: The Case of the Ethnic State and the Predicament of Its Minority," Ethnic and Racial Studies 21 (May 1998): 428-48
13. Baruch Kimmerling, "Religion, Nationalism, and Democracy in Israel," Constellations 6 (Sept. 1999): 339-63
14. Yossi Yonah, "A State of All Citizens, a Nation-State, or a Multicultural State? Israel and the Boundaries of Liberal Democracy," Alpayin 16 (1998): 238-63 and "Fifty Years Later: The Scope and Limits of Liberal Democracy in Israel," Constellations 6 (Sept. 1999): 411-29
15. and Lev Grinberg, "Demokratiya medumyenet beyisrael" (Imagined democracy in Israel), Sotsyologyah Yisre'elit (Israeli sociology) 3, no. 1 (2000): 209-40
16. See, for example, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York, 1991)
17. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983)
18. E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1990)
19. and Anthony D. Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (Cambridge, 1995)
20. For a notable exception, see Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity: Economy, Society and Culture, vol. 2 of The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, trans. pub. (Oxford, 1997), and Nested Identities: Nationalism, Territory, and Scale, ed. Guntram H. Herb and David H. Kaplan (Lanham, Md., 1999)
21. My account of the process of ethnicization draws some inspiration from Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Refrained: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge, 1996). But it takes his concept of the nationalizing state a step further: Brubaker analyzes a "regular" nation-state structure, whereas ethnocratic regimes undermine the demos and, with it, the possibility of a democratic nation-state
22. See Yiftachel, "Έthnocracy."'
23. See Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York, 1998)
24. See Julie Mostov, "Sexing the Nation/Desexing the Body: Politics of National Identity in the Former Yugoslavia," in Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation, ed. Tamar Mayer (London, 1999), pp. 89-110. Mostov has adopted the model to describe the paternalism and male violence inherent in ethnocratic systems, which are concerned, first and foremost, with ethnic reproduction and hence treat women/mothers as bearers of ethno-national honor
25. For illuminating discussions on gender and nationalism in Israel, see N. Berkovitz, "Eshet khayil mi yimtza? Nashim ve'ezrakhut beyisrael" (Who can find a brave woman? Women and citizenship in Israel), Sotsyologyah Yisre'elit 3, no. 1 (2000): 277-318, and Kathy E. Ferguson, Kibbutz journal: Reflections on Gender, Race, and Militarism in Israel (Pasadena, Calif., 1995)
26. See David Held, Models of Democracy (London, 1990)
27. see also Michael Mann, "The Dark Side of Democracy: The Modern Tradition of Ethnic and Political Cleansing," New Left Review, no. 253 (May-June 1999): 18-45
28. My work also draws on Foucauldian, Marxian, and postcolonial approaches as inspiration. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977)
29. Stuart Hall, "Who Needs 'Identity'?" introduction to Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Hall and Paul Du Gay (London, 1998), pp. 1-18
30. Ernesto Laclau, introduction to The Making of Political Identities, ed. Laclau (London, 1994), pp. 1-8
31. and Edward \V. Said, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969-1994 (New York, 1994)
32. See Held, Models of Democracy, and Charles Tilly, "Citizenship, Identity, and Social History," in Citizenship, Identity, and Social History, ed. Tilly (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 1-18. See also Mann, "The Dark Side of Democracy."
33. See Held, Models of Democracy, and Sara Helman, "War and Resistance: Israeli Civil Militarism and Its Emergent Crisis," Constellations 6 (Sept. 1999): 391-410
34. See Arend Lijphart, Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-One Countries (New Haven, Conn., 1984), and Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford, 1995)
35. Anne Showstack Sassoon, Gramsci's Politics, 2d ed. (Minneapolis, 1987), p. 110 n. I
36. see Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York, 1971)
37. Ian S. Lustick, Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993), p. 122
38. See Peter Jackson and Jan Penrose, Constructions of Race, Place, and Nation (London, 1993)
39. For further discussion of this tension, see Mann, "The Dark Side of Democracy," and Fareed Zakaria, "The Rise of Illiberal Democracy," Foreign Affairs 76 (Nov.-Dec. 1997): 22-43
40. See Ghazi Falah, "The 1948 Israeli-Palestinian War and Its Aftermath: The Transformation and De-Signification of Palestine's Cultural Landscape," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 86 (June 1996): 256-85
41. See Yiftachel, "Nation-Building or Ethnic Fragmentation? Frontier Settlement and Collective Identities in Israel," Space and Polity, 1, no. 2 (1997): 149-69. Although Israel is gradually shifting from a frontier to a civil society, as Yoav Peled and Gershon Shafir have noted, this process is far from complete, and the institutional setting of the Judaization project is still a major societal force
42. For the continuing impact of the de-Arabizing drive, see Peled and Gershon Shafir, "The Roots of Peacemaking: The Dynamics of Citizenship in Israel, 1948-93," International Journal of Middle East Studies 28 (Aug. 1996): 391-413, and Lustick, "Israel as a Non-Arab State: The Political Implications of Mass Immigration of Non-Jews," Middle East Journal 53 (Summer 1999): 417-33
43. For an early formulation of Israeli internal colonialism, see Elia T. Zureik, The Palestinians in Israel: A Study in Internal Colonialism (London, 1979)
44. For a critique, see Kimmerling, "Religion, Nationalism, and Democracy in Israel," and E. Salzberger and S. Kedar, "Hamahapecha hashketa: Bikoret shiputit left khukei hayesod hakhadashim" (The quiet revolution), Mishpat umimshal beyisrael (Law and governance in Israel) 4 (1998): 489-519
45. For a glowing description of Israel as a liberal democracy, see Aharon Barak, "The Role of the Supreme Court in a Democracy," Israel Studies 3 (Winter 1998): 113-23
46. For a systematic analysis, see Ghanem, Rouhana, and Yiftachel, "Questioning 'Ethnic Democracy': A Response to Sammy Smooha," Israel Studies 3 (1998): 252-67
47. and the response by Ruth Gavison, 'Jewish and Democratic? A Rejoinder to the 'Ethnic Democracy' Debate," Israel Studies 4 (Spring 1999): 44-72
48. See Yoram Bar-Gal, Moledet ve-ge'ografyah be-me'ah shanot hinukh Tsiyoni (Moledet and geography in a hundred years of Zionist education) (Tel Aviv, 1993), and Uri Ram, "Zionist Historiography and the Invention of Modern Jewish Nationhood: The Case of Ben Zion Dinur," History and Memory 7 (Spring-Summer 1995): 91-124
49. See Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory: The Socio-Territoral Dimensions of Zionist Politics (Berkeley, 1983)
50. See A. Kemp, "The Frontier Idiom on Borders and Territorial Politics in Post-1967 Israel," Geography Research Forum 19 (Fall 1999): 102-17
51. See Yinon Cohen and Yitchak Haberfeld, "Second-Generation Jewish Immigrants in Israel: Have the Ethnic Gaps in Schooling and Earnings Declined?" Ethnic and Racial Studies 21 (May 1998): 507-28, and Peled, "Towards a Redefinition of Nationalism in Israel: The Enigma of Shas," Ethnic and Racial Studies 21 (July 1998): 703-27
52. See also Helman, "War and Resistance," and Yagil Levy, "Militarizing Inequality: A Conceptual Framework," Theory and Society 27 (Dec. 1998): 873-904
53. See S. Kedar, "Zman shel rov, zman shel mi'utz: Karka, le'om, vekhukei hahity yashnut harocheshet beyisrael" (Minority Time, Majority Time: Land, Nation, and the Law of Adverse Possession in Israel), Iyyunei mishpat (Law research) 21 (Summer 1998): 665-746, and Arie Shachar, "Reshaping the Map of Israel: A New National Planning Doctrine," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 555 (Jan. 1998): 209-18
54. The state is routinely defined as 'Jewish and democratic" by a series of Israeli laws, especially since 1992. But the tension and even contradiction between the two terms is never resolved by the legal specifics. Further, a 1985 basic law empowers the state to disqualify from state elections parties that oppose the status of Israel as the "'state of the Jewish people'" (Kretzmer, The Legal Status of the Arabs in Israel, p. 29)
55. See Ella Shohat, "Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims," Social Text, nos. 19-20 (Fall 1988): 1-35
56. See Shohat, "The Narrative of the Nation and the Discourse of Modernisation: The Case of the Mίzrahim," Critique, no. 10 (Spring 1997): 3-18, and Shlomo Swirski, Israel: The Oriental Majority (London, 1989)
57. See Zeev Rosenhak, "New Developments in the Sociology of Palestinian Citizens of Israel: An Analytical Review," Ethnic and Racial Studies 21 (May 1998): 558-78
58. See Cohen and Haberfeld, "Second-Generation Jewish Immigrants to Israel," and Peled, "Ethnic Exclusionism in the Periphery: The Case of Oriental Jews in Israel's Development Towns," Ethnic and Racial Studies 13 (July 1990): 345-67
59. See Lustick, Arabs in the Jewish State: Israel's Control of a National Minority (Austin, Tex., 1980)
60. Smooha, Arabs and Jews in Israel: Change and Continuity in Mutual Intolerance, vol. 2 of Arabs and Jews in Israel (Boulder, Colo., 1992); and Zureik, The Palestinians in Israel
61. See David Newman, "Creating Homogeneous Space: The Evolution of Israel's Regional Councils," in Israel: The First Decade of Independence, ed. S. Ilan Troen and Noah Lucas (Albany, N.Y., 1995), pp. 495-519
62. See Amiram Gonen, Between City and Suburb: Urban Residential Patterns and Processes in Israel (Aldershot, 1995)
63. Space limits my discussion of theories of protest and mobilization, although they are of course relevant to the case and are treated in depth elsewhere. See Ted Robert Gurr, Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflicts (Washington, D.C., 1993)
64. The Politics of Social Protest: Comparative Perspectives on States and Social Movements, ed. J. Craig Jenkins and Bert Klandermans (Minneapolis, 1995)
65. Sara Helman and Tamar Rapoport, "Women in Black: Challenging Israel's Gender and Socio-Political Orders," British Journal of Sociology 48 (Dec. 1997): 681-700
66. and Yiftachel, "The Political Geography of Ethnic Protest: Nationalism, Deprivation, and Regionalism among Arabs in Israel," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, n. s., 22, no. 1 (1997): 91-110
67. See Shlomo Hasson, "From Frontier to Periphery in Israel: Cultural Representations in Narratives and Counter-Narratives," in Ethnic Frontiers and Peripheries: Landscapes of Development and Inequality in Israel, ed. Yiftachel and Avinoam Meir (Boulder, Colo., 1998), pp. 115-40, and Peled, "Towards a Redefinition of Nationalism in Israel." Studies of Israeli protest have traditionally focussed only on the political and geographical center
68. See Sam N. Lehman-Wilzig, Stiff-Necked People, Bottle-Necked System: The Evolution and Roots of Israeli Public Protest, 1949-1986 (Bloomington, Ind., 1990)
69. Tamar Hermann, "Do They Have a Chance? Protest and Political Structure of Opportunities in Israel," Israel Studies 1 (Spring 1996): 144-70
70. and Yael Yishai, "Civil Society in Transition: Interest Politics in Israel," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 555 (Jan. 1998): 147-62
71. See Eli Rekhes, "Yisraelim akhrei hakol" (Israelis after all), Panim (Faces) 5 (1998): 96-101
72. See Yiftachel, "Israeli Society and Jewish-Palestinian Reconciliation."
73. See Azmi Bishara, "Al she'elat hamiu't Hafalestini beyίsrael" (On the question of the Palestinian minority in Israel), Te'orya Uvikkoret (Theory and critique) 3 (1993): 7-20
74. See Lustick, "The Political Road to Binationalism: Arabs in Jewish Politics," in The Emergence of a Binational Israel: The Second Republic in the Making, ed. Han Peleg and Ofira Seliktar (Boulder, Colo., 1989), pp. 97-124
75. Kol Yisrael, 5 Oct. 1999
76. For enlightening discussions on the symbolism of Palestinian dispossession in their political mobilization, see Dan Rabinowitz, "The Common Memory of Loss: Political Mobilization among Palestinian Citizens of Israel," Journal of Anthropological Research 50 (1994): 27-49, and Ahmad H. Sa'di, "Minority Resistance to State Control: Towards a Re-Analysis of Palestinian Political Activity in Israel," Social Identities 2 (Oct. 1996): 395-412
77. See H. Dahan-Kaleb, "Mehumot vadi sahib" (The Wadi Salib Riots), in Khamishim le'arba'im ushmoneh: Momentim bikortiyim behistorya shel medinat Yisrael (Fifty to forty eight: Critical moments in the history of the state of Israel), ed. A. Ophir (Jerusalem, 1999), pp. 149-58
78. See Eyal Ben-Ari and Yoram Bilu, "Saints' Sanctuaries in Israeli Development Towns: On a Mechanism of Urban Transformation," Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development 16 (Summer 1987): 243-71
79. See Ghanem and Sara Oszacky-Lazar, "Toward an Alternative Israeli-Palestinian Discourse," Palestine-Israel Journal 3 (1998): 91-94
80. See Yonah, "Fifty Years Later."