| dc.description.abstract | Zionism after 100 years The State of Israel after 50 years.
A Survey of the Zionist Debate in Israel in the Nineties
Since its inception, the State of Israel has had to face a series of difficult questions and dilemmas concerning its relation to Judaism, the Jewish Diaspora and its immediate neighbors - the Palestinians, both inside and outside its borders. Today, one hundred years after the opening of the first Zionist Congress by Theodor Herzl and fifty years after the creation of the Zionist State of Israel, a series of factors - the peace process and the demographic evolution within Israel being the most important - have reinforced those dilemmas and are about to impose some very difficult choices on the Israelis concerning the meaning of a Jewish state and its future demographic and constitutional character. These difficult questions require answers. Because they concern the very nature of the State of Israel they have given birth to an important, vivid and controversial debate usually referred to as the Zionist debate - a debate as old as the State of Israel itself but whose intensity has increased in the past years.
This dissertation is a case study whose basic aim is to explore, describe and explain the nature of the political system of the State of Israel and its relation to the Zionist ideology. The main focus is on the relationship between the particularist concept of a Jewish state and the universal principles of democracy. In the first two chapters I discuss the relation between the Israeli state idea - its normative foundation - and its political regime - the organization of power within Israel - and argue that Zionism and democracy are incompatible. Furthermore, I argue that the tension between the particularist concept of a Jewish state and the universal principles of democracy is inherent to the special character of the Israeli political regime which, using Nils A. Butenschøn's terminology, I describe as an ethnocracy: A political regime which, in contrast to democracies, is instituted on the basis of qualified rights to citizenship and with ethnic affiliation as the distinguishing principle, downgrading the Israeli Arabs to the status of second-class citizens. I also explain why, fifty years after its creation, Israel more than ever is facing difficult political and ideological challenges that are directly or indirectly connected to Palestinian demographic trends and argue that one of the major challenges facing the Zionist State of Israel today is the determination of the status and rights of a growing number of non-Jews in a state that first and foremost was established to serve the interests of one particular collective - the Jews - and which therefore claims itself to be Jewish.
In the framework of this dissertation I use the Zionist debate in order to throw light on the special character of the Israeli political regime. By putting under scrutiny the views, currents and trends expressed in the debate I hope to contribute to a better understanding of the Israeli ethnocracy, its relation to democratic principles of power-distribution, its vulnerability to demographic changes and the directions in which it might evolve. I also hope that this, in its turn, will contribute to a better understanding of the situation for the more than one million Palestinians living inside the borders of Israel Proper. As a result, in addition to analyzing the relationship between the different principles of power distribution present in the debate and showing how the Zionists themselves view Zionist principles of power sharing in relation to other principles, I analyze the debate from a particular perspective that deals precisely with the rights of the non-Jewish population of the Zionist State of Israel.
Basically, the elements of the debate are divided into two groups: Zionism and democracy (chapter three), and Zionism and the Diaspora (chapter four). Chapter five is devoted to discussing the phenomenon known as post-Zionism and the claim according to which post-Zionism constitutes a challenge to Zionism. In the debate I found several indicators of the Israeli ethnocracy's vulnerability towards demographic changes and indicators of the unwillingness of Zionists to forego Zionism for the sake of democracy. Strategies such as the claim of "a Zionist majority" and the Absentee Voting Bill, together with the redefinition of the classical goals and role of Zionism and the reaffirmation of the state's commitment to aliyah, are all defense strategies aiming at counterbalancing the increase the political influence of the Arab minority, thereby undermining their rights. They all imply and advocate the reinforcement of the ethnocratic character of the State of Israel in order to protect Jewish dominance. On the other hand, post-Zionism is often associated with a more inclusive vision of Israeli society and is seen as a challenge to Zionism and the State of Israel both by mainstream scholars and some post-Zionist scholars. In chapter five, however, I point out the difficulty of evaluating the character of the post-Zionist movement as a whole. The post-Zionist scholars constitute a very heterogeneous group as they don't share the same academic methodology and political agenda. Although some of these scholars undoubtedly operate with a non-exclusive vision of Israeli society and advocate the making of Israel into "a state of all its citizens", thereby constituting a pole against the above-mentioned Zionist tendencies, they cannot be said to represent the post-Zionist movement as a whole. Nevertheless, I also stress the fact that in a culture so long dominated by myths and ideology, the advent of autonomous historiography and sociology and the destruction of a series of powerful myths might, in the long run, might have an important impact on the unfinished construction of Israel identity.
The reinforcement of the ethnocratic foundations of the State of Israel will increasingly make the contradiction between the concept of a Jewish state and the concept of democracy more visible, not only to Israeli society, but to the world, I conclude. As the need for the Israelis to choose between the concept of a Jewish state and the concept of democracy becomes more urgent, stronger views and radical solutions to the dilemmas faced by the State of Israel are likely to be uttered with more and more vehemence in the Zionist debate, with decisive consequences for the more than one million Palestinian Israelis who have irremediably become part of a state that wasn't meant for them. | nor |