Democracy and Conflict Resolution: The Dilemmas of Israel's Peacemaking

4: Does Democracy Tame the Radicals?

P A R T T W O Religion and Identity 101 4 Does Democracy Tame the Radicals? Lessons from the Case of Israel’s Shas1 Miriam Fendius Elman I N O C T O B E R 2 0 0 8 , the Israeli religious political party Shas (Sephardic Guardians of the Torah) succeeded in scuttling then Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni’s attempts to form a new coalition government. Livni preferred to return the mandate to Israel’s president, and risk her party’s chances in general elections, rather than give in to Shas’s demand for joining the coalition: a public promise by Livni that she would not bring up the subject of Jerusalem during any renewed negotiations with the Palestinians. Shas’s insistence that Jerusalem should not be part of final status negotiations effectively ended the ability of a Kadima-led ruling coalition to move forward on the mandate for territorial disengagement that Israeli voters 1. The author thanks Daphne Tsimhoni for helpful comments on an earlier draft. Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the conference “Democracy, Religion, and Conflict: the Dilemmas of Israeli-Palestinian Peacemaking” held at Syracuse University on March 26, 2009; at the 2009 annual meeting of the International Studies Association; at the Munk Centre at the University of Toronto on November 14, 2008; and at various seminars at the Maxwell School. Funding for this research was generously provided by grants from the Maxwell School’s Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs and the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration (PARCC). 102 ▲ Miriam Fendius Elman had overwhelmingly supported in the 2006 elections.2 Interestingly, these actions by the Shas leadership, which placed the party squarely within Israel’s rejectionist camp, marked the dramatic transformation of a party that had for years been viewed as dovish on the peace process and pragmatic with regard to the issue of territorial disengagement from the Occupied Territories. In this chapter, I consider the reasons for this about-face, and the likelihood that Shas will continue to play the role of spoiler. I also address the larger question raised by my analysis of Shas’s ideology and political strategies, namely the extent to which inclusion in the political process is likely to moderate religious political actors. Much has been written about whether involvement in a democratic decision-making process compels religious parties to moderate over time (the so-called “inclusionmoderation ” proposition). However, most studies on the issue focus on the behavior of Islamist parties in institutional settings that are not particularly democratic. A real test of the “inclusion-moderation” hypothesis requires real inclusion, something that the authoritarian and transitioning states of the Arab world do not offer. The focus here on a religious political party in Israel provides a corrective to a field of study dominated by an emphasis on Islamist groups. The chapter is divided into three parts. In the first section, I review the current debate over whether democracy will have a moderating impact on religious political parties and link this research question to the larger debate over the democratic peace phenomenon. In the second part of the chapter, I provide a framework for analyzing religious political parties. In the third section, I apply this framework to assess the role that the Shas party has played in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking. 2. Shas’s demand regarding Jerusalem was telling given that the party was a member of the Olmert government, which had endorsed the Annapolis declaration. At Annapolis, Israel had pledged to immediately launch good-faith bilateral negotiations and resolve all outstanding issues, including core issues. As a veteran member of the cabinet, Shas Party Chairman Eli Yishai was surely aware that the core issues on the negotiating table included the borders of Jerusalem and arrangements for the old city (Eldar 2008). Does Democracy Tame the Radicals? ▲ 103 Religious Political Parties and Extremism: The State of the Debate3 Although political scientists are increasingly writing on the origins, ideological platforms, and political strategies of religious political parties, the extant literature on this topic has been limited for several reasons. First, much of the recent scholarship has been devoted to Islamist party behavior . There has not been enough work comparing and contrasting religious political parties in different regions, and in different democratic institutional settings. The lion’s share of recent thinking on the nexus between religious political parties and security has been given over to...